by Neliza Drew
“That never happened.”
“She wasn’t trying to steal your man, you know. She was stopping your john from raping Nik.”
“Get out!”
I nodded and collected my jacket and purse. “I’ll be back, Charley.”
“I hate you!”
“I know.”
I stood outside the door finding my breath, pushing the past back into the spaces of my brain I tried not to visit. I shut my eyes. Reminded myself I’d made it out. Reminded myself Charley wasn’t why I’d come back.
Chapter eleven
I pulled into a gas station in Morehead and went inside for a soda and a bag of nuts or sunflower seeds. My head swam with possibilities, my eyes focused only on the goals of not running into anything and picking up something resembling calories. When a hand touched down on my right shoulder, my instincts kicked in.
I dropped the peanuts, put my left hand on his and spun, pulling him off balance onto the floor with his arm locked up, my foot ready to stomp the back of his neck.
The baby EMT yelped, dropped the hotdog he’d been holding and landed on it.
“Oh shit!” I pulled him back to his feet and reached for some napkins, even though the mustard-stained tee shirt was obviously a lost cause.
“What the…” He looked down at his shirt, at the hotdog, and up at me. “Craig said you were a little stressed. He didn’t mention you were a damn ninja.”
“Sorry. Reflexes.” I gave up with the napkins and tossed the rest of the bunch back toward the rack. “I lived in some rough neighborhoods for a few years.”
He cracked his neck and stared at me with a mixture of awe and terror.
I knew there was no way I was going to convince him I wasn’t some sort of lunatic. Hell, maybe I was. I had totally blanked out, lost in my head. It wasn’t like me not to be present, aware. “Look, I’m real sorry. Okay?”
He nodded. Backed away from me slightly.
“How ’bout I buy you another hot dog. Give you money for a new shirt.”
“It’s okay.”
I reached in my pocket.
He backed away faster.
“Look. Take it.” I held out a twenty. “I said I was sorry. I… I don’t know how to explain what happened. I’m jumpy, I guess. Charley in the hospital, my sister in jail.”
He took a step forward, but ignored the money. “Your sister is Lane?”
I nodded, confused that he hadn’t put those two together already.
“Oh man, I’m sorry. I’d have said something earlier.” He ran a hand through his scruffy blond hair then held it out to shake. “Scooter. From earlier. I feel like a real heel now.”
I shook his hand, confused. “Davis.”
“Lane and I went to school together. Over at the alternative place. You know it?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Can you believe I was a wild child back then? Smoking and all that?”
“You’re older than her.” He had to be, but to look at him, it didn’t seem possible.
“Oh yeah, we were only actually there at the same time for maybe a few months. I graduated and she’d just gotten transferred in. She seemed like a good kid, I remember. Didn’t seem like the kind to be over there, frankly. Made me wonder what’d happened. ’Course, she always seemed kinda quiet, sullen-like, so maybe she just did a lot of drugs I didn’t know about.”
I nodded like I understood.
“Listen, I don’t know what happened. I heard the call, but I wasn’t on that night and anyway, it was over in Beaufort. Not really my area unless they got something they need extra help with. But you know, all the calls come in on just a few channels and I heard it in my truck on my way to see my girlfriend. She lives over in Beaufort.” He looked almost bashful for a moment and added, “I usually switch over to the Beaufort or Downeast channels whenever I head that way. Figure if something happens and they need an extra hand. Wouldn’t hurt none, you know.”
“So you heard the call?”
“Oh, yeah. Neighbors heard a shot. First responders were Murphy from the Sheriff’s office and J.T. with the BPD. J.T. ran a little behind, sounded like. Murphy said he was nearby, but I think he just headed over ’cause it was Amber’s boyfriend’s place.”
“He knows Amber?”
“Second cousin. On the mom’s side. Used to do security down at Wright’s before he joined the Sheriff’s department. Not a bad guy, just… Well, let me not say nothing might get back to ’im.”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” I was only half listening to him.
“Yeah, so anyway. Sorry about Lane getting caught up like that. I don’t know what happened. Makes me almost wish I’d gotten to know her a bit better, but she had her own crowd.”
“You remember any of them?”
He rubbed his chin where a pair of hairs might have been trying to make a beard. “A lot of them have died. Car accidents, some overdoses. The ones that’re left? Amber’s still around. Rex was a few years older, like Billy. Both of them were my grade, but they went to regular school.” He shrugged.
“Thanks.” He reached out to shake my hand and I obliged. “And, sorry, really.”
“No worries.” He grinned and went off to get himself another hotdog.
I stood watching him, wondering if I’d fallen through one of those sci-fi cracks in space-time and landed in a Twilight Zone episode.
Chapter twelve
Talking to Scooter led me to Lane’s school, a former elementary school in a decaying part of what had once been a downtown. Sad old bricks full of students who walked by looking like they were older than the building. Among the trudging students, I found a bottom-heavy woman with dyed-yellow hair, teased and sprayed within an inch of its life. She sat on the old flat concrete platform that, based on the other side, had once held a proud concrete lion.
“You must be here about Lane.” She took a drag on the cigarette clutched in her fingers like a joint. “You look like she used to.”
I stopped, let the remaining few students pass.
“Lunch.” She nodded after the sagging pants, too-tight skirts, and frayed jeans.
“You one of Lane’s teachers?”
“Former. I’m Ellen. Haven’t seen her in a few weeks. Figured she either dropped out on purpose or forgot how to find us. She’s not the first. I’ve had kids show up the first day and don’t come back until February. Want to know when they get their credits. And pot? Find me some kids these days who haven’t smoked a little weed.” She sucked up another healthy dose of pollution.
“You ever talk to Charley about it?”
“Look, I ain’t gotta talk to you. You aren’t the parent and you haven’t passed through security or done the background check or whatever it is they do in the office these days.”
I held up my hands. “Wasn’t an accusation, just curious. Not like Charley would’ve remembered.”
She relaxed and took another drag. “Only reason I’m talking to you is the resemblance and because I might as well since I’m not supposed to be smoking on school grounds either.”
“You’re retiring this year, huh?”
“Damn straight. I’ve been here since they opened. Early on, we had decent kids, just didn’t like regular school. You know, the sitting in rows and turning to page thirty because it was Tuesday thing. Wanted to work at their own pace, get done on their own schedule.
“Last few years? Budgets tighter at other schools, legislature breathing down everyone’s neck about test scores this and graduation rates that and where are all the STEM graduates and what are you doing for the kids with disabilities and other languages and…” She threw up her hands and went back to giving her cancer stick a blow job.
“Lane slip through a crack?”
“Lane? She had potential. Started out as one of those kids who needed her own pace. Freshman year she lit up a joint in the bathroom over at West Carteret. They suggested she come here.” She tossed the butt, checked her watch and pulled out the pack for another. “She made some friends.
Some of them the wrong kind. She’d have been okay anyway, but something happened.”
“What?”
She inhaled. “That, I don’t know.” Exhaled. “You can ask her, but I don’t think she’ll tell you either. Never would talk to the school counselor. Wouldn’t talk to me. Wrote some pretty good stuff in English class, but the themes changed somewhat. Wouldn’t talk about that either except a snotty assertion it was fiction, imagination, and didn’t I have one of those.” She looked off at the semi-bare oaks. “Made you wonder just the same.”
I agreed and wondered. I’d written a few of those myself.
“I thought she’d be one that got out.”
“So she was into drugs before?”
“Just pot. After?” She sucked smoke. “Well, after, she picked up some other habits.”
“Heroin?”
“Pills.” Ellen took another desperate drag. The cherry burned down and charred the cotton. “Damn filters.”
I watched her toss it into a bush.
“Something changed about a year after she came here. That’s when she shaved her head, started getting tattoos — little girly heart on her wrist, a paw, stars down her leg, piercings all over — quoting old death metal from back when in her papers. Cry for help, I tell you.”
“Anyone listen?”
“Several of us tried. We weren’t the right ears.”
“Who had the right ears?”
“You, maybe. You were her hero. You know that?”
I didn’t believe it. Or, maybe I didn’t want to. “I kind of got the impression that she hated me.”
She checked her watch. “You saved her from something. She wrote a paper about it once. She was scared, but grateful. Then, you weren’t there.” She got up.
“I didn’t mean to let her down.”
“Neither did I.”
Chapter thirteen
Back in the car, I called Tom. “You still willing to help?”
“Mental health really isn’t my field of expertise.”
“Funny. Almost as funny as Charley. Like a sitcom a minute.”
“That good, huh?”
I rehashed the highlights.
“Davis, why does your mother think you’re dead?”
I sighed into the phone. “Because when she shot me, she did a shitty job? I don’t know.”
“She shot you?” His voice said this was news and he needed to know more.
I didn’t feel like telling more. “Long time ago. Water went under that bridge and then we burned it down from both shores.”
He was quiet for nearly a minute. “All right, what do you want to know?”
“I want to know what the hell Lane’s been hiding, but I’d settle for anything on her friends or this Sheriff’s deputy, Murphy.”
“He have anything to do with this?”
“Maybe. If he does, I need to see him coming.” I switched the phone to the other hand so I could stare at the scars that made up the left. “Look, whatever it costs, I’ll pay you.”
“You don’t have to. You know that.”
“The defense is going to need something to work with. Course, at the moment I can’t even find a lawyer and I have too much money to use the public defender.”
“So, you’re thinking she did this?”
Outside the windshield, the sky was gray and the bank sign said the temperature was forty-three.
“I don’t know what she did, Tom. I haven’t seen her in years. We might not be able to force it, but people change. The Lane I knew could never have shot someone, but the Lane I knew? Maybe I never knew Lane. I don’t think she wants me to know her now.” And that worried me more than the murder charge, because it said she’d done things she was ashamed to talk about.
“Why did you leave?” His voice was soft, gentle.
“I thought I had to. I shouldn’t have.” It had been naïve of me to assume Lane would be fine just because Nik and I had survived.
“What can I do?”
“What you do.”
He sighed hard on his end and shuffled papers. “The mother. Looks like she’s a nurse. Lives in Beaufort.” He pronounced it like the one in South Carolina.
“Beaufort. Bow, like ribbon.”
“Regardless.” He rattled directions to an apartment. “Guthrie was twenty when he died. Just had a birthday last month. I’ll have to call in a favor, see about the juvie stuff. Sally made just under thirty-eight thousand last year. Paid eight-sixty in rent on a two-one. William worked at Wright’s Seafood in Harker’s Island. He worked there three years, made nineteen thousand last year, a little less the other two, but only paid taxes on twelve.”
“Is there anything you can’t find out on people?”
“The things they keep in their heads.” He sounded older than usual.
“Good to know.”
“They recently came to own a boat.”
“A boat?” I pictured the yachts outside Tom and Marilyn’s house in the Las Olas Isles neighborhood. None of them seemed particularly useful in an aging fishing village, even if it had been reborn as a tourist destination.
“Forty-seven-foot fishing yacht with tuna towers. Inboard motor.” He clicked something on his end. “The title transfer says they paid a dollar. Prior owner doesn’t seem related.”
“I don’t believe in boat fairies.”
“Yeah, doesn’t look like the seller, James Martin, was doing well enough financially to give away a boat either.” More clicks followed.
“Martin? He related to Amber and Brad?”
“Hmm…” He didn’t say anything for a while, so I had to assume he was looking into it with one of the half-dozen databases he subscribed to. “Not immediate family. Could be a cousin.”
I remembered what Scooter had said. “Like Murphy?”
“It’s weird. James isn’t the only name here. At first, I thought it was the title company, but it’s a secondary seller. International WSD.”
“Who owns that?”
More clicks. “Eric Wright.”
“Well, that’s a helluva thing.”
“Yep. I’ll call you right back.” He hung up.
I started the car and headed toward Beaufort. My phone rang again on the causeway between there and Morehead.
“James Martin deposited a large sum of money right after selling the boat for a dollar.”
“Could Billy have squirreled money away living with mom? Maybe they did it that way to avoid taxes?”
“My guess? Something on the side. But that’s an ex-cop’s hunch, not a fact.”
Chapter fourteen
Sally Guthrie lived in an older apartment complex that hadn’t aged as well as the historic section of town. Its beige-yellow paint had collected dirt and a bit of mold and the blue on the doors looked faded.
Sally sagged like the privacy fence around the door. Her face had the suddenly aged look of someone dealing with loss and her clothes had the disheveled appearance of someone who’d been awake too long and didn’t care.
“May I help you?” Her voice had a sigh built into it. Until she took a good look at my face, and her features shifted through confusion and hurt to anger. “What are you doing here?”
“My name is Davis Groves. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Lane shot my baby.” She tried to slam the door.
I stuck my foot in the way. “I’m here because I want to know more about the relationship between Lane and Billy. I’m here because I don’t understand and I want to.”
“There’s nothing to understand. She killed my boy.”
“If you didn’t see Lane shoot him, there’s a possibility she didn’t do it — or didn’t do it alone. But, even if she did, don’t you want to know why?”
“He was a good boy.”
I nodded. “Last time I saw Lane, she was a good girl.”
“You didn’t see what she did. The mess. Took them two days to clean it. Still need new carpet.”
“I’m sorry.”
She stared at me. She smelled slightly boozy. Her hair matched the building and looked too sunny for her pallor.
“If this wasn’t what it looks like on the surface, Amber could be in trouble, too.” I gave her my most earnest attempt at concern and caring and sweetness.
“Amber’s a nice girl.”
“Lane used to be,” I reminded.
She nodded. “Yeah, she always was.” She opened the door a little wider. “I don’t trust you, I just don’t have anything left.”
I wanted to tell her I knew how that felt, but also knew it would ring hollow.
The room reeked of bleach and paint. Carpet missing down to the concrete, a lone kitchen chair near a small television set on a folding table, the walls newly white.
“Lane shot him right here.” She gestured at a spot of the concrete.
The cleaning crew had done a good job so far.
“There was blood everywhere. Bone. Brains.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I couldn’t imagine her living in that apartment.
She wrung her hands and looked around. “The detective gave me the number for a local crew. Probably still get evicted. I can’t afford the new places.”
“Sounds like it didn’t take them long to clear the scene, though.” I made a mental note to find out what the backlog at the state lab looked like and how hard the DA’s office would likely push to get the stuff processed. Assuming they didn’t just angle for a quick deal.
“I work nights, mostly. Gave him his privacy, you know. He was an adult. Just couldn’t afford his own place yet.” Her sadness hung off her like a blanket. “If I’d been here…”
If she’d been there, she might have ended up dead, too. “He seemed happy? No arguments with friends? With Lane?”
She shook her head. “The cops asked the same questions. He worked at a seafood plant. He coordinated work schedules and whatnot. How could that be trouble? How could that be dangerous?” She looked distraught, confused.
I had the same questions. “How’d he know Lane? She’s supposed to be in high school.”