Cotton

by Paul Heald

  His eyes narrowed. “I’ve already told the police everything that I know.”

  Melanie shot a glance at the reporter. He had told her that the authorities had never formally interrogated the Cavendishes, who had been on vacation in California at the time of the disappearance of their daughter.

  “Could I see the pictures?”

  Melanie could not tell whether the father’s expression was one of curiosity or trepidation. She watched her partner reach into his jacket pocket and pull out several pages of photocopies. She wondered whether the doctor would question why his daughter was standing in front of a white sheet in a bikini. Instead, one look at his daughter aged him fifteen years and he was overcome with emotion, lifting a hand to his face and fighting back tears. He forced himself to look at all the photos and clutched them while he spoke.

  “Such a beautiful girl,” he explained in a hoarse whisper. “She looks just like her mother at that age.” He tried to say more but instead apologized, stood up, and left the room. Jessica, who had been standing in the corner listening intently to the conversation, gestured awkwardly and followed her husband.

  The two investigators sat in embarrassed silence until the couple returned, bearing a large bottle of mineral water and several glasses.

  “I’m sorry.” The doctor sat down and poured himself a glass. His wife poured for their guests. He drank and seemed to get himself under control. “I can’t help but get emotional when I think that I might never see my daughter again.”

  The attorney thought the phrasing odd and inquired gently. “Are you hopeful she might reappear?”

  Cavendish looked over at his wife, who frowned from the corner, arms crossed over her chest. “I know her apartment looked pretty bad, but she was never found and we got a couple of emails after she and Granville disappeared. It seemed like they could be from Diana, but it wasn’t from her regular address.”

  “Could we see them?” Melanie wondered if they, like Jacob Granville’s parents, had been told not to divulge the existence of the tantalizing communications.

  Cavendish picked up his laptop and a few moments later spun it around. Murphy hunched down next to Melanie by the coffee table, and they both read two emails purportedly sent by the abducted girl within a week after her disappearance. The first merely stated that she was okay and out of the country. The second was slightly longer:

  J and I in a little trouble and had to bail out. Business gone bad; more later.

  “Do you have any idea what ‘business’ she might have been referring too?” Melanie spoke first. “That is, assuming the message is really from her.” She leaned back away from the computer screen and studied the grim-faced father.

  “I always figured this had something to do with drugs. I think that worthless boyfriend of hers was selling something. Diana got busted for possession of pot when she was in high school. That’s why she ended up at Clarkeston College instead of the University of Georgia. Her boyfriends were usually mixed up in something stupid.” He shook his head in disgust. “Probably got her bad judgment from her drunk of a mother.”

  “Could you forward those emails to me so that I could analyze them?” She handed him a business card that contained her contact information. She badly wanted to see if the messages came from the same ISP address as those sent to Jacob Granville’s parents.

  Cavendish gave her a puzzled look and then started tapping the keys on his computer. A minute later, he clicked his mouse with finality and met Melanie’s gaze. “You realize that I sent all this to you all years ago.” He leaned back in his seat with an expression that questioned the efficiency of the federal bureaucracy.

  “Us all?” Melanie asked.

  “Yeah,” he said impatiently, “you, the FBI. We were interrogated by two agents when we got back from California, and we passed these along to them right away.” He looked at his guests as if he were seeing them for the first time. “What’s going on here, anyway?”

  Murphy looked a little panicked so Melanie jumped in. “I know we get confused with the FBI quite a bit, but I’m an attorney with the Justice Department, not the bureau.”

  Cavendish looked at Melanie with widening eyes but pointed at her partner. “But he told me that he was an investigator.” Suddenly becoming red in the face, he blustered, “I assumed that he was with the FBI. We’re not supposed to talk to anyone else.”

  She looked at James. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him my name and that I was updating my investigation of his daughter’s disappearance. He told me to come up right away, so I assumed he recognized my name from the bylines of the stories about the case.” The reporter looked like he had made an honest mistake, but she doubted that Julius Cavendish would be very forgiving. Time for some damage control.

  She sat up straight in her chair, put her hands in her lap, and looked searchingly in the retired doctor’s eyes. She shook her head apologetically and added an extra layer of sweetness to her cultured southern lilt.

  “Mr. Cavendish, I am so sorry if we gave the impression we were from the FBI.” She put her hand over her heart. “I’m afraid that my colleagues there are not actively investigating the case, so when Mr. Murphy—who’s been covering the case for the Clarkeston Chronicle—brought these pictures to me,” she gestured reverently to the photos on the table, “I thought it best to pursue the lead myself. We never meant to mislead you.”

  She finished her explanation with a little fishing expedition. “And if the FBI has sworn you to secrecy, then we’re especially sorry.”

  Cavendish leaned back in the sofa, partially mollified by the pretty face offering the polite apologies. He took a sip of water and shook his head. “You’re all the federal government, right? I don’t see that it matters, but the agents were pretty insistent that we tell no one about the emails, or anything else, for that matter.” He set his glass down on the table and finally cracked a smile. “Right arrogant bastards they were, too. We call every six months or so but never get through to anyone who knows anything.”

  “Is there anything else that you can think to tell us about Diana or Jacob?”

  He thought for a moment and looked at his wife. “Jessica and I have been over this a thousand times and it always comes down to two possibilities.” She shook her head, but he continued. “I mentioned the first already: maybe they got mixed up with some drug dealers and had to leave the country. But if that’s the case, why just the two short emails? There’s no reason why she couldn’t get in touch with us again.”

  “Were you close?”

  Given his emotional response earlier, she expected a profession of parental devotion, but he surprised her.

  “No,” he admitted. “She was sixteen when her mother and I divorced, and she blamed me.” He avoided his wife’s gaze, sighing deeply. “She didn’t cut me off completely, but she was pretty frosty. I thought things were getting better right before she disappeared.”

  “You mentioned a second possibility,” Melanie pressed him.

  “That Granville killed her and tried to throw everyone off the scent by sending us emails pretending to be her.” His expression soured and he walked over to the wall of glass that looked over the valley. There wasn’t a single smudge on the window and it looked like he could reach out and touch the mountaintops on the other side of the valley. “That’s what Jessie thinks.”

  Melanie turned her attention to the young woman for the first time. She was standing by the bookshelves a couple of paces away from her husband, trying to blend in to the woodwork. “What makes you think that?”

  Jessica answered reticently. “It’s been five years now. We should have heard something.” She appeared not to care much one way or the other, and Melanie wondered whether the missing woman cared enough about her father to stay in touch.

  “What about Diana’s biological mother?” James jumped in. “Has she heard anything?”

  “I don’t know.” Julius Cavendish walked away from the window and stood by
his wife. “The divorce was pretty acrimonious and we haven’t really spoken in the last fifteen years.”

  “Not even after Diana disappeared?” Melanie found it hard to believe that two upset parents would not contact each other when their daughter was clearly in danger. If they had been in touch, she doubted he would admit it with his current wife in the room.

  “I didn’t know where Diana’s mother was until weeks later. I’d lost track of her and the FBI took a while to find her.”

  “But they did locate her? Do you know where?”

  “They said Chicago, but I don’t know the address,” he explained. “She was using her maiden name—Carolyn Williams—and that made it harder to find her, I suppose.”

  “What does she do?” She saw a wave of suspicion cross his face. “I’d like to find her, and if I learn that Diana has been in contact, I’ll let you know.”

  He thought for a moment. “She was trained as a graphic artist, but she stopped working after Diana was born. I don’t know what she’s doing now.” He gave a disapproving look. “She always talked about opening up a fancy cake shop once Diana went off to college. She got a big enough settlement, so maybe she did.”

  “Could I ask one final question? And could I see your computer for a second?” When he nodded, she took his laptop, went to YouTube, and opened up the two videos posted by j-gville. She clicked Play and handed the device back to Cavendish. “This is a video uploaded by Granville less than a month before he disappeared. Have you ever seen it before? Do you have any idea why he might have uploaded it?”

  He watched for a minute with increasing discomfort. Melanie could hear the young Mexican woman telling her horrifying tale in broken English. He snapped the laptop shut abruptly when the video was half-over. “What’s all this about? Are you implying that Granville did something like that to my daughter?”

  “No, not at all,” Melanie exclaimed, although the thought had crossed her mind. “We’re just looking very hard at every aspect of Granville’s life. I take it that he didn’t share this link with you?”

  “Absolutely not,” Cavendish barked. “Like I said, I couldn’t stand the guy. And he didn’t make any effort to befriend me, that’s for sure. So, no, we weren’t email buddies.”

  Given the strength of his response, Melanie doubted whether showing him the African video would be very productive. Then she saw Jessica walk over to her husband, take his arm and whisper pointedly in his ear. He replied, but she could not hear the short conversation. Guessing that their presence was becoming tiresome, and not wanting to destroy the goodwill that she had rebuilt, she stood up and declared that they had no more questions.

  * * *

  “What do you think?” James looked over at Melanie as she drove them back to Highlands. She had not said a word since Julius Cavendish had closed the door behind them, and her expression was inscrutable. He watched her concentrate as she took the curves on the windy road. Her face looked as dangerous as the scenic highway.

  “What do I think?” She glanced over while negotiating a hair pin curve that threatened to sling the car into the valley below. “I think you should do a better job explaining who we are before we start an interview.”

  “Sorry.” He felt like an idiot and acknowledged that her cool head had saved the day.

  “Don’t worry about it.” She tapped the steering wheel with her fingers. “You heard old Julius—we wouldn’t have gotten any information at all if he had known you were a reporter.”

  He thought he saw a trace of a smile in the corner of her full lips.

  “But what did we really learn?” James found the emails intriguing, whether they were from Diana or a Diana imposter, but he felt no closer to finding her missing boyfriend. “They basically gave us the same stuff as the Granvilles: mysterious messages and warnings from the FBI.”

  “Yeah, but hearing the same story twice means something.” She pulled onto the main road into Highlands. “But I doubt it means anything good.”

  She found a parking spot close to James’s rusty Honda and turned off the car. He was surprised how bad he felt for letting her down in the interview. Why did he care so much what she thought of him? He normally didn’t feel the need to impress every beautiful woman that he met, but Melanie was different. She was so smart and sophisticated and yet unexpectedly earthy. He felt a momentary pang of guilt for the depth of his appreciation of her—he was still a married man, after all. Oddly, the appreciation of her personality prompted shame, while his admiration for her legs had not.

  “What I don’t get,” she said, “is why we don’t see a connection between the FBI and the Clarkeston cops, when they are both restricting information about a case that should have instantly started a huge public manhunt.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said, trying to draw out their time together as long as possible. “Why don’t we walk and talk about this at the same time? Those pancakes have shaved about fifty points off my IQ, and I need to get my blood flowing. About fifteen minutes from here is a Forest Service road that leads to an unmarked trailhead and then to a nice waterfall. Only the locals know it’s there. It’ll take about an hour round-trip, and we can walk off breakfast and try to figure out what to do next.”

  In response, she looked down at her feet. “Lead on, James. You’re lucky I wore my flats.”

  This time they took his car, as the Forest Service road was rutted and muddy from a recent rainstorm and Murphy trusted only himself to pick the proper path between root and rock. After twenty minutes that severely tested the springs and shocks of the old Honda, the dirt road finally leveled off into a small glade surrounded by a thicket of rhododendrons and privet, with just enough room to turn the car around. A bullet hole–ridden No Trespassing sign bent over the entrance to a narrow trail at the end of the cramped parking area.

  “No worries,” the Western Carolina native declared. “We’re in the Nantahala National Forest. I have no idea who put that sign up, but nobody who loves Secret Falls is about to pull it down.”

  The trail broadened quickly, so the pair walked side by side under a dark green ceiling of hickory, maple, ash, and mountain laurel. Occasionally a rhododendron hell would force them to stoop and proceed single file, and James wished the sun were shining more brightly as they made their way toward the roar of falling water. The path was shrouded, and it reminded him of the shortcut through the woods he used to take home from school. He would pop out in his backyard, surprising his mother as she took in the laundry. At the time, he hadn’t understood the sadness in her eyes when she smiled at him. Now he knew how much she had feared his leaving, even when the fateful day was still years away. Sometimes he wished she had been as tyrannical as his father; then he wouldn’t feel the guilt of his escape so acutely.

  “The more I think about this case,” Melanie said as they hopped over a small but swiftly flowing stream, “the more careful I think we have to be. You’re already pretty paranoid about the local cops, but there’s some things about the feds that I haven’t told you.”

  James nodded and offered his hand as she climbed over a log blocking the trail. She grasped it firmly and he felt an instant jolt of intimacy. He wished they could walk hand in hand the whole way.

  “First, I found a mention of Jacob in the FBI database,” she said, “but there was no information except a notation to call a number in Arkansas if anyone made any inquiries. As a loyal and stupid public servant, I gave them your name when they asked for information, and lo and behold, your house is broken into a couple of days later. Now, that could have been a coincidence, but I’m starting to doubt it.”

  “What do you mean?” Her story put him on full alert. He did not like the idea that the FBI was aware of his renewed investigation. Moreover, he was pissed that Melanie had given him up so easily. He would never reveal any of his own anonymous sources. He stopped and faced her. “Who answered the phone? What did they say?”

  “They didn’t say anything.” She grimaced and then lo
oked down. “I got nothing from them, and when I called back, the line was disconnected, so I asked a friend at the FBI to track the number down for me. He asked around and then warned me off the case.”

  “And now we hear from both the Granvilles and the Cavendishes that the FBI has told them to shut up too,” he added quietly, still trying to determine whether Melanie’s slipup was merely negligent or a deliberate throwing him under the bus to protect her career.

  She turned to him, paused a moment, and then nodded her head gravely. “Someone’s got friends in high places who don’t like you poking around in their business.”

  The roar of the falls was getting louder, and they had to raise their voices as they made their way down the steep path to the base of the cascade. They moved slowly, grabbing and bending branches to keep from slipping on the mossy trail.

  “Are you dropping the case, then?” he asked when they reached the level bottom of the path, a broad pool of roiling water just visible through the brush. “Am I on my own now?”

  She moved past him toward the base of the falls. A small sandbar, the size of a child’s sandbox, jutted out into the pool, offering an unobstructed view of a muscled cord of ice-cold water cresting a precipice fifty feet over their heads. The far end of the pool churned and plunged down a further desfile, but their little beach was fairly still. She picked a stick off the sand and tossed it into the water. It moved slowly into the current and then dropped down into the next set of cataracts.

  “I’ve been thinking about this,” she said. “As far as the FBI and the Justice Department are concerned, I’m done. I’m a smart girl who plays by the rules and by all appearances will have no more to do with Diana Cavendish or Jacob Granville. So, whatever you do, don’t call me at work, and most certainly don’t pay me a visit there.”

  Melanie now faced him with her back to the torrent, wispy strands of water at the edge of the falls waving around the edge of her thick brown hair. Despite his misgivings, he did not want her to cut him loose. He wanted more of the look she was giving him right now.