“What possible motive could Lyle have had to hurt Colby, though?”
I had no idea. “A lot of other people were mad at Colby, too.”
“Like who?”
Like my father.
“Like Chief Turner. Where are we up to — seven?” I said, wiggling my fingers.
“Six.”
“Colby wrote a letter to The Bugle complaining about police incompetence in the fight against drugs — that would have angered Chief Turner.”
“The cops are always being criticized in the media, but we don’t go out and assault and murder the critics.”
“You said he dragged his heels on the investigation; maybe that was deliberate? I remember that when we were all searching for Colby, Turner didn’t even want to search the pond.” I thought of something. “Neither did the Beaumont brothers!” Or, I realized with a sinking stomach, my father.
“But based on the lack of reports about Frank Turner busting out of his nursing home and racing his wheelchair down Main Street to the gallery last night, I’m hazarding a guess that he didn’t steal the phone.”
“Sarcasm isn’t a good look on you, Chief.”
“I ought to lock you up for obstruction of justice.”
“Please don’t. Orange overalls wouldn’t be a good look on me.”
His lips twitched, and I hurried on, “Pete Dillon hated Colby because everyone knew Judy preferred Colby to him. And maybe Judy was still pissed off about being dumped.” I waggled all my fingers.
“Enough to kill him all those months later? C’mon, get real.”
Listening to him say it loud, I couldn’t deny that it was far-fetched. The thing was, I was getting increasingly accustomed to far-fetched.
37
NOW
Thursday December 21, 2017
“Where did you get the phone in the first place?” Ryan demanded, and then listened without interrupting as I explained who’d had it all these years and why. When I finished, he folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Losing the phone — that’s a real blow to the investigation, Garnet. You should have turned it in as soon as you found it.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” I dug the edge of a nail into the cuticles of the other hand, circling the arcs of the nail beds, tugging back the cuticles, avoiding his accusing gaze. “Don’t you have a log of the calls from back then, though?”
“Sure, but there might have been more information on the phone.”
I didn’t need to look up to know that he was scrutinizing me, suspecting that I already knew what that information might have been.
“But, you’d have records of that, too, right?” I asked.
“No. It took Turner several days to get his ass into gear and apply for a search warrant to get the information from Colby’s cellular provider. He had difficulty keeping things organized, and he used to procrastinate. At the time, I thought he was just sloppy. Later I realized he’d been showing early signs of Alzheimer’s. Anyway, by the time we received it, all we could get was call logs and metadata — the numbers, dates, times and lengths of incoming and outgoing calls. The details about voicemails, but not the actual recordings.”
Crap. Like Cassie, I’d thought they would have retrieved all of that information in the initial investigation.
“We followed up on all of the numbers at the time. That was my job.”
“Find anything?”
“Nothing suspicious. Most of the calls were to and from 802 numbers — friends and family.”
“And the others?”
Ryan opened a worn folder lying on his desk and sifted through the papers inside until he found the records he was looking for. He scanned the list, refreshing his memory. “There were a few we never figured out.” He flicked a finger at one of the numbers printed on the page. “This one, for example — outgoing, made on December twelfth.”
I sat up straight, buoyed by relief and hope. Maybe some information could still be salvaged. “Who was the call made to?”
“That was the puzzling part. Any idea why Colby would want to call the FBI?”
“As in the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”
Ryan nodded. “It was to the main switchboard number, and he was put on hold for” — he glanced at the log — “two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. But we never knew who he wanted to speak to, or why.”
“I have a pretty good guess,” I said, my excitement extinguishing as quickly as it had kindled. “He wanted a career in law enforcement, but his family thought that wasn’t good enough.” Realizing I was talking to a cop, I puffed out a breath of air in a go-figure sort of way. “He probably called the FBI to find out about possible careers. It was one of the sites in his phone’s search history, too, along with colleges offering degrees in law enforcement.”
“Anything else in his search history?”
I told him about the homework sites, the visits to the Town Clerk website and searches on different kinds of drugs. “Oh, and he’d looked up the meaning of a word — hypo-something.”
Ryan gave me a look.
“It was a very long word, okay? And I wasn’t expecting the phone to be stolen before I could note all the details.”
“Which it wouldn’t have been if you’d—”
“Yeah, yeah. I plead guilty. Were there any other interesting calls in his log?”
“This one was made the day before he disappeared. I remember Turner got real excited about it — figured it was evidence that Colby was a troubled youth. Maybe that he had some psychiatric problems.”
“Who did the number belong to?”
“A crisis counseling hotline.”
I didn’t need the word that popped into my mind — pregnancy — to know why Colby had called that number.
“That was probably for me. I had a pregnancy scare.”
“You told him?”
“I think he guessed.”
“Hmmm.” Ryan glanced back down at his list. “This one puzzled me. Also outgoing, to the department of Material Science and Engineering at MIT.”
“Why would he have called them?”
“Good question. When I followed up, I found Colby didn’t get through to the person he wanted to speak to, a Professor Harriet Linden. So, he left a message with the departmental secretary for her to return his call. Unfortunately, by the time she got around to doing so, Colby was … gone.”
I swallowed. “And she didn’t know what it was about?”
“Nope, said she’d never spoken to him in her life. So that was a dead end. The rest of the calls were nothing unusual.”
“What about that long call to his uncle, the one on that last morning?”
Ryan consulted his notes. “He said it was to organize their dinner arrangement that night. That there was some to-ing and fro-ing on where they’d go and if they needed to make a reservation. And—”
“For twenty minutes?”
“And that they’d discussed Colby’s future plans. The deadlines for college applications were approaching, and he wanted to give Colby guidance on his career choices.”
“Guidance, hah! Wanted to choose for him, more likely. And what about the text messages on the phone?”
“I don’t know what those are, Garnet, because I don’t have the phone,” he pointed out, sounding irritated all over again.
“No, I mean, what did you find in the information you got from the service provider?”
“Sweet diddly squat. By the time the search documentation was submitted, that information had already been wiped. In 2007, unless you were a terror suspect on the NSA’s watch list, that information wasn’t stored for long — the metadata about texts was only retained for about a week, and the actual content of the texts, the message itself, for only three to five days.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve really screwed this up.”
“No argument from me,” Ryan said. “So, if you saw something on that phone yesterday — and I’m thinking you did, and that’s why you were ask
ing about everyone’s cell numbers at the gallery last night — you really need to tell me. Now.”
“Okay. Just bear in mind that when I got it, the battery was stone-dead. As soon as I could switch it on, I did, but the power didn’t last long before it died again. And the phone wasn’t connected to any service. What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t see much.”
Ryan leaned forward, bracing his folded arms on his desk, drumming the fingers of one hand on the wood.
“Okay, there was a text message — incoming, sent the day before Colby disappeared, from a Vermont number. No name.”
“You didn’t recognize it?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything, you know? Even then, the only number I knew by heart was my own. And Colby’s.”
“What did the text say?”
“I can’t remember the exact words, but the sender wanted to talk to Colby privately, and suggested they meet at ten o’clock the next night, at the bandstand by Plover Pond.”
Ryan’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Yeah,” I said. “He was meeting someone. That’s why he was there. That’s why he was late coming to see me — only he couldn’t let me know because by then, Cassie had his phone.”
“That works,” Ryan said. “And no signature?”
“It was signed with a ‘J’.”
“‘J’ …” Ryan said, and I could practically see the wheels in his head turning. “Like Jessica, and Judy?”
“And James Armstrong. Though I don’t know if he would have signed off with a J. I mean, we all called him Blunt, but I have no idea how he thought of himself.”
“Hmmm.” Ryan looked up at the ceiling, thinking for a few moments, and then shot me a glance I couldn’t read. “Or I suppose it could stand for John.”
“John?”
“Your father’s second name.”
“In case you can’t tell, this” — I circled my face with a finger — “is my rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-my-ass-off face.”
“Some people call him RJ.”
“But no one calls him J.” I narrowed my eyes. “It’s much more likely to stand for Jackson,” I said tartly.
He merely laughed. “You think I’m a suspect in Colby’s death now? Man, you don’t trust anyone, do you? Tell me, how’s that working for you?”
“I just want to know who killed Colby. Who the J is who sent him that message.”
“Has it occurred to you that the ‘J’” — he sketched quotation marks in the air — “could just be an emoticon?”
“Huh? You’ve lost me.”
“Don’t you remember how, back then, you’d type a smiley face, and it would appear as a J? Sometimes you’d get emails, or documents from other machines, and they wouldn’t render correctly — the colon-parenthesis smile emoticons would show as J’s.”
I actually did remember that. At the time, I’d used Outlook as my email service, and it drove me crazy when it auto-converted my smiley faces to J’s.
“But … did that happen on phones, too?” My voice sounded plaintive even to my own ears; I could feel my grand theories slipping away.
“Yeah, I think so.”
Ryan’s phone rang then, and with a glance at the display, he indicated that he needed to take it. A moment later, the chief’s office faded from my vision, replaced by Doc Armstrong’s room at the nursing home.
“It’s too late, there’s no point in it now. Hell, there was no point when we first spoke about this all those years ago.”
“There was always a point. I was just too cowardly to make it public.” The lettering on the pen in my hands blurs as tears fill my eyes.
“Yes, well, in case you were planning on making any deathbed confessions, just know that I’ll still bring the sword down on your son. I’ve got hard evidence, you hear? Footage! And this time they’ll throw the book at him — he’ll never see the outside of a prison again. It won’t make any difference to me that you’re not here to see it.”
The door slams. The room is empty. I sigh.
“But perhaps it will make a difference to me.”
Vision shimmering, I blinked myself back into the present. Ryan was still on the phone — talking, by the sound of it, to someone about a car accident outside of town. With his back to me, he traced a red line on the route map hung behind his desk.
“How bad is it?” he asked the person on the other end of the call.
I was glad for the moment to recover my senses. What I’d just seen hadn’t been a flashback of Colby’s, but the pen in the vision had been his. It was the one I’d found in the box. The hands holding it had been old, and the voice belonging to them had been Doc Armstrong’s. I searched my handbag, but the pen was missing. I’d used it when I visited him yesterday and must have left it behind.
For the first time, I’d received a vision of something Colby was not a participant in, or a witness to. It might not even have been a flashback. I might just have seen something that was happening right now, in the present. The thought came before I could stop it: had the pen somehow been a bridge for Colby to observe that encounter, and transmit it to me?
Crazy. I was losing more of my mind by the day.
All the same, I grabbed my notebook and a pen from Ryan’s desk and quickly wrote down everything I could remember from the conversation, cursing the doc for having stared at the pen instead of at the person speaking to him. Whose voice had that been? It was male and had sounded familiar. But now, with the sights and sounds disappearing like the fading remnants of a dream on waking, I couldn’t say for sure who it belonged to. They’d been talking about Blunt — must have been. Some man had been threatening Blunt so as to compel Doc Armstrong not to blab a secret he’d been keeping for years. What was it?
As soon as Ryan ended his call, I said, “I’ve got to go now. I need to go see Doc Armstrong.”
“That’ll have to wait,” he said. “I’m afraid your parents have had an accident.”
38
NOW
Thursday December 21, 2017
I didn’t faint, or reel from the shock. Instead, my first reaction was a stupidly superstitious thought: I did this. By thinking bad things about my parents, I caused a bad thing to happen to them.
“Wait!” The alarmed expression on Ryan’s face told me that my own face must’ve registered serious shock. “They’re not hurt, or at least not seriously. But their car is stuck in a ditch and needs to be towed out to the repair shop.”
I blew out a long breath. “Oh, good. That they’re safe, I mean.”
“Do you need me to go get them?”
“I’ll do it. Where are they?”
“On the access road to the Johnson farm. Do you know it?”
“Sure, I used to help my father with deliveries there back in the day. What were they doing out there?”
Ryan held up his hands in a search-me gesture. “You’ll have to ask them that.”
When I arrived at the scene of the accident, my mother and father were keeping warm, waiting inside the cab of old Mr. Johnson’s pickup. Their Ford sedan was indeed resting nose-down in the gulley beside the road.
“Are you okay?” I asked as I opened the pickup door.
“I am,” said my mother, “but your poor father got hit on the pecker.”
“Shit!” I craned across her to see him.
“She means beak,” Dad said, pointing to a small cut on the bridge of his nose. “I banged it on the car door when I climbed out.”
“Is it broken?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Did either of you bang your heads?” I asked. One McGee with a malfunctioning brain was more than enough.
“The air pillows burst open, so we’re both safe and sound,” my mother said. “Though I would like to get home and have a warm bath and something hot to drink, because my goodness but it's cold enough to freeze the brass off a bald monkey!”
Dad and I exchanged smiles, then I helped them into my car — Mom in the front seat because
of her cast — and thanked Mr. Johnson for his help. I’d driven just a few yards when a thought occurred.
“Did you get everything you might need out of the car? Leave any valuables behind?”
“My crutches!” my mother said. “They’re in the trunk.”
“And my emergency kit — it’s in the trunk, too. I would hate for anyone to help themselves to that,” my father said.
I braked, backed up, and braved the cold again. I transferred the crutches from the trunk of their car to mine and returned to get the large red box with a white first aid cross stamped on the top. It was big enough to hold the contents of an entire emergency room and surprisingly heavy. A hook of something — curiosity or misgiving — tugged at me.
As I put the box in my car’s trunk, I removed the lid and for the second time in two days found myself examining the contents of one of my father’s storage boxes. A quick inspection confirmed that this one, too, had duct tape, cable ties, rubber gloves, rope, a box-cutter and a heavy flashlight, but also two bottles of water, a small fire extinguisher, a first aid kit, ice-scraper, rain poncho, several protein bars, a camo-patterned foldable shovel, and a tiny folded space blanket purchased, if I remembered right, from the gift shop at the National Air and Space Museum in DC, when the three of us had visited it at least twenty years ago.
As soon as we were headed back to town, I asked my parents about their accident. Between defensive-sounding explanations from my father and confused asides from my mother, who seemed inclined to blame the incident on Mars being “in retrograde” rather than on icy roads, I gathered that my father had overcorrected on a slide and executed a slow-motion plunge over the edge of the road.
Heart sinking a little, I realized this was probably a preview of forthcoming attractions. As my parents got older, there would be more accidents and illnesses, and I wouldn’t be able to take care of them remotely if based in Boston. Whatever I decided about my studies, I did not want to return to living in Pitchford. For now, they were still okay to live independently, but it was something I’d have to consider for the future.
The First Time I Died Page 24