Tar Heart (A New Hampshire Mystery Book 3)

by Mira Gibson

  “Slow down,” said Warren. “Benji is resting.”

  “So he is here?”

  Sarah chimed in with, “I haven’t seen him today.”

  Directing his point to Lucas, the older man explained, “He had a late night.”

  “Really?” Leaning forward, he asked, “What was he up to?”

  Sarah turned to her husband and chuckled as if in the throes of an inside joke, which Warren didn’t exactly participate in. He hushed his wife, taking her hand and tapping it. When she sobered up, he said, “I’m not my son’s keeper. What he chooses to do between those four walls is none of my concern.”

  It was starting to sound like the Wythes were under the impression their son hadn’t left the resort all evening so he questioned them.

  “By the sounds of it,” said Warren, “the music and the talking, I don’t imagine he went anywhere.”

  “The roads are terrible,” Sarah added, flexing her face into a frown and widening her smoky-eyes as if telling the scary part of a children’s story.

  “Do you know who he was talking to?” Lucas was poised, pen-tip to notepad, eager for a name, but Warren only opened his hands, at a loss.

  “His business is his business,” he stated.

  Frustrated, Lucas held his breath and when he let it out, he delivered the news that no in-laws ever wanted to hear, “Rose is dead.”

  Warren narrowed his eyes at Lucas and his mouth formed words that wouldn’t come, while beside him Sarah furrowed her brow confusedly at her husband as if waiting for the translation.

  After a long moment, Lucas said, “I’m sorry” to break the silence.

  “How did she die?” asked Warren.

  Relieved that the hard part was behind him—disclosing the ins and outs of a crime didn’t unnerve him quite like delivering the initial blow—he told them Rose had been shot, her body retrieved from Squam Lake, and that it was possible the shooter had intimate knowledge of the house, all the while Sarah began trembling and Warren pressed his mouth into a hard line as though he might get sick, though he had his wits about him enough to grip his wife’s hand.

  Another stunned silence ensued. The first person to speak was Warren. “You think my son did this?”

  Sarah’s mouth drifted open, catching up to her husband’s point. “That’s why you need to speak to Benji?”

  “I need to speak with Benjamin because he was married to Rose and I’m looking for leads here. Now if you wouldn’t mind waking him up, I’d appreciate it very much.”

  He hadn’t meant to take a tone and would’ve felt badly if it had registered, but the Wythes seemed to be drifting off into another dimension.

  “If you could please tell me his room number,” he pressed, rising to his feet and tucking his notepad into his pocket.

  Sarah’s voice was wind over reeds as she said, “One-twelve.”

  “The key?”

  “Can’t you knock?” she asked him, appalled.

  Warren met his gaze. “The front desk. Tell Ashley she’s fired if she asks questions.”

  Lucas walked with a sense of urgency, retracing the maze Sarah had led him through. When he reached the lobby, arching around the front desk, he was winded. He slapped his palm on the counter and Ashley rushed over to tend to him.

  “Key for one-twelve, now please.” She cocked her head questioningly so he added, “Police investigation,” preferring to throw his own weight around as opposed to Warren’s.

  After she fetched it, he snatched the key out of her hand, thanking her, and took off. But after three steps he realized he had no idea where he was going.

  Ashley must have had a genuine knack for working in the service industry, because as soon as he doubled back, she offered, “Down the hall the way you came, sixth door on the right.”

  He thanked her again, this time with a curt nod and started off.

  Finding the room easily, Lucas knocked on the door then listened hard, but heard nothing. He knocked again, stating, “Mr. Wythe? It’s the Center Harbor Police, open the door.” But again he was met with silence and suddenly realized that the bad feeling worming its way through his gut wasn’t from agitation his killer could slip away, but that something was wrong.

  Refusing to waste another second, he fit the key into the lock and let himself in.

  The smell hit him first. The unmistakable tang of drying blood, sharp and metallic—hot iron—stung his nostrils. The room was shadowy, its lights off, the curtains drawn where the headboard of the bed sat flush beneath the window, but Lucas could still make out the shape of the bed, the comforter bunched over the footboard.

  He found the light switch near the doorframe and flipped on the overheads. A soft glow filled the room, but the body wasn’t apparent. Edging deeper into the room, he neared the foot of the bed and a dark stain on the carpet in front of the bathroom came into view. Quickly, he sidestepped and saw the body—face down, naked but for boxer-briefs, one arm resting by his hip, the other stretched above his head or what was left of it. He had been shot in the back of the head where the nape met his hairline.

  Lucas crouched, examining the entry wound.

  A cell phone on the nightstand flashed, catching his eye. He angled over the body, grabbing the cell. There was a missed call from a 603 number. Eyeing the screen, he noted the call was time stamped just after four in the morning and there was a corresponding voicemail message.

  Knowing the message would require a passcode to play, he swiped his thumb over the LCD screen and selected the number. He hit Send, initiating the call, and hesitantly lifted the phone to his ear as he backed away from the body.

  A female voice came through, her tone youthful yet bristling with suspicion. “I thought you were dead.”

  Chapter Six

  Mary Cole kept her head down watching snow melt off her boots and form a glassy puddle on the buffed floor. She wasn’t so much standing as she was hiding beside a ceramic pizza chef—its thick eyebrow cocked jauntily, mustache arching with its smirk, the pepperoni pie on its palm looking stale and faded from the corner of her right eye. The American flag on her left was doing a decent job of concealing her from the customers that were scattered throughout the pizzeria, but she still felt anxiety buzzing through her bones as badly as the neon sign over the counter—PENIS!

  She stared at the word and realized the majority of the sign’s letters had burned out. It was supposed to read, PIES IN THE SKIES.

  Her name should’ve been called by now. She needed to not get caught, though it was unlikely one of her teachers or a school administrator would wander into Tony’s during fifth period. Still, she couldn’t afford to get in trouble again, not for ditching. Hannah and Cody could only dole out the same lecture so many times before they would be forced to leap to extreme measures, ground her completely, or worse... If they found out about the real shit she was up to...

  She crept towards the counter, shaking her platinum hair into her face like a clumsy crook too conspicuous to go unnoticed, and cleared her throat, not that doing so got the trucker’s-delight behind the cash register to lift her eyes. She was too busy popping her gum and making the sauce stain on her uniform worse by rubbing at it.

  “Yeah,” she said without looking up from her pointy chest.

  “How long for my pizza? It was a small, olive for Cole.”

  Turning over her shoulder, the girl barked, “Cole?” and Mary flinched along with the rest of the customers. “It’ll be right out.”

  Behind the girl, a cook in the back slid a wooden peel into the industrial oven, wedging it under an olive pizza that looked like Mary’s. When he drew it out, he shot her a wink and she scowled through her stringy, blonde locks, hoping she hadn’t slept with the guy.

  Soon the box was on the counter. Mary snatched it and quickly padded through the restaurant, glaring through her eyebrows and holding her breath that she wouldn’t have the luck of exiting in unfortunate timing with the school principal or Mrs. Keller or the Phys. Ed coach s
topping in for a spontaneous slice.

  The Audi was idling with its bumper pitched over the concrete parking-stop since her best friend had hit the brakes too late, adding yet another chink to the dimpled eyesore. Behind the steering wheel sat Roberta, one hand cupping her cell to her ear, the other draped over the top of her head, which was tilted towards the window. Mary guessed her friend didn’t appreciate what she was hearing, but the smug curl at the corner of Roberta’s mouth, the distinct arch of her brow, begged to differ. She was intrigued if not sparring.

  Clamping the pizza box between her hand and hip, Mary popped the passenger’s side door open, having gingerly squeezed the handle then given it a jiggle when the latch grazed the sweet spot—the quirks of this car were never ending.

  As Mary lowered in, keeping the pizza box level so the cheese wouldn’t shift over the crust, Roberta ripped her phone from her ear, hung up, and dropped her cell into the cup holder on the dash then began jiggling the stick shift in Neutral.

  “You got off fast,” she commented, resting the box on her thighs and fastening her seatbelt.

  “Don’t I always?”

  “Who was that?” Mary flicked her eyes at the cell as if clarifying.

  Instead of answering, Roberta reversed out of the parking spot, swinging around and actively checking each and every mirror. Despite her effort, the rear bumper clipped the grill of a truck, jolting the girls on impact.

  “Damn thing came out of nowhere,” said Roberta, throwing the Audi in First and punching the gas, as Mary looked on, a wry grin spreading across her face. She couldn’t wait to get her license. “It was no one,” she added as a footnote after darting into traffic. When she hung a confident left, veering between a truck and a station wagon, the latter of which skidded to a stop, someone leaned on their horn.

  “Christ, Roberta, who taught you how to drive?”

  Her friend shot her a sideways glance that landed like an inside joke. “Was it busy in there?”

  “Not too bad,” she said, watching the road open up, the town center vanishing behind them, snow-kissed trees—naked yet adorned with icicles—thickening just beyond the shoulder. “I hate going in during school hours.”

  “I couldn’t go,” she said, innocently shrugging. “I already called in sick for my night shift.”

  “That sign says penis, you know.”

  Roberta threw her head back, letting out a cackle that both startled and thrilled Mary.

  Most of the time she had a good read on Roberta and this was one of those times. “You blew out those lights?”

  “It took me like, I’m not kidding, two hours,” she confessed.

  “Jesus.”

  “What?” she sang, leaning forward and wiping her sleeve across the condensation as it formed on the windshield. “They left me alone for two hours. Mopping tomato sauce off the floor got boring.”

  “No one noticed?”

  “It’s only been a few days,” said Roberta.

  “Still.”

  Sly as a fox, she settled her angular eyes on Mary. “Ain’t no one looking up around here but you and me.”

  Mary eased at the thought and found Roberta’s hand, lacing their fingers together.

  The pizza box was scalding her thighs so she wedged her free hand under it. Roberta stepped on the gas, accelerating and merging onto the Daniel Webster Highway, which would take them south along Squam Lake, eventually hooking around the Meredith Bay and down to Lake Winnipesaukee where Roberta had promised her a special gift—their secret.

  Roberta was beautiful—voluptuous and emaciated in the same breath, porcelain skin, angular features, cat-like in her ferocity, fearless and dangerous because of it. Nothing could touch her, she liked to say. The worst already had. Strange logic that rang true for Mary as well since she had survived a similar past—endless nights spent shaving her mind down to a sliver, walling off, detaching from her body so she wouldn’t have to feel what was being done to her, the harrowing fallout to recover, days filled with sucking on beer cans in hopes the shadows swallowing her heart wouldn’t get the rest of her as well. Soul-murdering, that’s how it had felt. It had made her hollow and nothing had filled her—not her father getting locked up, not the year of therapy she’d struggled through sitting on a couch beside her mother and trying to wrap her head around the woman’s epic blindness that so many horrors had unfolded in their house without her so-called knowledge—nothing on God’s green Earth had filled her until the day she met Roberta King.

  Mary had been lurking in the alley behind Tony’s Pizzeria, the flickering streetlight overhead causing her nerves to ratchet up. She had just moved to Center Harbor from Wolfeboro, before that it had been Holderness from Gilford, so many boxes, always on the move, picking up right after settling down, precinct to precinct as though Cody had some kind of aversion to putting his roots down—always on the hunt for the next Kendra Cole case. The thing of it was, New Hampshire didn’t have that many brutal crimes.

  She had only wanted a six-pack, just a few beers to tide the night over. It wasn’t simply a craving. Those she could ride out cooking dinner or trimming Hannah’s hair, styling those brown locks around her half-sister’s face that looked nothing like hers except for the eyes—blue and screaming. That night she had felt like she was being skinned alive, raw and furious, despairing and desperate, sinking so low she feared there was no bottom, only an endless abyss she would never be able to crawl out of.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about Candice.

  She had needed a little help—alcohol.

  Having gotten a lead on a senior who checked out, Mary had shown up behind Tony’s right on time. She had waited eagerly at first, ready to make the trade. As the minutes ticked on, she began kicking a rock, heart plummeting all the while. Soon it was clear the kid wasn’t coming and she dropped to her knees, curling into a ball and praying for death to take her in the form of a car peeling down the alley.

  Instead, Roberta had stormed out the back door of Tony’s.

  Mary hadn’t died that night. She had been brought back to life.

  Roberta had driven her to a liquor store where she said the clerk never checked IDs. After getting two cases of beer, they'd sat on the hood of her car, talking and drinking and gazing up at the stars. When Mary got shitfaced and began wailing, Roberta hadn’t recoiled or called the night off, but wrapped her arms around her, holding her tightly and saying, I know.

  Mary snuck a glance at Roberta, as her friend squeezed the brakes, yanking the steering wheel one-handed and pulling down a snowy driveway. Roberta was so much like her that Mary just plain didn’t know where she ended and her friend began. The thought made her smile.

  Slowing to a stop in front of a Colonial house that hadn’t been lived in for upwards of six months—its For Sale sign, warped and spray painted with red graffiti that was far from artistic, pitched crookedly in the deep snow—Roberta said, “Fucking hope the car don’t get stuck.”

  “Wicked hope the car don’t get stuck,” Mary chimed in, flattening the vowels with a thick, New Hampshire accent.

  Roberta laughed, giving it a shot then told her they sounded terrible as she climbed out into the deep snow, her purse hanging over her shoulder.

  They started through the drift, veering away from the empty house, the owners of which had moved down to Manchester so they could easily visit their son who had been incarcerated for manslaughter—a sad story that Roberta only talked about when drunk. Small State as it was, Quinton Avery had been locked up in the same facility as Mary’s younger sister, Candice, but Mary didn’t let herself go there, as she stalked towards the shed.

  It was their place, the secret they shared, though the more time Mary spent with Roberta, and the longer they knew each other, the clearer it became that Roberta had her own secrets.

  Considering what they had been involved in, she feared to imagine.

  “It’s fucking freezing in here,” said Mary, following her friend into the shed. She latched t
he shed door, set the pizza box down, and huddled on a milk crate, figuring she would soon get the shivers, teeth chattering and fingers turning numb.

  “This’ll warm you up,” she stated, yanking a space heater from the corner, plugging it in, and getting it whirring. Then, dumping her purse upside down, she added, “And so will this.”

  Dozens of cocaine filled baggies began falling, plopping and shifting where they collided with one another on the floor.

  Mary beamed a big smile at her friend. “This is my surprise?”

  “Happy birthday.”

  Roberta crouched, scraping a second milk crate across the floor until it sat flush against Mary’s. When she sat, she wasted no time fishing a square mirror out of her bohemian coat.

  Mary pinched one of the bags off the floor and eyed it closely, working the powder between her fingers and feeling the fine grains through the plastic.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “You know where I got it,” said Roberta, brushing her off in favor of tapping a heap of powder onto the mirror now resting on her lap.

  Mary watched her for a beat, as Roberta used her index finger to stroke the powder into a thick line. “I don’t like him.”

  “You don’t have to like him,” her friend countered airily as if she wasn’t being confronted.

  “I don’t like you going there.”

  “There’s no reason to go there anymore.” Roberta met her gaze and offered her the mirror, but she didn’t take it.

  Instead, Mary studied her, but couldn’t make sense of her easy expression. “So... what? You’re not going to sneak off to the resort anymore?”

  Roberta gave her a mild frown, her brows drifting upwards, relaxed about shaking her head, and seemed so reserved in her watery agreement that Mary was entirely thrown.