___________
A few weeks after her presentation on ghosts, some students from her class dared Nola to go to a cemetery at night and dance on a grave. Everyone in this group of kids got a dare at some point, and they’d picked this task specifically for her because of her ghost report, though mostly they just thought it would be fun to make someone do something that would have scared themselves shitless. Funny thing was, they couldn’t have picked an easier dare. Nola was far more worried about being caught by the cops than anything else. As they gathered at the front gate once the last glow of twilight had faded, she insisted that one of them be on the lookout for patrol cars; the rest could watch, drinking their Cokes from McDonalds spiked with E&J brandy. The only other tricky thing would be taking care not to make it seem too easy—there was a fine line, she knew, between looking brave and looking like you enjoyed doing freaky things just a little too much. Jerry Dorpinghouse had taken such delight in eating dead bugs the last time this bunch got together that he could expect to find cockroaches Scotch-taped to his locker with notes (“Snack for you, Jerry”) from now until graduation.
But it was easy for Nola to take the dare. As she walked through the gates among the stones, she knew these were remains. Nothing here had died here. That had occurred elsewhere, and even if she didn’t know any of these people, how they lived or how they died, she knew what happened each time one of these deaths transpired. When she judged she’d gone far enough in to be really in but not so far that her darers at the gate couldn’t see her, she picked a random grave. Fredrick M. Garten, 1913-1978. Standing before the stone doing the Macarena, she offered a silent apology. It was hard not to, even though she knew Fredrick Garten was not there in the ground, or hovering in the sky above her, or wandering around the crosses and angels moaning like a specter in the movies. The apology, she knew, was more for herself than anyone living or dead. It was necessary to feel contrite, not because she was desecrating the dead but because she was doing something utterly ridiculous in order to be accepted. Fredrick Garten was not there, hadn’t been anywhere for a while, but Nola figured he’d probably gone through the same kind of thing while he was alive. Most everyone did, especially in towns like Redfort. Walking back to the gate, seeing the figures there ahead of her and wondering how they’d react, she knew the dead couldn’t hurt you nearly as much as the living.
She recalled all of this now as she drove home in a daze—one of those drives, she reflected as she suddenly found herself in her apartment parking lot, where you’re on autopilot and have no idea how you managed not to cause an accident. When she shut off the ignition, she immediately opened the door. No sitting around waiting for someone else to come around.
Her cell phone rang before she could get out, and she laughed out loud.
It was a local number, not one she recognized but clearly not a telemarketer either. Curiosity got the better of her. It could very well be Grayson again, after all, with yet more to overload her brain. She took the call.
“It’s Lynette.” She didn’t add a last name, though she didn’t need to. Nola knew only one person named Lynette, even if she would never have expected a call from her.
“Um . . . yes?”
“I need to talk to you about Culver Bryant. It’s important, really important, and I can only talk to you.”
5
Lynette Veesy worked at Tryst, a nightclub in the warehouse district. It was a place Nola had heard about but never been to, instinctively knowing it would not be her scene. The post-dinner crowd would be too yuppie and the late-night crowd would make her feel too obviously like a 27-year-old transcriptionist wearing her coolest outfit and trying to look like she always stayed up this late. Pretty easy to figure out which crowd Culver Bryant had been in when he’d met Lynette.
Of course, it occurred to Nola that this might not be the smartest thing she could do, that if Lynette was involved in murder or kidnapping, she could be walking into a trap. Just thinking those words, though—walking into a trap—sounded ludicrous. Still, she took precautions, telling Lynette that she was leaving a note on her desk at the police station saying when she expected to be back. If anything happened to her, they’d figure it out pretty quickly. She didn’t have a desk at the police station, but Lynette wouldn’t know that. Lynette thought she was a psychic, after all.
“Fine, whatever,” Lynette had said impatiently over the phone, “just don’t tell anyone what this is all about.”
“How can I when you haven’t told me what it’s all about?
Lynette hung up, either out of fear that someone was coming or because she was not used to being in the position of begging for help from people and hadn’t quite learned the etiquette it demanded.
Nola got there well before the place would open for the night, as Lynette had instructed, and let herself in through the unlocked front door. Without the music and black lights and well-heeled club-goers, the place looked like the warehouse it was—shabby, gloomy, cavernously empty. Lynette was waiting for her at the bar, sipping from a bottle of water. She didn’t offer one to Nola but instead began talking, urgently, before Nola even had a chance to take off her leather jacket. Something about going to a nightclub even for non-nightclub business made her think she should wear leather, though not entirely leather, from boots to beret, as Lynette was sporting. “We have to do this quick before my manager comes back,” she said. “I need your help. I can’t talk to the cops about this.”
“You do understand, if you say anything I think is relevant to the case—”
“I know, I know, you’ll go rat me out.” She made a sound like a gasp or a sigh and then scrunched her eyes tightly shut. When she opened them, she looked genuinely apologetic. “Sorry. I’m not the most tactful person on the planet.”
Nola decided to accept the apology. She was intrigued. “It’s OK. You’re dealing with someone who isn’t exactly on that top-ten list either. Go on.”
“Here it is. You probably wondered why I acted the way I did when you already knew nothing happened at my place, am I right?”
Nola nodded.
“Here’s the thing. Culver and I had this plan. We were going to run away together. His wife won’t divorce him, and one of his business deals . . . well, there’s stuff happening there and it’s not good and that’s all I know about that. Nothing illegal, Culver says, just, well, money problems. Big money problems. Like, I can’t even imagine how much money we’re—”
“I think I get it.” Another thing Nola was bad at, besides tact, was patience. She didn’t know how the detectives managed to deal with people who had nothing significant to say but made damn sure to take as long as possible to say it. “Please go on.”
“We were going to fake his death.” Lynette paused, either for dramatic effect or because she wanted to gauge Nola’s reaction before she continued. “You get it now, right? I didn’t want you on the case, because you’d know there wasn’t a murder.”
“Everyone would know. There wouldn’t be a body.”
“We were going to make it seem like he went out to the river to go fishing and got assaulted by some crazy person and was killed. The body would have gotten carried away. At first we thought maybe just an accident, maybe he hit his head and drowned. But we had to make it really convincing that he was dead so they’d give up looking for him, and we figured it would be easier to stage a violent murder than a simple accident.”
As absurd as it all sounded, Nola could see that the plan was plausible. She knew from her work with homicide detectives that the swamp the river drained into was almost impossible to dredge; something or someone could stay stuck down there for decades.
“The thing is,” Lynette said, “I wasn’t sure how the whole trace thing worked. You wouldn’t need a body for that so long as you knew where the death occurred—or where it supposedly occurred, right?”
Again Nola nodded.
Ruefully, Lynette tossed her copper hair. “If I’d known you were going to be on the ca
se, maybe we could have done it a different way . . . but that’s not the reason I’m here.”
“And the reason is?” Nola prompted, resisting the urge to check her watch.
“It didn’t happen the way it was supposed to! None of the things Culver was supposed to do were done, because he disappeared the day before it was all supposed to go down. He’s really missing now, not just fake missing. At first I thought maybe something came up so he had to sort of, I don’t know, improvise and get things going early, but now . . . I’m not so sure.”
Nola digested that. It was certainly an interesting revelation, but she wasn’t sure quite what to do with it. “I gather you’re telling me this rather than the police because there might be some sort of obstructing-justice charge to admitting you were going to help fake someone’s death.”
“Yeah, you got it. And me with a DUI and some other stupid shit on my record. They hate me downtown.” This last was said with sneering pride, although Nola doubted anyone downtown could tell Lynette from countless other people with DUIs and stupid shit on their records. Half of Redfort was probably on that list.
“Lynette, I’m sympathetic. I know this has got to be pretty hellish for you. I just don’t know how you think I can help.”
“I thought maybe you could kind of hint to the cops what I’m telling you so they don’t waste time going on the wrong track—the wrong track being me.”
“It’s a little hard to ‘hint’ about faking a death.”
“Or you could sort of, you know, do your own investigating. I’d pay you. And Culver will pay you a ton if you help find him.”
Nola noted the fervor in Lynette’s voice. Genuine. The fear she’d professed yesterday had been fake after all. She really thought her lover was still alive. “You’d be wasting your money. I’m not a trained investigator. All I do is this one thing.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she hated having said them. All I do is this one stupid little thing. Other than that, what good am I?
Lynette was clearly a woman who could tell when she was having an effect on another person. Now she smiled, relaxed her posture, and put her hand on Nola’s wrist tenderly, almost flirtatiously. “Oh, please say you’ll do it. I need your help—we need your help. You’re the only one I can turn to.”
Nola wanted to laugh. “Sweetie, that might work on a potential sugar daddy, but you were better off being honest,” she blurted before she could stop herself.
For a second, anger flared in Lynette’s hard grey eyes. Then she relaxed again, leaning back and nodding. “Fair enough. Here’s the bottom line: I do need your help. Telling you all this stuff was taking a huge risk, and I’m not someone who trusts anyone, ever. That’s how desperate I am.”
Even with this bald admission, Nola felt like she was being played, but then that was probably the way Lynette dealt with everyone. “I can’t promise anything. It’s not like the cops hang on my every word. What I can do is keep in mind what you’ve said for my own part of the investigation and see if—”
“That’s not good enough. You need to do more than just following the dicks around like a puppy. Oh, don’t get all pissy—I know how it is.”
Nola was not about to get pissy, though the words stung her quite a bit. “Considering I don’t have to do anything for you, I suggest that you control the pissiness.” Something else occurred to her. “Hey, how did you know about me anyway?”
“Culver’s brother. I guess he’s interested in paranormal stuff. Me and Culver sometimes met at Grayson’s place when he wasn’t there so Culver’s wife wouldn’t get suspicious if she ever put a tail on Culver—it would be just like he was visiting his brother. Sometimes I’d have to wait for a while for Culver to get out of business meetings and stuff, and Grayson had all these articles about tracists that I read. There was one with your name in it, about that case with the girl last year. I’d never heard of trace, though I do believe in ghosts and I . . .”
Nola tuned out Lynette’s chatter. So Grayson had been aware of her even before his brother’s disappearance. She wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Do you think Grayson is involved?”
Lynette looked confused. “Involved in what? You mean he and Culver have something cooked up?” She shook her head. “No way. They get along and all, but they’re not close. They don’t talk much. Don’t have much to do with each other. Culver would have told me if Grayson was involved.”
That wasn’t quite what Nola had meant, but she didn’t know how to ask whether Grayson might have cooked something up on his own without freaking Lynette out—or confusing her further. “What about Culver’s business partner, Vincent Kirke?”
Lynette’s face softened, and she smiled. “Vincent’s a sweetie. Culver would have told me if Vincent was helping him.”
Nola suspected that Lynette would say only positive things about attractive, wealthy men regardless of who they were. She decided to test her theory. “And Maureen Bryant?”
Theory gained support. Lynette’s face hardened, her lip curling into an ugly sneer, and she let loose. “That bitch. She married him for his money. He married her because he felt sorry for her. They never loved each other. Now he’s stuck with her and she won’t divorce him, because she says she’s Catholic, and I mean, come on, like no Catholics have ever gotten divorced before. They don’t have any kids—her fault—so they could get an annulment, but she won’t do it, the fucking bitch.”
Nola had a feeling that this little rant would go on for a while if unchecked. “One more thing,” she interjected. “The bird.”
“The what?”
Again Nola tried to read Lynette’s expression and saw nothing but puzzled annoyance for being interrupted. Still she needed to make sure. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“Uh, no. Look, are we done here? You are agreeing to help, right? If that’s the case, then stop jerking me around.”
“All right, never mind.” There seemed no point in prolonging the interview, so Nola got up to leave. Lynette got up, too, flouncing around the bar and turning her back without so much as a good-bye. That was fine with Nola. Lynette was exhausting. She wondered whether Culver Bryant really intended to run away with her after all or if that wasn’t just one of those things married men said to their mistresses. After just half an hour, Nola was eager to run away from Lynette.
___________
When she got home, Nola could hardly take the time to struggle out of her leather jacket, fling it and her purse aside, and grab a notebook and a pen. Something about this business demanded literally hands-on work and not a keyboard and screen. She wanted to write down everything she knew about the case and then figure out what else she needed to know and how she might find out about it. It was goofy, she knew, but she was excited. This would not be another Sunday night of lousy TV and leftover pasta. True, it wouldn’t be a night at Tryst with the cool kids (what did they all do for a living that they could go clubbing on a Sunday night, anyway, and why did thinking about them always make her feel like she was eighty years old?), but that was fine. She had a sense of purpose. That’s all she needed at the moment.
She wrote down the names of the four key players, in the order in which they were interviewed. The wife, the business partner, the mistress, the brother. Interestingly, if she had to order them in terms of their likely involvement in Culver Bryant’s disappearance, that’s how it would go. Under each name she jotted down whatever came to her without censoring anything or trying to organize it. After half an hour of solid writing, she put the pen down and considered what she’d written to see what stood out as being potentially significant.
No trace had been found at any of the main suspects’ houses (with an asterisk next to Grayson in this regard). That meant if Culver had been killed, it probably wasn’t a sudden crime of passion. That helped Maureen’s case for innocence, since the wife was traditionally the one most likely to commit such a crime, though Nola’s impression of Maureen was that she hardly seemed the type to be moved to
sudden violent murder, or sudden violent anything, really. Lynette would have been the next-most likely, but if Nola believed Lynette’s story—and for now there was no reason not to—it hadn’t been her.
Lynette had suggested Culver was having financial difficulties. Both Maureen and Vincent suggested Culver had been preoccupied by something—or, as Vincent had put it, guilty about something. If Maureen had suggested it, it might have been put down to his affair with Lynette. Nola wondered if it had anything to do with Greenbriar, his latest project. She definitely needed to find out more about that.
According to the bits and pieces she recalled from the interviews, the last person to see Culver alive was his wife, and she’d seen him before he left home around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday. About a half-hour later he’d called Lynette to tell her not to come to Grayson’s house to meet him after all; he had too much to do that night. That was his second-to-last call. Then he called his business partner and spoke very briefly about something he needed to do, and that was it. His car had not been found and there had been no sightings of it. He had not used his credit cards since his disappearance. He had not taken any other possessions when he left his house that evening, according to Maureen.
Grayson had been out of town when Culver disappeared, though, of course, that didn’t mean he was absolved of any involvement. Nola knew with absolute certainty that he was involved in . . . something.
Again a rustling sound came from the hallway outside her apartment, and she froze. Then she stood up and moved toward the door, burglar-silent. She stood before it wondering what would happen next. Her heart was pounding to a ridiculous degree. She heard a cough—most definitely a Mrs. Lafferty cough, followed by a Mrs. Lafferty clearing of the throat. Nola’s body slumped in relief to the point where she might have collapsed into a puddle on the floor. She opened the door.
“Hey, Mrs. L,” she called out. She figured it might be good penance to endure a lengthy conversation with her neighbor to atone for having turned into Nancy Drew, just as Mutt and Jeff had chided.
Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) Page 5