by David Bell
She looked at me over her sunglasses, her eyes clouded by suspicion.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“I just have to take it.”
“Is it your dad? Or that girl who was texting you?”
“I’ll be right back.”
I took the phone out to the concourse before she could say anything else. People streamed past in both directions. I dodged between them, looking back once to make sure Morgan wasn’t following me. I took the call.
“Mr. Fields?” Detective Givens said. “I thought you were going to be in Concourse B. You were going to call us when you found her.”
“I did say that, yes. But you need to give me a minute.”
“Where are you? Really?” Givens asked. “More importantly, where is she? We took a big risk letting this happen this way. Now you have to give us something. We agreed to that.”
A tour group went by, fifteen teenage kids wearing matching T-shirts advertising their church. They laughed and playfully shoved one another.
“I need time to talk to her,” I said. “You promised me that.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a bar.”
“Which one? The Keg ’n Craft?”
“A bar,” I said. “They all look alike.”
“Which concourse? B?”
I hung up.
It felt bold. A little crazy. But Morgan had that effect on me.
And the cops could wait just a little longer.
I took a deep breath and went back, cutting across the foot traffic in the concourse again. When I arrived, Morgan held her drink to her mouth, but she didn’t take any. She held it in the air.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Who was that?”
I sat and faced her. She’d pushed the sunglasses back up on her nose, but her lips were parted in a way that said she was nervous. Uneasy.
“We don’t have much time.”
“Why?” Then recognition spread across her face. “Who was on the phone? Tell me.”
“Not my travel agent.”
“Who?” She studied my face. “Joshua? Is it the police?”
I took a moment to answer, her laser glare boring in on me.
“They came to me,” I said. “After I got back from Nashville. They came by more than once.”
She put her drink down, the glass clunking against the bar top. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you doing this?”
“Hold on,” I said. “They told me about these women who Giles was rough with. They don’t know what happened in his house that night. I got the feeling from that Laurel Falls detective, Kimberly Givens, that they really don’t have much to go on.” I leaned forward. “They wanted me to wear a wire, to get you to spill everything when we met here. But I refused. I simply refused.” I put my hand on her knee, felt the soft denim against my fingers. “I wouldn’t do that to you. It’s too dirty, too underhanded.”
“They’re bastards. They’re—”
Before she went on, I stopped her, but her hand moved on top of mine.
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said.
She reached for her glass and took a drink. She studied me again, her eyes moving over my chest. “You’re really not wearing one?”
“Of course not. Do you want to check?”
Her eyes roamed over my body again, studying my shirt for any bump that would give things away. There was nothing there, nothing to see.
“Okay, fine.”
I checked my watch. I didn’t know how far away the police were, but they would be coming. Soon enough they’d be coming.
“Listen, the cops told me something Valerie said.”
Despite the sunglasses, I saw the change that passed over her when I mentioned Valerie and the police. Her cheeks flushed, and the muscles along her jaw tightened as though she was clenching her teeth.
“What is it?” she asked, the words slipping out through her pressed lips.
“If it’s true, if what Valerie said to the police is true, then maybe . . . maybe it can help you out as well.”
“What exactly did she say?”
I paused, not exactly sure how to say it out loud. “Valerie said she’s the one who killed Giles Caldwell. She said she took it upon herself to go see him when you needed the money, to stick up for you and defend you, and when he wouldn’t come around to her way of thinking, she killed him. She said she took the ring and hid the body.”
Morgan let go of my hand and turned away. She swiveled on her stool and bent over her glass, gripping the straw and taking a long drink. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed.
“I know that sounds kind of crazy,” I said. “A sick woman doing that. The cops seemed pretty skeptical of that story. But they have no way to prove or disprove it. And they have no way to prove or disprove whether Giles tried to hurt you.”
The TV had shifted to a morning program in which the host stood behind a stove while the guest flipped a pancake in the air and caught it with a skillet. An announcement came over the PA system, summoning someone to Baggage Claim C.
Morgan let go of the straw and reached up with both hands, rubbing at her temples. She continued to rub them as she spoke to me. “So what you’re saying is I have a couple of options here, right? I can claim self-defense because Giles has a documented history of threatening or even grabbing women and making them feel unsafe. Or I can back my mother’s claim that she did it. That she’s the one who went to Laurel Falls and killed Giles. Since she’s gone now, they can’t do anything to her. She’s out of their reach completely.”
“She is, yes. She was even when she confessed to Detective Givens. After all, they weren’t likely to arrest and jail a woman who was in hospice taking her last breaths.”
“I guess that’s one benefit of dying,” Morgan said.
“Maybe the only one.”
She turned to face me again. “And what is your interest in all of this now?” Her words carried an undercurrent of anger, her cheeks flushing a deeper red. “You’re here. And the police are here too? In the airport?”
“They are. I told them we were meeting here, but I didn’t tell them the truth about where. I gave them the wrong concourse and the wrong bar. If I had told them where we were really meeting, they would have snatched you right away. I put them off. But they’re going to be looking everywhere eventually, so we have to talk fast.”
As if on cue, my phone rang again. Givens. I silenced it.
“I don’t want to have to relive what happened in Giles’s house that night.”
“But you lied to me,” I said. “Or at least you didn’t tell the whole truth. You said you went there to demand your bonus, and when he balked you took the ring. But you knew exactly where his body was. You led me right to it. So if you didn’t have anything to do with his death, how did you know where the body was? In a park near where you grew up?”
“You shouldn’t worry about this,” she said, shaking her head but not looking at me.
“The cops aren’t going to let it go. So I am worried. We can’t move ahead if we can’t trust each other.”
She stared into the distance before heaving a deep sigh. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. What do you want to know? Just ask me, and I’ll tell you what you want to know. I thought this could wait until later, but you might as well fire away now. And then we’re never talking about it again.”
77
“What about the CCTV?” Kimberly asked. “Can they see anything?”
The airport cop shook his head. “It’s not that easy. There are thousands of people here. They could be in a bathroom. A gift shop. We don’t cover everything with the cameras.”
“Shit,” Kimberly said. “Shit, shit, shit. If they get on a plane . . . or if they leave the airport . . .”
78
I hesitated before I
spoke. Once, when I was a kid, I saw a bird’s nest in a tall pine tree in our backyard. I wanted to know what was inside—eggs? chicks?—so I climbed up to the branch it was on, about twenty feet off the ground. Then I had to shinny out along the limb in order to get close enough to peek into the nest. It all seemed like a good idea until I got there.
The farther I edged out, the farther away the ground appeared. And I started to wonder how I’d come that far without thinking it all through.
But did I just want to go back to the safety of the ground without learning the answer? After all that effort?
I felt the same way in BrewFlyers that day. I’d come so far. . . . I needed to hear it all, but . . .
“Valerie had a gun,” I said. “The police know that. And she used it to protect herself, even to protect you, before.”
Morgan looked disappointed. Her shoulders slumped. “So you really have been talking to the police. And believing everything they tell you.”
“No, they’ve been talking to me. At me.”
“Whichever it is, they’ve told you a lot.”
“See, I’ve been wondering—how did you get into Giles’s house? And once you were in there, how did you get him to sit and listen to what you had to say? He could have called the police. He could have made you leave. He could have just dragged you out. But if you had something to control him, something to keep him frozen in place . . . something like a gun . . .”
“You want to know if I took my mom’s gun up there to threaten Giles?”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Did your mom?”
She leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “Why do you want to know all of this? And in such detail?” She leaned even closer, until her face was about six inches from mine. “When we ran into each other that day at River Glen, you didn’t have any of these questions. I was so moved by the fact you were visiting Valerie. And then when we talked in the car, and we made these plans to go away once . . . once she was gone. I thought we’d figured it all out. Why do you need to know all of this now? Are you having second thoughts? If you are, you can just leave. We can go our own ways now.”
“I’m asking because we’re going away together,” I said. “We didn’t talk very long at River Glen. We couldn’t afford to. They were after you then and they’re looking for you now. They’re going to be looking everywhere in this airport. And I’m in it too. But if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to start over together somewhere, then I need to know what happened that night. We need to trust each other. I quit my job, Morgan. I’m giving everything up. We need to begin on the right foot. No secrets. Nothing hidden.”
“And that’s what you want to know?” Morgan asked. “If it was my mother or if it was me who killed Giles?”
“Yes. Because I guess I find it a little hard to believe that a woman who was dying of cancer would be able to drive an hour from Nashville to Laurel Falls and still have the strength to kill a man. Gun or no gun.”
Morgan smiled a little. She looked like someone remembering something mildly amusing and strange. “You’re underestimating her, Joshua. You don’t know how strong she was, how fiercely protective of her children. That’s what she lived for, her kids. Her foster kids. Yes, she did go there,” she said. “She had the strength to make that drive, and she went there to confront Giles. But that’s not all of it.”
79
Kimberly and Brandon walked down Concourse B with a uniformed officer on either side of them. The word had gone out to the police and security throughout the airport along with photographs and descriptions of Joshua Fields and Morgan Reynolds, aka Morgan Woodward.
Passengers gawked at them as they walked by, but they also moved out of the way, parting and stepping to the far sides of the concourse to allow the officers to march through. Kimberly had been out of uniform for so long she’d forgotten the way most citizens backed away when a decked-out officer came by.
They checked every restaurant, every store. But the airport was massive, almost like a small city unto itself. They might be in the wrong concourse, might be a twenty-minute walk from Fields and Reynolds. Maybe farther.
Just get to them before they get on a damn plane.
She’d held off on using her last resort—a complete lockdown of the airport. Nobody wanted that. Nobody wanted to deal with the hassles and delays that would create. The headlines, the angry tweets, the explanations to her superiors.
But if they had to . . .
“Can we search every concourse here?” Brandon asked. “This place is endless.”
“They’re looking everywhere,” Kimberly said. “But I want to find them. I want to ask Fields what’s wrong with him. Why isn’t he doing what we asked him to do?”
“We asked him to get the story if he could,” Brandon said. “Maybe that’s what he’s doing.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’re on their way to Belize or Timbuktu.”
“We knew it was a risk, letting them meet, letting them go this far. . . .”
“I know, Brandon,” she said.
She tried not to think of any mistakes she might have made. She tried not to think of the promotion she’d just earned days before. The one she might lose if things in the airport went sideways.
And Maria. She wanted to make her proud. Wanted to prove for her daughter what she could do.
Kimberly tried to focus on the task at hand—finding Joshua Fields and Morgan Reynolds.
80
“Valerie went there to defend me,” Morgan said. “She knew I wasn’t getting the money I deserved, and she knew Giles wasn’t budging.”
“And you needed the money,” I said. “She was sick, and you hadn’t been working.”
“Yes, we needed the money. She had doctors’ bills piling up. Prescriptions and tests all the time. Plus she wanted to leave something behind for me. When she was gone. But even with insurance it was getting way too expensive. She had a little house in Nashville, but she thought she might lose it because of the bills.”
“How did she manage that, though?” I asked. “I mean, she was so sick she went into hospice. . . . She must have gone into hospice right after she went up there to Laurel Falls.”
Morgan looked into her glass. There was melted ice tinged with red in the bottom, and a lonely celery stalk next to her straw. She picked up her glass and rattled it, then put it down like she was disappointed.
“Valerie had her moments when she was really, really doing well,” Morgan said. “Even when she was getting sicker, she’d have some days when it seemed like she was perfectly fine. She’d get out of bed. She’d cook. She’d shower and put on makeup. Those days were fewer and farther between that last month . . . and they were kind of cruel. Because on those days I would forget how sick she was, how inevitable the end that was coming.”
“That seems so strange,” I said. “That she could have those kinds of days.”
“I’ve talked to other people with relatives who had cancer. It happens. Someone can appear to be as healthy as anything one day and then be out of it the next. They can be that way just days before they die. Sometimes they can even seem well on the day they die.”
“Fascinating,” I said. I remembered the words of the hospice nurse when I went to see Valerie: Dying remains something of a mystery. “So I’m guessing she was having one of these good days when she decided to go see Giles. With her gun.”
“She’d been talking about it, saying things like she was going to go and set things straight with Giles before it was too late. I didn’t take her that seriously, although now I realize I should have. That day she got in her car and drove off, I was out of the house running an errand. I was out meeting with the hospice people, ironically, because I knew that was getting close. And then I came home and couldn’t find her. She didn’t answer her phone. There was no note. Then I checked her bedsid
e table and saw her gun was gone. I immediately remembered all her talk about going to see Giles. I put it together, but I didn’t know how long she’d been gone. I didn’t know what to do, so I jumped in my car and drove off after her.”
“And you caught up with her?”
“You know, I was more worried about her health than anything else,” Morgan said. “I thought I might come across her on the road. Her car in a ditch or maybe find her pulled over because she felt sick.”
“But she made it to Laurel Falls? Right?” I asked. “That’s what happened?”
“She did make it. And when I got there and rang the bell, Giles let me in.”
“He was still alive?”
“Yes. Very much alive. He looked almost happy to see me. I’m sure Valerie had told him who she was, and he hoped I was there to straighten everything out. That I would get the crazy lady out of his house so he could get back to his normal, entitled life.”
I started to feel a dull ache growing in the center of my chest. I looked at my empty glass, suddenly wishing for more bourbon. If Giles Caldwell was alive and well when Morgan showed up . . .
“What happened then?” I asked. “What went wrong?”
She scratched her cheek absently, the nails moving slowly across her clear skin. Skin I’d touched that night in the hotel. Skin I’d touched and kissed and wanted to feel again . . .
“Giles had taken the gun away from her. It was just sitting there on an end table. Valerie was in a chair in the living room. She looked . . . unwell, totally tired and spent. Driving up there and saying whatever she’d said to Giles must have taken a lot out of her. And it scared me seeing her like that. I think it scared Giles too. I thought we were going to have to call an ambulance. That’s really how I thought it was going to go. And if we did, how was I or anyone else going to explain what we were doing there in Giles’s house? The two of us had each driven an hour in separate cars to confront a guy over money I couldn’t really prove I was owed. And Valerie had brought her gun to do it. How did that sound?”