by Carter
“I was afraid,” she said. “I was afraid of losing the baby again. I was—”
“But at least we would have tried!”
“I was afraid of losing you, too.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t be able to take care of the baby. I wouldn’t be able to provide for it.” She was digging her hands into her overalls, her fingers curling and pinching like claws. When she spoke, there was a strange halting brittleness in her voice. “You were a cop. You could have died. You—you almost did. What would I do? I’ve—I’ve never been very good at making money. I was afraid.”
“You know I never asked you to,” I said, and I felt my anger slipping away. In the end, no matter how mad I was at Billie, my empathy for her always got the upper hand. “And I always had a good life-insurance policy, you know that. You wouldn’t have had to work a day in your life. Both you and the baby would have been fine.”
She shook her head violently. “It’s not just the money. I just didn’t … didn’t know if I was capable.”
“Capable of what?”
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Damn it, Billie! It matters to me. Capable of what? Of being a good mother?”
“No,” she said.
“Then what? Capable of bringing the child to term? Capable of surviving another miscarriage? Capable of being a good Scrabble player? Give me something! Anything!”
“Capable of being the kind of woman you wanted me to be!” she shouted.
In the empty room, her words resounded off the walls like the shot of a cannon. She was breathing hard, and so was I. The most shocking thing about what she’d said was that she hadn’t said mother, but woman. I didn’t know what to say.
“Billie,” I said.
“I’m done with this,” she said, and marched away.
I stayed there on the floor in the empty room. I stayed there a long time, and I didn’t drink another drop of my beer. When I came out, to find her, to talk to her, to do something, anything, to make amends, she was gone.
I didn’t see her again for nearly three months.
Chapter 17
Early Friday morning, two things hadn’t changed from the previous night. When I woke to the squeal of the garbage-truck brakes, having fallen asleep on the futon watching Charlie Rose, the back of my head still felt as if it had been the target of a drone missile. And my lovely wife, who’d taken off in a huff at Bernie Thorne’s office, was still missing.
I hadn’t closed the curtains, and the early-morning light, as weak as it was, stabbed at my eyes. The crick in my neck hurt almost as much as the throbbing in my head. It was going to be a glorious day. The only good thing about it so far was that no smug priest was standing in the room, waiting to deliver some smug, cryptic warning.
A cup of instant coffee, a hot shower, and a couple of Aleve later, I was starting to feel almost human. I was also pissed as hell. After five years, I’d finally gotten a lead on the man who’d shot me in the head, and everybody wanted me to let it go. I wasn’t about to let it go. I was going to get some answers.
The problem was, I still didn’t have much to go on. Somebody didn’t like me nosing around Karen’s condo, even though the place was so sterile it made hotel rooms seem cluttered. Why?
I needed to know more about Tony, but so far I hadn’t turned up much. Somebody had to know something about him, and I decided the two sisters might be a good place to start, since Karen said they really didn’t care for the guy. Maybe they knew something about him that Karen didn’t. There was also the younger brother. He was out of town, but he might have had a perspective his sisters didn’t.
I called Travis, the son, first, just because it was still a bit early and Travis was at Brown in Rhode Island, on East Coast time. He answered on the first ring, croaking out a hello, still sounding like I’d woken him even though it was closing in on noon there. When I asked him about Tony, he said he’d never met the dude and hadn’t even been back to Portland since Karen’s funeral, three months earlier, and that was the first time he’d seen his sisters or his dad in a year. When I asked him if he had any reason to think someone might want to kill his sister, he told me maybe it was because she was a total bitch and hung up. Nice kid.
Beth, the oldest child, had three numbers, a landline at her house in Lake Oswego, another landline at her cabin near Mount Hood, and a cell phone. She didn’t answer any of them. I left messages, explaining that I was a private investigator looking into Karen’s death and that I wanted to talk to her.
Janice, the second youngest daughter, answered her house’s landline on the first ring.
“Hello?” she said.
Her voice sounded much like Karen’s, but wearier. I heard children shouting gleefully in the background.
“Is this Janice Charlton?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, now sounding both weary and suspicious.
“Janice, my name is Myron Vale—”
“Hold on,” she said.
She cupped her hand over the receiver, and I heard her yell at her kids. When she came back, there were no more shouting kids.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “Who are you now?”
“Myron Vale, ma’am. I’m a private investigator, and I’m looking into your sister’s death.”
There was a pause. The line had a faint background hum. When she spoke again, there was a nervousness that wasn’t there before.
“Why?” she asked.
“There are certain suspicious details that raise questions.”
“Who hired you?”
“Your father.”
“My father? I don’t believe this.”
“I was wondering if you might have a few minutes to answer some—”
“Can’t he just leave the whole thing alone?” Janice snapped. “Karen had a drinking problem. We’re all sad she’s gone, but … Wait a minute, what kind of suspicious details? What did my father tell you? He thinks somebody killed her?”
“Well—”
“Who?”
“It’s a bit early to—”
“Tony? He probably thinks it was Tony, right?”
“Right now, I’m just trying to narrow down the—”
“Forget it,” she said. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know about any of it. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get my kids to school. I really don’t want to dredge this whole thing up. I’m still trying to heal, okay? I don’t have anything to offer anyway. Just leave me out of this.”
“Janice—”
She hung up. There was a frantic edge to her voice that raised all sorts of alarm bells in my mind. I called her again, but she didn’t answer. Vancouver was a good thirty minutes away from my house, on the other side of the Columbia River, and there was no guarantee she would return to her house after dropping off her kids. But I didn’t have any better leads, so I grabbed a bagel and hopped in the Prius. After digging through the various maps I kept in my glove compartment, I found the one for Vancouver and located Janice’s house. Billie was always pestering me to get a smart phone with GPS, but I didn’t want a phone smarter than me.
The sky was gunmetal gray, and the moisture was thick enough in the air that I had to turn on the windshield wipers a few times. With the early-morning traffic, it took almost twenty minutes just to get downtown. I was going north over the Interstate Bridge, entering Vancouver, when I become suspicious of an all-black Ford Explorer two cars back. Didn’t I see that one behind me near my house?
There was a Chevron station a few minutes over the bridge, and I stopped there to refuel, even though my Prius’s tiny tank was nearly full. I got out to wash the windshield, and sure enough, the black Ford Explorer pulled into the Denny’s parking lot across the street, easing into a spot facing me.
I glanced at it without making it obvious I was looking. It was a late-nineties model, no hubcaps, the sideboards caked with months of dirt. The Explorer also had slightly tinted windshield
, so I couldn’t see who was inside, but the driver’s hairy arm was sticking out of the open driver’s-side window. I asked the gas-station attendant, a girl with three nose studs and painted-on eyebrows, if the bathroom was in the back.
With practiced boredom, she handed a key attached to piece of driftwood. Just in case the obscenely large wood wasn’t enough to keep someone from walking off with the key, the driftwood had also been painted pink.
Making sure to hold the key on the side facing the Explorer, so it was obvious what I was doing, I took my time sauntering behind the building. There was a Honda car lot right next door. Leaving the key on the curb near the bathroom, I crouched low and ran behind a row of Honda Pilots. I was so intent on not being seen by whoever was in the Explorer across the street that I nearly ran headlong into a young Asian couple who were peering into the driver’s-side windows of one of the Pilots, hands cupped around their eyes to block the sun’s glare.
“Excuse me, sorry,” I said, twisting to avoid them.
Both the man and the woman gaped at me with alarm, then dove into the Pilot—straight through the glass and metal. Nice. I’d managed to scare another couple of friendly neighborhood ghosts. I kept running, to the far end of the lot, far beyond where the occupants of the Explorer should have been looking, then timed my dash across the street to their side when a semi was blocking their line of sight.
Winded, shirt sticking to my sweaty back, I approached the Ford Explorer from behind and at an angle, hopefully out of view of their mirrors. My jacket was unzipped, my Glock within easy reach. I smelled frying bacon on the cool breeze. A large family was heading into the restaurant. An old man in red suspenders was trying to hand out Gideon Bibles at the door, but neither the adults nor the children even glanced at him. It was hard to say whether he was a ghost or not, though in a sense, he was invisible either way.
The Explorer was burning oil, the exhaust filling the air with the stench of it. The driver, whose arm was hanging out the window, was holding a smoldering cigarette. It was a big, muscular arm, light brown skin, a gaudy gold watch on the wrist, a tattoo of intertwined snakes on his forearm. They were listening to Latin music with a good beat, which helped cover the sound of my footsteps.
I took out my phone and turned on the camera. My other hand was perched on the zipper of my jacket, ready to go for the Glock. When I stepped in front of the driver’s-side window, I held the phone aloft.
It took a second before the two men in the car, both Hispanic, turned to look at me.
“Say cheese,” I said, and snapped the picture.
They stared, dumbfounded, so I went ahead and snapped another one, making sure the guy in the passenger seat was fully in view. I was nothing if not thorough. They were both young and lean, with their short black hair slicked straight back, though the driver was dressed in a sleeveless white T-shirt with a low-cut neck that showed off all his gold chains and his many tattoos, whereas the guy in the passenger seat was decked out business casual, a stylish blue golf shirt and tan slacks, no tattoos or chains but instead a small diamond in his left ear.
“Shit,” the driver said, fumbling for the gearshift. His Mexican accent was pretty clear, even in that one word.
“Why are you following me?” I asked. I sounded remarkably calm for how hard my heart was beating.
“Go, go!” the passenger cried, and that was two for two with the Mexican accents. “Get out of here!”
“Shit, shit,” the driver said, finally managing to get the car in gear.
“Did you guys jump me at the condo last night?” I said.
The Explorer squealed out of the parking spot in reverse, a cloud of exhaust choking the air and stinging my eyes. When he was shifting gears, I snapped a picture of the license plate. He roared out of the parking lot, banging onto the street without stopping, forcing a red Volvo to swerve, horn blaring, into the far lane. The Explorer raced down the road and screeched around the corner, out of my sight, the whole incident lasting less than a minute from when I’d taken their first picture.
I texted the license plate to Alesha, asking if she could ID it for me, then waited a minute to see if the Explorer would return. When it didn’t, I started for my Prius, then stopped when I saw how the old man with the Gideon Bibles was sitting cross-legged on the ground, head bowed in defeat, a stack of pint-size green Bibles next to him on the ground.
There was nobody coming or going from the restaurant. I put my phone in my jacket and walked over to him. He looked up at me, his face a minefield of moles and scars, one of his eyes whitened by cataracts. I reached for the top Bible and sure, enough, my hand passed right through it.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
His mouth fell open. He didn’t have any teeth.
“Don’t freak out,” I said.
“You—you can see me.”
“I told you not to freak out. I just have to know. Do you still believe?” And when he blinked his wizened eyes, I added, “You know, do you believe in God? Now that you’ve crossed over. You’re trying to hand out these Bibles to people who couldn’t care less, who can’t even see you. Do you still believe?”
“More than ever,” he said, a warble in his hoarse voice.
“Have you met him? God, I mean?”
“Nobody—nobody has. This is just purgatory, is all. Heaven is still real.”
“How can it be purgatory if nobody leaves?”
“Heaven is real,” he insisted.
“Okay.”
“Can you see all ghosts?”
“Something like that. But you still think God’s real, huh? Even after dying and waking up to this?”
He nodded. Two men in business suits, one carrying a briefcase, exited the restaurant. Both looked at me, but not the old man. I waited until they’d gone a good ways toward their car before speaking to the old man again.
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you believe in him if you’ve never met him?”
He thought about it a moment. “Well, I hadn’t met him when I was alive either. I believed then. It just took a little faith. Why should I stop now? What if—what if this is just one more test?”
The old man had me there. I may not have seen a lot of logic in it, but using logic with him wouldn’t do me any good. If people wanted to turn the crappy things that happened to them into heroic challenges to their beliefs, rather than as evidence that maybe their beliefs were just as crappy, there was nothing anyone could do to dissuade them. Especially if even death couldn’t do the trick.
“Good luck with the Bibles,” I said.
* * * * *
It was pretty obvious that Janice Charlton was not happy to see me. I deduced this fact by the scowl on her face when I said who I was.
“I told you on the phone I didn’t have anything more to say,” she said.
We were standing on the arched portico of her stately brick house, the kind of residence with its perky white shutters and neatly trimmed boxwood bushes lining the drive that just shouted that a banker lived inside. Her face was flushed pink and coated with a sheen of sweat, her brown hair tied into a ponytail with a pink band that matched her leotard and her wristbands. The earbuds in her hand, attached to the iPod fastened to her arm, were still playing the steady beat of some rock song.
Other than the hair color, she looked remarkably like Karen, except that she was probably twenty or thirty pounds heavier. It wasn’t a lot of weight, a tad more in the hips, a fair amount in the breasts, a stomach that bulged a bit, and might have been barely noticeable if she hadn’t been wearing a leotard a size too small. There was also a certain sexuality that oozed from her, straining to get out just as her body was straining to get out of that leotard.
“I just want a few minutes of your time,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but this whole thing has just been so—”
“How well did you know Tony?”
She looked, for just a second, like a woman who’d been caught eating Ben and
Jerry’s ice cream in the car outside a Weight Watcher’s meeting. One of the things I’d learned as a detective early on was that if you asked questions quickly, when people weren’t expecting them, you could often see reactions in their faces that would tell you more than their words ever would. When she’d suggested on the phone that her father might think Tony was behind Karen’s death, there was a certain dismissiveness to her tone that didn’t match up with the low opinion Karen said both her sisters had of him.
“Not—not well,” she said. “Why?”
I’d gotten far more out of her than I’d even been expecting, but I didn’t yet know what it meant. Rather than admit my ignorance, I decided to see if I could bluff her into telling me more than she wanted.
“Come on, Janice,” I said, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “you know what was going on.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice even more of a whisper than mine.
“You don’t? That’s not what I heard.”
“You—you better leave.”
“Okay,” I said, with a shrug. “I’m just doing this to help Karen. I hope you feel good about doing your part.”
I started to turn away. It was all vague innuendo at this point, but Janice started to cry before I’d even taken a step. They were big rolling tears, and like thunder following lightning, she followed them with a childlike sob. She didn’t even build up to it, just let it all out at full force.
“Whoa,” I said, “it’s all right.”
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean for it to happen,” she blubbered.
“I know you didn’t.”
“It was just one night.”
“I know.”
“I wanted—I wanted to tell her. I just … I just couldn’t …”
“It’s okay,” I said.
She looked like she desperately wanted to be comforted, a pat on the shoulder, a gentle hug, but since we were strangers, all I could offer her was a sympathetic face. When she’d calmed down just a bit, I asked if I could come in and she nodded, leading me into a cozy entryway with gray stone flooring. Still sniffling but no longer sobbing, she directed me through open French doors to a den lined with teak bookshelves and a baby grand piano in the far corner. The room smelled of leather and old books. It was dim but cozy, lit by a Tiffany lamp between the suede couch and loveseat. A blue plastic dinosaur lay on its side in the middle of the Oriental rug, and Janice picked it up on her way.