by Greta Boris
I told Rodriguez that wasn’t possible. Tomas knew the difference between the two well enough, and, even if he’d made a careless mistake, I was the one who brewed the tea. I’d have noticed the seeds.
The police also asked me if I ever made tinctures for asthma or as a sedative from the plant. Even the seeds, the most potent part of the vine, were used in some cultures for those purposes. But I never had. Abuela Maria felt it was too dangerous, and I abided by Abuela Maria’s wisdom.
The official verdict of law enforcement was suicide. Doug hadn’t been himself for a long time, and he’d just gotten bad news at Providence. I knew some thought I’d done it. It made the most sense when you thought about it. I had the knowledge, the opportunity, and the motive. But it was hard to prove. Besides, most of the local police wouldn’t blame me if I had done it.
I turned and faced my home. Yellow light spilled from the windows, warm and welcoming. It was a place of peace once more. Strife and discord had never been allowed in Abuela Maria’s home. She could rest easy now.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
OLIVIA SAW SAINT Francis at the end of Los Rios as they rounded the corner. He was illuminated by a light at his base, like he’d been the previous time she was there. But tonight it wasn’t his face that demanded her attention. It was his open arms and raised palms. He seemed at once to be offering hope and asking for it.
She released her rigid fingers. They’d been balled into fists since Davy and Crackers had circled Tom’s house. The red slashes in her palms stung when the air hit them. She cradled her hands on her lap, palms heavenward like the statue’s, and breathed another prayer for her son.
Davy made a right onto the long driveway toward Sage’s house. Why were they here? At Tom’s mother’s? But he drove past Sage’s, and pulled up to the house next door. Gravel crunched under the tires, the engine died, and the soft croaking of frogs filled Olivia’s ears. “She lives next door? The woman we’re going to see?”
“Next door to who?” Davy’s eyes glittered in the street lamp.
“Sage. Sage lives there.” Olivia pointed to the squat yellow building that shared a side yard with the home they sat before.
“Who’s Sage?”
“Tom’s mother.”
The news seemed to surprise him. He didn’t say anything for a moment. “They must have been neighbors when it happened.” It, she knew, referred to the 1992 death of the boy from San Juan Capistrano.
Olivia had never seen the front of this house, only the side with the screen door. It was smaller than Sage’s and newer—a white, single story bungalow, probably built in the late 1950’s. The door was opened before they knocked. Mike stood in the light spilling from the doorway.
Olivia had always thought of Mike as ageless. He had a strong, wide face that looked the same when she’d met him as it had in pictures she’d seen of him as a young father. Tonight he looked old. His white hair was tousled and greasy, his face lined with deep furrows. “Come on in.” His voice sounded weak and tired. He ushered them through an entryway into a small living room.
The young woman Olivia had seen taking in the mail from the box outside huddled on a brown couch against the far wall. Her face was familiar. It couldn’t be from that night. Olivia hadn’t seen it clearly in the dark, but she couldn’t place where she had. The woman was older than the impression Olivia had gotten from her voice—early thirties maybe. A man, who must have been her father, stood next to her. His hand rested on her shoulder protectively.
“Abby and Paul Travers, this is my son, Davy, and Olivia, Brian’s mother, and this is—”
Art interrupted Mike. “Abby and I know each other. She works at St. Barnabas. In the school library.” Abby nodded a greeting to Art. A flashback to the day two months ago when a young woman with interesting eyes had trailed Olivia from the St. Barnabas parking lot flickered through her mind. This was that girl. That was where she’d seen her.
“Abby, why don’t you tell them what you told me?” Mike leaned against the wall and folded his arms across his chest.
The living room was small and sparse. What little furniture there was looked like it had been in place since the 1990s. Olivia sank into a floral print easy chair. Davy perched on the side of the couch closest to her.
“Brian is missing. If you have something that—” Davy said.
Mike held up a hand. “The police are out there. They’re looking in all the obvious places, following up any leads we have. We need to look in the less obvious places. Hear her out, Davy.”
“I’ll tell you what I told your father, but I’m not sure how it will help now.” Abby’s voice was a rasp of air, soft and brittle. Olivia had to lean forward to hear her.
“I was only about five when my brother died.” Abby launched into her story with the expressionless tone people use for well-rehearsed bits. “It was the worst day of my life. Scottie had made a jump for his BMX bike out of scrounged bits of plywood. He kept it in the side yard. The one we share with Sage. He and Tomas used to ride circles out there, flying off the jump. Mom hated it. She thought it was dangerous, and it was ruining the grass.”
Abby glanced up at the gathering, a sad smile on her face. “Mom told Scottie to get rid of the jump, but he dragged it to the railroad tracks and hid it behind a utility shed. I knew about it, but he made me promise not to tell. One day, about a week later, he told me he was heading to the tracks to practice his jumps. I said he shouldn’t go. I did say it.” She crossed her arms over her belly, folded in on herself.
“It’s okay, Abby,” Mike said. “Just tell your story.”
“I was only five,” she said again. “Scottie took off. I wasn’t allowed to leave the yard by myself, but I followed him. I worshipped my brother.”
“We worship God, Abby.” Paul Travers’s voice was gentle but firm.
“It’s just an expression, Daddy.” She cleared her throat as if the story had lodged there. “I got to the tracks in time to see him go off the jump once and head around the circle. When he hit it the second time, it cracked in half.” The placid mask of her face shattered into tragic fragments. She covered it with her hands for a moment. When she looked up again, it was repaired.
“The whole thing, it broke right in half. Scottie lost control of the bike. He went over the handle bars, and landed on the tracks.” Her voice sank so low, Olivia had to strain to hear her. “He was so still. I thought he was dead. I tried to wake him, but I couldn’t. There was blood everywhere. I... I ran home to tell Mama. I shouldn’t have left him. By the time we got back...”
Silence rang in the small room. Olivia knew what had happened. The train, the giant metal monster, had borne down on him like it had so many times in the past. But he hadn’t jumped out of the way this time. She felt the walls closing in, and had a sudden urge to go outside, to feel the cold night air on her face.
“I’m sorry for your loss, but I don’t see how...” Davy said.
“Let her finish.” Mike’s tone was impatient. “Go on, Abby.”
She sat up straighter, her detached expression in place again. “A couple of years later, I saw Tomas sawing a branch off a tree in his front yard, and I remembered something I’d completely forgotten. The day Scottie died, in the morning, I’d seen him coming up from the direction of the tracks with that saw in his hand. I guess I’d been so traumatized by the accident it’d gone out of my head.”
“I didn’t want to upset Daddy, but I tried to tell Mama. She wouldn’t listen. When Scottie died, she’d decided Doug, Tomas’s father, killed him. She got strength from that, from her rage. She almost lost her mind when Doug died. There wasn’t anybody to hate anymore, nobody to blame. Cancer took her about five years later.”
“You think Tom vandalized the jump?” Olivia fidgeted with restless energy in her chair. She wanted Abby to get to the point, give them something that would help Brian now, today.
“I do. I’ve thought so ever since that I had that memory. But what could I do about it? Tom
as went away to college in Boise. I saw him every so often when he came home on vacation; then I heard he got a teaching job there. I thought, I hoped, he was gone for good.”
“When he came home from Boise, I never talked to him if I could help it. I was scared. Tomas had a mean streak when we were kids. I didn’t want him to know I’d remembered about the saw.”
He’s mean. Brian’s words came back to Olivia. Why hadn’t she listened to him? Regret, pointed and painful, gripped her.
“Sage told me things though. She told me he was looking for another job. That he’d left his school because a boy in his class had drowned. That didn’t make sense. Why would he have to leave his job because a kid in his class died?” Abby’s eyes widened, and she looked around the room. “But then he got a job in Phoenix, and he went away again. I put it out of my head.”
“We know all this.” Davy’s voice filled with impatience. Abby’s lips thinned, and she stared at her hands.
“What you don’t know is that Abby is the one who left the messages for Olivia,” Mike said.
Olivia’s head snapped up. “What?”
“I was worried. Worried he might do something to Brian.” Abby’s eyes pleaded with Olivia to understand. “I heard about the other boy when Tomas got the job at St. Barnabas. The one in Phoenix who died when he was on a camping trip. I looked it up on the Internet and found out Tomas knew him. That he was dating his mother. That made three boys.” She paused and let the words sink in.
“I started watching him. I wanted to see if he was spending extra time with any of the St. Barnabas boys. I couldn’t sit by.” She turned her head to look at Davy. “I like Brian.”
Brian. His name brought a pain so deep Olivia almost doubled over. A phone rang. Mike pulled his cell from his pocket and walked out the front door, closing it behind him.
“Was it you then, following me?” Olivia said.
Abby nodded, eyes down. “When I found out he dated the mother of that Phoenix boy, I wanted to know if you and he were...”
Davy’s voice grew hard. “If you suspected Tom Hartman was dangerous, why didn’t you go to Art, or the police? Or talk to Olivia? Why leave messages on bathroom stalls and windshields?”
“Who would believe me? Sage, Tomas, they’re respected here in town. I’m the daughter of the crazy woman who never got over her son’s death. The woman who accused Doug Hartman of a murder everybody believed was an accident until the day she died. What I had, what I knew, it wasn’t proof.”
“But you wanted to warn me.” Olivia softened her tone.
“I gave you everything I had. You could make up your own mind.” Abby turned her palms up like the Saint Francis statue.
Mike returned to the house with a blast of chilly air, and all eyes turned toward him. Olivia’s heart tapped extra beats. He gave a small shake of his head. “They haven’t found Tom yet. They’re trying to get a search warrant for his house.”
Davy burst from his seat and moved toward the door. “What the hell are we doing here? We should be out there. Looking for Brian.”
Mike strode forth and blocked his way. “Son, listen to me.” He put his hands on Davy’s shoulders. “Let’s think this through. What do we know? What’s the pattern?”
“He likes to hook up with the mothers of young boys.” Davy spat the words.
“Right,” Mike said softly. “Then the boys have accidents. Accidents related to an outdoor activity they routinely did, or wanted to do.” He released Davy and took his position against the wall again. “Scottie was always on that jump. The child in Boise drowned in the river he loved to play near. The boy on the camping trip had been begging to go rock climbing.”
“Brian’s not an outdoors kind of kid. I don’t see how this helps us.” Davy said.
Olivia said, “He wanders.”
“That’s not exactly a sport,” Davy said.
“No, now, if our theory is correct, Tom staged each boy’s death to look like an accident. Everybody knows Brian is a wanderer. Then he disappears from school two weeks after he tries to leave campus on his own. Most people would assume he was successful this time,” Mike said.
“Right.” Davy tugged at his hair, leaving it standing in tufts on his head. “But where could he go that would prove fatal? Wandering in and of itself isn’t dangerous, not like bike jumps, rivers, and rock cliffs.”
“He could wander out in front of traffic.” Art spoke for the first time. His deep voice resonated through the room, and everyone turned to look at him. “Brian got hit by a pickup eight months ago. It could be a pattern.”
“I thought about that,” Mike said. “But a car accident is hard to stage unless you’re the one doing the driving. If you’re not, you’ve got an unknown factor and a possible witness.”
“If he was going to stage a car accident, why not do it already? Do it near the school? That would be the most believable,” Davy said.
“The other deaths occurred in solitary situations. The area around St. Barnabas is pretty busy.” Mike said.
Olivia sobbed. “How can you talk like this? Like you’re trying to solve an episode of Murder, She Wrote? This is my child.” She hugged herself. Warm tears slid down her cheeks.
Davy kneeled next to her chair and pulled her into an embrace. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“Maybe you should take her outside. Get some fresh air.” Mike’s voice was soft but firm. This wasn’t a request. She rose, and Davy led her through the front door.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
OLIVIA SHIVERED IN the cold night air. Brian hadn’t taken a jacket to school that morning. The sun had been shining, the temperatures in the seventies. She’d thought he would be home well before nightfall.
“Let’s water Crackers.” Davy walked toward his car, and paused. When they’d arrived Olivia hadn’t noticed the other vehicle in the driveway. It was the same make and model as Davy’s. In fact, she wasn’t sure which was his. The only difference between them was the color—one was a slightly darker shade. No wonder she’d made the mistake of thinking Davy was the one following her. Abby’s car was almost identical.
Davy opened the door of the lighter colored one, and the dog bounded from the car. He was so delighted to see Davy, his entire hind end wagged. Davy stroked Crackers’s head. The stoic lines of his face broke. His distress was only visible for an instant, before he rebuilt the expression he’d worn all evening. “How far could a ten-year-old boy walk in...” he looked at the watch on his wrist, “... a little more than two and a half hours?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“If I wanted to make it look like Brian wandered away and had an accident, I’d have to make the location a reasonable distance from where he was last seen. He was last seen at 4:00 in Dana Point. It’s about 6:45 now.”
Distress mounded over Olivia’s ability to understand like dirt atop a freshly filled grave. “Explain.”
“If Brian walked about three miles an hour, the farthest he could have gone is six or seven miles from school.”
“But Tom has a car. They could be anywhere.”
“Not if Tom sticks to his M.O. He wants everyone to think Brian wandered off, right? At least that’s our assumption. Given that kids get distracted, stop and fool around, I think anywhere from three to five miles would be a believable distance.”
Light inched into Olivia’s darkened mind as the truth of his words dawned. “The police and the searchers created a grid around the school, but I don’t think it was any larger than a mile.” She pulled her phone out of her purse and plugged in the St. Barnabas address. A map app opened and a red pin dropped to show the school’s location. A blinking blue dot in the corner of the screen indicated where she and Davy stood. “We’re about three miles from school here, but it’s a big circle.”
Davy took the phone from her hand and stared at the screen. “Three miles west would put them in the ocean. Every other direction lands them either in a suburban community, park, or...” His
voice dropped, “Onto a freeway.”
“The freeway would make the most sense if Mike’s theory about a traffic accident was correct.” Helplessness overwhelmed her as the words left her lips. A three-mile circumference around the school was a huge area. How would they ever find Brian? Davy dropped the phone to his side and stared at the night sky. He took her hand with his empty one.
They stood that way for a long time, silent, defeated, frogs and crickets the only sounds. The same sounds she’d thought so peaceful the night she’d sat on Sage’s porch. It had only been a little over a month, but it seemed a lifetime ago. Tonight the quiet felt empty and ominous.
A train whistled in the distance—the seven o’clock to Los Angeles. That’s what Sage had told her. It came through every weeknight. A commuter train. Tom had played chicken with that train as a child. He’d told her about the adrenaline that flooded his bloodstream like a drug when he stood watching the sleek bullet barreling toward him. How bold he felt when he leaped away at the last minute, like he’d cheated death.
Cheated death.
Brian had cheated death in Tom’s mind. That’s what he’d said that night at the beach. “The train.” Panic welled up like bile in Olivia’s throat. She gripped Davy’s arm.
“No,” he said, but his eyes widened with fear.
She ran toward the sound.
She cut across the yard, down the gravel drive, and onto the street that led toward the train tracks, Davy right behind her. The horn sounded again, closer this time.
She bolted toward the street’s dead end. Her feet crunched over dry grass. An old utility shed rose before her. A small place in her brain still reserved for logic registered it as the spot Scottie Travers must have died twenty-four years ago.