Wayward

by Gregory Ashe

  “Muffin,” his mother said, “are you hungry?”

  “What? God, Mom. You watched me eat that sandwich.”

  “I know, but you’re so skinny.” She squeezed Somers’s arm; he was on the floor now, helping Evie color in the outline of Snow White. “John-Henry, he’s skin and bones. Is he eating right at home? Sometimes he gets so focused on work that he doesn’t take care of himself.”

  Somers glanced up; at first glance, his face was studious concern, but Hazard had known the man long enough to spot the grin hiding behind his eyes. “Trust me: we’ve talked about his weight before.”

  “Well, I think maybe you should try some of those protein shakes. Don’t you think so? He could drink one before work every day, and then he could have one at lunch. We bought some for Frank, and he didn’t like the flavor, but I think you could add a banana and it would taste pretty good.”

  “Definitely,” Somers said.

  “Stop it,” Hazard said, dropping back into his seat and trying to think again.

  “Last week,” Somers said, “I made brownies, and he wouldn’t even touch them. I mean, I understand eating healthy, but I want him to have a treat now and then.”

  Hazard tried not to. “That’s because you put walnuts in them, John.”

  “Oh, don’t get me started on this boy’s picky eating,” his mother said. “I used to keep a list of meals he’d eat: crunchy grilled cheese, yes; anything with cream of mushroom soup, no.” She laughed as she sat down next to Evie. “Isn’t that beautiful, sweetheart? Bunny, come look at what this brilliant little girl did.”

  “What is crunchy grilled cheese?” Somers asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Hazard snapped.

  “Bunny, you should come see this.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Mom, I’ve got a refrigerator covered in them. I don’t need to see it.”

  “Does it have something crunchy inside it?” Somers asked. “Or is it crunchy on the outside? Does it have crunchy peanut butter?”

  “Well, I think it’s lovely to see how good she is at coloring,” Hazard’s mom said. “I just thought you’d like to see it too.”

  “Is the cheese crunchy somehow?” Somers said. “Is it the bread?”

  “I know what you’re doing,” Hazard said, pointing a finger at Somers. “Knock it off.”

  “Don’t listen to him, dear,” Aileen said, squeezing Somers’s arm again. “He’s always grumpy when he’s peckish.” She took her purse from the chair and fumbled through it. “I’ve got half a Luna bar in here.”

  Whatever train of thought Hazard had been trying to catch, it had now officially left the station without him. He swallowed a scream, opened his mouth, and was about to say something—he wasn’t sure what, but he knew it had to do with half a Luna bar—but his father spoke first.

  “Jumping Jesus, can’t a man die in peace around here?”

  The words were muzzy, and Frank’s eyes didn’t open.

  “Sorry, dear,” Aileen said. “It’s Emery’s tummy.”

  Somers was very carefully covering his mouth.

  “Did you leave the TV on?” Frank asked in that same thick voice.

  Hazard’s mom rolled her eyes at Somers. “Of course, dear. I put it on the news before I left.”

  Frank grumbled something and shifted in bed, and then he seemed to fall back asleep.

  “Now,” Hazard’s mother said, setting aside her purse. “John-Henry, I want to hear all about what you’ve been doing with that new house. Muffin sent me some pictures, but from what I understand, you’re the one doing all the work. First, I want to know how you did that beadboard in the dining room. It looks so good.”

  Somers started talking, and Hazard saw another opening to get back to thinking. He tried running through it all again, but he kept coming up against the same dead end: where had Donna May gone after parking her car and flashing her lights at Mr. Warner? He took out the picture that Courtney had given him; the paper was starting to get furry at the edges, the layers splitting from wear and tear. He studied the people in the photograph: the two men, three women. Daniel and Josh were different in coloring and build and style, but he wondered if they could be mistaken for each other. In the dark. From a distance. Maybe.

  His attention kept coming back to the three women: Donna May, Courtney, and Melissa. He remembered his initial impression, that the three women could have been sisters. He revised that thought now: sisters in a Greek tragedy, maybe. Or in a farce, a comedy, where they’re juggling the men and trying to match the right guy with the right girl. They’d certainly done enough bed hopping between them. Was that what Hazard was missing? Donna May had slept with Josh and Daniel; Courtney had slept with Josh and Daniel; Josh had slept with Donna May, Courtney, and Melissa. Hazard rubbed a spot between his eyebrows. Was he missing another relationship? Was he being heteronormative? Melissa and Donna May? Or Melissa and Courtney? Josh and Daniel? He felt the ghost of a grin; poor Mr. Warner would have an aneurysm at the mere possibility.

  He studied Donna May in the picture more closely. She looked happy. He knew, now, that wasn’t the truth; she had been cheating on Josh, she had been jealous of any attention he received, she had caused endless problems for her sister and parents. But for an instant, she looked happy. That was the magic of photographs; you saw something for an instant, and you assumed you knew the whole story. He studied her clothes, the white blouse and the jeans. Not exactly Whore-of-Babylon attire—wasn’t that pretty much how Mr. Warner had described her? For Hazard’s money—if, hypothetically, he were to engage in any sort of body shaming—Courtney was the one in whorish attire: a short skirt in spite of the February cold, a halter top with a plunging neckline, the thick sediment of makeup settled across her face. Melissa wasn’t out of the running either in a cocktail dress that rode up to expose long thighs.

  Hazard’s father flopped over in bed and said, in a too-loud voice, “What about Molly?”

  This question, coming out of nowhere, made Hazard wonder if this was it. But his mother just said, “She’ll stop by tonight, of course.” Some of Hazard’s confusion must have showed on his face because she said, “Molly’s our neighbor, bunny. She stops by at night. You know how your father is.”

  “Do you have a dog or a cat?” Somers asked.

  “No,” Aileen said. “But Frank is very thoughtful about home security. He likes to leave the TV on when we’re gone for a while so that, if somebody looks in the window, they think we’re home. Could she have a little hard candy? I’ve got some mints in my purse.”

  “Sure,” Somers said. “So Molly goes over to turn the TV off?”

  Unwrapping the mint, Hazard’s mother held it out for Evie and crowed with delight when Evie took it. “She’s so precious. And beautiful, too. No, Molly just makes herself a bowl of popcorn and watches her shows in the front room. She’s been doing it since I started staying nights with Frank. She doesn’t even look anything like me, but I suppose if a burglar wandered by, he wouldn’t know that.”

  Hazard sat upright in the chair.

  “Ree?” Somers said.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh my God.” He lurched out of the chair, barely even feeling the lingering aches from sleeping on the floor. “John, we’ve got to go back. I know how they did it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  MARCH 30

  SATURDAY

  1:44 PM

  SOMERS PARKED THE MUSTANG in front of Josh Dobbs’s house. He looked at Hazard, and Hazard said, “It’s going to work.

  Somers didn’t answer, but he sure as hell hoped so. No matter how Somers had argued, Hazard had insisted on going with him. And Frank had insisted that Hazard should go. And Aileen had insisted. And Somers, faced with three members of the Hazard clan, finally threw in the towel and agreed. They drove back to Wahredua, left Evie with Noah and Rebeca, and then went to the station.

  They�
�d had to work hard to convince the county prosecutor and Chief Cravens to go along with the plan, and then they’d had to depose Mr. Warner and Melissa’s neighbor Gladys to make sure all the pieces were in place. No matter how many times Somers called, Dulac hadn’t answered, so he was doing this with Hazard and with backup from Carmichael and Moraes. Now came the tricky part.

  When they knocked on the front door, Robert Dobbs, Josh’s dad, answered the door. He was a big athlete gone to seed, and his face was flushed, which might have had something to do with the beer on his breath.

  “Mr. Dobbs, we have a warrant to arrest your son,” Somers said.

  “What?” Dobbs pushed into the doorway. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Step outside, Mr. Dobbs. Please ask your wife to step outside too.”

  “Now hold on just one fucking minute. Josh isn’t home, and I sure as hell—”

  “You can call your lawyer, and I’m sure you’ll want to. But right now, I need you to step outside of the house while we look for Josh. Otherwise,” Somers glanced over his shoulder at Moraes and Carmichael, who were leaning against their unmarked car, “we’ll take you in for interfering with an arrest.”

  Dobbs screamed and bellowed and went on and on for a few minutes.

  “Ok,” Somers called to Carmichael, “I guess we’ll do this the hard way.”

  Dobbs stopped screaming pretty fast, and he and his wife and Dolly made a small group on the lawn while Somers and Hazard moved into the house.

  The search was quick and efficient. Josh wasn’t home.

  “Cars are in the garage,” Hazard said. “The one I’ve seen him driving, and two more.”

  They went outside. “Mr. Dobbs, do you own any other vehicles?”

  “I’m not saying anything until we hear from our lawyer.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Robert,” Mrs. Dobbs said. “No, Detective, we don’t have any other cars.”

  “Do you have any idea where Josh might have gone?”

  “Well—”

  “No,” Dobbs said, and when his wife opened her mouth again, he gripped her shoulder. “No. We don’t have any idea.”

  “Let me press him,” Hazard said in a low voice.

  Somers shook his head. “They’re litigious, and I don’t want you getting caught up in this. Besides, we know where he went.” To the Dobbs, he said, “I think you should call your attorney; we’re going to keep looking for Josh.” He issued the standard warning about being an accessory after the fact, making immediate contact if they heard from Josh, and the rest. He knew he was wasting his breath.

  When Somers and Hazard got back into the Mustang, Somers said, “We can still call it off.”

  Hazard shook his head.

  “It won’t work without Josh.”

  “As you said, we know where he is.”

  Somers shifted the Mustang into drive. “I feel a lot less confident when I hear you say it.”

  Hazard had one of those tiny Emery Hazard smiles.

  They drove the half mile to Melissa’s house. Somers guided the Mustang around the back of the house, parked, and they went up to the door and knocked.

  When Melissa answered, Somers saw the shift in her face. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on, nothing as dramatic as a twitching eyebrow or an involuntary spasm. But he knew people, and he spotted the moment when she knew that they knew.

  “Ms. Hall,” Somers said, “you’re under arrest.” He warned her of her rights and then said, “Where’s Josh?”

  “This is a very big mistake, Detective.”

  “Do you know where Joshua Dobbs is?”

  She shook her head and said, “I’d like my lawyer, please.”

  They placed her in the car with Carmichael and Moraes.

  No shootout. No wild struggle. Not even a shout or a protest.

  “So where the hell is Josh?” Somers muttered as they went back into the house.

  “He’s here,” Hazard said. “It’s the only place he could be. He didn’t take a car, so it had to be somewhere he could walk. He might have gone to Daniel’s, but Daniel is in the wind. He’s here. We just have to find him.”

  They searched the house, and, just as it had been at the Dobbs’ house, it was brutally short and disappointing. They stood together in the rear entryway, surrounded by ferns and houseplants and tchotchkes and busts. Somers turned his back on a sculpture that was staring at him from among the fronds, and he found a ceramic mask studying him from the wall.

  “Christ, this place is creepy. Who wants this experience when they’re visiting their therapist?”

  “It’s intentional,” Hazard said. “This space is purposefully discomfiting so that when they move into her office, they feel relaxed and relieved.”

  “It’s like they’re watching me.”

  “I thought of that too,” Hazard said. “Maybe that’s her little joke. She’s a kind of observer, isn’t she?”

  Somers shrugged. “I still don’t get it. If this is a waiting area, I wouldn’t want to wait around in it.”

  “No, I don’t think she keeps people waiting here. That would compromise client confidentiality. They’d pass each other, coming and going. She probably times the appointments very carefully so clients don’t see each other.”

  But Somers barely heard him. His gut was telling him something, and he was trying to figure out what it was. Hazard was right; this space had been designed purposefully. No other area in the house looked like it, and it didn’t complement the aesthetic that Melissa had cultivated. And Hazard was probably right about the juxtaposition of the soothingly neutral office and the claustrophobic watchfulness of this space. But there was something else too. Something about the desire to get the hell out of here. Why had she done this here?

  Somers pushed his way through the fronds. His toe caught a decorative lantern, and it clanged as it fell over. On his next step, a statue’s bronze spear poked him in the ribs. Then he had to bat some sort of hanging textile that was intended to look like a face out of his way.

  “This is interesting,” Hazard said.

  Somers gave him the finger.

  When he got to the end of the entryway, he pushed aside two potted ferns.

  “There’s a crawlspace under the stairs,” he announced.

  “I figured.”

  Somers stared at him until Hazard turned slightly pink.

  “It was a possibility,” Hazard muttered.

  Somers kept staring.

  “Uh,” Hazard said. “Good catch.”

  “Thank you.” Kneeling, Somers worked the crawlspace cover loose; it was designed to be discreet, but it wasn’t hidden. The plants and statues and faces, those had been the real element of cover. When the panel slid loose, Somers let out a breath.

  “You’d better call an ambulance.”

  Hazard was on his phone immediately, and Somers leaned into the space and tried to determine if Josh was still alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  MARCH 30

  SATURDAY

  6:08 PM

  AT THE DOOR TO JOSH’S hospital room, Somers traded nods with Janie Carlson, the uniformed officer on duty. Then he jerked his thumb at Hazard.

  “Any problem if he goes in with me?”

  “He’s a consultant on the case,” Carlson said with a shrug. “That’s good enough for you?”

  Somers nodded.

  “Then it’s good enough for me.”

  They moved into Josh’s room; a single row of recessed lighting above the bed provided illumination, but it was faint, and most of the space was lost in shadow. The room was a little too cold, a little too quiet, even with the TV and Josh’s soft breathing. It smelled like the perfume in a commercial cleaning product, sweet and stinging. Josh’s eyes were half open, staring at a TV in the corner that was playing an episode of Family Matters. Urkel had gotten himself into some kind of pickle, and he was doing the Urkel, his pate
nted dance, to get out of it. Josh chuckled, the sound deep in his throat and almost lost. Gensler sat next to him, and the big woman looked a little less put together after the long hours.

  “Oh,” Josh said muzzily. “Hey.”

  “I think it’s ridiculous you insisted on this meeting, Detective,” Gensler said. “My client is not thinking clearly, and everyone is exhausted. We wouldn’t be here if Mr. Dobbs weren’t an upstanding citizen trying his utmost to—”

  “Josh,” Somers said, pulling out one of the chairs to sit next to the bed. “How are you?”

  “Ok.” He worked his mouth drily. “She got me with something good, huh?”

  “Some sort of opioid,” Somers said. “The doctors found an injection site. They think it was heroin.”

  “How’d she get heroin?”

  “That was one of the things we were going to ask you.”

  “You don’t have to—” Gensler began.

  “Dunno.” Josh blinked, his eyes looking heavy. “Client, maybe.”

  “Do you remember what happened?” Somers asked.

  He shook his head.

  “We found you in a crawlspace under the stairs. She drugged you and she left you to die, Josh. If we hadn’t shown up to arrest her, if we hadn’t been looking for you too, you’d be dead right now. You’re only alive because Mr. Hazard called an ambulance.”

  “Technically,” Hazard said, “he’s only alive because of naloxone.”

  “Oh,” Josh said, his head rolling on the pillow until he was looking at Hazard. “Thanks, man.”

  Somers waited for something else, but all Hazard said was, “You’re welcome.”

  “Josh, we know that you helped Melissa. Why did she try to kill you? Did you fight? Were you going to tell us the truth?”