by Unknown
“It’s just what we did a couple times back when Roy Dean was still living at the house and he came home unexpected. I guess Pitt was still in the habit.” Chrissy laid a hand over her heart. “Pitt’s just a little sweetie, but he ain’t the most ballsy man. He don’t like confrontation.”
Stella didn’t bother to point out that desperation occasionally moved even un-ballsy men to act. “Was his car gone when you went outside looking for Tucker and Roy Dean?”
“He didn’t have no car. He had a buddy drop ’im, and he was going to just walk back home. He’s in those apartments over by the office park.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange,” Stella mused, “that he didn’t call you later that day?”
“Well, I ain’t got a cell phone.”
“Or stop by? Just to make sure you were okay?”
“It wasn’t like that, Stella,” Chrissy said, crossly. “It was just casual.”
It sounded to Stella like Pitt might not have considered it nearly as casual as Chrissy did.
“I’ll go talk to Pitt,” Stella said.
“Suit yourself,” Chrissy said. Her mood was darkening by the moment. “But it’s a waste of time, you ask me. It’s Roy Dean we got to find. Maybe we ought to see what the sheriff thinks. Get up a search party or something.”
“That’s something to think about,” Stella said, trying to hide her exasperation.
“But Stella . . . about them pictures. Can you do something?”
“Well, are they in digital format? Did Pitt put them on his PC? Does either of you have an Internet connection?”
“Ain’t neither of us even got a computer, Stella. And they was Polaroids—Pitt likes watchin ’em develop.”
“Well then, I wouldn’t worry too much about them getting online. Listen, the pizza’s going to be here in a minute. Why don’t we eat—it’ll help us think clearly.”
As if on cue Todd came bursting through the door, trailing a young man in a Papa Martino’s T-shirt who was carrying a suspiciously large thermal bag.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Todd said. “I ordered an extra pizza. I was hungry. You need to pay him. Don’t forget the tip, okay?”
By the time she got the kitchen cleaned up and Todd sent home and Chrissy settled into the guest room, Stella could sense the prickles of a second wind starting along her spine.
Part of it was the whole bar thing, of course. Stella couldn’t help it: she loved bars, loved the way folks came in and shed the first three-quarters of their day and settled into the final stretch, some of them weary, some of them desperate, some on the make, some—occasionally—even happy. Stella loved to sit on the sidelines and watch the squabbling and the mating rituals and the jealousy and the preening, the lively bubbling of humanity’s stew.
She’d missed so much; Ollie never wanted her to go out at night. With his crazy jealous streak he didn’t even like to let her wait on the very occasional male customer who came into the sewing machine shop. Since he died, Stella had decided she had some catching up to do, and she took herself out a couple times a month.
Tonight was a work outing, of course, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little fun. She’d told Chrissy she was going to stop by Lovie Lee’s divorce party, just to be polite. Lovie wasn’t a client; she and Larry Lee had just grown tired of each other. Larry’d been living in the garage, which he’d fixed up with a waterbed and a couple of weight machines, for a few years. They were only making it official because Lovie had got tired of parking on the driveway. She wanted her garage back.
The party probably would have been fun, but duty came first.
Chrissy hadn’t questioned Stella’s lie—which Stella had told only because she didn’t want to have to explain why her hunt for Tucker was starting out in a bar. She was afraid Chrissy might bring up the search party idea again. But deep in her melancholy funk, the girl just nodded and said she’d be fine, that Stella should go ahead and have a nice time.
Stella pushed the hangers back and forth in her closet, finally settling on a jazzy little teal number, a tank top with straps wide enough to cover her bra, which was a serious piece of equipment with a big job to do. The top had beads sewn along the neckline, a little sparkle to set off her earrings, which were a dangly crystal pair she’d got out of the Avon catalog Gracellen sent her.
She squeezed into her favorite jeans, which had a squiggly row of stitching on the butt pockets and molded everything into a tight-looking, if generous, package. She added slip-on black sandals with just a bit of a heel, sprayed herself with White Diamonds, and she was ready to go.
Stella peeked in on Chrissy, who was reading a copy of Redbook with the sheet pulled up to her neck. The fan in the window cranked along on high, cooling the bedroom down to a tolerable temperature.
“You gonna be all right, sugar?”
“Yeah, I guess. But every time I think about Tucker . . .” Chrissy’s lips wobbled, and Stella was afraid she was going to bust out crying again. Earlier, it had taken half an hour to get her calmed down, and Stella needed to get on the road.
“Look here, honey,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and patting Chrissy’s arm. “I’m doing everything I know to figure out where they’ve got to. And even if Roy Dean’s a son of a bitch, you know he won’t do nothing bad to Tucker.”
Chrissy nodded, and Stella prayed hard she had just spoken the truth.
“Sheriff Jones is good at his job,” she continued. “He’ll be looking in the places I can’t. And tomorrow, we’re going to keep you busy at the shop, so now you’ve just got to put it out of your mind, and get some rest, right?”
Putting Chrissy to work had been one of Stella’s better ideas: not only would it give the girl something to do, but it would free Stella up to work on tracking down Roy Dean and Pitt Akers. She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but as the hours ticked by she was getting more and more worried about Tucker. Get a bunch of stupid assholes together and the first things they were liable to let slide was the women and children. At least women had a fighting chance.
“Thank you,” Chrissy snuffled. “I just couldn’t go back home.”
Stella understood; having to go back to the empty house, with all of Tucker’s toys on the floor, his crib, would just make her crazy. Chrissy worked part-time at an in-home day care in her neighborhood, and she didn’t want to go to work either, and Stella guessed she could understand that too. She wouldn’t be much good to the other kids, frantic with worry. A quick call to Chrissy’s employer had straightened that out.
Stella headed first for the apartments across the street from the Prosper Industrial Park, a sad L-shaped complex of prefab buildings that had never been fully occupied in its ten-year history. The apartments had been there even before the industrial park was built, and hence had time to accumulate a nearly full complement of divorcées and down-on-their-luck entrepreneurial types and drifters and general underachievers—anyone who found the idea of a cheap, boxlike one-bedroom apartment with drafty aluminum windows appealing.
She found Pitt’s place easily enough in the last of the evening twilight. He had a ground-floor apartment on the back side, which enjoyed a fair amount of privacy on account of a bank of Dumpsters. After knocking and trying the door, Stella set down the Tupperware spaghetti tote she used to store her lock tools and shone her mini Maglite in the crack between the door and the frame, where indifferent construction had left a hair’s-breadth gap.
“Oh, didn’t your mama teach you nothing,” she breathed—Pitt hadn’t used the deadbolt. Stella was a little disappointed at the lack of a challenge; she’d spent a few recent slow afternoons at the shop making herself a set of shims using tin snips and some rinsed-out Bud cans, and she was eager to try them out.
Still, there were advantages to keeping it simple. Stella slipped her old Macy’s card—long since canceled but kept for occasions like this one—into the door jamb. Then she slid a pair of quart-size Ziplocs over her hands a
nd let herself in.
She stood for a moment in the living room, listening for sounds and glancing around. The door to the bedroom was open, and the cramped kitchen was visible through a pass-through. A shape darted past her, nearly giving her a heart attack, but as it bolted under the couch Stella realized it was just a cat.
She snapped on the lights. Illumination did little to improve the surroundings—scuffed white walls, dingy gray carpet, tired plaid sofas—but at least Pitt kept the place clean. There was no cat smell; Stella even detected a faint scent of Clorox. “Might oughtta have kept this one, Chrissy,” Stella murmured as she started looking around. “Knows how to clean.”
If she’d planned on any serious digging, she would have splurged and used a pair of disposable latex gloves from the box she kept under her bathroom sink, but they were so danged expensive compared to the Ziplocs. Worrying about fingerprints was probably ridiculous anyway; Stella highly doubted whether the crime scene techs would be coming down from the county seat in Fayette anytime soon to go looking for Tucker. Still, anything worth doing, as her dad used to say, was worth doing right.
There was little to see. Pitt, it appeared, had been leading a monklike existence since divorcing Chrissy, aside from his Polaroid collection, which Stella found in an envelope on his bureau. One glimpse convinced her she didn’t need to see any more of that, but she slipped the packet into her pocket anyway—one less thing for Chrissy to worry about.
Other than the racy photos, scouring Pitt’s place was about as exciting as watching paint dry. A couple of Costco uniform shirts hung in the closet. Tightie whities and V-neck T-shirts and over-the-calf athletic socks were neatly folded in the drawers. Pitt owned an impressive collection of household cleaners—409 and Windex, among other things—but nothing seemed out of place.
As she turned to leave, the cat appeared, one cautious paw at a time, from under the living room sofa, and stalked imperiously into the kitchen, where it lapped at a full water bowl. Watching the cat, Stella noticed something she’d missed earlier; there was not one but two very full bowls of cat food set out on a vinyl place mat on the floor. One had a small dent, a few of the little orange triangular nuggets having spilled to the floor, but the other was mounded high and undisturbed.
“Looks like your master wanted to make sure you had plenty to eat,” Stella said, “while he was away. Where’d he go, anyway?”
No response. Typical. Stella left without saying good-bye, having confirmed that she was still a dog person; she wanted a pet that interacted a little.
So it looked like Pitt had left town for a while. Interesting.
Stella returned her spaghetti box to the back of the Jeep and hit the road, thinking that in the morning she’d have to try to find out where Pitt had gone. She made the drive to BJ’s Bar with the window rolled down, despite the damage it did to her well-sprayed hairdo. Sometimes you just had to feel the wind on your face.
On her way from the parking lot to the front door, she patted her hair back into place and hitched up her bra straps, getting everything settled where it was supposed to go.
BJ’s wasn’t a place Stella visited unless it was in the line of duty. It was a little rough even for her. It wasn’t that she was afraid; get the meanest cuss drunk, and his reflexes would go to hell and he’d be no match for her, especially with the Raven in her purse. It was just that it wasn’t all that much fun to hang out in a place where optimism was in as short supply as overtime pay, tempers were thin, and old grievances lay thick on the ground.
Things went quiet when Stella walked in. She ignored the pool tables at the far end of the long, narrow room, the few square wooden tables where customers sat in twos and threes, and headed for an empty stool at the end of the bar near the bathrooms.
BJ’s wasn’t much to look at. You could tell before you put a hand on the bar or a table that it would come away sticky. Some of the wooden chairs didn’t match, and the bar stools were popping their brass studs and losing the padding on their vinyl seats. The walls were decorated with an assortment of titty posters and neon beer signs, some lit, some busted. A single framed softball photo gave evidence that at some point Big Johnson had gotten it into his head to sponsor a team, an event that must have caused the league a fair amount of consternation.
Big Johnson himself wandered down the bar to greet Stella. There was a waitress on duty as well, but she was on the floor with a tray, plonking down pitchers and trying to avoid having her rear end pinched any more than was necessary.
“Stella,” Big Johnson said, leaning his muscular, hairy forearms on the bar in front of him. Big Johnson had moved to town and bought this place after serving in the first Iraq dustup, and he already had his nickname then. Naturally there was some talk of whether it just referred to the fact that he was a solid 240 on a six-three frame, or whether there were further reasons, but if he’d shed any light on the question, Stella hadn’t heard about it.
She might not have minded finding out for herself, actually. But there was that delicate issue of dating people in the workplace—and as long as Big Johnson kept attracting the kind of clientele that was hanging around the joint now, the bar was likely to continue to be on Stella’s professional rounds.
“B.J., good to see you. Been a while.”
“Yeah. Last time you were in here, lessee, you dragged out one of my best customers, and he don’t come around no more.”
Stella felt herself blushing, but she doubted he could tell in the dim light.
“Yes, well—I just wanted to give him his Christmas card. Forgot to mail it and I’d been carrying it around in my purse. You know how that goes. Far as him coming around here . . . well, I hear he’s not partying much these days.”
Big Johnson gave her a ghost of a smile and a twitch that might have been a wink. “Aw, we ain’t missed him much. What’re you drinking tonight?”
“Let’s see.” Stella pretended to think it over, tapping her nose with her forefinger and glancing along the shelves behind the bar. “Well now, I guess you better make it Johnnie Black with a Bud back.”
Big Johnson went off to get the drinks, and Stella glanced down the row of drinkers at the bar. There he was, and she didn’t even have to go chasing him down: Arthur Junior was keeping company with a brassy redhead, the two of them giggling over something, their noses almost touching. Interesting. Last Stella heard, Arthur Junior had hooked up with a gal from Ogden County, but she hadn’t been a redhead. Oh, well, he was known to have quite a few smooth moves; probably the reason Gemma Shaw despaired of having any grandchildren off him anytime soon.
Any legitimate grandchildren, that is.
Big Johnson came back with the drinks and set them down in front of Stella. “You know,” he said, clearing his throat and looking somewhere over her shoulder, “I don’t believe I ever got your Christmas card either, now that you mention it.”
Stella raised an eyebrow. Could it be? Was Big Johnson actually flirting with her? Her stomach did a little back-and-forth slide, and she felt heat rise to her face. The light was mercifully low: one of life’s funny truths is that the worse the lighting in a bar, the better a lady tends to look.
“Oh.” Nice—idiot, she scolded herself, but couldn’t for the life of her think of what else to say.
“Yeah . . .’course, I didn’t send any myself, this year. You know, the holidays snuck up on me and what-all, had my brother’s family come stay . . .”
Big Johnson trailed off and cleared his throat again, backed off the bar, and still didn’t look her in the face.
“What I mean to say, though,” he said, grabbing a rag off the sink and taking a wild swipe at the stretch of bar in front of him, “was that if I did send cards, I woulda sent you one.”
Then he was off, practically jogging down the bar to where customers were hollering for him.
Well. Dang. Now that was interesting. Stella took a biggish sip of her whiskey and then a nice long cool drink of her beer, the foam tickling her up
per lip. There was something going on with B.J., that was for sure.
It was nice. But it wasn’t quite exactly the mmm-hmmm-yeah that generally signaled powerful attraction to Stella.
She thought about it some more. Waited a few minutes to see if a reaction was just sneaking up on her. But no: Big Johnson, sweet as he was, didn’t light any roaring fires under her. Which was just too darn bad, because there wasn’t exactly an abundance of suitors lining up at her door.
Truth was, ever since Ollie died, Stella had been pretty reluctant even to think about men—except for the ones whose skulls she was knocking together, of course. Those thirty years of paying for a single grievous mistake in the man department had put her off her feed a bit.
But . . . it had been three years. Long enough for even Stella’s rusty, ill-used parts to start clamoring to get put to use again. Hell, she was a grown woman; there shouldn’t be any shame to admitting, at least to herself, that she’d started thinking about sex again. Checking out butts at the Home Depot, spotting an appealingly crooked smile or a snazzy goatee or a nice tan . . . harmless, right?
Unfortunately, there was only one man in a hundred miles in any direction that really got her engines purring, and that was—damn it—the one man who was absolutely, positively, off-limits, the one who could send her world upside down and not in a good way—the kind of way that would have her serving time at the Sawyer County jail up in Fayette.
“Hey, Mrs. Hardesty.”
Stella jerked out of her reverie and turned to face the man who had spoken to her. Well, well.
“Hello, Arthur Junior.”
“Dad said he saw you out on the job.”
“Yes—yes, I did bump into him there.” Stella turned to Arthur Junior’s companion, who was standing behind him looking bored and teetering on her spike-heeled sandals. It appeared that Arthur Junior’s date was accustomed to deficits in his manners, but Stella believed in starting every relationship off on the right foot. “Hello, dear. I’m Stella Hardesty. My, you have lovely hair.”