‘Paul Sanger?’ The name was familiar. Malcolm snapped his fingers. ‘Dr Paul Sanger?’
‘Yes. You’ve met him?’
‘Not really. But he was pointed out to me, in the courtroom at the release hearing.’
Rose smiled. ‘Really? I haven’t seen him in years. He’s a pedi-atrician in Tucson. He’s an old friend, went to the same high school as Wes and Carrie and Nancy.’
‘Really? Wes and Carrie went to high school together?’
‘They did. They even went to grade school together. And you know what? I think Wes and Carrie always, always loved each other, from the minute they met in second grade, in Mrs Mueller’s class. But somewhere along the way they got sidetracked with their lives. Carrie went off to college. Then Wes got Nancy pregnant and, well, you know.’ She shrugged. ‘But as for Paul, he kind of sided with Polly rather than Wes on things, you know.’
‘Ah.’ He paused. ‘So putting rage and hatred aside, who benefits financially from these deaths?’
‘Just me and my mom for Carrie – but she didn’t really have much, just the shop with me – but Wes, he was pretty well off, I think, but actually right now I can hardly think at all. I just remember. That’s not the same as thinking, do you know that? Like—’
She reached for the stack of books beside her, took one off the top. Malcolm saw then that it was a photo album. She opened it and pointed to a snapshot. Two little girls on tricycles. ‘That’s me and Carrie when we were six and seven. And this one—’ she pointed – ‘is Carrie in her Halloween costume. It’s a cat. She made it herself. Those whiskers? They’re drinking straws!’ She turned more pages. ‘Here’s Carrie at her prom, isn’t she pretty? I remember going with her to get the dress. It was so—’ She stopped, sniffed. ‘So silly. We were so silly.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘We’ll never remember anything again, me and Carrie.’ She looked up at him eagerly. ‘Would you like to see their house? I can close up shop for a bit.’
‘Yes,’ said Malcolm. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, I would.’
Kate pulled into the parking lot near the Kroger’s, the Wendy’s, the Kentucky Colonel, the McDonald’s and all the motels. Home at last. She had what was left of today and all of the next day. She was due to fly back to Arizona the day after that. She could check into a motel right now or go look at the house first. She opted for the house – just a quick drive by.
The tree-lined street was deserted, and the house looked the same: the whitewashed brick maybe slightly flakier,the trellised climbing rose bush by the front door still full of yellow roses, except it wasn’t the same since it was no longer a house belonging to Ellen Wilson’s aunt. Yellow roses stood for something, Kate remembered, all roses did. What was yellow?
Was the key still under the rock? But it would feel like breaking and entering to go inside now – better to do things as legally as possible. Besides, what was there to learn by going inside? The ‘For Sale’ sign still hung crookedly from the iron stake. ‘Evan Bright Realty’ and a phone number.
Sitting in her car, she called the number.
‘Hi! No one’s in right now but leave a message for the realtor of your choice and they’ll get back to you. Or stop in tomorrow, we open at nine. Have a good day!’
Kate left a message – ‘I’d like to speak to a realtor regarding the property on three fifty Roscommon Drive’ – along with her name and cell number. It seemed like the best place to start.
Yellow roses stood for jealousy.
But so what?
She drove back to the shopping mall, parked at the same motel she had stayed in before and went inside.
The clerk looked like a high-school kid with a part-time job after school – nerdy glasses, big grin, favorite film-maker: Jude Apatow, favorite actor: Jonah Hill. He grinned at her as he took her credit card. His nameplate said ‘John’. Kate leaned against the counter, looking out at the cars parked row after row after row in the motel parking lot, in the Kroger’s parking lot, at McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Kentucky Colonel.
‘Kate Waters.’ The clerk snapped his fingers. ‘Aha.’
She turned to face him. ‘Aha, what?’
‘Now I remember. Your husband called.’
‘What husband?’
The clerk looked taken aback. ‘You’re not married?’
‘No, I’m not married. Tell me,’ said Kate gently, ‘exactly what you’re talking about.’
‘This guy called, he said his name was Roger Waters, his wife was Kate Waters and she was supposed to check in here, but he hadn’t heard from her and he was worried.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I checked our records and told him a Kate Waters had checked in here three days ago but she’d checked out the next day.’
The cellphone pinged in Kate’s purse – someone texting her. She ignored it.
‘Are you aware,’ she said to the clerk, ‘that it’s probably illegal to give out information like that?’
‘He sounded worried,’ the clerk said. He paused. ‘That’s not true about illegal. If someone calls and wants to talk to someone who’s here, we patch them through to the room.’
Patch them through? ‘What if I were a domestic violence victim,’ Kate said, ‘escaping from an abusive husband?’
‘But you said you weren’t even married.’
‘Never mind.’ Suddenly, Kate had a headache. ‘If anyone calls looking for me, don’t tell them I’m checked in here, okay? Tell them nothing. Please, it’s important. It’s not my husband, it’s an abusive boyfriend. He could be very dangerous.’
John’s eyes widened. ‘Sure. Sure thing.’
‘If I want to talk to someone I have a cellphone.’ She stretched out her hand. ‘Key, please.’
She went out to the rental car and got her carry-on. Someone was looking for her? Who? Why? Maybe it was a mistake to have come here. She walked with her back straight, one step, two step, three step, but her knees were trembling.
The Cooper’s house was two story, painted blue gray with two different shades of trim, white and navy. There were roses everywhere, along one side of the house, in the front and a rose garden in the back.
‘Carrie loved roses,’ said Rose. ‘We used to joke about it, ’cause of my name.’
She unlocked the door to the house, and Malcolm followed her in, down a hallway to a big den. There Rose stopped; the room was dim, curtains drawn. She flicked on a light, which only served to yellow the dimness. Malcolm saw a big flat-screen television, two leather recliners facing the TV.
He and Rose stood together. Rose seemed suddenly very close. Her hair smelled of sweet shampoo, and he was aware of the roundness of her body under the pink spangled T-shirt.
Malcolm stepped away. ‘So what was their life like?’ he asked.
‘Well, they went out to eat and to social events, but they spent lots of their time here,’ Rose said. ‘The TV’s pretty new.’
Lots and lots of their time here, Malcolm thought. There was a router, so they had Wi-Fi, and a Roku box too. He looked around and spotted a Big Mouth Billy Bass hanging on the far wall. His brother Ian had bought one as a joke a couple of years ago – three year old Shawn had screamed in terror the first time Big Mouth Billy had turned his head and sung ‘Take Me to the River’.
‘Ahem,’ Malcolm said. ‘So. You said they had no enemies – not really. So you can’t think of a single one?’ The question seemed unreal to him, by rote. How pretty Rose was, like a rose herself, in her pink spangly T-shirt.
‘Don’t all of us at times have enemies?’ she said, face a little flushed. ‘But no, not really. Wes played golf a lot. He retired a couple of years ago, early retirement – he got some kind of package deal to do it, so he took it. He and Carrie played bridge once a week with some other couples. Carrie and I ran the shop. They liked to travel.’
‘Carrie never married before Wes?’
‘That’s right. She had long-ter
m boyfriends; they would last maybe four or five years, with some short-term guys in between.’ Rose flushed even deeper. ‘It makes her sound awful. She was just always so attractive to men.’
‘Any of them, um, abusive?’
‘Not that I know of. Carrie wouldn’t tell me if they were; she had a lot of pride.’
‘Local guys?’
‘No. That’s the thing, I never really knew any of them. Carrie moved away after she graduated from high school. She went to college at Penn State, then she spent some time in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was the closest she got to home. Then New York City. But I think unconsciously she was kind of saving herself for Wes. I think both of them were in love from the day they met, and they never stopped.’ Rose sniffed. ‘I guess if they had to die in such a horrible way at least they were together. And now—’ She sniffed again. ‘Pretty soon I’ll have to start dealing with all their stuff. It’s kind of like them dying all over again, you know?’
They stood together. Malcolm and Rose, in the den. Rose looked forlorn, needy, as if she might burst into tears. Good god, thought Malcolm, what if she did? He imagined the scene, Rose weeping, him holding her, comforting. He would feel obliged to comfort her; he was just that sort of man.
And then what?
‘Umm,’ said Rose, her face reddening even more, as if she’d had the same thought. ‘There’s nothing really here. Let’s go back out.’
Outside, bees buzzed round the roses. He could smell the grass, so much grass back east. At the end they traded cellphone numbers.
‘I’ll keep you updated,’ he told Rose. He handed her his card. ‘And if you think of anything, anything at all that might be helpful, give me a call.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Malcolm was lying on top of an overly floral print bedspread watching the news with the sound off. It didn’t really matter; the news repeated itself over and over until you knew what they were going to say before they said it, and just in case you didn’t they told you again in the banner that slid across the bottom of the screen.
His cellphone chimed. No number he recognized.
‘Malcolm here.’
‘Hello. Malcolm MacGregor?’ A man’s voice.
‘Yeah?’
‘This is Dan Piper, Oceanside PD. Frank Cruz of Mesa PD gave me your number. Concerning Anna Marie Romero?’
‘Right.’ Malcolm got up and walked over to the tiny refrigerator, opened it. ‘Hey, thanks for getting in touch.’ He took out a Sam Adams. ‘What can you tell me?’
‘Anna Marie left her parents’ house where she was still living and drove to the tennis court at a local high school in her mom’s car, parked it there and was basically never seen again.’
‘I read that article,’ Malcolm said. ‘Wasn’t there some workshop she’d gone to?’
‘That was hours earlier.’ Dan sighed. ‘Beautiful girl. What’s your interest?’
‘One of the suspects was a professor, Harry Light? He ran the workshop.’
‘The poet guy.’ Dan Piper laughed. ‘Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t call him a suspect. Not exactly, anyway. I mean, he’d dated her a couple of times, so we checked him out, is all.’
‘Dated her? She break it off, do you know?’
‘According to him, even though she wasn’t technically a student when they dated, she took workshops from him and he felt uncomfortable about it, so he broke it off.’
‘Aw,’ said Malcolm, ‘a saint.’ He began to pace from the tiny kitchen to the bed and back again.
‘He’s got a misdemeanor charge from a while back, criminal damage.’ Dan laughed. ‘It was dismissed. But as far as being a suspect in the Romero case, he was down the list. It got some attention ’cause he was pretty well-known locally. But I didn’t really consider him a contender, if you know what I mean. Though at least one person did.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Another poet. I’m not kidding. A colleague. Name of Gregory, Michael Gregory. There was some kind of rivalry going on there. Said he saw them together at a local restaurant later than Harry Light admitted to.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. It was a restaurant out of town, but we couldn’t confirm it. Crab Heaven was the name of the place – down on the beach. We talked to the staff, but it was a busy night, no one remembered. No credit card receipt or anything like that. It didn’t go anywhere.’
‘You said Harry Light was down on the list of suspects. So who was on top?’
‘I exaggerated. She had a couple of other boyfriends – I mean, she was gorgeous – but I wasn’t really looking at the boyfriends.’
‘Who were you looking at then?’
‘Anna Marie’s dad.’
‘Her dad? No kidding.’ Malcolm paced back to the kitchen.
‘Name of Raymond Romero. He scared off her last boyfriend. He had a long history of domestic violence. His wife was scared of him, and Anna Marie was too, from what I understand. She’s twenty-four years old and still living at home with a jealous dad; I figured maybe she was talking about moving out and he got mad.’
One of the problems, Malcolm thought, with having a strong suspect like the dad, in a case like that: it meant nobody followed up on anyone else. But he had no reason to point that out. ‘So what’s going on with the mom and dad now?’ he asked.
‘The dad calls us up every once in a while with tips that never go anywhere. Then he gets mad and says we’re not really trying. He could be playing a role, covering up or he could be for real, for all I know. What can you do?’
‘What about the mom?’
‘Cecilia is her name. The whole situation put a big stress on the marriage, but they struggled through it. Best thing that can happen right now is for the body to turn up. Then we’ll have something to go on. You know, come to think of it, Cecilia has family in Phoenix. Visits them sometimes.’
‘Really,’ Malcolm said. ‘Where in Phoenix? You got names of the relatives? I’d sure like to talk to the mom, without, you know, the angry dad.’
‘Let me see what I can do, okay?’
Lupita, he thought after he got off the phone with Dan Piper. Lupita had texted him a couple of times now and he hadn’t gotten back to her. He called her now, but got no answer. He didn’t bother with her voicemail.
In the motel room Kate tried to reassure herself – so someone had called the motel looking for her, claiming to be her husband? The motel guy had told him she’d checked out. He wouldn’t know she’d come back. How could he? At least it sounded as though it wasn’t a woman, eliminating fifty percent of the world’s population from suspicion.
Then she remembered she’d gotten a text while she was talking to the clerk. She opened her cell, checked the message. It was from Dakota. Suddenly, she felt lonely, lonelier than she had before. Lonely for Arizona.
Where r u now? Let’s talk. Malcolm was looking 4 u.
Malcolm? Who—? Ah, the guy at the gallery, the one who’d tried to talk to her at the Co-op later. What was that Malcolm guy doing, talking to Dakota? Why was he looking for her? Could he be nuttier than she realized, could he have something to do with all this? But she couldn’t imagine how. She needed to talk directly to Dakota, hear the nuances of her actual voice. She called her.
‘Kate, wow, how are you? Are you having fun in New Jersey? Why did you leave New York City, anyway? I wouldn’t have.’
‘Dakota, stop. Why are you talking to this Malcolm guy? I don’t trust him.’
‘Kate, no, it’s okay. He’s a detective. From Phoenix, Mesa actually. He’s a cop, and he’s investigating the tourist murders.’
‘He says.’
‘He’s really a nice person, Kate.’ She paused and added significantly, ‘That’s probably why you don’t trust him, if you know what I mean.’
‘Oh, please. Look—’ Kate took a deep breath. ‘All these things have been happening to me.’ And she told Dakota the whole story, the empty house, Ellen being dead, everything.
‘Kate,’ Dakota said afterwards,
‘I think you should come back home right away.’
‘Home?’ said Kate flatly. ‘Home? And where is that?’
Malcolm was sound asleep on the motel bed, in a room with the TV on and the sound off. A room whose air conditioning was cold enough to preserve the dead, dreaming about one of them, Cindy, who wasn’t really dead; she was telling him this, that she wasn’t really dead, as they sat side by side on the swings in the playground where he’d gone to in first, second and third grades.
‘At least not yet,’ she said, and just as she said that he heard a noise, kind of musical.
He opened his eyes. His cellphone chimed again from the end table next to the bed. He reached for it, saw it was Dakota, then it slipped from his grip and fell to the floor. He leaned to over to pick it up, but it had stopped ringing. Lupita, Lupita had texted him earlier too, but he hadn’t gotten back to her. If she called him now, he would be too tired to talk to her.
He turned off his cell and fell asleep again.
TWENTY-SIX
The big plate-glass window of Evan Bright Realty displayed photographs of houses, remarkably similar in architecture, big McMansions on little lots. A lot of the snapshots had little banners across saying, ‘Marked Down!!’ And the words ‘motivated seller’. Kate paused for a moment looking for 350 Roscommon Drive but didn’t see it. She gave up and pushed open the door; a bell tinkled. Three women seated at desks looked up at her hopefully. All of them were smiling.
‘Hi!’ said the one closest to her, whose name on her desk said ‘Marci’. ‘I see you’re admiring our trophy case.’
Their what? Then Kate saw it, across from the door, a big wooden case with a glass front, full of shiny trophies. ‘Yes,’ she said politely. ‘My goodness, so many.’
‘Most of them are Evan Bright’s. He was a big local basketball star, all state in high school. He was the owner – he passed. His widow keeps everything the same. We’re encouraged to bring our trophies in—’ she giggled – ‘if we have any. Alice—’ she gestured somewhere behind her – ‘has one for golf.’
‘Ah,’ said Kate.
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