I balled up my jeans and T-shirt and went back out into the store, transformed. “I need all of this,” I said. I lifted my hair off my neck and felt for the tag in my shirt and yanked it out.
The sales clerk widened her eyes and nodded as she scanned the tags I unearthed from my new clothes. She was very confused. “Do you need a bag, for the, your, um?”
“No, I’m good.” I transferred my wallet to the new pants, which had dumb, tiny pockets but fit like a dream. Just before she swiped my card I grabbed a tortoiseshell hair clip from a last-chance display next to the register. “This too.”
I twisted a section of my hair up and secured it to the back of my head with the clip and hoped the strigine security guard who’d escorted me out of the St. Clair Club wouldn’t recognize me now.
* * *
My new loafers were a bit stiff but made a satisfying sound on the terrazzo flooring as I breezed past the hostess stand and through the curtain and into the dim, crowded restaurant.
I took a seat at the bar and ordered a whiskey and Coke from the same caterpillar-eyebrowed bartender who had served me the other night. “A repeat customer already.”
“Yes, I’m hooked. Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“I’m trying to find this kid. Have you seen him here?” I showed the bartender a photo of Aiden on my phone.
“In the bar?”
“Anywhere in the club.”
The bartender busied himself with slicing lemons. “It’s not exactly a kid-friendly place anymore.”
“Anymore?”
Without looking up from the lemons, he said, “My family used to belong to this place. Half of my childhood was spent running around this restaurant.”
I waited.
“Now I work here. I can’t eat here, but I work here. Got it?”
“So things have changed.”
“Old money, new money, it’s a whole thing. You know? My family, whatever money we used to have, it’s so old it’s been gone for two generations. My dad could barely rub together two nickels but he was always a member here. We were that kind of family, and it was that kind of place.”
“What kind of place is it now?”
“Mostly new money. People make money from all kinds of things now. You’ve got the shale-ionaires, you know, they made money from fracking or whatever. Petroleum companies. Then there’s tech money, app developers. Corporations. It’s all very different. But to answer your question, no, I haven’t seen the kid. Your kid?”
“Heavens, no. One more question?”
He nodded.
“What’s the deal with the penthouse suites? Do people live there?”
The bartender shook his head. “It’s like a meeting room, a member perk. You’re going to get me in trouble. Members never want to talk to the staff here.”
“If you see or hear anything about this kid,” I said. I folded a business card inside two twenties and tossed it on the bar.
* * *
Too smart for his own good, Sharon Coombs from Horizons Academy had said about Aiden. Certainly too smart for me, at any rate—I had no idea what he’d been doing at the St. Clair Club in the first place. The white shirt that he pulled on as he had walked up the sidewalk told me he’d been at the club before, maybe multiple times. Maybe he’d followed Joel Creedle to multiple meetings there. Meetings with whom? Aiden knew—I was sure of that—and I’d do anything to find out for myself. But now he was who knew where, stuck without a car in Detroit—what would he do in that situation? Where would he turn? A bus ticket back to Toledo probably ran fifteen bucks; if Aiden could afford a bag full of flash drives, he could probably afford that. But what if he’d never made it out of the club in the first place?
As I drove back to Toledo, I flipped through radio stations, searching for I had no idea what—something to solve my case or fix my mood. Instead, I caught a snippet of a gloomy news story that made my stomach hurt:
In Lucas County this morning, a man was found shot to death in the woods in Sylvania. Identified as Keiran Metcalf, the victim was the owner of Double A Security …
I couldn’t hear the rest—I swallowed bile and saw red for a second and forgot to make my brain listen. By the time I remembered, the news anchor had moved on and was talking about traffic on I-90. “Fuck,” I said, and snapped the radio off.
Some ten miles of silence later, the phone rang—finally, Maggie calling me back. “Hi,” I said, “I’m glad to hear from you. I want to ask you a few questions about the Key—”
“I’m really sorry to have wasted your time,” she interrupted, “but I’ve changed my mind about all of this.”
I blinked in the half sun. “What?”
“I can’t be doing this right now. I need to focus on my baby.”
“Maggie, I know it’s hard to think about, but you were right—”
“No, you aren’t listening to me. I thought this would be, I don’t know, cathartic. But instead it’s just upsetting me more.”
I was struck dumb for a second. “But I think I’m making real progress here.”
I could hear Bea crying in the background. “If I owe you more money, you can send me a bill.”
“Maggie.”
“I told you I didn’t want anything to do with Barry and what did you do? You talked to him again? You asked him to call me?”
“No, that’s not what happened—”
“Please, let it go.”
“I don’t know if I can do that now, Maggie, it’s bigger than just you.”
She bit off a sharp laugh. “You sound just like her.”
“Maybe that’s because she was right about something—”
“Stop. Just stop it.”
She hung up.
I tossed the phone at the dashboard—it hit the AC vent and flicked upward, smashing into the windshield before bouncing off the dash and sliding down to the floor. A small dimple appeared in the glass of the windshield.
“Fuck,” I snapped at no one. I leaned forward and ran an index finger over the chip. It was tiny, no bigger than the head of a pin. You might not even notice it if you didn’t know it was there. But I knew it was there, and I could already tell that every time I looked at it I was going to think of this shitty moment and feel annoyed all over again.
I retrieved the phone from the floor. It, at least, appeared no worse for wear.
* * *
Aiden Brant was still missing, and if it hadn’t been for me, he’d still be safe-ish under Rebecca’s guest bed instead of on the lam somewhere. I decided that it was time to have a real heart-to-heart with Joel Creedle—now that I knew his wife was out of his range, I didn’t see the harm in pissing him off.
But when I parked on his street, I saw that a cream-colored Beetle was in his driveway where he usually parked his Audi.
Preston and the redheaded girl were playing a game that could only be described as Flirty Keepaway with a partially deflated basketball. “Oh, you’re the Zumiez lady!” Preston said, apparently having grown fonder of me in my absence. “Did you reconsider? Do we get the prize now?”
“So you haven’t seen your stepbrother, then,” I said.
“I told you, he’s at school.”
“Right, the camping school. Do you remember the name, by chance?”
The front door of the house opened and the white dog bounded out, followed by a young blond woman that I recognized as a member of the Bloom staff, a Not-Kyla.
The dog ran over to me and jammed its nose into my crotch.
“This is the Zumiez lady, remember, I was telling you about her?”
Not-Kyla looked at me, profoundly confused. She was holding a cordless phone in one hand, or maybe another cleverly disguised stun gun.
“I’m hoping to chat with with Mr. or Mrs. Creedle,” I said. “About this awesome scholarship opportunity that Aiden qualified for…”
“Oooh, oooh,” Preston said, “can we pretend she’s my stepmom and then we can get
the prize?”
“I think we should all go inside now,” Not-Kyla said. Then she looked at me again. “I don’t know what you’re doing but lying to children is so wrong. So wrong. Preston, come on. Inside. And you—if you don’t leave now, I’m calling the police.” She brandished the phone at me.
I held up my hands and walked away, but not so fast that I couldn’t hear her place a phone call behind me.
“Did Pastor Creedle leave town yet?”
* * *
I saw no reason to stick around, but the clerk at the motel told me that even if I checked out now, I’d still be on the hook for tonight and tomorrow night because their policy required a full twenty-four hours of notice.
“And twenty-four hours from now is after our check-in time, so.”
“It’s fine,” I said, again, “I just need the zeroed-out invoice.”
“I can’t zero it out yet, because you still have to pay for tonight. And tomorrow night.”
“You have my card on file. Can you just charge me and then give me the invoice?”
He shook his head sadly. “I can’t do that.”
“So there’s literally no way for me to get an invoice.”
“No, you can.”
I waited.
“Not tomorrow morning, but the morning after that, you can come back and I will print it for you.”
“But I am checking out of this motel right now. That means I’m leaving town. Can you fax me the invoice?”
“Fax it? No, I don’t think we have a fax.”
“Can you mail it to me?”
“Mail it?” He scratched his jaw. “Man, I don’t know about all this. Maybe you should just stay, that would honestly be the easiest thing…”
I went back out to the car empty-handed and placed my phone in the center console so that I wouldn’t fling it angrily at the windshield again. I could tell that this case was something big. I never got frustrated like this about the cases that weren’t big, even the tedious ones, the cases that involved staring at the same house for six days straight or digging through an unheated shipping container full of identical documents or—the worst of the worst—looking at a spreadsheet for any amount of time. The frustration that came from boredom or inconvenience or a medium-bad tension headache was different.
So I would have known this case was something big, even if my phone hadn’t started buzzing under my elbow at that moment.
CHAPTER 31
This is Helen Pickett calling from the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center. Am I speaking with a Roxane Weary?”
“You are.”
“Great. Ms. Weary, I’m calling because we found your business card among the personal effects of a young man in our care—”
“Aiden,” I murmured.
“Excuse me?”
“Go on.”
“He was arrested downtown a few nights ago and placed with our facility today. He wouldn’t give his name so we aren’t sure who he is—”
“Arrested? For what?”
Helen Pickett gave an immense sigh. “If you’ll let me finish.”
“Of course. I apologize.”
“He’s currently being treated by our medical staff—it’s quite serious. I’m just trying to find out who the young man is and get in touch with his parents or legal guardian.”
My first thought was that this was another trick—a ploy to get me to rush out of the city. I said, “Can I call you back?”
“Um, I suppose?” She gave me her phone number.
I hung up and googled the Franklin County JDC—the numbers matched.
Not a trick.
I dialed and asked the receptionist to connect me to Helen Pickett. “Me again,” I said.
“Well, okay then. As I was saying, I was hoping you might know who this young man is.”
“Is he okay?”
“Like I said, his injuries are pretty serious. He’s stable at the moment but I really need to speak to his parents or legal guardian.”
“What happened?”
This woman had no time for my bullshit. “Unless you’re his guardian, which I can tell you’re not, I can’t and won’t give you medical information. Can you tell me how I can get in touch with his family?”
“I’ll do you one better,” I said.
* * *
Barry Newsome drove Nadine and Katie Brant down to the first rest stop inside the Ohio line. Katie climbed into my backseat without even looking up from her iPad, her ears encased in bright pink headphones. Nadine was swaddled in a wool coat several sizes too big for her, eyes puffy and red following her phone conversation with Helen Pickett. The bits and pieces I’d heard didn’t sound great—internal bruising, fractured ribs. But he was alive, and Nadine would be in the same city as him in the space of a few hours.
Once she was tucked into my front seat, Barry came around to the back of the car to talk to me. “You’re sure you can handle this,” he said.
“I’m sure.”
“Because I can bring her down in a few days. I can’t get away for long enough tonight, but tomorrow afternoon, if that would be better?”
“Why, because you’re a man?”
“No,” he said. “Yes?”
I shook my head. “She’ll be fine with me. I’m armed. I’m very pissed off at these people.”
Barry studied me for a while. “I read about you online.”
“Fortunately for all of us, they don’t write news articles about my abject failures. Now,” I said, “I want to get back before it’s dark. I’ll call you if anything comes up. Okay?”
He gave me an uncertain smile. “Okay.”
I got behind the wheel beside Nadine. She was staring at nothing, working at the cuticle of one thumb with the nail of the other. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t say anything. I decided I wouldn’t say anything either, hoping she’d open up first.
By the time we hit 23—at which point we’d been riding in silence for an hour—I finally spoke.
“It’s fine if you don’t want to talk. But if you do, you can.”
Nothing. She was clearly an expert at the quiet game.
“I think your son is a very smart kid, for what it’s worth.”
I saw Nadine look over at me in my peripheral. She said, “He is. Too smart. Katie too, but she’s so young. She still thinks the grown-ups have it figured out.”
I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw that Katie was asleep against the doorframe, her headphones askew. “Did the woman on the phone tell you why he’d been arrested?”
Nadine shook her head. “What’s he even doing in Columbus? He doesn’t know anyone.”
“What matters now is that you’ll get to see him. Soon.”
“What if Joel finds him first?”
That was a vague possibility, though I was hoping that Joel’s out-of-town trip was to Detroit instead.
She added, “He’s Aiden’s stepfather, and he can be very persuasive.”
I wanted to tell her not to think about it that way. That worrying herself sick now wasn’t going to help her son and it wasn’t going to keep Joel Creedle at bay. But I also knew that statements like these never made anyone feel better and sometimes only made things worse.
“You probably think I’m a ridiculous person.”
I stole a glance at her. “No, not at all.”
“You think I’m some silly woman who wasn’t even bright enough to see what was so clear to a sixteen-year-old boy and wasn’t strong enough to do anything about it.”
“But you did do something. You decided to leave.”
“I hid. I let my son tell me that he could take care of himself better than I could, and I hid.”
“You had a plan. An unconventional one, but I think it could’ve worked. Then Rebecca died, and everything changed. That’s what happened.”
“Why are you helping me?”
I felt her eyes on me. I said, “Because I believe that you’re right about your husband. I think he’s a bad guy who’s
been hiding behind the church for a really long time. In my world, you help the ones who are up against people like him. And, because I like to think I can be pretty tough when I need to be, but I was no match for you and your little stun-gun camera. So I figure we can make a good team.”
For the first time in my presence, she smiled.
* * *
Aiden Brant had a small cut above his eye, but otherwise he looked fine—except for the various tubes and wires connected to his lanky teenage body. He was unconscious and had been since puking blood and passing out in the intake office of the juvenile detention center. He had a perforated liver, a collapsed lung, and a slew of other internal injuries. But his surgeon, Dr. Chan, seemed optimistic about his eventual recovery.
“We were able to repair the liver,” she was telling Nadine inside Aiden’s hospital room. “We had to put a tube in the lung, which will help with drainage…”
I was in the hallway with Katie, to whom I did not know how to speak. I could deal with teenagers all day long, but the nine-year-old had me stumped.
“What do you like to watch on TV?” I tried.
“Joel doesn’t let us watch TV.”
“What about music?”
“We don’t listen to music.”
“Then what are you listening to in those headphones?” I tried to give her a playful nudge but she recoiled.
“I’m trying to learn Japanese.” She glared at me and showed me the language-learning app on her iPad.
The caseworker from the JDC came out into the hall with a clipboard and a coffee in a small Styrofoam cup. She rested the clipboard on the forearm above the hand holding the coffee, which seemed like a bad idea to me, but she obviously had some practice. “I appreciate you helping me out,” she said. “Sorry if I gave you a hard time on the phone. It’s just that this was an unusual situation and the boy needed emergency medical care.”
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