“She did?”
“Green, especially.”
LeAnne drove away from the old train station—Harvey up front, Goody in back—and was turning onto Main Street when the rain started up again. “Okay,” she said.
“Okay what?” said Harvey.
“To tea,” LeAnne said. “I’ll try green tea.”
The Bitterroot Café had four or five tables and a nice view of the river out the back slider. From their table LeAnne could also see the Honda, parked in the alley beside the café, with Goody sitting up straight in the backseat, gazing at a nearby brick wall.
At first, green tea did nothing for her; then it was not bad; and after that, nice. LeAnne realized this was the first conscious moment since that last mission where the word nice applied; all the different aches in her head were gone.
“Something to eat?” Harvey said.
That sounded good. LeAnne ordered fried chicken, a cheeseburger, a tuna sandwich, and a few sides. Harvey showed no reaction to that; he had soup.
“I keep thinking about the custody situation,” LeAnne said.
“Regarding Max, specifically?”
She took a close look at Harvey.
“What?” he said. “What? That X-ray thing scares me.”
“You’re a liar,” LeAnne said. “But yes—regarding Max, specifically. You’re obviously way ahead of me.”
Harvey spooned up some soup, blew lightly on it.
“Have you ever had a mustache?” she said.
He paused. “That’s a funny question.”
What was wrong with her? Somehow the image of the sheriff’s nauseating mustache had gotten mixed up with the sight of Harvey’s clean-shaved upper lip, quite pleasant to her eye. “Sorry.” A headache came back, very faint, like an electric guitarist tuning up before plugging in. She put down her cheeseburger, half-eaten.
“No big deal,” Harvey said, sipping soup and patting his mouth with a napkin. “I did try a mustache once. Marci hated it. I grew it again after the split—what a statement, huh?—but one day I saw it as others did, thank God. As for Max, I called the sheriff as soon as I heard about Mia, meaning the morning after the funeral. I explained how Max had irrevocably renounced all claims to custody. Cosgrove’s not stupid. He filled in the rest of the theory himself—the news of Marci’s death reawakening the whole thing in Max’s mind, all the self-justification that would accompany taking action, him being the girl’s only parent, Coreen too old for this, et cetera. You were thinking along those lines?”
“What do you teach?” LeAnne said.
“Huh?”
“You said you were a teacher. What do you teach?”
“Third grade. Mia’s in my class—didn’t I mention that?”
LeAnne needed more time to remember, but she never seemed to get it. Who wouldn’t be angry? “What subjects? I meant what subjects do you teach?”
Harvey sat back. “Third grade subjects. Spelling, reading, arithmetic—the usual.”
LeAnne didn’t care about that. She’d been going in a different direction. All she’d really wanted to do was to tell him she guessed he’d be a good teacher. Instead, she’d landed them in a snarl. LeAnne sat back, too, and folded her arms across her chest.
Harvey glanced around the table, taking in the sight of all her uneaten food. Now would come some bothersome question about cooking quality or lack of appetite. Except it did not. Instead, Harvey smiled at her.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing. I’m just smiling.”
“Why?”
Harvey shrugged. “Funny thing about happiness,” he said. “Sometimes it just bubbles up—kind of like Marci’s IED image, only in reverse.”
LeAnne understood what he was talking about, remembered when she’d been that way herself. But now she had to be realistic. The best she could hope for would be to stay on track, get from A to B. “Did Cosgrove do anything with your information?”
Harvey nodded. “Cosgrove’s known to be a pretty straight-up guy. He went down to Seattle and interviewed Max right away.”
“Max lives in Seattle?”
“Moved there five or six years ago. Had a chance to buy into a lumber business and now he owns it. Max alibied out—he was at some conference on Bainbridge Island the day of the funeral, was seen by multiple people in the bar that night and then again at breakfast.”
“What was his reaction to being questioned?”
“He wasn’t offended or anything like that, according to the sheriff—just worried about Mia.”
“Is he married?”
Harvey shook his head. “I think there’s been a girlfriend or two. He’s been off my radar for a long time.”
So: a dead end. LeAnne stared into her tea mug. She got the strange sense that Marci’s face was about to appear on the green surface of the tea, that Marci would soon be showing her the way. But before any miracles could happen, barking started up outside in the alley, muffled barking but plenty audible. LeAnne looked up. Goody was in the front passenger seat, barking furiously and pawing at the windshield.
LeAnne rose and hurried outside. “Goody! Calm down, for Christ sake.” She opened the car door. Goody leaped out, bolted down the alley and straight back, then just stood beside LeAnne and barked at the car. The barking was so loud that LeAnne barely heard the ringing of a phone—a ringing inside her car, beyond doubt, even though she had no phone.
LeAnne got into the car, followed the ringing sound. It was coming from under the driver’s seat. She fished around, felt the ringing phone, pulled it out: a red phone. LeAnne had seen this red phone before—the phone that Captain Stallings, G-2, had tried to foist on her outside her tent at 2241 Lost Hills Road, and that she had refused—but it was like an object from another life.
LeAnne pressed the talk button and the ringing stopped. Goody went silent.
“Hello?” LeAnne said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Hi, LeAnne.” She recognized the soft voice of the speaker at once. “Stallings, here, G-2. Thanks for picking up—you’re not easy to reach.”
Silence from LeAnne’s end.
“LeAnne? Are you there? Can you hear me?”
“You said you wouldn’t bother me again.”
“Can you speak up? I didn’t copy that.”
LeAnne said it again, a lot louder this time. She got out of the car, stood beside it. Goody was looking up at her, an intense expression in those coal-black eyes, like she was paying close attention to the conversation.
“And I meant it at the time,” Stallings said. “Which is the best I’ve ever been able to do in this life, don’t know about you. But how are you? You sound a lot better.”
“How did you do this?” LeAnne tried to bring back the details of their last meeting and some of them returned, but on the question of how Stallings had gotten the phone into the car, her mind came up blank. That was doubly infuriating: her shortcomings on top of what he’d done.
“Definitely better than the last time I saw you,” Stallings said, and then after a pause added, “in Arizona.”
Her voice rose. “I know where it was. You didn’t answer my question.”
“Does it really matter now?” Stallings said. “I take it you’re up in Washington.”
“You’ve been tracking me with this phone?”
“Not in any surreptitious way.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Maybe surreptitious is the wrong word,” Stallings said. “I meant sneaky.”
“You’re not tracking me in a sneaky way? Because . . .” Facts came together in her mind. “ . . . because you told my mother I was in Oregon the other day? That makes it on the up and up?”
“Technically, you’re still in the army, LeAnne.”
“What are you going to do? Throw me in the stockade?”
“The optics of that would be very bad.”
“Optics, huh?” LeAnne said. “You’re an asshole.”
“I di
dn’t mean it that way, as I’m sure you know,” Stallings said.
“The plain meaning was bad enough.”
“Sometimes that can’t be avoided, but plain meaning helps when there’s a mission to accomplish, which is where I am at the moment. What’s that noise?”
LeAnne realized that Goody was growling again.
“Sounds like some kind of motor.”
LeAnne gave Goody a nod, meaning keep it up. Instead, the growling stopped at once. Goody came closer, pressed against LeAnne’s legs, possibly with affection except she was pressing so hard that LeAnne was jammed against the car.
“Whew, now it’s gone,” Stallings said. “What’s the attraction in Washington?”
“The rain.”
There was a silence. Then Stallings said, “I hope you realize your mother’s worried about you. She seems like a very fine person.”
“You called to tell me that?”
“Partly,” Stallings said, his voice for the first time hardening a bit. “But mainly I need your help—not for long, just a day or two, three tops.”
“What kind of help?”
“I’d rather discuss that in person.”
“And if I say no, you’ll just show up here?”
“Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that. No reason to invade your personal space. I’ll get you on a plane headed my way.”
“Where is that?”
“I’m in Kabul.”
Through the phone came a sound LeAnne took for the desiccating Afghan wind.
“Forget it,” she said. “And don’t call me ever again.”
“Hear me out, LeAnne. You wouldn’t want it said that—”
She clicked off, tossed the red phone back in the car. The hand that had held it was shaking and wouldn’t stop.
Harvey came out of the café, pocketing his wallet.
“Some problem?” he said.
“No.”
He crouched down, took Goody’s head in both hands. “You just don’t like being all on your lonesome, is that it, big girl?”
Goody’s weird tail swung back and forth; not weird, LeAnne reminded herself, but mutilated.
“The sheriff called.” Harvey didn’t look up at LeAnne, kept his gaze on Goody. “They’re still waiting on a fingerprint match, but you were right—McCutcheon’s is sure the armband was Mia’s.”
“How did they know?”
“Because of the size, extra small. It was their last one—they had to reorder. A search party’s headed back down to the bike trail.”
“Let’s go.”
“A little problem with that,” Harvey said. “Cosgrove, for the time being, would prefer if you didn’t . . . well, help out right now.”
“Fuck him.”
“I agree. And just after I told you about his straight-up rep. You never know people until you see them in action.”
“Not your fault,” LeAnne said. “He doesn’t have the balls to stand up to his own deputy. That’s all it’s about—I’ve seen shit like this many times. Hop in.”
Harvey rose. He raised his hand, as though to lay it on her shoulder, and then thought better of it. “The thing is, LeAnne, he was pretty adamant.”
“So what?” She was halfway in the car, and Goody was already totally inside, on the backseat, up and alert.
“Just that if you come, there’ll be a scene,” Harvey said.
“So what?” she said again.
“A scene that will end up being a distraction,” he went on. “And I don’t see how that helps find Mia.”
LeAnne gazed at him. “Are you the kind who doesn’t step up, Harvey? Is that what really happened with you and Marci? You didn’t put up a fight?”
Harvey’s cheeks went bright red, like she’d slapped them good and hard.
“Get in,” she said. “Don’t worry—I’m not coming. I’ll just take you to your car.”
LeAnne drove Harvey back to his pickup, parked outside Coreen’s house. There was no talk until Harvey opened the door to get out.
“I’ll try to patch things up with Cosgrove,” he said.
“In a nice way, I’m sure.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Forget it.”
“No,” Harvey said. “Finish what you have to say.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to fight,” LeAnne told him.
“I’m starting to think it’s your default position.” Harvey didn’t slam the door, also didn’t close it extra-softly; just did it in the normal way. That puzzled her. Harvey was angry. Angry men slammed doors. Clever angry men closed them extra-softly. LeAnne couldn’t take it further than that.
Harvey drove away, hadn’t gone more than fifty feet before Goody crawled over and . . . took possession of the front passenger seat; there was no other way to put it.
“The back’s not good enough?” Easy to check on Goody in the back through the rearview mirror. “How come you always have to be where I can’t see you?” From her right came sounds of Goody settling in, getting comfortable. LeAnne drove for a while, going nowhere in particular, just trying to calm down inside, trying to make her headache go away, both without success. Then she felt Goody’s paw on her leg, pressing down way too hard to be comforting, the tips of her claws digging in. “What the hell?” LeAnne twisted around. Goody was sitting up now, her huge head only inches away, teeth exposed. “You’re hungry? Thirsty? What?” Goody dug in harder.
LeAnne turned into a drive-through, ordered a burger with no bun, parked in the lot. She took the burger from the paper bag, held it out. “Here. Eat.” Goody’s head snapped forward and she grabbed the whole thing, chomped it down in less than a second. LeAnne’s headache vanished. She gazed at the dog. The dog gazed back. LeAnne got the feeling Goody wanted to do the whole thing again, and at the same time realized she was hungry herself. But hadn’t she just eaten? She went back over the lunch at the Bitterroot Café, remembered she’d left most of her order untouched. LeAnne started the car and was about enter the drive-through lane again, when she noticed the sign on the white-columned building across the street: McCutcheon’s Funeral Home.
LeAnne cracked Goody’s window open an inch, no more—Goody’s window, Christ, what was happening to her? “You’re staying here. You’re lying down. You’re getting with the program.” Goody did not lie down, but she made no move to follow when LeAnne got out of the car.
The front door at McCutcheon’s was unlocked. LeAnne went inside. She was in a broad hall with a high ceiling and a thick, pale carpet on the floor. The light was silvery, the air still, sounds hushed. It reminded her of heaven in some movie she’d seen, but if heaven was like this, it was a deathly sort of place. LeAnne came close to turning around and walking right back out.
But she was on a mission. Not Midnight Special—a ginormous fuckin’ freight train, barrelin’ through to hell and gone—but something . . . quieter. She was in her own country, after all.
LeAnne kept going, past an empty chapel, an empty office, and an urn full of small white flowers with a smell that brought back her father’s funeral in every detail if she wanted to go over them, which she did not. A step or two past the urn, she picked up the sound of a song she knew: “Rip This Joint.” LeAnne followed the sound around a corner to the open door of another office, this one smaller than the first and full of technical equipment. A white-haired man with his back to her was working at a screen displaying a smiling photo of Marci with a baseball cap tilted back on her head. He tapped at a keyboard and the music stopped, then resumed again earlier in the song, right at the beginning of the saxophone solo. LeAnne knocked on the door.
The man turned to her, touching a key and pausing the music at the same time. He had pale skin and dark shadows under his eyes. His gaze went right to her bad side, but then very quickly switched to a head-on look. Maybe there was something to be learned about people by how speedily they got that done; she had a lifetime to find out. However long that might be.
“Hi,” he said. “Can I help y
ou?”
LeAnne told him her name. “I was a friend of Marci’s,” she said, gesturing with her chin at the picture on the screen.
“In the service?” he said.
“How did you guess?”
That embarrassed him, probably not easy to do with someone in his business. LeAnne felt kind of proud of that. “Uh, sorry,” he said, “no real reason. Just that I know most of her friends from around here and—”
“Not a problem,” LeAnne said, the pride turning to something like shame, and she fell into a tongue-tied state of uncertainty.
“My name’s McCutcheon, by the way. Fred to everyone up in this part of the state. I don’t remember seeing you at Marci’s service.”
“I got here too late.”
“That’s a pity,” McCutcheon said. “You can watch it if you like.”
“Watch it?”
“Well, not the whole thing.” He jabbed his thumb at the screen. “Won’t be complete for a day or two more—still in the editing process.”
“You’re making a video of Marci’s funeral? Like a wedding video?”
“A lot like that, actually, in a technical sense and even spiritually, if I may say so. There’s a surprising level of demand, and maybe not even that surprising, taking the long view of life’s mileposts, and all.”
“Yeah,” LeAnne said. “I’d like to see it.”
McCutcheon drew over a roll chair with his foot. “Have a seat.”
LeAnne sat down—on McCutcheon’s left, but there was no room on the other side. He smelled like the white flowers in the hall.
“I like to start with a sort of video collage of the person’s life,” McCutcheon said. “Collage being maybe too hoity-toity. Basically I use whatever I can get, boiling it down to two minutes—two thirty, tops—before I segue to the service. Here’s Marci.”
The image of smiling Marci in the baseball cap dissolved into a grainy video of baby Marci shaking the bars of her playpen; followed by birthday girl Marci blowing out candles—a still photo that lingered on the screen long enough for LeAnne to count the candles: seven. After that came some teenage Marci: at the beach with Coreen; at the edge of the Grand Canyon with her arms spread, as though preparing for take-off; having happy times with various friends; Marci pinning a boy on the wrestling mat. That was followed by a few seconds of blank screen—
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