“I’m not so certain you’ll have seen this. The killer . . . he . . . he sewed her eyes closed.”
Margaret winced. “You mean with needle and thread?”
Leah nodded.
“Now you have to show me. That’s just gross.”
Leah pulled out the photo and showed it to Margaret, who took one look at the eyes, and said, “You’re right. Nothing prepares you for that. I think I’m gonna puke.” She still hadn’t looked away, though.
“Do you recognize her otherwise?”
“Autumn Rain,” she said, her hand visibly shaking. “She used to strip at the Rabbit Room, takin’ off her top while guys stuffed ten-dollar bills in her bikini bottoms. Lately she’d been hangin’ out here. Tell you one thing—the woman could drink. I’d seen her drink three quarters of a bottle of tequila one night just to avoid goin’ home with the guy payin’ for her drinks. She wound up leavin’ him passed out in the booth.”
“Did she use drugs?”
Margaret shrugged. “None of my business. But most of the girls in here full-time don’t. Usually if you’re into drugs, you have trashy hotel rooms you live in and just buy your booze and take it home with you. Sometimes you find a john on the way, sometimes you don’t. If you don’t, you party until the money runs out; then you walk Oakdale until you hook your next fish.”
Leah wrote all this down in her pad. “You gonna be okay? From the photo, I mean.”
“As okay as anyone could be after seein’ that. Do you know who did it?”
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out. So, Mercy Jo was a hooker?”
“To be completely honest? Can’t be sure, but I have seen her leave with men from time to time. Just because she strips, doesn’t make her necessarily play. But sometimes she’d leave and come back alone only to go for round two. She was either a hooker or just really friendly. A lot of the girls are just nice to guys and the guys are nice to them in return, buyin’ them things. They don’t consider themselves as hookers.”
“It makes no difference to this case; the only thing I’m interested in is finding the son of a bitch who did this to her.”
“Well, I hope you do. If there’s anythin’ I can do to help, please let me know.” The guy down at the bar whistled at her again. She turned to him, making a fist. “You don’t wanna get me mad. Not only will you be tossed out, you’ll be tossed out with no teeth.” He stopped whistling.
“You’ve been more than helpful,” Leah said. “Do you have a phone number I can reach you at?”
“Your best bet is right here.” She handed Leah a business card for the bar. It said MARGARET PERKINS, OWNER. “I’m pretty near the only one ever working bar. Occasionally my brother, Tom, subs in for me, but that’s quite unusual.”
“Thank you. I’ll probably end up callin’ you with questions before this case is over.”
“Please do.” Another whistle came her way. “And please get outta here before I beat the shit out of that guy and you arrest me for it.”
CHAPTER 12
Me and Dewey took a break from all our D&D playing and sat in the backyard for a picnic lunch my mother put together for us before leaving for work this morning. It consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pears, cheese and crackers, a slice of pecan pie, and a box of orange juice. As far as picnic lunches went, this one was pretty good.
“You know,” Dewey said, and as soon as he said it I winced. Any sentence coming out of Dewey’s mouth that starts with “You know . . .” generally has a ridiculous ending. Just like all the other times, this time didn’t let me down either.
“You know,” he said, “I reckon I could be a pretty good psychic. At least as good as that Madame Crystalle. I reckon she’s a phony.”
“And what are you basing this bit of wisdom on?” I asked.
“Just what she said. First off, everythin’ she told your ma. Anyone can come up with that kind of stuff. Stuff like: I see a crazy T-shirt designer. He blinds with his designs. The number six hundred is important. Twenty-five people might die in two days if you don’t do somethin’ with the number six hundred. Or is it the number six? I can’t really tell. It might even be an upside-down nine.
“Wait, I see a name. It’s Fart. No, it just looks like Fart. No, it just smells like Fart.” He started laughing. I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing, too.
“Now it’s racin’ away,” he continued. “No, I’m racin’ away backward down a road and passin’ by a road sign with two flags. One says left, one says right. The road sign says Welcome to Al Pa . . . Pa . . . Pa . . . Al Pacino.” He laughed so hard orange juice came out of his nose.
“Okay,” I said. “I get your point. Still, my mom has been usin’ the information Madame Crystalle gave her to solve a crime.”
“It’s just a fluke.”
“What do you mean?”
“She just happened to find a crime that fit the vague descriptions that Madame Crystalle gave her. I mean, come on, Abe. Think ’bout Carry’s fortune. She reckoned Carry was smart in school. Have you ever seen one of her report cards?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Well, she certainly ain’t smart out of school. I can’t imagine the situation changing once she gets behind a desk. And, okay, so she called Carry sarcastic, but everyone knows Carry’s sarcastic, so that really wouldn’t have been hard to figure out ahead of time. She also said Carry had wit. What kind of a joke is that? Carry is a dimwit, I’ll give her that along with the sarcasm. Carry’s sarcastic like most people walk on two legs. I liked that she said Carry didn’t have many friendships, but the problem is that Carry is popular, so that’s just another one she got wrong.”
“You’re starting to sway me in your direction,” I said. And he was. Everything she’d said about Carry, now that Dewey was retelling it, really wasn’t so accurate after all.
“And she said Carry had a good heart,” he laughed. “What kind of person with a good heart makes her brother paint her toenails once a week all through summer break just because he asked her to help make some wooden swords?”
“You got a point there,” I said, feeling my face redden in embarrassment. I still wanted to kill Carry for that one.
“What else did she say?” Dewey asked me.
“That Carry gets lonely.”
He laughed again. “She’s got thirteen channels’ worth of friends constantly visiting her in the living room when she’s not out shoppin’ with her real ones. She doesn’t get lonely. She gets annoying. That was the word that Madame Crystalle would have seen if she was a real psychic.”
“Yeah, even Carry told her she didn’t get lonely and Madame Crystalle argued with her, telling her she covered it with sarcasm,” I said.
“And then came the big one—the proof that Madame Crystalle doesn’t have any ‘super psychic powers’ or anythin’ like that. When she said she saw a boy for Carry in the immediate future. Well, far as I’m concerned, the immediate future has come and gone, and I ain’t seen one single boy show up at the door for Carry.”
I thought this over. “You’re right. Madame Crystalle is a fraud. We have to tell my mom!”
“Sure. She’ll figure it out eventually on her own, though,” Dewey said. “My point is that I think I could be a better psychic than Madame Crystalle and make some good money doing it. They called eight psychics before they found one that wasn’t completely booked the entire two weeks before Christmas.”
“You don’t know the first thing ’bout telling the future.”
“I can learn. I’m gonna get me some tarot cards.”
“With what?” I asked. “You ain’t got no money.”
“Do too. I got twenty dollars from my granny for my birthday last year. I figure with Christmas right around the corner, I’ll get twenty more, so now it’s like free money. The twenty I got from Gran should be enough for a deck of cards and a book on how to do it. Feel like ridin’ your bike to the Brookside Mall?”
“I guess,” I s
aid. “It’s kind of entertainin’ watchin’ you waste your money on stupid purchases.”
“Just you wait. Pretty soon I’ll be rich and people will be bookin’ appointments for me to tell ’em what’s gonna happen to ’em and what lucky numbers they gotta watch out for and what kind of maniacs might blind ’em.”
Turned out the Barton’s Books in the Brookside Mall sold only one type of tarot card and it wasn’t the ones with the super-cool dragons on them like Madame Crystalle had. These were called Rider-Waite cards and had images of people. They were oversized and barely fit in Dewey’s palm. Even though they weren’t as neat as the other ones, Dewey bought them anyway, along with a book on how to read them. The book was called Mystical Tarot.
Dewey couldn’t wait to get home and start studying how to use them to tell the future. “I’m gonna be so rich,” he kept saying.
“You’re gonna be so bored,” I kept replying, but he ignored me.
“You’re just jealous cuz you never thought of this idea first.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”
CHAPTER 13
I am pretty used to answering the phone at my house on account of nine times out of ten? It’s for me. And nine times out of nine, it’s Dewey calling to see what I’m up to or to ask me some weird question about nuclear physics or something that he really has no interest or understanding of, but only wants to sound smart.
So when the phone rang this afternoon, I got up from where I was sitting on the floor by Carry’s feet—she was taking up the entire sofa and we were watching The Partridge Family, a show she picked—and ran to answer it.
I was quite surprised by the response on the other end after I said hello.
“Is Carry home?”
It was a boy’s voice. He sounded a bit nervous. Boys never called our house for Carry, so I wasn’t about to let this one go by unnoticed. It was just too bad my mother hadn’t been home; then I could’ve really worked her over with it. “Oh, Carry!” I called out to the living room. “Phone’s for you! It’s a booooy.”
She was at that phone faster than any deer you’ve ever seen in any forest. I couldn’t believe the speed with which she leaped off that sofa. She was just a blur.
“Hello?” she asked anxiously.
“Oh, hi, Jonathon. Nice to see you—er, hear—you again. Can you hang on for one sec?”
She covered up the receiver on the phone, and said to me, “Can you get out of this room and give me some privacy, ass face? Or I swear to God, I’ll kill you when this call is over.”
I had never seen Carry so serious in my entire life. I decided to heed her warning. Carry could have a rough side, and I’d rather not be attacked by a fifteen-year-old tiger high-school student when her call was over. Some things just weren’t worth the pain they caused. This one was close, but still, in the end, I decided to leave her alone.
She was talking pretty loud, though. I could tell she was excited. So I turned the TV down about halfway and heard most of Carry’s side of the conversation anyway. “Sure, I’d love to go for a walk,” she said. “No, I can leave right now. My mom won’t care.” And then, “Yeah, we can meet where we had the pizza catastrophe.”
What the heck was a “pizza catastrophe”? I wondered.
“Okay, see you in about twenty minutes,” she said, and hung up the phone.
“Who’s Jonathon?” I asked while Carry put on her boots.
“None of your business, ass face.”
“Where did you meet him?”
She lifted her eyes to me. “Again, none of your business.”
“How old is he? Mom’s gonna ask me and I’m gonna say he sounded about twenty-two because I reckon that’s how old he sounded on the phone.”
She exhaled deeply. “He’s seventeen. You better not say anythin’ to Mom ’bout this.”
“She’s gonna ask where you are.”
“I’m gonna leave her a note sayin’ I went for a walk with a friend. Which is the God’s honest truth.”
She struggled into her winter coat. “What’s a ‘pizza catastrophe’?” I asked.
“Did you eavesdrop on my entire conversation? You really are an ass face.”
She tore a piece of paper out of her pad of artwork paper that was still sitting in the kitchen by the phone and quickly wrote our mother a letter:
Dear Mother,
I went for a walk with a friend. Shouldn’t be any later than five or six.
Carry
“Make sure Mom sees that, okay? And no adding any embellishments to it, or I will seriously kill you.”
“Okay,” I said. I thought it sounded like a good trade: my life for not embellishing.
Then she left out the back door, practically skipping as she went.
The first thing I did was call Dewey. “Guess what?” I said.
“What?”
“Madame Crystalle’s not a fraud.”
“What do you mean?”
“A boy just called here for Carry. She’s gone to meet him for a walk,” I said.
“No way.”
“Way.”
“Holy cow. This changes everything.”
Now he had me worried. “What does it change, Dewey?”
“It means I can develop real psychic powers.”
“No, it don’t. You ain’t Persian.”
“I don’t think you have to be.”
“Well, you ain’t smart neither.”
“We’ll see. I gotta go. Been studyin’ my cards like crazy.”
He hung up and all I could think was that I just hoped this boyfriend turned out better than the last time Carry got herself one.
Jonathon was waiting on the exact spot they had their squashed pizza lunch when Carry made it down Hunter Road to meet him. She had spotted his red hair from nearly a block away. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I had to threaten my little brother with his life because he’s such a tool.”
“What do you mean?” Jonathon said, laughing.
“He threatened to tell my mother he didn’t know how old you were but when he answered the phone you sounded twenty-two.”
“That’s hilarious. He sounds like a pretty smart kid.” Jonathon was wearing a brown bomber jacket. And he had on denim jeans that were nice and tight, along with a pair of Converses that looked like they’d gone through enough hikes in their life that it was time to put them down and out of their miseries.
“That’s smart to you?” Carry asked. “That’s the dumbest thing in the world. He’d have to get all his teeth replaced after I hit him with the baseball bat.” Carry noticed most of the pizza mess was gone, but there was still a faded stain there. It looked sort of like the blood splatter and other evidence still present from a murder scene after it had been cleaned up. “So what do you wanna do?”
“I thought we were gonna go for a walk,” Jonathon said. He looked like he was dressed very warmly this time, with his jacket and all. The jacket made him look especially scrumptious, Carry thought.
“Okay, where to?” she asked.
“I was thinking there’s some nice trails down around Bullfrog Creek, or we could go up to Cloverdale.”
“Bullfrog Creek sounds nice. As long as we stay away from Skeeter Swamp.”
“Why’s that?”
“Do you remember the murdered fourteen-year-old girl last year who turned up beneath a willow beside that swamp?”
“The Cornstalk Killer stuff?”
“Yeah, well, my mom worked the case. I still get nightmares from it.”
“Oh. Are you sure Bullfrog Creek’s okay, then? It’s awfully close to Skeeter Swamp.”
“Oh, it should be fine. As long as I don’t see that willow tree that body was left left under.”
“Okay.”
They began walking down Hunter Road and not five minutes had gone by before Jonathon reached down and took Carry’s hand, interlacing his fingers with hers. She felt her heart start to pound against her ribs. “I wonder what my mom would say if
she knew I was going for a walk in the woods with a strange boy I don’t really know. She is a police officer, you know.”
“Probably somethin’ like, I hope he’s not a serial killer,” Jonathon said. But the way he said it put Carry slightly on edge. There was no laughter behind it. It was almost like he wasn’t kidding.
CHAPTER 14
Leah returned to the crime scene, not really expecting to find anything new—it was just something in her gut that pulled her that way. It was late afternoon and the park was pretty empty. She walked along the wharf they had found Mercy Jo’s body beneath and talked to herself as she did. She realized quickly what she was really trying to do was put herself in Mercy’s shoes or even the murderer’s. Try and figure out how it felt to be either of them. It was much easier pretending to be Mercy Jo than it was pretending to be the killer. Even adding in that Mercy went through such an ordeal, the thought of being a cold-blooded killer just made her shiver.
The police tape still cordoned off the site and she was forced to step under it in order to get in close to where the body had been. Her feet were in standard-issue police boots, but the rest of her clothes were civilian.
Despite knowing all the forensic evidence had already been nabbed, she was careful with the scene anyway. Some habits die hard.
First, she sat herself down in the sand and clay beside the wharf where the body was discovered in the shadow of the wooden pilings and slats. “So how did it go down? What did I, Mercy Jo, do differently that night than on most nights? What made him pick me?”
Leah stood and climbed out from under the wharf and walked along the top. The sun gently touched the water of the lake, dancing gently on its pallid surface in emerald greens and sapphire blues. The trees lining the park’s edge (most of them evergreens) looked beautiful this time of year, but Leah couldn’t shake the shiver she had running through her.
“So I got out of bed late and decided to head to the place where everybody knows my name. Fair enough. Life throws me curve balls that are actually lemons, so I make martinis out of them. Only on this night I maybe make a few more than usual. Makes me an easy target.
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