by Lisa Preston
The plywood hung under the trailer’s eave but showed years and years of weathering. The keepsakes had faded with their secret message, but the ghostly photographs of her sister’s likeness in the few years after high school graduation were already etched in Daphne’s memories. She didn’t know why the board was here, but she knew what she was looking at.
The board was a shrine to her dead sister.
CHAPTER 17
Staring hard at the tattered notes to and about Suzanne, Daphne knew Vic stared hard at her, knew he could see her pure trepidation and shaking hands. When she stayed voiceless, he told Lindsay Wallach who they were and accepted two glasses of water, served on the back deck because they were not invited inside.
“What happened at the funeral?” Vic asked.
Lindsay Wallach shot him a shocked look. “What?”
Daphne looked toward the board. The board, Vic. But she understood him. He’d always raised his eyebrows over what he termed the bad scene of Ross Bouchard being hauled out of Suzanne’s funeral after making a spectacle.
Vic shifted uncomfortably and said to Lindsay, “You were there, weren’t you?”
“At … Suzanne’s funeral? What, twenty years ago?”
Vic nodded and Daphne stayed mute, thinking about the retired homicide detective and his little nudge in this direction. She’s the one who first realized your sister was missing.
“At the funeral,” Vic asked again, “what really happened?”
When Lindsay threw Daphne a puzzled look, as though to point out that Daphne had, after all, been there for the entire service, Vic said, “She was just a kid at the time. I’ve heard a bit about it. What’s the deal? Ross Bouchard was escorted out. What happened?”
Lindsay winced at the Bouchard name. Daphne gazed at Lindsay’s face, watched her eyes close to avoid the stare.
“Ross sang,” Lindsay said, her gaze shifting from Vic to Daphne and back again.
Vic eyed Daphne. She’d told him many times about the singing, about the congregation’s gasps over the weird words the boy had wailed at the altar.
“It was just a tribute to Suzanne. An old Cohen song that just fit her. And him. And it was, the whole thing, a boy with a guitar, him singing about loving her … well, it was too hippie for that stuffed-shirt church. And Ross was broken up, half-crying so he was kind of talking the lyrics, and he came off pretty weird.” Lindsay looked at the shrine and back again. “Why? Why are you asking now? What in the world brings you out here today? After all these years?”
Mute, Daphne looked again at the board and its faded mementos of Suzanne. She felt Lindsay’s gaze follow hers, heard Vic clear his throat.
“Saturday,” he said, “tomorrow, is the anniversary of Daphne’s father’s suicide.”
“Oh, I-I didn’t know,” Lindsay said, her voice a soft, pained gasp. “You, your dad, your poor family. Some people get more than their share. That’s terrible. When did he … ?”
Daphne still couldn’t speak. Vic looked at her, nodded, and told Lindsay, “It’s been a while.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m sorry he died. Sorry he did that. Old news, apparently, but I didn’t know. The poor guy. You poor girl, Daphne.”
Daphne remembered sparing the retired detective this detail, wondering about her own character that she’d liked it a second ago when Vic dropped it on Lindsay, foisted bad news on Suzanne’s old friend.
“Tomorrow, huh?” Lindsay asked.
“Yes, tomorrow.” Daphne’s voice was measured, careful. But she couldn’t last, her voice breaking as she asked, “Do you know what day Sunday is?”
Lindsay glanced at Vic who watched Daphne then folded his arms across his chest and told Lindsay, “It’s Suzanne’s birthday.”
“Oh …” Lindsay exhaled. “I always think of the anniversary of, I mean, I remember Suzanne more in December …”
“When she died,” Daphne sniffed.
“Yes.” Lindsay faltered, seeming lost in thought.
“Why do you have that board over there?” Daphne asked at last, pointing to it now without looking at it. Satisfying Vic’s curiosity was not the same as satisfying her own. What he had wanted to know all along, and what she wanted to know since they’d arrived, were in different directions, past and present.
Lindsay opened her mouth, hesitated, then said, “I don’t. I mean, I just didn’t ever take it down. It’s been there a long, long time.”
Daphne felt herself soften and she wished the sun would stay on them, but the sky clouded. She wanted, needed, warmth.
Twenty years ago, she was my sister’s best friend.
“Can I use your bathroom?” Daphne asked, her voice hoarse.
Lindsay waved toward the door. “On your right as you go inside.” Daphne stepped inside but heard Lindsay say to Vic, “So … her father’s death still affects her.”
His soft response was immediate, clear to Daphne because she’d heard him say the same words only yesterday. “Her sister’s death more.”
She found the bathroom, a tiny thing with a triangular shower crammed next to a toilet and a small corner sink. Washing her hands in the minimal flow of cold water, Daphne looked at herself, at her palms, and turned her wrists over. The unsettling specter of Lindsay, out here in the woods in an ancient, crummy trailer, tending a little orchard, felt somehow morally suspect.
Because she survived? Because this is her version of survival? Daphne shook her head. Don’t go there, she warned herself. You might not stack up so well yourself.
Uncomfortable answers arose to other uncomfortable questions.
When she and Vic began as a couple, he told her about his divorce and talked of how he strove to improve his children’s lives by not engaging Cassandra’s bile. Passivity helped, he told her. Things had been worse before he figured out how to avoid Cassandra’s wrath. Vic had shrugged when Daphne suggested taking the fight to Cassandra and told Daphne he was a work in progress.
And now she decided, she was a work not-in-progress. Recognizing this made her wonder how long she’d been suspended, and whether it was an inherited condition.
Had Lindsay inherited this trailer house? Daphne tried to picture her perhaps coming here as a college girl, coming with Suzanne, with Ross. She thought of best-case and worst-case possibilities, tried to delineate the givens.
A man like Vic, a person like him, Daphne decided, would take a heavy breath and find it all an opportunity to be more thoughtful. He’d said this sort of thing before, to his son and daughter, and to Daphne. Never quite a lecture, just a considered nod and a hug and the comment that whatever upsetting thing had just transpired could be an opportunity for him and whoever else to work harder, to practice more patience, more kindness. Daphne wasn’t sure she wanted to work harder.
Cold. It was cold in the trailer, stagnant. Daphne thought of what it might have been like twenty years ago. What Suzanne might have seen. It was December then. It would have been even colder.
And that December Suzanne was attacked by someone. Just someone. Not knowing more was still as random and strange as it had always been.
Longing for the air on the deck, Daphne allowed herself a tour of the little house. The narrow hallway led to one small bedroom with veneer buckling on the walls.
It was just a thin home. There were no other secret shrines. Nothing untoward raised her hackles. Daphne wanted back outside, to escape from the cool, dark interior of Lindsay Wallach’s home.
“What did her dad do for a living?” Lindsay was asking Vic.
“He sold insurance.” Vic’s tone was cool enough to demonstrate this was not going to be an engaging conversation, but he was willing to tell what he knew. He was part of the Mayfield family, in the way that people close to one family member adopt. Lindsay Wallach had long ago filtered out and away from the Mayfields.
Daphne stepped back onto the deck and slid the door shut, reassured that Vic and Lindsay had not relaxed into friendship, but awaited her return.
“It’s a special kind of grief to lose someone unexpectedly,” Lindsay said, her acknowledgment spoken with the care of somber pronouncement one might make to the close relative of a dead friend. “With someone still young, with such promise, it’s even worse.”
Pointing again to the board beyond the deck railing, Daphne asked, “Did you make that?”
Lindsay cleared her throat. “Do you know about the, um, the gift of bones? The idea that a person might need a place to go … to grieve?”
Daphne felt her jaw tighten. Her mother had talked about the gift of bones after Suzanne’s body was found. Her mom was a grave visitor. The habit of mourning was a large part of Daphne’s dread for this weekend and its anniversaries. Daphne found no solace at the cemetery. “I know about it,” Daphne said. “We had the gift of bones two weeks after Suzanne disappeared. And then we had the funeral.”
“She had …” Lindsay began and stumbled, “a horrible death. I’m so sorry about that. Sorry for you.”
Am I supposed to say thank you? Daphne wondered.
“But,” Lindsay continued, “a great life. Suzanne had a great life. Don’t you think? Do you remember her well?”
Vic eyed Lindsay. “When her sister was murdered, I think Daph’s memories got all the stronger. She wasn’t going to get any more of them.”
“Are you looking for something else here?” Lindsay asked. “Are you searching? Ross said all of us are searchers until we’re freed.”
“You stayed in touch with him,” Daphne said.
Lindsay hesitated before nodding. Daphne took a deep breath, saw Vic do the same, and gestured for him to say nothing. It was time. After all these years, she’d find Ross Bouchard and confront the man so many thought was the killer who got away with her sister’s murder.
Daphne stared at the plywood board of old photos, the fluttered, faded colors of the high school graduation tassel above the old candles. “He made that board, didn’t he?”
“Before she was found,” Lindsay said, nodding as her voice caught and she was unable to speak.
Daphne set her jaw. Someone else crying, even threatening to cry over Suzanne, would make her crash. Don’t do it, she willed Lindsay. Don’t you dare do it. “He made it right after she went missing?”
“The second week. Then he added to it afterward, for a long time. Years. He used to live here, but often he went off to his father’s place down in Oregon.” Lindsay squeezed her eyes shut. “Ross said a girl like Suzanne comes along once. Like once in a generation or in a lifetime.”
“He was right about that,” Daphne said.
Lindsay cocked her head as if struck by some personal thought. “I know how much Ross cared about Suzanne.”
Talking right on top of her, Vic said, “I know he failed every lie detector test he ever took about her.”
Lindsay’s eyebrows perked up an inch.
“You didn’t know that?” he asked her, his voice harsh now, even cruel.
Hallelujah, Daphne thought.
“He failed the polygraphs when he was questioned about Suzanne’s death,” Vic said, a judgment sealed.
A long exhale escaped Lindsay’s pursed lips. “Well, he must have felt guilty.”
“Why?” Vic and Daphne said as one. Daphne continued, “Why did he feel guilty?”
Lindsay’s voice grew small and strained. “He was with me. That night. The night before, you know. The night when Suzanne took off, went off wherever she went, did whatever she did. Something reckless, I’m sure. She’d found us here, together, said she was going to find some action—”
“But you …” Daphne felt tears sting her eyes on her sister’s behalf. She thought again about Lindsay filtering out of the Mayfields’ lives. Suzanne had known this would happen before anyone else. She’d known it fresh and painful in the last hours of her life. “You were her best friend.”
“Yes. And I was twenty-one. So was he. I’m sorry I went after my best friend’s boyfriend.”
“She told me you guys didn’t even like each other! Her best friend and her boyfriend don’t like each other. I mean, they didn’t like each other.”
Lindsay and Vic gaped at her.
“And Ross Bouchard—” Daphne began.
“Was sorry, too. Sorrier. I mean …” Lindsay hesitated, her gaze casting about and hands fluttering. “We liked each other, Daphne. We tried not to. I was, and am, as sorry as I can be, but I forgave myself. And Ross, well Ross never got over it.”
Feeling Vic’s gaze shift to her, Daphne met his glance but couldn’t hold it. There was too much in his face. Sympathy and questions, his and hers.
And then Lindsay told them, “He’s dead, you know.”
Vic closed the distance and put an arm around Daphne, who managed no words from her open mouth.
Lindsay cleared her throat, and when she spoke again, her voice held the raspy catch of grief. “It was a couple years ago, March. He’d been a drinker, tried to dry up and relapsed lots of times. A few months before, he’d been back in central Oregon, out on the rimrocks. A favorite spot of his. I’d been there with him. The ground just falls away. His body was found below. At the top of the ledge were a lot of empty beers. At the bottom …”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Daphne’s mind created an image of Ross Bouchard—not a man approaching forty but a boy dating her sister—in a suspended free fall from one of Oregon’s high desert mesas. She shook her head and inclined her chin at Vic, glancing away to indicate readiness to leave.
She needed air, wanted to drive too fast, to leave this place. They said stiff good-byes and slipped around the trailer to her truck.
Before Vic entered the passenger side, Daphne said, “When I went away to college, I felt out of place. After the first summer, I had a hard time going back. After the second summer, it was worse. My mother promised the angels would come, but the next year my father killed himself.”
“I know, honey.” Vic pressed his lips to her hair as soon as they got in the truck’s cab.
She fired up the engine and shoved the transmission stick. “The angels never came.”
He held her hand, kissed her hair again. “There are different kinds of angels.”
Lindsay ran at them, waving. Daphne braked and lowered her window.
“When he sang at her funeral,” Lindsay said, breathing hard, “you have to understand this, he sang with a whole heart.”
Using the black mood plied by the encounter with Lindsay, Daphne pressured Vic and his tight schedule until he agreed they had just enough time to drive by the intersection where the Lincoln had been discovered and towed.
“What’s the big deal?” he said again. She’d already explained how she wanted to see it, and he’d explained how he thought he might be late getting his kids.
“What’s the big deal with you?” she fired back. When he kept quiet instead of letting it become an argument, she made a point of staring out her window. Let him look at the back of her head, if he was looking at her at all, she thought. I dare you to tell me to watch the road while I’m driving.
“Left here,” Vic said. “The guy at the impound lot said it was the northwest corner, on the northbound side, right after the fire hydrant in the first curbside spot.”
She blinked at him and pretended not to notice his stretch, which ended with a twist of his arm in a disguised gesture to check his watch again.
Following the directions, she mused, “I wonder why they towed it in the first place.”
“It was a stolen car, Daph.” He stretched his legs as best he could in the little truck cab. “If that Lincoln at the impound lot was the same car you followed yesterday, it makes sense that they felt nervous about you. I mean, if they were driving a stolen car that had stolen license plates on it, they would be a little nervous about any contact. They wouldn’t want anyone to connect the dots.”
Daphne wanted to be pleased that he was interpreting the facts, that he considered the possibilities about whatever
was going on with Minerva Watts, but her tone became challenging. “So that’s why they drove like crazy down Eastpark?”
“I don’t know. I was just talking about the Lincoln being impounded from this street. Some cop noticed it was a stolen car.”
“But you don’t know that by looking at it, right? What attracted some cop’s attention to it in the first place?”
He pointed to the sidewalk. “Well, it’s metered parking. Maybe with the meter unpaid, they just ran a check. Maybe the license plates were already reported stolen, too.”
She nodded, distracted, and stopped her little truck in a parking space the Lincoln may have occupied mere hours before. When had it been parked here? “The impound yard guy seemed to think it was kind of noteworthy that the VIN was checked. That’s how the cop realized the Lincoln was stolen out of California …”
He checked his watch. “Can we go now?”
She let her Toyota idle out of the parking space. There was no traffic behind them on the road. It was a general business district, with a few oncoming cars. “And you’ll drop me off at home and go pick Jed and Josie up?”
“Daph, there’s not really enough time now. We have to go together.”
“I can just see Cassandra making a big deal about four of us in the truck. I don’t want us to both go get the kids and then all of us to squash in here.”
He checked his watch and frowned.
“You could just drop me off at a coffee house or something and come back for me … ,” she offered, looking left and right on the street to see if there was some suitable Internet café where she could pass an hour or so.
“Just dump my kids at the house and come for you?”
“The kids can stay at the house alone. They have keys. You’d … we’d be home soon.”
He slouched. “I should have just taken the Honda as it was. It ran. It might not be worth fixing, it’s so old.”
“Hey, there’s a car rental place,” she said, perking up as she saw the business at the end of the block. “Let’s rent a car there.”