Henry scratched his neck. “Are you sure?” he said from the couch.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Archie said, trying to sound sure, trying to sound not a little bit crazy. “There was another picture,” he said to Huffington. “It was similar, from the same series. But the Beatons were standing with two teenage girls. The boy wasn’t in it.”
Huffington frowned. “So you’re saying there was another picture that looked exactly like this picture but with a girl instead of a boy.”
“Yes.”
“You saw this other photograph for how long?” Huffington asked.
Archie knew where she was headed. “I glanced at it,” he said. “I gave it a long, hard glance.”
She nodded slowly, still frowning. “Could it be that you just thought you saw two girls?”
Archie looked down at Henry. Henry shrugged.
This wasn’t going the way it was supposed to. “It’s a different picture,” Archie said.
Huffington ran a finger along the top of the frame. Then she leaned over Henry and peered at the top of the other pictures. “It’s dusty,” she said. “Like the other ones.”
“It’s not a new frame,” Archie said. “It’s a new picture.”
“Maybe she changed it,” Huffington theorized. “After you left.”
She was humoring him, and they both knew it.
“I need to talk to the son and daughter,” Archie said.
“They both left town after high school,” Huffington said. “Melissa Beaton moved to California, I think. Died of cancer about ten years ago. Colin Beaton came and went for a while. But he hasn’t been in town for a few years. I think he lives in Nebraska. We’ll try to track him down. Tell him what’s happened. I’ll let you know when we locate him.”
She seemed to know a lot about the Beatons. Archie wondered where all this information was when he’d visited her at her office.
“There are ten thousand people in this town,” Huffington said, before he could ask. “We know each other. And when cops come poking around in our business, I make an effort to ask around and get up to speed.”
Archie wasn’t sure how far he could push it with Huffington, but he decided to try. “I want all the photographs from this house,” Archie said. “And any old letters or diaries.”
The corners of Huffington’s mouth tightened. “It’s not your investigation, Detective.”
Archie hoped he didn’t look as desperate as he felt. “Please,” he said. “I will turn over anything that seems related to the investigation. I need to find out more about the girl I saw in the photograph.”
She looked at him for a long moment. There was the mask again.
Someone sneezed.
One of the three cops said, “Sorry. Allergies. It’s the dog hair.”
The dog.
Huffington’s shoulders dropped. “Shit,” she said, looking around.
They had all forgotten about the dog.
“It must have gotten out when the killer came in or left,” Archie said.
Huffington raised her voice. “We need to fan out and find the dog,” she said. “You three,” she said, pointing to the three officers, “you’re not doing anything. Search the neighborhood.”
She took a few steps away from Archie and then turned back. “You find anything in those pictures, you tell me,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Archie said.
“This is a small town,” she said. “Full of nosy neighbors. So far, no one my guys have talked to says they saw anything, but someone will. We notice stuff that doesn’t belong. Strange cars. Strange people.”
“It’s a man,” Archie said. “If it’s connected to Gretchen Lowell, you’re looking for a man.”
She handed the framed picture back to Archie. “I’m reopening the James Beaton case,” she said. “I’ll be needing any information you have on that.”
Archie hesitated. “My task force is already on it,” he said with a nod in Henry’s direction.
Huffington smiled curtly at both of them. “Then you won’t mind the help.”
It was her jurisdiction. And she knew the town. It was possible she’d see something that they didn’t. “Okay,” Archie said.
Huffington said, “I’ll be in touch.”
She went back into the bedroom and Archie sank down on the couch next to Henry, immediately creating a dust storm of corgi hair. Archie could hear the three cops calling for the dog outside. More flies had gotten in when they’d gone out. The flies floated in the living room, trying to orient themselves to the source of the smell of rotting flesh. Archie looked down at the photograph he held in his lap. “I need to see her again,” he said.
Henry sighed. But he didn’t look surprised. “I’m coming with you this time,” he said.
Archie didn’t protest. Henry hadn’t seen Gretchen since the hearing. He was in for a pleasant surprise.
The Beaton family stared up from the strange family portrait. Three people in that photograph were already dead. Archie handled it gently, careful not to destroy any salvageable prints.
Henry hunched forward and gave the picture a long look. “You think the girl in the photograph you saw was Gretchen,” he said quietly.
Archie nodded. He could barely breathe. He had never been this close to her, to who she really was. The first record of Gretchen Lowell had been a bad-check-writing bust when she was nineteen. Before that, nothing. No birth certificate. They had no idea where she’d come from, who her family was, or even how old she really was. He didn’t even know if Gretchen was her real name.
“So where is she?” asked Henry.
Archie’s finger hovered above an image at the bottom of the photograph, a dark shape on the grass—the shadow of a teenage girl holding a camera to her face. He said, “She’s the one taking the picture.”
CHAPTER
41
Bliss offered the bong to Susan. “Do you want a hit off this?” she asked. “It’s Northern Lights.”
The bong was hand-blown glass. One of Bliss’s boyfriends had made it several years before. He called himself a “functional glass” artist, but everyone knew what he meant.
“I’m working, Mom,” Susan said. Bliss held a lighter to the bowl and took a long drag, and Susan heard the familiar babbling-brook gurgle of bong water. When Bliss finally exhaled, the sweet-smelling smoke drifted up and joined the marijuana smog that hung over the living room. “You shouldn’t have that on your lap,” Bliss said. “It’ll give you cancer.”
Susan looked down at her laptop. She was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, the laptop balanced on her bare thighs. “It’s a laptop,” she said. “They wouldn’t call it that if it wasn’t supposed to go on your lap.”
“It’s not called a laptop,” Bliss said. “It’s called a notebook. They’re careful not to call it a lap top, so you can’t sue them when you get lap cancer.”
The sun had set and it was finally cool enough to open the curtains, pry open the windows that weren’t painted shut, and revel in the feeble current of fresh evening air that moved through the house. Bliss had lit candles, but the fan kept blowing them out.
Susan took her computer off her lap and set it beside her on the sofa. She’d never heard of lap cancer, but why risk it?
Bliss stood up and stretched. She was wearing a teal and red Jazzercise bodysuit that she liked to wear the nights she taught yoga at the Arlington Club. It was a one-piece unitard; sleeveless, with a teal-and-white-striped top, a red band around the middle where a belt would be, and teal leggings with stirrups. Bliss wasn’t wearing a bra, or probably any underwear at all. Susan’s mother hadn’t worn a bra since the night Ronald Reagan was elected. Some sort of personal protest. Susan was pretty sure that Bliss wore the unitard to scandalize the society ladies at the Arlington, but it was hard to tell with Bliss; she might think of it as dressing up.
Susan was wearing her Pixies T-shirt and underpants. It was too stuffy for pants. Though pants probably provided at least some protect
ion from lap cancer.
Her mother took another hit off the bong, and used the lighter to relight a candle.
Susan squinted at her computer screen.
The editor at The New York Times Magazine had given her two days to get him copy. She had transcribed the interview with Gretchen and pasted the quotes she wanted to use into her document. She wondered which quotes they would make her cut. She guessed the Times’ style guide might have a thing or two to say about Gretchen’s gift for graphic detail. Grossing out readers first thing in the morning couldn’t be good for business. But then again, they put starving babies on the front page all the time. . . .
“I’m thinking of taking a masonry class,” Bliss said, bending her left leg, opening her hips, and resting her left foot on the inside of her right thigh, and then balancing in “tree” pose. “I’d like to build a rock wall. I’ve always been interested in rocks.” She put her hands in prayer position in front of her chest and then slowly raised them above her head until her arms were straight. “Do you remember when we used to go tubing on the White Salmon River and I’d pick up river rocks? I knew a man who had a rock collection. He spent summers on the East Coast as a kid, and he would go to this particular beach he loved, his secret beach, and he always came back with a rock. He was in his sixties when I knew him, and he had a whole shelf full of these rocks. He’d stopped traveling years before and he hadn’t been back to that beach since he was a kid, but he’d held on to these rocks. One day an acquaintance of his came over and saw the rocks and she said that she had a similar collection. It turned out that she had spent summers as a kid on the East Coast, too, in the same town that he had. She had gone to the exact same beach, his secret beach, and she had brought back her own rocks.”
“You’re high,” Susan said.
Bliss reached down and grabbed her left big toe, and then leaned forward and lifted her left foot up behind her above her head. She held it here.
Susan had done what Archie had wanted. She had left Ryan Motley out of the story. If Archie brought it up, she would tell him she’d done it for him, but the truth was that she hadn’t made a copy of the flash drive before she’d had to unexpectedly return it.
She wondered if it hadn’t been an accident that he’d taken all her printouts. Maybe he’d known exactly what he was doing. Now, without the flash drive or the printouts, she had nothing.
Her phone rang. It was sitting next to her laptop on the couch and Bliss glanced at it, her foot still behind her head.
“It’s Leo,” Bliss said.
Susan had recognized the ringtone. “I’ll call him back,” she said.
Who had closets in their bathrooms anyway? Rich people, that’s who. What did she expect? She had known what she was getting into. Archie had warned her outright. Told her what Leo’s father did for a living. Maybe Leo had a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he had a brick of cocaine the size of a toaster oven in his gym bag.
She listened for the tone that would alert her to a voice mail. But Leo didn’t leave one.
Archie was probably working.
She wondered if he’d even call her if he found something. In the old days, when she’d worked at the Herald, she’d know right away when news broke.
Now she had to make an effort.
She opened the KGW local news page on her laptop. Star anchor Charlene Wood smiled from the banner at the top of the page. Charlene’s arms were crossed jauntily, and she was winking, as if to say, I’m a serious journalist, but still a lot of fun in the sack.
SECOND MURDER! screamed the headline. PORTLAND LANDMARK DAMAGED! SERIAL KILLER AFOOT? KGW IS THERE AT 11!
That was the thing with local news: too many exclamation points. Susan thought that exclamation points should only be used ironically. Or when someone was actually screaming.
If Susan hadn’t glanced at the sidebar of stories, she would have missed it altogether: WOMAN MURDERED IN HOME IN ST. HELENS. She clicked on the link and read the story. Dusty Beaton had been found dead. Her death was attributed to “homicidal violence.” Her body had been discovered that morning by two Portland detectives. The story was four paragraphs. There was no mention that her husband had disappeared eighteen years earlier. “Homicidal violence” wasn’t as sexy as “burned to a crisp on the Portland, Oregon, sign.”
Susan looked at the time on her screen. It was minutes before eleven. “Can we watch the news?” she asked her mother.
“Kill your television,” Bliss said loudly. “The medium is the message. Television is chewing gum for the eyes.”
Sometimes Bliss talked like that; in bumper stickers.
“Please, Mom,” Susan said.
Bliss rolled her eyes, sighed deeply, and waved her hand in a sort of grand acquiescence, like she’d just allowed her sons to go off to war.
“I’ll get it,” Susan said.
She got up and went into the kitchen, opened the cabinet under the sink, and pulled out the nine-inch black-and-white TV that Bliss kept behind the Dr. Bronner’s all-purpose peppermint liquid soap and the unbleached paper towels. Bliss only had the TV for emergencies: congressional hearings, or special episodes of Masterpiece Theater. Susan heaved it to the living room, plugged it in, turned it on, and switched the dial to channel eight. But no matter where she directed the antennae, she wasn’t getting any reception.
Once when Susan was a kid she’d twisted a whole roll of aluminum foil into an elaborate system of antennae that had allowed her to watch an episode of Scooby-Doo.
She smacked the side of the TV. “This isn’t working,” she said.
“That’s because there’s no more free TV,” Bliss said. She had changed legs when Susan was getting the TV, and was now standing with her right leg wrestled up behind her. “They offered me a free digital converter box, but I said I didn’t want it.”
Susan had forgotten about this. Had it really been that long since she’d tried to watch TV at Bliss’s house? The transition to digital TV had meant that Bliss’s analog TV was useless without a converter. “Why didn’t you take the free converter?” Susan asked.
“On principle,” Bliss said.
“Why do you still have the TV if you can’t watch it?” Susan asked.
Bliss sighed and wrenched her foot up over her head another inch. “For emergencies.”
“What are you going to do, throw it at someone?”
Bliss raised an eyebrow. “I may throw it at you in a minute,” she said.
Susan let out a frustrated groan and flopped back down on the couch. “If you had faster Wi-fi I could stream it,” she said.
“If I had faster Wi-Fi, we’d both have brain tumors.”
Susan clicked on the live video button on the KGW home page. It started buffering.
“What’s so important?” Bliss asked.
“I want to check on something.”
“What?”
“The wife of someone I’m writing about was murdered this morning,” Susan said. “Plus, there’s that guy they found in the park. And that woman who was torched on the rooftop downtown. Do you keep up on the news at all?”
“I don’t want to think about that kind of stuff,” Bliss said. “It attracts negative energy.”
“Here.” Charlene Wood’s image stuttered on screen. She was standing in the studio in front of a photographic background of the city. “Gabrielle Meester. Murdered.” An image of a dark-haired smiling woman appeared in a graphic on the side of the screen. There were no leads. They were asking for people with information to come forward.
Susan heard an intake of breath and turned to see her mother lose her balance. Bliss toppled onto the couch, and immediately sat up and pointed at the screen. “I know her,” she said.
“That’s Charlene Wood,” Susan said. “There’s a poster of her on all the bus shelters in town.”
“Not her,” Bliss said. She pointed at the image of Gabrielle Meester. “Her.”
“What do you mean, you know her?” Susan asked.
“She looks familiar?” Susan asked. “Or you know her?”
“I’ve seen her before,” Bliss said.
“From the salon, or a yoga class?”
Bliss pulled her legs into lotus position. Then she picked up the bong and took another hit. The bong water gurgled.
Susan waited.
Bliss exhaled an impressive lungful of smoke. “No,” she said. “Somewhere else.”
The video on the Web site was buffering. “I hate this Web site,” Susan grumbled.
“Why don’t you go to the Herald site?” Bliss asked.
Because they’d fired her. “On principle,” Susan said.
Bliss stood up and stretched again. “I’m going to meditate,” she said.
That was code for going to bed.
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Susan said.
Bliss patted Susan’s head. “He’ll come around,” she said. She took a few steps, returned for the bong, and left again.
He’ll come around.
Susan realized that she didn’t know which man in her life her mom meant—Leo, or Archie?
She closed the Web site and searched for information on Mrs. Beaton’s murder online. Nothing useful came up. Archie wasn’t picking up his phone. So Susan focused on the story, rereading what she had so far and then editing the first few paragraphs. She’d work in Mrs. Beaton’s murder at the end—it would make a great close. Susan had to admit this story just got better. It was a special pleasure to describe Gretchen’s physical deterioration. They’d run a photo of Gretchen that was as glamorous as ever, of course. It was her beauty that drew people. If she hadn’t been such a centerfold, she wouldn’t have become a media icon in the first place. Ugly people killed people all the time. But when pretty people did, it got attention.
The goat was baying at the back door. Bliss let the thing roam free back there. It had already eaten the better part of a hundred-year-old rosebush, and a pair of faux-crocodile-skin clogs that Susan had outside the back door.
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