by J. C. Kenney
The story made my blood boil, as it brought old wounds back to the surface. When I was a junior in high school, I’d almost been sexually assaulted. Sloane had saved me from that nightmare, but the memory still haunted me.
One of the reasons I’d been so eager to leave Rushing Creek was what I’d seen as an egregious divide between the haves and the have-nots. As time went by, things had improved. Luke’s words were a painful reminder of how bad they used to be, though.
“Let me guess.” I circled Star’s name. I really wanted to talk to her. “Nothing happened when she reported the assault.”
“Wise up, Allie.” Rachel shook her head. “Back then? Nobody would have believed her. I’d bet she didn’t even bother telling the cops.”
“And you’d be right,” Luke said.
“Any idea who did it?” Someone with a history of sexual predation would go to the top of my suspect list.
“There were rumors, but that was it. Some people said it was Ronald Spade. He was on the custodial staff back then. Others said it was more likely a classmate, Cecil Burgess.”
“Bobcat Burgess?” I underlined the man’s name twice. He was a prime suspect, indeed.
Cecil “Bobcat” Burgess had been a scourge on Rushing Creek for years. He’d been a big-time partier and small-time dealer, who made his money selling weed to kids in the area. He was also an excellent baseball player. Those talents had kept him out of trouble until he got busted for having drugs in his car while on campus the summer between his junior and senior years. He got kicked off the baseball team but didn’t get expelled.
He wrapped his car around an oak tree at forty-five miles an hour a week after graduation, walking away with only minor cuts and bruises. What was left of the vehicle was a heap of twisted metal and shattered glass. The brush with death must have opened his eyes, because three months later he joined the army and completed two tours in the Middle East.
After leaving active duty, he returned to Rushing Creek, went to college on the GI Bill and got a degree in business. Now, he owned a ziplining and ropes course situated on a few hundred acres west of town.
Two weekends every year, he hosted outings for young people who’d been like him—troublemakers and petty criminals. He told them his story and how he’d been given a chance to turn his life around. He always finished his talk by shaking the hand of every kid in attendance, looking them in the eye, and telling them they could turn their lives around, too.
Bobcat’s story was a compelling one. The bad boy who became a good man. He openly talked about the skeletons in his closet. The question now was whether there were any skeletons still hidden in the darkest regions of his past.
“Valerie had an off-and-on boyfriend, too,” Luke said.
A scratching sound to my right brought my notetaking to a stop. I chuckled as I turned my head in Jeanette’s direction.
“What?” She put her hands up. A small notebook was in one hand, a pen in the other. “Just because I’m not in uniform doesn’t mean I stop being a cop. This information might prove useful. About this boyfriend.”
With a half grin, Luke shook his head. “His name’s Dak Middleton. He plays in the Thursday night softball league. The best first baseman in the league.”
Luke told us that Dak and Valerie spent as much time apart as they did together. “One day, you’d see her hanging all over him. A week later, she’d practically scratch your eyes out if you mentioned his name in her presence.”
“Are you trying to say she was a psycho?” Rachel’s tone was neutral, but her brow was furrowed. I knew that look. She didn’t care for Luke’s veiled slut shaming. Sometimes, my older siblings got crossways with each other. On these occasions, it was best for me to keep my mouth shut and let them hash things out.
“Relax, Rach. All I’m saying is that he thought he was a big shot since he was all conference in baseball. She didn’t like being told what to do.”
“Do you know where to find Mr. Middleton when he’s not tearing it up at the Rushing Creek softball diamond?” Jeanette asked.
“Yeah, at the grocery store. He’s the butcher.”
Given how Valerie died, Dak’s profession was attention-grabbing. Someone who grew up to be a meat cutter likely would have been strong enough, even back then, to strangle Valerie and carry her body into the forest to dump it. I underlined his name.
By the time I left the Pub, I had a solid list of suspects. There was a lot of ground to cover, but a dearth of solid leads. I was moving forward, though. Hopefully, that progress would lead me to some rock-solid answers and not bury me under an avalanche of lies.
Chapter Seven
On my way out of the restaurant, I heard people talking about a disturbance in front of the municipal building. In a classic eavesdropper move, I rustled around in my backpack, pretending I was having trouble locating my keys, to get the scoop.
“There’s, like, a mob,” a young woman said. “They were chanting and waving signs. It was, like, something straight out of the sixties part of my American History book.”
Protests in Rushing Creek happened about as often as a visit from Halley’s Comet. My interest piqued, I dug deeper into the nether regions of my backpack, mumbling about a fictitious pen I couldn’t get my hands on.
“Democracy in action,” someone else at the table said.
“They ought to go home and let the police do their job.” A red-haired man sitting with them drained his beer. “Stirring up trouble doesn’t help anything.”
Stirring up trouble.
As one with a reputation for doing that exact thing, I couldn’t go home without seeing the alleged disturbance for myself. I hadn’t seen, much less participated in, a protest since I’d returned home from New York. At the very least, I could snap a few photos and send them to colleagues in the City to let them know my tiny hometown wasn’t so boring, after all.
The Rushing Creek Municipal Building was located on Harrison Street, a block east of the Boulevard. The police department occupied the northern third of the structure. The fire department was housed in the southern third. The center third was home to the mayor’s office and a few other city departments.
Constructed of red brick and Indiana limestone with an abundance of windows, the structure tried to convey a welcoming, Hoosier Hospitality vibe. With a police car or two always parked in front, it came up short in that regard, but I still gave it an A for effort.
Growing up, I visited the place only a single time. In high school, I won an award for an essay I wrote about women’s suffrage. I went there to accept it from the mayor. My parents attended the ceremony, and between them, the reporter from the Beacon, and the city’s chief executive, I felt like a real-life version of Jo March, storyteller extraordinaire.
Since my return from New York, I’d visited the building more times than I cared to count. None of those trips had approached the celebratory nature of that first visit, unfortunately.
As I pedaled toward my destination, the protestors’ voices became more and more clear. And angry. Shouts of “No justice, no peace,” alternated with full-throated cries of “Who deserves better? Valerie does!”
I rolled to a stop thirty feet from the group. A quick count confirmed it was fourteen strong. Hardly a mob. They ranged from an elderly man who walked with a cane to a little girl with blond pigtails. Two women were wearing threadbare denim jackets with “Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse” printed on the backs, presumably Star and Arwen. Connie wasn’t among the demonstrators, but one familiar face was.
Calypso.
They shook their homemade signs as they marched up and down the sidewalk. When a chant died down, Calypso, brandishing a bullhorn, led the group in a rhythmic clap until someone began a new one.
A white news van from an Indianapolis TV station pulled up near the group. The protesting didn’t cease until a camera operator and a woman in a suit with a microphone approached the crowd’s leader. The group wasn’t simply looking to make a fuss, it
s members were truly angry.
I couldn’t blame them.
Despite my earlier thought about taking photos, my phone stayed in my bag. Taking pictures of them and sending them to New York seemed unseemly. These folks were hurting. They deserved respect, not to be ridiculed by people from the big city.
These people cared enough about a girl who’d been gone for two decades to raise their voices until they were heard. They wanted to let those in power know they were watching. They wouldn’t accept another subpar criminal investigation.
A lump formed in my throat. When I walked in the Women’s March, I’d been one of thousands. I was secure that my anonymity would protect me from any reprisals at the hands of a disapproving employer or person with influence.
These people had no such assurances. Calling out the police right on their doorstep took guts. More guts than I had.
Out of the corner of my eye, the glint from a cop’s badge caught my attention. It was Gabe Sandoval, standing near the entrance to the police station. He was young but had an old soul. His lack of hotheadedness helped make him a good cop. Despite my respect for him, my stomach turned when he began writing in a small notebook.
It didn’t take someone with a brain like Einstein’s to guess what he was doing.
The protestors refused to be intimidated. They had a cop twenty feet away, recording their names, yet they carried on.
Was it an intimidation tactic? Simply a matter of logging who was there in case the information was needed later? What mattered was that it seemed to go against the most basic of American rights. The right to speak freely.
And that made me want to shake the hand of every one of the protestors.
Even though they hadn’t noticed me, I gave the group a salute before turning my bike toward home. Would the protest do any good? In this day and age, everything was recorded. I was willing to wager that even if the report from the TV station never made it on the air, the protest would still end up on social media.
How things had changed in twenty years. It was a lot harder to hide the truth nowadays.
As my legs cranked the pedals, the breeze created by the effort cooled my face. My mind wandered as I cruised the handful of blocks toward home. I knew the streets of Rushing Creek as well as I knew my own name, so I didn’t need to focus on steering the bike. Instead, with a free mind, I let my thoughts come and go. A question popped into my head as I rolled to a stop in front of my building.
What was life like for an eighteen-year-old at the turn of the twenty-first century?
Sure, I could scour documents in the library, talk to people who were around at the time, and search the web. Would that give me the historical insight into the Rushing Creek, Indiana, of two decades ago that I needed? Would I understand and fully appreciate the look behind the curtain I so desired?
What I needed was to understand what Valerie’s thought processes were. Easier said than done. Back then, cell phones were becoming more common, but text messaging was still in its infancy, and smartphones were still years down the road. For all intents and purposes, social media didn’t exist.
Shoot, Internet service in small-town Southern Indiana needed a physical phone line and modem. The god-awful screeching that went on while waiting for the dial-up connection to go through was enough to drive one insane.
“It was a simpler time,” my mom had once told me. Maybe so, but it still must have been a lot harder for the have-nots than the haves.
I hoisted my bike over my shoulder and climbed the stairs to the second floor, wondering whether I could have made a go of it as a literary agent based in Rushing Creek two decades ago. Dad had done it, but his most successful client lived in the same town. The stacks of paper he had to deal with amounted to a tiny forest, too.
And the waiting.
These days, when a client sent me a manuscript, I had it in seconds. My papa had to wait days, sometimes a week if the client lived on the West Coast. All the financials were dependent on the good old U.S. Postal Service, too. Dad had to block out hours each week to take care of receipts and payables. It was work that I did in a fraction of the time. And I had twice as many clients.
No, I wouldn’t have been able to make a go of it then. Good old days or no, I was happy with my life in the here and now.
I set the bike by the door and took a deep breath. No matter how many miles I rode or steps I walked, lugging my steed up the stairs left me winded. While my heart rate slowed, I looked toward the apartment across the hall, where Renee lived. No light came from below the door. Evidently, my landlord was asleep. My desire to talk to her about life two decades ago would have to wait.
Renee Gomez was a true unicorn. She ran the bookstore, owned my building, and kept an eye on Calypso. And yet, despite spending so much time with her, I knew very little about the woman. Sure, I was aware that she’d never married, liked coffee almost as much as me, and that her wardrobe consisted of more shades of black than I thought was possible.
But I didn’t know her like I knew Jeanette or Diane, and I’d only made the acquaintance of those women in the past two years. That made her the perfect person to talk to about life twenty years ago. I could probe her memories without falling into a trap of focusing on Rushing Creek at the time.
Light didn’t appear from underneath the door, even after I made a racket of getting my things out of my saddle bags. That interview would have to wait.
With too many random thoughts running through my mind, I fed Ursi, cleaned out her litter box, then changed into workout clothes.
“I’m gonna spend time with the kickboxing bag, girl. Care to join me?”
My feline bestie stopped drinking long enough to pin an ear back before returning to her water fountain. Evidently, she had no interest in working up a sweat. Which was no surprise at all. At times, the life of a house cat sure had its appeal.
To get the most out of my workout, I liked to listen to hard-driving music. Sometimes I chose a classic rock band like Deep Purple. Other times, a current group like Imagine Dragons fit the bill. For this session, I wanted something different, so queued up the blues artist Samantha Fish. The scorching riffs from her electric guitar and rhythmic thump of the bass propelled me into forty-five minutes of sweat-inducing exercise that left my heart hammering like a drum against my breastbone.
As I worked the bag with my fists, alternating combinations with single punches, I tried to envision Valerie’s life in the time leading up to her disappearance. With no Instagram or Snapchat, there was no social media trail to mine for clues.
Assuming her disappearance was a runaway case, she must have felt alone, with nowhere to turn. If she did feel isolated, she had no social media for connecting with people like her out in the wider world. Then again, that also meant she wouldn’t have been subjected to cyber bullying.
Real-life bullying? Maybe. Especially if Bobcat or Dak had been involved. Admittedly, I only had Luke’s recollections to go on, but those could be easily confirmed. If he was right, it wasn’t hard to imagine either boy getting angry with a girl who refused to play by their rules.
And deciding to make her pay.
I made a mental note to see if either man had come up during the first investigation. If Matt’s dad had failed to give them a close look, the murderer might have been hiding in plain sight all along.
About halfway through the workout, while I was practicing leg kicks, a question popped into my head. It seemed like the key to the whole unfortunate affair.
Why?
I flicked sweat from my brow as I kicked the bag’s midsection. The breakthrough gave me a fuel boost. Everything I’d read had focused on the days immediately before and after she disappeared.
The investigation had revolved around her disappearance. There was no evidence she was abducted, so the police decided she left of her own free will. A right-hand jab to the bag was followed with a left uppercut, a punch I threw when I was angry. Nobody had asked the foundational question.
&
nbsp; Why did she go missing?
I finished my workout with a left-right-left punch combination and a roundhouse kick. I was exhausted yet filled with the euphoria from the post-workout endorphin rush. I lowered myself to the floor and sucked down the contents of my water bottle while I cooled off.
Ursi sauntered in and began licking at one of my ankles. When I told her vet about the odd habit, she said Ursi probably liked the salty taste. Whatever. It seemed weird to me.
“Here. This will be better for you.” I poured the last bit of water from my bottle into the cap and placed it on the floor.
While my kitty lapped at the water, I finished winding down by taking slow laps around the perimeter of the room. I also teased out my latest Valerie-related conundrum.
Had she been pregnant when she went missing? The card from the family planning clinic made it a reasonable assumption. If so, that might explain a lot of things. It also begged a lot of questions. Was she unable to cope with the pregnancy? Who was the father? Had she told the father about her condition? Did she and the father disagree over what would happen to the baby?
I was practically drowning in questions, so I grabbed my case notebook and climbed out the back window onto my deck, more commonly known as the fire escape landing. A gentle breeze cooled my skin as I transcribed the questions as if my life depended on it.
By the time I got to the bottom of the page, I had two dozen issues. I drew a circle around the toughest one because Connie was the only person I could put it to. Did she know Valerie was pregnant? It was going to be uncomfortable, but it had to be asked.
If Valerie was hiding her pregnancy, she must have had her reasons. Everything I’d learned about her so far told the story of a girl who was quiet, a bit on the rough and tough side, and someone you didn’t want to screw over.
On the other hand, she got into a fair amount of trouble. That hardly made her a criminal, though. Even if you put weight behind the fact that she liked to party, which included drinking whiskey and smoking some weed, she probably wasn’t that much different from dozens of her classmates.