Lost Lake

by Emily Littlejohn

  Bull nodded, his throat too thick with emotion to speak.

  I stood up and sniffed. “Is that homemade bread I smell?”

  Bull cleared his throat and smiled gently. “Laura bakes when she is stressed out.” He patted his belly. “Where do you think this extra fifteen pounds came from? Her specialty is cinnamon bread with raisins and walnuts. Let’s go talk with her in the kitchen. I’d like her opinion of this Carver place.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  It was ten after five when Allison Chang arrived at the police station. I walked down the hall and greeted her. Now that I knew she was pregnant, it was easy to recognize the tiny bump she sported under her striped blue-and-white blouse for what it really was. I took her to the conference room and left her there a moment while I got us a couple of bottles of water from the vending machine.

  When I returned, she was staring at her cell phone, frowning. I closed the door, then took the seat next to her and pushed a bottle across the table.

  “Sorry, I’m trying to respond to this email,” she explained. “It’s for my job.… But your wireless connection doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “What do you do?”

  Ally brightened and set her phone down on the table. “I teach fifth grade at Burnham Elementary in Avondale. We’ve got a few more weeks before summer break, and it’s a crazy time of year for us. There are a lot of things to wrap up.”

  “How long have you taught there?” I didn’t take notes as she spoke, hoping to keep the conversation casual, a warm-up for things to come.

  “Gosh, it’s been seven years now. Sometimes it feels like seventy years,” she said with a laugh. “I love it, though. I can’t imagine doing any other kind of work.”

  A knock on the door, then Finn stuck his head in. “Ally, right?”

  She nodded.

  He entered the room. “I’m Finn, Detective Monroe’s partner. Mind if I sit in?”

  Ally looked uncertainly at me. I smiled. “Finn’s working on Sari’s case with me. It’s best if he joins us.”

  Finn took a seat, and I explained to him that we were just chatting about Ally’s job.

  “And you grew up here, right? You and Sari were what, neighbors?”

  She shook her head. “We met in first grade. We didn’t live close to each other, so our parents were constantly driving us back and forth. We were born three weeks apart at Memorial General. Neither one of us ever wanted to leave this place, even when all our friends were going away to colleges on the coasts,” Ally said. Tears welled in her eyes. “I still can’t believe this is really happening.”

  I nodded. “I can only imagine. Ally, we know about the affair between you and Mac. And the baby.”

  Ally flinched and knocked over her bottle of water, which splashed against the table and all over her jeans and shoes.

  A pink flush crept over her neck. “Damn it!”

  I calmly reached across the table and grabbed a box of tissues. She took a few and dabbed at her clothes. By the time she was done, the flush in her neck had moved to her cheeks. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “My parents are immigrants. They moved here in the eighties, with just a few hundred dollars in their pockets. I’m their only child,” Ally said, dabbing at her eyes with a fresh tissue. “They worked two, three jobs at a time to give me the best life they could. I’ve never wanted for anything. And what do I do? I betray everything they stand for with my best friend’s boyfriend. Who does that? I’m a monster.”

  “No, you’re a human being,” I said, careful not to meet Finn’s eyes. “People make mistakes. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  Ally’s story mirrored Mac’s: the birthday party celebration, a late night out on the town, one thing leading to another. It was when I pressed her on Sari’s knowledge of the affair that their stories diverged.

  “No, absolutely not,” Ally said, shaking her head emphatically. “Sari would never have forgiven me or Mac. So no, no I don’t believe you. Or rather, I don’t believe Mac. There’s no way he told Sari about us.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  Ally shook her head again. “Beats me. Like I’ve said before, Sari had a temper like you wouldn’t believe. She would have had his balls for breakfast.”

  “Mac also said you are planning to keep the baby?”

  “Yes, that much is true. Lord knows how we are going to do this. We’re not meant to be together. But he’ll want to be involved as a father. He’ll be a good dad.”

  Finn asked, “Do you think he could have hurt Sari?”

  “Absolutely not,” Ally said. She answered quickly, but there was the slightest doubt in her eyes and I touched her arm very gently.

  “Ally?”

  Tears filled her eyes, and she nodded. “Mac can be … rough. At first, it was exciting. He knows how to play the bad boy. But sometimes, he takes it too far.”

  “Sex?”

  “No. And he’s never gotten physically abusive, at least not with me. And not with Sari, that I’m aware of. It’s more his attitude. He has a mean streak that he keeps well hidden, but it’s there. A few times, he’s scared me,” Ally said. “You saw the weapons in his house, his gun. He keeps a shotgun in his van, too. He’s … paranoid, I guess is the right word. Sari once told me that Mac’s dad was pretty rough with the family; beating up on his mom, that sort of thing. I guess Mac wants to be able to protect himself.”

  “How did he scare you?”

  “Just, you know, wondering how far he’d go if push came to shove. That sort of scary.”

  “Did he ever threaten you?” Finn’s voice was tight.

  Ally shook her head. “No. Like I said, he keeps the meanness hidden. Overall he’s a really good guy.”

  We talked a few more minutes, but I had the sense that I’d gotten all I was going to get from Ally. I had one final question, and I asked it of her as Finn and I walked her down the long hallway of the police station and back toward the entrance.

  “Ally, you said Sari would have been furious at Mac for the affair. And you also said she would never have forgiven you. Do you really believe that?”

  Ally touched her belly, just once, very gently, and I felt a pang in my chest. I remembered doing the same thing when I was newly pregnant, that universal gesture of wonder and acknowledgment of the new life developing inside me. Though my baby was only six months old, it felt like a lifetime ago.

  “Yes, I really believe that. Sari would have killed me.”

  * * *

  As I packed my things to leave for the day, I couldn’t find my house keys.

  I retraced the steps I’d taken over the course of the day and realized they must have fallen out of my purse, in my locker, during my earlier attempt at a workout.

  It was dark in the locker room. I flipped on the lights and, as the fluorescent bulbs flickered and hissed, a voice cried out in surprise.

  I froze. “Who’s there?”

  Another cry, this one more subdued. Then a shaky voice said, “It’s me. Chloe.”

  I rounded the corner and found her sitting on a bench, her head in her hands. I sat next to her and touched her lightly on the back. “What is it?”

  She sobbed in response, and I glanced around, unsure what I should do.

  I knew Chloe in that way that you often know co-workers: superficially, with enough knowledge to make conversation. In fact, I could list what I knew about her on one hand: she’d been with the department about nine years and had a couple of kids in high school. Her husband, Bud, part-time trucker, full-time bowling alley owner, held the town record for the highest number of hot dogs eaten in one sitting (Cedar Valley Fourth of July Festival, 1997: seventy-three hot dogs) and bragged about it every chance he got.

  “Is it the kids? Or Bud?”

  “No,” Chloe said. She finally raised her head and looked at me. Her cheeks were pale and streaked with tears. Thick gobs of wet mascara clung to her eyelashes. “They’re fine. They’re perfect.”

 
“Do you want to talk about it?”

  Chloe thought a moment, then nodded. “I might as well. I can’t keep going like this. It’s killing me.”

  I waited patiently while she took a deep breath. She ran a hand through her short blond hair and dried her eyes with the hem of her shirt. “It all started in February. You’d just finished the Fuente case and things were quiet in town. I was at the grocery store, minding my own business, when my credit card was declined. It was so embarrassing, Gemma. Bud’s been struggling with the business. He can’t compete with that new arcade in Avondale. No one wants to bowl anymore except that old fart Jethro Dodge and his cronies. Anyway, I guess we’d missed a few payments. No big deal, right? I wrote a check to the market and walked out. Well, next thing I knew, Bryce Ventura sidled up to me as I was loading my groceries into the car. He slipped me a business card and whispered, ‘I’m very good to my friends. Let me know what you hear, Chloe.’”

  She stopped to blow her nose—also on the hem of her shirt—and I felt my stomach drop. I had a bad feeling I knew where all this was going.

  Bryce Ventura’s second clue suddenly made sickening sense: What gets hit and keeps coming back for more?

  Bowling pins.

  Goddamn bowling pins.

  “So a few weeks went by and then there was that terrible fire at the apartment complex on Second Street. Remember that? Thank god no one was hurt. Well, I just happened to overhear the fire chief tell Chief Chavez that they suspected arson. And I thought, well, that’s something the public ought to know about! By then, we’d missed another credit card payment and Bud was getting very nervous. He talked about taking on another job, but he’s already had three heart attacks … anyway, it seemed so innocent at the time. I convinced myself it wasn’t a big deal to call Bryce and tell him what I knew. And wouldn’t you know it, the very next day an envelope with two hundred dollars in it was delivered to my house,” Chloe said. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked a few times. “Two hundred dollars might not sound like a lot of money, but when you’re trying to keep a roof over your head and feed three growing boys, every cent counts.”

  “Chloe, this is not good.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” She choked out another sob. “Why the hell do you think I’m in here, crying like a ninny? I may be responsible for Kent Starbuck’s death. I adore the chief. I’ve worked for the man for years. How am I supposed to look him in the eye and tell him what I’ve done?”

  I sighed. “People make mistakes.”

  She sat up, straightened her shoulders, and wiped away the smeared mascara from under her eyes. “You know what Chief Chavez hates more than anything, right? It’s disloyalty. He can forgive stupidity, carelessness, and arrogance. I don’t think it’s in his bones to forgive betrayal. Do you want to hear the worst part of it all? Bud sold the bowling alley at a nice profit to a developer two months ago. I didn’t need to keep sharing information with Bryce. But I did.”

  So that was that.

  Chloe Parker was our department’s Deep Throat. No, scratch that. Deep Throat had myriad motives for leaking information to Woodward and Bernstein. Chloe had been motivated purely by money. She’d jeopardized investigations and her actions might have led to the death of Kent Starbuck.

  I’d wasted precious time and attention getting dragged into Ruby Cellars’s theories about Lost Lake being a site of some kind of curse or supernatural activity. After all, if I hadn’t set up a trap to catch the leaker, Bryce Ventura never would have tweeted about the diary curse and Ruby never would have called me.

  And I most definitely never would have spent the night at Lost Lake with Finn.

  In hindsight, it should have been so obvious.

  As a dispatcher, Chloe was first to hear of anything going on in town. She had the full run of the station, access to memos, files, all of it.

  Chloe patted me on the hand, reading the disappointment written all over my face. “Thanks for listening, Gemma. I’m sorry for what I’ve done. I’ll be lucky if the chief lets me resign. He may press charges, and if he does, I deserve whatever punishment I get. I know in my heart I’m not a bad person. But I’ve done a bad thing. And to be honest, I’d do it all over again if it meant keeping my family safe and fed.”

  “I don’t agree with what you did … but I understand why you did it. Do you want me to go with you to talk to Chief Chavez?”

  Chloe stood up and shook her head. She paused a moment, then removed her name tag and pressed it into my hands. “I wish you the best, Gemma. I’ve always liked you. Hold on to that, will you? It’s too sad to keep it at home, and I can’t bear to put it in the trash. Consider it a reminder to keep your chin up and your nose clean.”

  I sat in the dim locker room, listening to a dripping faucet, staring at that name tag, for a long time after Chloe Parker walked out.

  Chapter Forty-two

  The following day, Chief Chavez sent out a department-wide email, the heading of which was Personnel Changes.

  I read the short message with mixed emotions. Chavez wrote that Dispatcher Chloe Parker had resigned, effective immediately, after nearly a decade with the police department. He thanked her for her years of public service and shared that he would seek to fill her position as soon as possible.

  The chief left out any mention of the fact that Chloe had been sharing confidential information with Bryce Ventura, and my respect for him, already high, went up another notch. I could only imagine how uncomfortable and awful the meeting between him and Chloe must have been.

  I sighed and tucked her name tag into a drawer in my desk. With any luck, as time passed, the memory of the department’s leak would fade. People would soon forget all about the hard months when we’d looked at one another with suspicion.

  There was at least one person who read between the lines of Chavez’s memo.

  Finn pushed back from his desk and came over to me. In a low voice, he simply said, “Chloe?”

  I nodded and bit my lip. “She confessed to me last night, after I stumbled on her crying in the locker room. She must have gone directly to the chief after that. In the end, she was brave. Brave and apologetic.”

  Finn snorted. “I hardly think she was brave. She was going to get caught sooner or later. It was just a matter of time. The chief should have pressed charges.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, Finn. You didn’t see her face. You weren’t there. She was sorry for what she had done.”

  Finn nodded. “There’s that, I guess. Look, I’ve been thinking—taking a step back, trying to approach this from a new direction. Who benefits from Betty Starbuck’s death and who benefits from Sari Chesney’s death? Setting aside the fibers on Starbuck’s body for a moment—because we can’t be certain that they did come from her killer—let’s assume in the first scenario there’s one killer who did them both and in the second, there’s two killers. And if no one benefits, then we have to assume we’re dealing with a random psychopath who just happened to target two women who worked together.”

  “And we both know that’s a stretch and completely unlikely.”

  “Agreed.”

  We moved to the far end of the squad room. There, an enormous blank whiteboard took up the length of the wall. I grabbed a couple of dry erase board markers. I made two columns, one for Betty Starbuck and one for Sari Chesney. “Let’s run through this, starting with Starbuck. I want only the names and possible motives of the people who also had means and opportunity to kill her.”

  Finn, perched on the edge of a table, nodded. He thought a moment, then started calling things out. As he talked, I wrote on the board.

  He started with family. “Kent Starbuck, motivated by an inheritance and/or revenge, had means and opportunity. He had no alibi and was observed at the scene of the crime. Patrick Crabbe’s alibi didn’t hold up. His motivations were also financial, and/or whatever this psychosis is that he’s experiencing. Moving on to colleagues: we have Larry Bornstein, looking for a promotion; Sar
i Chesney, also perhaps seeking a promotion, or revenge, or she did it as part of some connection to the still missing Rayburn Diary.”

  “Good, this is good. But I don’t buy Chesney for Starbuck’s killer.” I crossed her name out. “Although we won’t ever know for sure, we have to move forward under the assumption that Sari was killed in the early morning hours on Saturday, May fourteenth so she can’t have killed Betty Starbuck.”

  “Okay, that’s fine. Let’s add James Curry to the list as well. His motive is perhaps the murkiest of all the suspects: we know from Larry Bornstein that Curry wanted access to the diary. He could have stolen it, and perhaps Betty Starbuck suspected him, even confronted him. Curry then killed Starbuck.”

  We paused a moment and looked over the names on the board. “Are we missing anyone?”

  Finn shook his head. “I don’t think so. Except … let’s go ahead and add ‘unknown subject.’ I hate to make things even messier, but what if Larry Bornstein and Lois Freeman are in on this together? Maybe they concocted that story about Betty confiding her fears of Patrick to them. Maybe the note Patrick found in his mom’s house wasn’t written about him or his brother. Maybe there is an unknown subject at play here.”

  I exhaled. “You’re right, of course. A lot of our movement in this case has been based on secondhand accounts from unreliable witnesses. Now let’s do Sari Chesney. Both Mac Stephens and Allison Chang had motive, opportunity, and means, either independently or together, to kill Chesney. The affair, the baby … it’s compelling.”

  “There’s the Bookkeeper, too.”

  “Right. What about Sam Birdshead?”

  Finn shook his head. “Sorry, but no. Sam is not a killer. There’s just no way.”

  I chewed on the end of my pen, reluctant to say what I was about to say. Finn sensed it and said, “What? You disagree?”