He was Walking Alone

by P. D. Workman

  The envelope was made out in Zachary’s name, not Bridget’s. At an address that was a couple years old, from when they had been living together in wedded bliss. Or not so much bliss.

  “I still have the mail forwarded,” Bridget explained. “I know I shouldn’t keep paying for forwarding from an address that neither of us has used in years, but then every time I think of letting it expire, I end up getting something that wouldn’t have reached me otherwise. Or… you.”

  Zachary looked over the envelope to see what other information he could gather from it. His name and address were printed. Not exactly neatly, but clear enough to read without a problem. A hand that he would have identified as male rather than female, when women were the ones who usually sent personal notes by postal mail. Handwritten mail—did anyone really do that?

  There was a return address, printed in tiny letters, but not so small that Zachary needed a magnifying glass to make it out.

  T. Goldman.

  Zachary’s heart started to pound. He looked at Bridget in disbelief. “T. Goldman?”

  “I know, I saw that. I didn’t think… well, you haven’t had any contact with anyone, have you?”

  “No.” Zachary hadn’t had any communications with anyone in his family since that fateful day when the social worker had insisted that Zachary’s mother come to the hospital to see him before making the decision to dissolve the family and relinquish them all to foster care. Mrs. Pratt had hoped that by bringing Zachary and his mother together again one more time, she would see the error of her ways and would agree to look at other solutions. There were other social programs, other ways the family could be given support and help. But Zachary’s mother had been adamant. She had called him incorrigible. She had looked him in the eye and told him, “You don’t deserve to be part of a family. None of you do, but you most of all. Every time I turn around, you’re getting into some kind of trouble. Don’t give me those sad puppy dog eyes. You know I don’t want you.”

  Her words cut him to the heart. He had tried so hard. Even after that, he had tried to be well-behaved in the hopes that she would change her mind and take him back. He wanted to prove to everyone how well he was doing. Show them that he could be a good son and a good brother. They could reunite him with his siblings. Maybe once their mother had had a bit of a rest, she would feel strong enough to take them again. She’d see that he could be a help to her instead of causing her more stress. But that wasn’t the way it had turned out. She had never changed her mind and, in spite of Mrs. Pratt saying that he would be able to see his siblings again, he had never laid eyes on any of them since the fire that had burned down his childhood home.

  “Zachary.” Bridget touched his arm to try to bring him back to the present. “Zachary. Why don’t you open it? See what they have to say.” She hesitated, searching his face. “Do you know who T is? Is that a brother or a sister? Or a more distant relative?”

  “Tyrrell. Younger brother. His nickname was T. At least, that’s what I called him sometimes.”

  “Remind me of the names of the others. I know you’ve told me before, but I don’t remember. There were two girls…?”

  “Two older girls,” Zachary corrected. “The oldest kids were Jocelyn—Joss—and Heather. They were like… they were supposed to take care of the rest of us. Like… second mothers.”

  “And then you?”

  “Yeah. Me, I was ten. And then T was… I think he was in first grade. Six years old. Then Vincent. And Mindy. She was just little. Not a baby anymore, exactly. A toddler. Maybe two. Not quite two, I don’t think.”

  It was hard to remember back that far. So many things had happened in between. His memories of those early years with his family felt like a dream. Not a happy one, but distant and blurry.

  “Wow, that’s a lot of kids. You haven’t had contact with any of them?”

  “No. I don’t know where they are.”

  “Well, apparently you do now,” she indicated the address on the envelope. “Besides, you’re a private detective, you could find them anytime you liked, couldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. They might have changed their names. Been adopted. Moved out of the country.”

  “But you’ve never looked for them?”

  “No.”

  She sat there looking at him. She didn’t pry, but it was obvious she wanted more from him. They’d been married for two years, and he hadn’t told her any more than the absolute minimum about his biological family. It would be easy to say he had forgotten about them, but he hadn’t. He’d been ten. He’d held as tightly to those memories as to his own name and identity. They were all he had left of his family.

  “I’m afraid,” he admitted. “If I contacted one of them, and they said they didn’t want anything to do with me, I don’t know if I could handle that. And if they blamed me for breaking our family apart and ruining their lives… well, I did. It was all my fault. Everything that happened to them from that Christmas Eve when I started the fire until now. It’s all my fault.”

  “You never intended to start the fire. And I don’t think you can say that you were the reason your mother and father decided to split the family up. That’s on them, not you. There have been other families that have gone through worse tragedies and toughed it out together. None of you were killed in that fire. None of them were even injured, were they? Just you.”

  “Yeah.” He’d spent weeks at the hospital recovering from the burns and the damage done to his respiratory system. But everyone else had gotten out of the house without any injuries, he had been told. “But she told me. She said it was my fault, and that it was because of me that she couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “If it was because of you, then why didn’t she raise the other kids and just have Social Services take you away? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Zachary shook his head. He looked down at the envelope in his hands.

  “Open it,” Bridget prompted.

  “I can’t.”

  “Then give it back to me and I’ll open it.”

  He didn’t. It was his. It wasn’t Bridget’s to open. It wasn’t even hers to read or to insist that he open it in front of her. Just because it had gone to her house, that didn’t give her any claim over it.

  “So… you’re just going to sit here looking at it. You’re not going to open it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Because you’re afraid of what he’ll say.”

  Zachary nodded. He flipped the envelope over in his hand, turned it back around again, and studied the postmark and stamp as if they were important evidence in a case.

  “You think that he’s waited thirty years to tell you how much he hates you for something that wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was my fault.”

  “He was a little boy. He’s trying to reach out to his big brother. It isn’t about blame. He wants to get in touch with you.”

  Zachary pressed his lips tightly together and shook his head. He looked at the clock on his DVD player across the room. “I didn’t realize how long I’ve kept you,” he said. It wasn’t a total lie because he was surprised at how much time had passed. He must have withdrawn into himself for a long time. He shook his head, as if that would clear his sense of disorientation. “Gordon will be wondering what happened to you.”

  Bridget recognized a dismissal when she heard it. She stood up slowly, looking down at Zachary on the couch.

  “I’m here because I want to help, Zachary.”

  “Thank you for bringing the letter. I appreciate it.”

  Kenzie had said to cut his ties with Bridget. This was exactly what she had meant. Bridget thought that she had the right to be involved in Zachary’s life and to make decisions for him. She thought that he owed her something because she had put up with him for two years and had brought him the letter. But she was the one who had chosen to break up. That hadn’t been Zachary’s decision.

  Bridget huffed out an exasperated breath and headed for the door. “Are
you just going to sit there looking at it all night?”

  Maybe. Probably.

  “Thanks for bringing it,” he repeated.

  Bridget’s heels clicked all the way to the door, and she pulled it shut behind her with force that wasn’t quite a slam, but not exactly a sedate departure either.

  Zachary put one hand over his face, elbow braced on his knee, and tried to figure out what to do.

  Chapter Three

  R

  usty Donaldson was the trucker who had hit Richard. Zachary didn’t know if Rusty was his birth name or a nickname due to his orange beard and hair. He was a pleasant man, around Zachary’s own age, but much bigger, his chest twice as thick as Zachary’s, towering over him by a least a foot. A hearty man’s man.

  “Uh, hi.” Zachary forced a smile and offered his hand. Big men made him nervous. Sure, he’d known a few gentle giants, but more often he’d been bullied by the bigger boys as he grew up. There was lot of competition in foster homes and institutions, lots of opportunities for physical and emotional torture by the boys who were bigger and stronger.

  Rusty took Zachary’s hand and shook it warmly, without squeezing the life out of it. Though he had a naturally cheerful face, it turned grave as he looked at Zachary.

  “I’ll answer whatever questions you might have,” he said. “I’m just sick over this thing. I’d never intentionally hurt someone, much less kill them. I feel awful for his family, and I’ll do whatever I can to… make some sense of this for them.”

  Zachary nodded. Rusty had picked out the meeting place, the lounge of a truck stop. It was clean, quiet during the day, and upholstered in a dark red. They sat down and Rusty leaned in, eager to get started with the questions. Zachary felt a little disconcerted, used to witnesses who were a little more reticent.

  “Why don’t you tell me in your own words what happened that night, and then we can go over some additional details as questions come to me. You don’t mind if I take notes while you’re talking?”

  “No, man. Go ahead.”

  “Thanks.” Zachary opened his notepad and nodded for Rusty to begin.

  He started off with a lot of technical information about the run he’d been doing, which meant little to Zachary, but he wrote down the details he thought were pertinent. Rusty’s deadline and destination, the route he’d followed until he got to the secondary road where Richard had been killed.

  “You’d been on that road before?” Zachary asked. “You’re familiar with it?”

  “Oh, sure. Been on it a dozen times before. A good shortcut, if you know the road goes all the way through. A lot of experienced truckers take it.”

  “And you’d never run into any trouble before.”

  “Nah. It’s quiet. No accidents, no mechanical problems. The road itself is in good condition; paved, no potholes or ruts to deal with.”

  “But no shoulder, either, if you did run into any problems.”

  “No, you’re right. Have you been on it?”

  “I’m going to drive out to take a look at it after I have your story. No point in going out without knowing something about what happened.”

  “So you can check out my story,” Rusty said with a bit of a grin.

  Zachary returned his smile. “Of course.”

  “Good man. So… there’s not really that much to tell. I was flying along, no obstacle or problems, nice straight stretch of road. Then I hear a bang and feel the truck take some kind of impact. So I hit the brakes and pulled over the best I could, in the dark with no shoulder. Got out the old Mag flashlight and scouted around the truck to see what had happened. Figured maybe I hit a deer. Not like it hasn’t happened before.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “A new dent and a bit of blood on the front right. No significant damage, lights were all intact. Maybe an animal smaller than a deer. A coyote or something.”

  “Did you have a look around to see if you could see it?”

  “Sure. Walked back along the road maybe half a mile, sweeping my light across the road and off the side into the ditch. But I couldn’t see anything suspicious. Couldn’t find the place where I’d hit it, couldn’t find any sign of a hurt animal. Sometimes they just run off into the woods and there’s nothing you can do. I looked again on my way back to the truck, still couldn’t see anything. So I got back in and kept going.”

  “And you had to have your load delivered the next morning,” Zachary said, looking at his notes. “So you must have driven all night.”

  “We’ve all pulled an all-nighter now and then. I’m sure you have too.”

  Zachary hadn’t slept a wink the night before. He nodded. “Yes, a few.”

  “Company’s got rules about night driving and the number of hours you can drive at a time, all aimed to keep sleepy drivers off the road. Most guys are pretty good about following them.”

  Zachary noticed that Rusty didn’t exactly say that he had followed them.

  “I dropped my load and headed for home. I was just a couple of hours further on, then I could flake out in my own bed.”

  “Right. The police said you reported the possible collision to your insurer that morning?”

  “Sure. You have to get these things taken care of as quickly as you can. No one is going to give you any breaks if you put it off. I called, told them I figured I hit a coyote, all the details, and went to bed.”

  “But it was a few days before you called the police.”

  Rusty nodded grimly. “I got my sleep in, took a couple of days’ break, just like the company policy states. I was lined up for another run, so I went out to check out my truck, make sure I hadn’t missed any damage in the dark that night.”

  Zachary cleared his throat and waited. Rusty was scowling, his bushy eyebrows drawn down fiercely over his eyes.

  “There was a dent and blood spatter on the front, like I said. I took a picture with my phone and grabbed the high-pressure washer to clean it off. While I was washing it off, I was looking for any other damage or clue to what I had hit. There was a torn bit of cloth in the fender. It could have gotten there some other time. I didn’t know for sure. But it seemed… out of place. Like it wasn’t just someone who had brushed by it in the parking lot and got their jacket caught.”

  “So that’s when you called the police.”

  “Yeah. Didn’t get much response when I first called it in. It was just kind of a routine report, they didn’t seem to think there was anything to be worried about. But then I got a call back from the police detective who was in charge of this Harding case. Told me I’d better come in and give a statement. Answer some questions.” Rusty sighed. “So that’s what I did. You might think that all truckers are naturally law-breakers, always in trouble with the police, but we’re not. There are some rowdies out there, and everybody’s had a traffic citation at some point, but most of us, we do our best to stay out of trouble and just live our own lives.”

  “Sure. So you were pretty anxious about having to go in and tell them about what had happened. You wondered why they had called you back after the reception to the initial call was so cool.”

  Rusty nodded earnestly. “Yes. Exactly. That’s it exactly. I go in, thinking they want me to just write down in triplicate what I had told them on the phone, and it turned out that they had found a body in the ditch. I’d actually hit a person, and I had no idea.” He blew out his breath noisily. “You have no idea how that feels.”

  “The police followed up on the call you made with your insurer. They examined your truck, even though you had already washed it off.”

  “I guess there was still some blood that I hadn’t gotten off. In cracks. They charged me with hit and run, but released me, and the DA is reviewing it now… I guess deciding whether I did everything right, or whether there was something else I should have done. I swear I looked in the ditch, but it was dark, and I must have missed him. If there was something I could have done…” He had a haunted look. “I can’t imagine him, lying in the d
itch there, dying, thinking that nobody cared and that I had just gone on…”

  It was a macabre thought, and Zachary didn’t envy Rusty his nightmares. He had done everything right as far as Zachary could tell. He hadn’t known that he had hit anyone.

  But Zachary had been hired to look into Richard’s death from the other angle. To look into the possibility that Rusty Donaldson had intentionally killed Richard on the road that night.

  “Did you know Richard Harding?”

  “Know him?” Rusty shook his head. “No way. I’d never heard of the guy before the police told me he was dead. I guess I’d driven down his road before, past his farm, but I had no idea. I don’t know anyone who lives along that route. Not that I know of.”

  “His girlfriend doesn’t think it was an accident.”

  “Not an accident? What, she thinks…” Rusty’s florid color drained. “She thinks that I ran down her boyfriend on purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would she think that?” He seemed truly astonished. Apparently, the police hadn’t told him about Ashley’s theory.

  “I haven’t quite figured that out yet. There may be something she isn’t telling me. Maybe he got threats or had something on his mind. Maybe it’s just the shock and grief. I don’t know. But that’s why she’s hired me.”

  “She hired you to prove that I killed Harding on purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  Rusty’s expression changed so rapidly Zachary was reminded of a board game spinner cycling through options. Where was it going to land? Anger, astonishment, regret, fear, more anger, directed at Zachary this time, confusion, guilt, more wide-eyed fear. Finally, he just stared at Zachary, blanking all expression out, staring at him with lifeless eyes, as if Rusty himself had left his corporeal form and gone far away.