She handed him back his license. “Okay, Romeo. But this is a pretty quiet neighborhood, and with all these girls disappearing, people are skittish. They see a big black truck sitting out here in the middle of the night, engine running, and they call us. So why don’t you toodle on home and try again tomorrow, during the day? Maybe bring her flowers?”
Ethan smiled. “Yes, Officer. Sorry for the bother.”
“No bother, as long as you’re telling me the truth and I don’t catch you back here again.”
“You won’t.”
“All right, then. Good night,” she called as she walked to her car.
Ethan put his wallet back in his pocket, climbed into his truck, and sat there feeling more stupid than he had since high school algebra class. It was one thing to have sexual fantasies about a woman you barely knew but another entirely to sit outside her place of business as if she might magically appear, answering the same carnal call of the night. Was he suddenly a love-struck adolescent again?
He put the truck in gear and sped away.
RACHEL WATCHED his truck vanish into the night. She was shaking again, but not from fear. The god-awful lust had returned, just as bad as before, as if the night’s tryst with the lake had not even happened.
She went into the bathroom and started a cold shower. Her fingers shook as she peeled off her sweaty clothes. And as the icy spray first touched her, something she’d completely forgotten rose from her memory, adding an emotional chill to the water’s effect.
Back at Father Thyme’s, the man in the Packers cap had asked, Out late again? She was not a regular at the coffeehouse, and she visited the lake in secret, so how did he know she was out late again?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A KNOCK ON THE DOOR awakened Rachel. She was sprawled facedown on the couch, the TV playing softly in the background. She wore only a man’s undershirt, and when she moved, every muscle protested. She stood with a groan, dislodging Tainter from the small of her back, and grabbed sweatpants from the floor in the bathroom. Without removing the security chain, she opened the door.
Helena stood there, her expression odd. “What time is it?” Rachel asked sleepily.
“It’s five A.M., but… something awful has happened.”
“To you?”
Helena looked like she might cry. “No, it’s … Can you please open the door?”
Rachel closed the door, removed the chain, and opened it all the way. “What?”
“You better come downstairs and see for yourself.”
Rachel followed Helena downstairs. When she came into the diner, she froze, eyes wide.
The dry-erase walls were covered in enormous, sloppy red writing. Fuck you bitches was written in two-foot-high red letters along one wall. Kiss my ass whores took up another wall. One of the counter stools had been wrenched from its base, and red paint had been poured into the toaster and coffeemaker.
“Jesus Christ,” Rachel whispered. “How did… When…” After the events of the previous night—hell, she though bitterly, of just a few hours ago—she lacked the stamina to control herself much more. She felt tears surge up, and it took everything she had not to let them fall.
The kitchen door opened and Jimmy entered, whistling. When he saw the writing he stopped in mid-note. “Holy shit. What happened?”
Helena shook her head. “I don’t know. What time did you get home last night, Rachel?”
She said nothing, but the evening’s events rushed through her head. The door had been unlocked, but she hadn’t turned on the lights when she went to look out the front window. She had been so focused on the man in the truck that she hadn’t even glanced at the walls. Had Ethan done this? No, that made no sense at all. If not him… then who? The man she’d chased away from Patty? Some random gang of teens?
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” Rachel said. She caught Jimmy staring at her breasts, which the baggy undershirt did little to hide. Crossing her arms, she said, “Jimmy, go down to the Ace Hardware across from St. Vinnie’s thrift shop and get three gallons of red paint and three of those long-handled rollers. Do it fast; they open at five-thirty. Helena, you go out to Target and get us a new toaster and coffeemaker; they’re open twenty-four hours. When Jimmy gets back, we’ll paint over those lovely comments and get ready for our customers. I’ll order some replacement wall panels and a new stool today too. In the meantime, put a wet floor sign over that spot so nobody gets tetanus from those broken screws.”
“On it, boss,” Jimmy said, and left. Helena put her hand on Rachel’s shoulder and said, “Are you sure? Shouldn’t we call the cops or something? Maybe not open today?”
Rachel shook her head. “I’ll talk to my insurance company and see if this is covered. If they need a police report, then I’ll call the cops. But if we don’t open, then whoever did this wins.”
Helena started to say something else, thought better of it, and followed Jimmy outside.
When she was alone, the morning sun just lighting the tops of the trees outside the window, Rachel sighed, bowed her head, and allowed herself to cry for five minutes. Who could have done this? Who could hate her that much?
Only one name came to mind: Don Talley, her ex-husband. He was petty enough to do this, but would he? She recalled the truck that followed her on the way home. She hadn’t looked closely to see if it was, in fact, the same truck that had menaced Patty. Could it have been Don, intending harm only to her?
That marriage had been the single biggest mistake she’d ever made. She had met him at a wedding she catered back when she ran Soirees to Go, and at first he’d seemed so easygoing, likable, and charming that she thought, briefly, he might understand her relationship with the lakes. He’d dazzled her with his attention, and before she knew it she was Mrs. Rachel Talley.
By the end of the next six months, she was ready to commit murder or suicide, whichever opportunity presented itself first. Don had hidden a mass of insecurities the size of Australia behind that charming exterior, all of which he now felt free to expose. At first she’d tried to reassure him and assuage his ego, but it was just too much. And it all coalesced and eventually centered around one thing: her inability to have an orgasm with him.
She’d mentioned she liked to skinny-dip and planned to tell him the whole truth soon after their honeymoon. But almost at once he became fixated on making her come. He insisted that if he had just five more minutes, even when they’d stretched things out to nearly an hour, she would’ve gotten “there.” He blamed everything on her lack of regular orgasms, and since he also kept her away from the lakes, she grew more tense and snippy as well. Their home became a battleground and their bed the Russian front: cold, brutal, and the site of unbelievable carnage.
But Don hadn’t contacted her in years. The last she heard, he was in Hong Kong. What could have brought him back after all this time, seeking revenge only now for some perceived wrong?
She looked up at the graffiti. It was impossible to identify the handwriting. And if Don had come all this way, would this be all he would do?
That thought made her carefully look around for more damage. She found none, but perhaps this was merely the beginning of something. Would she have to be on her guard constantly now, like she’d been for Curtis?
“No,” she said aloud, hands on her hips. “No one will terrorize me. Not Don, not Curtis, not anyone.” Her words echoed off the empty, defaced walls.
Then she headed upstairs to get ready for the day.
THEY MANAGED to cover the words before the first patron, Mrs. Boswell, arrived. She looked at the patchy painting, scowled a bit at the smell, but said nothing. She took her usual seat, opened her newspaper, and began to read. Helena poured her coffee and took her order as if nothing unusual had happened.
Suddenly Mrs. Boswell exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness. Oh, this is awful. Did you see this?”
She pointed at a photo on the front page. “That poor Chinese girl who disappeared—Ling Hu. They found her body
last night, or, rather, early this morning.”
Rachel looked up from the sink where she was wiping down the new coffee carafe. The name cut through her hazy, sleep-deprived brain, carried on the half-remembered melody of Patty Patilia’s song. She rushed from the kitchen, sat on the counter, and swung her legs over it to the other side. She peered at the newspaper over Mrs. Boswell’s shoulder.
“I knew it would end like this,” Mrs. Boswell said. “But it’s still just so awful.”
The byline was by Julie Schutes. The lead paragraph read:
Fishermen found the body of missing UW–Madison student Ling Hu in Lake Mendota before dawn this morning. Police say at present they know neither the cause of death nor how long the body had been in the water.
Rachel scanned the rest of the article. With nothing new to report, it simply rehashed the previous coverage. This included reprinted quotes from people who knew the girl, photos of the original crime scene and apartment building, and of course a photo of the girl herself, the image significantly smaller than the one showing her covered body being loaded into an ambulance.
Rachel felt hollow as she stood up. She knew nothing about this girl, she’d had no visions regarding her, and had gleaned her Lady of the Lakes info from the usual cop scuttlebutt. But there was Ling Hu, smiling in one picture and dead under a sheet in the other. The other two missing girls would no doubt soon meet a similar end. But at least she’d saved Patty.
“That’s so sad,” Mrs. Boswell said. “She was such a lovely little thing.”
The door opened, and Elton Charles entered, sweaty from his morning run. “Did you see the news? They found one of those girls who disappeared.” He did a double take at the red walls but, like Mrs. Boswell, said nothing.
“I was just reading about it,” Mrs. Boswell said, holding up the paper.
Helena put a large glass of orange juice down in front of Elton, then turned to Rachel. “Are you all right?” she asked quietly. “If you need to go upstairs for a while…”
Rachel shook her head. “I’m just really tired,” she said, and went into the kitchen and began scrubbing red drops of paint from a pot, just to have a task. She was too exhausted to cry again, but she knew it would come tonight when she was alone—tears for a total stranger. And then there was the practical consideration: What would The Lady of the Lakes have to say about this?
HELENA WATCHED her boss with concern. She couldn’t imagine why this news bothered Rachel so much, when she’d taken the vandalizing with such equanimity. They didn’t know the victim, and while it was sad, the world was full of sad things.
Before she could ponder it further, though, the bell over the door jangled and Marty Walker entered. He hung his suit jacket on the wall peg and took his usual seat at the end of the counter, nodding at Elton and Mrs. Boswell. Then he stared at the red walls.
“Surprised to see you in here,” Helena said as she put coffee in front of him. “Shouldn’t you be at Lake Mendota with all the other cops?”
“I have been. Now it’s all about waiting for test results and other lab things.” He nodded at the red wall. “What happened?”
Helena glanced back toward the kitchen. “Spur-of-the-moment experiment. What do you think?”
“It’s a little… ragged around the edges, isn’t it?”
Helena shrugged. “That’s what I thought too. Way too modern art for me. But there was no way to know without doing it. I bet we go back to the white walls pretty soon.”
Marty looked at her oddly, then looked past her at the kitchen doorway. “Is Rachel back there?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you ask her to come out here a moment?”
Helena turned and called, “Hey, boss! You got a visitor.”
When Rachel approached, Marty stood and said, “Can we step outside for a moment?”
Rachel glanced at his shoulder holster. “Your gun’s showing. Am I in trouble?”
“No, nothing like that. Just something I’d like to discuss in private.”
RACHEL FOLLOWED Marty outside. It was already warm, and the air hung with mist the sun had not yet burned away. She put her hands on her hips and said, “Yes, Officer?”
“I want to apologize for my idiot brother.”
“Again?”
“Apparently. I talked to him this morning about his little, uh…”
“Covert surveillance?” She said it without a smile, because it certainly wasn’t funny.
“Let’s say overzealous approach.”
“Let’s say stalking.”
“Rachel, I’m really sorry. So is Ethan. He was just lonely and sleep-deprived and not thinking things through. He wanted to come with me and apologize himself, but I said it’d be better this way.”
“Did he really?”
“Yes,” Marty said. “Ethan takes things to do with personal honor very seriously.”
“That whole once-a-soldier thing.”
“No, he’s always been that way. I admit you’ve seen the less admirable aspects of him, but, really, he’s a good, decent guy. He didn’t mean to step on your toes when he chased away that troublemaker, and he didn’t realize parking outside the diner would freak you out.”
Rachel looked down as she pondered this. Someone had spray-painted a small stencil of a broken heart on the sidewalk, and it was faded but still visible. At last she said, “He probably didn’t even know I lived here, did he?”
“Probably not. I didn’t tell him.”
“And he is your brother.”
“All my life.”
“And I did invite him back. Although I kind of imagined it would be during business hours.”
Marty smiled.
She blew a curl from her forehead. She had been passive in responding to everything that happened last night; here, at least, was a chance to be direct. “Okay, Marty, tell you what. Give me his number and I’ll call him and talk to him. If it’s like you say, just a string of misunderstandings, then everything’s cool. But if he does one more weird-ass thing, he’s out. For good, end of story, restraining order filed. I mean it.”
Marty handed her a business card. “That’s his office and cell number.”
She read over the card. “He runs his own business?”
“Well enough to support our father’s farm too. Because God knows Dad isn’t making any money at it.”
Rachel put the card in her pocket. “Okay. But I’m serious: no more weirdness. I don’t need it, and I won’t put up with it.”
Marty held up his hands. “It’s between you and Ethan now.”
JULIE SCHUTES sipped stale coffee as she read through the text on her screen. She desperately wanted a shower but didn’t trust the office to let her know if any new information came in. She wasn’t some blank-skulled TV reporter, after all; she was a whole lot more than her pretty face and top-rate legs, although she was not above using whatever it took to get the story. Her coworkers, especially the female ones, saw this as an unfair advantage and took any chance to sabotage her.
The call about Ling Hu’s body had come in at 3:30 A.M., and she was at the crime scene fifteen minutes later. On the way there, she’d called Sam Garnett and told him to hold the morning edition, that she’d have the story within an hour. It had taken a Herculean group effort to get it done, and she’d actually been impressed with the way Garish stroked everyone’s ego so that the end result was important to them all. Maybe he wasn’t such a putz.
She’d written the story on her laptop in the car, then pasted in sections from her earlier stories to reach an acceptable word count. Now she had to write a real story for the next day’s edition. She had her contacts at the coroner’s office primed to notify her as soon as the cause of death was determined, far in advance of any official announcement. Using her most sympathetic, gosh-I’m-nearly-in-tears voice, she’d left messages with Ling Hu’s friends, seeking comments. She’d written the outline and all the prose around the comments, so now she just had to wait for the pho
ne to ring.
She saved her work, then switched over to the Internet. The Lady of the Lakes, curiously, said nothing about Ling Hu. That struck her as odd; how could a person or group know about every cat stuck in a tree and yet not know about this? Did he/she/they just not care? Was it a racial or political thing, because the victim was Chinese?
This lapse was a clue, she realized, to the identity of the mysterious blogger. She made a note in the special file she kept, one more tidbit that would, someday, allow Julie to unmask this erstwhile Lady. Then her phone rang with the first of many returned calls.
LATER, AS SHE stood on State Street, Rachel wondered what would really qualify as “weirdness.” She was exhausted after last night’s adventures and really should be at home, resting and dealing with the vandalism, instead of standing downtown in the summer heat. She certainly shouldn’t be wearing a vaguely provocative spaghetti-strap top, a tight khaki skirt, and high-heeled open-toed shoes. And she definitely didn’t need the splash of red lipstick that, she knew from experience, accented her mouth in a way that made most men a little nervous. Yet here she was, gazing at the tasteful sign that said Walker Construction, while Helena and Jimmy prepared for the lunch crowd and got the estimate to replace the damaged dry-erase wallboards and the ripped-out stool. Some boss she was.
She could’ve just called Ethan, of course. His cell-phone number was on the card Marty gave her. That would’ve been enough for most people. But something in her practically screamed to be in his presence again, and she figured that during the middle of the day, in public, would be the best way to keep from making a fool of herself. Well, a bigger fool.
She went inside and took the stairs instead of the elevator. When she emerged onto the third floor, she easily found the right door. She opened it and saw a sparse office suite with a young Indian woman at the receptionist desk.
The woman looked up and blinked with slow, dramatic disdain; obviously she felt Rachel was in the wrong place and the distraction annoyed her. She said, “May I help you?” but for a moment it wasn’t clear if she was speaking to Rachel or into her headset mouthpiece. After a moment she added, “Yes, miss, you standing right there.”
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