by Mary Stone
“Greg sent me. Greg Starr? Your friend from high school. You told him about your wife’s disappearance, and he asked me to take a look into it for him. I’m his…partner.”
She gave Linc a sideways glance as she said it, and he just shook his head. No, she wasn’t technically Greg’s partner, but she was constantly lying about her position when the situation called for it. And this situation…called for it. She couldn’t put it past the man to not be holding a shotgun behind the door, ready to run them off his property.
Instead, his eyes lit up. “Oh. Right. Sorry.” He thunked his head and opened the screen door for them.
Kylie breathed a sigh of relief, then realized the man was now regarding Linc with suspicion.
Hmm. No wonder he thought there was foul play in his wife’s disappearance if he was this wary about everyone.
“This is Linc Coulter,” Kylie quickly explained as she went past him, taking a short whiff and noticing he smelled heavily like body odor, like he hadn’t showered in a while. Guess losing the person you love the most’ll do that to you, she thought, then reached for Linc’s hand. “He’s one of the best SAR guys in North Carolina.”
“That so?” he said, regarding him through his thick glasses. “Well, Beez was the best SAR in the whole dang country.”
He said it like it was a challenge, and they were trying to one-up each other. Well, Linc is the best SAR in the whole universe! Yeah. That would probably get her seeing the butt of his shotgun all too soon.
Before she could think of how to best handle this man, Linc extended his hand. “Yes, sir. I worked with Beez a few times. She’s truly a gifted woman. I was honored to learn quite a bit from her.”
Ollie Crosby shook the hand, still wary. “Well, good to meet you,” he said, closing the door and ushering the couple to a room cluttered with old flowered couches and Hummel figurines. The man walked, creaky and bow-legged, his baggy jeans dragging on the floor, to a vinyl recliner and threw himself down on it.
He certainly wasn’t the model of fitness his wife must have been, Kylie observed as she followed, trying not to breathe in too much. The air was hot and stuffy and smelled like bacon grease and the aforementioned body odor. Kylie fought to keep a straight face as she sat on one of the mismatched chairs near the upright piano. Linc sat next to her, on a spindly piano bench that creaked under his substantial weight.
“I’d get you something to drink, but…” He looked regretfully at the kitchen, and Kylie understood. The poor man was lost without his wife, his other half. The half that clearly kept his world glued tightly together.
“It’s fine,” she said, reaching out and touching his hand. “I know this must be hard for you. We don’t want to disturb you, but we do want to help you as much as possible. That’s why we’re here.”
“I appreciate that,” he said, gruff and unsmiling. His manner reminded her of how Greg spoke to her, but the difference was that this poor man had a reason for being grumpy. “I called Greg because I get the distinct feeling I’m being hoodwinked by the police. They ain’t doing all they can to find her. Jockeying me around and giving me the runaround. You know?”
“That’s what we want to get to the bottom of, Mr. Crosby,” Kylie said. “We’ll do all we can to locate your wife.”
He nodded, his jowls flapping, reminding Kylie not so much of a koala now than a sad St. Bernard. “What can I do to help you?”
“Well,” Kylie reached into her bag and pulled out a pad and pen, “you can start by telling me a little about Beatrice. Linc was telling me she was quite a good tracker and outdoorswoman?”
He scoffed. “She wasn’t good. She was the best.” He motioned with his chin to Linc and rubbed his whiskered jowl. “Am I right? Been doing it for going on three decades. Ain’t no one ever been as good as Beez. Bet kids like you could’ve learned a thing or two from her.”
Kylie looked at Linc, who nodded, though she had a good feeling Linc could’ve given any SAR tracker a run for their money. He was just being humble, as usual. As far as Kylie was concerned, if Linc couldn’t find it, it didn’t want to be found.
“Yes, sir,” Linc told the man, using a respectful tone. “Like I said, she was a fixture in our community. I’m sorry you’re going through this.”
“And that’s what I don’t get,” Crosby said, waving his hands in agitation. “She was exactly that. A fixture at that park. Born on that mountain. More at home there than the rocks and the trees. She knew it like the back of her hand. I proposed to her there ‘cause ain’t nowhere else she’d rather be. She’d be the last person I’d expect to go off and get lost there. So I’ve been tellin’ the police that there’s some serious shit going down in those hills. Something bad. Something real bad.”
Kylie looked up from her scrawlings. “By the mountain, you mean—”
“The gorge. She done rescues in Tallulah Gorge all her life. That’s where she was headed when she disappeared. After some crazy lunatic with a death wish.”
“Death wish? Oh,” Kylie said, scribbling again. “Why do you say that?”
Ollie immediately looked ashamed, but only for a moment. “Because the man was suicidal, left a note.”
Kylie swallowed, her heart breaking for anyone who had lost hope that their life could get any better. “And when was the last time you saw her?”
“Well, I was reading…” He scratched his nose, looking a little embarrassed. “You see, I’m retired on disability, and Beez is ten years younger than me, and they couldn’t make her retire if she was a hundred.” He cleared his throat. He rambled more than Kylie. “Anyway, she stood right there…” he pointed at the door, “and she told me she’d got a call about some missing suicide at Tallulah Gorge, and she was gonna take Tiger and hoped she’d be back by dinner.”
“Tiger? Your pit bull, correct?”
He nodded. “Sweet dog. I looked out the window, saw her get into her pickup with the dog, and that was the last I ever saw of her or the pup.”
Kylie dropped her head when she noticed the man’s eyes were brimming with tears. She looked at Linc, who said, “Do you know anything about the missing hiker she was going after? Was he familiar with the area?”
“Hiker?” The man looked appalled. “He ain’t no hiker. Just a poor dumb sap with nothin’ to live for. I don’t know nothin’ more than what I heard on the news. Some jumper that didn’t wanna live. Left a note at his apartment for his girlfriend to find, about how he wanted to end it all and didn’t want to be found.”
Kylie nodded, flipping through her pad. “I saw it mentioned on the news. A Craig Silva, is that right?”
Ollie grumbled under his breath. “Yeah, that’s him. And the irony of it is, he was found. Dead at the bottom of the gorge. But my wife, she’s gone. My poor wife died looking after some idiot who didn’t even wanna live. What a waste.”
“Hold on a minute,” Kylie said, reaching over to place her hand on the older man’s. “Beez hasn’t been found yet. Don’t assume the worst. You have to have hope.”
Linc looked at her, and she got the feeling, in all her incurable optimism, that she’d said something wrong. Maybe it was too foolish even to have optimism now. Maybe it was good to strive for acceptance.
Ollie let out a long breath. “Nah. She’s dead. Ain’t no way she wouldn’t have come back to me if she were alive. I can feel it.”
Kylie’s heart twisted. She wanted to go to the poor man and hug him. She felt tears fighting their way out of her eyes, and her throat started to close up.
Thankfully, Linc picked up where she’d left off. “It’s been rainy in these parts the past few weeks. Makes the trails hard to handle. She could’ve run into trouble because of that.”
“I don’t buy it,” Crosby grumbled.
“She was on the North Rim Trail when she disappeared?”
Crosby shrugged. “I don’t know those trails like she does. I’m not SAR. We gone up there a few times, but I’m not much of a hiker myself. I know all the p
eople she works with ‘cause she’s worked with a lot of them a long time. But I don’t know which trail she was on. She said something before she left that the guy didn’t get a permit to be on any of the trails, so they had no idea where to search. And yeah, it’d been raining, but she was used to that.”
Kylie flipped through her pad. “Craig Silva was found off the North Rim Trail.”
Crosby rubbed at his whiskered jaw. “That’s right. They found him, and a few hours later, they realized Beez hadn’t reported back and wasn’t responding on her radio.”
Kylie scanned the room for any sort of identification she could find, to put a face with the name of Beatrice Crosby. She’d gone through some news articles online, but none had shown the woman’s recent photograph. She noticed a lot of crosses on the walls and religious figurines on the surfaces. Spotting a frame in a shabby glass and metal cabinet in the corner that was littered with many religious sculptures, she walked over to it.
It was a picture of a dog, possibly Tiger. No Beatrice. “Do you happen to have a picture of her?”
He scratched the pockmarked side of his face, then held up a finger. He picked up the book laying by his feet, an old Louis L’Amour, and pulled out what he’d been using as the bookmark. He glanced at the crumpled item for a second before passing it off to her.
Kylie swallowed as she looked into the sweet face of a spry, fit woman in a baseball cap. She was wearing sunglasses, had sunburned, chipmunk cheeks, and a bright, open-mouthed smile. In the picture, she wore a bright red windbreaker, holding a walking stick, her other hand clasping the strap of a heavy backpack. As much as Kylie disliked the outdoors, she had to admit, the scenery around Beez was breathtaking.
“Where was this taken?” she asked.
“At the gorge,” Crosby replied. “She never wanted to hike anywhere else. That was her place.”
“Okay. And what was she wearing when she went out?”
His eyes fell to the photograph. “That red jacket. Turtleneck. Jeans. Just like the picture. She didn’t wear anything else this time of year. I don’t think she was wearing the ball cap. If she doesn’t wear that, she puts her hair in one of those scarf things.” He motioned to his head, then nodded at Kylie. “You know, right? Like a wrap thing women wear. Keeps bugs out, I guess.”
“Right.” Kylie stared hard at the picture, then lifted her phone to take a photo of it. After making sure it wasn’t blurry, she handed the original back to him. “When she went out, was she with anyone? I mean, other than Tiger? Were there other people on the search with her?”
Crosby tucked the photo back into the book and hitched a shoulder. “I don’t know. Knowing how much ground they had to cover, she was probably by herself. They’d put the other SARs on other trails. Beez couldn’t stand being told what to do.” He laughed a little, but the sound was so sad Kylie’s heart squeezed. “Stubborn ol’ girl.”
He hung his head low, staring at the dirty shag carpeting between his legs. His heavy, flannel-shirt-clad shoulders heaved.
He was crying.
“I don’t know,” the man said, not looking up. “I can’t help thinkin’ the worst. If she’s dead, I just need to know it, and I need to know how it happened. She told me that if she ever died, she wanted me to scatter her ashes over the gorge. If the worst has happened, I want to do that for her. If her body’s in the gorge, it’s where she wants to be, but not how she wants to be there. I want to put her to rest. She deserves that.”
Kylie looked at the man’s long face, then at Linc, and her heart started to thump painfully.
Before she realized she was crying, a tear slipped from her cheek and landed on the pad.
She tried to be the hardnosed PI, but that wasn’t her. And it seemed that the more experience she got in investigations, the worse she got. She hated to see people suffering. Always would.
Linc reached over and squeezed her hand. It’s okay, he mouthed to her.
Kylie wanted to believe that was true. But she knew that for Ollie Crosby, if the worst had indeed happened, life would never be okay again. The man would be forever altered, and Kylie felt like it was up to her to make whatever amends she could to give him back some semblance of a normal life. She wanted it so badly, it hurt.
5
They didn’t find a huge number of pet-friendly lodging choices once they got to the small town of Tallulah Falls. Actually, they didn’t find a huge number of lodging choices at all. Or restaurants. Or much of anything besides scenery. Lots and lots of beautiful, breathtaking scenery.
If it hadn’t been for Kylie and her nature hating ways, Linc would have been happy to pitch a tent under one of the gold and burgundy trees but knew better than to introduce camping to his fiancée just yet.
One day, maybe.
With it being in the middle of autumn foliage season, the area was enjoying an uptick in visitors, although peak leaf viewing was still a week or two away. They ended up driving to another town just outside their destination to find lodging and settled on a no-tell motel called the Twin Pines, a place that Linc couldn’t help thinking looked like the motel from Psycho, only a lot older and more broken down. Like Janet Leigh, they wound up having the only car in the lot.
Inside, Linc had to get Kylie to stop from tossing her stuff on the furniture before he had a chance to check the place for bed bugs and other equally disgusting hazards. He had a special black light that he carried to make sure the sheets were reasonably clean, and he made sure they didn’t use the blanket, since even good hotels rarely washed that bedding.
Once that was done, Kylie curled up under the clean blanket he’d brought and looked at a brochure for a restaurant. “So, in this horror movie you were talking about, where they all got picked off by the locals…did it have anything to do with there not being suitable human food to eat?”
He looked up from giving the dogs bowls of water. “Are you talking about Deliverance?”
She made an uh-huh noise deep in her throat.
“Well, in the movie, these men decide to escape life for a week, leaving their jobs, wives, and kids behind. They—”
Hmm…maybe it was better that he not tell her all the details.
Kylie blinked innocently at him. “They what?”
He cleared his throat and fudged the plotline a bit. “They went kayaking and ended up fighting for survival. The end.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Sounds…fascinating.” She looked back down at the brochure. “About as fascinating as the dining choices around here. Is Frank’s Chicken Hut seriously our best choice?”
“Frank’s is delicious.” He bent down to retie the laces on his hiking boots. “We can think food later. We need to head over to the park to meet with Dina. We’re meeting her at headquarters in a half hour, remember?”
She burrowed under the covers and let out a long grumble. “Can I have five more minutes? Cold. Mud. Outdoors. Maybe I can find a bootleg of Deliverance on YouTube. Never mind. There’s shitty cell phone service here.”
He sat down next to her and patted her hip through the blanket. “This is the job from hell for you, isn’t it?”
“Yes and no,” she answered, sitting up and wrapping her arms around her legs. “I wish there was bigger hope in finding Beatrice alive, and that would certainly make me happier. But since it’s probably too late for that, I want to help that poor man. I just feel so terrible for him. I want to bring her back,” tears brimmed in her eyes and she blinked them away, “but I’m afraid there won’t be a happy ending.”
He rubbed her shoulder gently. “I’m not totally counting Beez out yet. Sure, the odds are stacked against her, but she might just surprise us. And if not, we can bring her body home to her husband. Give him that bit of comfort. That would be a good thing.”
She stared off into space. “Yes. I suppose. I don’t know, though. It doesn’t feel good enough.”
He moved his hand to her back, gently massaging the muscles around her shoulder blades. That was Kylie.
She sometimes got so wrapped up in other people’s emotions that these things got hard for her. She cried for a week when she learned that the missing person she’d searched for in her first big case had been killed, and she hadn’t even known the young woman.
Such a quality probably wasn’t the best to have as a private investigator, but Linc wouldn’t have changed it for the world. He loved all the things that made Kylie, Kylie. Even the things that made him want to bash his head into a wall.
She leaned onto his good shoulder and looked up at him. “How do you stand it?”
He took in a deep breath, knowing she meant the cadaver hunting. It wasn’t his favorite thing, no. Obviously, the garage collapse had proven that.
“You don’t think of what you’re looking for. You just think of the search. And you think of, like what Ollie said, bringing people peace by answering those what-ifs. It does mean a lot, and sometimes, it’s the most we can do, sweetheart.”
She brushed away the tear that had made it past all the blinking. “Okay.”
“Come on,” he said, standing up and pushing back the curtain to peer outside. The rain was still falling in sheets, unfortunately, drumming on the roof in a way he normally found soothing. “Looks like there’s a break in the clouds over there.”
She stood up reluctantly, strapped on her hiking boots, and shrugged into her jacket. “All right. Lead the way.”
She was soaked by the ten-yard dash to the truck. They got in with the dogs, and after he pulled out, he glanced over at her, with her hood pulled so tight it only bared a tiny circle of Kylie’s face. She looked pathetic and waterlogged, and they hadn’t even gotten out on the trail yet.
“If you want, I can go on the trail by myself while you meet with Dina and the others,” he said, patting her knee, and he was glad he’d forced her into waterproof pants.
There was supposed to be a two-hour window of clear skies that afternoon, and Linc wanted to get Storm’s nose on the ground while Kylie conducted her interviews. His shoulder wasn’t quite ready for an advanced missing persons hunt, but a cadaver hunt, he could handle on his own.