by Jane Haddam
Kenny did not say that walking had not kept the weight off for the odd-looking one. “I think she’s right,” he said to Haydee. “I think it’s dangerous. There isn’t a bus or anything you could use instead?”
“It’s not convenient,” Haydee said.
“She means it costs a dollar and a half,” Desiree said. “You wouldn’t believe this girl. She won’t spend money on anything.”
“I’m saving up for a car.” Haydee looked near tears. “And it really isn’t dangerous. It really isn’t. Not as long as we’re together.”
“So what if I get sick?” Desiree said. “What if I get sick and tired? What happens if I can’t come? For God’s sake, Haydee, I’m sick of this already and you know it.”
Haydee looked one or two breaths from breaking down. Kenny watched her carefully. He didn’t really believe that she was only shaken and out of breath because she’d just walked a long way. There was definitely something else happening. He knew all about something else happening.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ll take you home. Tonight, you know, and any other night I’m in class. I try to be in class, you know, so that would be all right.”
“She won’t miss classes at all,” Desiree said. “She comes in when she hasn’t had any sleep or she’s just worked twenty hours straight or any of it. She’s crazy.”
“I don’t miss classes much, either,” Kenny said. He was lying. He missed classes as much as he could. He’d just try not to miss this one anymore. She was really very pretty. “Do you live by yourselves out there, at the trailer park?”
“I live with my mother,” Haydee said. “And Desiree—”
“I live with my mother, too,” Desiree said. “You forgot to tell him about your stepfather.”
“He’s not my stepfather,” Haydee said. “He’s just—around.”
“He’s around and he’s trying to find her money,” Desiree said. “He’s a real prick, believe me. She had twelve hundred dollars saved up the last time and he found it and took it and spent it on beer or whatever. And he knows she’s got money now and he’s looking for it. She won’t even tell me where it is.”
“My money is safe this time, it really is,” Haydee said. Now she wasn’t on the verge of tears. She was just there. Kenny could see the glisten just under her lower eyelids
“I’ll drive you home,” Kenny said. “I will. I can do it after every class. At least you won’t have to go back in the dark.”
Haydee seemed to collect herself. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. That would be very nice. I’d appreciate it.”
“Listen to this bitch,” Desiree said. “She’s changing the whole way she talks. She’s trying to sound like Dr. Penelope London. She thinks she’s going to go get herself one of those PhDs when she’s done here. I mean, as if.”
“There’s no reason she shouldn’t get a PhD if that’s what she wants,” Kenny said. “I mean, people do, don’t they? All the time. And she’s smart. I’ve heard her talk in class.”
“Thank you,” Haydee said.
Kenny didn’t say that he probably would have told her she looked like Jessica Simpson if he thought that that was what she wanted to hear. She really was very pretty. She got prettier the longer he looked at her. And there was that something else he couldn’t put his finger on.
“Okay,” he said. “Come on. We don’t want to be late after you two walked all this way.”
Haydee adjusted her pack on her back and started to walk toward the building beside him. Kenny didn’t think she noticed that Desiree was trailing behind.
2
Shpetim Kika didn’t know what he thought his life was going to be like after the crew had discovered that backpack and that little tiny skeleton, but he was sure it had nothing to do with sitting on a bench in the waiting area of The Elms, waiting for the hostess to seat him.
Of course, Shpetim was not alone. Lora was there, looking decked out for a wedding already. She’d even made him buy her a big white orchid to wear on her best blue dress, and another orchid that he was holding in a box, for when Nderi brought Anya in. Lora was fussing, too, the way she fussed when they were going to have a party. Every once in a while, she poked at him and asked him to stand up.
“You’ll get your suit wrinkled,” she said. “Is that the way you want to meet your future daughter-in-law? With a wrinkled suit?”
Shpetim got up. It was easier to get up than it was to fight with Lora. “I didn’t know she was my future daughter-in-law yet,” he said. “I thought you wanted to look her over.”
The hostess was advancing on them. She had too many teeth, and they were all too big. She smiled the way a shark did.
“Right this way,” she said, grabbing a little pile of menus. “We’ll seat the rest of your party as soon as they arrive.”
Shpetim followed Lora down the long passageway to the big table at the back. Lora had made him call ahead special to reserve it. The table was right up against a window, but instead of looking out on the parking lot, like the other windows did, it looked out on grass and hills and trees. The Elms was the most expensive restaurant in Mattatuck. It was the only restaurant in Mattatuck that served what Lora called “real American food.” By that, she seemed to mean steak and fries.
The hostess with the teeth held out a chair. Lora sat down in it. The hostess put the menus down. Then she said, “Your server will be with you shortly,” and disappeared.
Lora did not pretend to look at the menu. “Of course she’s our future daughter-in-law,” she said. “She’s Nderi’s choice. That isn’t the way we did it in Albania, but we’re not in Albania anymore. And I asked around. She’s a very nice girl.”
“She doesn’t have any family,” Shpetim said.
“Her family was killed by Milošević. Does it matter that they were Greek Orthodox? She will become Muslim for Nderi, that’s enough.”
“I thought you’d have more of an objection,” Shpetim said.
To tell the truth, he’d thought she was going to have a screaming fit. Now here they were, in this expensive place. She wasn’t even leaving the first meeting to chance at home.
Lora picked up her menu. “See if you can’t get me a Diet Coke,” she said. “She’s a registered nurse, this Anya Haseri. Did you know that? A registered nurse. That’s a good job. It brings in good money. It teaches a woman things she needs to know as a mother. And you can go back and forth with it, to stay at home when your children are young. Also, it shows that she’s intelligent, and ambitious. You have to care about these things.”
Shpetim did care about those things. He just also cared about other things. And then there was the—irregularity of it. There should have been a meeting of families. Now there were no families, or only their own, which might be worse. If one of the pair wasn’t going to have a family, it ought to be the groom.
The waitress arrived. She had too many teeth, too. Maybe they only hired women who had too many teeth. Shpetim asked for a Diet Coke for Lora and a mineral water for himself. Muslims were not supposed to drink, but he did have a beer now and then, sometimes with Nderi, usually after work. He couldn’t do that now.
“Then there’s this other thing,” he said. “This thing with the police. Maybe this isn’t the best time to plan a wedding.”
Lora put the menu down and gave him what he thought of as “One of Those Looks.” “What would make it not the best time?” she demanded.
Shpetim took a deep breath. “The thing,” he said. “With the police. Because we found that. That thing.”
“The skeleton of the baby.”
“Lora,” Shpetim said. “Somebody will hear you.”
“Well, I don’t see that it matters if they do,” Lora said. “Everybody knows all about it. It’s on the television stations. They’re bringing that man here, that man we saw on American Justice. That’s his problem. It isn’t ours.”
The waitress came back with the drinks. Shpetim wanted to look at his watch. How long were Nderi and
Anya going to take?
“It’s not that simple,” he said.
“Shpetim, please, it’s just that simple,” Lora said. “What would make it complicated?”
Shpetim thought he really should have ordered a beer, no matter how bad it would look in front of Anya. He wished he had the nature to overthrow the ban entirely and have a whiskey. He looked at the back of his hand on the table. It looked old.
“It was an old skeleton,” he said finally.
“What?”
“It was an old skeleton,” he said again, getting his courage up. “It had been there a long time. It had—the skin and the flesh had rotted away from the bone, it had done that naturally. Do you see?”
“Of course I see,” Lora said. “But I still don’t see why I should care, or why you should. Of course it was an old skeleton. The television said it had been in that backpack for twelve years. Really, you have to wonder what goes on with these people, the way these people live. They have no morals.”
Shpetim tried again. “It wasn’t in the ground there, where we found it,” he said. “It wasn’t there for twelve years.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re working that ground,” Shpetim said. “I’ve been walking over it every day for months—”
“But it was buried. You wouldn’t know if you walked over something buried.”
“It wasn’t buried deep,” Shpetim said. “They found it—they didn’t do anything, practically, and it was right there. And I walked over that ground just the week before. And—”
“And?”
“And it didn’t smell,” Shpetim said. “There. I’ve said it. I’ve been biting my tongue, not to say it to the police. But that backpack couldn’t have been buried in the ground like that for twelve years. It couldn’t have been there a week. And we’re the only ones there. We’re the ones who are on that ground every day. What if one of us put it there?”
“Put a skeleton of a baby?” Lora said.
“Yes.”
“In a backpack that belonged to that man who went missing? That’s what the television said. The backpack belonged to that man who went missing, that they found hanging from the billboard.”
“The skeleton couldn’t have been in the backpack all that time,” Shpetim said. “There would have been—I looked into the backpack and there was nothing in it. No … no—”
“Rot?”
‘Yes.”
“Would there have been rot after twelve years?”
“There would have been something,” Shpetim said desperately. “It didn’t make sense, I’m telling you. What if the skeleton didn’t have anything to do with the man who was hanged? Or hanged himself? Or whatever it was? What if it’s something else? Somebody put the skeleton of a baby in a backpack and then put the backpack in the ground on my building site, and I don’t know that—”
“You don’t know anything,” Lora said. “You’re jumping at shadows. This is our Nderi. That must be the girl. She’s a very beautiful girl.”
Shpetim Kika already knew that Anya Haseri was a beautiful girl. He just didn’t think it was the point.
3
For almost the last week now, Darvelle Haymes’s clients had not been clients. They had been people who wanted to get a look at—even to talk to—the woman who might have killed Chester Morton. Darvelle knew all about those particular kinds of people. She’d met a lot of them after Chester first disappeared. She’d met them everywhere. Once, she’d come home—that was to the old place, the bad place—and found one of them in her living room, crawling around on the carpet with a magnifying glass, like a goddamned Sherlock Holmes.
So far, this time, there hadn’t been much in the way of that kind of thing. There had been the “clients” who weren’t clients, but it had all been very civilized and oblique. She’d go out to show a few houses to somebody who said she was looking for a four bedroom ranch or something new with copper plumbing. Then the questions would start. They were never direct questions. The “clients” never came out and said they knew she was the one everybody had talked about when Chester went missing, or that that crazy Charlene Morton had been talking about on television and in newspapers ever since. They didn’t say anything, just “My my,” and “Oh, dear,” and “Don’t you wonder if it’s getting so it’s not safe to live here anymore.”
Darvelle had gone out on the night they found the body. She’d driven all the way over to Mattatuck–Harvey Community college and parked her car on the grassy side of the road. She wasn’t up near the billboard. By the time she’d got there, half the town had come up. There was no space up near the billboard. Still, she’d been close enough. She’d been able to see the body swaying back and forth in the wind and the guys climbing up to bring it down. Nothing about it had looked familiar to her. She didn’t know why she had thought it would.
Now she turned off her engine and looked up into the rearview mirror to make sure Kyle was pulling in behind her. He had his red pickup truck and not the police cruiser, which was as it should be. He wasn’t on duty, and even if he was, she would have insisted. She didn’t want police cruisers parked at her place, not the way things were. She didn’t want police cruisers anywhere near her place.
She got out of the car and looked around. There were no flyers taped to the telephone poles. The last of those had gone up the day Chester was finally found. There was no crazy old woman sitting on her doorstep. Darvelle kept expecting her to show up there. Threatening. Or something.
Kyle got out of his truck and looked around. “It looks quiet enough,” he said.
“It is,” Darvelle said. “Of course, we’re not inside yet. Maybe she’s in the kitchen waiting for me to come home. Maybe somebody else is. You have no idea what it was like twelve years ago.”
“I was there.”
Darvelle considered this. This was only half true. She had seen Kyle on the night Chester was supposed to have gone missing, but she hadn’t seen him again for months after that. He hadn’t even wanted to talk to her.
She went up to the front door, and opened it, and looked around. She flicked on the overhead lights and waved Kyle in. It had started to get dark earlier again. She didn’t like it when it got dark earlier.
Kyle came in and sat down on the couch and said, “Well?”
Darvelle headed toward the kitchen. “Don’t be like that,” she said. “You don’t know what that woman is like. I wouldn’t put it past her to have this place bugged.”
“She had to get a warrant to get this place bugged,” Kyle said, raising his voice so that it carried to her. “And no judge is going to issue a warrant to a civilian, and nobody in the department has asked for a bug. I’d have heard about it if they had.”
Darvelle got a couple of beers out of the refrigerator. She got a glass for herself.
“People install illegal bugs,” she said. “You hear about it all the time.”
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever those get, they’re not admissible as evidence.”
“They wouldn’t have to be admissible as evidence for you to lose your job,” Darvelle said. “You’re not supposed to be talking to me about this, and you know it.”
She went back into the living room and handed a can of beer to Kyle. He popped the top and drank it.
“You know,” he said, “it’s not like they don’t know that we’re together. They know that we’re together. That’s why they took me off the baby thing—”
“But you were on the baby thing,” Darvelle said. “You went out there.”
“I went out there, we didn’t know what it was. Not really.”
“They tell you it’s the skeleton of a baby in a bright yellow backpack and you don’t know what it is, not really?”
“Yeah, I didn’t know what it was. You told me you’d never had a baby. You’d never had an abortion. You’d never been pregnant.”
“And it’s true,” Darvelle said. “I’ve never been any of those things.”
“I had
no reason to think you’d have anything to do with the skeleton of a baby. Anyway, I wasn’t, you know, much of anything when all that happened. I was still living with my parents in Kiratonic.”
“We were going out.”
“And everybody knew about it,” Kyle said. “That idiot woman told everybody on earth that you’d killed her son because—hell, I don’t know why. Because you wanted to be with me? What sense did that make? We were all about eighteen. If you wanted to dump him and be with me, you didn’t have to kill him. You just had to do it.”
“I did do it.”
“I know.”
Darvelle poured beer into her glass. She didn’t really like beer. She used to like it, but that was before she’d gotten her life together and grown up. These days, she only kept the stuff in the refrigerator for Kyle.
“So,” she said. “What’s going on?”
Kyle shrugged. “They’ve hired this guy. Gregor Demarkian.”
“I know that. I looked him up on the Internet.”
“Then you know as much as I do. They hired him to consult, whatever that means. That’s what he is, a consultant. He’s due up here tomorrow or the day after.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know then what,” Kyle said, sounding irritated. “He’ll consult, I guess. I don’t know how he works. The clerks have been spending all their time making copies of all the files and sending him things. Every once in a while, we get a request for something from forensics. That’s a joke. What does he think this is, CSI: Miami? Forensics, for God’s sake.”
“I thought you got a lot of new stuff for forensics. From the stimulus package, or whatever that was.”
“We did. But we didn’t get the guys to run it. You’ve got to have really good guys. They cost a lot of money. We didn’t get money for that. We going to make something or go out to eat?” Kyle said. “I’m starving.”
Darvelle didn’t want to go out to eat. There would be people in restaurants. The people might not be as polite as the clients.
“I’ll make something,” she said, getting up. “I could use the distraction, anyway. Are you going to be able to spend the night?”