But the gold butt-end in the grass is as undeniable as Cole’s indifference as he drifts back toward the house. He mounts the stairs and pushes past me, his eyes daring me to say something. I don’t give him the satisfaction.
“So, what now?” I ask Sawyer, once Cole retreats into the kitchen. “I can’t just stand here and do nothing. I have to talk to Sharpe. If he won’t take my beer-can DNA, then—”
My phone buzzes in my pocket, electrifying my blood. “Restricted,” I say, reading the screen. Sawyer raises his eyebrows. Cole races back to the entryway. Even Gus’s ears perk.
“Hello.” Dread sloshes like swamp water in my stomach.
“Hi, Mollie. It’s Officer McGinnis. I wanted to follow up on that message you left for me on Thursday. About Boyd Blackburn. Is this a good time?”
I give the irony what it deserves. A derisive bark. “As good as any.”
“Well, you were right. Blackburn’s rap sheet is clean as a whistle. Not even a speeding ticket.”
Swamp water receding, I let out a breath. “Alright. I guess that’s a relief. Anyway, I really appreciate you—”
“Hold up a sec. There was something.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Cole waves his hand at me: “Put it on speaker.” I figure I owe him that much just for showing up here, so I tap the button and Officer McGinnis’s voice fills the room.
“Back in 2015, patrol picked up a Boyd Blackburn prowling in a backyard over in Cuttings Wharf. Apparently, a girl heard him rustling around outside her window. Her parents weren’t home, and she got scared and called the police. They took him in for questioning.”
“Like a Peeping Tom?” I ask, reconsidering everything again.
“That’s what they suspected, but they cut him loose. I guess his story checked out.”
“His story?”
Officer McGinnis laughs dryly. “Yeah. Of all things, he said he’d lost his snake. I mean, you can’t make this shit up.”
“And they believed him?”
“Seems like it. I checked with one of the cops, asked if he’d remembered the name Boyd Blackburn. He said the guy gave him the heebie-jeebies. They’d had a slew of prowler reports in the neighborhood that summer. They had him figured for the guy.”
“So why didn’t they arrest him?”
“Simple. They found the snake in the yard, coiled up under a bush. His mom confirmed his story. The girl couldn’t identify him. She’d only seen a shadow. So no probable cause to make an arrest.”
Cole’s eyes are on me, the questions behind them poised like darts aimed at a bullseye.
“But if you wanted to know whether this guy could’ve posed a threat to your daughter, I’d say hell yes. Not to mention, he was what, thirty at the time? What would he want with a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old?”
Cole’s nostrils flare. I half-expect him to throw something, to punch the wall. To find Boyd and strangle him with a Star Wars T-shirt. What I don’t expect is the unbearable silence that comes when I hang up the phone. I bear it anyway, because I need time to think. And thinking too hard hurts.
Cole paces to the kitchen and back again. His footfalls come and go, come and go. Then, he clears his throat. “Grant, could you give us a minute?”
I want to cling to Sawyer, to beg him not to leave me alone. Because that’s how I feel with Cole. How I’d felt that whole summer before Dakota disappeared. Alone. But I nod at him instead.
The front door yawns open and Sawyer steps out onto the porch. I wait for Cole to ask his questions, to make his demands—Who is Boyd? And why didn’t you tell me about him? I have a right to know these things—to say all that, with a sprinkling of expletives.
He collapses onto the sofa, drops his head back, and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they’re brimming with sadness. It shocks me. Mainly because I’d waited so long to see it. He’d hardly ever cried, not even at her funeral.
“Come sit,” he says.
I take the place across from Cole, in the oversized leather chair he’d always loved. Its color, an exact match for my office sofa. No wonder I’d hated the damn thing. He looks at me like I’m brand new to him, which I suppose I am, and rubs the hollow of his throat. A place I’m sure I’d kissed once upon a time. Another time, another Mollie. “You stopped wearing the necklace,” he says, softly.
I know what he means, but my hand goes to my breastbone anyway and comes back empty. Once, a sterling silver heart hung there, MOM engraved at its center. Cole and Dakota had presented it to me in a Tiffany blue box on the last Mother’s Day I remember. All the others since, I’d drunk straight through.
“I had to. It was too hard. People would notice it and ask me about it. I’d have to go through the whole tragic story. Or lie.” I don’t tell him I’d done both. That the lies came easier than the truth.
“You could’ve told me, Mol.”
“Told you what?”
“That you were still struggling.”
“And listen to you rub it in? No, thank you. You said yourself I need to let her go. To move on. To bounce back like you. Cole, the amazing rubber ball. Besides, I’m not your problem anymore.”
“Is that what you think? That I bounced back?”
I give a halfhearted shrug, ignoring the undeniable. The tears on his cheeks. The pain in his voice. Now that he’s here in front of me, it’s obvious this fish is not as free as I thought, and it unnerves me.
“I couldn’t be here. In this house. In this town. Sleeping in a bedroom just down the hall from hers. I didn’t bounce back. I ran away. I thought you, of all people, knew that. Hell, I’m a cancer doctor who smokes. What does that say?”
When I don’t answer, he does it for me. “It says I’m messed up. I’m a wreck. And I want to know who killed our girl as bad as you do.”
“What about Joanna? Is she still puffin’ on the ole cancer sticks?”
I haven’t said her name out loud in so long it sounds strange. Like a made-up word. But it still has the same bitter sound, the same cruel meaning: utter betrayal. Cole wipes his cheeks with the back of his hand.
“You didn’t think I’d figure it out?” What I don’t tell him: He’d paid for the information himself. Two thousand dollars of his alimony to the chief nurse at Napa Children’s, a small price to pay to keep tabs on Joanna Montgomery. She’d told me when the Montgomerys finalized their divorce; when Joanna moved into an apartment downtown, leaving Hannah with her dad; and when she’d given her two weeks’ notice this spring and made a solo pilgrimage to the land of coffee and grunge rock. Rainy days and my ex-husband.
“We’re not . . . we’re just . . . we didn’t plan it.”
“So she just happened to get a nursing job in Seattle?”
“We only reconnected a few months ago, I swear. I really wanted to put things back together with us. It was just too broken, Mol. We were unfixable.”
I can’t argue with that, but it’s never stopped me before. “And what she did? That’s fixable? She must be a helluva handywoman. What does Little Miss Bob Vila think about you coming back here now?”
“This is not about you and me. It’s about Dakota. She knows that. I’ll always be Dakota’s dad.” His voice softening, Cole gestures to the window. It frames Sawyer’s back, his broad shoulders, as he sits on the front step, patiently waiting. “It looks like you’ve moved on too. Seems like a nice guy.”
“He is. Very nice. But don’t pretend it’s the same thing.”
“C’mon. Let’s not do this again.”
“How can you trust her? After—”
The honk of a horn blasts me to a stop. I’m grateful to see Detective Sharpe waving at Sawyer from the driver’s seat. I let my question die. Because I’m just doing this mindless dance we do. I don’t really care about the answer. Cole’s a sadder sack than I am. But he’s not my sad sack anymo
re. Thank God for that.
I stand up and head for the door, newly determined. When Cole calls after me to issue his predictable diatribe, I smile a little to myself.
“We’re not done here, Mol. Who is Boyd fucking Blackburn? Why didn’t you tell me about him? I have a goddamned right to know these things.”
****
Detective Sharpe has one heck of a poker face. He doesn’t even blink when Cole walks out behind me and positions himself alongside Sawyer. Just shakes his hand and says it’s good to see him again. He takes my whole story down, repeating the same monotone lines—Okay. And then what happened?—until it’s all out, immortalized in ink on the notepad he slips into his jacket pocket.
“What’s next?” I ask, anxious to keep talking. Because I already know what’s next, and I’m dreading it. The waiting.
“Well, to be honest, the whole thing sounds pretty far-fetched. But I’ve been around long enough to know that far-fetched can happen. More often than you’d think. Unfortunately, your beer can doesn’t exactly satisfy the chain of custody. Does your father own a vehicle?”
“A broken-down old truck, last I saw. He parks it outside the gate.”
Detective Sharpe nods. “Any other reason to believe your dad would be capable of this kind of thing? Was he ever abusive to you? To your mother?”
There are pictures in my mind. My father’s mouth frothed with anger. His hands hard as a ruler against my face. Words too. Strip! All of it! Down to your skivvies. But some things are unspeakable. Even for a shrink. “He killed our dog.”
Cole frowns at me as he chalks another one up to Things He Didn’t Know About Mollie. The tally is growing higher than my dad’s kill count.
“When?” Detective Sharpe asks.
“Just before I ran away. I was fifteen.” The same age Dakota will always be. “1992, I think.”
He jots another tragic note into his little book filled with them.
“There’s something else too,” I add, holding up a finger. “Give me a sec.”
I jog toward the house, my pickled brain jostling against my skull before I think better of it and slow to a fast walk. I grab Boyd’s DOGS folder from the fireplace, where I’d tucked it for safekeeping, and head back the way I came, toward three pairs of waiting eyes. It’s time to lay down all my cards.
Detective Sharpe flips through the pages, frowning.
“How’d you get this—” He stops himself. “Let me guess. Part of your rogue investigation?”
“Dakota’s rogue investigation actually. It turns out she was interested in Shadow Man. She’d joined this website, Shadow Seekers.”
“The armchair detectives?”
I nod.
“So what am I looking at here?”
“These dogs belonged to Shadow Man’s victims. It looks like they were all adopted from the Solano County SPCA. Gus was as well.”
I take a breath, trying to keep my focus on Sawyer. Because Cole’s already judging me, and I haven’t even gotten to the crazy part.
“This is going to sound nuts.”
“When has that ever stopped you?” Detective Sharpe deadpans, earning a hearty guffaw from Cole.
“My dad brought dogs home when I was a kid. He always told me he’d found them on the side of the road. That somebody dropped them off. But they match up almost exactly. We had a mutt and a bulldog and a collie like Bucky. The last dog was Roscoe, the basset hound. The one my dad killed.”
“What the hell, Mol? How long have you known about this?”
I shrug at Cole as Detective Sharpe studies the folder.
“Alright,” he says, giving away nothing. “I’ll be in touch when I have news.”
He backpedals toward his car, then raises a finger, as if he’s just thought of something important.
“I know, I know. Stay in my lane.”
“That too.” He smiles, megawatt, but it fades fast. “Actually, I was going to ask what happens if you’re right. Are you prepared for that? For what it means?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer, doesn’t say goodbye. No matter, because all I hear are echoes of Wendall. Young man, next time, before you ask the question, be sure you’re ready for the answer.
BEFORE
Chapter
Twenty-Three
(Saturday, August 6, 2016)
Dakota regretted coming the moment she arrived, chauffeured in the passenger seat of Liv’s Hummer. Well, Liv’s dad’s Hummer. Liv already had her driving permit. Along with the type of parents who’d let her drink wine coolers with her friends at her fifteenth birthday party and stock condoms in her bathroom.
“You know Tyler’s going to be here, right?”
Dakota nodded. “Obviously. It’s his house.”
But it wasn’t Tyler she worried about. Since Hannah had posted that photo of her, he’d been back on his best behavior, texting her just to say hi like he had in the beginning. It disappointed her how simple he was. Hannah had been right when she’d said boys were not calculus. Not even algebra.
Hannah. She would be here too. That had Dakota’s stomach in knots. But she needed to escape the war zone, if only for one night. Besides, if she was being honest, she wanted to see Hannah. She needed to see her.
On Monday, Dakota’s dad had been placed on paid administrative leave, pending the outcome of the investigation. What’s to investigate? she’d overheard him on the phone that night, talking to his attorney. Dad had lawyered up. Just like an innocent man. A goddamned he-said, she-said. That’s what this will turn into.
That night, battle lines had been drawn. Dakota and her mom, upstairs, hunkered in their bedrooms. Her dad camped out on the sofa, subsisting on rations of PB & J and potato chips. Between them, a minefield of unspoken accusations. A trip wire of silence that felt more dangerous than any of their screaming matches. Only Gus had crossed into enemy territory.
“I heard he wants a second chance at love.”
Dakota stared slack-jawed at Liv, before she’d remembered what they’d been talking about. “Tyler wouldn’t know love from a lacrosse stick. He’s just after a hookup.”
From inside the house, the music blasted. So loud, the doorknob shook in her hand. She didn’t bother to knock or ring the bell. No one would hear it. Good thing there were at least two miles between the Lowry compound and the nearest neighbors.
“And?” Liv asked as they made their way through the crowd gathered near the keg in the kitchen. “Do you know how many girls would be all over that? Tyler is the whole enchilada. You owe it to womankind to take a big bite.”
Rolling her eyes, Dakota took up a position in the hallway. “If the fate of womankind depends on me hooking up with Tyler, we’re probably doomed.”
“Probably? So you’re saying I have a chance.”
Dakota heard the beer sloshing in Tyler’s voice before she turned around and saw the telltale red cup in his hand. He slung his arm around her carelessly, nearly spilling its contents. She quickly wriggled free, embarrassed for them both. Certain the whole house had gotten quieter, Dakota glanced around. But only Liv watched. And only for a moment, before she backpedaled into the kitchen, fist raised and mouthing “For womankind!”
“How long were you standing there?” Dakota asked, her cheeks on fire.
Tyler wiggled his eyebrows. “Te gustan las enchiladas?”
“Impressive. Eric must’ve been lying when he said you slept through Spanish I.”
“Want a beer? A little cerveza to go with your enchilada?” He cocked his head at her, flashing a grin. The old Dakota would’ve swooned, considered herself lucky to be the target of Tyler’s sexual innuendo.
“Maybe later. Have you seen Hannah?”
“Forget her. She’s pissed at you anyway.” So he knew, then. Which meant everyone did.
“I really need to talk to he
r. That’s sort of why I came.”
“Ouch.” Tyler pouted, waiting for her to give in. But when she didn’t, he quickly turned his back, scanning the crowd.
“There,” he said, finally. Dakota spotted her too, in the middle of a group of girls, barefoot and dancing. One look and she knew. Hannah was wasted. “Be careful. You know how nasty she can be when she’s drunk.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
As she tried to sidestep Tyler, he bumped into her, and she stumbled into the wall. His body pressed against hers, radiating heat, and she sucked in the stench of alcohol and the body spray she’d seen him douse himself in after practice. He grabbed her arm and held her in place, smiling as he grinded against her. “But seriously, you and me. Later.”
“Get off me!” she yelled, shoving him in the chest. His beer went flying, splattering onto the floor and halfway up his legs. Now, the whole house was watching. Liv and Hannah and Eric and half the lacrosse team and kids she barely knew.
Dakota pushed past a stunned Tyler and headed in the other direction, searching for the quickest escape route. But not before he recovered, just in time to take the last shot. As expected, a game-winner.
“That’s not what you said when you sent me those naked pics.”
“I wasn’t naked.”
Tyler guffawed, the loudest hyena in the pack. She covered her mouth, wishing for a takeback. For invisibility. For a time machine to take her far, far away from here. But she had no superpowers, and she remained alarmingly earthbound. So she did the next best thing when faced with complete mortification.
She ran.
****
Dakota sat on the floor of the Lowrys’ hall bathroom, licking her wounds. She’d been holed up there for at least thirty minutes, ignoring the intermittent pounding on the door. The occasional but frantic Hurry up in there! I gotta go!
Eventually, they all gave up. The Lowrys had at least five bathrooms—one for every member of the family, Tyler had joked with her the first time he’d invited her there—and this was the least interesting of them all. With an empty medicine cabinet, a stark granite countertop, and one of those fancy bowl sinks her mom liked. Pretentious and pretty. But so boring. Tyler’s, then.
Shadows Among Us Page 27