by Mason Cross
“Jane, wasn’t it?”
She looked up.
“Shit.”
“Nice to see you too.”
“What the hell do you want from me? I told you, I’m not this girl, okay?”
“You were very convincing. I guess you’ve had fifteen years to practice. You’ve probably convinced yourself. Nice background work, too. You made a slight slip on the name of the high school in Orinda though. Morgana, not Morgan. Only one letter difference, but nobody forgets the name of their high school.”
She looked up at the apartment building. A radio was blasting from an open window. A heated argument between two male voices from another.
“I liked your other place better.”
She folded her arms and glared at me. “How the hell did you— I mean what are you, a stalker?”
“The super at your last place, the address on your license, claimed you didn’t leave a forwarding address. Fifty bucks later, his memory improved.”
She rolled her eyes. “Bobby, that son of a …”
“How about a deal?” I offered. “Five minutes of your time, and if you still want me to go away, I’ll leave you alone for good this time. Promise.”
“Or what?”
“Or you can skip out on this place too, find yourself an even shittier apartment in a different city. Whatever it is you do when someone asks too many questions.”
She seemed to consider it. Then she reached into her purse.
“I have a counter offer.”
“I’m listening.”
She pulled her hand out. There was nothing in it, but she had rearranged her fingers into a familiar configuration.
“Fuck off.”
She pushed past me, heading back out to the sidewalk
“Adeline,” I called after her. She didn’t break stride. “They’ve arrested David. Unless you can help him, they’re going to put him on trial for five murders.”
Adeline watched as I sipped my coffee in the greasy spoon on the corner of her block. Her own cup lay untouched, even though she had already ruined it with four spoons of sugar. Finally, she had admitted who she was. She had sensed I had been following her; used the Honorific thing to sound me out. She had been pretty confident that her feigned annoyance and fictional childhood memories and fake driver’s license had satisfied me. And they had, for a while.
“So is David … okay?”
“He’s in a cell, and most of the Bethany Sheriff’s Department think he killed four people in cold blood this week. Some of them even think they’ve caught the Devil Mountain Killer after all this time.”
She looked down at the table, and I remembered who I was speaking to and felt a twinge of guilt. Her abrasive attitude had made me forget the circumstances of her disappearance.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’ve never really talked about it with anyone.”
“How did you get away from him, back then?”
She shrugged. “Luck. I’ve always been lucky. My dad used to say if I fell in the lake I’d come out with my pockets full of fish.”
“You want to talk about what happened that night?”
“No. Maybe. I mean …” she laughed. “I’ve never tried.”
I waited for her to continue.
“The news reports got it about right. I was hitching. Only I was planning to head north, to New York, not to Atlanta. I thought I was going to have to walk all the way to the highway when I saw lights on the road. I was soaked to the skin. I stepped out to make sure I got the driver’s attention. I wasn’t thinking clearly anyway, and in the rain, I didn’t hear the other car.”
“The second car was Arlo Green’s?”
“Yeah. He came around the corner fast, had to swerve to avoid hitting me. He almost went into the other guy, but he missed it and hit a tree. The other driver, the one in the blue car stopped. I didn’t know him but I recognized Mr. Green from town. I thought they would be mad that I had caused the accident, but they were both just shaken up and glad everyone was okay.
“The guy in the blue car said he would take us to get help. Mr. Green said they should drive me home, but I convinced them to take me as far as the highway. I told him David hit me, and I couldn’t go back there. He offered to let me stay at his place for the night, but I said no, and that I had friends coming to get me. The other one told me his name was Eric. I don’t know if they totally believed me, but Eric agreed to take me out to the rest stop on 19. There was a Foo Fighters song on the radio, I remember he was telling me he saw them in some tiny venue before they were huge. He wasn’t listening to Mr. Green when he tried to direct him, and took the wrong road. We ended up on the road up to the mountain. Mr. Green was telling him where there was a place to turn. And then we saw somebody by the side of the road.”
She closed her eyes, and I knew she was picturing the images from that rainy night a decade and a half in the past.
“It was … well, I guess you know who it was.”
“What did he look like?”
She thought about it for a second. “Hard to tell in the dark and the rain. Average height, I guess. Thin. A blue raincoat with a hood over his face. He slowed the car down. We didn’t discuss it, I guess we both assumed it was somebody who had broken down or … I mean we didn’t even think about …”
She was breathing faster. She was tearing strips off the napkin she had been holding.
“Eric rolled his window down to ask if he needed help. That was when he got shot.”
“You need menus?”
We both looked up sharply at the bespectacled waitress, who had appeared silently beside us. The tired eyes and vacant smile told me she hadn’t been listening in. Adeline looked down at her hands again.
“No, thank you,” I said. The waitress moved away, but made a point to look pensively at the three vacant tables still left. The place was filling up fast, it was almost lunchtime.
“Who do they think David killed?” Adeline asked quietly when she had gone, without looking up at me.
I wanted to know more about the night she disappeared, but my instinct was to let her tell it in her own time. Besides, if I was right, it was all related.
“You didn’t seem to be surprised when I told you about that,” I said. She didn’t respond, so I answered her question. “Four people have been killed in Bethany over the last few days. There are similarities with what happened before. They found a gun at David’s house.”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t him.”
Adeline raised her eyes to meet mine again. She didn’t say anything, but I had a feeling she already knew what I was going to say.
“They found something else at his house, too. A body, buried underneath the deck.”
Adeline closed her eyes and let out the breath she had been holding.
“It’s your father, isn’t it?”
She opened her eyes. She glanced around the diner. Two of the three remaining tables were gone.
“Do you have a car?” she said finally.
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you the rest on the way.”
64
Isabella Green
McGregor studied Isabella, waiting for her reaction. He had just told her the ballistics tests had been completed, and the .38 found at David Connor’s house was the same weapon used to kill Jeffrey Friedrickson, Thomas Leonard, Dwight Haycox and Roland Roussel.
“You understand what this means?”
She knew exactly what it meant. “Yes, sir.”
He nodded. “We’re charging him for all four murders.”
“And the FBI?”
“They’ve been in touch. I politely declined their offer of help. I’m headed back up to the house in an hour or so, if you want to come along?”
She opened her mouth and then shut it. McGregor watched he
r, looking satisfied when she didn’t object.
“What about Blake? Is he still around?”
She shook her head, and McGregor looked back down at the report.
“Sir …”
He looked up, as though surprised to find her still in his office.
“I just wondered, when you went out to talk to Connor on Monday after we released Blake. What did you talk to him about?”
He watched her carefully. “Why do you ask?”
“Did he seem …”
“Seem what? Like somebody who had just killed a couple of people?” McGregor shrugged. “We asked him his whereabouts when the hunters were killed, if he had been speaking to Blake. It wasn’t a long visit. We didn’t really have any reason to zero in on him at that point. He had no connection to the two victims.”
“Sure, okay.”
“Is there anything else?”
She shook her head.
McGregor cleared his throat. “Feldman came to me earlier on.”
“Oh yes?” she kept her voice even.
McGregor hesitated a moment, and she wondered why he was bringing this up. And whether he would have done if she hadn’t started asking about his brief interview with Connor. “Blake helped us out yesterday, no doubt about that.”
“I sense a ‘but’, Sheriff.”
“You can tell me I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, of course …”
“I appreciate you giving me that latitude, Sheriff.”
His brow furrowed. “Blake is not good news. And I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interests if he sticks around after today. Least of all yours.”
Isabella turned away without taking the sheriff up on his offer. She and Blake could talk about that if and when he came back from Atlanta. In the meantime, she needed to know why McGregor was so resistant to bring in help from outside. He seemed to be absolutely determined to keep everything contained within the town limits. If he had his man, perhaps that would be fine. But if not …
The nagging headache she had had all week seemed to be gaining in intensity. She drove out around the west loop of the town, slowing as she passed the Mercer place. The drapes were closed, Mercer’s jeep wasn’t in the drive. She wondered if Sally was there, probably tensing up as she heard a car approach, relaxing a little when she realized it wasn’t going to stop. She drove up the hill to her mom’s house. That tune from the dream was still stuck in her head; it was driving her crazy. She let herself in. Kathleen was napping in the chair in front of a movie on TCM. Anthony Perkins in Psycho II, no doubt cut to ribbons for daytime audiences. Isabella adjusted the blanket which had fallen off her and went outside and sat under the big oak tree. She placed her hand flat on the ground and closed her eyes, trying to block out the throbbing in her head.
Who the hell was doing this? It was starting to feel personal. Like someone was stomping around the room, getting closer and closer to the fragile house of cards Isabella had built up again since the night …
The echoes from 2003 were impossible to ignore, and not just the ones everyone knew about. Who was doing it?
Maybe Blake was wrong about Connor’s innocence, maybe they had been suckered in by a calculating killer who was also a great actor. The murder weapon being found in his house suggested that quite neatly.
But maybe he was right. Maybe David Connor wasn’t guilty of killing Friedrickson, Leonard, Haycox and Roussel. In that case, there was only one other reason the weapon would be found at his house. Somebody planted it there. And only one kind of person could have done that in this town.
65
Carter Blake
North, back to Bethany again. The blue sky of the morning had given way to gray clouds. Light rain hit the windshield in that frustrating rhythm that’s pitched exactly between two speeds of the wipers.
“Are you sure about this?”
Adeline Connor had one arm on the window sill. She had donned a pair of sunglasses from her bag, but hadn’t removed them when the sky clouded over. She was staring out at the trees at the side of the road as they flashed by. She hadn’t spoken since we had got in the car. I had figured she needed some time to collect her thoughts, but it had been a while now, and I was starting to think we’d get all the way back to Bethany without exchanging another word. Besides, I was interested in the answer.
She spoke without looking away from the window.
“You have to go home sometime, ain’t that a saying?”
Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought her accent was getting a little more southern as we got closer to her hometown. She had dropped a lot of things about her act.
“‘You can’t go home again’ is the saying,” I said. “Thomas Wolfe said it. And you better believe it’s going to be true today.”
She sighed and turned her head from her window so she was looking straight ahead, which was progress.
“My father was a piece of shit, did David tell you that?”
“Not in those exact words, but I got that impression. From him and from other people I talked to.”
I was concentrating on overtaking a truck, so I didn’t actually see her roll her eyes. I just heard it in her voice. “Jesus, small towns. What did other people say?”
I passed the cab of the truck and pulled back into the lane before I answered.
“That he was a drunk, and probably a wife-beater when your mom was alive. That he abandoned you both, and he did you a favor when he did.”
“He would have, eventually,” she said. “Left us, I mean.”
“What happened?”
“He was pretty much what people told you he was. I mean … shit, it could have been worse. I think we had it easy compared to some of the stories I’ve heard. He would ignore us most of the time. Normally he was a docile drunk. He would drink a couple of six-packs of Old Milwaukee in front of the game until he passed out in his easy chair. I would throw a blanket over him sometimes. Maybe once every couple of weeks he got the dosage wrong and it would make him mean instead of sleepy. He would get rough if you looked at him the wrong way. David got it worse. Usually it was nothing serious, shoving, cussin’ you out, getting in your face, you know what I mean?”
“A bully.”
“Just that,” she said. “As I got older, I pitied him, more than anything else. I think he saw it in my eyes once, made one of them black.”
She paused and I felt no need to fill the silence. She was right. Bad as it was, there were worse stories of abuse. But too many small mundane, soul-destroying stories just like this one.
“Must have been …” she paused to think about it. “April of that year. I was at one of my friends’ houses. I got back late and David was all beat up. I knew Dad had done it, but it looked like he had gone further than before. I was expecting it, sooner or later. Used to be he’d get mean every few weeks. Lately it had been a couple times a week. David had cuts, a black eye, his hand was bandaged up. Dad had thrown a bottle at his head hard enough that it broke when he put his hand up. Dad was nowhere to be seen. That was the night he left town, as far as everybody was concerned.”
“What did David say about it?”
“He said he had gotten home and Dad was in one of his moods. Something stupid. He thought somebody had eaten one of his microwave dinners. They started out with words and moved on to fists. Thing is, I was worried about David. I don’t know what he’s like now, but he was skinny then, and my dad had sixty pounds on him, easy. He could have snapped him in half.
“I took him into the bathroom and got him cleaned up and tried to calm him down. He was shaking, crying. He told me Dad had taken the car and gone. I believed him.” She looked over at me, to see if I was going to say anything. I let her keep talking.
“I think he would have told me. I guess he … I don’t know, he wanted to protect me. Eighteen months older than me, and li
ke I said I could have taken him in a fight, but he always did the protective big brother thing.” She laughed at the absurdity of it and pushed her hair back. “God knows where he got that from, it sure wasn’t the old man.”
“I’m sure you would have done the same for him.”
“I wouldn’t. I didn’t. He was better than I deserved.”
“Seems to me like you’re doing it now.”
She didn’t say anything for a while, and I wondered if that was as much of the story as she was going to tell me. There was a gap in the clouds and the sun stabbed through at us.
“The night it happened … it was that night. Halloween. I remember it had been raining all day. It was the first big rain of the fall. David was at work. I was alone in the house. It had been six months since Dad had left, and I had loved every day of it. It was the happiest I had been since … well, since ever. We had made the place pretty homely. I was thinking how lucky we were that he had finally gone, that we could start living. I always knew I would leave town soon as I graduated high school, maybe even go to college. But it was nice to have a little practice at being grown-ups, you know? David and me, we got on great, maybe for the first time. It just felt like …” she scrunched up her face, thinking about how to explain it. “It was like your whole life you’ve been carrying a weight, and not realizing, and when you set it down you suddenly realize, my God, this is what it’s like for normal people. This is what life is like.”
She smiled at the irony, and I knew she was getting to the punchline.
“I thought it would be nice to get a fire going in the stove. Dad used to do it before the drinking got really bad. I had never so much as lit a campfire before, but I thought what the hell? I was learning so much in those days. So much.
“I grabbed my jacket and held it up over my head and I ran out to the woodshed in the rain. There was that great smell, when it rains after a long dry spell. It was late in the day and it was really dark when I got inside the door. There was power out there, but the bulb had been out for a couple of years and nobody had replaced it. Still on our to-do list. I knew there was a shutter on the window at the far end, so I climbed my way through the junk, trying not to fall over anything. That’s when I noticed the smell.