by Mason Cross
When she went through to the kitchen, muttering about fetching something, Green leaned over and whispered.
“This is a very good day.”
“She’s quite a woman,” I said.
“I think it’s been really good for her, having somebody new to impress.”
After dessert, Kathleen excused herself and went to bed. Green took a beer and a bottle of water from the refrigerator. She handed me the beer and we sat down on the couch.
“She seems really proud of you,” I said.
Green thought about it. “She is, I think. When she remembers to be.”
“What was the diagnosis?”
“It’s called Cadasil syndrome. It’s an acronym for a lot of long words I’ve never been able to memorize. Long story short, there’s no treatment, and it’s downhill from here.”
I started to say, “I’m sorry” again and stopped myself.
She took a drink of her water. “What happened in Atlanta? Fill me in.”
I told her about Atlanta. Detective Correra. The tattooed man. How I had started to think Wheeler had been targeted, rather than the victim of a random attack. Finding the girl Connor had seen; the girl he thought was his sister.
“You break it to him yet?”
“Of course.”
“Let me guess, he didn’t accept it?”
I made a noncommittal noise.
“You think they’re connected somehow? Wheeler and the tattoo guy?”
I hesitated. I had a good feeling about Green, both as a cop and … more than that. But I had known her just over a day. I didn’t know if I could trust her with my suspicions. I played for time instead of making a decision.
“You said you had something on your mind earlier. What was it?”
She looked puzzled for a second, and then remembered what it was. “Oh. It’s nothing really. Certainly nothing compared to the day you’ve had. It’s Deputy Haycox.”
I remembered the young guy in the station. The one with the Devil Mountain Killer hobby. “What about him?”
“He didn’t show up for work today. It isn’t like him.”
“Does he have family out of town?”
“Macon. That’s what I came up with too. Maybe it was a family emergency, and for some reason he hasn’t gotten around to calling yet. I’m sure he’s absolutely fine. Although he won’t be once Sheriff McGregor gets his hands on him.”
I was watching her. She looked like someone trying to talk herself into feeling better.
“What’s wrong?”
“Tell the truth, I was only a little worried until I talked to you. Now I have a very good idea that somebody targeted Wheeler and the tattooed guy. Somebody who may have a connection to Bethany. And Atlanta isn’t so far away.”
Atlanta isn’t so far away. As she spoke the words, I put some of the pieces together in a new formation. Could Haycox have something to do with the two deaths?
But Green wasn’t thinking along those lines at all, I realized. Quite the opposite.
Her eyes found mine. She put her bottle of water down on the coffee table, as though she had just remembered she was holding it.
“I’m sure we’ll hear from him tomorrow,” she said. “If not … will you help me take a look for him? Since it’s what you do, and all.”
“Sure.”
“How did you get into that line of work, anyway?”
“By accident,” I said. “I found out it’s what I’m good at.”
She decided not to press further, perhaps too tired for an interrogation. She took another sip of the water, thinking. “The person who killed Wheeler and the other guy. You’re thinking it could be the Devil Mountain Killer, aren’t you?”
It was the first time anyone in Bethany had directly referred to the person she had correctly assumed I was thinking about. Most people talked about “What happened”, or maybe “Him”. No one had used the name in front of me until this moment. Just then, we heard a muffled roll of thunder outside. Before it tailed off, the pitter-patter of raindrops picked up the tune on the roof. I waited for her to continue.
“You said somebody doesn’t want anybody looking into Adeline Connor’s murder. Or into the past generally. Two dead in Atlanta.”
“González was stabbed, but Wheeler was shot. Two to the head.”
She shook her head firmly. “You’re wrong.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to, but you’re wrong. The Devil Mountain Killer is as dead as Adeline Connor.”
“You seem pretty sure of that.”
“The killer is gone, Blake. Maybe he died, maybe he’s sitting in a cell somewhere for some other murder. But he’s long gone. If the same person really did kill Wheeler and the other guy, this is something new.”
The grandfather clock in the hall chimed softly, and I realized it was later than I had thought. I counted eleven chimes. It was as though a spell had been broken.
“I should go,” I said.
She opened her mouth as though she wanted to say more, but then nodded. “I’ll get the keys.”
On the drive back, we didn’t speak until Green had made it almost halfway back to the cabins. It had started raining for real just as we were leaving, and the downpour had intensified. She kept her eyes on the road and the needle under forty-five on the winding road. I had forgotten all about deer and reckless Maserati drivers.
“It was a bad time.”
I looked over at her, but she kept her eyes on the road.
“I know what you think. Little backwoods town, they don’t like to hang out the dirty laundry. Keep up the pretense that nothing has ever gone wrong in good ol’ Lake Bethany, Georgia. And part of it is that. Have you ever lived anyplace like this Blake?”
I thought about Ravenwood, the town I had had cause to visit recently for the first time in twenty years. Not so different in size, and yet very different in other ways.
“Once,” I said. “For a while.”
“A while. Then you can’t understand. For a lot of people here, Bethany is the world. Back in ’03, we were living in dreamland. Like, everybody knew bad things happened out there in the world, but not in this little bubble. And then it was like … it was like a curse. The first body was found here, and the last.”
I understood what she was saying. It was like the killer hadn’t just taken lives, he had taken the soul of the town itself.
“Things never really got back to normal after that. You never forget seeing the fear in your neighbors’ eyes. It changes things. Everything.”
As she said that, her eyes shifted from the road for the first time and met mine. There was a curious blankness in them, as though she was reliving those dark days in her youth.
“You must have been afraid too.”
“That’s the funniest thing. I never felt afraid. Even after what happened to my dad. I can’t tell you why.”
We reached the cabins and she dimmed the lights to avoid waking up Joe, if he had turned in already.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said.
She made a dismissive gesture. “Thank you, you did me a favor. I’m just sorry things got … maybe we could do something again.”
“Sure,” I said. I got out and shut the door. Green backed out, turned in the road and drove away without looking at me again.
I stood in the darkness, in the shelter of the porch, looking out at the black void of the lake, thinking about everything Green had said. I unlocked the door of my cabin and my hand was tightening on the handle when I remembered the little trap I had set. I circled around the back of the cabin and entered via the French doors.
The vase wasn’t hanging on the door handle any more. There was an even semicircle of broken glass on the tile floor at the door. I held my breath and listened. Far across the lake, a noctur
nal bird called out. I moved across the room to the light switch and turned it on. I checked the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom. I approached the door, kicked some of the glass out of the way. Perhaps a gust of wind through the cabin had dislodged it. I examined the hinge, and decided no gust of wind could have snapped the pencil lead.
I stepped back and looked at the shards of glass. From the pattern, it looked like the door had been opened three inches, and then closed again as the vase smashed. Could it have been Joe Benson? Perhaps he had come in with fresh towels or something.
Except that the cabins were serviced weekly, on a Wednesday. Probably not at night, either. And Joe would certainly have cleared up the glass, and probably left me a note.
It wasn’t a large cabin, and I hadn’t left much in it. It took less than twenty minutes for me to be satisfied that nothing had been taken, and nothing had been left. Perhaps whoever had opened the door had run when they heard the breaking glass. I checked the locks again and put a chair under the front door handle.
It had been a long day, but I ignored the lure of bed for a few more minutes. I opened my laptop and searched for Jane Graham’s hometown. Apparently, Orinda had been voted one of the top twenty places to raise a family in California. I recalled what else she had said about her childhood and looked up the local schools. Dean Elementary was there. Morgana High was close by.
I sat back in the chair and thought about the woman with the dark hair as the rain clattered down on the roof of the cabin. All thoughts of the broken vase and the evening with Green gone from my mind. I doubted a school would release information on old students over the phone, but perhaps there would be a yearbook somewhere. Not that that would conclusively prove anything, either. I switched screen and composed an email to a company called Honorific.
After that, I called it a night. I didn’t dream. I slept right through until the banging on the door woke me.
Monday
37
Carter Blake
“Open up, Blake, we know you’re in there.”
The sun was streaming through the gap in the curtains. I rubbed sleep out of my eyes and took a second to remind myself where I was, knowing that whoever was banging on the door at dawn probably didn’t have good news to impart. I went over to the window and peered through the gap. There was a sheriff’s department SUV outside. Deputy Feldman was watching the back porch, his gun drawn.
“Open up, Sheriff’s Department.”
I recognized McGregor’s voice and walked to the front door. Before I put my hand on the door handle I spoke out loudly to let him know what I was doing. I knew there was a gun drawn on one of my potential exits, it was likely there was one on the front door too. If I absolutely have to get shot someday, I don’t want it to be accidental.
I was right. McGregor had his gun out and pointed at my bare torso as I opened the door. I raised my hands carefully. Across the lot, I saw Joe Benson standing in the doorway of his house, in a robe and slippers. The expression on his face was impossible to read.
“All right, I promise not to swipe the towels.”
“Very quick with the humor, Blake. For a guy looking at twenty-five to life, best case.”
Feldman drove me in the department SUV, while McGregor followed in the Crown Vic. On the ten-minute drive from the cabins back into town, he kept tight-lipped. The closest he came to communication was a long stare as he watched the sheriff guide me into the back of the car. My hands were cuffed behind me, which wasn’t the most comfortable position, but I knew my complaints would fall on deaf ears. As would questions, so I didn’t give Feldman the satisfaction of getting to tell me to shut up.
I had plenty of them, of course. Starting with who was dead, and what made the cops think I had killed them. Even in the South, they don’t hand out “twenty-five to life, best case” for something minor. I noticed that Isabella Green was nowhere to be seen, and I sure as hell hoped it wasn’t her. Neither was Deputy Haycox. I remembered Green’s concern last night. He hadn’t shown up for his shift, and it wasn’t like him. So maybe it was Haycox who was dead. But what made them think I had done it? And did it have anything to do with the fact somebody had tried to break into my cabin last night?
Fifteen minutes later, I was in the interview room at the back of the Bethany sheriff’s office. It was a rectangular box, about ten feet long by seven feet wide by seven feet high. There was no window, just a big sheet of mirrored glass through which I could be observed from the adjoining room. The walls were cinderblock. The door had a wood veneer, but I knew it was reinforced from the weighty clunk noise as it had swung back into place.
They kept me waiting a while, maybe half an hour. It was hard to be exact, because there was no clock, and they had confiscated my phone and my watch, along with my belt and shoelaces. An over-precaution. I didn’t think I was going to be able to hang myself from the light fitting, which was a dirty yellow Plexiglass dome screwed to the ceiling.
Eventually, I heard voices outside. Both male. McGregor and Feldman, I thought. And then the loud clack noise of the lock being disengaged, and the heavy door swung outwards. McGregor was there, Feldman a step behind him. He waited for me to speak, but I just sat back in the bolted-to-the-floor chair and kept my eyes on his.
After a minute, he nodded at Feldman to dismiss him. Feldman hesitated a second, and stepped back, closing the door and locking it.
“Am I under arrest?”
“All in good time. I suppose you’ll be wanting a lawyer.”
“Most likely,” I agreed. “Unless you want to clear this mistake up quickly so you can find your murderer.”
McGregor smiled thinly. “I’m looking right at him. And who said anything about murder?”
“Is Green okay?” I asked.
He looked like he was going to stonewall again, but then thought better of it. “Deputy Green is fine. Why do you ask?”
I leaned forward. “Look, I’ll make you a deal. I could shut up and wait for a lawyer, and you would waste all day being very pleased with yourself until you find out you’ve got the wrong guy. Or you could tell me what the hell this is about and I can help you.”
“If you want to make a confession, I’m all ears, but we’ll need to get recording equipment in here.”
“All right, you can at least start by telling me who I’m supposed to have killed.”
He didn’t speak. The little smile stayed on his mouth. I couldn’t tell if he really thought I had done whatever it was, or if he had an open mind but was enjoying watching me squirm, regardless.
Something about the sheriff’s demeanor, and Feldman’s, had made me start to suspect I was mistaken about the victim. It couldn’t have been Haycox. They were treating me too nicely.
They hadn’t exactly been polite to me since the knock on my door, and I spent the last hour being shoved, ignored and barked at, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. I hadn’t been roughed up, not really. Neither Feldman nor McGregor had looked close to losing control and screaming at me, or throwing a punch. Neither of them seemed inordinately upset that a human being had, apparently, been killed. If it had been Haycox, a brother in blue, the last hour would have been a whole lot less pleasant for me. For the same reason, I knew McGregor was telling the truth, and it wasn’t Green either.
Then who?
I knew it would be pointless playing twenty questions with McGregor, so I ran through the previous two days, working out who I had come into contact with in Bethany. I already knew Joe Benson was alive, because I had seen him back at the cabins. Green and Haycox I had ruled out. David Connor, perhaps? That would make sense. It would explain why they had immediately focused on me, since he was my client. And then I remembered I had come across others in Bethany.
In Bethany, but not from Bethany.
38
Isabella Green
Isabella was thinking about Hayc
ox as her feet pounded the sidewalk, her breath puffing out wispy clouds in the cold morning air. Still nothing. His parents had finally gotten in touch. They had been out of town, and there wasn’t a cell number for them on record, but when they called back, they said they hadn’t heard from him since last week. Now Isabella was even more worried, and she had worried them.
She ran one of her short routes, down by the school, along Main Street and back up the hill, because it would take her past Haycox’s place. He lived in a one-bed apartment on the second floor of a building at the corner of Main and Lavigne. Wherever he had been all yesterday, surely he would be back by now. She jogged up the stairs and knocked on his door. Nothing. She tried his phone for the twentieth time. Still going straight to voicemail. She considered knocking on the door downstairs, but Haycox’s neighbor was a nice old lady in her eighties. If she had any helpful information, it could wait a couple of hours.
Isabella leaned on the railing and looked across Haycox’s yard and up into the woods on the slope behind his house, thinking about what she had said to Blake. There was a whole lot of out there, out there. She had hoped the run would do its usual job, draining out some of her tension and the anxiety. It hadn’t.
Her phone rang and she reached into her pocket, hoping it would be Haycox. It wasn’t, it was Feldman. But why was he calling so early?
“Where are you?”
“Out for a run,” she said, noting that the tone of his voice confirmed this wasn’t a social call. “What’s happened?”
“We have two gunshot victims up on Slateford Pass. Both dead.”
“What?”
“I need you to go up there and meet Dentz. I’m … we’re following up.”
Part of her wanted to ask him what exactly he was following up, and why he sounded so cagey about it. But the rest of her was already calculating how long it would take to run home and get changed.
39
Carter Blake
I put my hands flat on the table and looked across the table at Sheriff McGregor. “The two guys at the bar the other night. Which one of them got himself killed?”