by Joe Hart
Mary Jo’s hands flew over two different screens. “Male, female, adult, child?”
“All of the above.”
The clicking of the dispatcher’s fingernails became the loudest sound in the room. “There are forty-two coming up over the last seven years.”
“Narrow that by those that weren’t resolved.”
More tapping.
“Twenty-six left.”
“Narrow that by those that were changed to an ENS file.”
Mary Jo raised one eyebrow. “That leaves only one, happened just six months before you took office and Sheriff Enson left for Wheaton.”
“Why would it get changed to evidence not supported?” Ruthers asked, coming closer to the desk.
“It would be on the sheriff’s orders,” Gray said. “If it doesn’t look like the person is actually missing, the officer in charge can close it and re-label the final file.”
“Which is exactly what Enson did,” Mary Jo said.
“What’s the name and address?” Gray asked.
“Joslyn Worth. Twenty-nine ninety-five Second Street, Briton Addition.”
Gray leaned away from the counter, his eyes narrowing beneath his hat.
“Widow Town.”
Chapter 13
Gray flew west from Shillings, the cruiser’s tires buzzing beneath him, endless rows of corn to either side.
He tapped the screw in his pocket with an index finger, trying to keep time with the small bumps in the road. The land slowly changed from flat to hilly, trees dotting the edges of fields, sentries standing watch. The road leveled again and the crops ended in a jagged cut of ground that became scrub weed. The area looked like an atomic test site, the earth flat and featureless, cleared of everything save the indomitable weeds that grew to over five feet high in some places. A single sunflower held its wilting head above the rest of the field, its color browned by the sun.
A side road approached on the left and Gray swung into it, past the sign reading “Briton Addition,” and below that “Transon Inc Mining, site #5471.” Another fiberboard sign had fallen in the last year beneath the weather’s pressing hand, its proclamation faded beyond reading. Gray drove up the narrow street until the houses began to appear.
There were four rows of them in all, eight in each line. White clapboard siding that was actually single pieces stapled to the four walls. All the roofs slanted the same way, the front doors stood inside modest porches, flanked by two windows that looked unto yards long devoid of any green grass.
Gray idled down the first street, gazing at the attached garages, a dancing napkin fluttered in the breeze like a broken-winged bird. Some of the house’s windows were shattered, their gaping mouths ringed with teeth of glass. Hastily scrawled graffiti covered a few garage doors, the profanity laced messages nearly meaningless idioms of hate. Gray shook his head and turned the corner at the end of the street, cruised up the next until he came even with a house on the right, identical to its neighbors on either side.
The breeze was hot breath on the back of his neck when he stepped outside and surveyed the empty street. He expected a tumbleweed to roll out of the field but didn’t wait to see if one would.
He walked up the drive to the covered porch, paint peeling like the tips of cracked skis. A nest of beetles undulated in one corner near the front door, their black bodies crawling over one another until they looked like one animal writhing in pain. Gray peered in through the door’s windows, relatively clean carpet and linoleum butted together under garish orange walls.
Gray tried the door and entered when the knob turned in his hand. The smell of dust and mold came to him and he listened to the silence of the house, the breeze coursing past the windows, the creak of the floor heating in the sun.
The heat intensified in the closed air as he walked through the single level home, noting how clean the house was. Two bedrooms, one bath, a well-arranged kitchen minus appliances. The backyard was a postage stamp running parallel with the two houses on either side. A little oak tree grew in its center, its branches bare save for three brown leaves at its top.
Gray glanced to the right as movement caught his eye. A plastic beach ball rolled across the yard and bumped into a multicolored play set, its swing swaying back and forth, apocalyptically empty.
When he stepped outside he smelled cigarette smoke and saw that a young woman stood on the porch next door. She was pretty in a weary way with blond hair tied back in a ponytail. She held one of her arms across her stomach, tucked beneath her opposite elbow, a long cigarette perched between her first two fingers like a delicate bird.
“Good afternoon,” Gray said, shutting the door behind him.
“What’s good about it?”
“The sun’s shining.”
The woman squinted and inhaled a deep drag. “You’re the sheriff.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“What are you doing in Joslyn’s house?”
Gray moved down off the porch and walked into the woman’s front yard, stopping before her steps. “Just looking around.”
“Cops don’t just ‘look around’.”
Gray smiled. “No, they don’t.” He studied the woman as she took another puff from her cigarette. “You’re Rachel Simmons.”
Only a flutter of surprise in her eyes. “That’s right, what do you want?”
“I’d like to come inside and talk, if that would be okay with you?”
“What’s this about?”
“It’s about you calling in a missing-person report on Joslyn Worth.”
Rachel looked down and stubbed out her cigarette on the porch railing, adding to a grouping of innumerable black circles. “Come on in then.”
She turned away and Gray went up the steps, following the young woman inside. The sounds of cartoons floated to him from another room as he walked into the house and a bout of déjà vu assaulted him at seeing the exact same interior as the gutted house next door, only this home looked lived in. Three paintings of the same yellow flower hung in the entry hall and a vase containing dried reeds sat on a chest of drawers near the door.
Rachel motioned for him to follow her. “You don’t have to take off your shoes, I was going to sweep and mop the floors anyway later this afternoon.” She disappeared around the corner at the end of the hall, which Gray knew led to the kitchen. “Coffee, Sheriff?”
“Please,” Gray said, moving farther into the house after checking to make sure his shoes were clean. When he came even with the living room he saw the television lit with colorful figures dancing in a circle, their cartoon faces overburdened with glee. The song they sang was familiar and for a moment he felt the floor drop away from his feet as the memory of where he’d last heard it overcame him, the toy in his hands emitting the same song he heard now, its colors pleasing to the eye.
“He likes taking his naps there,” Rachel said, pulling him back to the present. Gray glanced at her and then at where she looked in the living room.
A small boy no older than a year sat in a reclined bouncy chair, his skin the color of coffee with cream. He had dark hair that curled in ringlets above his ears. A tiny runner of drool leaked from one corner of his mouth.
“What’s his name?” Gray asked.
“Kenneth.” Rachel blinked once and then smiled tightly. “For his father.”
Rachel led him into the kitchen and he sat at a round table overlooking the backyard. After a minute she brought two steaming cups of coffee and set one in front of him.
“Seems almost wrong to drink something so hot when the weather’s like this,” Rachel said before sipping at her mug.
“It’s nice and cool in here. Makes it a little easier.”
She smiled but it barely lifted the ends of her mouth. “So what is it you’d like to know?”
“What can you tell me about Joslyn?”
“What’s this all about?” Rachel said, reiterating the words she’d spoken outside.
“It’s concerning an ongoing investigation.”
&
nbsp; She studied him, her brown eyes sharp and clear. “I reported Joslyn missing well over a year ago, did you find something?” A twitch of her lips. “A body?”
“No, nothing like that,” Gray said. “I read the file on your call, but I wanted to speak to you personally, see if there was anything else you could tell me.”
Rachel cupped her hands closer around her mug. “I told everything to that other sheriff.”
“Well I’d like to hear it,” Gray said, easing his voice down a notch lower into what he hoped was a soothing tone. Rachel shot him a long look and then dropped her eyes back to her coffee.
“We came here at the same time, I mean within the same hour. Joslyn and Tony were moving in next door, unloading some terrible looking furniture from a trailer when Ken and I pulled up in our truck. You saw the inside of their house, the orange walls? Joslyn loved bright colors like that, she was always wearing something neon. We helped each other unpack and right away I could tell we were all going to be friends.” Rachel looked up at Gray. “You know how that is? When you meet somebody and you have that good feeling that you’re going to have someone new to care about?”
“Yes I do.”
Rachel nodded. “It was like that with Joslyn and me. She was already three months pregnant when they moved in. You should have seen her, so happy, always rubbing her belly and smiling. This place was a new start for her, just like it was for all of us. When Transom Inc. called, Ken almost jumped for joy. He’d been out of work for a while and there wasn’t much call for an ordnance expert back in Wisconsin where we’re from, there just isn’t that many companies still using explosives to mine. But Ken was good even though he wasn’t versed in mining Lithium. It turned out the system they were using here was similar to what he’d done before, so it was a fit. And with housing provided along with a company car to each family, it was hard to turn down.
“So Joslyn and I started visiting each other when Ken and Tony were on shift. Typically they worked at night with a crew of twenty other guys, so we’d sit up and watch movies, play games, cook, anything to pass the time.” Rachel paused and her brow dipped as she swallowed. “We worried, I won’t lie, that’s what part of our friendship was based on. People think it’s a safe profession, but being a miner’s wife is a waiting game. You watch them leave for shift and breathe a sigh of relief when the door opens and they come through it again.”
Rachel wiped at one eye where a tear tried to slide free, but she caught it and whisked it away, her voice steady. “I can still feel that rumble under my feet, Sheriff, and sometimes I wonder if I’m going crazy. Joslyn was over that night and I’d just told her I was pregnant, and I’d only told Ken an hour before he went off to work. God, he was so excited.” Tears tried to overwhelm her eyes again but she blinked them back. “Then we felt it. The whole house shook for a second and then came the quiet except for the car alarms starting up all through the neighborhood from the vibration. We just sat there, paralyzed until Joslyn finally got up and went to the phone to call the office near the site. When no one answered, we knew. We wouldn’t say it out loud, but we both knew we wouldn’t ever see our husbands again.”
Rachel fell silent and let her shoulders round as she finished her coffee, deflating into an even more diminutive figure.
“I’m very sorry,” Gray said, putting his hand on her forearm.
She smiled into her cup. “Not as sorry as I am.”
“Did most of the families move away after the cave-in?”
“Some stayed. Well, you know as well as anyone that they shut the project down, not because of the accident but because the latest surveys from underground showed less than optimal conditions for the Lithium content. I’m not sure if their reports were wrong to begin with or what, but it’s insult to injury that my husband and all the rest died trying to work a project that was doomed from the beginning.” Rachel laughed and it was a bitter sound in the close area of the kitchen. “I hate them a little, you know, the families that didn’t have loved ones on shift that night. They came by the house when Joslyn and I were trying to make sense of our worlds being flipped upside down, and I wanted to scream at them. I knew what they were thinking, that Ken was in charge of the blasting and that’s what caused the accident, but there must’ve been something else wrong because he was excellent at his job, so careful.” Rachel rubbed the table with a fingertip. “Mostly we just didn’t want to see their faces, the pity in their eyes.”
“But you and Joslyn decided to stay.”
She looked up at him and for the first time Gray realized how young the woman truly was. “We didn’t have anywhere to go. Transom signed over the mortgages as part of the settlement and at the time Joslyn and I had no jobs, so yes, we stayed. And don’t think that I don’t know what they call this place. There was thirty-two families here before the explosion and seventeen widows afterward, eight of them had infants or were expecting. All eight stayed because as sick as it was to stay at the site where our husbands died, it was the most financially secure for us.”
“I don’t think anyone blames you for staying,” Gray said.
“I don’t think anyone has an idea what we lost.” The venom in Rachel’s voice cut the air but Gray held her gaze until she dropped it to the tabletop. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to be.” He let her have a moment of silence before asking, “When did Joslyn disappear?”
“Two months after the accident. She was fit to burst, her due date was in a week. We had a get together the evening before, the remaining women of the neighborhood try to gather once a week, let our kids play, catch up with one another. Joslyn left the little park at the end of the block where we were all sitting around nine in the evening and waddled home. I remember someone saying she looked like a penguin walking away.” Rachel smiled her sad smile again. The expression fell from her face like a mask being drawn away. “In the morning I went next door to ask her if she wanted to go into town to grocery shop and she didn’t answer. I knocked and knocked and then I called her cell before I took the key out of her hiding place under the first patio block and let myself in.”
“The door was definitely locked?” Gray said.
“Definitely, I remember trying it.”
“And what did you see when you went inside?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary. There were no windows broken and nothing spilled on the floor. Most of her clothes were gone along with her jewelry and a suitcase. Some of the kitchen stuff was taken too like the toaster and microwave.”
Gray nodded. “But you called in a missing-person report anyway.”
“Of course. Sheriff, Joslyn was almost ready to give birth. You don’t run off in the middle of the night when you’re that close.”
“You don’t think that’s why she left? To go to a different town to give birth, start a new life?”
Rachel leveled her eyes on his and shook her head. “She would’ve told me, I was her best friend and she was mine. We talked about everything. If she was going to leave, she would’ve wanted me to come with. Besides, she had nowhere to go. She was an orphan and Tony’s parents wanted nothing to do with her after he died, kind of broke her heart.” Rachel glanced away from him to the window. “That little oak that’s dead or dying in the backyard? Tony planted that for his son before the cave-in. Said he would be able to hang a swing from it when he was old enough. Joslyn went out and watered that tree every day after he died, she was determined to keep it alive for her child. She wouldn’t have left that tree behind.” Rachel sniffed once and shook her head. “I told all this to that other sheriff and he assured me he’d look into it.”
“Do you feel that he did?”
“Hell no. He walked around her house for a while, had a guy come scan for prints but I heard them talking through an open window. They thought she split town, finally had enough of the pity in the community and went somewhere new.”
Gray finished his coffee and swirled the dregs around in the bottom. “Is there anyth
ing else you can remember?”
Rachel reached over to a nearly empty cigarette pack and pulled one of its long contents out, rolled it between her fingers. “Yeah, but I told the last sheriff and he almost laughed at me.”
Gray leaned forward and touched the young woman’s hand with the tips of his fingers. “Rachel, he and I are two very different people. You can tell me.”
He thought she might cry again, but instead she clenched the cigarette in one fist, crushing it in her grip. “There was a smell in the house when I went in there that day. At first it didn’t register fully, but after I came outside and went back in to make sure, I knew.”
“Knew what?”
Rachel released the broken cigarette and let it fall to the table in pieces of paper and tobacco. “That there had been someone else in the house with Joslyn the night before, and the only way I know that is they had on the same cologne Ken used to wear.”
Chapter 14
“Do you think she was telling the truth?” Ruthers said.
The deputy sat in the chair Mark Sheldon occupied that morning, his face creased with thought, one leg crossed over the other.
“I do,” Gray said, tapping the digital keyboard to bring his computer screen to life. His shirt was a wet skin over his own, the heat in the office almost unbearable. He glanced at the immovable pane of glass in the wall and wished once again he could open it, at least to gain some moving air through the office.
“So someone came and took Joslyn from her home in the middle of the night and carried out all her belongings too?”
“That’s what it appears like, Joseph, and the one thing that makes me think that’s the way it happened is because Mitchel was headed in the opposite direction. The difference between wise men and fools is that fools learn from their own mistakes and wise men learn from other people’s.”
“Do you want to take a scanner out there and comb the whole place again, see if we can pick anything up?”
Gray shook his head. “No. If they were careful enough to make the whole thing look like she left under her own accord, they wouldn’t leave anything behind. Technology is wonderful, Joseph, but it’ll never rival an inquisitive mind.” Gray tapped his temple once. “So now that we’ve established an idea of how, we ask why.”