by Layton Green
Gritting his teeth, he knocked on Blue’s door. No answer. All the lights were off inside. After that, he went door to door and talked to a few more neighbors, including a wiry retiree who lived across from Blue. Dressed in overalls with no undershirt, his teeth and nails stained yellow from tobacco, the old man’s rheumy eyes wandered to his left, focusing on a trio of children at play, as he answered Preach’s questions. When asked about the camera, the old man got a clever glint in his eye, right before he said he had no idea what Preach was talking about.
“A hot piece like that wouldn’t last five seconds around here,” the old man, whose name was Billy Flynn, said. “Someone would pawn it off quicker than a raccoon fart.”
“I never said it was stolen,” Preach said quietly.
He stuttered for a moment. “Well then how else in the Sam Hell would it end up here ? Look around you.”
Preach stepped closer, invading his space. The old man’s breath reeked like spoiled meat. “Why don’t you think a bit harder ?”
Billy shuffled back a step. “You can’t just come on in here.”
“Is there a reason I would want to ?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one came round.”
“I think you’ve seen that camera before. I want to know when.”
He leered at Preach, defiant. “I’m telling you I haven’t.”
Preach stared right back at him, until the old man lowered his eyes and retreated another step inside his trailer. On the kitchen table behind him, Preach spied an open laptop that looked twenty years old.
“How about I take that computer back to the station with me? I wonder if there’d be anything on there that shouldn’t be ?”
Billy started, his eyes slipping again to the kids playing in the street. “You can’t do that. You ain’t got no warrant.”
“Mr. Flynn, I’m investigating a homicide. You have no idea what kind of authority I have. Don’t believe what they tell you on TV. Now do you want to tell me something, or do I take your computer with me and see where you’ve been going on the Internet?”
“Aw listen, now,” he said, waving a hand. “It’s just that girl Blue.” He pointed. “Lives right over there. I seen her with a camera once. Ain’t got no idea if it’s the same one, but it had to be stolen. She was prancing her little tush around at night filming stuff, pretending she was a fancy director.” He cackled. “Kids got to dream when they grow up round here, don’t they?”
“When was this?”
He shrugged. “Dunno. Couple weeks ago ?”
“What else ?”
“What you mean?”
“What else do you know about the camera ? Does she still have it ?” He drew back as if Preach had insulted him, suddenly self-righteous. “Why would I know shit about that girl? I only seen her once at night with the camera, that’s all.”
“How often do you watch her at night ?”
“What?” he said, sullen now. “Never.”
“Except that one time.”
“I was looking for my cat. It ran away.”
Preach gave him a long, hard stare. He knew his type. Besides a probable pedophile, Billy was a man who would sell out his own mother to save his skin, living on the margins of society like a rat, gnawing at whatever came near. Preach sensed the old man was holding something back, too, though maybe it had nothing to do with David’s death. Preach could come back and lean on him if needed. Right now, he had to find Blue.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Preach asked.
“The girl? Dunno. I ain’t her pops. I s’pose it’s been a few days, but like I said, I don’t look out for her or nothing.”
Before Preach could press him, Billy pointed a crooked finger over the detective’s shoulder. “Why don’t you ask her, now. That’s her mother coming in from work.”
Preach turned to see a tall, lean woman with dirty blond hair tied in a ponytail approaching Blue’s trailer. The woman had Blue’s narrow shoulders and graceful neck, but none of her poise. He could tell she once had been a stunner, but now she looked exhausted and defeated, a dirty dishrag that her forty-odd years had wrung the life out of.
“Excuse me,” Preach called out as he hurried over, catching her just before she shut the trailer door.
“Oh,” she said, holding it open. “Do I know you?”
He pulled out his badge. “I’m Detective Everson with the Creekville Police.”
She waved a tired hand. “Annie isn’t here. I haven’t seen her in a few days. I just came home for a bite to eat.”
“Annie is Blue?”
“That’s right. I’m Gigi Stephens, her mother.”
“How many days ?”
She looked genuinely perplexed. “I . . . I’m not sure.”
“And you’re not worried?”
“About my daughter ? I only said I hadn’t seen her. I assumed she’d been in her room all week. She only comes out for school or money.” Preach had a hard time believing what he was hearing. “Are you telling me you don’t know for sure if you’re daughter’s been home this week?
Blue’s mother looked uncomfortable now. “I’m not neglecting her. I work long hours, and she’s just at that age, you know? Teenage angst and all that. Convinced the world is against her.”
It kind of looks like it is.
“What’d she do this time?” Gigi said, with a sigh.
“She might have come into possession of a stolen camera. Have you seen one around?”
“No,” she said, “though I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s obsessed with movies.”
Preach sucked in a breath. “Is that right?”
“She’s always talking about going to Hollywood one day—as if anyone over there would have her. Not just Annie,” she said hurriedly, sensing Preach was judging her. “I mean someone from,” she waved a hand, “you know, from around here.”
“Has your daughter ever owned a camera?”
“You mean a real camera? A movie camera?” Her laugh was self- deprecating, ashamed. “I can’t even buy her a cell phone.”
“Ma’am, I need you to listen carefully. I think your daughter may be in danger.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m not positive—not even close to it—but there’s a chance someone believes Blue witnessed a crime. A murder.”
Gigi slowly lowered her hand from the door. “Who?” she said, almost in a whisper, then clapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.” “What?”
“Someone else was here looking for her. Just yesterday. He said he was a friend from school, though he looked a little old for that. I thought maybe he’d been held back a year or two.”
“What did he look like ?”
The description she gave him, a young Latino male with an athletic build and intense eyes, caused a lump of dread to settle in Preach’s stomach. “What did you tell him?”
“Just that I hadn’t seen her. Who was he ?”
“Let’s just find Blue as quick as possible and see if we can clear this up.”
“Okay. Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Do you want to come in?” “Sure.”
After searching Blue’s room and coming up empty, Preach accepted a glass of water and sat across the kitchen table from Gigi. The cheap plywood surface was covered in coupons and scratch-off lottery tickets.
Blue’s mother looked shaken. “She took my spare cash,” she said. “I haven’t checked the drawer in a while. She wouldn’t have done that unless she was leaving.”
“Do you have any idea where your daughter might have gone ?” “She’s never run away before. Not for real.”
“Does she have a hideout? A special place she goes when she’s upset?”
Her mother thought for a while, then held out her palms, helpless. “What about a relative ?”
“My family lives in Utah. We never talk.”
“And her father ?”
Gigi looked at an old photo attached to the refrigerator, of herself holding a baby in a city park.
“He left a long time ago. When Annie was nine.”
“Were they close ?”
She started chewing on the tip of her thumb. “She worshipped him,” she said distantly, still staring at the photo. “And he never came back. Not even a card on her birthday. Not once.”
“Where did he go?”
“He ran off to California with a girl he met at a bar. And that, Detective, is the whole of the story. We fought from the beginning, and I can forgive him for leaving me. But Annie . . . he hurt my little girl so bad.”
As he decided what to ask next, Gigi reached for a pack of Camel Lights sitting in a wooden bowl in the center of the table. After fishing out a cigarette, she lit up, crossed her long legs, and leaned back in her chair. “I stayed in this shithole trailer because I’m too poor to leave. My family in Utah is even worse off. God gave me blond hair, a healthy daughter, and little else in life. She’s everything I have.” Her chin quivered, and she swallowed. “Please find her for me.”
“I’ll do everything I can. Is there anywhere else she’s familiar with? Has she ever been out of town before?”
Gigi thought for a moment. “She’s been to the beach a few times. Day trips to Wrightsville. Her father took her to the circus once, Raleigh a few times . . .” she shrugged. “That’s about it.”
“Where’s her father from?”
“Old Fort. A little hick town outside of Asheville.”
“I know it. Has she ever been there ?”
“Nope. Her father wasn’t close with his family either. Had a falling out about an inheritance.” She rolled her eyes. “A piece of swampland worth about five thousand dollars, mind you. Hardly the Biltmore fortune.”
“Did Blue know about this ?”
“We always kept that from her. After her father left, she never asked about his family.”
“She knows where he’s from, though? The town?”
“Yes.”
“What about the address?”
“I’m not sure she knows it.”
“But you have it?”
She told it to him. Preach gave a grim nod and dropped a card on the table. “If you hear anything, call me immediately.”
“You’re leaving? Where are you going? She could be anywhere.” No, he thought. Not anywhere. People don’t go just anywhere. They go to someplace they know, and which they think others don’t. If Blue knew someone like Cobra was after her, she wouldn’t stay in Creekville. It was too dangerous. She would go away but not too far, and she would
go someplace where she had a connection. By all accounts, this girl with big dreams had no one to turn to. No friends, no family, no sympathetic teachers at school.
Nothing except the memory of a beloved father, preserved in the amber of her own mind.
37
After pulling out of Carroll Street Homes, Preach grabbed a coffee to go and made the drive to Old Fort in under two and a half hours. A towering granite arrowhead, the only distinguishing feature as far as he could tell, marked the intersection of the two principal streets.
He went straightaway to the childhood home of Blue’s father and was told the family had moved away years ago. He was also told a young woman had visited earlier that day, looking for Donnie Blue. The new residents had no idea where the girl had gone. He was glad to have his theory validated, but this was a problem. If Blue left Old Fort, then she could have gone anywhere, depending on her funds. Though if he moved quickly enough, he might be able to find her before she disappeared. He drove back to the center of town, parked his car beside the arrowhead monument, and tried to think it through from her perspective.
If I were a girl of sixteen, on the run with no help, where would I go ? Would I return home? Not under the circumstances.
Would I keep running? Maybe, if I had enough money.
And if this was the end of the line, at least for now? Where would I go? What would I do?
Though Preach had only met Blue once, he sensed both resilience and desperation in her eyes, strength and vulnerability, someone unsatisfied with her lot in life and who knew she had to make a change or risk drowning forever.
He didn’t think she would crumble. That girl he had spoken to briefly was tough. Yet the news about her father’s family might have hit her hard. He imagined that, in her mind, she had nurtured a secret hope that her father would one day return for her, and that he might help her now.
She wouldn’t be ready to leave town. Not yet. She would stay a few days to process this final betrayal, this severing of a lifeline.
But where would she go in Old Fort? Again, it depended on her funds. She might check into a cheap motel, or even find a room for rent. Somewhere she could pay cash. How many hotels were in town? He had not seen a single one. Somehow, he doubted Airbnb was thriving here either.
First, he would check the obvious. Blue was young and poor. She had stolen petty cash from her mother. Unless she had sold the camera, which he doubted, she was probably desperate for money. Before she took a job or thought about whether to resort to stealing again, she would need a place to sleep. The streets were exceedingly dangerous for a young woman. Winter was coming on. It was cold at night. Yet there were options, shelters for the poor.
He imagined Asheville, only half an hour away, had plenty of choices. But a quick Google search told him there was a shelter right here in Old Fort, just a few blocks from where he was standing.
The Promise House. A home for runaway teens and single mothers.
Disappearing in and out of the mist, the mountains seemed to breathe around him, living monuments to an ancient age. The tallest peaks had a crown of early snow. He blew on his hands and got back in his car. There wasn’t much to the town. An abandoned industrial plant sat like a scab near the exit off the interstate. Barely any pedestrians. A few elderly people doddering toward a funeral home. The directions to the shelter led him to an old church with a granite base and a newer second story with plank siding. A pair of teens loitered on the front steps. The cold climate had already stripped the leaves from the chestnut trees in the scraggly front yard, bare limbs clawing at the sky. An abandoned shopping cart rested against the brick sign at the head of the sidewalk.
Inside, he saw a familiar despairing sight. A short hallway that opened up into a common room divided into cubicles. Linoleum floors and the smell of disinfectant. A line of shabbily dressed mothers sitting in folding chairs at the front of the room, keeping an eye on a group of children watching cartoons on TV.
The head-high partitions were a nice touch, he thought. They gave the quarters a little dignity. Preach had visited plenty of shelters over the years, both as a pastor and as a police officer. They all made him sad, but it was the kids that got him the most. Not so much because of the physical circumstances, because kids were resilient. Give them stable love and food, and they didn’t care about much else.
But take away one of those two, and you had problems.
Not that any normal parent didn’t love their child. But life on the edges was rarely normal.
Times were always tough. Fortunes rose and fell. A few of these young mothers, maybe more than a few, would manage to pull out and reenter society. Yet most of them, due to addiction or abusive relationships or a cycle of poverty that had started when they were young, would fail.
And they would drag their kids down with them.
He didn’t have the answers, but his thoughts about mothers and children drew him back to Claire, and Blue. Two people whose lives he had a chance to affect. As his eyes roamed the shelter for someone in charge, a spindly white-haired woman approached and asked if she could help. “Betty-Anne Clark” the nametag read.
According to Betty-Anne, Blue had checked in the night before and left around nine that morning, dressed in the same clothes as the day before.
“Do you remember if she had a camera with her ?” Preach asked.
Betty-Anne tapped a finger against her sapphire ring as she thought. “I can tell you she wasn’t carrying
anything when she left this morning.”
That was good, he thought. She had just left for the day and was planning on coming back.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you more,” she said, after Preach displayed his badge and explained the situation. “Our regulations prohibit random property searches.”
He could get a warrant if needed, but that was okay. If the camera was in the shelter, it wasn’t going anywhere. And Blue wasn’t going back inside without him noticing. He knew both of these things as facts, because he planned to plant himself outside the shelter and wait as long as it took for her to return.
On second thought, Preach decided to park on Main Street, a block away from the Promise House. He still had a view of the entrance, and he didn’t want to scare Blue off if she noticed a suspicious sedan parked right out front. She was skittish the first time he met her, even before she went on the run. If she saw him first, she might bolt and disappear.
As daylight faded, he drew stares from the handful of pedestrians who passed by on the sidewalk, unused to strange men camping out in parked cars in their town. A local officer stopped to question him, then brought Preach a cup of coffee and said to holler if he needed help. The coffee was weak and stale, but it worked its dark magic.
Just as he began to wonder if Betty-Anne had seen the wrong girl and Blue was on a bus to Charlotte or Atlanta, he heard a rumble in the background. Nothing too unusual, just a street bike, though on second thought he hadn’t seen too many crotch rockets in Old Fort. He had seen zero, in fact. A pair of bearded old men on Harleys had cruised past him on the way in, and that was about it.
In the rearview, Preach saw a rider bearing down on a young woman walking his way on the sidewalk. He thought he recognized Blue’s gangly form and swagger, as well as Cobra’s lean build. Preach spilled his coffee in his haste to leave the car. By the time he had opened the door and jumped out to shout at her, Blue had turned and noticed Cobra, yelled, and dashed down a side street. The gang member quickly parked the bike and gave chase.