The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. He’s not back at work yet, at least.”

  “OK,” Tony said in a soft, slow exhalation, speaking mostly to himself. He stared at his notebook and tapped his pen against the desk’s surface, wondering if there was anything he hadn’t yet considered. He was trying to connect the dots, but he didn’t see the way to. Dancing with a “fat woman.” An argument; she leaves. They get him stupid on shots. They abandon him. And at some point, for some reason, Ronnie enters the equation, and she and Wyatt end up together at the Fill-Up in Roma.

  A week after that, Wyatt has a heart attack.

  Sam cleared his throat. “We done here?”

  Tony finally nodded and punched the stop button on the tape recorder. “Yeah. Well, wait. The missing woman, Ronnie Eastman. What do you know about her? Do you remember seeing her?”

  There was a pause, long enough to notice. Then Sam shook his head no.

  “You sure?” Tony asked, trying to catch his eyes. “You don’t seem sure.”

  “I mean, I think I saw her around at Nancy’s a few times. She was always trawling for fry.”

  “Trawling for—”

  “Trying to move in on younger men,” Sam said.

  “And you didn’t see her that night? For sure?”

  “No,” Sam said. “I didn’t.” He rose, the chair squealing one last time in good-bye, and paused when he reached the door. “Oh, and, Officer? If any reward money was to come along, remember who told you first about Wyatt Powell. All right?”

  “All right,” Tony said wearily. “I will.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  1.

  Wyatt was dozing in his easy chair when a loud knocking awoke him, setting Boss to howling. He sat up suddenly, heart racing, and then exhaled, hand on his chest. He lingered a moment, catching his breath, and checked the time on the VCR above his television set: seven fifteen. Sarah should have been here almost two hours ago. He had drifted off waiting for her.

  He pulled in the chair’s footrest and hobbled to a stand. His blood pressure was better today, but he was feeling the full brunt of last night’s exertions in the muscles of his biceps, calves, and lower back; his hands, which were arthritic, were so stiff he could barely squeeze them closed. He awkwardly patted his thin hair into place and ran both hands over his crumpled shirt, wondering why Sarah would knock now when she hadn’t knocked last night. He’d left the back door unlocked for her, just like he had yesterday.

  The knock sounded again, and Boss bayed again. “Damn it, Boss, shut up,” Wyatt said. The knocks had been at the front door—that was why they seemed so loud. His sleepy brain stabbed once more at understanding (Did I lock the door after all? How long has she been standing out there?), and then he widened his eyes, rubbed his face briskly, and was awake enough to realize that it wasn’t Sarah knocking at his door, that Sarah hadn’t shown. Which could mean anything, really—that she had been delayed on her shift, that something else came up—but his heart, stitched together as it was, told him that she had seen the sketch. She had seen it, and it frightened her away.

  Did she call the number on it? Would he open the door to the police? He swallowed against a taste of bitter bile and turned the deadbolt.

  Illuminated by the porch light, face calmly polite, was a man—a black man, tall, youngish. He was dressed in a way Wyatt couldn’t quite make sense of. Not in the jeans and big sneakers he thought those guys all wore, or in the dark blue uniform of the local police force, but like—well, he didn’t know—an English countryman or something: tweed sports coat, sweater, a red pop of tie at the collar, a leather satchel strapped across his chest and resting on his hip. Wyatt stood behind the storm door, trying to keep Boss back, and said, “Yes?”

  “Wyatt Powell?”

  “Yes?” Wyatt repeated.

  The man pulled his wallet from his back pocket in a friendly, almost sheepish way, as if he were going to give Wyatt a business card, and folded it open. A brass badge glinted. “Good evening, sir. I’m Tony Joyce. I’m the detective for Roma’s police department, and I was wondering if you had time to answer a few quick questions.” He seemed to register Wyatt’s uncertainty. “I promise it won’t take more than five or ten minutes. I’ve heard you’re recovering from a heart attack, and I’m sure you need your rest.”

  “Did Sarah tell you that?” It came out before he could stop himself.

  “Sarah? Well, I can’t exactly recall. Who’s Sarah?”

  Wyatt swallowed. “Nobody. A nurse.”

  Tony Joyce smiled in what felt to Wyatt like a patronizing way. “At the hospital? Someone who took care of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually, then, no. I haven’t been in contact with a nurse named Sarah.” He was still wearing that pleasant expression on his face, but something steeled beneath it. It was a change Wyatt didn’t see so much as sense—a quiver of the jawline, a vein in his temple becoming more pronounced. “Actually, it was your friend who told me. Sam Austen? From Price Electric?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call him a friend,” Wyatt said as evenly as he could.

  “Mind if I come in, Wyatt? Just for a bit? It’s pretty chilly out here.”

  Wyatt hesitated, then nodded, stepping to the side so Tony could enter. Boss immediately set to prancing, plunging his snout into the detective’s crotch, and Tony reached out to pet the dog’s head, amiable enough.

  Crossing the room back to his chair, Wyatt switched on a couple of lamps—his living room had been dim, illuminated only by a wedge of light coming in from the kitchen—and then cleared the couch of the pile of flyers and pamphlets he’d been sent home from the hospital with: Life After a Heart Attack, Your Healthy Heart Diet, The Five Habits That Could Save Your Life, a bunch of others just like them. He had paged through a few today, wanting to do something that would please Sarah, but they only depressed him. The injunctions to go walking or biking were accompanied by sun-filled photos of tan, silver-haired couples on the beach, the diet tips with equally light-filled images of glossy fruits and vegetables and amber-colored bottles of olive oil. A smiling woman took a big bite of an apple. A good-looking man in his sixties held a toddler, presumably his grandchild, laughingly above his head. The pamphlets told him to fix his life by entering a world he’d always been denied, a world of leisure and love and plenty. He had planned to tell Sarah this; he had wanted to hear her thoughts. He could imagine her getting fired up on his behalf just as easily as he could imagine her gently ribbing him for his sensitivity (Jeez, Wyatt, they’re telling you to eat an apple, not to remortgage your house and go to a resort), and he had looked forward all day to the surprise of her reaction.

  He wouldn’t hear it tonight. He wondered if he ever would.

  Tony sat on the couch, laughing a little when Boss jumped up to lie on a cushion beside him, and Wyatt dropped into his easy chair with a wheeze.

  “You’ve got a good dog,” Tony said. “Bloodhound?”

  “Yeah,” Wyatt said. “That’s Boss. He’s the boss around here.”

  “Looks that way,” the detective said, laughing again. “I bet he’s good company to you right now. How’s the recovery coming?”

  Wyatt rocked a little and kneaded his crumb catcher. “Bit by bit, I reckon. It’s not been easy.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Tony said. “My father had a heart attack four years ago. He had a rough couple of months, but his life got more or less back to normal.”

  “I’ve got to get back to work or I’ll go broke on bills,” Wyatt said. “I know that much.”

  “You got that right.” Tony leaned back into the couch cushions and crossed one leg over the other. “Of course, when my dad had his heart attack they didn’t require employers to give medical leave. He’s a custodian at the nursing home. He took a week and a half of sick leave and another half week of vacation, then he was back to pushing a mop around. He told me he kept wanting to crawl into one of the empty beds and give up.”

  “I
don’t blame him.”

  “When was it you had your heart attack, Wyatt?”

  “A week ago today,” Wyatt said.

  “Sam told me you were parked over on Hill Street.”

  Wyatt nodded. “That’s what they tell me. I don’t remember much about it, though.”

  “You pulled over because you were having pains?”

  “I reckon that’s what happened.”

  “Lucky that woman came when she did,” Tony said.

  “I reckon it was.” Wyatt folded his hands in his lap to keep them from fidgeting. “Is a man having a heart attack normally police business? No offense intended, but I’m just wondering what it is we’re discussing here.”

  Tony smiled gently. “No, I’m not here about your heart attack. I was just chitchatting to break the ice.”

  “I’d say it’s broke. What’s on your mind?”

  Tony unzipped his satchel and removed a binder. He opened it, slid a piece of paper from a plastic sleeve, and did a quick hunching walk across the space that separated them to hand it to Wyatt. Then he backtracked to the couch. “Do you recognize the woman in that photograph?”

  This was it—the moment Wyatt had known was coming.

  “Yes,” Wyatt said. He felt his armpits prickle with sudden sweat as he stopped himself just shy of using the past tense. “Her name’s Ronnie. I can’t remember her last name. I met her a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Can you tell me how you met her, Wyatt? As much as you can recall about the circumstances?” The detective’s expression was alert and keenly interested. He had, Wyatt noticed, slipped a notepad out of the binder, and his pen was poised over the paper.

  “Why?” Wyatt asked, handing back the photograph, which Tony stood up to receive. He hesitated, then added: “Did she do something?”

  “You don’t know?” Tony asked, sitting again. His eyes were steady and unblinking. Wyatt had never felt so studied.

  “I guess I must not,” Wyatt said. “I haven’t been getting out. I’ve got a lot else to worry about right now.”

  “She’s gone missing.”

  Wyatt thought that the detective had ceded something he had not planned to. “Really? I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “She hasn’t been to work. She hasn’t contacted her sister. The reason I’m curious about the circumstances of your meeting is that it appears that the last night anyone can account for her was Saturday, October twenty-third. And what I understand from your friend Sam Austen is that you and a group of men from Price Electric were all at Nancy’s Dance Hall in Sylvan, Tennessee, on that evening. Does that sound right?”

  Wyatt squinted in thought. “I guess so. I’m a little shaky on dates since the heart attack, but that ought to be right.”

  “And you met Ronnie at Nancy’s the night you were there with your friends?”

  He wondered why Tony kept calling Sam and his gang “friends.” He felt a burn of irritation every time he used the word. “Yes.”

  “So if you would, please, tell me about those circumstances.”

  “Well, let me see,” Wyatt said. He folded out the footrest on his chair, aware that his rocking was starting to take on a frantic note. “I went over there with Sam and Gene. I didn’t really want to, but they’d been working on me a few weeks, trying to goad me into it. At some point I figured why not. It turned out they were just playing a big joke on me. They got me drunk and took off, stuck me with the bill.” He let some of his authentic anger show on his face here. “Which is why I said I wouldn’t call Sam a friend. I think it was a real lousy thing for them to do to me.”

  “So do I,” Tony said.

  “Anyway, that woman in the photo, Ronnie, she saw what happened, and she offered me a ride home. It was real good of her to do. I don’t know what I’d of done if she hadn’t.”

  “And she drove you straight home?”

  “No,” he said. “She asked me if I was hungry, and for some reason I was. So we went to a gas station and got some food and beer. Then we went over to her house and ate it. Then she drove me home.”

  “OK,” Tony said, writing in his notebook. “So the last you saw her was when she drove you to this house and then left.”

  “That’s right,” Wyatt said.

  “About what time would that have been?”

  Wyatt thought. “Late,” he said. “One thirty or two in the morning.”

  “Did she tell you that she had any other plans for the night?”

  “No,” Wyatt said. “I assumed she was going to go home and go to bed.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Tony scribbled something, then flipped back a page to look at his notes. “Wyatt, I’m going to ask you a personal question.”

  Wyatt squeezed his right hand, which was dangling on the far side of the rocker, out of sight. The pain was clarifying. “Yes?”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  Wyatt felt his face bloom with heat—he couldn’t stop it from happening. “Wh—” His throat was dry, and he swallowed hard. “What?”

  Tony dropped the notebook to his lap and leaned forward. “Did you and Ronnie have sex?”

  “Of course not,” Wyatt said harshly. “She was young enough to be my daughter.”

  “But you did drink with her at her house.”

  There was a high tone sounding in his left ear. He grabbed with a shaking hand at the glass of water on his end table and tried leaning back into his chair with it, managing to spill some in his lap. “I’m—I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I’m having a spell.”

  “Are you all right?” Tony said. “Can I get you something?”

  Wyatt held up the near-empty glass. “Refill this for me?”

  While Tony was in the kitchen, Wyatt wiped his face with his shirtsleeve and worked on steadying his rapid breath. It was frustrating, infuriating, to be a slave to his body this way. When Tony came back with the glass of water, which was clinking with a few fresh ice cubes, Wyatt nodded gratefully and drank half away in a draft. At last his face cooled.

  “Do you think you need a doctor?” Tony asked. His concern seemed genuine.

  “Nah.” Wyatt finished the water. “My blood pressure’s been up and down all week. I haven’t been drinking as much water as I’m supposed to.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’ll let you rest. I’ve already stayed longer than I intended to,” Tony said. He put the photograph and the notebook away in his satchel and rose. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Powell.” He removed his wallet again and this time did produce a business card. “I’d like you to give me a call if you remember anything else about the night you met Ronnie Eastman. It sounds as if she was a really nice woman, and I’m sure you’ll want to do everything you can to get her reunited with her family.”

  Wyatt felt his sinuses swell with tears. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I do.”

  The clock on the VCR read 7:43. When the engine on the detective’s car had sounded and headlights cut across Wyatt’s picture window, he put down his head and started sobbing.

  2.

  Tony had an idea.

  He drove from Wyatt’s house straight to Ronnie’s. He had been over it twice already, shooting photographs, taking notes on the food, the arrangement of the furniture. He did these things mostly because he could, because the only resource getting used was his own time and some film; it wasn’t, so far as he knew, a crime scene, and he couldn’t yet justify to the police chief the expense of treating it like one. At any rate, though, Wyatt had owned up to coming to the house to eat. Fingerprinting would reveal what they already knew.

  He let himself into the house using the spare key Susanna had given him and went to the kitchen. A rotten, shut-up smell lingered in the room despite the fact that Susanna had, with Tony’s okay, come over yesterday to pitch the old food into the trash and to lay out some ant traps. “Don’t spray down any
surfaces,” he’d told her, and it looked like she had followed his instructions, though his nostrils prickled at an odd floral note—some kind of air freshener, he suspected.

  A wooden box labeled MAIL was mounted to the wall beside the refrigerator. Beneath slots labeled BILLS, COUPONS, and PERSONAL was a little shelf and a series of hooks; Ronnie’s car keys dangled from one of them, as Tony had already noted in his inventory. He didn’t know if this was a spare set or her primary set, and Susanna hadn’t been sure, either—the difference might make for radically different scenarios for her disappearance. He slipped on plastic gloves, hooked a finger through the loop on the key ring, and went outside to the Camaro. The night had gotten bitter, and a light rain, almost a mist, drizzled down. Maybe it would become snow if it kept on, he mused. Uncommon this time of year, but the forecast called for freezing temperatures overnight.

  He had pulled a flashlight from the glove box of his car, and he switched it on now, shining it with his left hand on the lock and using his right to turn the key, then pull the handle. The door sighed as it opened, and Tony was hit with the musk of worn-in leather. He got down on his haunches and let the light play over the inside: the driver’s and passenger’s bucket seats, the floorboards (clear of trash but grimed with dirt and bits of dried leaves), the narrow backseat. There was something back there—he leaned around the seat carefully and grasped it, pulling it forward to where he could get a better look. It was a pillow or a cushion of some kind: round, overstuffed, and tufted with a single button in the center, little ties trailing off where it would have been looped to a chair back. According to Susanna, Ronnie was a small woman, barely five feet tall; this looked like the kind of thing she might have used to give her a little extra lift behind the wheel.

  But it wasn’t in the driver’s seat. It had been in the backseat, on the passenger’s side of the car—as if the person behind the wheel had tossed it there.

  Tony put it back where he had gotten it and slipped gingerly into the driver’s seat. He was six foot two, and the windshield bore down on him oppressively, but his legs fit under the steering wheel pretty comfortably, and he could extend his arms in a natural way to mime moving the gearshift and hitting the turn signal. If he were going to start this car and drive off, he might move the seat back another couple of inches.