I still said nothing.
“So anyway, Len says no way, he never sold or gave this guy’s kid any X, and the guy, then he’s all, okay, if Len didn’t give it to the kid, maybe he knows who did. And Len says no fucking way, he doesn’t know, and the guy, he says maybe Len needs time to think about his answer, and he grabs Len and he stuffs him into the trunk of Len’s car. Len’s, like, he’s totally claustrophobic, and just about freaks out, so the guy lets him out, and I think he actually kind of believes Len now, that he really doesn’t know who gave the kid the X, but the guy, he tells Len if he tells anybody about what just happened, he’ll put the word out that he
did
give up a name. Len was scared shitless, so he never told his parents or the cops or anyone else but me and a couple of other friends.”
It was very quiet in the car.
“So,” Sean concluded, “that’s why, when I saw you, I told you right out that I didn’t know anything. Because I didn’t want to end up in a trunk like Len. That’s why Roman decked you. He was trying to save my ass.”
I shot him a startled look, but said nothing. I pulled the car over to the shoulder, eased to a stop, and put it in park.
“We’re here,” I said. “This is where I dropped Hanna off.”
TWENTY
We
both got out and stood a moment in the cool night air. Unlike twenty-four hours before, there was no rain. There was the sound of distant traffic, and the occasional vehicle that went right by us, but other than that it was very quiet.
A few car lengths up, the traffic light changed. The businesses were closed, and there were few lights on in the homes that were sandwiched between them.
“You let her out here?” Sean said. “This is, like, the middle of nowhere.”
“She tried to jump out of the car when it was moving. I had to pull over. I couldn’t force her to stay.” I was trying to convince myself as much as Sean.
“Seems like a shitty thing to do,” he said.
I went around to the back of the car, used my remote to pop the trunk. Sean spun around, a nervous look on his face.
“Don’t worry, I’m just getting a flashlight,” I told him, and grabbed a heavy Maglite I kept in there, along with other tools of the trade, like a bright orange safety helmet that would allow you to go almost any place you wanted when you put it on your head, as well as a laptop, a mini-printer, even a Kevlar vest I’d kept from my days as a cop but had never worn since. I closed the trunk, joined Sean, and clicked the light on.
“When she jumped out,” I said, “she ran that way.”
“Why are we doing this?” he asked. “This doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“This is where Hanna called you from. Last thing she did was show me she had a phone, which I took to mean she was going to call someone else for a ride.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“She called you. And got interrupted. Right now, it looks like you’re the last person we know who’s spoken to her. It happened around here. So I want to look around. Over here, by these bushes, that’s where she tossed her wig.”
I cast the flashlight beam around the shrubs. Panned it low first, then went higher, in case the wig had caught on a branch before it hit the ground.
“There,” I said.
We closed the distance. I went down to one knee and took hold of the wig, tentatively at first, like it was a piece of roadkill. “This look like the wig?” I asked him.
“I think,” Sean said.
“Me, too. How many wigs can you expect to find along the side of the road?”
“I guess.”
I got up, heard my knee crack. I walked back to the car, unlocked it, and set the wig on the backseat.
“Let’s head up this way,” I said, pointing to the corner. “When she got to the corner, she turned right.”
I kept scanning my flashlight across the sidewalk, using it like a white cane. I didn’t know what I was looking for, if anything, but it seemed like a detective-ish thing to do. When we hit the corner, I saw that the cross street went only about a hundred yards before there was a short bridge. Just this side of it, on the right, was a house that looked as though it had been knocked down in one windstorm and reassembled by the next. Boards askew, eaves hanging loose. But there was activity here. Three people sitting on the sagging porch, drinking beer, sitting in what were once, perhaps in another millennium, living room chairs that now had the stuffing exploding from them.
“Hey,” I said as we came up in front of the house.
There were two women, heavyset, and a thin, bearded man between them. All in their sixties, I guessed, enjoying a night of getting buzzed in the evening air.
“Hi,” said the man. “How you boys doing tonight?”
“We’re good,” I said. “My name’s Cal, and this is my friend Sean. We wonder if you might be able to help us.”
“You lost?” the man asked. “’Cause I can’t imagine anyone would intend to be walking along here at night unless they was.”
The women cackled softly.
“We’re trying to find a girl,” I said.
“You can have both of these ones,” he said, and the women cackled some more. I laughed along with them, showing I could appreciate clever repartee.
Sean was drifting away, heading toward the bridge. From what I could see, it spanned little more than a creek, and was only about forty feet long.
“A girl came running along here last night, about this time,” I said. “It was raining, and she might have been on her cell phone.”
“What she look like?” one of the women asked.
“About seventeen, five and a half feet tall, slight, with short blond hair,” I told them. “We think that while she was making the call, someone may have stopped, given her a ride maybe.”
“What time did we go in last night?” the woman asked the man.
“We didn’t even sit out here,” he said. “’Cause it was raining. We enjoyed our evening festivities indoors.”
“That’s right. We didn’t come out here at all,” the second woman said.
I was trying to keep track of what they were saying while keeping an eye on Sean. He was at the bridge, which had two streetlamps at each end, and was peering over the right railing.
“You didn’t hear anything at all?” I asked. “Nothing out of the ordinary?”
“Nope. Except for Mildred here, who had some terrible gas.” He pointed to the woman to his left. There was more cackling.
“And those damn dogs,” Mildred said.
“What dogs?” I asked.
The man said, “They’ve been going at it, off and on, all day, like they’ve been fightin’ over somethin’. Settled down lately.”
“Where?”
The man pointed in Sean’s direction. I turned my head. He was on the other side of the bridge now, leaning over the railing, looking down into the dark. Sean shouted: “Come here! Come here!”
I ran.
“Down there,” he said as I came up alongside him. “It looks like there’s something down there.”
I shone the light down. Water trickled along a gravel bed, probably no more than six inches of it at its deepest point. Along the bank, close to the abutment, there was something lighter in color up against the dirt and brush.
I played the light over it. It looked to me like a foot, and a leg, up to the knee. Badly mangled. I wouldn’t be able to see any more until I got under there.
Sean was starting to move, but I grabbed his arm and said, “Stay here.”
“I gotta see if—”
“Stay here,” I repeated, more firmly.
I ran to the end of the bridge, then cut my way through brush and tall grasses that matted the hill down to the creek. I nearly fell twice, my foot slipping on a beer bottle or can. I worked my way toward the slope of the abutment, shining the light ahead of me.
It was a body. And it was a mess.
From what I could tell, it was a young woman with short blond hair. Wearing the same clothes I’d seen Hanna in the night before. Most of them, anyway.
She was naked from the waist down.
She was on her side, her legs angled down toward the creek. I shone the light on her face, and I was as sure as I could be that this was the girl I’d found in my car when I came out of Iggy’s.
“Jesus,” I said under my breath.
The phone in my jacket pocket, pressed against my chest, went off. It was like someone had placed the paddles of a heart defibrillator on me.
I reached for the phone, nearly dropped it next to the body, and put it to my ear before I’d had a chance to see who it was.
“Hello,” I said.
“You left a message,” Augustus Perry said. He sounded annoyed. “What do you want?”
“What I called about has changed. Something else has moved to the top of the list.”
TWENTY-ONE
She
looks out the window and sees that their boy is home. Well, not a boy, really. He’s a man now. But isn’t that how mothers always view their sons? As their boys?
“I’m
just here for a couple minutes,” he says to her as he comes through the door. “I’ve been running around all night putting out fires and I’m not done yet. But I wanted to see how he is.”
“Wound up,” she says.
“Did you give him something?”
“No, but I may have to. He needs his sleep.”
“I’m doing everything I can,” he says. “This’ll all get sorted out.”
His mother shakes her head doubtfully. “We started off with one big problem and you turned it into two.” She’s about to say something else, but bites her lip. But he knows what it would have been. That if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t have this problem in the basement to begin with.
“I told you I’m going to deal with this. There’s a couple things I can do before morning.”
“You better, because I feel like this is all ready to blow up in our face. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop, but when it does, it’s going to land on a mine.” She sighs. “You’re just one brainstorm after another.”
Wearily, he takes a seat at the kitchen table. “God, I just want things to be normal. Things have never been normal.”
“Some people’s lives are never normal,” she says. “That’s just the way it is.” She surveys the room, but she’s really looking beyond it. More to herself than her son, she says, “It’s like we’re all prisoners. I haven’t had a vacation in years.”
“And I haven’t had a life,” he says. “This overshadows everything. It’s no wonder she broke up with me.”
“She wasn’t right for you.” His mother never thought any of his girlfriends were right for him. “What did she say, exactly?”
“She didn’t really say anything. She just ended it. But I know why. It’s because she could tell something wasn’t right. I mean, I couldn’t even bring her here, to meet you. It had to be at a coffee shop. She had to think it was weird that everything about this house was off limits.”
The woman puts her hand to her forehead. It’s late, and she’s exhausted. “You have more important things to worry about. Finding that girl, and then the boy. Making sure he can’t hurt us.”
“I know. You don’t have to keep telling me.”
“Even after you find them, deal with them, we may have to make some changes around here,” she says, casting her eyes down to the floor, as though she can see right through it.
“I’m going to go down and see him.”
“There’s something going on with his book,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s never where I can see it. He says he writes in it after I’ve gone. That’s not like him. I’m worried what he might be writing in it. I need you to go down and find it.”
He goes downstairs, is gone several minutes. When he returns, he says to his mother, “It’s not there. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“What’d he say?”
“I asked him what he’d done with it. He said he didn’t remember.”
“Tell me he didn’t . . .”
“I think he did. I think he gave it to the kid.”
The woman closes her eyes, as though she’s in physical pain.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s all gibberish. It’s meaningless.”
She shakes her head. “Maybe. But there are dates. And it’s all in his handwriting.”
TWENTY-TWO
When
Scott was twelve, he had an idea for a movie. He spelled it out for Donna and me over dinner.
“It’s about this guy who comes to Earth from another galaxy, or maybe it’s this one, like from Mars or something, it doesn’t really matter, but he comes here wanting to see what Earth people are like, and he has to take human form so nobody can see what he really looks like, which is kind of gross. Like, he has what looks like worms all over his face or something, but they’re probably blood vessels.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, glancing down at my noodles.
“At first I was thinking someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger could play him, but it’s not really a Terminator kind of role, so I have to think about that a bit more. His mission is to make friends with one person, and to study him, and he picks someone totally at random and watches what this person does, and how this Earthling interacts with other Earthlings. But what the alien doesn’t know is, he picked a real nerdy, geeky guy who doesn’t have hardly any friends, so he doesn’t interact much with other Earthlings. So the alien guy goes back to his home planet and reports that all Earthlings are lonely and unhappy and don’t really fit in, because they’re weird and like stuff nobody else likes.”
Donna and I said nothing for a moment. Finally, I asked, “That’s how it ends?”
Scott shook his head. “No, no. It has a happy ending. The alien guy comes back, and takes the person he was, like, shadowing, back to his own planet, because he feels sorry for him, and the Earthling turns out to be really happy there because everyone thinks he’s really cool and interesting and he doesn’t think about killing himself anymore.”
Donna put her hand over her mouth, got up, and left the room.
Scott said, “Was it the worms thing? I could take that out if it’s too gross.”
* * *
I’m
not sure why that memory popped into my head after I ended my brief conversation with Augustus Perry and made my way back up to the bridge, where Sean Skilling was waiting for me. Of course, I had Scott flashbacks about every five minutes since he’d died. He was always there, just below the surface, regardless of what I was doing.
Maybe it was the notion of happy endings, how elusive they can be, and how they aren’t the same for everyone. For Scott, a geeky kid transplanted to another world, millions of miles from home, finds his happy ending among aliens who appreciate his uniqueness. But was it a happy ending for the parents he left behind?
Scott was on my mind because I was starting to worry there might be no happy ending in my search for Claire Sanders. Not if she ended up the same way her friend Hanna Rodomski had.
When I got to Sean, he was a mess.
“Is it her?” he asked, tears running down his cheeks. “It can’t be her. There’s no way it’s her.”
“I’m pretty sure it is,” I said. “But it’s a bad scene down there.”
I had to grab him as he attempted to get past me to go under the bridge and see what I had seen.
“You can’t go down there.”
“Get the fuck out of my way,” he said, practically spitting the words into my face. He was a strong kid, and I wasn’t sure I was any match for him, but there was no way I wanted him going down there and seeing Hanna. First, he just didn’t need that, and second, I didn’t want him messing with evidence.
Although the dogs had already done a good job of that.
“Sean, listen to me,” I said, blocking his path. “You can’t go near her. I may have already screwed things up, getting as close as I did. Are you hearing me? Whoever did this to Hanna, we want the son of a bitch caught. You go down there now and you run a chance of messing up a crime scene. You hear me?”
I could feel the muscles in his arms, taut as steel, relax ever so slightly. “Please,” I said. “We’ll stay here on the bridge, we’ll stand guard, make sure no one else goes down and disturbs her, okay? Let’s preserve what dignity she has left.”
He turned and walked to the other side of the bridge, put his hand on the rusted railing. His body started to shake with sobs. I put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to find out who did this. I swear.”
Sean turned and pointed an accusing finger at my face. “This is your fault. You dropped her off. You left her here for whoever killed her.”
I was aware.
I thought about that black pickup, pulled over to the side of the road, that I’d noticed seconds after Hanna had fled my car. The one that had taken off by the time I’d turned around and gone back for another look. I struggled to remember any details about it. Ford or Dodge? Foreign or domestic? I was usually good at that sort of thing, but it had been dark, and it had been raining.
“If I hadn’t got pulled over by that damn cop . . . ,” Sean said. “I was supposed to
be
there. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there. She wouldn’t have tried to run away from
me
.”
The trio from the porch were cautiously approaching. The one I knew as Mildred called out, “What’s happened?”
“There’s a body under the bridge,” I said.
“Mother of God,” Mildred said.
I told her the police would be here shortly. When I’d told Augie who it was I’d found under the bridge, he didn’t know the first name, but he’d recognized the last. “Jesus. That must be Chris Rodomski’s kid. Chris and Glynis.”
I’d confirmed it for him. He’d wanted to know what I was doing there, but agreed to wait for details until we could talk face-to-face.
“Ten minutes,” he’d said. “And I’ll call it in.”
I could hear sirens in the distance as I walked back over to Sean.
“I’m gonna hafta call my parents,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Look, Sean, before the cops get here, is there anything you haven’t told me? About who Hanna was helping Claire get away from?”
He shook his head. “I told you what I know. I swear.”
“After the cops let you off last night, after you ran the stop sign, go through it with me. What did you do then?”
“I drove by Patchett’s, just in case Claire was still there. Then I went to Iggy’s, in case Hanna or her were still around.”
“What time did you get to Iggy’s? Did you see Hanna get into my car?”
“No. I never saw you.”
“So you didn’t follow me, did you, Sean?”
“What?”
“In your Ranger. Did you follow me down this way?”
He blinked at me. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw a black pickup around here after Hanna got out of my car. I’m gonna have to tell the police that.”
The sirens grew louder.
Sean shook his head. “Are the cops going to think I did this?”
“They always look at the boyfriend. Luckily for you, the cops are your best alibi, since they had you pulled over around the time Hanna was killed. Plus, you may have been seen at Iggy’s, or caught on their security cam, if they have one, which again places you away from the scene.”
I hoped Iggy’s was more diligent than Patchett’s where security was concerned. If they had cameras, Claire might have been caught on them after I’d headed off with Hanna.
The first cruiser arrived at the scene, lights flashing, siren wailing. Two officers—a male and a female—got out. Kate Ramsey and her partner. The ones who’d sent the bikers on their way. Seconds later, another car rolled up. Out got Ricky Haines and Hank Brindle.
“What about you?” Sean asked.
The arrivals had distracted me. “Huh? What about me?”
“Aren’t they just as likely to think you did it?” Sean asked. “You dropped her off just before she got killed.”
It occurred to me at that moment that pissing off the chief of police at family get-togethers over the years might not have been such a good idea.