by Rachel Lee
“I’m Chief Douglas.” He removed his hat and laid it crown down on the dashboard. “And you are...”
“Milagro Ramirez.”
The name alone made him expect to hear an accent and sounds meticulously pronounced. He didn’t hear either. She said it exactly the way he would have, her accent indistinguishable, as if she might have been from anywhere but south of the border.
“I understand you found Mr. Carlyle’s body.”
“Yes.” She sat rigid, her spine not touching the seat, and stared at some point in front of the vehicle. The air rushing from the vents blew fine tendrils of her hair and was slowly chasing away the pink that spread across her cheeks.
Was she here illegally? Rumor had it that the guy who owned Happy Grass Lawn Service was too cheap to pay decent wages so he relied on immigrants who had no status and no one to complain to. Or she could have all her papers in order but be in trouble for something totally unrelated. She could be a perfectly law-abiding born-in-the-USA citizen who’d never had contact with the police, or she could distrust cops just for being cops. There was no shortage of that sentiment these days.
And yet he and all the others who did it stuck it out. They were the protectors, the investigators, the defenders, the justice seekers and, sometimes, given the nature of criminals and the extent of the things bad people could do to other people, they were just plain insane.
Though Sam had started the day feeling all law and order, truth, justice and the American way, about now he was thinking he just might be insane.
* * *
It didn’t take long for Mila’s body temperature to drop from borderline heatstroke to shivering like winter in her wet clothing. Her arms had goose bumps and her hands were shaking when she reached out to close the vents until only a thin line of air came out.
For a while she’d been lost in blessed numbness. She’d walked calmly out of the backyard, stopped Ruben and asked him to go with her. He’d taken one look at the body, shooed her away and called 911. Next he’d pushed her down onto the driveway in the miserable bit of shade the pickup provided, thrust a bottle of water into her hand and stopped the other two working. She’d had a few lovely minutes when she saw nothing, thought nothing, remembered nothing, when she was just a drifting soul in a distant universe where no person or thing could follow her.
Then she’d heard the sirens, reminding her of other sirens, other lives, other deaths. The noise and bustle of the first responders had drawn her back into this universe, reminding her to pull herself together. It hadn’t been easy gathering all the parts of herself back into a coherent being. Fortunately, these people, this police chief, would find nothing unusual about an incoherent being under these circumstances.
She waited for Chief Douglas to begin his interrogation. He was entering information into the computer mounted between them, and she watched peripherally, thinking his big hands were better suited to birthing cattle or catching footballs than typing on laptops. When his fingers went still, she felt his gaze shift to her.
“Are you all right?”
The question surprised her into looking at him. His eyes were blue and serious, and he studied her as if he could read everything he needed to know in her own eyes. Only one person had ever truly read her emotions—she confused her grandmother and her psychologist on a fairly regular basis—and that person was nothing more than dust and bones in a pauper’s grave. She would spit on it if she knew where it was.
The chief was still waiting. “Yes. I... I walked into that yard not thinking about anything other than the work and the flowers, and instead I saw—” With a shudder, she raised one hand that she knew would still tremble, would make him sympathetic, because he just had the look of someone who was very sympathetic, then sighed.
“I’m sorry.” His voice rang with sincerity.
Guilt twinged deep inside, but she forced it back. She wasn’t lying, just playing a role. Any other person in her spot right now would be entitled to sympathy without feeling guilty, and she was pretending to be any other person. “Better me than his wife or kids.” Her voice came out small, the way it did when she was trying to shrink out of existence.
That wasn’t a play for sympathy. She knew better than most that Carlyle’s six-and eight-year-old daughters didn’t need to see their dad like that, just as she hadn’t needed to see her father in all the ways she’d seen him.
Douglas watched her a moment longer before turning his attention to the report template called up on the computer screen. “I need to get some basic information from you.”
He asked questions; she answered. Some of her answers were even true. All of them felt true. She had been Milagro Ramirez for so long that it felt genuine. Cassie, Candace, Melanie...all the other names she’d answered to were like a long-distant dream. The name she’d been given at birth wasn’t even that. She was no longer any of those girls. She was Milagro, who had never had a mother or a father, who lived happily with her grandmother Jessica, whose life had begun at age eleven.
As she talked and he typed, yet another vehicle parked ahead of them. A man and a woman got out, retrieved a gurney from the back of the van and disappeared around back. Presumably they were from the medical examiner’s office. They would put Mr. Carlyle into a body bag, then wheel him back around front, no longer a husband, a father, a boss, just a package, evidence, to be delivered to people who would do even more damage to him than his killer had. They would take specimens and photographs and notes, and then they would send him on to some funeral director who would fix it all so his family wouldn’t recoil in shock.
Her stomach heaved.
Mila shifted so she was facing Chief Douglas, so the activity at the house was a blur she couldn’t easily follow. He gave the impression of being a big guy, but she doubted he was taller than six feet or heavier than 190 pounds. It was just this air of confidence about him, not boastful or brash but quiet, like he knew he could hold his own, and it didn’t matter if anyone else knew it.
He wasn’t a guy she would look at and think, Damn, he’s gorgeous, but he was definitely someone she’d look at and think, He’s in charge here. Authority accompanied that quiet confidence, backed up by the badge, the weapon and the Taser.
But he was good-looking, too. Light brown hair slicked down by the hat he’d worn, earnest blue eyes, a straight nose, a square jaw, a mouth that probably delivered impressive smiles...among other things. If he’d only had dimples, Gramma would melt in a pool at his feet. “I’m sixty-five” she liked to remind Mila. “That’s a long way from dead.”
And sometimes that was followed by a reminder. You’re a long way from dead, too, sweet girl. You should be grateful for it every single day.
She was grateful, more some days than others. She knew how fragile life was, how it could be taken on a whim, how the same hand that tickled or soothed or petted could also deliver pain so intense that it stole her tears.
She was very grateful. Mostly.
The chief’s cell phone rang, and with an apologetic gesture, he answered it. She narrowed her focus to him. If her attention didn’t wander outside this vehicle, it couldn’t go where she didn’t want it to. Instead, she wondered if he was married. He didn’t wear any jewelry, not even a watch, but that didn’t mean anything.
What was his first name? She would vote for something wholesome, middle America, untrendy: Joe, Tom, Jack. Gramma had bought her a subscription to the Cedar Creek newspaper, which had surely printed his name a thousand times, along with some personal information, but Mila didn’t often read it. She wasn’t interested in crime or politics or who got married, had a new baby or won the trout derby out at the lake.
She wasn’t interested in the police chief, either.
Really.
He kept the conversation relatively short. “...just the basic info for the reporters—name withheld until next of kin is notified, our investig
ation continues, so on.”
Mila wondered briefly if Chief Douglas and his officers had investigated many murders. As cops, were they good, bad or indifferent? Fifteen years she’d lived in Cedar Creek, and she’d never had any contact with the police, not even a warning. She’d made a point of not being noticed by them, either.
She took a sidelong look at the chief and drily wondered, how was that working for her?
* * *
In a lot of big police departments, the chief’s job was administration, political meeting and greeting, and dealing with the media. Cedar Creek’s department was small enough that if Sam wanted to work traffic or act as primary investigator on a routine case, he could. Today, he was grateful to leave this case in Ben and Lois’s capable hands. He’d made one too many death notifications, had dealt with one too many grieving family members and friends. He would be satisfied to make his notes on the interview with Milagro Ramirez, turn them over to Ben and get back to the work piled on his desk.
As soon as he dispensed with Ms. Ramirez herself.
“If you’d like me to call your boss and see about getting the rest of the day off...”
Her gaze slid his way quickly, shy or possibly furtive, then shifted forward again. She considered the offer, looking tired and pale and tempted. He didn’t know her situation. He did know an unexpected day off resulted in financial hardship for people who counted on every hour’s salary to pay their bills. It was a decision she would have to make.
She looked at him again, keeping the eye contact to a minimum. Her hands were clasped in her lap, long fingers, nails cut short, a bandage wrapped around one tip, a bruise discoloring another. Not delicate hands, no polish, almost certainly callused, but capable. Strong. “I—I would appreciate that.”
As he picked up his phone, she told him the number. “What’s his name?” he asked during the first ring.
“Lawrence.”
“First name?”
“Mister.”
Ah, one of those people who didn’t get overly familiar with his employees. At the moment, that grated on his nerves, but then, his nerves had already been shredded in the few minutes in the backyard.
A woman answered on the third ring, and he asked for her boss. Overhearing her call out “Ed, it’s for you,” when the man came on the line, Sam adopted what he considered his politics voice.
“Ed, this is Sam Douglas down at the police department. How are you, man? It’s been a long time.”
Sam didn’t know if he’d ever met Ed Lawrence, but he certainly knew his kind. Made his success on the backs of underpaid, overworked employees, somehow convinced himself that they would be nothing without him when it was really the other way around, smarmy and blustery and always looking for anything he might use to increase his sense of self-worth. In a small town, being on a first-name basis with the police chief could be that something.
“Oh, I’m good, Chief, good.”
“You heard about the incident out here at Hawk’s Aerie, I’m sure. Your employees have been most helpful. I really appreciate it a lot.”
“At Happy Grass, we’re always glad to help. Glad to help.”
Great, a repeater. It was a quirk of cops that too many of them figured if it needed saying one time, it couldn’t hurt to say it twice. It was on the short list of things that drove Sam crazy.
“Listen, your worker who found the body...she’s pretty shook up by this. You can’t imagine what it was like for her.”
“Must have been a pretty ugly scene.”
Lawrence’s voice held a sly, inviting tone that all the put-on sympathy in the world couldn’t hide. He would love to share the gruesome details with his buddies while bragging that he got them straight from the police chief himself. That would be worth free rounds at the bar for two or three days, at least.
“Ugly enough that she really needs to take the rest of the day off. You’re fine with that, aren’t you, Ed? I mean, supporting the community and the police department the way you do, of course you’d want her to go home and deal with this instead of worrying about lawns.”
In his peripheral vision, he caught Milagro rolling her eyes. Apparently, she couldn’t imagine her boss caring anything about his employees except that they showed up and worked hard. Sam couldn’t imagine being that kind of supervisor. Couldn’t imagine anyone in his family letting him get away with it before they smacked him back down to size.
“Sure, sure, she can take the day off,” Lawrence said. “It’ll put us behind schedule, of course, but that’s a small price to pay given the circumstances. You just go ahead and tell Maria—”
“Milagro.”
“Yes, yes, of course she should deal with this. Tell her I said don’t think about work at all today. Tomorrow’s plenty soon enough for that.”
“I will. And you know, Ed...” Sam adopted Lawrence’s insincere good-ole-boy tone. “I would consider it a personal favor if you didn’t dock her pay for the time off. She’s doing her civic duty, helping the police, and I would just hate to see it cost her more than the emotional trauma she’s already been through. You think you could do me that favor, Ed?”
The level of joviality in Lawrence’s voice dropped enough to force him to clear his throat to answer, but he came out with the right response. “Of course, Chief. I’m happy to do it. Happy to do it.” He pronounced each of the last four words with extra emphasis, like he was trying to convince himself.
“Thanks, Ed. I’ll see you around.” Sam laid the phone in the console cup holder.
Milagro was watching him again, but this time her gaze didn’t dart away and back. Her brows were narrowed, and something that might be the start of a smile curved her lips a bit. He got the impression that she didn’t smile much. Lurking beneath the lingering shock and dismay was an intense solemnity that he doubted gave way very often.
What had she been through in her twenty-six years that made her so solemn?
The list of possibilities was too long to consider right now.
She made no comment about the conversation, though she’d clearly heard enough from his end to get the gist of it.
“Do you need to go back to the shop to pick up your car?”
She shook her head.
“How’d you get to work this morning?”
“Ruben picks us up. We’re on his way.”
“I’ll take you home then.” When she opened her mouth to argue, he went on, “You’re on my way. Buckle up.”
She did, and so did he. He pulled out and drove to the driveway, where he rolled the passenger window down. “Simpson, get a ride back with Lois. And Lois, give him the benefit of your years of experience, will you?”
Lois saluted him with a wink and a grin.
After raising the window again, he followed the loop past quiet grand houses and out the gate. He figured Milagro would be happy if they made the drive in silence, but silence wasn’t usually one of his strong suits. “How long have you lived in Cedar Creek?”
Quick glance, hesitation. Yep, she’d rather not chitchat. “Fifteen years.”
“Hmm. I see the same people so often, sometimes I start thinking I know everyone in town. You go to school here?”
“I was homeschooled.”
“Church?”
“No.” After a moment’s pause, he guessed curiosity made her ask, “Do you?”
“Regularly enough that God doesn’t forget my face. Every Sam Douglas in town is expected to be there at least twice a month on Sundays.”
That caught her attention, as he expected it would. “How many are there?”
“There’s me. My father. My grandfather, who’s gone now. My cousin Samson. His boy, Sammy. A cousin Samantha. And her son, Samwell. Samantha hyphenates Douglas with her husband’s last name for both her and Samwell.”
“Maybe your family should look at one of th
e other twenty-five letters in the alphabet.” She folded her arms across her chest, tucking her fingers into the folds of fabric at her elbows.
Wow. A long sentence with a little bit of humor in it. Feeling a sense of accomplishment, he turned the AC lower. “We’re a big family. We require a lot of names.”
She didn’t ask how big. If she had, he would have turned the question back on her. Since she didn’t, he turned it back anyway. “Do you have family?”
Her expression turned both pensive and wary, and though the truck cab left her little room to move, she managed to put some distance between them.
“Look, Milagro, I don’t know if you’re a citizen, an immigrant or an undocumented worker, and I don’t care. You had a shock today. You probably need someone to stay with tonight, just in case. Do you have someone you can call?”
Her face had gone pale once more, but reluctant acceptance replaced the wariness. “Gramma. My grandmother.”
“Do you want me to take you to her house?”
“No. She’ll come.”
He caught a glimpse of that tiny sort-of smile, softened with deep affection.
“She always comes.”
Whatever she’d been through, she’d held on to her faith in her grandmother with both hands. That was good. With a family the size of his, it could have been easy for some of the kids to get lost in the crowd, to not have anyone special they could trust no matter what, but with parents and grandparents like his, that hadn’t happened to them. He appreciated that it hadn’t happened to Milagro, either.
By that time, they’d reached her street. Sam’s own house was only six or eight blocks away, across Main Street and in a very similar neighborhood: old houses, some neatly maintained and others looking as if the next strong wind would blow them away. Some of the yards were lush with flowers and vegetable gardens; some looked as if a flock of ravenous chickens had pecked out the last piece of grass and it had never grown back.