Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  “Could you show us?” DeMarco asked. “Show us her room?”

  “It’s my room. And I rented her bed already, I told you. Weeks ago. She was gone.”

  “You didn’t keep her things?”

  “Well, yeah. Some of them.”

  To his credit, DeMarco didn’t show any impatience. “Can you show us her belongings now? We’ll be taking them in any case. They’re evidence, and her mother will want them.”

  Maybe her mother would. And maybe she wouldn’t.

  Cheryl got up, DeMarco looked at Jim, and Jim followed Cheryl back into a tiny bedroom, filled up fairly completely by two twin beds, neither of which was made. Not much of a place. Not much of a life, but somebody’s life all the same.

  Cheryl got down on her knees and poked around under the far bed, the one by the window, and finally pulled out a green garbage bag.

  “I put her stuff in here,” she said. “In case.”

  “That was kind of you,” Jim said, taking the bag from her.

  The compliment worked, because her mouth got a tiny tremble to it, and she lost a fraction of her toughness, that shell that was probably the only defense she had. “I thought . . .” she said. “You know. In case she came back. When you don’t have much, and what you have isn’t that great—some people think you wouldn’t care, but it’s all you have, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know. Come on.” Jim gestured toward the door and followed her out.

  She sat in her chair again, and Jim sat on the couch and emptied the bag onto the coffee table.

  Cheryl said, “Hey!”

  Jim looked up at her. “Sorry. But we want you to go through these things with us, in case any of them are significant.” Which they didn’t look to be. Jeans, shorts, tops. A pair of high-heeled sandals, a cheap short black dress with spaghetti straps. A tangle of bras, some underwear. And a bear.

  A raggedy, floppy thing, its chest replaced with some ancient flowered material, buttons sewn in place of its eyes, and its paws rubbed until they were nothing but a checkerboard of threads.

  “No purse,” DeMarco said. “No cosmetics. No shampoo. Where’s the rest?”

  “I didn’t save everything,” Cheryl said. “I mean, she didn’t come back. And I had to rent the place.”

  She’d used the shampoo, Jim guessed, and maybe even the makeup.

  “What about her purse?” DeMarco pressed.

  “It wasn’t with her? I mean, when they . . .” Her throat worked. “Found her?”

  DeMarco ignored that. “She use drugs?” he asked without looking up.

  Jim was watching Cheryl. The purse part had rung true. The purse was really missing, then. Well, a woman always took her purse, which made it recognizable. Anybody who’d bothered to hide a body would have disposed of the purse. Where? Anywhere. It was a big county.

  He saw Cheryl’s eyes shift to the side before she said, “I don’t know. It was none of my business.”

  “But she drank in bars,” DeMarco said. “And smoked.”

  “How do you know?”

  DeMarco lifted a flowered top to his nose and took a sniff. “I know. And even if I didn’t, the lab will be able to tell us exactly what she smoked, and what other residue is on these clothes. So if that residue isn’t yours, you’d better tell us, because otherwise, we might be thinking it came from you.”

  Cheryl was looking wild-eyed now. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe she did. I wouldn’t really know.”

  “What?” DeMarco asked. “What are we going to find on her clothes that we wouldn’t find if we, say, searched your apartment? Meth?”

  “No,” Cheryl said, more alarmed than ever. She made a convulsive movement as if she were going to stand, then clearly thought better of it. “Not meth. No. I would have known that.”

  “Uh-huh. She leave anything behind?”

  “I told you. I tossed everything except what’s in there.”

  “Uh-huh. You tossed her drugs. How much weed was it?” DeMarco asked.

  “It wasn’t—” Cheryl began to say, then clamped her mouth shut.

  “We can’t help you unless you tell us,” Jim said. “If you tell us, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Like you say—it’s nothing to do with you.” Cheryl had taken the drugs herself, or she’d sold them. Depending on what they were.

  “Maybe . . .” Cheryl hesitated.

  “If you remember,” Jim said, “tell us. We don’t care what you use or don’t. We care about finding out who killed her. She didn’t have money for drugs, it sounds like.” He looked at the pathetic pile of clothes on the coffee table. “Sounds like she was barely hanging on. If we knew what kind of drugs she left behind, it could bring us that much closer to finding her killer. I’m guessing somebody gave them to her. Or that she . . . traded for them, maybe. What do you think? Which one would be more likely?”

  Cheryl tucked her arms and legs closer to her body. Drawing in tight, like a crab going into its shell. “Maybe . . . pills,” she whispered. “Vikes. And I don’t know how she got them. I don’t.”

  Vicodin. Prescription pain medicine. Opiates. The fastest-growing drug problem in North Idaho, and one of the most deceptively addictive. Not a surprise, not in a college town. And the first real break they’d had.

  Jim tried some more, and then DeMarco did, but when Cheryl didn’t say anything else, just kept looking resolutely at her feet and shaking her head, they gave it up. For today. Jim handed over his card. “I have a daughter myself,” he told Cheryl. “I want to find out who did this. This shouldn’t have happened. Heather didn’t deserve it. She was just a girl with a rough life, trying to get by. That’s why you called us, because you cared. And so do we.”

  Cheryl picked up the ragged bear from the coffee table, rubbing its paw between finger and thumb. “That is why I called you,” she said. “I know you guys don’t believe me, but that’s why. I didn’t think she’d leave her bear. She slept with it. I bet she’d had it since she was little. I didn’t want to call you. I knew I’d get in trouble. But I did.” Her eyes were suddenly fierce. “What you said,” she told Jim. “She wasn’t trash. She was just a girl who’d had a hard time. People do. Girls do.”

  “Yeah,” Jim said. “They do.”

  “And I thought . . .” Her face worked, her mouth twisting up tight. She’d lost her tough edge, and for a moment, Jim could see the girl she’d been even through the heavy makeup. Just a girl who’d had a hard time.

  “If it was her,” she said, still rubbing the bear’s threadbare paw, “I wanted you to know. I thought—” She looked down at the tattered thing, and when she spoke again, her voice was soft. “She was scared of the dark. She should at least be able to be buried with her bear.”

  NOT SO SLOW

  Rochelle expected Travis to call her on Sunday, but he didn’t. Instead, she got another text.

  Recovered?

  She thought a moment, then typed,

  In what sense?

  She could almost see that smile curling up one corner of his mouth before the words appeared on the screen.

  Oh, come on, baby. You know the answer to that.

  Not slow, she typed.

  Right.

  And that was it. All day. He might be willing to go slow, but she wasn’t sure she was, because it was just about killing her.

  He didn’t show up, in fact, until Tuesday afternoon, when he sauntered into her office and dropped into her visitor’s chair.

  She propped her elbows on the desk, set her chin on her folded hands, and eyed him. Blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, Levi’s, one ankle crossed over the other. Absolutely average, and not one single bit average.

  “So,” he said. “Adequately casual amount of time elapsed?”

  “Maybe,” she said, trying so hard not to smile.

  “Good. Then let’s have dinner. And forget the not-slow element of that. You’re working all day, I’m working all day, and I don’t want to wait until the weekend for a recreational activity
that either frustrates me to the point of actual pain or injures critically important parts of you. Dinner.”

  “My.” She opened her eyes wide. “Somebody woke up bossy this morning.”

  “Let’s call it decisive,” he said.

  “Oh, let’s. When?”

  “I don’t care. Today. Tomorrow. Soon as I can get it. Dinner, out where everybody sees us and everybody knows us and everybody can think what they like, because I’ll be thinking the exact same thing. I want to see you wearing something really good just to tease me. I want to get that testing thing where you dare me not to look and I have to sneak a peek anyway, because I can’t help it.”

  She was smiling. She was totally helpless not to. “Tomorrow. Don’t wear khaki Dockers.”

  He stood up. “I’ll pick you up at six thirty. And I don’t own any Dockers.”

  The minute she opened the door, she saw that they weren’t Dockers. They were some kind of slim summer-weight black wool trousers, because the weather had turned hot again, one of those blasts of Indian summer that so often happened when harvest was over, as if Nature knew that the farmers needed to have their own chance at lazy summer days. Travis was wearing them with a short-sleeved soft-blue knit shirt that showed off the corded muscles of his forearms and the very satisfactory bulge of biceps and triceps. All the appropriate arm muscles, all fully present and accounted for. And when he stood on her porch and looked at her in her blue flower-print halter-top sundress and high heels, he sighed, said, “You know what? Screw going slow,” put one hand on her waist and the other on her shoulder, pulled her up close, and kissed her breathless.

  He lifted his mouth from hers at last, brushed his lips across her cheek, making her shudder, and murmured into her ear, close enough that she felt all the shivery heat of it, “I’d say, ‘Screw dinner,’ too, but I might be pushing my luck. What do you think?”

  “Mm.” She kissed him this time, because his mouth was firm and warm and so delicious. He smelled faintly of pine and leather. He smelled like a cowboy ought to and never actually did, so she buried her face in his neck, breathed him in, and then kissed him there, too, just because he had such a wonderfully strong throat, and he’d obviously shaved before he’d come over. A man deserved some kind of reward for that, didn’t he?

  She got a sharp inhalation for her pains, and a tightening of his hands on her body that didn’t feel bad at all, before he said, “You’ve got five seconds to say, ‘Let’s go out.’”

  She pulled his head down for one more soft, sweet kiss, smiled into his eyes, and said, “Let’s go out.”

  Travis sat on the patio of Paradise’s newest and finest restaurant, La Traviata, and looked at Rochelle some more.

  Paradise’s finest had turned out to be a pizza place. Of course it had. But it had a weathered brick façade, candles on the tables, and a great wine list, and he didn’t care anyway. He liked pizza, and he liked Rochelle. He’d especially liked swinging her down from the truck with two hands around her waist, which had been absolutely unnecessary, and totally necessary all the same. Not to mention the feeling of warm, bare skin under his palm when he’d put a hand on her back to escort her into the restaurant. If he could have, he’d have traced right up the line of her shoulder blade with one slow thumb. That hadn’t been an option, but he’d felt the tiny ripple that went through her at his touch, and his body had responded to it like it was wired straight to hers.

  They’d eaten dinner in the last warmth of the setting sun, and then she’d reached for her cropped white sweater, and he’d put a hand out to help her on with it. He’d watched her button it slowly, from bottom to top. She’d known he was watching, and she hadn’t minded a bit.

  The other part of his plan had gone well, too. He’d seen a few people he knew while they’d been sitting here on a warm September night on one of the busiest corners in town, and she’d seen more. He hoped they all spread it around. Suited him fine.

  “You know what I want to know about you?” she asked him now, running a slow fingertip around the rim of her wineglass in the soft glow of candlelight and driving him crazy.

  “Mm,” he said, still watching that finger.

  “How’d you get those muscles?”

  He laughed, feeling ridiculously gratified. “I told you. I was a swimmer. Still am. A mile first thing every morning in the university’s pool, and more on the weekend.”

  “Maybe.” She looked at him from under her lashes. “That’s not all, though. You’ve got man muscles. More than you did before. And man hands.”

  “Hope so.” He’d forgotten about his own wine. He took a sip, but the buzz he was feeling wasn’t coming from the alcohol.

  “You did something that changed you these past months,” she said. “I can tell. You’re . . . patient.”

  “Not that patient.”

  “Yeah. I noticed. So what happened? After your dad died?”

  “Man,” he said, “I shared a lot in that elevator, didn’t I?”

  “Good thing, too, or we wouldn’t be here. So what was it? You went . . . mountain climbing? Or on a three-month Buddhist retreat that included lots of gym time? What?”

  “I built houses.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “For Habitat for Humanity, down near home. My dad’s farm used a lot of migrant workers. All that agriculture down there does. It’s hand cultivation, not like here. And their housing is . . . you could call it substandard.”

  “At your parents’ place?”

  “Nope. They’d moved off the farm, remember? Anyway, my folks did things right. My mom wouldn’t have had it any other way, even if my dad would’ve. Which he wouldn’t. But when I was looking in the mirror after we put my dad in the ground, and not much liking the man looking back at me . . . I wanted to do something that wasn’t about me. Something hard. Something at home. Something that mattered. That was what I came up with. It worked all right.”

  “For how long?”

  “Five months. Until the foreman took me aside one day and said, ‘Whatever you were running away from, don’t you think it’s time to head on back and face it?’ That sounded like good advice to me. Decided I’d take it.”

  “But you didn’t. You came here.”

  “Nope. Went back to San Francisco. Thought about doing something new, something in the business. Had some ideas, too, but I couldn’t settle. I’d gotten used to being outside more, I guess. Having some space and some quiet. And then I saw the ad for this job, and it didn’t sound bad, as a transition. You asked me about that, remember? Maybe I remembered something about that town, too. That it had somebody in it I wanted to see again. So I came to Paradise, took a job that’s kicking my butt, and found a girl I used to know. And that part,” he told her, “would be the bonus.”

  “I bet your mom’s proud of you,” she said.

  He had to look away at that. “I hope so.”

  In fact, his mom had been proud of him. When he’d come up halfway through his stint to spend the weekend, once he’d felt like he could look her in the face again, she’d let him know it.

  That was when he’d finally had the guts to say, after dinner on that Saturday night, while they were still sitting at a kitchen table that had one too few people at it, “I did the wrong thing, not coming home when Dad was sick. And I’m sorry. I wish I could tell Dad so.”

  They’d been some of the hardest words he’d ever spoken. The tears had risen in her eyes, and seeing them had made his own throat close up.

  “Oh, baby,” she’d said, her hand coming out to clasp his and holding it hard, as hard as she’d hugged him when he’d arrived. Like she needed to hold him, or like she knew how much he needed her to do it, or maybe both. “Your dad knew you your whole life, remember? He had plenty of time to know the man you grew up to be. Just like I have. He lived proud of you, and he died proud of you. Don’t you worry.”

  He might have shed a couple of tears himself that night. But there were some things that were too much
for a man to bear.

  “She said she was, didn’t she?” Rochelle asked now. “Proud?”

  He breathed out slowly. “Do you have to keep messing with my head?” She laughed in surprise, and he gave her a rueful smile and said, “You just can’t help but make this real, can you?”

  “No,” she said, “I think that’s coming from you,” and just like that, he was taking her hand across the table. Taking it, and holding it, rubbing a thumb over the sensitive palm and watching her eyes darken. With passion, maybe, and with something else, too. With emotion.

  “Hey, guys.”

  He didn’t drop Rochelle’s hand. He just turned to see Stacy, in a red T-shirt and khaki shorts, standing beside them holding the handlebars of her bike.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’re you doing?”

  She looked between him and Rochelle. “Want me to go?”

  “No,” Rochelle said, withdrawing her hand hastily, and Travis sighed and thought, Damn.

  “Of course not,” Rochelle went on. “Sit down. You want some pizza? We’ve got quite a bit left.”

  “Ugh.” Stacy made a face. “Sorry,” she added hastily. “It’s just—No, thanks.”

  Once Stacy had parked her bike and joined them, Travis lifted a hand for the waitress and asked her, “Would you like something to drink? A salad?”

  “Well, thanks.” She looked surprised. “Just a Coke, maybe.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Rochelle said when the Coke had been ordered. “What?”

  Stacy shrugged and sat, her shoulders slumped.

  “Is it school?” Rochelle pressed. “Or—” She glanced at Travis. “Shane? Come on and tell us. Or just tell Travis. He kind of specializes in defending women’s honor.”

  “Only Marks women,” he said with a smile for Stacy. “But I’m not too bad at that. Say the word.”

  “What? No,” she said distractedly. She pulled her dark hair back from her face, then let it fall. “It was just . . . they found out who that girl was, the one Cal Jackson found. Did you hear?”