A Dime a Dozen (11 page)

That led me to think that the arsonist had probably come here by car or truck rather than on foot, since he—or possibly she, I guess— must’ve grabbed the flare from the vehicle when it became obvious the matches weren’t going to work. The ground was muddy from recent rains, so I looked for telltale tire tracks. Unfortunately, the driveway was rutted by numerous imprints, and I doubted this crime would warrant enough police manpower to analyze those tracks in the hunt for suspects.

As for witnesses, I walked to the road to scope out any nearby houses, but there were none. This stretch of highway was lined on one side by woods and the other side by the creek. I knew the road was dotted with other houses and trailers along the way, but none were close enough to be of any use.

I stood at the top of the driveway and looked down at the scene, trying to form a mental picture of the perpetrator. To me, this seemed like a careful, methodical display of aggression. This person—or people— had wanted to make it clear that this fire was no accident. After all, they had left everything behind except the gasoline can.

I walked back around to the group at the picnic table, and I could see that Luisa’s eyes were still red, but she seemed to have stopped crying.

“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting them to address Luisa directly, “but can you honestly say that you can’t name a single person in this town who has a problem with you? Some kind of grudge? Some reason to want you to suffer?”

Luisa blew her nose before looking up at me.

“I don’t know that they want me to suffer, necessarily,” she said. “They just want me to go away.”

“That’s one of the first things they did to her,” Natalie explained. “They spray painted those very words, ‘GO AWAY,’ right on the driveway.”

“But I won’t go away until my husband comes back,” Luisa said, her face threatening to crumple into tears once again.

“Your husband left you?” I asked.

“No,” Luisa said, sniffling. “He didn’t
leave
. He would never leave us. Something happened to him. And we are going to stay here until we find out what that was and where he is!”

Her declarations brought on a fresh wave of sobs.

“Enrique was always a good man, a family man,” Dean said to me. “It was a surprise to all of us when he disappeared.”

“I’ve been trying to find him for over four months,” Luisa cried. “But the police, they do nothing. They said they are conducting a missing persons search, but I don’t believe them. Maybe they sent out one or two pictures, but that was all. They think he is a deadbeat. They think he is off to greener pastures without me or the children to hold him back.”

“Did he take any of his things when he left?” I asked as gently as I could.

“He didn’t leave!” Luisa cried. “Of course he didn’t take anything. Enrique was at the orchard, picking apples. Mr. Pete sent him off to prune some trees in the high block, and he simply never came back.”

“The high block?”

“Sometimes orchards are divided into sections,” Dean explained. “Over at Tinsdale Orchards, they call the very top field the high block. It’s the last section of apple trees before the property line.”

“Was there a search?” I asked. “Maybe he fell down an old well or something. Maybe …” I cleared my throat. “Maybe a wild animal got him.”

“They considered all of that,” Dean said. “When Enrique still hadn’t shown up the next morning, the foreman organized a search. He had every one of his employees combing the entire place. Later, the police came out and did the same thing. But there was no trace of him, no evidence of foul play, no sign of a struggle.”

“Then the letter showed up,” Natalie added.

“The letter?” I asked.

Luisa looked up at the sky and took a deep breath.

“I got a letter in the mail about a week after he disappeared, postmarked from New York City. It said ‘I’m sorry but I don’t love you anymore, and so I had to go. Goodbye.’”

“Does your husband have any ties to New York City?”

“None at all. I think the farthest north he’s ever been is Virginia.”

“Do you think there could be another woman involved?” I asked.

“No,” Luisa replied calmly. “There is no other woman. The letter was not even from Enrique.”

“How do you know?”

“First of all, it was typed. He does not know how to use a typewriter. Secondly, it was written in perfect English. Enrique speaks English well enough, but he can’t write in it. I mean, I suppose he could try, but he would never spell the words correctly. English letters don’t follow the same rules as in Spanish. He writes only in Spanish.”

I thought about that, a letter sent from a city where the man had no ties, typed, in English. Whether the letter was completely fraudulent and written without his knowledge, or written for him on his behalf, at the very least it proved that someone else had to have been involved here.

“Do you have the letter?” I asked.

“No, I gave it to the police. Big mistake. Instead of using it as a clue to find him, they decided it was proof he had left of his own free will. Case closed. I still go to the police station every week, and ask, ‘What are you doing to find my husband?’ They tell me they are looking. But I know they do not even try.”

“What about the person or people who started this fire? Could they have kidnapped him or something?”

“If he is kidnapped, then why? Where is the note? What are the ransom demands? Where is my husband?”

We let that question settle as we sat, lost in thought. I felt sorry for Luisa and her children, but as an outsider looking in, I didn’t think the situation was as hopeless as it seemed. Now that there had been a murder, especially, I felt certain the police would revisit Luisa’s situation with more careful attention. In the meantime, I didn’t see what purpose it served for her and her children to remain in Greenbriar, where they were obviously in danger themselves. I said as much, though from Dean’s and Natalie’s expressions, I could tell that this was a conversation the three of them had had before.

Sure enough, Luisa sat up straight, her fists clinched, her shoulders high.

“I am not leaving this town,” she declared, pounding her fist on the table, “until I find my husband.”

“Then perhaps you have some relatives living somewhere else,” I said, “who can take care of your children until then.”

Luisa’s firmness seemed to waver just a bit.

“Relatives?” she asked.

“Someone attacked your car and your home, Luisa,” I said firmly, leaning toward her across the table. “It’s no longer petty vandalism. The stakes are too high now. And you can’t ignore the fact that there has been a murder.”

Luisa was quiet for a moment, and finally she nodded.

“We saw that man die,” she whispered. “But I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. With us.”

“It probably didn’t,” I said. “But just in case, don’t you think you’re better safe than sorry?”

She chewed on her bottom lip.

“I will call my sister in Texas,” she said, blinking as two tears trailed down her face. “Perhaps she will let the children come and stay with her.”

Dean exhaled loudly, patting Luisa on the arm.

“Now you’re talking,” he said. “We’ll even pay for the tickets to get them there, if you need.”

The police arrived at that moment, so while the three of them talked about the logistics of sending away the kids, I walked over to meet the officers who had pulled into the driveway. The way I saw it, this case didn’t begin with today’s fire or even with last night’s murder.

It started last fall, the day this woman’s husband disappeared.

Eight

Talking with the uniformed officers who responded to the call, I was disappointed to learn that June Sweetwater, the detective in charge of the murder investigation, wouldn’t be coming. When I suggested that perhaps she should, they told me she was in Asheville at the medical examiner’s office and wouldn’t be back for several hours. In any event, they said, since this was a fire, the fire marshall was on his way and he would be the one to investigate. Detective Sweetwater would be fully apprised of the situation when she returned.

Sure enough, the fire marshall showed up a few minutes later and began taking some digital photos of the scene for the records. While he worked, he fired off questions to Luisa about what had happened. The cops took notes, and Dean gave them the business card of the tow truck driver to corroborate Luisa’s story. I mostly hovered around the fringes, watching and listening.

It seemed to me that everyone grasped the gravity of the situation and its possible connection to last night’s murder. The cops were obviously familiar with Luisa’s plight and the missing persons search for her husband, though they didn’t seem convinced that the fire was related in any way to his disappearance. One cop actually wondered aloud if perhaps the person who started the fire
was
her husband, now back from wherever he had been hiding and ready to make trouble. Though Dean spoke out in the man’s defense, I had to admit I had been wondering the same thing as well.

Once the fire marshall collected all of the half-burnt matches and the discarded auto flare, the men wrapped up their questioning and thanked us for our cooperation, telling Luisa she could come down to the police station anytime after noon tomorrow to pick up a copy of the report if she needed one for insurance purposes.

She began to express her worries about money after they were gone. The cost of repairing the fire damage hadn’t occurred to her before now, and she was afraid that the kind-hearted local who had loaned her the trailer would hold her responsible for the expense. From what I could gather, the trailer belonged to Butch Hooper, the big man with the booming voice I had met at my welcoming party. Dean assured Luisa that Butch undoubtedly had insurance on it, since he was in the construction business and owned a number of rental properties. What Dean didn’t add was that the whole trailer couldn’t be worth more than a few hundred dollars at best anyway.

As we prepared to leave, it crossed my mind that concepts like insurance and mortgages and home values were probably so far removed from Luisa’s life as an itinerant migrant picker that she might not even understand how they worked. What would it feel like, I wondered, to have no home, to own nothing more than what could be carried around from job to job in your car? I had a feeling it was that very mobility that had probably complicated the search for the missing husband. There weren’t many ways to trace a man who owned no property nor had any assets.

Dean and Natalie and I were starving by the time we left, but with so much happening, we didn’t want to take the time to go back to Auntie’s Country Kitchen for a full meal. Instead, we stopped at a fast-food restaurant on our way back to town and had a quick late lunch. Over hamburgers we talked about Luisa.

Though I felt sorry for her and her children, my own personal concern was more for how her troubles were affecting the Webbers—and the impact that all of this had had on MORE. Though Luisa no longer worked there, the “black eye” that Natalie had spoken of still remained with the county—and would until a full understanding of the situation was reached.

The sequence of events was a bit confusing, and so I asked them to go back and clarify it for me. Natalie reiterated the whole story. According to her, Luisa and Enrique Morales had come to Greenbriar last July with their two children, moving into the migrant family dorms as they did every year during harvest. Enrique had gone to work picking apples for Tinsdale Orchards, and Luisa had taken a job at MORE. Things were fine until November, near the end of harvest, when the husband disappeared, seemingly without a trace. Subsequently, Luisa had the two big mess-ups at work where she left confidential papers in the Laundromat and then wiped out portions of the database. She lost her job, and then she and the kids moved from the seasonal migrant dormitories into the trailer where they lived now. Soon after they moved in, they found the words “GO AWAY” spray painted on the driveway. Since then, several times Luisa had found herself the target of some menacing act—a slashed tire, last night’s stink bombs, today’s fire—all apparently meant to harass her into leaving town. Luisa took in laundry to provide for her family, but last week she had lost one of her best clients when their neatly washed-and-folded clothes were stolen from the back seat of her car.

My eyes widened.

“A criminal act,” I said, “that led to the loss of employment? You understand, don’t you, what this means?”

They both looked at me blankly.

“All of the things that have happened to her—but particularly the stolen laundry—actually support her claim that she wasn’t responsible for the problems at your agency. I mean, think about it. What better way is there to get a person to leave town than to make them lose their job?”

Dean and Natalie looked at each other and then back at me.

“You think someone really did those things intentionally so that Luisa would get fired?”

“It fits the pattern. I haven’t got a clue why someone would want her to leave town so badly, but I think it started back then, and now I feel strongly that she was telling you the truth about what happened. I think it wasn’t her own carelessness, but some sort of deliberate, malicious act by someone else.”