by S. J. Harris
“We’ll be done soon. You can have our table.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“So who’s your friend?”
“His name is Bill Driscoll. He’s from here in Hallows cove.”
“That’s....”
“Oh, speak of the devil.” I introduced Peter to Bill. “Peter’s in the band over at Lyon’s den,” I said.
Bill gave Peter a hard look. Peter looked away as they shook hands.
“Come on, peckerhead,” one of the band members shouted from across the room. “It’s your turn.”
Peter grabbed his pitcher of beer and headed back toward the pool tables. “See ya, Kim,” he said.
Bill faced the back bar and sipped his beer in silence.
“What was that all about?” I asked. “Do you know Peter?”
“Never met him,” Bills said.
“Why did you seem so...unfriendly?”
“Did I? Sorry. I guess it caught me by surprise when I came back from the head and saw you talking to Mr. Wanna B. Rockstar. I just know the type, that’s all. Oh, shit. Look who it is.”
Two men walked up from behind us. Bill had seen their reflections in the mirror behind the bar. He introduced me to Hal and Dean.
“These are a couple of my best old drinking buddies,” Bill said. “Haven’t seen you guys around in a while.”
“We been doing some work down souse,” Hal said.
Souse. South. Hal spoke with a thick eastern European accent. He raked his fingers through his thick black hair, revealing a forehead pitted with acne scars.
“What kind of work do you guys do?” I asked, trying to be friendly.
Hal looked at Dean. “Pharmaceuticals,” he said.
Dean laughed and went into a little coughing fit. The cough projected his sour, metallic breath.
“Really?” I said. “I’m an RN. I thought about doing that for awhile, being a drug rep. I hear there’s good money in it.”
“Yeah, good money,” Dean said. He had an accent too, one I couldn’t nail. Maybe French or French Canadian. He coughed some more, his chest rattling.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Table’s open,” Peter said. He and the other band members headed toward the exit. “Have a good one.”
Bill invited Hal and Dean to join us for a game of eight ball, but Hal said they needed to get going.
“Come on Hally,” Dean said. “Couple o’ three games. We can hang around for awhile. Come on. Couple o’ three games.”
“Gotta go,” Hal said.
Dean went into another coughing fit. He sounded as though he might, at any minute, cough up a couple o’ three lungs. Hal asked Bill if they could talk outside for a minute.
“I’ll go hold the table and rack the balls,” I said.
Bill walked outside with Hal and Dean. When he came back I handed him a cue stick and told him he could break. He hit in a stripe, but scratched. I ran the rest of the striped balls and the eight.
“Rack ‘em,” I said.
Showing no mercy, Bill beat me seven games in a row. He played with intensity and barely spoke.
“Okay, this ceases to be fun,” I said. “I give up. You ready to go?”
“One more game.”
I snapped my cue stick into the wall rack. “I’m no competition for you. If you want to play one more game, play with someone else.”
“What’s your problem?” Bill lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my direction.
“You’re the one with the problem,” I said. “You’ve been a prick since we left your aunt’s house. I’m out of here.”
I snatched my purse from the bench against the wall and stormed outside. I walked west on Main Street, toward the motel, cursing with every stride. First Bill wouldn’t take me to Lyon’s Den. Then he was rude to my friend Peter. Then he treated me like the invisible woman while we played pool. Maybe I was being a brat, but I was pissed. At any rate, I figured the seven block walk to The Parkside would do me good.
As I crossed the intersection of 4th and Main, I turned and saw Bill’s Cadillac creep up beside me. The passenger side window was down.
“Get in,” he barked. “I’m taking you home.”
“The only thing you’re going to take is a flying fuck,” I said.
Bill’s eyes bulged wild. From the street I could see how glassy and bloodshot they were. I talked tough, but his look scared me. I’d never seen this side of him. I walked on.
Bill revved his engine, pulled up a few feet and steered the car at a diagonal over the curb and the sidewalk, blocking my path. Adrenaline molecules coursed through my circulatory system like microscopic speedboats, permeating every cell. I was stone cold sober, ready for fight or flight. Flight, most likely.
Bill opened his door and climbed out with tears rolling down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Kim. Please don’t leave me. You’re, like, my best friend.”
My compassionate side kicked in. I thought of him losing his parents at such a young age and of the abuse he suffered thereafter. I thought of S.O.S. suspended in ice cubes, the distress signal of a lonely and trapped lad. Maybe I was his best friend. I decided to give him another chance.
“You’re in no shape to drive,” I said. “Get in and I’ll drive you home.”
I took the driver’s seat, turned the car around and took a right on 6th.
“I worked last night and didn’t get much sleep before I picked you up today and I guess all that wine at Aunt Julie’s went to my head,” Bill said. “I usually don’t drink wine. Again, I’m sorry.”
When I dropped Bill at his aunt’s house I told him I’d leave his car at The Parkside. He staggered inside.
20
At nine o’clock Monday morning I called Micromode to see if they had completed the DNA testing I’d commissioned. Once I had the hard evidence of matching DNA, I could take it to the police. That, along with the circumstantial evidence of Bill’s testimony and the matching fonts from the magazines, should be enough to initiate an investigation against Lori Barbera. Kinsey Randall told me they should have everything done by ten, so I showered and dressed and headed toward Mandarin.
It was sunny, hazy and humid, so I decided to leave the top up and turn on the AC in my car. My nose was still peeling from my previous sunburn at the beach and I didn’t want to add insult to injury.
I took SR 13 north through Fruit Cove and across the Julington Creek bridge. When I got to Micromode, I sat in the waiting room for a few minutes and wrote a check for the remaining one-thousand dollars I owed them.
I tried to call Bill on my cell phone, to make sure he’d gotten a ride to The Parkside to pick up his car. I also wanted to ask him if he knew of a good place to get a front-end alignment. My Mustang wasn’t handling quite right. I couldn’t reach Bill at home or on his cell.
I sat and waited and looked through some old magazines. Kinsey finally came out and motioned for me to step into the lab.
“I’m really sorry for the inconvenience,” she said, “but we have to double check a couple of things. It’s going to be sometime this afternoon before I have your printouts ready.”
I handed her the check I’d already torn out. “Can you just call me later when everything’s done?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
As I approached the Julington Creek bridge, on my way back to St. Augustine, I realized that I had left my cell phone and purse on the magazine table at MICROMODE. My wallet and checkbook and everything. I would have to cross the bridge, turn around and go back.
I heard an agonizing, shearing whine, saw one of my tires bouncing on the road ahead and sparks shooting from the naked hub where the front passenger’s side wheel had been. I gripped the useless steering wheel, slammed the brakes and skidded to a smoking halt. The grill of my Mustang was crumpled against the guard rail. Below me, the mouth of Julington Creek rushed into the St. John’s. If I had been going any faster I might have smashed through the rail and plunged into the swift current.
I heard a
horn blow, looked in my rear view mirror and briefly saw a chrome bulldog and the letters M-A-C-K before flipping over the rail and sailing to an abrupt splashdown. My airbag deployed, driving my head hard against the seat and causing a wave of nausea and dancing dots in front of my eyes. I shook it off, struggled to unlatch my seat belt, reached for the door handle.
The car was floating upright, but the door, partially submerged, would not open. I pulled the keys from the ignition, reached up and slashed my convertible top. As I started to climb out, the car tilted forward from the engine’s weight and the sudden jolt threw me back inside. The car inverted, sank, came to a gentle rest upside down at the bottom of the creek.
The interior filled with murky water. I was trapped. I tried the electric windows. Dead. Like me, if I didn’t think of something fast.
I kicked at the driver’s side window but the water’s resistance slowed my movements. I couldn’t get enough force behind the kick to break the glass.
My lungs craved oxygen.
Maybe I was supposed to die on those train trestles Thursday night. Maybe I had cheated Death and now it had come back for me with a vengeance. But if I died, who would look for Jenny? Who would look for Darla’s killer?
I turned sideways, wedged myself between the console and the window and pushed with all my might. I felt it give, then crumble. I pulled myself out.
I rose toward the light, toward the surface, toward precious air. I thought I saw Greta Wales looking down at me just before everything went black.
21
Jesus kissed me.
That’s the only explanation my oxygen-deprived brain would accept.
Jesus kissed me and I tasted pecan pie.
Pecan pie is the ultimate indulgence on the planet Earth. Heaven for me would be eternal pie. It’s what I tasted immediately before projectile vomiting in the direction of Christ My Savior’s face.
His head darted to one side, avoiding my vile spray.
I saw multiple piercings in his ears and a gallery of tattoos on his arms. He wore a humongous belt buckle, cast with the image of an angel’s wings. The angel’s name was Harley-Davidson.
Maybe I had gone to the bad place.
“Gawd dayumm,” he said. “I thought you was dead for sure.”
My savior, I found out, drove a Mack truck. He had jumped from the bridge, hauled my limp body to the creek bank and performed CPR.
I managed to stand up, dizzy and wobbling. At first I thought my ears were ringing but then realized what I heard was the howl of an ambulance siren. We climbed the slope to the highway and the ambulance pulled up, followed by two Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office cruisers. I spent nearly an hour answering questions and filling out paperwork for the cops. I sent the rescue unit on its way, declining a trip to the hospital.
Nate Conners, the truck driver who’d saved my life, was kind enough to give me a ride to Micromode. I saw my one surviving tire off on the shoulder, about a quarter mile north of the bridge, and felt like crying. My Mustang was gone.
My things lay on the magazine table at Micromode where I’d left them. For once, I was thankful for my absentmindedness.
Lori Barbera had tried to kill me. It had to have been Lori. She would get hers. As soon as I got those DNA results I’d be off to the Sheriff’s office and Lori would be arrested for first degree murder.
I hoped.
Bill still wasn’t answering his cell. I tried the house and got Julie.
“He was gone when I got up this morning,” she said. “I assumed he was with you.”
I didn’t tell Julie about the day’s events, about my “accident.” I didn’t want to worry her.
I was worried, though. If Lori Barbera had loosened the lug nuts on my tire, then she had probably gone after Bill too. It disturbed me that he wouldn’t answer his phone.
I took a taxi to the nearest rental car place. Because of my appearance--damp and wrinkled clothes, matted hair, mud-caked shoes--and the fact that I probably smelled like a sewer rat, they gave me a hard time. I contacted my insurance agent in San Diego, who assured them that the agency would be picking up the tab. They finally gave up a Ford Escort, the only car they claimed to have available without a reservation. It wasn’t a Mustang GT, but it would have to do.
I drove to the Holiday Inn in St. Augustine, took the most satisfying shower of my life, plopped on the bed and thought about Blake Wales’s words of wisdom: A good detective always knows when to get the hell out of Dodge.
Maybe it was time to get out. I could call Orion and see if my New York assignment was still available. Or, I could fly to Louisville and take a nice long vacation with Jim Higgins. You might never get a second chance for true love, Sara had said.
But what about going the distance and bringing Darla Bose’s killer to justice? For Jenny’s sake and my own peace of mind? What about the possibility of losing my nursing license?
I was mulling all this over when I got the first in a series of phone calls that changed everything.
22
“The cells don’t match,” Kinsey Randall, the technician at Micromode said.
“What?” I said in disbelief.
I thought there must have been a mistake.
“They don’t match. We’re one-hundred percent certain of that. But, we routinely cross match samples with those on the FBI database.”
I remembered seeing that when I skimmed the contract.
“And?” I asked.
“No match on the fingernail cells, but we did get a positive on the hair. It matched up with a database sample of someone named Jennifer Journey, social security number....”
“Who? Say that name again.”
“Jennifer Journey. Is she a relative of yours? I thought she must be, same last name and all....”
Kinsey Randall kept talking, but my circuits were too overloaded to process anything else she had to say. When she finally fell silent I thanked her and hung up.
How could it be? I had taken those hairs from the brush on Darla Bose’s dresser. How could they have been Jenny’s?
My stomach and imagination churned in unison. Had Jenny changed her identity? Was Darla Bose really Jennifer Journey? Was that my sister’s finger in the can of GIANT-PUP? No, the fingernail cells and hair cells didn’t match. Was Darla Bose still alive? Did Jenny use Darla’s hairbrush?
I paced the room, fists clenched. Then it came to me.
I pulled open the bottom dresser drawer, took out Jen’s J.C. Penney treasure box and dumped the contents onto the bed. The lock of hair was still there, still wrapped in a pink ribbon, but the knot was different. I had tied the original, and I’m left-handed. I do everything backwards.
Someone, a right-handed person, had untied the ribbon, had taken some hairs and planted them in the zip-lock bag where the hairs from Darla’s brush had been. They had re-tied the ribbon, only from a right-handed perspective.
Someone had come into my motel room and had tampered with my evidence. Lori Barbera came to mind first, but how could she have gotten in? The deadbolt opened electronically with one of those credit card type keys, and even a professional thief or a locksmith probably would have had a hard time with it. There were no signs of forced entry. If she came into my room, then someone on the motel staff must have let her in.
My cell phone rang. It was Sonya Shafer.
“Peter told me he saw you out with Bill Driscoll last night. Are you dating him?”
“We’re just friends,” I said. “I met him my first night in Hallows Cove. He rescued me from some jerk trying to pick me up in Kelly’s Pool Hall. Do you know Bill?”
“You could say that. He’s my ex-boyfriend. Actually, I’ve known Bill for a long time. All through school.”
Sonya gave me the Reader’s Digest condensed version of her history with Bill. Everything sounded okay, until the end.
“I just wanted to warn you that he can get pretty rough sometimes, especially when he’s been drinking. That’s why I broke up with him.
He hit me. It was last year on my thirtieth birthday, the day Ron Kuhlman fired him. Bill hit me first, but I got him good. You’ve seen his chipped tooth, huh? I got him with a piece of plastic tubing from my new vacuum cleaner my dad sent me for my birthday. Bill spent the night in the ER in shackles. He had been living with me at my trailer until then. I took his stuff to the hospital, threw it into his room and told him I never wanted to see him again.”
“You sure we’re talking about the same Bill Driscoll?”
“I’m sure. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. I thought maybe you were dating him. I know he’s charming and really good looking and all, but he has a volatile temper. Just be careful.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said.
Soon after hanging up with Sonya my phone rang again, and any illusions I still clung to regarding the virtues of Bill Driscoll shattered and crumbled like the safety-glass window I’d kicked through earlier.
23
It was Brian Cooper, the retired Chief Petty Officer I’d met at The Twin Flames.
“I took your advice,” he said. “I went to Baldwin’s Nursing Home to visit Steve Morrow. I explained to him who I was and how sorry I was. We were alone in his room and, I swear to God, he talked. He said three words, words I wish I could have heard sixteen years ago. He said, ‘Bill pushed me.’ I don’t know who he’s talking about, but if somebody pushed him into my path then the accident definitely wasn’t my fault. I feel like I can finally get on with my life now. Thank you, Kim, for encouraging me to go see him. It might have saved my life.”
I was speechless, except to say, “You’re welcome.”
Bill pushed me.
Bill Driscoll?
Had Bill Driscoll tried to kill Steve Morrow sixteen years ago? Why?
Sonya had told me, in her mother’s garage, that Steve Morrow had been her boyfriend in ninth grade when the accident happened. They had been in love, Sonya said. But how in love could ninth graders be? I tried to think back to that period in my own life, and the boy I had a crush on then. I guess if you think it’s real, it is real. Even though most adults probably look back on those days as folly, as puppy love.