Stranded

by Alice Sharpe

  He walked back to find Jessica standing on the porch, Lynda still in the house by the door. “Well?” she demanded.

  “It’s possible someone tried to enter your shed. It doesn’t appear they were successful.”

  “That was probably Billy’s doing,” Lynda said. “He keeps his engine parts out there and he’s always losing the blasted key. You look like a drowned rat. Go home and tell Frank thanks a lot when you see him.”

  “Let us know if you have further problems,” Alex said as he reached up to take Jessica’s hand and help her down the rickety stairs.

  * * *

  “I TRIED TO talk to her about her son and his living conditions while you were outside,” Jessica said as they pulled up in front of a diner they’d last frequented years before. It looked to her that it had changed hands. Bright lights and plaid curtains on the windows gave it a homey, welcoming appearance.

  “Have any luck?” Alex asked.

  “None. I met her years ago when Billy was in my class. She was odd then, she’s odder now.”

  “What an understatement,” he said, holding the door open for her. They were greeted by the delicious smells of coffee and bacon. She thought it must be amazing to Alex to be in a restaurant after months of cooking his own food over a campfire.

  Alex called around while they waited for their order to be delivered. He jotted down the airport mechanic’s phone number on his paper napkin, then called the man. When he hung up, he shook his head.

  “Billy has never been to Tony’s house,” he said. “In fact, Tony sounded surprised I’d even suggest such a thing.”

  “Maybe Billy has a life his mother knows nothing about,” Jessica said. “One that includes friends. After what we saw this morning, I have to say I sincerely hope that’s true.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jessica took a deep breath. She was going to be a mother soon. She couldn’t imagine ever talking about her child as Lynda Summers had talked of Billy.

  “What are you going to tell Frank Smyth?”

  “Exactly what happened. I’m hoping he volunteers the reason he was in the middle of such a routine call and why he sent a detective out for something that should have been handled by a patrolman. I can’t quite make sense of it.”

  Their food was delivered right as Alex unfolded the newspaper someone had left on the bench seat. As Jessica buttered her waffle, he groaned. “Look at this,” he said, holding the paper so she could see the photo below the fold. There was Chief Smyth with his arm around Alex’s shoulder and a big grin on his face. “Chief Frank Smyth welcomes home Detective Alex Foster,” the blurb beneath it announced.

  “Good heavens,” Jessica said.

  “There’s a whole recap of the same story they ran Saturday,” Alex said. “People are going to be sick of me if this keeps up.”

  She put down her fork as he sliced a bite of melon. “Alex, how did you catch the fish you ate? How did you cook them?”

  “I found fishing gear in the emergency kit I salvaged,” he said after swallowing. “Of course, it was touch and go for a few days when I was too sick to fish, but eventually I cooked on spits or flat rocks. The stuff I walked out with, I dried and smoked.”

  “I wish I had been with you,” she mused aloud. “Not because it was a picnic, mind you, just because I could have helped.”

  “I thanked God every single day that you weren’t on that plane,” he said seriously.

  “How did you keep from getting lost?”

  “There was a compass in the emergency bag. The trail between the lake and the camp was marked with a forked tree at the lake side, so it wasn’t too hard. What with my leg and everything, I didn’t exactly wander far afield.”

  She chewed silently for a moment before adding, “We haven’t really talked about what Agent Struthers told us yesterday. About the call from Shatterhorn to someone here in Blunt Falls.”

  “I don’t know what we can do about any of it until they figure out who the call was made to. We just have to be extra careful.” He paused before adding, “Would you consider flying to Kansas City to stay with your sister for a few weeks until this is over?”

  “No,” she said.

  “But—”

  “But nothing. I just got you back, I’m not leaving.” She didn’t add that if she left, she might have nothing to come back to. The threat from some nameless, faceless person coupled with the threat of losing her marriage made leaving impossible for her. “We’re in this together, as a family,” she said.

  He nodded and she was shocked he didn’t pursue it. Pleased, but shocked. “Okay,” she continued. “Let’s move from looming disaster to more mundane things. How about helping me change the batteries in all the smoke alarms today? You weren’t here on the first day of spring when we usually do it and I didn’t want to ask Billy.”

  “Sure. But now that you’ve brought up Billy, I was just thinking that he never came around our house before I crashed the Cessna.”

  “I know. I hadn’t seen him since high school, but like I told you, two or three days after the crash, he showed up and asked if I needed help shoveling snow. Once I gave in and agreed, I tried to pay him, but he wouldn’t take any money. How he rode from his place to our house in the snow on that old red bike is a mystery, but he did.”

  They left the café holding hands. The wind had come up and cut through the fog, made the parking lot a cold, damp, nasty place. Once they got to the car, he turned her to face him. “Do you need to go anywhere else before we head home?”

  “Nope.” She noticed that he scanned the parking lot every few moments, looking for bad guys, she supposed. She looked around, too. What people were visible through the mist seemed in a hurry to get out of the weather. No one seemed to have a good tan like the man in the photograph.

  “Let’s just go home and do chores like normal people,” he said at last as he turned his gaze to her. His hazel eyes seemed to glow and she realized that each day he was back seemed to erase a week of the time he’d been gone. He was growing familiar again, closer, like before the Labor Day mall shooting and even way before that.

  He kissed her forehead and she smiled. “Watch what you say,” she warned him, touching his forehead where a pink welt was all that remained of the cut she knew he’d received when the plane landed and he was hit by broken glass. “I happen to have accumulated a long list.”

  “Great,” he said. “Just make sure there’s time in there for us to take a nap in the hammock if it ever warms up, okay?”

  “And to talk to Billy when he comes by,” she added.

  “If he comes by.”

  * * *

  FOR THE SECOND morning in a row, Alex awoke to the sound of a ringing phone. He answered it quickly, noting as he did that the fog was gone, replaced by heavy, thunderous-looking clouds. May in Blunt Falls was always a mix of weather.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The chief just called,” Dylan said. “We have a dead body out on Evergreen. I’ll be by to pick you up in fifteen minutes.”

  “I can come get you,” Alex said. “It would be faster.”

  “No, I’ve moved out beyond your house. Just be ready.”

  Alex got out of bed as quietly as he could, took a quick shower and pulled on his clothes. It would have been nice to start back to work with something a little less gruesome, but you took what you got.

  He leaned over the bed and kissed Jessica awake, knowing the alarm clock would ring within minutes anyway. He’d talked to her last night about making sure the house alarm was set and driving a different route to the school, encouraging her to park near others and not wander around by herself. She’d tolerated his instructions better than he’d thought she would and then reminded him that no one had tried to kill her, so maybe he should take his own advice.

  “
I have to leave,” he told her. “We have a dead body.”

  “Do you know who it is? Is it Billy?”

  “I seriously doubt it. Evergreen is a long way from Blue Point. I’ll call you later and let you know my plans.”

  “Okay.”

  “And don’t forget—”

  “To set the alarm when I leave. Yes, dear.”

  He smiled at her and kissed her forehead.

  Dylan pulled up right as Alex walked down the driveway. He got into Dylan’s dark gray car and they took off as Alex opened a Vita-Drink and took a swig.

  “You still drinking that stuff?”

  “It’s good for you,” Alex said. “I’d think you’d appreciate that. Where’d you move to?”

  “Eagle Nest.”

  Alex whistled. “That’s the high-rent district.”

  “I got a deal. They like having a cop around and I like the on-site gym.”

  Alex looked at the scratched dashboard and added, “I thought someone said you got a new ride.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “This doesn’t look real new.”

  Dylan nodded. “It’s not. I drove my car to Billings yesterday for a date.”

  “That’s a long ways to go for a date,” Alex said.

  “You haven’t seen the girl. Man, she’s barely out of high school.”

  “Did you check her age?” Alex said.

  “Of course I did. She’s legal. Unfortunately, she’s also a terrible driver. Got rear-ended, so I had to borrow her car while mine gets fixed. Eight hundred and six miles on the odometer and she puts it in the shop.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, always amazed at Dylan’s desire to bed any female he met. For Alex there was one girl, one woman, and that was Jess. “Time to get to work,” he said. “What do we know about our victim?”

  Dylan cast him a swift look. “A guy with a metal detector was working the lot at the old drive-in theater when he came across a dead man.”

  “It’s kind of early in the morning for a metal detector isn’t it? Was it even light when he was out there?”

  “Just barely. It takes all kinds, though. I’ve run kids out of there plenty of times.”

  “Maybe they hit someone they didn’t know was there,” Alex said.

  “Maybe. But these kids also do drugs so maybe one of them OD’d and the rest ran off. I’m thinking about the Cummings twins.”

  The Cummings twins. Was that what Lynda Summers had meant when she said “look-alike” kids? They drove in silence for a moment and then Dylan started talking again. “What did you and Jess do over the weekend?” he asked as he turned onto Evergreen.

  “Things around the house.”

  “I can’t believe you’re back from near death for two days and Jessica has you doing chores.”

  “I didn’t mind. I just like being with her.” He paused a second, thinking back to the day before. “Chief Smyth had me handle an off-the-record complaint from Lynda Summers. She said she heard a noise in her yard.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “No. Someone might have been trying to break into the shed—I doubt it, though.”

  “He’s had me run out there a handful of times in the past few weeks, too,” Dylan said. “What a pigsty.”

  Alex cast him a long look. “Same kind of thing?”

  “Yeah. Almost always it’s nothing I can do much about. Last time it was because she was mad at a neighbor who told her they were going to turn her in if she didn’t fix up her yard. She wanted me to go read them the riot act. I walked over and calmed down the neighbor. Face it, the Summers house belongs on one of those reality TV shows.”

  “How did the chief ever get on the receiving end of her calls?

  “Believe it or not, his mother is responsible. He told me this one night after a couple of beers. His mother was Lynda’s godmother. The old lady—on her deathbed, mind you—made Frank promise to take over as Lynda’s unofficial guardian angel. By then Lynda was getting a little goofy. He did as good as he could when he was a detective like you and me, but it was impossible to protect her from everything. Now he’s acting chief and he seems hell-bent on making sure her antics fly under the radar.”

  “I’m not sure he’s doing Lynda a favor by helping her avoid reality,” Alex mused. “It’s a wonder something hasn’t fallen on her head and crushed her to death.”

  “Yeah,” Dylan said, “but since Smyth is obviously aware of her predicament, I’ve decided to mind my own business.”

  They finally glimpsed vehicles and lights up ahead all pulled into the giant parking lot of the old drive-in theater. Dylan drove slowly through the open gates.

  Kit Anderson was one of the uniforms who had responded to the panicked metal detector’s call. He had on rain gear which he might very well need within the hour. “We’ve got guys combing the area for any evidence,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Get them into a grid,” Alex said. “Try to cover the whole lot before the weather breaks.”

  “Where’s the guy with the metal detector?” Dylan asked.

  “In the back of my car. He was pretty shook up. His name is Henry Fields and he admits he comes here once or twice a year to see if he can find anything interesting. He says he always wiggles through some loose boards in the back so he didn’t notice the chain on the front entrance had been cut.”

  “Why in the world did he come out here so early?” Alex asked.

  “I asked him that. He says there’s never anyone around out here when it rains, so as soon as he got up and heard the weather report, he took off. His truck is parked out behind the lot where he left it.”

  “We’ll go talk to him,” Alex said.

  Kit shook his head. “There’s no need,” he said. “He already told me everything he knows.” Kit was a tall, wiry man who had been a track-and-field star back in high school. He gestured with a long arm. “If I were you, I’d go talk to the M.E.,” he suggested, his voice on the raw edge of condescending. “He’s been here for quite a while.”

  “But you aren’t me,” Alex said softly. “Please join the search and set up a grid, okay?”

  “Sure,” Kit said, and walked off with a scowl.

  “You got yourself an enemy,” Dylan said as they moved toward the squad car.

  “I guess. I don’t want him pissed at me all the time, but there’s not a lot I can do because I didn’t wind up moldering away in the mountains.”

  “Are you thinking Kit had something to do with that crash?”

  “Hell, no. I didn’t say that.”

  “Because I can’t imagine he’d go to such lengths.”

  “Nor can I.” Alex stopped abruptly. “You know, though, in this case he may be right. We both don’t need to question our metal detector. I’ll go get started on the crime scene before the weather deteriorates.”

  “Sounds good,” Dylan said, and ambled toward the squad car.

  Alex approached the crowd of people gathered under an open tent. He’d come to this theater a few times when he was a kid but it had closed decades ago. There was no longer a standing screen or a concession/projector building, just gently rolling ground. In the old days, cars would pull their front ends up on the berms, giving them a clear line of sight to the big outdoor screen over the tops of the cars in front of them. Remnants of metal posts that used to hold the speakers stuck up out of the weeds.

  Patrolmen had erected a tent over the body in deference to the deteriorating weather. The victim was facedown in one of the lower spots between the humps. Thanks to the team working the scene, he couldn’t see the dead man, just a pile of what appeared to be mangled dark clothing amid a sea of flashbulbs.

  “Someone ran over him,” the M.E. said as he approached Alex. “More than once, I might add.” He t
urned to the ambulance crew and called, “I’m finished for now. You can get the Vic ready for transport.”

  “Do we have an ID?” Alex asked.

  “Not yet. We’ve taken his prints, but right now all I can tell you is we have a Caucasian male in his early twenties. There’s no sign he struggled, which leads me to believe he was unconscious when he was run over.”

  “Any signs of drugs?”

  “No, but I’ll run a toxicology.”

  “How about a time of death?”

  He shook his graying head which was covered with a jaunty plaid beret. “At least twenty-four hours. He’s been here awhile.”

  So he’d died sometime early Sunday morning. Alex thought for a moment before speculating. “I wonder if he walked out here, overdosed on something and fell into a deep sleep or hit his head.” Like Dylan said, teens sometimes cut through the chain and came in here at night to race over the rolling lot, seeing just how fast they could go and most of the time, they did it late enough there were few people to see their headlights. If there’d been a sleeping or drugged person in a dark spot, it was conceivable someone ran over him accidentally. However, you’d think they would have noticed a bump and quit after the first hit.

  “I’ll know more after the autopsy,” the M.E. said.

  Alex nodded as he looked around. The ground was covered with a layer of weeds that would make getting tire impressions tricky even if it hadn’t been raining most of the night.

  Alex pulled up his collar as more rain started now. He began the trek down to the body but before he got far, Kit Anderson yelled from the back of the lot near where the screen used to be. Alex changed direction and jogged through the rain. He stopped short as he got close enough to see what had been found near a pile of discarded lumber: a mangled red bicycle.

  “I don’t think it’s been here long,” Kit said as Officer Herrera planted an evidence flag near the bike and the photographer began snapping pictures. “There’s no rust to speak of.”

  “Get something over it as quick as you can,” Alex said, then turned and retraced his steps. They were loading the body into the ambulance as he gently pulled the blanket away from the victim’s face.