by Chelsea Cain
Bliss was drying dishes. “You know where the stove is,” she said.
Susan got up to use the phone. There was a glass with a little bit of orange juice left in it still on the table and she took it with her to the couch. By the time she realized that she had a dead fruit fly in her throat, her only option was to swallow it.
CHAPTER
45
Archie had all the Beaton photographs and documents that Huffington had boxed up delivered to his apartment. He and Henry unpacked the boxes without talking and spread the contents out on the floor of Archie’s living room.
The dead children were in the bedroom.
A dead woman’s personal papers filled the living room.
That was about right.
“Gretchen could be lying,” Henry said. “About this whole thing. She could be lying about all of it.”
“We need to organize the photographs by subject,” Archie said. “If you think it’s the boy, put it here.” He paused. “I want to see any picture of a teenage girl.”
There was a knock at the door, and then the knob immediately started to jiggle. Archie walked over, unlocked the door, and opened it.
Susan walked in.
“I need your help,” she said. She walked past him into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Claire said you were here,” she said, pulling an apple out of his produce drawer. “I’m not mad at you anymore.”
“Help yourself,” Archie said.
Susan carried the apple into the living room. “Oh, hi, Henry,” she said.
“Hi,” Henry said.
Susan shuffled up a stack of photographs that Henry had just sorted and moved them over so she could take their place on the sofa. Henry stared, dumbfounded at what she had done. Susan didn’t seem to notice.
“I know where Pearl is,” Susan said.
She paused, like she expected climactic organ music. Archie didn’t have time for this. He had other leads to follow. He lingered near the door, hoping Susan would take the hint. “Pearl didn’t see anything,” he said.
“What if she did?” Susan said.
“We’re working here,” Henry said from the floor. He snapped the pile of photographs Susan had displaced and began re-sorting it.
Susan took a bite of the apple, chewed, and swallowed it. Then she wiped some juice from her mouth with the back of her hand. “She says she ran away because some cop tried to grab her,” Susan said.
Archie couldn’t help but be interested and Susan knew it. “A cop?” he said.
“Well,” Susan said, waving the apple in the air, “a guy pretending to be a cop.”
It was a good story. But Archie didn’t believe it.
“Teenage girls say a lot of things to get out of trouble,” Archie said.
Susan arched her brows at him. “You’re willing to give a psychopathic serial killer the benefit of the doubt and you don’t trust a seventeen-year-old kid? What if this guy tried to bump her off because he thought she saw something that could connect him to the crime?”
Bump her off? Where did Susan get this stuff? “Can she identify him?” Archie asked.
“Yes,” Susan said.
It was worth following up on. Pearl was trouble, but she was also only seventeen. She’d age out of the system in a few months, and then she’d be lost to them. In the meantime, the system owed her every effort.
“Where is she?” Archie asked.
“I’m not saying.” She took a bite of the apple.
Susan could be a real pain in the ass sometimes.
“Is she at your mother’s house?” Archie asked.
Susan looked to the right. “No.”
Pearl was at Susan’s mother’s house.
“She’s a minor,” Archie said. “I need to call child services. You know that.”
“She’s an emancipated minor,” Susan said.
Henry laughed out loud.
“Do you even know what that means?” Archie asked Susan.
“She’s been declared an adult,” Susan said.
“She’s emancipated from her guardians,” Archie said. “She can sign business contracts and work long hours. She’s still a minor as far as the law.”
Susan bit her lip. “Shit.”
“Do you want to call CPS, or shall I?” Archie asked.
Susan pointed at him. “You owe me.”
Archie was at a loss. “How do you figure that?”
“You took my flash drive,” she said.
“You took my flash drive,” Archie said. “I required that you return it.” This wasn’t worth arguing about. “If she was attacked, we need to investigate that.”
“Send Claire to talk to her,” Susan said. “Send a sketch artist. But give me twenty-four hours to call child services. In the meantime, she stays with me.”
Henry chuckled some more from the floor. “Send Claire,” he said. “I’m gonna tell her you said that. She loves it when people do that. She loves to be sent places.”
Susan blew away some hair from her face. “You know what I mean,” she said to Henry. “Pearl doesn’t hate her.”
Archie felt the need to point out the obvious. “What if she’s actually in danger?”
“He doesn’t know where she is,” Susan said. “She’s safe.”
Archie looked around at the files on the floor. It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough to deal with already. “Okay,” he said. “For now.”
Susan eyed all the boxes, like she’d just noticed them. “Are you moving?”
“It’s evidence from the Beaton house,” Archie said.
He’d had fifteen e-mails from Susan since last night asking questions about Dusty Beaton’s murder. He’d given her statements when he could, and forwarded the e-mails to the right people when he couldn’t. Sometimes the only way to get Susan to stop was to give in.
“I’ll say one thing for Gretchen, she knows how to create narrative,” Susan said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to my Times story. Widow slaughtered eighteen years after Beauty Killer murders hubby.” Susan paled and gave Archie an anxious look. “Hey, you don’t think she had that woman killed for my story, do you?”
“No,” Archie said.
Susan seemed satisfied. “I should get back,” she said. She stepped over the stack of Beaton family photos that Henry had just finished sorting, nearly sending them cascading with her flip-flop. Henry got his hand out just in time to secure them. Susan looked down at the pictures and frowned. “I wonder if they made it,” she said.
“Where?” Archie asked.
“Heaven,” Susan said, like it was self-explanatory. “Look at them. What a bunch of Jesus freaks.”
Archie still didn’t understand.
Susan reached down and fanned some of Henry’s neatly stacked snapshots out on the floor. They were all taken in the Beaton house.
“Look,” she said. She pointed to the walls in the background, the bookshelves. Archie noticed, for the first time, all of the crucifixes. She handed him an apple core. “Crosses,” she said. “Every picture.”
CHAPTER
46
Pearl was wearing Susan’s favorite Decemberists T-shirt and a pair of red cutoff corduroys that Susan hadn’t been able to zip up since high school. Susan was on deadline, but she couldn’t take her eyes off her. Pearl was curvier up top than she’d been a year ago. She filled out the T-shirt and then some. Susan hated to admit it, but Pearl had cleaned up well. While Susan was at Archie’s, Bliss had trimmed and colored Pearl’s hair over the sink. When Bliss did Susan’s hair, they used colors like Atomic Turquoise and Vampire Red. Pearl’s dye job looked more like “prom queen.” Bliss had transformed Pearl’s mangy hippie mane into a glossy mix of dark blond and buttery gold highlights. It swung and shimmered and gleamed. Susan hadn’t known that Bliss had that kind of hair in her. If Susan’s mother had done that for her in high school, Susan’s whole life might have turned out differently.
Pearl was lounging like a cat, stretched
along the back of the sofa. She rolled from her side onto her back without missing a beat on her handheld video game.
Since the couch was taken, Susan was relegated to a nearby chair constructed out of driftwood and sheepskin. It had been a gift from an ex-boyfriend of Bliss’s who’d turned a nice profit making driftwood grizzlies for tourists in Newport. The chair was more comfortable than it looked, but still not ideal.
The video game sounded like a car alarm that was going off a half block away. It wasn’t exactly loud; it was just annoying and persistent.
Susan glanced at Bliss, who was in the kitchen rolling out flax-seed pizza dough for their lunch. Susan hadn’t seen Bliss cook this much since she’d volunteered to provide craft services for a community theater production of The Vagina Monologues. Bliss didn’t seem too concerned about Pearl’s video game. Apparently Susan’s mother hadn’t told Pearl about her “magnetic field free zone” policy. Or warned her about the correlation between electronic handheld devices and lap cancer.
“I’m on deadline,” Susan said to Pearl. “Can you do that upstairs or something?”
Pearl’s eyes stayed on her screen as her thumbs danced furiously. “It’s too hot upstairs.”
That was true enough.
Susan went back to writing.
Pearl kept playing.
Soon the smell of pizza filled the room. It wasn’t real pizza. It was some vegan flaxseed version of it. But it smelled like pizza.
After a while, Pearl put down her video game, rolled down the back of the couch, wound herself in Susan’s direction, and flung her arms and legs over the couch arm. Teenagers didn’t have bones, Susan decided.
Susan waited. Her cursor blinked.
Pearl crossed her arms over her legs and rested her chin on the space inside of her elbows. Her hair looked perfect. “So what’s Archie like, in person?” she asked.
Seriously? “You’ve met him,” Susan said. “Just before you electrocuted him.”
Pearl shrugged that last bit off. “He seemed nice,” she said. She gave Susan a conspiratorial smile. “Do you like him?”
“I have a boyfriend,” Susan said quickly. “A person. A person of interest. That I’m interested in.”
“Where is he?”
Who the hell knew? He hadn’t called. He was somewhere selling a gym bag full of coke, that’s where he was. Drug runners worked strange hours, like surgeons. They didn’t have time to call people. “He knows I’m on deadline,” Susan said.
“Is he hot?” Pearl asked.
Susan craned her neck. Where was her mother?
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Pearl said.
Susan was finding Chatty Pearl a lot more annoying than Sullen Pearl. “I think I’ll go work upstairs,” she said.
“Can I come with you?” Pearl asked, blinking hopefully.
“Don’t you have a car to steal or something?” Susan asked.
There was a knock at the door and Susan bounced up to get it. “It’s Claire!” she said when she saw Claire Masland. “Come in, Claire.”
“Uh, hey,” Claire said. “It’s me. Here I am. Hurray.” She was with some guy with a goatee and a laptop.
Susan opened the door and let them in, as Bliss came bounding over from the kitchen.
“This is L.B., our composite artist,” Claire said, jabbing a thumb toward the guy with the laptop. She looked peeved, like she had better things to be doing. Susan knew the feeling.
Bliss threw her arms around Claire, while Susan gave Claire an apologetic shrug from over her mother’s shoulder.
“Pearl’s over there,” Susan said, pointing to where Pearl had rolled herself into a sullen ball on the couch.
“Okay,” Claire said. “We’re going to need to take her statement.” She waited a beat. No one moved. “Is there somewhere we can talk to her privately?”
Susan glanced at Pearl sulking on the couch and then, knowing full well that it was a hundred degrees upstairs, smiled. “You can use my room,” she said.
CHAPTER
47
The Church of Living Christ was a one-story brick building with a marquee out front that read free coffee, every sun-day. Archie parked in the church parking lot. The grass around the church was dark green, right up to the property lines, where the irrigation stopped and the grass turned the color of hay. The paved path from the parking lot was lined with white flowers. Snapdragons. There was a big double door at the end of the walk. About ten feet over was another door with a sign on it that read office. Archie walked to that door and knocked on it.
After a minute, a woman about Archie’s age opened the door.
She smiled. Her dark hair was threaded with gray and wound back in a tight bun that looked like it required a lot of muscle and hair spray. She had a long face, with a lot of forehead and chin, and three brown moles on one cheek. Her eyes were joyful; her smile beatific; and her laugh lines were deep. She was someone who smiled a lot.
She said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
That caught Archie off guard. He assumed she thought he was someone else. He said, “Excuse me?”
Her lips were frosted pink. She said, “Jesus is in your heart.”
Archie fumbled for his badge. “I’m not here about Jesus,” he said. He showed her the badge. “I’m here about Dusty Beaton.”
The smile remained locked into place, but her posture shifted. Her eyes darted to the side, back inside the office. Then she frowned sadly. “We were so sorry to hear of her passing,” she said. She gave him a helpless shrug. “But she had not been a church member here for many years.”
Archie got the feeling that she wasn’t going to let him in. “Did you know her?” Archie asked.
She adjusted the shoulder pad of her silk blouse. “No, not well. Not to speak of. I remember her. But I couldn’t tell you anything personal about her.”
Someone was taking care of things at the Beaton house. Someone was helping keep up the exterior of the house, cutting the grass. Someone had planted white snapdragons in Dusty Beaton’s front yard. Archie looked back along the snapdragon-lined path where he’d just walked.
“You’ve got some nice flowers,” Archie said. “Who planted them?”
“We have volunteers,” she said. “Church members.”
The door opened wider and an elderly man appeared next to the woman. He was wearing a clerical collar. The woman immediately dropped her head submissively. He patted the woman on the arm and said, “It’s okay, Nancy.”
She stepped back into the office, and the reverend stepped outside into the light. He had thick white hair and the eyebrows to match. His face was cobwebbed with wrinkles, and he had ears the size of coasters. He held a hand out to Archie.
“I’m Reverend Lewis,” he said. “Let’s go find someplace to talk. I’m all ears.”
Someplace to talk turned out to be a park bench behind the church. The bench overlooked a Dumpster, and beyond that a pasture, and beyond the pasture a mobile home park. The afternoon sun was hot, but the bench was under a tree, in the shade. There was a vague vinegar smell from the Dumpster, and Archie could hear crows fighting in the tree.
“How long have you been reverend here?” Archie asked.
“Long enough to be the one you’re looking for,” the reverend said.
“You knew Mr. Beaton?” Archie asked.
“I knew the whole family,” the reverend said.
A crow swept down and picked up something that was lying on the pavement next to the Dumpster and flew off with it.
“Are you a religious man?” the reverend asked.
Archie hesitated. “Will my answer affect what you’re willing to tell me?” he said.
The reverend smiled. “I’ll answer your questions as truthfully as I can, regardless of your eternal salvation.”
“I think that my eternal salvation is a lost cause,” Archie said with a rueful smile.
“We’re all sinners,” the reverend said. “That’s why we seek forgiveness.�
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“I’ve worked too many homicides to put much stock in forgiveness,” Archie said.
The reverend nodded thoughtfully. “Human beings are capable of great evil.”
“That’s your word, not mine,” Archie said.
“You don’t believe in evil, either, eh?”
“It presumes a lack of biology or experience,” Archie said. “People don’t kill because they’re evil. They usually kill because they want money or sex.”
“Ah, a moral relativist.” He cocked his head at Archie. “What about Gretchen Lowell?”
Archie looked out over the pasture. “You know who I am.”
“We get newspapers. Even in St. Helens.”
The pasture was spotted with green—weeds were always the last to die in the summer. Archie looked back at the reverend. “I haven’t figured her out yet,” Archie said.
Reverend Lewis reached behind his neck and loosened his clerical collar. “It’s been a hot few months,” he said.
“Yes, it has,” Archie said.
They both looked at the view. Two more crows landed near the Dumpster.
“I have a theory that James Beaton was murdered,” Archie said.
The reverend nodded solemnly. “Do you think Mrs. Beaton’s murder is connected to her husband’s murder?”
“Well, it’s a hell of a coincidence,” Archie said. “Excuse my language.”
“Oh, we use the word hell here quite a bit,” the reverend said with a soft smile.
“Right,” Archie said. “So what can you tell me about the Beatons?”
“James grew up in St. Helens, attended church,” the reverend said. “He left to attend college. He met Dusty at school and brought her home when he graduated. Dusty joined the church, and I officiated at their wedding. James took over his father’s accounting business not long after that. He and Dusty had the two kids. Colin and Melissa were both teenagers when James disappeared.”
“How did they all react?” Archie asked.
“Dusty was angry, mostly,” the reverend said. “She truly loved him.”
“He cheated on her,” Archie said.