Plus, Raleigh was too good for a guy like Damien Parker.
Chuckling under the spray of the showerhead, Ethan rolled his eyes at the internal dialogue battling inside his head. He really was losing his grip on sanity, wasn’t he?
He didn’t care. What did sanity matter to him now? Because, alive or dead, his prospects with Raleigh looked pretty damn grim.
As he toweled himself dry, he faced his tired, pale, and aging reflection in the mirror and realized that no matter what he discovered in northern Michigan, he was going to come home alone this weekend. Either Raleigh was involved with another man, or she was dead. She wasn’t coming back and, no matter how much that hurt, he had five and a half hours on the road to come to grips with that.
Raleigh wasn’t coming back. He’d never hold her hand, kiss her knuckles, inhale the smell of her sour apple shampoo, take hold of her hips while they danced after wine, after she called him mi todo.
She was forever a part of his past, and there was nothing he could do to change that.
It was the worst feeling he’d ever experienced.
For the five and a half hour road trip to Boyle Mills, Ethan had transferred the SIM card from his phone back to Raleigh’s. He kept her device plugged into the Jaguar’s USB slot, allowing it to stay charged while he listened to the songs she’d downloaded over seven and a half years ago. Many of those songs were from Billboard’s Top-Whatever charts, and the one song brought tears to his eyes—Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie.”
Ethan wasn’t a big music junkie—he remembered Raleigh once telling him that music was her love language, and when he asked what the heck she was talking about, she’d produced a book about love languages and thrown it at him—but Eminem’s rage reminded him of his wife. If there had ever been a more appropriate song and artist created for Raleigh, it had to be Eminem.
Once he made it through Grand Rapids, Michigan, the 131 became a progressively lonelier stretch of roadway. At various points, each direction split apart, separated by a forest median. In a small town called Big Rapids, he decided to refuel the Jaguar at a Meijer before heading into the neighboring Ruby Tuesday’s for a lunch and dinner combo. He wasn’t exactly hungry, but he knew better than to continue with an empty stomach.
While he waited on his food, Ethan tried to figure out Damien Parker’s true involvement with his wife. He wanted to believe that the black sheep of the Parker family had actually kidnapped Raleigh, orchestrated the entire abduction because he had the financial means to do so, but like Klein had said so many times before, those types of abductions were rare, and they certainly weren’t required for people like his wife. If she’d been the heir to the ParkerPharma empire, not Damien’s brothers, it became a little more possible, but she hadn’t been.
His wife was a scientist. A senior researcher who had helped discover and develop a low-cost solution to treat opiate addiction through a chemical reaction that didn’t cause any damaging physical changes. He remembered that conversation so clearly—water turning to ice was a physical change—that Ethan could still hear her insistent tone.
A physical change was a lot like the photos Klein had shown him of Raleigh’s battered face, and her drug was different. Her drug could propel ParkerPharma’s bottom line, and maybe Damien didn’t like that, being the black sheep and all of that. Maybe that was his motive?
But then there was the matter of the police reports . . . another loose end that Ethan couldn’t work out.
Why did you file those false reports of spousal abuse, Raleigh?
Or were they true, and had he simply blacked those beatings out like he had with Thomas Braun’s? He hated to admit it, but part of him feared it could be the latter; why else had her friends and their “joint” friends abandoned him while he’d struggled with the reality of her disappearance?
Because they blamed me. It had nothing to do with me being an absolute nutcase, unable to see the pity in their faces without losing my shit and sobbing for hours.
Surely he’d played a role in that; but had it been more than his uncontrollable emotions? Had Raleigh instructed them to drop him as a friend before riding off into the sunset with Damien Parker?
Once his meal arrived, Ethan’s appetite had shrunk even more. But he ate half of his California primavera pasta with chicken. And he also drank a Coke, plus one and a half refills. When the waitress asked if he wanted to box the remaining pasta, he declined, paid the tab, and continued on his way.
After a mile on the highway, traffic thinned. A mile after that, it was thinner yet, and five miles farther, he felt like the only person in the world driving the 131. The scenery kept him company, though, and while the signs on either side warned of wildlife, he didn’t see anything except for the carcass of a deer on the shoulder, just outside of a town called Cadillac.
By the time he took the Boyle Mills exit, the sun was fading fast, turning the sky to a deep purple. The contrast was further pronounced by the dark green of the tree line, creating a visual display that made Ethan happy to be alive.
Like a lot of small towns, Boyle Mills wasn’t immediately accessed off of US-131. He had to make a few more turns before he reached the town’s main street. There was an independent full-service gas station called Carl’s at the one end of town, a dozen or so shops and vendors on both sides with diagonal parking spots out front. The stamped concrete sidewalks were made to look like stone. The downtown area ran a quarter mile deep, ending with another gas station to the left, this one a national chain, and a motel with a neon vacancy sign on the right.
With the sunlight ticking away, Ethan turned onto the motel’s lot, secured himself a room, and then returned outside to his car. The old-fashioned, high-pressure sodium streetlights were glowing by the time he parked diagonally in the core of Boyle Mills. When he stepped out of the Jaguar, he noticed just three more cars parked on the quiet main street, all of them domestic-brand pickup trucks.
The other thing Ethan noticed was that many of the stores along the main street were empty with “For Lease” signs in the dusty windows. He’d parked right in front of an occupied shop, though, the hand-painted sign in the window identifying it as the Boyle Mills Community Health Center. Another sign, this one in the door, listed its business hours from ten until four. No doubt, it was one of those outfits that was operated by volunteers.
With nothing else to do, Ethan decided to walk the main street. The air had a little more bite, cooler than the air in Chicago but, then again, he was a little farther north, as well. He needed to gather his thoughts. When he spotted a couple of older teens coming toward him, their hands linked, he reached into his jacket and produced his phone. The couple tried to ignore him, as if the guy wearing a leather jacket and who drove a Jaguar into this shit hole of a town was going to ask them for spare change.
“Excuse me,” Ethan said, standing directly in their path. He showed them his phone, stretching out his arm as if he were holding a badge or a Captain America shield. “I’m looking for this woman. Have you seen her?”
The teens exchanged a glance, a suspicious one that said they might recognize Raleigh but they were unsure whether they should confess it. Whether their hesitation was for their own protection or for Raleigh’s, Ethan wasn’t sure.
“She was kidnapped seven and a half years ago,” Ethan explained. “If you recognize her, it’s okay. I’m here to help.” He took a deep breath, watching their suspicious glance soften and relax. “Her mother isn’t well and wants to see her before…” He let the words trail off, allowed them to fill in the blanks.
At last, the female teen shook her head. “I’m sorry, mister. She’s not from Boyle Mills.”
The male teen nodded, adding, “We’d know her if she was. Everyone knows everyone around here.”
After considering the teens for a beat longer, Ethan sighed, lowered his arm and shoved the phone back into his jacket. The teens stepped around him and walked away, leaving Ethan feeling disappointed that, in a town where “ev
eryone knows everyone,” neither of those kids recognized Raleigh.
Was she not a presence in Boyle Mills?
Or, Ethan wondered, had she changed her appearance?
Or maybe Thomas Braun had been right, and the body he fed into the incinerator was indeed hers.
He walked the rest of the main street, using the crosswalk at the far end and then looping back toward his Jaguar. There was a diner across the street from the community health center, a place with a few customers inside and a sandwich board out front where, written in chalk, the place bragged about its all-day breakfast and better than Starbucks coffee.
With nobody else to approach on the street and flash his potentially outdated picture of Raleigh, Ethan climbed back into the Jaguar and retreated to the motel.
Tomorrow, he’d have some answers.
He just didn’t know it yet.
Chapter Fifty-Three
The following morning, Ethan woke and showered in the grimy tub. He walked out to his Jaguar and was just about to climb into the driver’s seat when he decided to walk instead. He’d spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling the previous night, the neighbor’s television pounding through the motel’s thin wall and keeping him awake. In those moments of contemplation, he’d thought back to the look those teens had given him, the worry in their eyes after he’d shown them the photo of Raleigh.
At first, he thought he’d spooked them. Or maybe he just came across as a little too intimidating or imbalanced. There’d only been three cars in the diagonal spots along Boyle Mills’ main street; there was no question these kids knew who owned the two trucks, which meant the Jaguar stood out. A flashy, luxury SUV in a small town where everyone knew everyone was suspicious.
So, he’d decided, when people started associating him (a stranger) with the Jaguar, they might resent him. They might not like that he had more money in the bank than they had combined, or that he drove a vehicle that wasn’t homegrown from Michigan, or that he was flashing a fancy phone with his clean and manicured hands with a photo of a beautiful woman on it.
A woman, he had no doubt in his mind, who’d walked these very same streets a hundred times before.
They know Raleigh here. They just weren’t admitting it to him.
The trick was to get them talking about her, and burning into town in an expensive Jaguar, wearing a flashy leather jacket and carrying a phone that cost more than their monthly rent wasn’t helping him.
So the Jag stayed at the motel.
He walked to the diner, one of the few Boyle Mills businesses that remained in operation. Inside the tight entry, he read a sign that asked him to seat himself. Grabbing a window table, Ethan made himself comfortable so that he could watch the community health center across the street, just in case someone with Essential Thrombocythemia happened to walk in with a need for treatment.
A few doors down from the community health center, there was a grocery store, the same size as a corner store back home in Chicago except with tiny shopping carts and two check-out lanes just inside the front door. Watching its patrons come and go, Ethan wondered if he’d slipped back in time fifty years or so.
When the waitress came for his breakfast order, she smiled and lingered. She was a slim young woman, probably in her early-twenties like the teen couple he’d come across yesterday. The woman before him had short red hair and an intensity in her eyes that suggested she had bigger dreams than Boyle Mills, which meant that she was actually quite a bit different than the couple from yesterday. It took a few seconds for her to ask the question that was on her mind.
“Are you travelling through?”
“Working.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Well, then, Mr. Working Man, what will you have today?”
He told her the special, the one on the sandwich board outside, which was exactly like the one he’d enjoyed with Agent Klein at the retro diner in south Chicago a week or so back. “Is there a lot of grease?” he asked.
The waitress chuckled, grinning. She gave a simple nod out the window next to Ethan’s shoulder, indicating the community health center across the street. “Depends who you ask, but we’ve cut back a lot. Now we use olive oil, no trans fats and all that jazz. So much talk from those folks across the street about obesity and other health risks, we’ve decided to scale back before customers start demanding it. Or falling over dead at the tables.” She shook her head at the ridiculousness of it all. “Closest hospital is half an hour away in Hollis Falls.”
Ethan kept staring at her, wondering why she’d just read him the riot act about the grease content in their breakfast. “Well, okay, but your cooks don’t have to hold back the good stuff on mine,” he said.
She kept chuckling. “If I had a nickel for every time someone said that.” And then she wandered off to submit his order to the kitchen.
With the waitress gone, Ethan considered the dozen or so other people that were eating at the diner. Many of them were indeed overweight, almost all had gray hair and looked to be retired after long lives of working in the town’s mills. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t much left of that industry.
Turning his attention back out the window, he watched a slim young woman in blue scrubs who appeared to be his age step up to the community health center door, produce a key, and then let herself inside. She glanced back once she was inside, and then locked the door. To Ethan, she didn’t look familiar, but he couldn’t help but wonder if she might be one of Raleigh’s new friends. He couldn’t imagine Raleigh existing without a wide network of friends to surround her, just like she had back home where she’d lived for her girls’ weekends, always keen on getting there ahead of the others to decorate or prepare little gifts.
With a smile on his face, Ethan watched a retired couple slip out of the diner and walk between a Ford pickup and a subcompact Kia Rio. At first, he thought the old man was going to pull open the Kia’s passenger door for his wife, but they kept walking. The old lady stopped first, pulling back on her husband’s hand to stop him from stepping out into the street, right in the path of a Jeep Cherokee, the only traffic he’d seen since he’d taken his seat at the booth. Once the Cherokee passed, the old couple continued across the street. They weren’t quick, but then again, they didn’t need to be.
“Your breakfast, Working Man Sir.” The young waitress placed a big plate before him. Even if they’d cut back on their use of trans fats “and all that jazz,” they certainly weren’t skimping on serving sizes.
“Looks delicious.” The plate had twice as much food on it than he’d received back home with Klein.
The waitress crossed her arms and tilted her head. “So, what kind of work are you doing in Boyle Mills?”
Ethan considered the breakfast, but then pulled his hands back from his utensils. Producing his phone, he brought the image of Raleigh onto its screen. Before showing it to the young waitress—would she recognize Raleigh just like yesterday’s tight-lipped couple had?—he stared into his wife’s eyes from that wedding photo. After all of these years, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
“My wife is missing,” Ethan said, staring at Raleigh’s picture. “I’m here to try and find her.” Then, turning the screen to the waitress, he added, “Or get any kind of information about her, where she might be.”
The waitress leaned forward and blinked hard a couple of times while she studied the image.
“You recognize her,” Ethan said. Unlike the teens from yesterday, the waitress raised a hand to her mouth, making it obvious. She saw something in the image of Raleigh. She sure as hell recognized her. Maybe she even knew her. “Please, what can you tell me?”
The waitress seemed to consider him before turning and staring at the corkboard on the wall, just inside the main entrance to the diner. Ethan hadn’t noticed it when he’d entered, but there were plenty of pages pegged to that board. Among those items was a trio of “Missing Person” sheets, all aligned against the far right side of the frame to not dist
urb the abundance of community events, for-rent and for-sale advertisements, and who knows what else occupying the rest of the space.
Rising out of the booth and leaving his plate of hot food on the table, Ethan stepped past the waitress and walked over to the board. The third missing person announcement, the one right at the bottom, was the exact same image that Ethan had shown the waitress just now, and the teens yesterday. Reading the write-up, he saw that anyone with information about Raleigh’s whereabouts was asked to contact the FBI.
He glanced back at the waitress and saw that she was standing exactly where he’d left her—at his booth. Offering a thankful nod, he returned to his booth and slid in front of his meal, ready to start eating. Of course, he wasn’t as hungry as when he’d ordered, but he still needed to eat. And stuffing food into his mouth allowed him to camouflage the crushing disappointment; those teens didn’t know Raleigh, but they’d recognized her as a face on the diner’s board.
While he cut through the sausage with his fork and knife, he chanced a glance over at the waitress. She was still standing at his booth, a few steps away now, but staring at him with wide eyes.
“It’s okay,” Ethan told her, giving a nod and hoping that she would just walk away.
“The FBI,” she said, her voice quiet, a tremor cutting through as if she’d just stared at a ghost. “They’re looking for her, too?”
Ethan nodded, stabbed at a piece of sausage and raised it to his mouth. “She’s missing. Not wanted.”
The waitress seemed unconvinced. So when Ethan finished chewing his food and swallowed it—tasty, but not quite as flavorful as the pork at the diner in South Chicago—he tried to explain Raleigh’s “case” a little better.
The Last Night (The Last Series Book 2) Page 22