CHAPTER 28
For the second time in as many days, I made the drive north into Michigan. But this time I went straight for the tunnel beneath the Detroit River and paid my five bucks and made it into Windsor by eleven in the morning. I’d been trying to come up with a plan since last night and had ruled out a number of options.
Idea #1: Call the room.
Idea #2: Call Barry Newsome.
Idea #3: Bribe the housekeeping staff to let me into the room in question, thereby taking everyone by surprise.
Ultimately, I decided to go with knocking on the door.
After riding up and down in the elevator a few times waiting for someone with a room on the same floor, I found myself in a tan and bronze carpeted hallway in front of room 615.
My thinking was this: if Nadine and Katie were staying here of their own accord, having ditched the problematic husband and troubled son, I had no desire to interfere and could be on my way. But if something else was going on, maybe I could help.
I knocked.
A vague rustling came from inside but no one answered the door.
I said, “Nadine?”
Rustle rustle.
Then, “Who is it?”
The voice was female, quavering, but almost comically upbeat—a sitcom character caught in some embarrassing act.
“My name’s Roxane. I’m a private investigator from Columbus, and I just want to chat with you about your son.”
The door opened a few inches and stopped.
I felt my forehead crease, confused, when nothing else happened.
I pushed on the door with my fingertips, gently. It slammed against the safety bar and before I could grasp what was happening, a hand darted through the gap and my rib cage exploded in pain.
* * *
There was carpet on the floor, tan and textured. I was flattened against it, palms pressing into its looped fibers. My ears were ringing and the inside of my mouth tasted like wet pennies. I tried to sit up but nothing happened.
Three pairs of feet were in the room with me: Silver ballet flats, pacing. Wing tips. White canvas sneakers, kicking back and forth against a damask stripe bedspread.
“… did the right thing,” a man was saying.
“Is she dead?”
“No, she’ll be fine.”
“She looks dead.”
I guessed they were talking about me. I tried to sit up again, this time making it onto one elbow before the room righted itself and I had to close my eyes against a sharp pulse of nausea. I wiped my mouth and my hand came away slick with spit.
The wing tips came closer to me, then disappeared beneath knees in charcoal-grey trousers. I blinked and Barry Newsome’s face appeared. “She got you with a stun gun. Not a quick li’l zap either, the full five seconds. Your nervous system is probably going haywire right now but give it a minute and you’ll be okay.”
I struggled into a sitting position, perspiration popping along my upper lip. With shaking hands I lifted up the hem of my shirt and saw a large red welt, tinged purple at the edges, with two dark-colored dots at the center as if from the fangs of a snake. I felt my head lolling to the side but I couldn’t quite manage to lift it.
Behind Barry, the canvas shoes hopped down from the bed, disappeared, and came back a beat later with an offering of a small bottle of orange juice.
“That’s probably a good idea,” the man said. “The stun gun converts sugar in the blood to lactic acid and all that.” He opened the bottle and held it out to me but I was using all of my energy to keep myself from flopping back onto the carpet.
Finally, I was able to tip my head back against something hard—the wall, or a dresser. I saw that the canvas sneakers belonged to Katie Brant, a skinny, nerdy kid with a messy dun-colored ponytail and wide eyes staring at me from behind translucent pink-framed glasses.
The ballet flats, then, belonged to her mother. Nadine was still pacing, arms crisscrossing her midsection. Her dark hair had a grey stripe at the roots where the natural shade had grown in over the last month. She didn’t look at me.
I reached for the orange juice and managed to grasp it and move it to my lap without spilling it.
Barry Newsome stood up, knees crackling. I saw that he was holding my wallet in one hand, my laminated investigator’s license in the other. He went on, “How did you find them here?”
I hadn’t noticed it the other day, but he looked like an investment banker.
I cleared my throat and said, “Give me back my ID.”
My jaw wasn’t working properly and it came out strained and tight. But he did as I asked, which made me feel the tiniest bit better.
“I checked you out,” he said. “You’re not one of them. At least I don’t think so.”
“Can someone please tell me what the fuck is going on?”
Nadine gasped a little.
I added, “Rebecca asked you for help.”
“And I thought I was doing a damn good job. How did you find this room?”
I took a small sip of juice and lifted my eyes to Katie’s wide ones. “Your friend Emma.”
Nadine stopped her laps across the room. “What? Katie, I told you you could not contact anybody—”
The kid burst into tears. “I just miss everybody, we’ve been here for so long.”
“Please,” I said. I was able to breathe properly now, though my side throbbed with even the tiniest movement. “I didn’t come here to get anyone in trouble or to stress you out. And certainly not to get tased. I’m trying to help you.”
Nadine sat down at the foot of the bed. “I’m sorry. I panicked.”
“I gathered that.”
“Do you know where my son is?”
“No. I was hoping you could tell me that.”
She pulled on the ends of her hair. “He’s been using his phone card to call us. But then last week, he stopped. I never should have let him talk me into this. Coming here.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because Joel isn’t.” She nodded like that explained it. “Because he can’t be. He doesn’t have a passport. Neither does Aiden, which is why he’s not with us. But Katie and I do, she went to this science program in Toronto a few years ago.”
Barry Newsome said, “Why don’t you get off the floor, have a seat, and we can tell you the whole thing.”
* * *
Barry and Katie left the room in search of food so that Nadine and I could talk in private. “I know that Rebecca is dead,” she said. “Barry told me. After we didn’t hear from her, he did some digging. But I haven’t told my daughter. I don’t want to scare her. She just lost her dad a few years ago.”
I was sitting upright in a desk chair, doing my best not to move the left side of my body. Nadine sat cross-legged on the bed. “You didn’t tell Aiden either.”
“No. I thought he might do something stupid.”
“Such as?”
Nadine ran a hand over her face. “Joel,” she said, and it looked like she was going to continue, but she didn’t.
“He hurt you.”
She nodded. “Aiden never liked him. Katie didn’t at first either, but then she started to. But Aiden, he begged me not to marry him. I thought it was because of his dad. Like he didn’t want me to replace his dad. I wasn’t trying to, though. I just—I wanted to make sure they were taken care of. My kids. Geoff wasn’t a saint. He never hurt me, not physically, but he was no saint. He left me with a lot of things to deal with. Debt. Joel didn’t care about any of that.” She folded her arms over her chest as if she was freezing cold. “And the people at Keystone were so welcoming. I wanted—needed—that so much. It happens so gradually, the way it takes over. And when they take away all that love-bombing, it just makes you feel so cold and small, like you’d do anything to get it back. Put up with anything.”
Nadine looked up at me with bright eyes. “Aiden kept trying to tell me and I didn’t get it. It made more sense to me to wear long sleeves to cover the bruises than to
listen to my child.”
“How did Rebecca get involved?”
“He told me that she saw one of the Keystone tracts in his backpack at school. She was familiar with our—with the Fellowship. She’d been a member some time ago and had to fight to get out. I told her I didn’t want out of anything. At first I really thought that this woman was crazy. But then Joel was pressuring me to take Katie out of the Science Academy—because Keystone has plans to open its own school in the future. My girl is exceptional, and she needs to be with other gifted kids. I told him no, I wasn’t going to take her out of school. It was so much easier for me to draw a line where it came to her, than it ever was about myself. That was the night that I truly realized what a monster he is.”
I waited for her to elaborate, but she seemed to withdraw into herself for a long moment. Then she said, “Rebecca told me about Barry, who’d helped her out when she left the Fellowship. She’d been in touch with him and he offered to let us all stay here until we figured out a plan. But Aiden doesn’t have a passport. I said we could apply for one for him and just wait until it came, but he was afraid for me. So afraid. Rebecca said that Katie and I could leave now, and Aiden could stay with her until his passport came. She was so helpful. Supportive. She even let my son drive an old car she had so he could get to the homeless shelter where he volunteers. And I just—it’s an idiotic plan. I realize that now. But it was only supposed to be for a few weeks.”
“When did all of this happen?”
“Around the middle of September.”
About a week or so before Rebecca’s fall.
“Aiden was so brave,” Nadine added. “He even said he was working on something to make sure Joel could never bother us again.”
“Like what?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know anything about Nora Health?”
“Who?”
“Is Joel still involved in antiabortion protesting?”
She sighed. “He’s very dedicated to the cause.”
“What does that mean?”
“His first wife. She never told him that she was pregnant, and she ended it. This was shortly before she passed. Joel is haunted by it. By the child that could have been. It’s so sad.”
“That she felt like she had no other choice?”
Nadine’s eyes widened in horror, but then fluttered closed as she realized that she could relate to the feeling. She said, “He’s on a mission to make people see.”
“And how does he go about doing that? I know he’s no longer involved with Life Begins.”
“He’s forming his own coalition.”
“Of?”
“I don’t know.”
“With other people from the Fellowship?”
“Everything he does is with people from the Fellowship.”
“Do you know what people?”
“No.”
“Do you know what he intends to do?”
“No. What does this have to do with my son?”
Now I shook my head. “I’m not sure, but there’s something going on here that I can’t see yet.”
Barry and Katie returned to the room with a large pepperoni pizza in a grease-spotted cardboard box. I was hungry, but my jaw hurt too much to chew. While Nadine and her daughter ate, I went down to the security office with Barry.
“She got you good with that thing, huh?”
At some point, it would probably strike me as funny—that time I got zapped by a stun gun shaped like a digital camera—but I wasn’t there yet. “What’s the deal with you and Rebecca?”
“There’s no deal.”
“You know what I mean.”
Barry sighed. “I was a terrible husband and father the first time around. I abandoned her and Maggie. It was wrong of me. It’s no wonder that Rebecca turned to a community like the Keystones in the aftermath.”
“So Maggie was brought up in the group.”
Barry nodded. “Rebecca and I had a major falling-out over it. Over Maggie getting brainwashed by those nuts. But she told me, and rightfully so, that I wasn’t a part of their family anymore, that I gave up the right to have an opinion when I left them to start a new family. It was pretty ugly. I hadn’t heard from Rebecca in, oh, ten years, maybe more. I got divorced, remarried, divorced again. Then one day I got a call from her, here at the casino. There’d been this profile of me in some security newsletter her new husband subscribed to and she happened to see it.”
“So ten years after a knock-down, drag-out fight about her church, she just calls you up.”
“She told me that I was right. About the Fellowship.”
“And you were her hero who swooped in to save the day.”
His expression tightened. “Not her. She was already well on her way to save herself. She was calling about Maggie.”
“Oh.”
“She and Maggie’d had a version of the same conversation I tried to have with her all those years ago, with more or less the same result. Maggie wasn’t speaking to her. She wanted me to try.”
“Did you?”
“I tried. She wouldn’t return my calls. But after that, Rebecca and I kept in touch here and there. Six weeks or so ago, she reached out and told me about Nadine. Of course I was willing to help.”
“What changed between Rebecca and Maggie?”
“Oh, I think Maggie getting pregnant made her realize a few things.”
That echoed what Sharon Coombs at Horizons had said, too.
Barry added, “Rebecca wasn’t going to question it too much. She was just happy.”
“Did Maggie reach out to you after Rebecca died?”
“No, and I tried getting ahold of her, but again, she wouldn’t talk to me.”
“So what’s the plan now?”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Rebecca’s plan made sense at the time. I swear it did. But now I don’t know what to do, because Nadine’s son is out there somewhere. She doesn’t want to leave the hotel because this is the only place he knows to look for her. But if he doesn’t have the passport by now, I don’t know what’s going on.”
I wondered if Aiden’s passport was sitting in a pile of mail at Arlene French’s house.
“A few days ago, he was still at Rebecca’s,” I said. “I talked to him there. He was very freaked out to learn that she wasn’t coming back.”
Barry nodded. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. I followed him to Detroit—while he was following Joel.”
“Joel was in Detroit?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Downtown. The St. Clair Club.”
He leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “I’m not familiar with it. Is he still in Detroit?”
“When last I saw him, he was threatening me in Toledo. Do you really think this whole cloak-and-dagger bit is necessary?”
“I thought Rebecca was being a bit dramatic, but she’s dead. So who was right?”
I sighed. That was a good point, though Joel Creedle had seemed surprised when I mentioned that my interest here was finding out what had happened to her. I said, “If she hears from Aiden, will you give me a call?”
As I walked out of the casino, I dialed Lindy Brant’s number. I hadn’t clued her in on my lead about Nadine because I wanted to make sure all was well first, relatively speaking. Now it seemed safe to let her know.
I could tell something was wrong as soon as she answered. “I was just getting ready to call you,” she whispered, voice thick with emotion—fear or anger. “I think something terrible’s happened.”
CHAPTER 29
Keir Metcalf’s Escalade was parked just outside his closed garage, its driver’s-side door hanging open. The keys were in the ignition and the rhythmic chime of its warning alert punctuated Lindy’s footsteps. “Keir?” I heard her say in the video, which wobbled in her shaky hand. “Something isn’t right here.”
In person, in her homey kitchen, she said to me, “I don’t know what
made me start the video. I just thought, there needs to be a record. In case things get weird.”
It wasn’t like Keir not to come in to the office without telling Lindy he’d be late, she’d explained already, so she had gone over to his house to make sure he hadn’t thrown his back out or something. She found his vehicle with the door open but the house locked up tight, and Keir nowhere to be found. On closer inspection she saw his phone in the SUV’s console and his concealed-carry holster on the passenger seat, empty.
She called Eddie, a young guy who worked for AA Security. She also called me, but of course I hadn’t answered. No one called Joel Creedle but he showed up in short order anyway, and that was when things had gotten weird.
“Put that away,” he snapped at her, pointing into her camera. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I don’t want anyone to say everything’s fine. This is not fine.”
Creedle tried to snatch Lindy’s phone away. “This is your boss’s private property. What gives you the right?”
“What gives you the right to tell me what to do? I’m concerned about Keir, which you don’t seem to be, even though you showed up here like you were expecting some kind of trouble. Do you have a GPS tracker on my vehicle too? Huh?”
From off-camera, Eddie said, “Joel, what’s she talking about?”
“She’s being hysterical. I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
Lindy went on, “Or maybe on both of our cars, me and Eddie? Keir was going to confront you about all this. Today. And now, suddenly, he’s gone?”
“He probably saw something and went into the woods after it.”
Eddie said, “Like what?”
Now Creedle was scrambling. “A wounded deer, maybe. I’m gonna go look for him. You two want to come?”
“I am not going into the woods with you, Joel,” Lindy snapped.
Eddie walked behind Creedle on the video. “I think we ought to call the police.”
“Do you have any idea how mad Keir is going to be if you do that?” Creedle made another move for Lindy’s phone, but she moved out of his reach. “If anybody can take care of himself, it’s Keir. He has a piece on him. He’ll be fine.”
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