by H. P. Bayne
Days like today, those barricades felt like castle walls, and he didn’t have a ladder high enough to scale them.
5
Dez kept a vigilant watch on the road as he, Sully and Pax drove back toward Kimotan Rapids.
He could count on one hand—one finger, actually—the number of ghosts he’d actually seen in the course of his life, and he continued to struggle with a fear he’d add to his tally.
When they came to the end of Hollow Road with no indication from Sully he’d seen Flo again, Dez allowed himself to relax.
But into the quiet another thought pressed, no less upsetting than the one he’d just abandoned.
“Hey, Sull, I never asked you. Last night, while we were at the acreage, did you see Aiden?”
Sully had yet to pull down his hood. The question had the hood moving toward him slightly, before the head beneath turned back toward the windshield. “Yeah. I did.”
“And? Did he tell you anything?”
A slow head shake, side to side. “He didn’t stick around long. Sorry, Dez. I’ll keep trying. I promise.”
“Why does he keep disappearing like that? Why wouldn’t he want help? I mean, he came to you when I was stuck in that grave, right? He knows he can go to you.”
A shrug. “I don’t know. Unless they decide to share stuff with me, all I can do is guess.”
“Guessing isn’t going to get us anywhere. I can’t stand leaving him out there. It isn’t right that he’s spent seventeen years by that damn river.”
“He’s not trapped there. We’ve both seen him in other places.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know. Believe me, I’m trying. I’ll figure it out.”
“How? If he won’t communicate with you, how are you going to figure it out exactly?”
It was impossible to be satisfied with another shrug, but it was all Dez got before his phone rang through the vehicle’s hands-free Bluetooth setup. The number showing on the dashboard screen belonged to Lachlan.
Hitting the talk button, Dez greeted his boss.
“Where are you?” Lachlan asked.
“Just left Loons Hollow.”
“Mr. Chadwell with you?”
Sully, Dez had recently learned, had been using the name Oliver Chadwell when in public, leaving Dez to suspect Lachlan wasn’t somewhere private at the moment. Either that, or he was practicing a more subtle form of sarcasm.
“Yeah, he’s here. He didn’t see any signs of Lonnie. He saw someone else though.”
“Don’t tell me she’s real?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Anyway, we didn’t get to look around as much as we wanted. Sully’s ex-girlfriend was there.”
“Did she see him?”
“No, but there are a lot more people who are likely to turn up there soon. Ara’s new….” Dez paused and cast Sully a look, uncertain about saying the word out loud.
His brother finished where he’d left off. “Her new boyfriend is missing. We looked around for him, but there’s no sign of him. Ara was going to call 911. We didn’t think it would be a good idea to be there when search teams show up.”
“Good plan. What happened to him?”
“If we knew that, there wouldn’t be much need to have search teams brought in now, would there?” Dez said.
“Smart ass,” Lachlan said. “I meant, what was he doing when he disappeared?”
Dez provided his boss with the rundown Ara had given him about their ghost hunting channel and Emory’s inexplicable disappearance after he’d gone outside.
“No signs of wildlife?” Lachlan asked.
“I don’t think a grown man got dragged off by coyotes,” Dez said.
“You’re on a roll today, Braddock. What’s got your panties in a twist?”
“You know damn well I hate ghosts, and you sent me out here anyway.”
“Hey, not my fault your family adopted a psychic. If we can’t use his talents, what good is he?”
Sully snorted, a sign he, at least, found Lachlan amusing.
“You’d better not be anywhere out in public right now,” Dez warned.
“Don’t worry, Mother Hen. I’m at my storage locker, going through my files and the one I snagged from the KRPD. Rather than eating up my minutes, why don’t the two of you head over here? We should touch base, figure out a next move.”
“It’s past lunch. I’m starving.”
“So pick up a burger on the way over. In fact, bring me one too. Get me a side salad instead of fries, though. And no pop. I’d like a tea instead. Oh, and skip the cheese and ketchup on the burger, and tell them to go heavy on the onions.”
“Seriously?”
“Hey, onions are healthy.”
“I mean, do I look like a waiter at Chez Louis’s? Who the hell orders fast food like that?”
“Just do it and get your asses over here.”
Dez disconnected the call, letting out his frustration in a low growl.
Sully chuckled. “He’s a little on the high maintenance side, but I kind of get a kick out of him.”
“Funny you should mention the word ‘kick,’ ” Dez said. “That’s exactly the one I was going to use.”
A piece of onion poked out the side of Lachlan’s mouth as he chewed on his burger. The thing to do would be to look away but, like viewing a car crash, Dez couldn’t avoid staring.
One benefit to feeding Lachlan: he refused to talk with his mouth full. A lover of art, history and classical music, Lachlan prided himself on good breeding. He could be plenty uncouth when he wanted to be—and, as far as Dez was concerned, the opportunity arose far too often—but he was also capable of impeccable manners in the right company.
Dez had quickly discovered he was not that kind of company.
A small blessing came when Lachlan discovered the escaping onion. He sucked it back, chewed and swallowed before addressing the visitors to his strangely well-furnished storage locker.
“It’s been a while, and I moved to other investigations, but I did play a small role in the Lonnie Debenham case,” he said from a padded leather chair. “I was a staff sergeant at the time, working watch command. I was stuck in the office, but I was in charge of the initial search, tasking my officers with making inquiries and the like. I was all right to handle it when it sounded like a simple case of a guy who decided to ditch the family in favour of quality time with either a mistress or Captain Morgan.
“But when he didn’t turn up after a couple of days, and our searches came up empty, I brought Major Crimes up to speed. They didn’t take over the case right away, so I had a couple of days to make inquiries—enough time for me to start thinking there might be more to this than a depressed businessman on a bender. At that point, I talked to Major Crimes again, and they took on the file. If there was anything suspicious to it, they had more experienced interviewers who might be able to drag something out of someone, plus they had better contacts on the street than my comparatively junior officers. I did my best to keep tabs on what Major Crimes was up to, largely because I was interested. But it was a busy department, even back then, and it soon fell off my radar.”
“But you kept a file,” Dez observed. “It must have been somewhere on your radar.”
“I kept files on a lot of cases. You’ve been through my filing cabinets. You know I take a broad interest in local crime.”
“You didn’t know it was a crime, though, did you?” Sully asked.
“When someone goes missing without a trace, you don’t leave a lot of stones unturned. At least, I didn’t. There was that one stone other investigators back then didn’t want to touch, though.”
“The psychic thing,” Dez said.
“Yeah, the psychic thing. Here’s the part you’re going to find interesting. I couldn’t remember the guy’s name, and it didn’t make it into the actual police file. It’s in mine, though. Psychic’s name was Harry Schuster.”
Dez’s jaw dropped, and he quickly shut it, hoping Lachlan had
n’t noticed. The man played up drama just to elicit a response, and damned if Dez was going to supply it willingly. Even so….
“Harry Schuster, as in ‘Harbinger Harry’?”
“That’s the one. I had a chat with the guy after, when no other cop seemed interested in following up. Guy was short a few bricks, for sure, but he had some details which hadn’t been released publicly yet. The investigative team had some holdback info at the time, because they were operating under the possibility of a kidnapping. We’d put a photo of Lonnie out to the public, but not a clothing description. Harry told me exactly what the guy was wearing when he was last seen. And he said he was covered in dirt and a few leaves, and that he had a significant leg injury. Oh, and he said he believed his body was underground somewhere.”
“And Harry’s vision was of Lonnie near Loons Hollow.”
“Bingo. By rights, I should have taken him in for questioning as a potential suspect. Conventional wisdom tells you someone doesn’t come by that sort of info unless they have direct knowledge, either as a witness or a suspect. But I didn’t get that vibe from the guy. I’ve always run on a solid combination of knowledge and instinct, and everything pointed away from that guy being in on something like that. He was more or less begging me to find Lonnie. Said the visions would keep coming otherwise.”
“I guess the info we had about Harry two years ago was on the money,” Dez said. “He had a reputation even back then for seeing stuff like that.” He turned to Sully. “You know, I never asked. Did you ever see Harry again—in spirit form, I mean?”
“He never reappeared to me after I ended up in Lockwood, but then I was so heavily medicated, I wasn’t seeing anything unless they wanted me to. Maybe he and Betty are watching over their son, or they’re all together now. You never heard what happened to Thackeray, did you?”
“No. It’s like he walked right off the earth. I figure he either committed suicide, like I was thinking, or he took a page out of your book and decided to make himself disappear. He didn’t exactly have much going for him here. Whatever happened to the Schusters, it looks like Harry’s crept back into our lives, if in name only. You okay with that?”
“In the end, he wasn’t all that bad,” Sully said. “He was only trying to protect his family. I can understand that.”
“He tried to kill you, too, Sull. Let’s not forget that.”
Lachlan had been uncharacteristically quiet, and he now broke into the conversation.
“You two done with the trip down memory lane?… Thanks. Anyway, back in my policing days, we looked at every possibility on the Debenham case, including that he might have been kidnapped. His father, you understand, is one of the wealthiest men in the city. Thomas Debenham built his business from the ground up, and he earned every penny he made—plenty of it on the backs of others. Certainly, the family didn’t want to buy our theory about the affair, the possibility Lonnie was on a drinking or drug binge, or had gone off to kill himself. They probably felt it was more respectable for Lonnie to have been kidnapped.”
“I don’t know, man,” Dez said. “Seems pretty far-fetched they’d rather he was at someone else’s mercy than out there somewhere, maybe alive.”
“You don’t know the Debenhams,” Lachlan said. “If you did, you’d be whistling a different tune.”
“They that bad? I mean, Lonnie’s wife seemed okay from what I could tell. What you’re suggesting makes them sound pretty rotten.”
“Carlene was a lovely woman, if not a little Orange County housewife-y back then. And Rose was a nice enough woman, as I recall. I got the impression she married Thomas well before money came into the picture. Money changes people, Braddock; it twists them. Like an addiction. When you start making it, you’ll do anything to keep it. Thomas was like that, the kind of guy who would have sold his mother into slavery if it meant saving a nickel.
“Fortunately, it never came to that. The good thing about banks like the one he owns is they’re never broke. It afforded him a lot of luxuries, got him invites to the swankiest social events, put him at the front of the line at every trendy restaurant. He had the best of everything, and that included his family—at least from the outside looking in. It wouldn’t do for him to have a son who wasn’t fitting into his image of the perfect life.”
“How far do you think he would have gone to maintain that image?” Sully asked.
Dez peered at his brother. “You aren’t suggesting Thomas would have bumped off his own son?”
“Stranger things.”
“That’s pretty strange, and it’s plenty dark. Even if Thomas Debenham is as rotten as Lachlan thinks, I can’t imagine he’d go that far.”
“Don’t discount it,” Lachlan said. “During my years with Major Crimes, I attended more than my share of fatal family disputes. I’m sure you did too during your years on patrol. Most of the ones I dealt with came about during a night of heavy drinking or drugging. But some of them were pretty damn cold-blooded. One thing we need to keep in mind: When people disappear, when they die, the people close to them tend to forget about the bad things. You don’t often hear people openly disrespecting deceased friends and relatives, do you? It could be Lonnie Debenham had some skeletons in his closet we never uncovered.”
“If that’s true, we’re going to need to watch our backs,” Sully said. “If someone who loved Lonnie is responsible for his disappearance, they won’t think twice about making us disappear too.”
6
Pax’s head hung out the window as Sully crossed the bridge from the North Bank into the Riverview area where Dez had his apartment.
Sully had left Dez with Lachlan, the pair planning on going to talk to Thomas and Rose Debenham about their son. Obviously, Sully couldn’t be there. Nor could he be anywhere near Loons Hollow now, not with police and his ex-girlfriend there.
Left with time on his own, Sully mentally kicked himself for how close he’d come at the storage container to revealing his biggest secret—Lowell Braddock’s biggest secret. He knew firsthand how prepared some people were to hurt those they said they loved. Lowell had, after all, murdered his own brother and five-year-old nephew, and had attempted to kill Sully. The why was what bothered him. Flynn and Sully had both figured things out, so their deaths would shelter his secret. But why Aiden? What danger could a five-year-old boy have posed?
Sully had plenty of questions, but Lachlan’s storage container was not the place to ask them, not when it meant putting problematic thoughts into Dez’s head. Sully planned to take Lowell down, but he intended to keep his brother well out of the line of fire. That wouldn’t be possible if Dez began to suspect.
With time on his hands and Dez nowhere nearby to rein him in, the obvious thing would have been to pay a visit to the judge. But it was far too early, and daylight wouldn’t conceal him as he would need it to.
His mind turned to the ghost on the road. Flo was a local legend, but apparently not a fictional one. Legends could be born of truth; he knew that. But he also knew they could be twisted with time, their truths lost to the passage of years until something new and wholly inaccurate stood in their place.
If the legend was true, there had to be a record somewhere. Murders and missing people didn’t often go unreported, even back then. It would be a hard slog, but there would probably be something buried within newspaper archives from the time.
That would mean a trip to the library, a place Pax was unlikely to be welcome.
Dez’s neighbour Emily Crichton had proved a godsend, she and Pax having taken to each other from the start. She’d become both dog sitter and counsellor for Sully, more than eighty years of patience, wisdom and pluck wrapped up into one small, unassuming form.
She beamed, as she always did, when Sully appeared at her door. He hadn’t planned on going inside, but he ended up there anyway, sitting at the table while she brewed him a cup of tea.
“You seem out of sorts,” she said, once the tea was poured and she’d joined him at the table.
/>
“I’m okay. Just thinking.”
“If there’s anything you want to talk about, you know you can trust me.”
His eyes snapped to her face, and he realized he’d given a lot away in one inadvertent move.
“There’s something you’ve been hiding, something you’ve been keeping to yourself,” she said. “It’s eating you up inside, isn’t it? I’ve lived a lot of years, Sullivan, and I’ve known a lot of people with secrets. I recognize it in you as I recognized it in them. You don’t have to tell me, of course. Just know you can trust me to hold onto anything you want to say.”
“Even if it concerns Dez? I can’t ask you to keep something from him. I know you care about him too.”
“I most certainly do. Tell me this for starters. Has he done something wrong, something that could get him in trouble?”
“No, nothing like that. He hasn’t done anything wrong. And I want to keep it that way.”
“You’re worried if you tell him, he will do something bad?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think.”
“Perhaps you aren’t giving him enough credit. He can be a little intense, but he is a very good man. And he has you, after all, to guide him when he goes a little off course.”
“I don’t know if I’d be enough. Not for this.”
Emily leaned forward and smiled, bringing her fingers to rest atop Sully’s. “You know, if you don’t give me some idea what you mean, I can’t really give you any advice. I would like to help if I can. You don’t have your birth mother, after all, someone you might have gone to for advice were she still alive. If I’d been able to protect her at the end, the way I should have….”
Sully turned his hand so he could take Emily’s fingers in his. “It wasn’t your fault, what happened to her. Lucky made her own choice, and I’m probably alive because of it—and because of you. You gave her the power and the ability to make that choice. That’s what was important right then. Anyway, she didn’t die at Lockwood. She got out because you and Ben helped her. In the end, she was betrayed by her own family. What happened to her is their fault, not yours. The people who were supposed to love and protect her ended up murdering her. You couldn’t have known that, and you couldn’t have done anything to prevent it. Don’t put that on yourself. You don’t deserve it.”