I took the hint and grabbed my coat and keys, leaving Raven sitting at the table.
Who else, I wondered, knew the truth about Opal’s father?
BEFORE GETTING ON I-89 up to Burlington, I stopped in town at Haskie’s for a cup of coffee and a bottle of aspirin. My ankle still throbbed and my head wasn’t doing much better. I had resolved to steer clear of Wild Turkey for the rest of my visit.
“Heard about your mother’s cat,” Jim Haskaway said as he rang up my purchases. “Damn strange thing—its throat being cut like that.”
Oh, come on. Not this. I was in a hurry and not in the mood for anymore small-town gossip.
I nodded.
“Another funny thing,” Jim continued, “about that old murder—Del Griswold. When I saw Ellie Miller at Tori’s funeral, I mentioned you were back in town helping your mother out. We got to talking and Ellie said you and little Delores were the best of friends back then. Now I figure Ellie’s all shook up with her daughter being killed and all, and must be confused. ’Cause the way I remember it, you told me you hardly knew that Griswold girl.”
He eyed me with practiced suspicion. Great, a small town amateur detective—look out, Angela Lansbury. I wanted to suggest he stick to his role as fire chief, but was interrupted by a chime coming out of Jim’s scanner that seemed to get his full attention. It was followed by the staticky voice of a dispatcher saying that there was a car accident in town near the waterfall, then another series of electronic beeps.
“Ellie must be mistaken—it was a long time ago,” I confirmed, laying my money on the counter and hurrying away before he gave me back my change. He was too focused on the scanner to call after me. Saved by the bell.
I had parked the rental car in front of the Millers’ antiques shop and when I looked in through the filmed-over window, past the CLOSED FOR THE SEASON sign, I saw a woman I immediately recognized as Ellie sitting at a table thumbing through a stack of cards. She looked much the same as she had when I’d last seen her at high school graduation. She still had perfect posture and was dressed in a fashionable yet tidy way. Her hair was lighter than ever and she wore it in a neat bun. When she looked up and saw me, I felt compelled to say hello and made my way to the shop door, which was unlocked despite the CLOSED sign.
“I heard you were in town,” she said flatly.
Good to see you, too, Ellie.
The store smelled like old leather and furniture polish. A string of sleigh bells that were hung on the door jingled as it swung closed.
“Word gets around,” I told her, forcing a kind smile. Ellie turned her attention to the pile of old postcards she was sorting on the desk. Old sepia-colored images of a Vermont long gone. In front of the piles of yellowed postcards was a silver letter opener, a pad, and a pen. The desk was small, almost child-size, and Ellie sat with her knees pressed beneath it, looking terribly uncomfortable.
The shop itself was in a state of disarray and looked to be in the middle of a major off-season reorganizing project. At the back of the store stood a ladder resting against a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves that had been stripped bare. Carefully labeled boxes were stacked around the shop along with clipboards, price stickers, and reference books on antiques and collectibles.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. The words sounded hollow. She didn’t look up, and continued working through the postcards like they were a tarot deck, dealing them out to tell an uncertain future.
“People are talking,” Ellie said at last, her voice quavering. “People are saying you might have had something to do with what happened to Tori.”
Her face twitched as she spoke her daughter’s name. She fingered a stained postcard showing a picture of the old waterwheel that once ran the mill in town. Long gone. Wood rotted. Metal turned to dust.
“Me?”
“You and Nicky Griswold.”
Perfect. The dynamic duo of crime.
I laughed, unable to stop myself.
“Me and Nicky Griswold,” I repeated. “Is that what you think, Ellie?”
She pursed her lips, squinted down at a picture of a man with a team of horses hauling buckets of maple sap. Quintessential Vermont.
“I don’t think anymore. When you lose a child, you stop thinking.” Her words were sharp and her eyes never left the postcard. I nodded down at her sympathetically, knowing she didn’t see.
“I heard what Nicky thinks,” Ellie said. “He’s been going around town saying the Potato Girl did it.” She snorted derisively. “The Potato Girl’s the one who gets blamed for everything around here. If there’s a drought, it’s her doing. A car wreck, she’s responsible. But it makes me sick to hear people blame her for this. Just to hear her name and Tori’s in the same sentence makes me sick.” Her fingers trembled as she raced through the cards, seeming to put them into random piles.
“I understand,” I said.
“No!” Her tone was sharp. Angry. “No, you don’t. What’d you come here for, anyway, Kate? To reminisce about old times? To say how sorry you are about my daughter?” She looked up at me for the first time, her eyes burning into mine. She sat up even straighter, banging her knees into the bottom of the tiny wooden desk.
“I am sorry.” My voice was nearly a whine. “I just wanted to offer my condolences. I’ll go now and leave you to your work.”
“Good idea,” she said. “Why don’t you get in your little car and get out of New Canaan, Kate. No one wants you here. You showed up and the trouble began.”
She was right about that. Had my arrival triggered something? Put forces in motion? Or was it all just an unhappy coincidence?
“Just go!” Ellie barked. She stood up fast and flung an arm toward the door. As she rose, her legs caught the edge of the desk and it overturned, spilling postcards everywhere. The letter opener skittered across the floor to my feet. Ellie crouched, snatching up postcards, and began to cry. I picked up the letter opener and took a step toward her, thinking to help her collect the cards. Ellie jumped back, putting a hand to her throat.
“Are you going to hurt me now? You think I haven’t been through enough? You think there’s anything you could do to me that would hurt worse than the pain I already feel?” She was sobbing now. I dropped the letter opener to the floor.
“God, no. I’m so sorry. I was just trying…I’m sorry.”
She kept her hand protectively over her throat.
“You know, the truth is, I don’t think you killed my daughter,” Ellie said through her tears.
Before I could think how to respond she went on.
“But I think you know who did. I can see that in your eyes. I see it just as I saw that you really were friends with Del back then and that everything you told Sam and me about her was bullshit. Am I right, Kate?”
I opened my mouth to say something, anything—none of your business, we were in fifth grade for God’s sake, what difference does it make—but instead I snapped my jaws shut, turned on my heel, and slipped out the door. She had made me feel like a criminal after all.
“Am I right?” Ellie called after me, her voice raised in desperation. I shut the door hard, hopped into my car, and drove away without glancing back.
DRAGON MIKE’S TATTOO EMPORIUM was on Pearl Street, tucked between a cosmetology school and a Chinese takeout. The front room was poorly lit and the walls were plastered with tattoo designs. There was a large metal desk set up in the corner with an upholstered chair behind it and a metal folding chair in front. Behind the desk hung a red curtain and I could hear voices—a man and a woman, and a steady mechanical humming. In a minute, a woman with spiked magenta hair emerged from behind the curtain. She was dressed in tight jeans, biker boots, a white T-shirt, and a leather vest.
“Howya doin’?” she asked.
“Okay.”
“Yeah? Good. Take your time. Check out all the flash. We got books to look through, too. Ask if you need a price on anything. You ever had a tattoo before?”
“No.”
“A virgin, huh? Well, it’s true what they say. You can’t stop at just one. There’s just somethin’ about it. You can’t get enough. An addiction, I guess.” She held her arms out for my inspection. They were encircled with dozens of red roses. Woven into the flowers were several hearts, a black panther, and a few brightly colored butterflies.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said with a wink. “The real beauties are hidden.”
I prayed she wouldn’t offer to show me.
It’s a good kind of hurt.
“Actually,” I confessed, “I didn’t really come for a tattoo. I was hoping to talk to Mike.”
She eyed me skeptically.
“You know Mike?”
“Yeah, we went to school together.”
“Then you know he won’t be doing a whole lot of talkin’.”
I nodded. She continued on, a wistful look in her eyes.
“Some of my girlfriends wonder what I’m doin’ with a guy that can’t talk, but the way I figure it, God took away one thing and gave him another. The man’s an artist. He’s got a gift. You know what I’m saying? We gotta be thankful for what we got, not bitter about what we don’t. Right?”
I nodded again.
She smiled widely, showing several gold-capped teeth.
“He’s just doing a touch-up job. I’ll let him know he’s got someone waiting. What’d you say your name was?”
“Kate. Kate Cypher. I don’t know if he’ll remember me.”
“I’ll let him know.” She disappeared behind the curtain again, leaving me to study the walls. I found myself face-to-face with skulls that had snakes crawling out of the eyes and skulls with roses surrounding them.
Bones, I thought. Del’s just bones now. Or is she? I shivered.
The woman emerged from behind the curtain.
“He’ll be out in a minute. I’m headed home. Make yourself comfortable.” She gestured toward an old vinyl recliner in the corner. Next to it was a coffee table piled high with tattoo magazines. She grabbed a leather jacket from under the desk and walked out. “See ya,” she called to me.
In a few minutes, an enormous man with a shaved head came through the curtain, followed by a tall wispy man who wore his hair in a ponytail. I remembered how tall and thin Mike had been and it seemed like not much had changed, until I heard the skinny guy speak.
“Thanks, Mike,” he said, passing the hulking giant a wad of bills. The giant nodded and smiled. The skinny guy left the shop.
“Mike? Mike Shane?”
I was nearly struck mute. My old classmate now resembled a biker version of Mr. Clean, complete with gold hoop earring. He wore ripped jeans and a black leather vest with nothing beneath it. His exposed flesh literally rippled with muscles. His biceps were nearly as big around as my waist.
He nodded at me, his face expressionless.
“I’m Kate Cypher. We went to school together. Remember?”
This got me another nod.
“The thing is, I’m here for a reason. A kind of strange reason. I’m here about Del Griswold.”
No nod this time. He took a breath and seemed to hold it, his impossibly large chest looking larger still. He gestured me over to the desk and I sat down in the metal folding chair across from him. He pulled out a pad of paper and a pen and wrote a sentence, then turned the paper toward me.
What do you want?
“I want to know about Del’s tattoo.”
He narrowed his eyes.
What tattoo?
“The letter M on her chest. You gave it to her, didn’t you?”
He studied me a minute, didn’t write anything down. I realized he wasn’t going to give me anything if I didn’t give him something first.
“No one knows about the tattoo, Mike. I think I was the only one Del showed it to. She was really proud of that tattoo. She told me someone very special had given it to her.”
He scribbled violently on the pad.
I didn’t kill Del.
“I believe you. I just want to know about the tattoo.”
He wrote rapidly for a moment, then shoved the pad toward me defiantly. It was covered with neat, slanting block letters, amazingly legible for the speed with which he wrote them.
I was in the ER when Del was killed. I was there 5 hours. They took X-rays. Set my arm and nose. You saw the beating I took that day. Police knew I couldn’t have killed Del. All it took was a phone call to the ER and one look at my busted arm.
“The police never knew about the tattoo, Mike. The killer cut it off her.” His face went slack and he looked down at the desktop, his eyes glassy as marbles. I continued. “I’ll make a deal with you. If you tell me the truth about the tattoo, I won’t go to the police about it. I believe you didn’t kill her. Like you said, you couldn’t have. But I think you may have given her that letter M. And I also think the police would be mighty interested in that part of the story.”
He looked me in the eye, scribbled on his paper.
It was 30 years ago.
“Yeah, I know. But in case you hadn’t heard, there’s been another murder. A copycat killing. Ellie Bushey’s daughter. So the police are all of sudden interested in the unsolved case of Del Griswold. Now am I going to go to them with what I know, or are you going to help me out? I’m not interested in getting you in trouble, Mike. I just want to know what happened. I want to understand everything I can about Del’s last months alive.”
I wasn’t good at giving hard-boiled detective ultimatums, but I needed to get somewhere. I felt I was getting close to finding out what had happened to Del, and Mike was an important piece of the puzzle.
He looked at me a moment, then down at his yellow pad. He picked up the pen and started writing. His brow furrowed and his eyes squinted. He held the pen so tight that I was sure it would crack in two. The writing came slow at first, then faster, the letters scrawled quickly, like he was running a race. He filled three pages—as he finished a page he would tear it off and push it toward me, already starting on the next. When he was finished, he wiped sweat off his wide brow and set down the pen.
Most people didn’t know Del like I knew Del. They thought she was just some dumb retard, which I guess is the same way they thought of me. “Two peas in a pod,” that’s what I used to write in my notes to Del. Del said we were more like onions than peas, each of us with all these layers. When people looked, they saw our dirty outsides, that was all. That’s how Del used to say it.
I gave myself my first tattoo when I was 12. Tiny heart with the initials DG inside it. It’s on my right thigh. Dear God. That’s what I tell Lucy those initials stand for, but she must know I’m lying. Never mentioned Del to her. Not now, not ever. I don’t think she’d send me packing, but it would wreck her. To know I’d cared for some other girl so much. Even if I was only a kid. And if she found out that girl was dead, there’d be no contest. You can’t compete with a 1st love—especially not one who’s dead. You’ll always feel 2nd best.
I sure did love Del. All her layers. Even when peeling them back made me cry. Seems like that girl was always finding some new way to make me cry. She said there were other boys. Described what she did with them to me sometimes, like it was supposed to get me all hot or jealous or something, but really it just made me cry. But she said I was her only one. I was special. And to prove it, she asked me to tattoo my name across her chest. That way we’d be bound together…forever. Yeah, forever.
Well, like you know, there’s no such thing as forever. I only got as far as the M. Then some fucker, one of the other guys, I guess, killed her. Maybe he saw the tattoo and freaked out in some jealous rage. Maybe that’s why he cut her like that. To make her all his. I could almost understand that in some fucked-up kind of way. I had no idea the tattoo was cut off. I always expected the police would connect me to the M, but they never did.
Anyway, like I said, I didn’t kill her and I don’t know who did. The girl was a fucking mystery. I loved her yeah, but I never got anywhere
close to the center, if you know what I mean. The heart of the onion. I just scratched the surface. Left my M there as a mark.
I finished reading the pages and pushed them back to Dragon Mike. “Thank you,” I mumbled. I felt a combination of things. Jealousy, humility, sorrow. Had I ever let myself love anyone as Mike had loved Del? Loved someone enough to carve their initials in my skin, to carve mine in theirs? I was jealous that he had known such love. And that he had had that chance to know Del in that way. I realized that I hadn’t had the courage to peel back those layers, not just with Del, but with anyone. Not even with my husband. Ex-husband.
One thing was clear—I hadn’t known Del at all. She’d had a whole other life I knew nothing about. A life of boys who loved her, tattooed her, messed around with her. And one of them had killed her. My gut told me it wasn’t the huge man across the desk from me. He’d loved Del, he’d given her the M, but I didn’t think he’d killed her, nor did he know who did.
“I think I’d like a tattoo, Dragon Mike,” I told him, feeling suddenly spontaneous and brave. The big man smiled at me.
“I’d like a name,” I told him. “Desert Rose.”
Mike nodded, turning to a clean page in his pad. He wrote down the name in scripted letters, not unlike the letter M he’d done on Del’s chest.
You want any flowers around it? A red rose maybe?
“Uh-uh. Just the name.”
Where do you want it?
“On my chest, the same place you did Del’s M.”
Mike nodded and took me behind the curtain. As he was setting up, I asked him about the star.
“Mike, do you remember that sheriff’s star you gave Del?”
Mike looked puzzled, reached for his pad of paper, scribbled his answer, and passed it to me.
I didn’t give Del that star.
“Well, who did?”
Not sure. I think maybe she said she got it from her brother or someone her brother knew, maybe. Yeah, I think that’s it. Some friend of her brother’s.
The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle Page 18