by R. L. Syme
Derek yanked at me, and I finally returned the album to its place beneath the manila envelopes. He was so frustrated, he wasn’t even speaking.
As he dragged me out the door, Derek took out a cloth and started wiping down the surfaces around us—door knobs, exposed furniture, and what not. Since he had gloves on, I assumed he was trying to get rid of the evidence that I had left behind. If I’d known we would be breaking and entering, I would have brought gloves, too.
We got through the garage and out into the shaded yard without him speaking another word to me. He locked the door and pulled it closed behind him.
“We have to pretend like we were never here.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets as we walked up the sidewalk, acting casual as could be, as if we had nothing to hide.
I stopped in front of his bike, which was only a few feet back from the Tank. “What are you going to do with it?”
He touched his pocket. “I don’t know. But I really shouldn’t tell you. I don’t want you to get in any trouble for me, Vangie. You need to get in your car and head somewhere you’ll be seen.”
“Like where? The bakery is closed. The church will be deserted.”
“A store or something. I’m going to John’s Bar, so don’t go there. We shouldn’t be seen together.” His eyes danced back and forth, like he was following the paths of the cars that puttered by us, still in the low-speed school zone.
“If we haven’t already been seen,” I said.
“Nah. The trees were high, and the lady who lives across the street drove off in Frances’s car with her just before you showed up. The guy next door—” he nodded to the place, “—is doing woodwork in his backyard. No one is going to see us. Come on.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “This obviously isn’t my first B&E.”
My phone started buzzing in my pocket, so I rolled my eyes at him rather than commenting. When I pulled out my cell, I saw my sister’s name on the screen. I said goodbye to Derek and asked him not to turn his phone off in case I needed to get ahold of him. By the time I swiped at my sister’s call, I was climbing into the Tank.
“Bad news,” she said, without even greeting me.
“Hello to you, too.” I gave her a little laugh.
“I just got a call from Ana at the denominational offices. She said that Peter put in a call to the bishop this afternoon.” The words sat there in the miles between us, like little bombs waiting to go off. I found myself holding my breath, so I huffed it out.
“I was afraid of that.”
“Vangie, what in the name of everything holy are you doing up there? You should not be getting in trouble again.”
Even though she was four years my junior, my baby sister had a type-A personality—scolding was her natural language. She always made me feel like a kid when she talked to me like that.
“I’m not,” I said with a squeak in my voice that belied my words. I so was.
“Well, you asked me to tell you if your name came up, and it did, so I’m telling you. But I don’t want to know anything about anything. I’m sick of trying to hide stuff from Dad.”
I slid the phone into the visor, clicking on the speaker option, and started the Tank. I didn’t want to stay parked in the vicinity of Frances Barnett’s house. I looked in the rearview mirror, but there was no sign of Derek’s bike. He must have turned around to go the other way, because I hadn’t seen him pass. There was now a steady stream of parents who’d just picked up their kids.
Priscilla’s sigh came through the speaker loud and clear. “Vangie, are you even listening to me? What do you want me to do now?”
“Can you find out what he said?”
“I don’t know. Ana is already acting cagey.”
“I thought she was your friend.”
“She liked my purse once, Vangie. Once. If you keep asking me to spy for you, I’m going to have to give her the purse or something.”
I shook my head, a tiny smile tugging at my mouth. “That’s not how spying works, Sil.”
“Well, it might have to.” A honking sound echoed through the phone, faintly. “Look, I have to go. Ty is here. Can I call you back tonight?”
I turned the Tank in the direction the feed store. Derek had said to be seen, and I hadn’t yet checked in for feedback on the macarons. Besides, I didn’t want to go back to the bakery just yet. “I have to go to bed early tonight,” I said. “We’re making macarons in the morning.”
“Then call me while you’re baking.”
“I can’t, I’ll have Leo there. I promised him I’d try to teach him everything I know. I mean, I don’t know much, but I’ll teach him what I can.”
We agreed to catch up the following afternoon. Her classes would be over, my lunch rush would be over, and her boyfriend was going out of town to a conference, so she would be around all night. I could sit on the couch in my office and catch up with her. If I didn’t get fired, of course.
I hung up with my sister as I pulled into the parking lot of the feed store. Danny Murphy wasn’t outside to greet me this time, so I headed inside to collect the comment cards for myself.
The interior of the feed store always smelled like livestock to me. I wasn’t sure why. They didn’t sell livestock. But it had the same earthy scent farms have, all hay and leather and mulch, and it was actually sort of comforting.
One of the sales girls greeted me and told me that I should head back to the office to find Danny. I weaved through the shelves, greeting people as I went. The more people who saw me, the better.
The ceilings of the store were high, but everything was cramped once you got through the door to the back. There had to be two levels of offices, because even at 5’9”, I could have probably reached the ceiling by standing on my toes. It made everything feel dark.
Danny Murphy called out my name when I walked into the first office. I leaned around the doorway, seeing him in the very, very back. He gave me his customary grin as I came through the door.
He gestured to the man standing beside him. “Pastor Vale, I don’t know if you’ve met Justin Brent.”
“I haven’t.” I leaned over the desk to shake the man’s hand. The heavy dark brows and short, thick hair apparently ran in his family. He could have practically passed for Joshua Brent’s twin. So, this was Emma’s brother-in-law.
“I know your brother,” I said.
“Oh, right.” He held the handshake for a little longer than felt comfortable. Perviness also apparently ran in the blood in the Brent family. “You’re the girl who owns that bakery.”
Woman. I corrected him only in my head, though, in case the temper was also hereditary. Joshua did not like to be corrected.
“You should taste her cookies,” Danny said, reaching behind him for a box, but when he opened it, there were only crumbs left.
“I really should,” Justin said with a leer.
“None left.” Danny’s sing-song tone and smile said he was either oblivious or he had chosen to ignore the man’s insinuation. “I just hired Justin to drive trucks for us. If you drop by with another batch, he’ll get to fill out one of those cards, too. Oh, by the way, let me pick those up for you, Pastor Vale. Just wait right here.”
He scooted around the desk and out of the room before I could think of a response. I crossed my arms, staring at Justin. He had that tired, bleary-eyed look that spoke of a bad diet and too much drinking.
“So, you’re driving truck for Murphy’s now?” I asked, trying to pass the time while Danny dug around in the adjacent office.
“I started on Monday. I’ll start solo runs next week, but I’ve done shifts with the other driver for a couple of big orders.” He touched the empty box with the tip of one finger, rubbing at the stamp on the cardboard. “So. Matchbaker, huh? What does that mean? You gonna find me a date with your baking?”
Shoulda worn my clergy shirt and collar. Anything to make him less interested and more polite.
“That’s not what it means,” I said, smiling sweetly, t
rying not to also blurt out that no amount of sugar would make him more palatable. That women weren’t won over by double entendres.
“Then what does it mean?”
“I read people.” I settled my arms a little tighter across my chest. “I help match them with what they’d like to eat or drink by observing them and making assumptions about their behavior.”
“Oh yeah?” He leaned forward just enough to seem predatory. “And what do I want?”
I narrowed my gaze. “Given the untidiness of your general appearance, I would assume that you don’t have a wife or girlfriend, and from your attitude, I’m guessing that’s a long-term choice, rather than an accident of timing. You haven’t stopped leering at me since I walked through the door, which generally makes women uncomfortable, but since I’m only reasonably attractive for my age, I would guess it isn’t something you reserve only for super hot women, which makes me assume you probably get rejected. A lot. To deal with that rejection, you drink. A lot. Probably binge drink, if I had to guess, because your shirt can’t quite hide the gut you’re forming. You probably eat at the truck stop more often than you eat at home, or you’re eating greasy bar food, which is worse, and your skin looks like you haven’t seen a vegetable in the whole of your adult life.” I took a quick breath. “So I would say, what you think you want and what you really need are two different things, Justin Brent, just like your little brother, because I’m sure you want to get in my pants, but what you need is a conscience.”
His jaw had dropped steadily as I continued talking, but he seemed to have been stunned into silence by the end, which was just the way I liked him. I had no patience for guys like that, for whom every woman was a target.
I recognized my judge-y inner voice and had to take a deep breath. My fists had formed tight balls, and I’d moved forward in a predatory stance. It was no longer Justin who was on the offensive. It was me.
The whole time I’d been talking, my vision had narrowed, my fists had clenched… This wasn’t about Justin Brent at all. A lump caught in my throat. It was about Edward.
I had to stop seeing him everywhere I went—in every man, in every situation, in every threat. There was no getting around how much he still affected me, but I wanted it to be over. Needed it to be over.
With a backward step, I opened my mouth to apologize, but Danny called out my name as he walked into the office, stopping me.
“I’ve found them,” he said, handing over the little white cards in a neat pile. I wanted to get out of the office as fast as possible.
Danny walked with me, and I didn’t say goodbye to Justin Brent. I was ashamed of how personal I’d made my dressing-down, and I recognized the same killer instinct I’d used with Scarlet earlier in the week. It was one of the things I disliked the most about myself. Sometimes, in looking for justice, I was willing to be unjust.
When we got about halfway up the first aisle, I realized Danny had been talking my ear off, and I hadn’t listened to a single word he’d said. I settled the cards into a neater pile and smiled over at him, trying to regain my composure.
But then I spun around toward the offices. I tried to think of an excuse to go back and apologize. There was no acceptable reason for my rudeness—and the last time I’d acted out like this, someone had died.
“Can you excuse me for a second?” I asked, touching Danny’s arm. “I think I forgot something.”
As I rushed back into the office, I heard Justin’s voice call out. “Y’know, I should head back out to the Pump’n’Go over in Rolo. That motor oil finally—” When he saw me, he stopped talking. “Oh. I thought you were Danny.”
“Yeah. Look. I’m sorry, okay?” I stopped with my body halfway through the door. “I didn’t intend to be so mean.”
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
“No, not whatever.” I furrowed my brows and inched a little farther into the room. “I really shouldn’t have said that.”
“Fine.” Justin flipped through a couple more pieces of paper, not meeting my eyes. I did notice he was sucking in his gut a little. My words had obviously hit some nerve.
Danny came up behind me, standing beside me in the door. “I meant to tell you, Justin, Roy called about that back-ordered box of motor oil he didn’t get.”
Something clicked in my head. Rolo. Pump’n’Go.
“Wait, do you deliver to that convenience store in Rolo?” I asked, turning to Danny.
He nodded. “They call it The Store,” he said with a grin. “It was the first convenience store in the town, so it only had one name.”
“Were you in Rolo on Tuesday?” I looked at Justin, but he was still busying himself with paperwork.
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Fridays,” Danny finished for him. “Why?”
“I wasn’t there for the murder, if that’s what you’re asking,” Justin sneered, still not looking up. I was about to ask another question, but he kept going. “I went to school with Claire, y’know. If I had seen someone kill her, I would have come forward.”
His tone said, I’m not that big a jerk. And I deserved the defensiveness. But the words he’d chosen made me pause.
“You didn’t see someone kill her, but…did you see her that day?”
“Yeah. We pulled up to the corner of the highway. Y’know, you have to turn left to go along the highway, but if you turn right, there’s The Store.”
I nodded, leaning forward in eagerness.
“When I looked over, I saw some black car speeding away. Claire was trying to follow it, yelling something. We had the right-of-way, but the car cut in front of us. They looked pretty pissed.”
Emotion flooded through me. Henry. He’d seen Henry’s car. On the road back to Saint Agnes. And Claire had been alive.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I called the sheriff’s office on my way back from Murphy’s, and reported to the night clerk that someone should talk with Justin Brent about Henry’s alibi. I was doing what Malcolm had told me and staying away from it.
In lieu of going home, where I wouldn’t have reception—and where I wouldn’t have a landline until Monday—I went to my office at Saint Agnes Community Church. They hadn’t fired me yet, and there was work to do, for both my jobs.
I spent an hour typing up notes from the comment cards and tweaking recipes. I settled on four flavors of macarons for the next morning, and printed out the individual recipes.
Then I turned my attention to my other job. It was time to switch out the sermons. When I opened the box, it struck me that Norman’s sermons were organized by date. Considering how long he’d held his position, it was a little like having a living history of the town. I was on 1995, which was still early in his tenure, but it wouldn’t be long before I reached the first year of the school co-op—the timeframe during which those pictures I’d seen at Mrs. Barnett’s had been taken.
I flipped through the folders, moving forward in time, and pulled the files from July, August, September, and October of 1998. Shoving them into my messenger bag, I moved the sticky note that reminded me where I was to July of ‘98, and then left the office and locked up.
Norman had been more of an academic-minded teacher from the pulpit, but he’d always done a sort of week-in-review at the opening, tying something that had happened in the world into the topic of his sermon. It was easy to imagine the old pastor sitting at his kitchen table with Nadine in the mornings, the newspaper spread open in front of him, over a copy of The Cost of Discipleship.
He must have been an interesting man.
It was dark when I got home, and there was a strange truck in Malcolm’s driveway. I tried not to stare, as I gathered my things and walked into my house. A quick dinner of chicken breast and French green beans distracted me, but I checked on the truck again when I sat down to read the sermons. It was still there.
I purposefully lowered the lights in my living room, which faced Malcolm’s house, and kept the curtains mostly closed. There was just enough space for me to peek out and kee
p an eye on what was happening next door.
Reading through Norman’s sermons, starting from July 5th, 1998, which had been a Sunday. He made a big deal out of the veteran’s parade—a tradition I’d heard about from the coffee ladies.
Norman’s Fifth-of-July sermon acknowledged Frances Barnett and her sister Phyllis, who were the chairs of the parade planning committee. That seemed a strange thing to mention, since none of the Barnetts were members at Saint Agnes Community. The parade had to be a bigger deal than I’d originally thought.
Subsequent weeks in July revealed nothing interesting, and the first sermon in August was uneventful. Norman prayed for the people killed in an earthquake in New Guinea. He congratulated the Montana Little League teams for their performance.
But August 9th had some hand-written notes in the margin. Pray for the family of August Krantz, who is missing after a bombing at the embassy where he was stationed in Nairobi. His parents, Audric and Clara Krantz, are members of this church and pray for him to be found, quickly and safely.
I pulled out my phone and googled pregnancy calculator. I clicked on date I conceived, entered August 7th and hit calculate my due date. After a little waiting on my slow internet, the page loaded.
April 30th.
That confirmed my suspicions. Auggie couldn’t have been Austin’s father. I didn’t know a single doctor who would let a woman stall delivery for more than thirty days after her due date.
Was Henry really Austin’s father? There had to be a way to find out.
I brought up the search engine again and searched for Henry’s name. The first hits were on Wikipedia and IMDB, which I perused. According to whoever wrote his bio, he was discovered at his gym—which fit what Scarlet had told me—but didn’t give any dates, except for the first film, which was released in 1999. He had minor parts in several films and a couple of long stints on TV shows before he struck the proverbial gold with Bronson. He hadn’t exaggerated; he’d been married four times.
It bothered me to look at the photos of him, happy and alive. It still hadn’t really set in that I would never see him again. I hadn’t known him for long enough to feel real, deep grief, but I did grieve for him. He’d had so much to atone for, and he’d tried so hard to escape it.