Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  THE FIXERS

  Rochelle was in the kitchen, just starting to wonder what was keeping Stacy and Zora, when she got the call. Travis had said his sister was a fanatic about her photography, but Stacy knew her parents always started meals on time. When you were one of six kids and you were poor, you showed up when dinner started, or you didn’t eat.

  Travis brought her purse to her in the kitchen on the heels of the thought, holding the bag out while her phone buzzed inside like an angry wasp.

  She pulled the phone out and pushed the button. “Stacy. Finally. Where are you?”

  And then she put out a hand for Travis, and he stopped on his way to the door. Stopped and stood.

  “What?” she said into the phone. “Say it again.”

  She could barely understand the voice at the other end. It sounded as if Stacy’s teeth were chattering.

  “He’s dead,” she heard. “And the truck . . . the truck’s crashed.”

  “Oh, my God.” Rochelle had grabbed Travis’s arm, and her mother had stopped in the act of stirring the stew, the wooden spoon dripping rich brown gravy back into the cast-iron pot. Plop. Plop. Plop. Her eyes were on Rochelle.

  “Stacy,” Rochelle said, keeping her voice calm even as she wanted to scream. “Did you hit somebody? Did you . . .” Kill somebody, she didn’t say, because she couldn’t stand to think it.

  “No.” It was a sob. Rochelle sagged a little, and Travis put a hand out to steady her. “But the truck went into the ditch, and . . . and . . . he’s dead. The sheriff’s here, and I need you to come get me. Please, Ro. Come get me.”

  “Where are you?” Rochelle demanded.

  “Miles . . . Miles Kimberling’s. Up there. On his road.”

  “And somebody’s dead?” Rochelle pressed. Her mother was white, now, and Travis had gone rigid, was mouthing, “Zora.”

  “Stacy,” Rochelle said. “Is Zora all right?”

  “What? Yes,” Stacy said, and Rochelle breathed out, said, “Yes,” to Travis, and saw him close his eyes for a moment.

  “But I need you to come,” Stacy said again. “Because Miles . . . he’s dead.”

  Rochelle’s father was in the kitchen now, too, his face hard and alert, the little room steamy and crowded with people and tension.

  “We’re on our way,” Rochelle told her sister, and hung up. She’d go get Stacy. They’d sort out the rest after that.

  In the end, after a brief discussion, they took two rigs. Travis and her dad in her dad’s truck, and Rochelle and her mom in Rochelle’s car.

  Rochelle’s mother said, when they were in the car, “Miles Kimberling. Oh, poor Pam.”

  Her voice was bleak, and Rochelle knew how doubly hard that blow was falling. A son lost, and Stacy . . .

  Please, God, she prayed, let Stacy not have done something really wrong. Let her not have hit him. Let her not have to live with that.

  The drive seemed to last forever, following her dad’s rig, the windshield wipers slapping time. In fact, it was only fifteen minutes before they came around the curve and saw them. The sheriff’s vehicle blocking the road, the white SUV with its light bars rotating, flashing red and blue through the rain. And Travis’s pickup, tail down in the ditch.

  Jim Lawson got out of the SUV as they approached, rain streaming off his Smokey Bear hat, a slicker doing an inadequate job of protecting his broad-shouldered frame. He put a hand up, but it wasn’t necessary. Neither Rochelle nor her father needed telling. They stopped, and Rochelle was out of the car and racing to the SUV, because she could see the figures inside it.

  She made it at the same time as her dad. Her mom puffed up a second later, and Stacy was tumbling out of the SUV and throwing herself into her mother’s arms.

  There were no bodies. There was no ambulance. Because Stacy hadn’t killed anybody.

  After that, it was just a matter of organization. Rochelle and her mom getting Stacy and Zora into Rochelle’s car, while her dad maneuvered his pickup nose-to-nose with Travis’s rig. By the time Rochelle had backed, turned, and headed down the road again, she could see Travis in the rearview mirror, going headfirst on his back under his truck with the tow strap.

  Zora in the front with Rochelle, Stacy in the back with her mother. Valerie holding her daughter, strong and silent. Taking care of her youngest child as she’d taken care of them all, and thinking about that other mother, Rochelle knew. That mother who was finding out that she’d just become a member of the least popular club on earth.

  Then they were back at home, and Rochelle was shepherding Zora and Stacy into the house and helping her mother find dry clothes, because the girls were soaked. The men arrived a few minutes later, her father grim-faced, Travis quiet and solid, his clothes caked with mud.

  “Your truck,” Rochelle said to Travis once he’d accepted the loan of dry clothes from her dad and gotten changed. She gestured him to a seat in the living room. He might as well get comfortable while they waited for their much-delayed lunch. Once again, their day out hadn’t gone anywhere close to plan.

  “A couple dents,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  “Who was driving?” she asked. The question had nagged at her even as she’d listened to Zora’s quiet, shocked explanation of what they’d found at Miles’s house.

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”

  “I saw the marks,” she said. The clear indications of a skid, dug into the gravel and the mud. “They took that corner way too fast.”

  Zora had come into the living room to sit with them, the light within her subdued for once, and Rochelle looked at her. “Who was driving?” she demanded.

  Zora hesitated, and that told the story. “I thought so,” Rochelle said. “Stacy.” She squared her shoulders and told Travis, “I’ll pay to get it fixed. She can pay me back.”

  “No,” he said, “you won’t. It’s a couple dents. No need to bang out a couple dents on a work truck.”

  “Travis—” she said.

  He looked at her, and she recoiled a little, because for once, he looked . . . angry. With her. “Do you think that matters to me right now?” he asked her. “Do you imagine I give a damn?”

  “No,” she said, willing her voice not to tremble. “But I do. It doesn’t do a bit of good not to have to pay for your mistakes. You know that as well as I do.”

  He said, “Whatever. We’ll talk about it later.”

  They ate a lunch, then, that nobody had much appetite for. With her dad gone quiet, her mom’s eyes gone red, and Stacy gone white.

  Finally, they were driving back to Paradise, and Zora said, “I missed my plane.”

  Travis said, “Yeah. I’ll buy you a ticket home for the morning.” He looked at Rochelle. “I’ll come in for a minute and take care of that.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  It was five by the time they got back to her house, and the continuing rain had brought an early gloom to the day. True to his word, Travis came in and took care of Zora’s ticket. Of course he did, because Travis was focused. And Rochelle set her alarm clock for three so she could wake Zora up in time for the drive to Spokane to catch the six o’clock plane, because she was focused, too. And then Zora and Stacy were on the couch, wrapped in afghans and watching a movie, and Rochelle and Travis were sitting at the kitchen table warming their hands around cups of tea. Rochelle had taken tea out to the others as well. Tea seemed like a better idea than vodka.

  “Rough day,” Travis said.

  “Yeah.” Just like that, the tears rose, threatening to choke her. She looked down and took a sip of tea, and Travis’s hand was around hers. Nothing but comfort, and she sat for a moment and breathed it in.

  “Your folks,” he said. “That’s a rough thing, too.”

  “Yes,” she said, so grateful that she didn’t have to explain, that Travis was a . . . a grown-up. That he might be able to guess with what stoicism her parents would go to Miles’s funeral, and that her mother would be delivering a casserole to Miles’s
mother as her neighbors had done for her after the military officers had appeared on her doorstep. And not just this week. Her mother would be doing it next week, and the week after that. A month from now, when the comfort and the understanding had disappeared from everywhere else. When the shock had worn off and the grinding pain of a new reality had set in. That’s when her mother would be there.

  Miles hadn’t been much to write home about, not so far. But he hadn’t been bad, either, not really. He was like Lake, that was all. Convinced that there was a more exciting life he should be living, and always chasing it. And whatever he’d been, he’d been his parents’ child. His loss would open all the old wounds for her parents as well, because that was how it worked. And they’d cope the same way they always had. They’d endure, and they’d reach out to help somebody else through it.

  She didn’t say all that to Travis, though. She was too tired. And maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe he knew.

  “Zora will be all right,” he said. “But Stacy’s pretty shook up.”

  “Sorry again about your truck,” she said. “Sorry about Zora missing her flight, too.” The weight of it all tried to crush her for just a moment, and she set her shoulders under it, as always, and pushed back up. “Another thing you had to take care of.”

  “You’ll be the one getting her on the road, though. Somebody’s always the fixer, aren’t they? It’s you, just like it’s me.” He stood up then, and said, “I’ll go. Long day for both of us. But if you need me, you know where I am.”

  She got up herself, went to him, and put her arms around him, and he wrapped her up, held her close, and rocked a little. Then he kissed her on top of her head, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut against the tenderness of it.

  She held the front door open for a minute when he’d gone, after a quiet word and a hug for Zora, and watched him loping across the sidewalk through the rain that had started up again as if it would never stop, as if the world were made of rain after the heat of the summer.

  He hopped into his truck, raised a hand to her, and pulled out. And Rochelle thought, I need you now.

  A DANGEROUS PROFESSION

  Jim Lawson sat in the little conference room with DeMarco and Mark Lawrence and looked through the various printouts. Ten shades of nothing, right there.

  “Yeah,” DeMarco said, leaning back in his chair and flipping a pencil in his hand. Point end tapping, then eraser end, over and over against the laminated wood. “Car fell off the jack. Looks like an accident, pure and simple.”

  “I could swear, though,” Jim said, “that he was antsy. That he wanted to talk. Now he’s dead, and that’s just way too much of a coincidence for me. Falling off the jack with the car on a concrete slab? Not the best concrete job I ever saw, but not the worst, either. It happened before it started raining, too.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Could happen, of course. Happens somewhere every other week, probably.” He shuffled through the papers again. “Too much rain to show any tire marks on the road, too. It’d be nice if Stacy Marks hadn’t gone into the ditch right below the house. Muddied things up, so to speak. But it probably didn’t make any difference.” He sighed, knocked the papers together, and set them down. “Nope. You’re getting the go-ahead for the DNA match if you can, I assume.”

  “Already asked his parents for the permission,” DeMarco said. “You think he could have gotten careless because of the investigation?”

  Jim sighed and scratched the back of his head. “Nah,” he finally said. “Or maybe yeah. Upset, for sure. Obviously, he was upset. At being a suspect, and I’d say that was it. I still say the same thing I said before. I wouldn’t peg him for this. He’s a follower, not a leader, always has been. No real badass to him. Get a girl pregnant, lure her out into a field, strangle her, and hide her in a ditch? And then shut up about it and not fall apart?” He shook his head. “Not where my money would be. My money would’ve been on him knowing something, being pressured not to tell, and caving anyway. Wherever the pressure was coming from at the moment, that would be the way Miles would jump. Which is why I don’t believe his car fell off the jack.”

  “You think somebody shut him up.” DeMarco’s pencil was moving faster than ever. Eraser. Point. Eraser. Point. “So,” he said, running through it one more time, because that was what you did. “If it’s the country boys who are at the heart of it, and this Kimberling is either the one who was scared, the one somebody shut up before he could talk, or the one who did it? And don’t tell me he wasn’t a badass,” he added. “A weak guy, a guy whose dad’s leaning on him already to straighten up? Who’s afraid he’s going to get dumped on his ass out of his inheritance, or whatever a farm is?”

  “Not quite an inheritance,” Jim said. “Too much work for that. But his future. Call it that.”

  “All right. Guy like that. Get him cornered. Druggie girl, runaway type, she’s pregnant and he’s Catholic. She says she’ll go to his dad. You think he couldn’t get his hands around her throat?”

  “Sure he could,” Jim said. “But if he had, he wouldn’t have seemed like he was dying to say, ‘Hit me with that Q-Tip.’ And he did.”

  “Granted,” DeMarco said. “Unless he knew he wasn’t the father, but he was the killer.”

  “No,” Jim said. “Like I said. I don’t buy it. And nobody else is going to be clamming up, scared to rule himself out for fear of Miles Kimberling. Or for love of him, either. He wasn’t what you’d call magnetic with other guys. No kind of an alpha male.”

  Lawrence nodded at that.

  “Back to square one, then,” DeMarco said, because he’d met Miles, too. “Back to personalities. If Kimberling’s death wasn’t an accident, we’ve got hot blood—maybe—with Heather’s murder, and cold blood with Kimberling’s for sure. And a country boy for sure, too. We’re closing in on that. Not two directions anymore. One direction.”

  “Yep,” Jim said.

  “Farnsworth. The party was at his house. Kimberling was his friend. You said he had a fighting side after a few.”

  “Murder in cold blood, though?” Jim shook his head. “Not so much. Harris is meaner, like we said. And Farnsworth’s never been what you’d call a big planner.”

  “Well,” DeMarco said, shoving himself back from the table, “we’ll get him in here again. We’ll get them all in here again and put the heat on. If they think we’re moving in on them, and if we tell them we know why Kimberling died? Somebody’s going to cave.”

  “If that’s why he died,” Jim said, “then nobody’s going to talk. If we bring them in and they clam up even more? Then that’s why he died.”

  “How many accidents can one guy arrange?” DeMarco asked. “Before somebody says, ‘Hell with this, I want out.’”

  “I wouldn’t want to bet,” Jim said. “Farming’s a dangerous profession.”

  ANOTHER MONKEY WRENCH

  Rochelle knew Travis was frustrated, even though he hadn’t said so. She’d spent every night at home this week, not wanting to leave Stacy, who seemed more fragile than ever since the events of Sunday. Her sister would come home and go straight to her room like a teenager, and Rochelle wasn’t sure what to do about it. She had a feeling, though, that it was better to be home in case Stacy did want to talk.

  She and Travis had made dinner together at his house a couple nights during the week, but she’d been home by eleven both times. He’d gotten out of bed and kissed her good-bye at the door without a word, but as whirlwind romances went, he was probably thinking that it wasn’t the most spontaneous and carefree thing he’d ever experienced.

  She wished, selfishly, that Zora had stuck around, so she could have left Stacy with her. Besides, she liked Travis’s sister, and she thought her relaxed attitude would be good for Stacy right now. The two of them had shared that experience, which always helped. But it was true that you had to show up for jobs if you wanted to keep them. She wished Travis didn’t have to go back to San Francisco on Sunday, too, speaking of that. She wished he didn’t have to g
o back at all.

  This one’s going to fly. I know it.

  He’d looked so excited when he’d said it. So alive. It was his future, and his passion, and he was going to pursue it. In San Francisco. And there was nothing wrong with that.

  Dell’s words came back to her then. You can be as sure as the day, you can be right as rain, and you can do every single thing in the world exactly perfect. And you still won’t necessarily get forever.

  Anybody who’d been married and wasn’t anymore knew that was true. It is what it is. She had a toothbrush at his place, some clothes in his closet, and a key to his house, and all those things had been his idea. She wasn’t going to wreck this by looking past December and wondering what would happen then, or by being dissatisfied with the time they had now. She’d found out she could have a decent relationship, that she could recognize a decent guy. That was important, going forward. And going forward was what it was all about.

  And then Travis came by the office on Thursday, sat down in the visitor’s chair, looked at her soberly, and said, “Tell me we get all night tomorrow,” and she threw another monkey wrench into the mix.

  “Sure,” she said, then picked up her pen and fiddled with it. “Maybe you’d help me with something first, though. Right after work, as soon as I change my clothes. It’ll take about an hour, and I’m afraid it isn’t all that fun. And then—whatever, though.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “I’ve just resigned myself. This is my patient face. What is it?”

  “I’d like it if you’d drive me out to Lake’s and hang around with me while I do something.”

  “We talking arson?” he said. “I thought we were both letting the past go.”

  She had to laugh. “No. It’s my bulbs.”

  “Christmas, or otherwise?”

  That won him another reluctant smile. “Of the flower variety. It took me a long time to get those tulips and irises together, all the ones I wanted, and I can’t stand to think of them coming up another spring at his place and getting . . . ignored. Or trampled, probably. I can just see his boot coming down on them.” Her fingers curled more tightly around her pen at the thought. “I should’ve taken them at the time, but it was winter. Snow, you know. And I didn’t think of asking for them in the settlement. I wasn’t at my best. Anyway, I’m . . . attached, I guess. I want those ones. And now’s the time to plant them.”