by Lucy Score
I’d heard every damn word she and my sister exchanged the other night. And I thought Cass had taken it seriously. I had hope. But tonight was just another example of her shutting me out.
Jonah had tried to pry it out of me when I got home, but I’d brushed him off. I didn’t feel like talking about how much my girlfriend had let me down. It was worse, coming on the heels of willingly going out in town together. And then baring our souls in a house that held hardly anything but sadness for me.
“Fuck,” I swore. This wasn’t the relationship that either one of us wanted or deserved. I didn’t know what to do about it. I loved her. I belonged to her. We had a future together. But I couldn’t make her trust me. I couldn’t make her open up.
The knock was so soft I didn’t think I’d heard it. Then it was back. Three soft taps coming from the door between our kitchens.
I pulled myself off the couch and shuffled down the hall. The door was unlocked, as always, but she was asking for permission.
I opened it. Cassidy hadn’t bothered changing out of her ice cream and sex clothes. She was clutching a thin stack of papers. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“I’m sorry for kind of ghosting on you,” she said.
I remained silent. I wasn’t going to make this easy for her anymore.
“Bow, your mom never let your dad drive her car.”
“What are you talking about, Cass?” I asked wearily.
“But he took her car to New York. He was in her car when he got the speeding ticket.”
To give myself something to do besides feel hurt and confused, I headed into the kitchen for another beer even though I’d barely touched the one I had. Cassidy followed me.
“There was something that bothered me about your dad’s speeding ticket. It was the fact that he got it in your mother’s car. A car he wasn’t allowed to drive. So why would she have lent it to him for a multi-state road trip?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he stole it,” I said.
Or maybe he needed the trunk of a car to conceal something he couldn’t haul in the open bed of a pickup. The thought turned my stomach, and I put the second beer on the counter next to the first.
She was fired up. I could see her cop brain working. Excitement was crackling off of her. And I wanted to take it away from her the way she’d taken my hope away from me.
“What does it matter? My mother died in that car. It was totaled.”
“And sent to Buddy Foster, Jr.’s junkyard,” she said, shuffling the papers. “Buddy never gets rid of anything. There’s a chance her car is still there.”
If my father had used that car to cart Callie’s body out of the state… “It’s been more than ten years.”
“But there might be something in it. Some clue.”
“What could you possibly find?” I asked, not caring that I was raising my voice. “There’s no way DNA evidence could survive ten years in the elements.”
“We have to try, Bowie.”
The woman I loved, the one I wanted to marry, was asking me to help her prove that my father was a murderer. She was, essentially, expecting me to help her ruin my family’s life. Didn’t she care what this would do to my family? Not just to our reputation, but how we saw ourselves. We were already the sons and daughter of a drunk. What would adding “murderer” to that description do?
“What about the pictures from the Kendalls?” I was grasping at straws.
“If we find the car and there’s nothing in it, no evidence that Callie was ever in it, that could pull in favor of the theory that she hurt herself. If there’s nothing to be found, that’s another huge piece of evidence that Connelly can’t keep ignoring.”
I needed her to say it. Did she think my father was guilty or innocent?
Cassidy took a deep breath and blew it out again. “I’ve been struggling with wondering if I should tell you something or not. So I’m gonna say it. You have a right to know.”
“You’re starting to make me nervous,” I said, picking up one of the beers.
“There’s a possibility that your mom’s accident wasn’t an accident.” She blurted the words out, and the beer went bitter on my tongue. “I talked to my dad about it and he had his suspicions.”
“What? You think my dad murdered Callie and got a taste for it so he went ahead and killed my mom, too?” It would have been laughable if it weren’t my fucking life. My fucking family.
“No. Not that kind of a not an accident,” she explained gently. “There’s a chance—a small one—that your mom crashed on purpose.”
“Suicide? You think she went through that guardrail on purpose?”
“We both know she wasn’t happy, Bowie,” Cassidy began. “She had dreams much bigger than being a stay at home mom in a tiny town always worrying about money.”
“They did the best they could.” But even I didn’t believe it. My parents had let blame and dead dreams ruin what life they did have.
“I know, Bow. I know,” she said softly. “But what if your dad had some kind of involvement and…and your mom knew?”
She was asking me what if my mom found out that my dad killed Callie and she couldn’t live with it.
If Mom couldn’t live with it, how was I supposed to?
“We need to go to Buddy’s,” she said, crossing her arms against some invisible chill.
We. She was including me in this. I almost laughed at the irony. I didn’t want to be included.
I wanted to rewind to two hours ago when Cassidy had given me something beautiful to hang on to in that house. I felt sick.
She was supposed to be my future. My parents, my childhood, those were in my past. But if Cassidy had her way, she’d drag my past back out and make sure it haunted me forever.
58
Cassidy
The rusted metal gate protested as it clanked open. The requisite junkyard dog made his leisurely appearance. Unlike his snarling, territorial brethren, Huck the bloodhound gave Bowie’s pant leg a sniff and then meandered off in search of a warm bed or a biscuit.
“Mornin’ there, deputy.” Buddy Foster, Jr., junkyard entrepreneur extraordinaire, spat his tobacco in the direction of a 1980 Ford Granada on cinder blocks. There was a small cherry tree growing out of the engine block.
“Mornin’, Buddy. Thanks for letting us come out,” I said. I’d dressed casually in jeans and a heavy coat, not wanting to attract any unnecessary attention.
“Sure. Sure,” Buddy said. His red-and-black checked flannel coat was older than I was. “Got a map for y’all.” He handed over a hand sketched version of the junkyard that looked like Mother Nature was trying to reclaim. “It’s thereabouts,” he said pointing at a circle in the northwest corner.
“Appreciate it.”
Bowie was quiet next to me. He’d been quiet, cold since last night. Since I’d shared.
Was he worried we’d find something?
Was I worried we wouldn’t?
I didn’t have high hopes that there’d be answers awaiting us here. But it was one more piece of the puzzle. Something even Connelly couldn’t ignore.
Buddy waved us on and told us we could find him in the office trailer if we needed anything.
“You can wait in the car if you want,” I told Bowie. It had been ten years since Connie had passed. But sometimes all it took was one memory to make those ten years disappear.
“Let’s go,” Bowie said briskly.
We walked the sloping, frozen ground, heading toward the area Buddy indicated. It was a crisp, cold winter morning just days before Christmas, and I was making my boyfriend check out the car his mother died in. This wasn’t sharing. This was torturing.
I stopped. “You know what, maybe you should wait in the car,” I said.
He didn’t look at me, but he stopped walking. “I get that you feel ownership of this whole investigation, but this is my family. My mother. You don’t own that.”
I flinched. “Bowie, maybe this isn’t such a good i
dea.”
“I can see it from here,” he said flatly, pointing ahead of us. There tucked in between the rusted-out corpses of family cars and broken-down pickup trucks was a white Pontiac 6000. Its front end was smashed all the way back to the dash. There were wispy tendrils of blue tarp fluttering in the winter wind out the broken driver side window. It was the kind of tarp we put over fatalities. I felt my blood go cold.
Days ago we’d been decorating cookies and hanging Christmas lights. He’d helped me put up a tree and chased the cats out of it the first six dozen times. And I’d marched him right on up to his mother’s death.
“What are we looking for?” Bowie asked, stuffing his hands in his pockets. He was watching the tarp flutter.
“Dunno.” I approached the car. It was free on the driver side, a grassy path dividing patches of wrecks from each other ran alongside it. The back door was missing. Dead weeds choked out the car all the way around. The tires were long gone. There was no way I was trying to crawl under the wreck and look at the undercarriage. That would be up to Connelly if we pulled the car for some forensics team to take a crack at. If he thought it might offer some hint at what had happened to Callie or if it was just another piece to ignore.
The quarter panel on the passenger side was missing. The rear bumper had fallen off on one side but was still attached on the other. The rear fender was scraped up. There was rust on every single surface, but the interior was remarkably intact aside from a decade of leaves and dirt and nature’s debris. After snapping a few pictures of the exterior with my phone, I pulled the latex gloves out of my coat pocket and put them on. I ducked down and climbed into the back seat.
“Cassidy,” Bowie warned.
“It’s fine. I’ll be a second,” I said. My throat tightened when I saw the rusty brown stains on the driver seat. Old blood. So much blood.
I thought of my father being called to the scene and seeing Connie’s lifeless body limp behind the wheel.
I thought of him keeping his concerns to himself to protect the family.
I’d known Connie. About as well as a teenager could know her best friend’s mom. Suicide didn’t make sense. She was stubborn, like Scarlett. I could see her deciding to live to ninety just to displease her husband. But accidents happened every damn day, stealing people away from their loved ones.
“Move over,” Bowie said gruffly.
“Bow, you don’t have to—”
But he was sliding in next to me.
“We used to fight over who got to ride up front,” he said, patting the disintegrating blue cloth that sagged from the roof of the car. “Gibs was the tallest and needed the most leg room. But I had an inch on Jameson. Of course, then Scarlett started pretending to get carsick and got the front seat all the time.”
“Diabolical, that sister of yours,” I said.
Bowie gave a non-committal grunt. I patted his knee. “There’s no need for you to be in here. I shouldn’t have dragged you out here. It’s gotta be hard for you.”
He reached into the seat back pocket with more bravery than me. Who knew what kind of tarantulas or fanged, poisonous wildlife had taken up residence.
“Here.” I shifted and pulled out a second pair of gloves.
Wordlessly, he snapped them on and dug back in. Not finding what he was looking for, he felt around with his feet on the floor.
“Still here,” he said, reaching down into a pile of leaves and twigs and pulling out a pink-and-purple striped umbrella.
It sparked a few dozen memories. Grumpy Gibson carting groceries to the car, Connie holding the umbrella over him. Me and Scarlett trying to use it as a lightsaber while Connie drove us to a junior high dance. Jameson taking a whack at the Canadian goose that tried to take a bite out of Bowie’s arm when Connie had dragged us out of the house for a rainy day walk.
“What’s that still doing in here?” I asked softly.
“Dad was supposed to come clean the car out after…after she died. Looks like he never did.”
There was a paper coffee cup still tucked in the cupholder. One of Scarlett’s flip-flops was in the door pocket.
“She used to have a whatchamacallit…a dreamcatcher,” Bowie said.
“On the rearview mirror.” I remembered it.
I peered between the seats. The windshield was cracked in a few thousand spidery veins. The driver’s seatbelt was still clipped, but the belt itself had been cut. The gas station coffee cup had brown spattered stains, and I wasn’t sure if it was spilled coffee or long dried blood.
Something glimmered through the dried, frozen muck on the passenger side floorboard, and I reached down.
“Anything up there?” Bowie asked. He sounded numb, and I was reminded that I was a gigantic ass for bringing him here.
I pawed carefully through the dead leaves and mud coating what had once been a Tasmanian devil floor mat. “Aha!” I plucked it out of the debris. The synthetic feathers were long gone, but the silver hoop and wire were mostly intact.
I handed it over my shoulder to Bowie. It wasn’t evidence. He could have this piece of his mother.
There were other things in the dirt. Bits and pieces of a life. A grocery receipt. A crushed soda bottle. I found one of Scarlett’s old Bonne Bell lip glosses and a guitar pick that could have been Gibson’s or Jonah’s. There were no folded maps with a convenient X marking the spot where Jonah had gone after the disappearance, nothing that said Callie Kendall was here.
I peered over at the driver side. Glass glittered amongst the leaves on the floor. The seat’s fabric had rotted through, and god knows what might be living in the sodden mess.
I tried the trunk release, but it didn’t work. As I was pulling my hand back, a yellow piece of paper caught my eye. It was wedged in a crack in the dashboard between two molded pieces of plastic.
With a hard tug, it came free.
It was some kind of ticket, faded and hard to read.
“Are you done yet?” Bowie’s voice had gone flat.
“Yeah. Yep,” I said, sliding back between the seats into the back. I followed him out, stuffing the ticket into my back pocket.
If there was any evidence of Callie in this car, it was either microscopic or she hadn’t ridden in it as a passenger. My eyes skated to the trunk.
It’s not like there would be blood-soaked tarps in there. But if Jonah had killed Callie, there was a chance that there was something back there. And it would be better to have forensics go over it rather than having me poke around.
Bowie was standing there in silence, watching me and holding a plastic grocery bag.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Some crap from the back seat. Family stuff.”
I looked back at the trunk for a moment. If there was anything inside, Connelly and his forensics team could find it. I had put Bowie through enough already.
I glanced at the rear fender, the broken taillight and stepped in to get a closer look. It was definitely scraped. There were streaks of blue paint mixed in with the dirty white and the rust.
“What are you looking at?”
“Did your mom back into anything that you remember or get hit?”
“I don’t remember, Cass.” I was losing him. I’d found the end of his infinite patience. “Why?”
“This.” I indicated the damage. I pulled out my phone and scrolled to the pictures I’d taken of the accident report. I found one of the drivers side of the car on the wrecker and zoomed in. It was grainy, but the car was much less rusty and the gouge was there.
“Maybe it happened during the accident.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “But this looks like paint to me.” I needed to look at the original photos again. But it looked as though some blue paint had transferred onto the Pontiac.
“Why does it matter?” Bowie asked.
“I need to run a reconstruction on the accident,” I said mostly to myself.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to tell tales out of
school, without doing some research. But this accident might not have been an accident.”
“Suicides usually aren’t accidents,” Bowie said bitterly.
I looked over my shoulder at him. “I mean it’s possible that someone hit your mom’s car.”
59
Cassidy
I drove us home and was surprised when Bowie followed me into my kitchen. I was fixing to apologize when he sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands. Eddie skittered out of the room like it was on fire, but George wandered his chunky ass over to Bowie and wove his way in and out of his feet.
“Not everyone wants answers, Cass. Do you think I want to know for sure that my father murdered a sweet, beautiful teenage girl? Do you think that will help me sleep at night? To know that I have that in my blood?” He reached down and stroked a hand over the cat.
I pushed the start button on the coffee maker. “This limbo can’t be good for you. Even if it turns out to be true, at least you’ll know.” He really believed there was a possibility that his father did it. I was surprised by that. I didn’t believe it. Hell, I knew every piece of evidence we dug up would lead the blame away from Jonah.
“How would that help?” Bowie asked. “How would that not ruin everything for every single one of us? Do you want to marry the son of a man who committed cold-blooded murder? Are you okay with having your name linked to mine and my father’s for forever? Do you want to have babies with me and then spend the next twenty years watching them to see if they display any homicidal tendencies?”
“Bowie, it doesn’t have to be like that.” I was scrambling for the thread. But it was lost to me. I felt like my father trying to carry on a conversation. Tongue-tied and misspeaking. I’d forgotten that not everyone needed answers like I did. I’d forgotten that for some answers made things much, much worse. “You’re not your father any more than I am mine.”
“What about my mother? My mom.” His voice broke, and I died a little bit on the inside. “You say you think she might have killed herself. You think that answer would bring comfort to me? When I’d spent the last eleven years believing that she finally found her peace. It’s not always about answers, Cass!”