Little Falls

by Elizabeth Lewes

  5

  I returned to the county building just after seven on Monday morning. Inside the County Assessor’s Office—third floor, last door on the left—the cheap metal receptionist’s desk had that waiting look of a place unused, and the frosted glass panel in the door to my boss’s office was still dark.

  On the other side of the room, I unlocked another door and slipped into my cubicle. All clear, thank God. I plugged in my laptop, then set up the file transfer when it had booted up.

  “I’ll be damned. If it ain’t the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  I clenched my jaw. Gene. He loomed at my elbow, one arthritic hand on the outer wall of my cube, the other clutching his beloved NRA coffee mug. A vicious smile spread across his thin red lips, splayed by an underbite as bad as a chihuahua’s.

  “Does that make you Scrooge?” I asked levelly.

  I watched him slurp his coffee. “What brings Your Holiness in today?” he said. The boss liked me. I knew it and Gene knew it. And this was his way of trying to punish me for it.

  I stared at him blankly for a long moment, then turned back to my computer screen.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Waresch?” he snarled, the chihuahua gone rabid. “A man says good morning, and you—”

  “You didn’t say good morning.”

  Gene sputtered. “I’m the senior man in this office. I expect you to—”

  “I’m filing a report.”

  Dramatically, I clicked “Submit,” shut down the laptop, and slid it into my backpack. That’s the best thing about being a property tax inspector; aside from filing reports, there’s no need to be in the office.

  “See? All done. Parcel 15981-2851: you can check it yourself.”

  I stood up and Gene immediately stood up taller. We shared a moment of furious silence; then I slung my backpack over my shoulder and brushed past him.

  Before I got through the door, Gene said, “Parcel 15981 … 2851?”

  I paused, my fingers gripping the doorframe like it was a live thing, a sudden surge of anger whipping my spine straight.

  “Ain’t that out there where they found that kid?” Gene asked.

  I turned back, ready to lie, ready to argue, ready to tell him to mind his own damn business, and—and nothing. I saw the gray stubble coating his sagging jaw and the spot of food—egg, maybe—crusted on his short-sleeved shirt. His coffee cup was chipped and stained, and his hand quivered just a little, like he wasn’t quite strong enough to hold it anymore. And I remembered that his wife had died a year or two before, and he was on his own now: like me, but not like me.

  “Beale,” Gene said softly. “His name was Beale. Local kid. Hurt pretty bad, I heard.”

  My fingers tightened on the doorframe and I leaned into it; pressed my palm against the wood, dug my fingernails into the white paint, willed away the horror show in my head before it started again. But, no. That smell, that rotting stench, and the flies and the bloating and the muddy purple skin peeling—no. No.

  Gene sniffed.

  I said, “I gotta go.”

  Downstairs, I darted past the security desk, pounded out the doors, and stood at the top of the stairs, sucking down the cold morning air. A woman in a fringed shirt and feathered hair glanced at me sideways and hurried past. I smiled tightly and grabbed the railing, walking down slowly, steadily, then scrambled back up when a group of kids poured around the corner. A tide of little brown and blond and red heads swirled across the sidewalk in front of me. I wondered how old they were. Eight? No. Six? The same age Sophie was when I came back from Iraq for the last time. The age she’d been when I had barely recognized her at my mother’s funeral.

  As quickly as they had appeared, the children passed, following their teenaged chaperones down the sidewalk and into the old county courthouse.

  More slowly this time, I walked down to the sidewalk. It was shady in front of the building, but when I crossed the street, the sun was so fierce it burned through my hair. I hurried past the wide windows of the drugstore and on to the place on the next corner, the Do-Re-Mi Café, its windows lined with red vinyl booths and tables shingled with plates of pancakes and eggs and bacon.

  Inside was Lucky Phillips, rising from a booth in the back corner, and Darren Moses, still seated, drinking coffee from a mug the same shade of brown as his uniform. The bells were still crashing against the glass door when I slid into the seat Lucky had left behind.

  “Moses,” I hissed.

  “Camille.” Darren smiled thinly and pushed his half-finished plate toward me. “You want some hash browns?”

  “Why haven’t you called me back?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have anything official. I can’t tell you anything.”

  “At least tell me what you got out of Jer—”

  Darren, reaching for his wallet, glared at me.

  “At least tell me what you got out of the property owner,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh, come on. Did you get him to say it was his or not?”

  “He says it isn’t.”

  “What about the hay?”

  Darren glared at me again, so I whispered instead: “The padlock?”

  Darren dropped a twenty on the table and put the salt shaker on it. “He admitted those are his, but he says the building belongs to the neighbor.”

  I nodded. “It does.”

  “You been doing my job?” he asked, gazing out across the restaurant, his eyes sliding over the people hunched over scrambled eggs and coffee, out to the far wall, where an old, grease-slicked poster of Mount Rainier hung in a blue frame.

  “I’ve been doing my job,” I shot back. “Reviewing the records. Research. You should try it sometime.”

  Darren cracked a smile. “I will.” He yawned, then swallowed the last of his coffee. “Lucky’s going over there to ask, anyway.”

  “What about the kid?” I asked, knowing I shouldn’t have.

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “At least tell me his name.”

  Darren’s eyes were cold as he put his wallet back in his pocket.

  “Everyone already knows, Darren.”

  He stood up, settled his belt on his hips, and glanced out across the restaurant again. “Come on. I’ll walk you to your truck.”

  Fine. Maybe he’d talk away from other people. Maybe he’d tell me the kid wasn’t my daughter’s friend after all, that before the rot and the insects set in, he hadn’t been the stoned boy in the photo on her phone. But when we got outside and I started for the truck, he didn’t tell me anything at all, just offered me a piece of gum.

  I looked at him and said, “No, thanks.”

  Darren pointed to a brown truck with a faded county seal on the door. “That yours?”

  “No, it’s the green one on the next block.”

  He nodded, kept walking with long, loose strides.

  “Look,” I said after we stepped off the sidewalk at the corner, “all I want to know is whether you’ve identified the kid.”

  “The doc got some good fingerprints,” he said, his voice low, even though the street was deserted and all the buildings were closed tight to hold in the AC.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Do you have a name?”

  Darren stepped between two cars and crossed the street diagonally. I followed, hurrying to keep up with his long stride.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said.

  I stopped in the middle of the pavement, my keys gripped tightly in my right hand. “Then why does Sophie know?”

  Darren stepped onto the sidewalk, then turned toward me. “Your daughter?” He was curious, but not surprised.

  “She knew him. They were dating,” I said, without knowing the truth.

  “No way. He was too old for her.”

  “Nineteen?”

  “Yeah.” Darren frowned. “What name did she give you?”

  “Patrick.” Then I added the name Gene had mentioned
, again without knowing the truth: “Patrick Beale.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No.” I paused. Then, not sure if I was right or just crazy, I said, “But he—the kid at Leamon’s place—he looked familiar. I mean, sort of. Maybe I met him, saw him with Sophie. Or maybe he came into the mart.”

  Darren folded his arms across his chest, leaned back on his heels. “Recently?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You got a camera at your mart?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded once. “His folks have a place a few miles from you.”

  I shook my head, but then I remembered seeing them, their faces pale and worn, in front of the little white church down the street from my mart the day before. “Ed and Christine? He was Ed and Christine Beale’s son?”

  Darren just kept walking.

  “You gotta get a better rig,” he said when he saw my truck. Then he went around to the passenger side.

  I followed him, stared him down. “You’re not going with me.”

  Darren wrapped one hand around the door handle, placed the other on the side panel. “Yeah, I am.”

  “What are you gonna do if I say no? Impound my truck for asking inconvenient questions?”

  “Just open the door, Camille.”

  But like I said, I’m not good at taking orders. I went to the driver’s door and unlocked it, slid onto the torn vinyl seat, then turned the key in the ignition. Darren, his brow creased over his mirrored shades, his mouth set in a thin line, knocked on the window, hard. I put on my sunglasses, leaned over, and stared him down again. Then I let him in.

  When he’d closed the door, I cranked the wheel hard to the left, pulling out into the street while he was buckling up.

  “So, where we headed, Sergeant?”

  Darren pointed straight ahead. “North.”

  We drove through town—what there is of it, anyway—crossed the river, then got on the highway and accelerated. I asked questions, but he stonewalled me just like when we were kids, just like when I went for the bad boy instead of him in high school. I guess it’s a sort of patience. Or cussedness. Probably both.

  I shut my mouth, but over the steady whir of the tires, my mind wandered to all the dark places. Until—

  “Pull over!”

  I slammed on the brakes and swerved to the side, one wheel going off the side of the pavement and into the dirt, throwing up a cloud of dust. A red and black Chevy Suburban swept past, the driver leaning on the horn and a passenger gesturing out the window. In the seat next to me, Darren had a death grip on the door.

  “What the hell?” I shouted.

  “You missed the turn,” he said, sounding more calm than he looked.

  “You couldn’t just tell me that?”

  “I did. Twice, Camille.”

  “Oh.” I swallowed, stared at my hands on the steering wheel. They were still shaking. “I, uh … I was thinking about something.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw him staring, wondering about things I didn’t want to tell him. Didn’t want to tell anyone.

  Instead, I nodded, flexed my fingers, and glanced at the rearview. Empty highway and brown grass ran to the hills. “Where was the turn?”

  “About a half mile back.”

  I made a wide U-turn and veered onto the county road Darren pointed out. After a few minutes, we passed a long, narrow track that went off into the fields and then plunged into a gulch.

  I glanced at him. “You took a risk highjacking my truck back there.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I could take you down one of these roads, and no one would ever see you again.”

  He smirked. “I don’t know. I can think of worse things than going down one of these roads with you.”

  I pushed down on the accelerator and powered the truck around an uphill curve. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him—a married man—smiling to himself.

  “You sure?” I kept my eyes on the road, watching a blue car approach at reckless speed. I guess I was feeling existential that day. Finding a dead body can do that to you. “I mean, I could have killed that kid. It’s a good way to get away with murder, you know, calling in the body.”

  Idly, unconcerned, he said, “Did you kill him?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No. I’m just saying.”

  “We’ve known each other a long time, Camille.” He paused, smiled slyly. “Besides, at least twenty people saw you leave the Do-Re-Mi with me. That’s enough to start an investigation.”

  “Yeah, and how’s this investigation going, Sarge?” I jutted my chin at the road. “You got any leads?”

  But Darren was good at silence.

  A few minutes later, we passed the sign for “Little Falls, Population 72.” A moment after that, Darren told me to pull into the lot of my mart. Out front, Rhonda Faye, the woman who ran the place for me, had set out baskets of her mother’s vegetables in the shade of the awning. Another woman hustled out of the mart to a dented cream sedan idling by the gas pump, a kid wailing in the back seat.

  I parked the truck in the shade in the back lot, jumped out, and slammed my door. Darren closed his. I started toward the door to my apartment.

  “Where you going?” Darren said, still standing by the truck.

  “My place.” When he looked surprised, I added, “Don’t you want to see the property records? My research?”

  He shrugged. “Not really.”

  “What’d you come out here for then?”

  “The video, Camille.” I must have seemed confused because he added, “The security video from the mart. You said the kid may have come in.”

  I smiled. “So it was Patrick. You admit it.”

  Darren turned away, walked around the side of the building. I followed, but he went through the open doors of the mart before I could catch up. Inside, Rhonda Faye was behind the register, watching a telenovela, her way of learning Spanish so she could work the harvest in her fiancé’s orchards that fall. She smiled at me, then raised her eyebrows high when she saw Darren’s uniform. He stopped and held out his hand to her.

  “Don’t worry about him,” I said to Rhonda while I unlocked the office door. “We’re just assisting in his inquiries.”

  “You must be Rhonda,” Darren said in a voice that was all honey, no sting.

  From inside the office, I heard Rhonda get to her feet and reply abruptly, then the creak of the stool when she sat down again. He kept her talking for a minute or two about what usually happened at the mart while I was away, even got her to laugh a couple of times. Then he was standing behind me, the office door closed, only the high notes of Spanish melodrama audible from the mart.

  I had the system up on the computer and clicked the “Play” button. “I’ve got fourteen days of footage.”

  The security recording played back on fast-forward, the digital black-and-white picture showing everything happening at lightning speed: Rhonda opening on Friday morning. Rhonda setting up outside. The first few customers darting in and out, cups of coffee and Rhonda’s cinnamon rolls in their hands. Cars filling up their tanks in seconds, then speeding back out into the street. Rhonda rearranging the displays, her arms moving like a snake’s tongue, flicking up and down and around. Me taking over at five, then closing at seven thirty. Everything was dark for long, steady moments, until the sun broke through the windows again, and there I was, breathing hard, walking past the door after my run. A little while later, me opening the front doors on Saturday and the slow, steady trickle of people who come through at the weekend went on for mere moments before I swept up and locked the door and then night fell, and the place was silent, dark, all day Sunday. And then, on Monday—

  Darren leaned closer to the computer. “Wait, play that again. At normal speed.”

  I clicked on an earlier point in the timeline and then hit “Play.”

  On the screen, a small pickup parked in front of the open doors, and a kid with tufts of shaggy hair poking out from under a ball cap s
lid out the driver-side door. He walked in with the sort of narrow-hipped swagger you’d expect from the star player on a high school baseball team. Maybe he had been. Inside the mart, he nodded toward the counter, and I saw Rhonda, fiddling with a display, nod back and say something. There was no sound with the video, but I imagined what she’d said, probably something about how the cinnamon rolls were already gone and she had another pot of coffee brewing.

  The kid wandered out of the image but returned a few seconds later with a bottle of soda and a packet of jerky. Rhonda walked around the counter and rang up his purchase. While she was counting his change, he turned and looked up at the camera for a long moment, his face tilted up so I could see his chin and his mouth, his eyebrows knitted up like he was wondering if the camera was real. His hand, strong and long-fingered, was resting on the counter, but then he reached up to scratch his neck, to scratch the skin under his patchy stubble …

  My spine turned to ice.

  “That’s him,” I whispered.

  I glanced at Darren: his jaw was clenched, and he was squinting at the screen—not at the kid, but at his truck. I handed him a piece of paper and a pen, and he scribbled down the license plate number. On the computer screen, I watched Patrick Beale turn back to Rhonda, flash her a smile, then take his change, go out to the truck, and drive away.

  Darren picked up the phone on my desk and called in the plate, then held his hand over the receiver while he waited for the registered owner’s name.

  “Can you make me a copy?” he said quietly.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’ll email the files to you.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “On a drive. A USB or a disc or something.”

  By the time I found a USB, he was off the phone and pacing the office, his dark eyes stormy.

  “Can you get all the footage on that?” he asked.

  “What, all fourteen days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Probably.”

  “Great,” he said, then slipped out the door.

  His frown shifted to a smile for Rhonda Faye. He questioned her carefully, opaquely, about customers in the mart, while I transferred the files. But Rhonda’s no idiot, and neither am I.

  Later, as I drove Darren back to town, he got a call. The truck didn’t belong to the kid or his parents. I asked him if it belonged to the people who owned the property next to Jeremy Leamon’s, and how Lucky’s talk with them had gone. He stonewalled me for twenty miles before finally giving me a name: CLA. The truck belonged to some company out of Delaware, a company called CLA LLC.