Dust to Dust dffi-7

by Beverly Connor

  “I didn’t think private investigators could investigate an open case,” said Wendy.

  Samantha came in with her mother’s tea and gave it to her. Marsha gave it to Wendy, who took it to the liquor cabinet and set it on top, turned, and looked at Kingsley for an answer.

  “That’s a popular misconception,” he said. “We just can’t get in their way.” Kingsley looked at each of them and nodded. He and Diane left.

  “You finessed that well,” said Diane when they reached the car.

  “It wouldn’t have done to tell them that, at the moment, the police are calling her death an accident,” Kingsley said, almost absently.

  He frowned and looked back at the house. Diane got in and closed the door.

  “There’s a note on your seat,” she said when he opened his door to get in.

  Kingsley picked it up and read it out loud. “Lakeshore Mall. Cookie Company. Now. Please. Thanks.”

  “Not signed?” said Diane.

  “It’s from Samantha,” said Kingsley. “Of course, when I met her, she was the drummer’s cousin.”

  Chapter 25

  Diane looked at him, perplexed. “She’s Stacy’s drummer’s cousin?”

  “She told the police she was. I think we need to go to the mall,” he said.

  He started to pull out of the drive just as a blue Volks wagen Phaeton pulled up, blocking them. A man jumped out, slammed his car door, and came marching up to the driver’s side of their car. He looked in his late forties or early fifties. A slight bulge hung over his belt. He wore dark blue suit pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a light blue tie, loosened. He banged on the roof of Kingsley’s car with his palms.

  Diane got out of the car and looked over the roof at him. Kingsley got out on the other side. They stood face-to-face.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, coming around here harassing my family?” he said.

  “We were not harassing,” said Kingsley. “We were asking questions about a young woman who visited here about four weeks ago.”

  “You have no business here. I called the police to see what this was about, and they said the woman’s death was an accident,” he said. “So what are you playing at?”

  His face was so red Diane was a little concerned. His comb-over fell into his face and he pushed it back.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” said Kingsley. “But as to your complaint, we were not harassing your family. We were speaking with your wife in the presence of your neighbor.”

  “You aren’t to set foot on my property again. Is that clear?” he said.

  “We won’t need to,” said Kingsley. “The police will be handling it from here.”

  “If it wasn’t an accident, the police would have told me. You think you know something they don’t?” he asked.

  “Dad, I need to go to the library.” Samantha stood a few feet from him. A book bag hung on her arm.

  A candy-apple red hardtop convertible, not there when Diane and Kingsley drove up, was parked in a small parking space just off the driveway. Diane assumed it was Samantha’s.

  “I can’t get out,” she said. “You’re blocking the drive.”

  “Just a minute, Sam, honey.” He turned to her. “Did these people upset your mother?”

  “How could I tell?” she said. Her face looked both sad and a little angry.

  “Sam, not now, and not in front of strangers,” he said.

  Kingsley and Samantha exchanged brief glances.

  “Dad, you’re always talking about me making good grades. Well, I need to get to the library,” she said.

  “All right. Do you have your cell?” he said.

  “Always,” she said.

  “Don’t be too late.” He turned back to Kingsley and Diane. “I don’t want you here ever again. I don’t want you harassing my family, or my neighbors. Do you understand?”

  “As I said, Dr. Carruthers, the police will be taking it from here. Now, we need to go, unless you intend to keep us here against our will,” Kingsley said.

  He backed off and raised his hands, palms outward, then walked to his car. “Just remember what I said,” he yelled, getting into the driver’s seat.

  Kingsley and Diane got back in their car and Kingsley drove off. Diane saw the bright convertible behind them. Kingsley headed toward the mall.

  “I certainly hope Lynn comes through,” said Kingsley, “or I’ve just been bluffing.”

  “I said there’s no guarantee she’ll come up with murder,” said Diane.

  “But you think she will,” he said.

  “Yes. And with what we found in the apartment, I think the police definitely need to reopen the case.” Diane glanced over her shoulder at the red convertible following them. “What is the deal with Samantha?” she said.

  “I have no idea,” said Kingsley.

  “She was there when you spoke with the drummer, right?” asked Diane. “She looks a lot like her sister. You didn’t recognize her?”

  “We were in a dark café, and she has that pink and black hair and the weird makeup. No, I didn’t recognize her.” Kingsley glanced into the rearview mirror. “God. She found the body. What kind of hell is that?”

  To Diane this was the hardest part of dealing with crime: the aftermath, the effect on the victims. Long after everyone thinks they should just get over it, the crime is always there inside them. Every day they wake up and it isn’t a dream; it’s a living nightmare.

  “Are you okay?” he said as he turned on the Dawson ville Highway.

  Diane nodded. “I wasn’t very professional, I know. It’s one of those characterizations that is likely to set me off-that I don’t know the pain of loss.”

  Kingsley was acquainted with the tragedy Diane went through: the loss of her adopted daughter in a massacre in South America when Diane was there as a human rights worker.

  “You may have done her some good. You let her know she isn’t alone in her grief,” he said.

  “Maybe, but sitting in front of that painting day after day,” she said. “If it was her and not the father.”

  “What? Did I miss something?” he said.

  Diane told him about the indentations in the rug.

  “I didn’t notice. What made you look at the rug?” he asked.

  “It was the arrangement of the furniture,” she said.

  “Do you have to be female to notice things like that?” he said.

  “No.” She smiled. “Just experienced at doing crime scenes. Little anomalies stand out. I can’t imagine what it’s like for Samantha.”

  He drove onto Pearl Nix Parkway and to the mall. Samantha wasn’t far behind. They walked into the mall with her and sat down in front of the Cookie Company after Kingsley got each of them a rather large chocolate chip cookie and a drink.

  “Are you going to tell my parents?” asked Samantha after she took a bite.

  “How old are you?” said Kingsley.

  “Eighteen,” she said. “I’m an adult.”

  Diane had to smile. She tried to hide it behind her cookie.

  “I take it you’re not Jimmi’s cousin,” said Kingsley.

  “No. We made that up for the police. I was so freaked out and Jimmi was, well, she was, I mean, Stacy was her friend since middle school.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police who you are?” asked Kingsley.

  “I knew my parents would find out. I couldn’t let that happen. They would take my car away. And Mother would have some kind of screaming fit if she knew I was hanging with Stacy Dance. I showed the police one of my fake IDs.”

  Kingsley rolled his eyes. “You what?”

  Samantha reminded Diane of Star, Frank’s daughter, the girl he adopted at sixteen when her parents, Frank’s best friends, were murdered. Like Samantha, she had multicolored hair, was defiant, and used kid logic to make decisions.

  “They didn’t care. They hardly questioned me,” she said. “I told them I lived in Ohio and was going home and tha
t Jimmi could get in touch with me if they needed me.”

  “They bought that?” said Diane.

  “I told you, they didn’t care. They were like my parents. I’m invisible. I think it’s my superpower,” she said.

  “Why were you hanging with Stacy? How did you meet?” asked Kingsley.

  “Both of us were auditing a class at Gainesville State College. She wanted to transfer there and was trying it out. I’m going there until I can transfer to UGA. I recognized her last name, but there are lots of Dances, so I didn’t think anything of it. Of course she recognized mine and kind of avoided me.”

  “How did you finally meet?” asked Kingsley.

  “I found out she was in a band. A real successful band. They played lots of gigs, and people in class knew them. See, I play the guitar and I’m really good. I wanted to be in the band and they needed another guitar player. I talked to her and that’s when she told me who she was. She was kind of freaked about it,” she said.

  “You weren’t?” asked Kingsley.

  “No. She didn’t do anything to my family. And she said her brother was innocent and she was going to prove it,” Samantha said.

  “Did you believe her?” asked Kingsley.

  “Why not? I’ve been blamed for stuff I didn’t do. My parents still think I took money out of my aunt’s purse when I was ten. It was my cousin who did it, but he’s a really good liar. So why couldn’t it have happened to her brother?” she said.

  “What about all the evidence?” said Kingsley.

  “Evidence doesn’t mean anything. It can be anything people want it to be. I mean, look at Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs looked real to me,” she said.

  “It must be hard, living in a world where everything could be an illusion,” said Diane.

  “We all do. It just means we can make the world the way we want it. That’s what Stacy’s band did. They wanted to be successful and they are making it real. Or, they were,” she said.

  “You need to tell your parents you found her body,” said Kingsley.

  “They’ll just yell,” she said. “They’ll tell me I betrayed El. You’d think they would want to be really close to me, with El gone and all, but they don’t. All Mother does is sit in front of that painting. And Dad… he just pays lip service to telling me not to be late. He doesn’t even know when I come home. He stays in his games. That’s how he’s remade his world,” she said.

  “Games?” asked Diane.

  “Warcraft and Second Life. He fights demons, rescues princesses, and builds his own world to live in.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Diane.

  Samantha shrugged. “They gave me a cool car, clothes, telephones, and money. It’s not so bad. I don’t want that to stop. It’s all I have.”

  “You need to talk to someone,” said Diane. “The police are likely to be coming around and they’ll recognize you. Your parents need to know what happened to you. Maybe this will jolt them into the real world. At least go to a counselor at college.”

  Diane took one of her cards and wrote her psychiatrist friend Laura Hillard’s name and number.

  “Dr. Hillard is a friend. Tell her I sent you. If you don’t want to talk to her, she can send you to someone here who would be good.”

  “Shrinks can’t take things out of your head,” Samantha said.

  “No, but they can teach you how to cope,” said Diane.

  “I cope,” Samantha said in an uncertain voice, her eyes downcast.

  “Are you having nightmares?” said Kingsley.

  She nodded. “They’ve started back again. I had bad nightmares after El died,” she said.

  “Take Diane’s advice. See someone, just to talk to, at least,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said, sticking the card in her purse.

  “Have your parents been like this for nine years?” asked Kingsley.

  “It comes and goes. It gets bad around Christmas and El’s birthday. It’s worse when Mother is drinking. Sometimes she takes a cure for a while, but sooner or later she goes back to it. She likes vodka in tea. Can you imagine? If she put it in orange juice, she’d at least get some vitamin C.”

  “By ‘takes a cure,’ what do you mean?” asked Kingsley.

  “She goes to visit my grandmother for a while. They don’t have any alcohol around and she stays in the house. Sometimes she goes to a clinic in Atlanta. She comes back and starts falling back into bad habits. I told them we should move, but they won’t. They don’t want to go to a house where El has never been. They think it’ll make her disappear, and I’m like, hello, she’s gone. She’s already disappeared.”

  “You seem to have supportive neighbors,” said Diane.

  Samantha shrugged. “Kathy Nicholson is pretty nice. I go over to her house some. She gets kind of lonely. We talk about things. But it’s not like she can do anything about my parents. Wendy Walters means well, but I think Mother wore her down. She used to try to discourage her from drinking, but now she just helps her. You saw when I brought the tea.”

  “Why did Stacy want to speak with your parents?” asked Kingsley. “If she knew you, you could give her a lot of the answers she wanted.”

  “Not really. I was nine when El died. I didn’t know a whole lot that was going on in El’s life. Stacy thought they could tell her about the day El disappeared. I didn’t really know much about that. Except, I think my parents think it was my fault.”

  “How is that?” asked Diane.

  “We’d been fighting that day and El said she didn’t want to ride all the way to Grandma’s house with me and she was just going to stay here. She wasn’t home when we got back,” she said.

  “That wasn’t your fault,” said Diane.

  Samantha shrugged again and took a sip of drink. “Maybe not, but still, if we hadn’t fought…”

  “You think she might have wanted to stay home for reasons of her own?” said Diane. “And the argument with you was just her excuse?”

  Samantha raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth slightly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” asked Diane.

  “She always had boyfriends. You saw her portrait. That’s pretty much what she looked like. But it would have been in her diary,” said Samantha.

  “She kept a diary?” asked Kingsley.

  Samantha nodded. “I loaned it to Stacy to copy.”

  Chapter 26

  “Your sister kept a diary?” said Kingsley.

  “Yes, like forever. I mentioned it to Stacy one time and she begged me to let her see it. I told her it wouldn’t help. See, El caught Mother reading her diary when she first started writing one and she was really pissed. That’s when she started writing in this code she made up. El was really smart. Mother wanted to read her diaries after she died, to be close, I guess. But she couldn’t make heads or tails of them. Dad packed them in a box when he packed up El’s room. Mom wanted to keep it the way it was, but it was a little too creepy for Dad. They saved her things in the basement. I took her last diary so Stacy could copy it.”

  “Did she copy it?” asked Kingsley. He leaned forward in his chair slightly. Diane knew what he was thinking. Diaries can be loaded with just the best clues.

  “Yes,” said Samantha.

  So, the copies were probably in the file that was missing, thought Diane. “What happened to the diary?” she asked.

  Samantha Carruthers hesitated and was quiet a moment. Then, quick as a mouse, she slipped her hand into her backpack, pulled out a book, and handed it to Kingsley.

  “Stacy returned it to you?” asked Kingsley.

  “No, not exactly. When I found her… like that, it was in her bookcase. The spine was facing out, but I saw it right away. So, well, I took it. After all, it was mine. Or, at least, my family’s. I’ve been carrying it around, hoping maybe I could figure out how to decipher it,” she said. “Jimmi said Stacy’s dad told her Stacy’s folder disappeared… the one full of stuff about her investigation. I figur
ed something in the diary might be important.”

  The front of the journal had been découpaged with magazine cutouts from the television series Charmed.

  Kingsley opened it up and he and Diane looked at the writing. It was a mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols.

  “See,” said Samantha. “You can’t read it.”

  “Will you let us copy it?” said Diane.

  “Sure. There’s a place in the mall where we can go,” Samantha said.

  They took the last bites of their oversized cookies, washed them down with their drinks, and threw the trash away. Samantha led them to a Mailboxes Plus store where Diane copied the entire diary. When she finished, she handed it back to Samantha.

  Sam stood for a moment, looking awkward. “You aren’t going to call my parents, are you?” she asked.

  “As you said, you are an adult now,” said Diane.

  “Yeah, but…” She hesitated, looking at her watch. “I guess I’d better get to the library.”

  “Thank you, Samantha,” said Diane. “Seriously, you should talk to your parents. They need to know what’s going on in your life.”

  “I’ll think about it, but you don’t know them like I do,” she said.

  “You may not know them as well as you think,” said Diane.

  Diane and Kingsley left the mall with Samantha. They watched her drive off before they got into Kingsley’s Prius.

  “She needs help,” he said.

  “Yes, she does. And her parents need to wake up and realize they have another daughter to care for. She’s old enough to be out on her own. If she decides to make the break, it will be harder on all of them.”

  Kingsley glanced at the package of copies Diane held in her hand. “So, how do we go about deciphering that?” he said as he left the parking area and headed back to Rosewood.

  “I’ll ask Frank to do it,” said Diane.

  She removed the first several pages of the diary from the store bag. The writing looked like gibberish to her-a lot of stars, squares, wavy lines, letters that didn’t make sense, and numbers scattered throughout.