by Tony Healey
“Yes.” Harper looks as the door to the coffee shop opens. Stu emerges, phone in the crook of his shoulder, carrying two coffees. She takes hers, freeing him up to hold his phone properly. She doesn’t know who’s on the other end of Stu’s phone, but whoever it is has him riled up. His face is red, body language definitely aggressive.
“Uh, sir, about our conversation at the morgue—”
“Listen, Detective. You do what you’ve gotta do. I’ll worry about my own ass. Check in with me later.”
“I will, sir. I appreciate it.”
The captain ends the call and Harper barely notices, her attention is so fixed on what Stu is doing. He paces back and forth, voice rising to near-hysterical levels as he gets angrier. Harper puts her phone away and walks toward him. Now she can hear his voice—an angry growl he doesn’t make often. Only when he’s really pissed.
“. . . no, listen to me, Karen. No! You listen to me!”
Stu sees Harper coming and turns his back.
“Well I don’t know where you got that from, but you’re wrong. So fucking wrong . . . Who? He did? That’s alright . . .”
He snaps his phone shut.
“Hey,” Harper says.
“My ex-wife. She tells me I’m such a loser for cheating on her, for throwing my marriage away.”
“Calm down. You look like you’re about to have a stroke,” Harper tells him in her most level, reasoning voice, despite the thumping of her own blood in her ears. “Let’s go to the car.”
“Wait. That’s not it. Guess who bumped into her a while back in the supermarket, of all places?”
Harper draws a blank.
“Dudley. Karen said it was Dudley who told her about you and me, said we started hooking up as soon as we became partners. Told her we were having a fucking affair.”
“What? she asks incredulously. “That little bastard . . . but why? That’s so random.”
“I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out.” Stu charges toward the car, his blood pressure up.
Harper catches up with him. “Stu, hold on a second. Don’t go rushing off. Wait.” She grabs him by the arm and forces him to stop. “Wait! Look, we don’t know all the facts yet. But we will. It’ll do us both no good to have you flying at Dudley right now. And anyway, we can’t go to the station just yet.”
“Why?”
“There’s a ton of press there. Morelli told me to steer clear for now,” Harper says.
Stu falls silent. He puts his coffee on the top of his car and leans against the side of the vehicle.
Harper uses a softer tone than usual. “Stu.”
He looks at her.
“Why don’t you come with me to see Ida? We can sort all this out later. I’ll tell Morelli.”
Stu considers it for a minute. Eventually he says, “Fine” and gets in the car.
Some of the time, they fuck all day.
Ceeli is fifty years old with a deep-brown, perfect complexion, has streaks of gray in her kinky black hair, but has kept a good figure. Her tits sag when they’re free of her bra, but it doesn’t bother Lester all that much—they’re still big enough to bury his tortured face in when she’s on top of him, and that’s all that matters. He loves that she’s skilled with those thick lips that are so quick to smile.
“You don’t ever worry Mack if gonna find out?” Lester asks her, lying in the double bed she shares with her husband, watching Ceeli get back into her dress.
“No. He don’t pay me no attention, Lester, you know that.”
“Yeah.”
“Besides,” she says, grinning at him. “I like that big ole cock of yours. I swear, I never rode one like it. Makes me feel like a girl again.”
He doesn’t know what to say; he never does. The only time Lester is confident is when he’s with his girls, when he makes them sleep, watching their faces change and knowing that they see him; they really see him for who he is inside. The angel in devil’s clothing.
To Ceeli he is a toy to be played with. The role is reversed.
“What waf it you wanted fixin’ anyway?” Lester asks, following Ceeli downstairs, adjusting the suspenders on his jeans.
“It was me needed the fixing, Lester honey. And God knows if you ain’t done a good job this time,” Ceeli says, followed by a hoarse chuckle. They walk into the kitchen. Ceeli holds a glass under the faucet at the sink.
Lester’s hands fall to her hips, to the big round cheeks of her ass beneath the dress.
“Stop it, Lester. God, ain’t you satisfied after screwin’ me all day long? Damn, I can feel you’re hard already.”
She can’t see the face he is making as he lifts the back of her skirt. “I’m never fatiffied.”
Ceeli sighs with pleasure as his forefinger finds her slit, his free hand pressing her against the counter, the tap still running, spitting water everywhere.
“Go on, Lester. Go on,” she urges him breathily. “I’m hurtin’ but I’m achin’. Go on honey.”
He quickly drops his jeans, runs his fingers across the folds of her vagina, feeling her wetness, her eagerness to have him inside her again. Ceeli reaches behind her, guides him in. “Oh God,” she groans, leaning as far forward as she can. The water is spraying everywhere. “Honey . . .”
Julie carries her bag around the side of the house, eager to show Ceeli her finds. She snags one of the bags on an overgrown bush and curses as she tugs it free, continuing on. Julie looks through the window, at the point of announcing her presence when she freezes.
Lester, the dullard Ceeli has doing odd jobs at her place from time to time, is in the throes of fucking her neighbor over the sink. Julie shrinks back, not wanting to be seen, but filled with a dark desire to watch, all the same. She knows he could turn his head any second and see her standing there. But she’s rooted to the spot.
Julie can hear Ceeli moan with pleasure, and she can hear Lester grunting with effort, his pale-white ass pushing in and out. The fronts of Ceeli’s thighs slap against the cabinet as Lester pounds her so hard she cries out. Common sense kicks in and Julie backs off, retracing her steps and departing before she’s noticed.
She hurries to her home, wanting to get out of sight while she decides what to do.
“Ass end of nowhere, ain’t it?” Stu asks, getting out of the car and blinking in the sunlight.
Harper removes her shades. “Yeah, she likes her solitude.”
“I’ll say.”
“Well, hello.” Ida appears in the doorway. “You coming in? Or you want to sit outside?”
“Why don’t we enjoy some of this sunshine?” Harper says, remembering how hot it was in the house.
They sit out on the porch, on chairs Ida pulls from around the side of the house. She offers them both a cool drink, but they decline.
“You come to talk about last night?”
“Yes, but there was something else, too. I wanted to know if you’d take a ride with me to Wisher’s Pond.”
Ida looks away, to the road where the heat creates a haze over the baked ground. “Figured as much. I knew it was only a matter of time.”
“Are you willing to do it?” Harper asks her.
Ida looks at Stu. “Only if he’ll do something first.”
“Me?” Stu asks.
“Yeah,” Ida says. “I can’t help you two no further if you don’t believe me. I’ve spent too long hiding my gift to have it doubted. There have been too many unbelievers in my life.”
“What do you want?”
“Give me your hand, sugar,” Ida tells him.
Reluctantly, he places his hand in hers. Ida closes her eyes. A minute stretches out, the two detectives all too aware of the sounds around them. The distant cars. Crickets in the grass. Somewhere far off, a crop duster’s engine as it turns in the sky, leaving a trail of white smoke on the fields.
Then the sounds seem to fade. The air around them grows heavy.
Ida’s eyes open slowly. Stu cannot look away from her big dark pupils. From the i
ntensity of her glare. “Your daddy used to buy you those sherbets. Lemon ones. On the ride over, you bought yourself and Detective Harper a lemonade. The kind comes in a plastic cup with a lid, filled with crushed ice. Mint leaves on the top. You told her it reminded you of the sherbets your daddy used to buy.”
Stu tries to move his hand, to pull it back, but Ida’s grip tightens just enough to let him know she’s serious, that he has to hear the rest.
“When he died, you found yourself walking through the town. You went into a little store there and got yourself a big old bag of those sherbets. Out in the park, there’s a little river, and a bridge going over it. You sat on a bench near one side of that bridge, crying like you hadn’t done in years, like a hurt child. All you could think about was your poor old man, six feet in the dirt. Everything you could’ve said to him, but didn’t get a chance to.”
“That’s enough,” Stu says. He tries to get his hand free, to move, to do something to break the spell, but he can’t pull his hand from hers; he can’t look away; he can’t stop listening to her soft voice reveal the workings of his own heart.
Ida sighs. Her thumb works on the back of his hand, rubbing it gently, soothingly. A single tear rolls down her cheek, and Stu watches it fall to the porch, where it makes a puddle in the dust that covers the boards.
“You and your wife couldn’t have kids. But you tried. God knows you wanted them kids, but they just wouldn’t come. She blamed you. Little did she know just how much you wanted a kid all your own, to buy them lemon sherbets. To take on a long walk and tell ’em ’bout your daddy. Your missus never got that, sugar. She ain’t never got that at all.”
Ida lets go of his hand and he gets up, trying to get off the porch to hide his face, wet with tears. Harper starts to go after him but Ida shakes her head. “Let him have some space.”
Stu stands with his back to them. The wind churns up from somewhere, blowing his tie out behind him.
“We got a name for the girl,” Harper says, eyes still on Stu.
“I was right,” Ida says. “Weren’t I?”
“Yes.”
She nods, her voice grave. “Like I said.”
“Have you ever been to the scene of your mother’s murder?”
“No.”
“I thought it might stir something up, something new you might’ve forgotten from . . . well, you know . . .”
“Don’t need no convincing. I’ll do it,” Ida says. “But don’t be expecting some kind of revelation, sugar. In my experience, there’s only what there is, and what there ain’t.”
Stu is quiet on the drive to Wisher’s Pond.
“It’s a peaceful spot,” Ida says, walking ahead of them. “The old-timers would come up here, snag catfish, and throw ’em back, just for sport. I don’t think there’s any catfish in there now, though. Probably eaten. Some folk got no respect for anything.”
Harper looks at Stu. “You okay?” she whispers.
He nods. That’s it. Ida is still talking. It doesn’t sound like the spiel of a local tour guide, but the twittering of someone who is incredibly nervous, speaking just for the sake of doing so. They walk through the tall grass toward a cluster of trees in the middle of an abandoned field. On the drive over, Ida told them that no one had worked that land for a hundred years. “It’s never dried up,” she tells them. “Far as I’m aware. Always been here.”
The trees are spaced out around the pond’s edge, but far enough back from the bank to allow short, soft grass to grow there. Ida hesitates at the edge of the trees.
“You okay?” Stu asks Ida. It’s the most he’s spoken since leaving her house.
“Just cold.”
Harper looks at Stu, and he shrugs to say he doesn’t know what she’s talking about either. It’s extremely hot and sticky out. Stu removed his suit jacket and stripped off his tie back at the car. His shirt is undone a few buttons, revealing the vest beneath and the gathering of dark hairs on his chest. His sleeves are rolled up, as are Harper’s.
“You feel cold?” Harper asks Ida.
She shakes her head. “No. I feel the cold,” she says, walking slowly through the trees.
Ida picks her way around the old trunks, the strong smell of warm bark and the green pond water, the whisper of grass out in the field, pushed by a breath of hot air. She pauses, eyes closed, and it takes every inch of her resolve to continue. Coming up on the place she has revisited in her dreams since she was a little girl. Ida hunkers down on the ground, feeling the soil with her open hands, finding the spot where her mother died. Digging her fingers in, grabbing at the soil, clenching it, feeling it crushed in her hard grip, the grains, the coolness.
Here she lay. Here she died.
“Ida, is this the place?”
She nods.
“Damn . . . ,” Stu says, looking around. “I remember the photos in the file now.”
Harper squats down near Ida. “What’re you feeling?”
“Just . . . she was here. He was here. Nothing specific—it’s like turning a corner and seeing a building you used to look at as a kid,” Ida says, looking about. “My mamma used to pour glasses of lemonade. Full of ice. The glass was so cold it’d sweat and drip everywhere. I think of that every time I see a cold glass. This place is like that. It’s an echo. A memory.”
“Anything more specific coming through?” Harper asks her.
Ida shakes her head. “No,” she says, her face suddenly screwed up tight. Something sour in her mouth. “There’s only pain here.”
And fear.
Harper watches her get up. “Do you want to go home?”
“Yes,” she says, hugging herself. “And I don’t want to come back here ever again.”
9
The sun is far behind the buildings on the other side of town when Harper and Stu arrive at the station. The press is reduced to a few men and women by now.
She stops the engine, and talks to him for a short while, warning him to hold his tongue around Dudley until they know all the facts. Even then, she tells him, he should go directly to Captain Morelli.
Stu clenches his jaw, looks dead ahead, and she can see his rage is at a simmer. Before walking inside, she stops him again.
“Promise me you won’t go off.”
Stu lets loose a big sigh. “Yeah.”
“Stu?”
“Look, I said yes. Trust me. It’ll be hard not to knock the little prick out, but I’ll hold it back, okay?”
“Okay,” Harper says, opening the station door and letting him go first. “You know you’re hot when you’re mad, though, right?”
He shrugs, playing along. “Sure do.”
It must be fate, Harper thinks as Dudley approaches. Stu rubs his temple.
“Jane, I’ll go do that thing,” Stu says, heading straight for the basement.
“Okay. Check in with you later.”
Dudley frowns, watching him go, but Stu’s odd behavior is forgotten in Dudley’s eager rush to impart his information.
He walks with Harper to her desk, where she sets down her bag and keys. “I interviewed Gertie Wilson’s parents. They took it pretty hard. Said they listed her missing because it wasn’t like her not to come home. She’d never done it before.”
“Any boyfriends? Men hanging around?”
Dudley shakes his head. “None that they knew of. She was a good girl. Top student.”
“What about Albie? Any luck with the records from the phone?”
Dudley nods. “He’s in IT right now, pulling everything off of it. Should have it any minute. What I heard was he had the cell phone sitting in a bowl of rice to dry it out.”
“Apparently that works,” Harper says. “Did we get anywhere with the trucks in the local area?”
“Nope. There’s just too many. Until we get a plate, or a distinguishing feature.”
“I hear you,” Harper says, looking at him—really looking—trying to determine if he’s the sort who would do something like phone a colleague’s ex
-wife and cause trouble. He’s hard to read. His appetite for the job, for career progression, his dickish behavior sometimes—it’s possible.
“What’s up with Detective Raley? He seemed off.”
“Oh he’s caught up in the case. Those young women, the way they’ve been killed. He’s finding it tough switching off.”
Dudley nods, as if he understands. “Yeah, I guess it gets that way, huh?”
“So anyway, I’ll let you get going. I’ll catch up with you later,” she says.
Dudley flashes a smile—she notices again that the gesture does not fit his face. “Sure.”
When she’s certain he’s gone for the time being, Harper heads down to the basement, where she finds Stu sitting at a table, the files in front of him.
“Stu? You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, as if nothing is wrong.
That’s a bad sign, Harper thinks, but she tries to push the thought to the back of her head. He promised her he’d keep himself under control. She has to trust that’s what’s going to happen. “What’re you looking at down here?”
“The files again. You know, we can’t question the families of the other cases because they weren’t made aware of the real circumstances. Their loved ones died, but they were lied to. Ida is our only link to the past, to this guy’s first murder,” Stu says. “But looking through them all, you see a definite pattern. He goes for the same look, the same build, the same kind of hair.”
“Either he’s revisiting that murder, over and over again, because he enjoyed it, or—”
Stu says, “He’s infatuated. Something about Ida’s mom, the way she looked. Do you think he had a thing for her?”
Harper shrugs. “Could’ve been what you were saying before, an infatuation. Does it say where Ruby worked?”
Stu leafs through the file, looks up, shaking his head. “No.”
“I’ll look into it. If he was an admirer, he might’ve been seen with her. People who worked with her might remember.”