by Paul Doiron
As for Jamie and her ex-husband’s rekindled relationship (if that was what it was), I realized it was none of my business. Word around town was that they were hitting the bars together again. She’d lost her job at McDonald’s. I couldn’t bring myself to drive past her house, lest I see Munro’s Tundra out front.
I did have a keen interest in knowing whether Mitch was indeed the man Randall and Prester had gone to meet in the Heath that snowy day, as seemed likely. But trying to factor Munro into a murderous equation that already included Kendrick and the Spragues was a leap even my own overly active imagination refused to make.
But it was an equation, of sorts, that revealed the truth about Trinity Raye. More like a code, actually. After I found Lucas’s notebook, I took it back inside my malodorous trailer and sat down at my kitchen table and began flipping through the pages.
I’d made myself a cup of instant coffee, but it tasted, like everything in the damned house, like skunk. Rivard had told me that Joe Brogan had fired Billy Cronk because he’d been gossiping too much about what his employer had done to my living quarters. Rivard thought I might be able to wangle a trade out of Cronk: testimony about how Brogan had released a live skunk into my trailer in exchange for my dropping the firearm charge against the gentle Viking.
It was a deal I would make, I decided.
Picking up Lucas’s notebook, I stopped on a jumbled series of letters that I had noticed before on the cover. I hadn’t given them any attention then, but after everything I had subsequently learned about Lucas’s big brain, I now found my curiosity engaged.
DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ
It took me a few minutes to realize that what looked like gibberish was actually a simple cipher of the kind that had fascinated me when I’d read the Hardy Boys books as a kid.
I turned on my computer with the familiar sense of anticipation that now greeted me every time the screen lit up. But there was no new message from George Magoon, and perhaps there would never be another one. I went looking for “secret codes” in the Google search menu.
I found the key quickly enough:
DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ
Reading the first letter of the top word, followed by the first letter of the bottom word, followed by the second letter of the top word, followed by the second letter of the bottom word, and so on in a zigzag pattern, I ended with this:
DCON RAT POISON ZZZ
I put down my pen and stared at the words. Then I began reading carefully through the pages, looking for an actual confession. But Lucas had been coy throughout.
He didn’t know what I did to the pills, neither… and wasn’t he in for a wicked surprise when someone swallowed one of them Oxycottons?
What had he done to the OxyContin pills? Sprayed them with some chemical? What had he done with the rat poison? I thought back to my search for the boy in the Sewall house. Down in the cellar, I remembered a rusted oil tank with an open box of d-Con rat poison on the dirt floor beside it.
Trinity Raye had died from snorting heroin cut with baking powder and brodifacoum. People called it an overdose, but in truth the girl had also suffered an esophageal hemorrhage, causing her to bleed out. The active ingredient in d-Con is brodifacoum.
“What happens if a kid kills somebody?” Lucas had asked me.
The boy knew what he’d done. That was why he’d asked the sheriff if we were there to arrest him the night Rhine and I delivered Prester’s death notification. It was the reason he kept asking if I was taking him to jail. No wonder he was being chased in his nightmares by an avenging angel dressed like a white owl.
I grabbed the notebook and hurried out to my truck. What was I going to say to Lucas? What would I tell Jamie? I’d been so worried about seeing her lose custody. Now I found myself in possession of circumstantial evidence that linked her son to the accidental death of a young woman. But who would believe me if I turned it in? Everyone knew about Mike Bowditch and his wild imagination.
Lucas had contaminated Randall Cates’s stash of drugs to get even for the pain the dealer was inflicting on his mother. Maybe he hoped someone would get sick, so the blame would fall on Randall. With the boyfriend out of the picture, his mother and father might finally reunite, as had seemingly happened. Had he expected someone to die? I hoped to God he hadn’t.
If Lucas hadn’t tampered with the heroin, Trinity Raye might still be alive, and if so, Joey Sprague would not have pressed a handgun against his temple and flinched at the moment he pulled the trigger. Kendrick and Ben Sprague would never have had a reason to kill Randall Cates. Prester might not have committed suicide. The whole chain of fatal events, I realized, began with a brilliant, bitter boy who just wanted his daddy back.
You and Lucas have a lot in common.
The drive was a blur. One poor old geezer nearly went off the road when I zoomed past his puttering Buick.
My cell phone rang in my pocket. I dug it out and looked at the number.
“Charley,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Hot pursuit?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I was just calling to invite you up to the Ponderosa for Saturday dinner,” he said. “The Boss said it was past time I offered you a formal invitation.”
It had been too long since I’d eaten Ora Stevens’s fresh-baked bread or shared a hot cup of coffee with Charley while he told me one far-fetched but invariably true yarn after another. And maybe my wise old friend could advise me what to do about Lucas and his notebook. Should I turn it over to the state police with my unprovable suspicions, and if so, to what end? So that the boy would be shunted off into some facility for troubled children? More than ever, I realized, I wanted the benefit of Charley’s considerable wisdom.
The only hesitancy I felt in saying yes to his invitation came when I remembered those jade-green eyes, the most beautiful I’d ever seen.
Charley, as always, was three steps ahead of me. “Stacey will be joining us.”
“What about her fiance? Will he be there, too?”
I could hear the smile in my friend’s voice. “No, I believe Matt is working that night.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, cresting a hill. “But I’ve really got to go. I’ll explain why on Saturday.”
“You damn well better!”
I tucked the cell phone into my shirt pocket, feeling unreasonably hopeful. Stacey might have a fiance, but who knew what was truly possible and impossible?
I braked when I came around the corner, and I braked even harder when I saw the FOR SALE sign in the yard outside Jamie’s house. My patrol truck slid on its brand-new wheels and tires across a sanded stretch of asphalt before it came to rest in front of the driveway.
In the past, Jamie had barely bothered to shovel out a space to park her van, but someone had plowed out a vast expanse of the dooryard to make way for whatever big truck had hauled away her furniture and other possessions. You could tell from the dark, curtainless windows that the Sewall family was long gone. Jamie had sworn to me she’d do anything to hold on to her troubled son, even if it meant spiriting him away in the dead of night. What reason did they have to stay in that haunted house anyway? Who wouldn’t want to escape from this snowbound wasteland?
I tried to remember the story Jamie had told me when we were lying in bed in the motel, the one about Prester John and his legendary African kingdom: “But someday I’m going to take off south, and I’m not going to stop until I find my own golden city in the sun.”
I wondered if she would find it.
Does anyone ever?
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