The first girl took a quick look at Mia’s phone and then passed it to the waitress next to her. And so it went, hand to hand. Charlie watched closely, but no one’s expression changed.
When they were finished, Zhong barked a question. They all shook their heads. “I am so sorry,” he said, turning to them. “No one remembers Scott being here. Of course, why should they remember one person out of many seven months ago?”
The thing was, the waitress with the bruised wrist—Charlie thought he had seen the faintest shiver run through her.
A
s Charlie walked briskly back to the car, Mia trailed a bit behind him. She was in no hurry to go to the place where Scott had drawn his last breath. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but it still seemed like it might hold an echo of his last desperate struggle.
She just hoped he had been unconscious when the blows had come.
“Lady!” An urgent whisper broke the silence.
She turned.
“Lady!” It was an Asian man dressed in a stained and wrinkled white uniform. Standing between a side door and two big black trash receptacles, he beckoned her closer.
Mia turned back to look for Charlie, but he had his back to her. He was talking on his cell phone, one foot up on the frame of the open door of his car.
“Lady!” Cringing, the man beckoned her with both hands.
She did not want to venture into that shadowed space with a stranger. Shaking her head, Mia motioned for him to come to her.
He shook his head even more violently than she had. Then he pointed at a spot high above the entrance doors. She followed his finger to something tucked up in the eaves.
It was painted the same color as the restaurant’s exterior, but it looked like a small video camera. A video camera that must have a good view of most of the parking lot.
But hadn’t Kenny Zhong just told them that he didn’t have any video footage? Or maybe he had thought Mia meant just of the inside of the restaurant? Or just of that night, months earlier?
She tore her eyes away. If someone was currently monitoring or later reviewed this tape and saw her stare, they might also realize who had shown it to her. If this cowering man was so afraid, she didn’t want to get him into trouble.
Mia hurried over to him. He was dancing on his tiptoes, looking ready to break into a run. The air stank of fryer grease that had been used and reused and re-reused. She thought of the pot stickers that had begun the meal and her stomach roiled.
“You Mrs. Scott?” he asked.
“Yes?” This guy wasn’t one of the people who had looked at Scott’s photo. He must work in the back of the restaurant. Judging by his damp, dirty apron, Mia thought it likely that he was a dishwasher rather than a cook. At least she hoped he wasn’t a cook.
“He . . . he . . .”
As the man searched for a word, Mia found herself wanting to fill in the blank. Only she had no idea what it was.
Finally his face lightened as he found what he was looking for. “He help.” He nodded, watching her expectantly.
“Help who? With what?” Mia didn’t understand what this man was trying to say, but she did understand his body language, his nervous darting glances. He was afraid someone would see them together. Terrified.
His mouth opened, but then he suddenly jerked his head to look over his shoulder. His head whipped back to her. “Go,” he whispered urgently, his hands now flapping at her to get away. “Go!”
His fear was now hers. She turned and hurried back toward Charlie. When she looked back, the man had disappeared.
Charlie was still holding his phone, but he wasn’t talking on it anymore. Instead, he was watching her. “Who were you talking to?”
“I don’t know. A dishwasher, I guess. And I don’t know if
talking
’s the right word. All he did was ask me if I was Mrs. Scott. And when I said I was, he told me, and I quote, ‘He help.’ He seemed to think that was enough for me to understand.”
“Do you think he meant Scott was helping someone? Helping him? Helping someone to do what?”
“I started to ask those questions, but he must have heard somebody coming. He freaked out and told me to go, and then he went back inside.”
“So much for no one knowing anything about Scott.”
Something more than old fryer grease smelled bad here. But even though Mia was angry, she also had to think things through.
“Yeah, but if I go storming back in the door and demand to speak to that guy, whoever he is, I’ll bet that he would pretend to speak even less English than he does. Plus, by the way he was acting, he was worried about getting caught. So it wouldn’t do me any good, but it might end up costing him his job.” She remembered what he had shown her. “Oh, and you’ll love this, Charlie.”
“What?”
“He pointed at something, and I’m pretty sure it’s a video camera mounted up in the eaves. I’d say it has a good view of the entrance and most of the parking lot.”
Charlie snorted. “So that’s another thing Kenny lied to us about.”
“Well, it might not be a lie, but it’s not all the truth either. He didn’t say they didn’t have a video camera. He just said they didn’t have footage from that night.”
“Something about this place bugs me.” With narrowed eyes Charlie looked past Mia and at the restaurant. “Did you notice our waitress’s wrists?”
Mia was embarrassed to think she had only had eyes for the food. “No. What about them?”
“They were bruised.” He circled one wrist with the other hand. “And the bruises were shaped like fingerprints.”
“That doesn’t mean she got them here,” Mia pointed out. “She could be being abused at home.”
“Maybe.” Charlie looked dubious. “And maybe not. I wish I spoke Cantonese or whatever Kenny was speaking. I’d really like to know what he told them about Scott’s photo. Maybe he didn’t ask if anyone had seen him. Maybe he told them all they would be up the creek without a paddle if they admitted to knowing him.”
“So do you think Kenny did meet Scott here that night?”
“I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not.” He shook his head. “All I can tell you is this: I am sure that at least some of what he told us tonight was lies.”
A
s Charlie started the car, Mia kept thinking about the frightened man and what he had said—or tried to say—to her. How desperate he had been to communicate. If Kenny figured out they’d been talking, would the poor guy end up losing his job—or worse?
The sky was growing dark. She wished they didn’t have to go to the accident site. Wished Charlie had asked to meet Alvin Turner some other place.
“Okay, we already know that Scott warned Kenny that he was not showing enough income,” Charlie said. “Maybe Kenny killed Scott because he was threatening to turn him in to the IRS?”
“Would Scott really put himself on the side of the angels like that? He didn’t say one word about the IRS in that note,” Mia pointed out. These days it was easy to believe that Scott had been capable of anything. “Maybe it’s more likely that Scott was blackmailing him. Only maybe he called it guanxi.”
“Either way it would give Kenny a reason to want him dead.” Charlie began to construct a scenario out loud. “So say Scott came out here that night, met with Kenny, had a few drinks, they argued, he left, and Kenny followed him. Maybe the reason that guy saw
Scott speeding was because Kenny was chasing him. Then Scott crashed the car and Kenny thought,
Aha, here’s my chance. I’ll finish
him off
. And he got a golf club or something out of his car.”
Mia’s shoulders hunched as she wondered how close they were to the accident site. She made herself think back to the report Charlie had given her. “Yeah, but the witness only reported one car passing him at a high rate of speed. Not two.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Charlie said. “Probably the patrol officer only asked about Scott’s car. It’s not like he had any reason to believe this was anything but what it seemed—a one-car accident. Too bad Scott was in a loaner and not the Suburban. I checked on the make and model he was driving. It didn’t have a black box. If it did, we’d know exactly how fast he was going, whether he braked, and whether he was wearing a seat belt. Plus any vehicle fault codes.”
With each passing second Mia’s tension grew. By the time Charlie turned onto Vollhanger Road, her left leg was jiggling and her hands were twisting together.
The road rose ahead of them, curving sharply to the left. A line of evergreens bordered the right side. That must be the place. Mia’s stomach bottomed out.
Charlie nosed the car onto the narrow shoulder. Just ahead of them, one of the trees bore a white scar, an ugly slash about knee-high. Or bumper high. It no longer bled sap, but the bark hadn’t grown back either. It was like Mia. The wound was still there, it still gaped, but it no longer hemorrhaged.
“Breathe, Mia.” Charlie’s voice interrupted her thoughts.
“What?” She didn’t turn her head, her eyes still fastened on the scar.
“Don’t forget to breathe. Breathe deep.”
She did. For a moment she saw stars, but then they flickered and faded.
Mia pushed open her door. It was absolutely silent. The sun was
setting. There was still enough light to see, but the colors were shifting and darkness waited on the edges. They had stopped at the pivot point of the curve. She looked back the way they had come, then ahead to where Scott should have gone if he hadn’t been drinking, if he hadn’t been speeding. There wasn’t much to see around them. Just land. Some of it farmed, some of it filled with nothing in particular, as far as she could tell. No houses holding potential witnesses. Theirs was the only car in sight.
“No skid marks,” she observed. She felt brittle and light, as if she weren’t really there at all. “Although I guess it has been nearly seven months. Maybe they just got worn away.”
“It was wet that night,” Charlie said, “which takes away most of the friction. There wouldn’t have been enough heat to melt the rubber.”
She leaned down to look closer at the gravel. Mixed in among the small gray stones were shards of plastic—some clear and some yellow, as well as little pebbles of blue safety glass from the windshield. If someone had really hit Scott, seven months ago there would have been cast-off blood spatter every time they drew back to hit him again. If Charlie and Mia stayed until it was fully dark and he sprayed Luminol, would the gravel and these tree trunks light up like the night sky? Or had all the rain in between washed everything away?
“Mia, breathe,” Charlie reminded her again.
She forced herself to take a slow breath. Was it possible that one of the molecules now entering her lungs had been part of Scott’s dying breath?
She put her hand on the trunk of the tree and closed her eyes.
Scott
, she thought,
I’m sorry I didn’t help you. I’m sorry I knew something
was wrong and didn’t push when you told me that it was nothing.
I’m sorry I didn’t fight hard enough for our marriage.
“Are you okay?” Charlie asked.
“I knew for a while that things were wrong,” she said without
opening her eyes. “I asked, but only a few times, and when he said he didn’t want to talk about it, I stopped. I was afraid he was thinking of leaving me, and if I pushed him that was exactly what he’d do. Maybe I could have changed things if I had spoken up right when things went off track.”
He rested his hand on her shoulder and then took it away. Mia opened her eyes and turned to face him. “You never met Scott, did you?” Of course he hadn’t. Charlie mostly belonged to her new life, Scott to her old. She and Charlie had worked exactly one case together before she quit the DA’s office and became a stay-at-home mom. And even that one case had fallen apart when Charlie’s unique approach caused the whole thing to get thrown out.
Now she saw him with different eyes. She knew his heart, both how reckless it was and how brave.
Or maybe she only thought she knew Charlie. After all, she had thought she knew Scott. And learning the truth wouldn’t bring him back, wouldn’t change what had happened. Maybe it was better to live with the falsehoods she had told herself, her selective memories.
“Somebody’s coming,” Charlie said, pointing. Two headlights pushed toward them through the gathering darkness.
A
n old blue Taurus drove slowly past them. The white-haired man at the wheel had his hands at ten and two. He favored them with a nod, then carefully maneuvered off the road until he was parked about thirty yards past Charlie’s car.
He got out and walked toward them. He was dressed in a black Windbreaker and dark jeans that were a little too short. Under a shock of pure white hair, his face was ruddy. As he got closer, Mia saw that it was pitted with old acne scars, scars layered on top of scars. He gave them both another nod and a tentative smile.
It was the kind of face that probably wasn’t being made anymore. Today the jumble of crooked teeth would have been straightened long ago with an Invisalign, the skin smoothed with Accutane. The senior citizens of the future were going to be a much more homogenous lot.
“I’m Charlie,” Charlie said, holding out his hand. “And this is Mia. Scott Quinn’s widow.”
Mia hated the word
widow
. It conjured up the image of a weeping old woman dressed in all black. It simply seemed impossible to be a widow while you were still in your thirties.
Alvin’s rheumy eyes were at the same level as Mia’s. “I am so, so sorry,” he said as he shook her hand. His grip was soft, as if he was afraid of injuring her further.
“Thank you.” It was what Mia always said, but it never sounded quite right. What was she thanking people for? Their apologies were just awkward words or easy platitudes, and her hurt was so deep, far past the level that a word or two could reach. “And what do you do? I don’t think the accident report said.”
“Me?” He gave a little laugh, as if it had been some time since anyone inquired. “Oh, I’m retired. I used to work in hardware.”
“We really appreciate your coming out tonight to talk to us,” Charlie said.
Alvin waved his hand. “It’s no trouble at all.”