by Unknown
Nowadays the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys was a lot blurrier, and it wasn’t clear to Stella who was winning. She was almost tempted to feel sorry for Goat and his crew; she knew that they spent most of their time on patrol and traffic stops and trying to keep a lid on all the problems at the high school, a job that Stella figured parents ought to be helping out with. Sawyer County didn’t extend down to the lake, so they were spared the job of patrolling the shore, but they got the traffic heading home, often drunk, frequently rowdy, and sometimes belligerent.
And with the mountains of procedural requirements in place these days, Goat and Ian and Mike didn’t have the freedom to police the town the way they saw fit, as Burt Knoll had once done. Hell, they probably spent half their time doing paperwork.
It was a wonder Goat had never been tempted to go freelance himself, like she had.
“Well, Roy Dean likes go to BJ’s after work some days,” Chrissy said. “Him and Arthur and them all. Sometimes things get a little out of hand.”
Goat wrote a few words down. “Bar fights, then,” he said. “Anything lately?”
Chrissy shifted uncomfortably in her chair. A pale band of flesh muffined up over her shorts, her lively top not quite up to the task of covering it, and Chrissy tugged at the fabric ineffectively. “Well, maybe,” she said. “A couple weeks ago he came home scraped up some.”
“How so?”
“Well, a little worse’n some, not as bad as other times.”
“I mean, what was the nature of Roy Dean’s injuries?”
“Oh. One of his eyes was swoll up so he could hardly see out of it, and he got hit in the other one too, but not as bad—it didn’t bruise up until the next day. He did something to his arm where he couldn’t lift it up past his shoulder for a while. He was favoring it, said it hurt to lift anything. Oh, and he thought he was gonna lose one of his teeth. It went kind of loose on him, but you know, that seemed to take care of itself. And of course he was cut up here and there, not bad enough for stitches or anything.”
“So a pretty good dustup, then,” the sheriff said.
“Well, not the worst ever, but bad enough, I guess.”
“And you don’t have any idea who it was he got into it with?”
“No sir. Roy Dean don’t like to talk about that kind of thing much. He just makes light of it. I put Bactine on ’im, gauze and bandages. Put some steak on his eyes, raw, you know, have him lay down and that helps.”
What a fool waste of meat, Stella thought. But at least Chrissy was answering the sheriff’s questions without mumbling too much—and without giving too much away about her marital problems. But if Goat had any sense, he’d be on his way to figuring out that part.
“You know men,” she interjected, joining the conversation in an effort to distract him. “They don’t have much to say when they’re on the receiving end of a beating.”
Oops.
Stella clamped her mouth shut, but the unfortunate remark had slipped out. Goat turned to her and gave her a long, searching look. She had to work hard not to fidget. It was like those blue eyes sent out some sort of low-level laser beam that burned right through her skin.
“Is that right,” he said mildly.
Stella had a thought that she’d had before, and not a very comfortable one. At times it seemed as if Goat suspected a little too much about her sideline business. The sewing machine shop provided as much cover as she ought to need: Stella was there every Monday and Wednesday through Saturday, nine to six; Sunday and Tuesday were her days off, and then she made sure that folks saw her doing errands around town.
Her other business was the sort of thing that could be conducted in the evenings. Late evenings, if need be, which was often the case. Besides, it was word of mouth only—and her clients were very, very discreet. They passed her name along only to their most trusted—and desperate—friends. After all, they had as much reason to keep things quiet as she did. More, most of them.
“So I hear,” she said, cool as she could. She felt little prickles of sweat pop along her hairline but resisted the urge to wipe them away. Fussing like that was a good way to signal you were thinking something you didn’t want to let on—Stella had learned that from the online course.
“What about when men are the ones dishing it out?” Goat asked. Same steady gaze.
Stella shrugged. “Wouldn’t know.”
She looked straight at him and carefully blinked twice while she told this whopper of a lie. That same criminology course had advised that people who didn’t blink at all might be lying, concentrating a little too hard at looking you in the face.
Although this might be a pointless lie. It wasn’t exactly an iron-clad secret that Ollie had taken out his frustrations on her for the better part of her marriage. Neighbors heard sounds coming from the house, friends noticed the bruises, and even the most taciturn talked eventually.
Of course, lots of folks had talked when Stella went up in front of the judge, back when Goat was still just a deputy sheriff all the way over in Sedalia, and it was Burt Knoll who had answered a call from the neighbors and found Stella sitting in this very living room next to the body of her husband, wrench still in her hand.
Every person in town knew that Ollie was a wife beater, and plenty of them were prepared to say that he’d always been a cowardly bully, as well. The judge finally had to turn away the flood of would-be character witnesses who’d swear they’d seen Ollie kick a dog or backhand Stella in the car as they pulled out of the church lot after Sunday services. The judge did allow several to testify they’d clearly heard Ollie threaten to kill his wife.
But Stella was willing to bet that Goat didn’t know everything. One of the holy commandments of small-town living was that newcomers weren’t privy to local gossip, even if it was acknowledged truth. So he probably had to do a little guesswork to fill in the gaps. For all Stella knew, he was still wondering why old Judge Ligett had dismissed the case and sent her home in time for Jeopardy.
“All right then.” Goat turned back to Chrissy. “Can you give me the exact date of this fight?”
Chrissy thought about it for a few moments. “No, I can’t,” she said apologetically. “It was probably a Friday, ’cause Roy Dean does his more serious drinking on Fridays, and I guess it was probably in April, but I don’t know beyond that.”
“Well now, Easter was, let’s see, I believe it was on April twelfth. Was it before Easter or after? You remember that?”
Chrissy put on a look of tremendous concentration, pinching her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger. “Well . . . we went to Easter dinner at Roy Dean’s folks’ place and I don’t remember him being busted up in the face then, so I guess it must have been after.”
“So that leaves, uh, Friday the twenty-fourth, and then you’re into May. May first’s a Friday. You think it was the twenty-fourth?”
More thinking. Chrissy’s brow wrinkled with intense concentration. “Oh, Sheriff, I just don’t know. I’m sorry, sir.”
Goat reached over and patted her knee awkwardly. “That’s all right, hon,” he said gently.
Stella noticed the gesture with surprise. Goat was hardly a warm and fuzzy creature. She had never heard him use any form of endearment before, but maybe Chrissy’s pathetic expression had swayed the stubborn man. A point for their team.
“And you’re sure you don’t know who he might have seen that night?”
“No.”
“Do you think his brother Arthur would have been there?”
“Well, maybe. Sometimes they’d go together, sometimes not. You know how brothers are. Sometimes Roy Dean’d get mad at him for some silly little thing and not talk to him for a day or two.”
Goat scribbled in his pad a little more. “How about since then? Any more fights? Did you overhear any arguments, maybe on the phone?”
“No, nothing like that,” Chrissy said, a little too quickly.
Stella guessed she knew what that meant. Usu
ally women came to her when there had been an uptick in the abuse heaped on them by their men. Sometimes there was a huge confrontation, but more often it was just that the abuse became more and more frequent until the women never had time to recover in between, to convince themselves that it was worth sticking around, that they’d imagined how bad it was, that things would change. In the end, one last straw, usually not so different from those that came before, would be the one that broke the camel’s back and sent them to Stella’s doorstep.
She peeked at Goat and saw he’d knit his eyebrows together in a look of consternation; Chrissy’s quick denial hadn’t got past the man.
Stella also noticed, before she had a chance to stop herself, that Goat had some fine-looking eyebrows: for a man who was out of the hair business on the top of his head, he’d got him some nice thick all-business brows with a rakish slant to them that made him look like the close cousin of a handsome devil.
Goat caught her looking. Winked at her.
Winked! Just when Stella figured she had a handle on the man, he’d go and do something like that, shake her foundations. Maybe that was his goal, to get her flummoxed enough that she’d let her guard down. As Stella blushed, he turned back to Chrissy.
“Any change in his work habits?”
“Well . . . I don’t think so. I mean him and Arthur Junior been helping their dad on a job at Parkade Elementary School over in Colfax. It’s a big job, so he’s been gone regular, and he doesn’t call me during he day less he needs something.”
“Arthur Junior still on that job?”
“I guess.”
“You haven’t talked to him since Roy Dean left?”
“No . . . me and Arthur Junior, we don’t get along so good. I can’t ever think what to say around him. I don’t guess he much likes me.”
Stella narrowed her eyes. That was news to her, news she would have preferred Chrissy save for later. She coughed lightly, trying to signal to Chrissy to put a sock in it.
Goat didn’t seem to notice. “I’ll talk to him. What about their folks? Mr. and Mrs. Shaw. Have you talked to them?”
“No sir. I just usually wait until I see them. We go over for Sunday dinner once a month or so, and his mom and I catch up then. Roy Dean sees his dad on the job most days.”
“But didn’t his dad call around looking for Roy Dean yesterday when he didn’t show up for work?”
“Well . . .” This time Chrissy glanced at Stella before answering. “See, it’s not all that unusual . . . if Roy Dean or Arthur Junior take a day off here and there. . . . They cover for each other, you know? If one of them is feeling poorly or something like that?”
Stella couldn’t help it—she rolled her eyes heavenward. Feeling poorly—yeah, she could guess what that was about. She had plenty of her own mornings when she was feeling that brand of poorly. She, however, went and opened up the shop, hangover or no. She didn’t give herself a day off as a reward for misbehaving the night before.
Goat evidently got the drift. He gave those eyebrows a bit of a workout and cleared his throat.
“I see. Okay, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your boy. Tucker, was it?”
“Oh, yes. Here, I got pictures.” Chrissy sat up straight in her chair and grabbed her purse off the table. She dug in it and found a cheap little plastic flip book and handed it to Goat.
He paged through the book, taking a few moments over each photo. “Well, if he isn’t a little dickens,” Goat said, smiling, and Chrissy brightened.
He handed the book to Stella. Tucker was adorable, a big, chubby-handed baby who was laughing in nearly every picture. He had his mother’s wide blue eyes and silky pale hair.
Stella glanced over at the fireplace mantel, where she still kept one of Noelle’s baby pictures; her daughter had been a big, happy baby too, a good sleeper and nearly always contented.
Funny how they turned out.
Stella turned back to the conversation and noticed that Goat was watching her. “That your daughter in that picture?” he asked.
Stella nodded. She didn’t plan to say anything more on the subject, but to her surprise she suddenly couldn’t say any more, because her throat closed up and her eyes stung. Well, it was no wonder, was it, what with all this talk about missing kids.
Of course, Noelle was twenty-eight now, and she wasn’t exactly missing; she just wasn’t speaking to her mother.
“Tucker’s eighteen months and thirteen days old,” Chrissy said. “I got his fingerprints done at the Home Depot on Safe Kids Day. You want me to go home and get the card?”
Goat snapped his notebook shut and slid his pen into the ring binding. “Well, I don’t see any need for that just now, Chrissy. I don’t want you to worry too much about Roy Dean and Tucker just yet. There’s all kinds of reasons why he might be gone, hear, and you’ve given me lots of ideas for where to look for him.”
“You’re going to start right now?” The longing in Chrissy’s voice tugged at Stella’s heart; the girl was desperate enough to get her baby back that she was eager to launch a hunt for her no-good husband.
“Might as well. I’ll be in touch soon’s I find out anything. You think of something, or hear from him, you call me.” He stood, unfolding his lanky legs like a carpenter’s rule, and took a card from his pocket and laid it on the coffee table in front of Chrissy. After a moment’s hesitation, he laid a second one in front of Stella. “I suppose you might as well have one too.”
He gave her that same long, studied, know-too-much look before he threw in a grin, nodded to Chrissy, and made his way to the door. Stella stood and watched him warily. “Thanks for coming so quick,” she said.
“Anytime.” He shut the front door with care, holding the handle so it wouldn’t slam. Through the screen Stella and Chrissy listened to him start up his department-issue Charger and drive off.
“Well,” Stella said uncertainly. “I guess that went about as well as it could have.”
“He sure is tall,” Chrissy said, “for a sheriff.”
“Why, you known any short ones?”
“Short what?”
“Sheriffs, hon.” Stella’s opinion of Chrissy was taking a turn for the dumber, and she was sorry to see it. Dumb wasn’t going to help find Roy Dean any quicker. Still, it could just be the stress of the situation. Poor girl had a lot on her mind, and besides, talking to Goat did weird things to Stella’s own brain, so she supposed she shouldn’t judge Chrissy too harshly.
“Oh! No. Well, there was Sheriff Knoll, of course, and he was about medium, I guess.”
“Chrissy.” Stella sat back down, scooted a little closer to Chrissy, and leaned in close. “This is important. What you told the sheriff, was that all true?”
Chrissy nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
“Did you leave anything out?”
“You mean, like what he done to me lately? Yes, I guess I did.” Chrissy lifted up her shirt, showed the shadow of a wide black-and-blue bruise that stretched across her rib cage. “He’s got more careful about hitting me on the arms, ’cause sometimes it showed. Done this one with his fist though. And got me right above the butt, too, here.”
“All since that fight in the bar?”
Chrissy sighed. “Yes, these ones . . . they’re taking their time fading. I never do heal up very quick. But before that it kind of seemed like things might be looking up a bit, you know?”
Stella didn’t say it, but she remembered well. How you’d go a week or two, a month, sometimes maybe three with nothing. Start thinking things had changed, that your man wasn’t really so different from other guys, that he’d just come through a bad patch, that was all. That if you were just a little extra careful, a little more attentive, it would be different this time.
Until one day he saw fit to remind you.
“Okay. Well now, look. I want you to go on home and try not to worry, just like the sheriff says. If he calls you, you tell him whatever he wants to know. But then you call me up and tell me about
it, hear?”
Chrissy nodded, only a little wobbly. “I just want Tucker back. I’ll do anything to get Tucker.”
“Me too, sweetheart. And I’m going to work hard to make that happen. We’ll get your boy. But if Roy Dean comes back too, then we’re going to be right back where we started. And we need to make sure that you’re still ready to do what needs done. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re gonna whup Roy Dean’s ass.”
For the first time that day, Stella managed a smile. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s the spirit.”
THREE
By the time Stella pulled into the Parkade Elementary parking lot, the day had moved into asphalt-melting, breezeless midafternoon. The place looked to be locked down tight as a drum, but there were a few cars in the lot, and Stella figured the handful of teachers and administrators still hanging around during summer vacation had themselves barricaded in with the air-conditioning.
Over at the far end of the parking lot was a white pickup with SHAW PAINTING spelled out in a mostly straight line in black stick-on lettering. It wasn’t a bad-looking truck, maybe six or eight years old, with a recent-enough wash. A nice Dee Zee aluminum toolbox was bolted in the bed, and a utility rack had a variety of tools and ladders lashed to it, neat and orderly. Stella’s dad always said you could tell a lot about a man’s character by looking at his workshop. If he didn’t respect his tools, according to Buster Collier, then he likely didn’t respect himself either, and you could forget about him respecting anyone else.
Well, this sure as hell wasn’t Roy Dean’s truck, then.
Stella got out, lugging her water bottle—she was trying to be mindful of staying hydrated in this heat, and she figured the iced tea had worn off by now—and leaving the gun behind in the box. She took a discreet sniff under her arm: not too bad, considering that this was one of those days when you’re sweating two minutes after you get out of the shower. This meeting wasn’t any beauty contest, of course; but the morning’s encounter with the mirror had Stella in a self-conscious frame of mind.