by Deirdre Dore
“It will go faster if you shut up,” Mark countered, “and keep digging.”
“Why do you need it now?” Circe asked Mark, so tired she didn’t even remember thinking the question.
“What?”
“Why are you so desperate for the money?” she repeated more softly. “You don’t seem like you need it.”
“It’s five million dollars,” he pointed out like she was stupid. “You telling me you don’t want five million dollars, Circe?” he mocked. “Just think what you could do with your little store.”
Circe thought about it. Her store was actually doing really well. She’d taken only ten thousand, carefully hiking back to the old mill one day months after they’d buried it and agreed to disappear. She didn’t think five million dollars was worth the risk of getting caught by the police, or by the men from whom they’d stolen the money.
They hadn’t been nice men.
If the bodies the FBI found in the millpond were identified, they were going to be extremely unhappy men as well.
“What if we don’t find it?” she said, her voice so quiet, so small, that it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, someone else entirely.
Mark looked thoughtful. “Then we find Gloria Belle, and we ask her a few questions.”
29
RAQUEL’S MOUTH TIGHTENED as she watched her mother stumble out of the small house in Atlanta that Raquel had bought for her several years before. Belle’s blond wig was askew and unflattering against her dark skin, her short dress leaving little to the imagination.
Beside her, Burns watched and said nothing. He’s good at that, she thought, only a little snidely.
It was late Tuesday afternoon, nearly three thirty. She’d worked most of the night trying to trap an online predator who was targeting twelve- to fourteen-year-olds in the Atlanta suburbs. He’d sexually assaulted one girl that they knew of, but the girl hadn’t been able to describe her attacker. Usually Raquel didn’t work with a specific target in mind, she just searched for predators in general, but she wanted to stop this guy before he hurt anyone else. She hadn’t been able to find him and had finally gone to bed around nine a.m., only to be woken up by a call from Brent around two.
She wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to help him with his mysterious problem. He hadn’t told her much about it, only that it involved her mother.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen the documentary?” Burns asked, keeping his eyes on Belle as she crossed the street.
They were crammed into his wreck of a Jeep since it was going to rain and Raquel hadn’t wanted to ride her bike home from the station.
“Since it came out,” she muttered. He’d tried to get her to go on film when he’d been making the documentary about her mother, the blues sensation of the eighties who’d crashed and burned spectacularly, but she’d refused, largely because she hated the mess her mother had become and didn’t really want to see it played out on screen.
She’d gone to see it, though, in a small artsy theater in Atlanta, by herself. He’d done a surprisingly accurate job, revealing her mother’s beauty, the glory of her voice, and, sadly, the weakness in her character. Raquel had learned things about her mother that she’d never known, that her grandmother had hidden from her.
He didn’t ask what she thought of it. She was glad. She didn’t know if she could explain her complex rush of emotion at the thought of that documentary. On one hand, she felt like he’d given her a gift, the gift of her mother. On the other hand, he’d exposed the shame of her mother’s addiction, her prostitution, to the entire world. The documentary had received critical acclaim, but at the time Raquel had felt like someone had ripped out her heart and stomped on it for a while.
“You should watch it again.”
“Why?” Raquel questioned.
“She talks about what it was like living in Fate, about the witch family, about the love of her life.”
Raquel struggled to remember. The scenes that stuck out in her mind were the ones where her mother used a dirty needle to inject meth into the veins of her delicate brown arms.
“What did she say?”
“Not a great deal that I put into the film. She was high at the time, damn near incomprehensible, so a lot of it was cut out.”
“You have the tapes handy?”
He nodded, still watching Belle pick her staggering way across the street, his normal expression of jovial goodwill stilled and silent.
“So what did you hear that made you want to make a documentary about Tavey’s family?”
He slid her a sly glance. “What if I told you that the documentary about the Collins family is only a piece of what I want to write?”
“I’d say that if Tavey finds out you’re not being totally honest, she’ll verbally flay you, kick you off her property, and sic her lawyers on you.”
He winced. Lawyers.
“Are you going to tell her?”
She gave him an are-you-crazy look. “Of course I’m going to tell her.”
He scowled. “So I get no credit for my performance in bed?”
Raquel sniffed. “I’m pretty sure you’re in debt to me for the rest of my life.”
“Well, that’s true,” he agreed with a quick grin.
“So what else are you looking into?”
“Have you ever heard of a biker gang called the Warlocks?”
Raquel hadn’t done much work with gangs, but she’d started looking into who was into meth during the eighties after her conversation with Tavey and Chris. The Warlocks were a gang that had started in Pennsylvania and had gotten really big after the Vietnam War. In the eighties they’d aggressively expanded their base of operations from Philly down to Miami, using Atlanta as a stopover. They were primarily drug traffickers, mostly methamphetamines, but they’d moved into human trafficking as well, which was why Raquel had paid attention. Many of the girls who were trafficked were underage and often non-English speaking.
“I have,” she said simply, wondering where he was going with this.
“Belle talks about the gang. She describes ‘meeting the harpies’ in the woods, about how they cooked the drugs. The harpy is the symbol for the Warlocks. She talks about having sex with the bikers, about a deal worth a lot of money. She repeatedly mentions someone named Charlie.”
“Charlie Collins?”
“She did grow up with him.”
“He died in 1980. Are you saying they were involved with this gang way back then? That doesn’t make any sense. He was young, wealthy. How would he be involved with a bunch of drug-dealing bikers?”
He shrugged. “I found a connection between Abraham Jones and one of the gang leaders, Jessop Chance.”
“Old Abraham?”
He nodded. “They served together in the Vietnam War.”
“Did they?”
“They did.”
“So your story is about the Collins family and some hypothetical dark secret or about the biker gang and their activities?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure yet, but there’s a story here somewhere. I can smell it.”
“I don’t see how you smell anything in this mess,” Raquel muttered, looking around at the cluttered Jeep. There were food wrappers, maps, blankets, camera equipment, various black laptop bags, and an ancient coffee mug with a smiley face sticker stuck to its side.
“You get used to it.”
“You’ll be cleaning it if you want my help,” she argued simply.
“I’ll clean it,” he agreed easily enough.
She turned and looked at him, her dark eyes frank and assessing. “Why do you want my help? Why do you want to write this story?”
He rubbed his forehead, mussing the thinning hair he had left. “My little sister, Jessica, ran away from home when she was about sixteen. We think she hitched her way down to my uncle George’s
place—George Mills?”
Raquel nodded, indicating that she recognized the name.
“He said she came to visit in the summer of 1986 and stayed a day or two before taking off in the middle of the night with about two grand in cash and some jewelry that had been his wife’s. My mother got in touch with him the next day, but the police couldn’t find Jessica. No one’s ever found her.”
Raquel felt a brief sharp tug. Summer. She pushed the thought of her friend aside for the moment, focusing on Brent’s story.
“He didn’t think it was strange that she showed up by herself?”
Brent shrugged. “My uncle is strange.”
“So what makes you think she’s connected to these bikers?”
“When she arrived at the house, she was clearly high on something and sporting a tattoo on her chest, fist-size, that looked like some kind of bird. She said some new friends had helped her get it.”
“A harpy?” Raquel guessed.
Brent nodded. “I showed him a picture. He recognized it.”
Raquel looked back at the street; her mother had disappeared inside a house with boards covering the windows.
“And you think my mother knows something?”
He nodded. “And some of your family and friends.”
“And you want me to help you ask them?”
“Yes, that’s what I want.”
Raquel started to answer, but her attention was caught by a long black car pulling up to the curb in front of the house with the boarded-up windows. The driver was a slender black woman wearing a tailored green dress and low-heeled nude-colored shoes. Her gray hair was twisted into a tidy bun at the base of her neck. She opened a black umbrella and lifted it to cover her hair.
“Gramma,” Raquel whispered softly, forgetting that Brent was there.
She shoved the car door open and started to chase after her grandmother, but Brent caught her.
She shoved him, furious, blinking the rain out of her eyes. “What are you doing?”
He ignored her question, looking around briefly before tugging her to the side of the road, between two of the houses.
Raquel thought about breaking free. She could do it. Even from Ryan’s massive paws.
When they were mostly out of sight of the houses, he switched his grip so that he was holding her hand. “Come on, let’s listen in.”
He led her behind the row of houses, where an alley lined with weeds and trash cans provided an alternate entrance. Rain slipped over broken furniture and beat a steady tattoo on an old paint can, covering the sounds of their steps with a light but steady drumbeat.
He pulled her to the house where her mother had disappeared. Some of the windows on this side were intact, no boards covering them. Raquel shook him loose and took the lead, approaching stealthily, hoping his enormous self could follow just as quietly.
They reached the back window and Raquel heard her grandmother’s voice, but the window was above her head.
Brent’s hands circled her waist and lifted her, gently, steadily, up to the window. He was strong and his arms were steady.
“. . . going to tell her,” her grandmother said.
“What the fuck for?” Another voice. Raquel thought it might be her mother. The snap of a lighter being opened, she thought. The rain was slackening.
“Thought you didn’t want to break little miss’s heart,” Gloria Belle said snidely.
“It’s time. They’ve found some bodies out at that place. They’re going to find out.”
Belle was silent. The hiss of someone taking a long drag. A hacking cough.
“What you want me to do about it?” Belle’s sultry, songbird voice was rough, sullen.
“You could be in danger.”
Belle laughed, and it was rich and lush and full, which made the cough that followed even more disturbing. Several long seconds later, Belle’s voice croaked out, “Like you give a shit, Momma.”
“You’re wrong if you think I don’t, baby girl.”
“Yeah, well, I’m wrong a lot. If that’s all you want, give me my money and get out.”
“I’m going to tell her Charlie was alive all that time. I’m going to tell her about you and him, about the drugs. The police will come calling, honey. Don’t you think they won’t.”
There was the sound of glass on a table, like someone had stabbed out a cigarette and the ashtray has slid across it. “They aren’t the only ones.”
30
ON TUESDAY MORNINGS, Tavey always refreshed the window display in Dog with Two Bones, checked the stock on the shelves, answered emails, and then worked on paperwork till late afternoon. Occasionally she’d have a late lunch with Chris, who held yoga classes on the second floor, or join Sylvia and Bessie for a manicure. She normally didn’t spend all morning writhing in the sheets with Tyler Downs.
She felt a stupid grin float over her face. She was almost glad Bessie had called to say that they weren’t coming into town for their manicure. Raquel’s grandma had sounded worried, mentioning that she wanted to talk to Tavey that evening about something important, but Tavey couldn’t quite manage concern, not right now, not when her body was still tingling from his hands.
Tavey blinked at the time on her computer. It was three o’clock and she hadn’t been able to concentrate all day. She wanted to see him again, wanted to touch him with her lips, her tongue, her hands.
He’d already called her, asking her if she wanted him to come back and stay the night after he took Christie home. She’d forgotten he’d intended to bring Christie back for a training lesson, but she’d said yes so fast it was almost embarrassing. She didn’t care how awkward it was or how much driving that meant for him. She wanted him to come back and stay with her. He’d also mentioned that he hadn’t been able to get a hold of his uncle.
She chewed on her lip, wondering why the thought of him stopping to see his uncle bothered her. She was afraid, she realized, afraid that something would happen to take him away from her.
She usually wasn’t so irrational. There was no reason for her to think that anything would be wrong. But still . . .
Too restless to sit at her desk in her tiny closet of an office, Tavey shut down and closed her laptop, packing it away in her bag and setting it on the small desk that she’d wedged in the corner. A two-drawer filing cabinet below held her employee documents and her most important paperwork. The rest of the room was filled with boxes full of additional stock, bags of premium dog food, a lost-and-found basket with leashes, blankets, and toys, and pictures of some of the rescue dogs that had been adopted out. Sometimes their adoptive parents sent pictures and cards, thanking her.
Grabbing her keys, she locked the office door and stepped into a small hall that separated the grooming salon from the store and turned left into the main retail space.
There were a few customers browsing the dog clothes, one of her regulars, Julie Parsons, was reading the ingredients on a bag of dog food. Since Betty was busy helping someone, Tavey walked over to help Julie; her dog Curtsy had a sensitive stomach. Julie had a hard time finding food that didn’t make the dog sick.
“Good afternoon, Julie. The last dog food didn’t work out?”
Julie, a short woman with curly brown hair and a stout frame, looked up, surprised, when Tavey approached. Her round face creased with surprised relief.
“Oh, Tavey. I’m so glad you’re here. No, it didn’t work out. She just kept throwing it up.”
“Did you bring back the bag?”
“I did. It’s in my car.”
“We’ll exchange that for you. I’ll bring it in if you need some help.”
“That would be wonderful.” There were tears in her eyes as she handed Tavey her keys.
Tavey touched Julie’s arm in sympathy. The woman’s daughter was stationed in Afghanistan and Julie took care of Curt
sy, her daughter’s enormous Great Dane, while the girl was gone. Julie was also going through a divorce, so distraught seemed to be her default emotional state for the past year.
“We’ll find something that’ll work, Julie. Have you taken her to the vet?”
She nodded. “Over and over again. Doc Clive, she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong.”
Rebecca Clive, the old veterinarian’s daughter, had taken over the practice in Fate nearly five years before. The citizens of Fate called her “Doc Clive,” too, and would likely continue to do so even if she eventually married and changed her name.
Julie continued to explain. “I was talking to Circe about it, and she recommended an herbal supplement and a calming charm for Curtsy’s collar, but she hasn’t been there for a few days. I heard someone tell Mrs. Carlyle that her husband came back after all these years.”
Tavey didn’t want to get into Circe’s husband or the possible reasons why she hadn’t opened the store, nor did she feel the need to discuss the merits of calming charms. Quite frankly, if one of Jane’s charms made Julie feel better, the dog would probably calm down as well.
“I’m sure she’ll be open soon,” she reassured the woman. She held up the keys. “I’ll be right back with the food.”
Tavey waved at Betty, indicating with a quick gesture that she would be right back.
Tavey left through the side entrance that opened into the main lobby of the building. There were black-and-white tiles on the floor and three metal mailboxes set into the opposite wall. Switchback metal stairs led up to the second and third floors, where Chris held her yoga classes and had lived until recently. The third floor was vacant now, but Tavey hadn’t yet found anyone she wanted to rent to.
Tavey left through the door at the back of the building. It led to an alley and a small parking area.
She pressed the button on the keys to unlock Julie’s silver Camry and was walking to the car when she heard someone shout, “Get ’em. Get ’em.”
Tavey heard the sound of running steps and turned to look to her right. Yarrow, Schisandra, and Datura were running down the alley as fast as they could, their yoga mats—which they’d strapped to their backpacks—bouncing behind their heads.