Wayward

by Gregory Ashe

  “We loved Rory,” the sheriff said. “I know he liked you, Emery. He was happy to have met you. And we’re so grateful you found him. It’s better—” The sheriff’s voice broke here, and struggle moved through his face. “It’s better than not knowing. Mitchell, I’m sorry you went through what you did. But I’m glad you were with our son. I’m glad you could help him as much as you did.”

  Mitchell was shaking so hard that Hazard finally let his arm slide around the redhead and pull him into a hug.

  If the sheriff wanted to say more, he didn’t—maybe couldn’t. His eyes were wet, and he wiped one hand down his face like he was running a squeegee. He looked at his wife, waited, and then let out a breath and nodded.

  “Come on,” the sheriff said. “We wanted to buy you boys breakfast, and then we’ll let you have the rest of your day back.”

  Mitchell was trying to say something, but he couldn’t. He was dabbing at his face with a huge, old-fashioned handkerchief, and his eyes were red and streaming. It should have looked silly, but instead, Hazard felt himself coming apart at the seams.

  “Mitchell,” the sheriff said, “let’s get you cleaned up. They’ve got a bathroom in the Living Word place, or whatever it’s called.”

  An old hand at this kind of thing, the sheriff managed to peel Mitchell away from Hazard and, one arm over Mitchell’s shoulders, guided him toward the white stone building. Margaret Engels, actuarial supervisor, with her shock of pink hair fluttering in the wind, hadn’t moved.

  When she spoke, it was like someone turning a screw inside Hazard.

  “He’s always been very paternal,” she said, eyes locked on the gravestone. “The whole time I’ve known him. He’s the one who wanted children. Plural. He’s the one who liked going to tee ball games, birthday parties, school plays. Rory had him wrapped around his finger, of course.” She smiled then, and Hazard stared at the wrinkles around her mouth filled in with a shade of lipstick that looked a little too much like blood. “And, of course, he was the one Rory came out to first. He was the one Rory introduced Phil to first. He was the one Rory told about drama at the studio, or drama in the ballet company, or drama with friends. Rory told him everything. No surprise, I guess. Rory couldn’t be bothered to tell his ice-queen bitch mother anything.”

  The sun was hot on Hazard’s face; he had to turn his head, narrow his eyes. But Margaret’s expression didn’t change: the pinched, purplish lips; the too-sharp nose; the pink hair’s pathetic defiance.

  “I’m sure he didn’t think of you like that,” Hazard said into the void.

  Margaret scoffed. “Of course he did. Dennis catered to him. Encouraged his little fantasies. Professional ballet dancer. My God. Rory was living in Columbia, Missouri. It’s a miracle they even have a ballet company, but to have the delusion that you’re somehow going to—what? What was the plan, exactly? Build up your skills doing the Nutcracker once a year for people who wouldn’t know Tchaikovsky from General Tso’s chicken, and then one day somebody spots you and hands you a plane ticket to New York? Was he going to move there? Was he just going to get up and go and think everything would work out? That’s how he was, you know. Wouldn’t think about anything beyond the next day. Wouldn’t plan. His father’s like that, too. Dragging us across the state so he can be sheriff in this . . . this shit hole.” Margaret’s face was still stone, but her breathing had accelerated. “It makes me so angry sometimes. This is Dennis’s fault. We wouldn’t be here if not for him. Rory wouldn’t have been here if not for him.”

  Hazard wanted to tell her that wasn’t fair, but he’d been pretty unfair himself lately, and he had an idea, now, of how pain made people crazy, made them think and say and do things that they didn’t even understand themselves.

  “Homosexuals can’t really understand, of course,” Margaret said. “What it’s like to lose a child I mean.”

  “I have a daughter.”

  The corner of a wrinkled, stained lip quirked, but Margaret only said, “Rory was a perpetual disappointment. Dancing. Ballet. For the love of God, he would have made more money wearing a thong and pole dancing. Did you know he was third in his class at Mizzou? In the business school? That’s incredible. I don’t know if people understand how competitive that program is. And he was third in his class. And then, one day, he stopped going to class. He had to tell everyone he was gay—not exactly what every mother wants to hear, but fine—but apparently being gay meant flunking out of two semesters and having the university suspend your enrollment. Can you imagine what it’s like to get that kind of news? But I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was Rory all over again. Rory dropping out of Boy Scouts. Rory dropping out of 4-H. Rory digging in his heels and refusing to do those math competitions.”

  Shading his eyes, Hazard said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “You think I’m a bitch.” Margaret laughed, the sudden dissolve of her features more shocking than the sound itself. “I am a bitch. But I wanted Rory to have a good, happy, safe life. And he was determined to fight me on it every step of the way. He got what he wanted, just as he always did. So here we are, Mr. Hazard.”

  From the other side of the cemetery came a faint, warbling hymn from the Van Sants. “God Be with You Till We Meet Again.”

  Margaret’s hand jerked on the zipper, and the next words seemed to escape her against her will, spoken in a low, dead voice. “These days, everybody wants to talk about how their parents ‘messed them up.’ As though parents are supposed to be perfect. As though if things had been different, the right set of parents, everything would have turned out better. Nobody thinks about it the other way, though.” She took a few tottering steps, as though her legs were locked and wouldn’t bend, and then said, “I don’t think we’ll be going to breakfast; I’ve lost my appetite. Goodbye, Mr. Hazard.”

  Hazard stayed where he was for a long time, the sun baking him in his suit, his hand a weak visor against the light, the Van Sants’ hymn trailing off like a bad choir rehearsal. When his phone rang, he startled, and then he pulled it from his pocket and saw Somers’s name on the screen.

  “You need to get over to The Oaks,” Somers said. “We’ve got something.”

  He raced back to the van, slowing only when he registered the paper folded under the windshield wiper. His first thought was parking ticket, but that didn’t make any sense. His next thought was flyer, but who was distributing flyers in a cemetery parking lot? Then he thought maybe it was a note from the Engels, so he worked it out from under the blade and unfolded it flat against the windshield.

  A row of three names marched down the center of the page.

  Rory.

  Phil.

  Mitchell.

  Rory and Phil had been struck out with a fat black line. Below the names, a single word was printed in the Greek alphabet. Hazard didn’t need a transliteration guide; he could recognize the shapes of most of the letters, and he knew what it said.

  Aristaios.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MARCH 29

  FRIDAY

  10:11 AM

  SOMERS HELD OUT A FRAGMENT of scorched paper in an evidence bag; when Hazard accepted it, he said, “That nosey neighbor, the one you talked to. He called it in. I guess he saw the smoke from his window, got curious enough to crawl out of his own filth, and came over here to see if something interesting was happening. Ehlers said the poor guy was so excited he could barely breathe.”

  Hazard turned over the page, studying it.

  They stood on the cement parking pad at the front of Daniel Minor’s trailer. The spring day was clear and bright and beautiful; in typical Missouri fashion, it was threatening to turn hot ahead of schedule, and Somers was already regretting his decision to wear a tie. Hazard seemed to have made the same kind of wardrobe error. He was wearing a white dress shirt, a skinny black tie, and black suit pants. Why? And why did Hazard look like he’d already tied a noose and was thinking about taking one final step? Beca
use of last night?

  “It looks like a diary entry,” Hazard said.

  “That’s right.” Somers jerked a thumb. “Norman and Gross put out the fire, and now they’re trying to save whatever they can.”

  “And it’s a fucking shit job,” Norman shouted as he came along the deck. Soot and char marked him, staining his arms, his shirt, even a smudge across his forehead. His volume dropped as he came down the stairs. “The two of you give us the worst fucking jobs. I ought to start charging you double.”

  “Maybe you’d be able catch up on all that alimony,” Somers said.

  “Keep laughing, dumb fuck.” Norman looked at Hazard. “I thought you guys broke up.”

  “You think a lot of stupid things,” Hazard said, still examining the page. “Do we know who this belongs to?”

  “I think it’s pretty obvious,” Somers said.

  “Hey, King fucking Kong,” Norman said, waving a hand in front of Hazard’s face. “Where the fuck do you get off?”

  Hazard lowered the page fractionally to look at Norman. “Fuck off, Norman. Go do your fucking job.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Norman said, shooting a glance at Somers. “What kind of fucking butt plug do you have him wearing today?”

  This time, Hazard lowered the page more, and a growl was building in his chest.

  “Ok,” Somers said, a hand on Norman’s shoulder to guide him past Hazard and toward the patrol cars. “Both of you, drop it.”

  “Tell me to drop it?” Norman shouted, twisting to look back at Hazard. “Tell him to drop it. Tell him to get a fucking attitude adjustment or I’ll fucking adjust it for him with my fucking Beretta. See how fucking sweet he sounds after that.”

  Hazard turned.

  “No,” Somers snapped, pointing a finger at him. “Stay.”

  He got Norman out to the cars before letting go of his shoulder.

  “He’s having a bad day,” Somers said.

  “Bad day? We’re all having a fucking bad day. I’m digging through this asshole’s barbeque grill, but I’m still all rainbows and sunshine. Tell that fucking asshole to learn some fucking respect. He’s not police anymore, Somers. He’s got to learn that.”

  Somers nodded. Then, a crooked smile on his face, he said, “Rainbows and sunshine?”

  It took a moment before the tension eased out of Norman’s body and then he grumbled, “Don’t get any ideas.”

  “It’s going to be hard.”

  “Don’t go falling in love with me just because of my sexy body,” Norman said, rubbing his potbelly.

  “I’ll try to control myself.”

  He left Norman to search through their equipment and went back to Hazard.

  “Could you try to be civil for five minutes?”

  “Where’s Dulac?”

  “He took a sick day. Don’t change the subject. Could you pretend to have decent, human-level manners for the length of one conversation?”

  “Like the conversation we had last night in our bedroom?” Hazard didn’t wait for a response and held out the page. “You think this is from Courtney’s diary?”

  Pushing the evidence bag down, Somers said, “I’m serious. These guys are doing shitty work. They’re good at it. And if they don’t do it, I have to. So can you please just show the tiniest sliver of patience with them?”

  “He was trying to get a rise out of me.”

  “Yeah, well, gee. I can’t imagine what would have happened if he’d succeeded.”

  Hazard frowned, opened his mouth, frowned again.

  “No,” Somers said. “You’re just going to make it worse.”

  “I want to see the other pages. Anything they’ve recovered.”

  Somers raised an eyebrow.

  “Please,” Hazard said through gritted teeth.

  “Don’t ask me, ask them.”

  Somers glanced over Hazard’s shoulder at Norman, who had somehow gotten himself tangled in police tape. The roll of black-and-yellow tape had fallen to the ground and was unspooling as it rolled away. Somers held back a sigh; sending Hazard to deal with that clusterfuck would be like dropping a nuclear bomb on unruly kindergartners.

  “I should make you ask them,” Somers said.

  Hazard folded his arms.

  “I should. I should make you apologize and then ask nicely to see what they’ve bagged already. But I won’t. Because I love you.”

  “And because you know it wouldn’t be efficient.”

  “And that,” Somers agreed.

  After a few minutes of wrangling, Somers managed to get the four of them up on the deck, crowded around a patio table. Somers was surprised to see only four bags: one contained a diary with a scorched leather cover; the other three contained individual pages similar to the one Hazard held. Hazard placed his on the table with the others, and the four men bent over the find.

  “Good thing she went with leather,” Gross said, tapping the cover through the plastic. “Held up pretty well to the heat. Smell the kerosene? Somebody did their best to try to get rid of this; lucky for us, they didn’t know fuck all.”

  “These pages were torn out,” Hazard said, touching the individual sheets.

  “Oh,” Somers said. “Is that why the edges look ragged?”

  “If the binding was cheap,” Norman said, “or the paper was cheap, it could have happened pretty easily. One of my ex-wives liked stuff like this. Some of the paper they sell you, it’s pretty thin shit.”

  Hazard grunted, but for a miracle, didn’t point out what Somers was pretty sure he was thinking: if the cover was real leather, the odds that the binding and paper were cheap were much lower.

  “Why light it on fire and then run?” Somers said.

  “Because they don’t want to stand around and answer questions when everybody gets curious,” Norman said.

  “So why not bury it? Why not drop it in the river?”

  “You never know,” Norman said. “It ends up on the shore. Or a big storm hits, and all the rain washes away the dirt.”

  Hazard’s mouth twitched. He was obviously trying. Hard.

  “Not if you dig down three feet and put rocks on top of it,” Somers said.

  “Fuck that,” Gross said. “Norman’s right: the only way to make sure this thing is destroyed is to burn it.”

  Hazard’s eye had a tic.

  “But it isn’t destroyed,” Somers said.

  “Yeah,” Norman said, as though he’d just scored the winning point.

  “Exactly,” Gross said, leaning back and resting his hands on his potbelly.

  When Hazard bent closer to study the pages, Somers copied him.

  “We can be together forever,” Hazard muttered.

  “Aww shucks,” Somers said. “Not in front of the guys.”

  “Dumbass,” Hazard said, sliding the first loose page toward him; Somers spotted the phrase in the middle of the page, part of a long, run-on fantasy about escaping to Trinidad and Tobago. From what Somers could judge through the plastic, the paper didn’t feel thin. It was printed with unicorns and rainbows, and in spite of his best efforts not to leap to conclusions, he couldn’t match the diary up with anyone else except Courtney.

  “And this: ‘He thinks we have to worry about money, but I have all we need. That dumb bunny didn’t even want the money. I told her she’d earned it, after everything he put her through, but she doesn’t want it. Why shouldn’t somebody get to enjoy it? Why shouldn’t it be me, after everything I’ve been through?’”

  “Let me see,” Somers said.

  Hazard passed him the page and looked at the next one. He was making a low, considering noise in his throat, and then he began reading again, “’Every time I turn around, that dumb bunny is back. She won’t just let us alone. She won’t let us be happy. I wish I could make her go away forever.’ Sweet Jesus. She must have owned a thesaurus. How many ways can she explain that she wants to be ‘the enveloping heat for his turgid ma
nliness’?”

  “Engorged lance,” Norman said.

  “Swelling member,” Gross said.

  Somers glanced up at them as he took the page from Hazard.

  “What?” Norman said.

  “We can like books too,” Gross said. “It’s not just you and Hazard.”

  Somers honestly didn’t know what was more upsetting right then: Norman and Gross as romance aficionados, or having to hear those phrases out of their mouths.

  “Go check at the Vegas, will you?” Somers said. “See if Courtney’s home. I want to talk to her.”

  “Yes, sir, your majesty.”

  “Right away, sire.”

  Hazard was holding out the last loose page, obviously finished reading it. Somers accepted it, scanned it, and then re-read the last few lines. “I know how to do it,” he quoted from the page. “I know how to make her never come back.” He laid the page down. “God, that’s a little unsettling.”

  “It’s a little convenient. Even the pages that fell out seem convenient.”

  “You think we were meant to find the diary.”

  Hazard snorted. “That part’s obvious. You figured it out too, or you wouldn’t have pointed out all the other ways to get rid of it. Someone thinks we’re stupid. They’re trying to point us at Daniel or Courtney. Or both.”

  “Maybe,” Somers said. “The money, if that part’s true, that’s a real motive.”

  Hazard grimaced.

  “Right?” Somers asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Hazard raked back his long, dark hair. “Courtney’s lying about work. She’s not employed, although she claims she is. And she’s got expensive tastes.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. This part about the money, where Donna May got it—a divorce?”

  “Maybe. Or a settlement or judgment. Did she ever bring a civil suit against the police department? From what I remember, she probably had reason.”

  Somers shrugged. “If she did, I never heard about it. I guess we’ll have to do some digging. If this stuff isn’t all some kind of trick, then the important thing is that somehow, Donna May got a chunk of money and didn’t want anything to do with it. Courtney, who obviously sees herself cut out for greater things, decided to help her with that problem.”