Cry Mercy (10 page)

The only other time she'd mentioned it, he'd silenced her with a softly said, “Gotta protect my investment, Angie,” and that was the end of that.

The house came into view before the row of cinder-block garages did. Since the passing of both grandparents, Nick had never driven up that lane without feeling his heart pinch just a little. He missed them both, and probably always would. More, maybe, even than he missed his parents.

He parked near the back porch where his grandmother's roses stretched up and over onto the roof and got out of his car, listening to the stillness there. No traffic noise, no human sounds. It was the quietest place he knew. He fingered the old key ring in his pocket, debating. House first or barn or garages? He opted for none of those, and instead, made his way down to the pond.

The air smelled clean, of new grass and the late spring flowers that grew wild. He knew the names of some—marsh marigolds, violets, cornflowers—but
he'd forgotten more than he'd remembered. As a boy, learning the names of flowers hadn't been a priority. He knew roses, of course, and dandelions, and Queen Anne's lace, but it was too early still for them. He had a sudden memory of seeing a picture in one of his grandmother's magazines of a woman identified as Princess Anne, and wondering aloud if she was the lady the flower was named for, and if so, what she'd done to have been demoted from queen to princess. Wendy had laughed at him and called him a cute kid. It was the last summer they'd both spent time at the farm together. The following year, Wendy had gone off to Princeton and Nick had the farm and his grandparents to himself.

The cattails were thicker than he'd seen them in past years, and as he walked the slope down to the water, a great blue heron rose on wide wings from the reeds and took off abruptly, as much spooked by Nick as Nick had been by the bird. Geese nested amidst the grass that had grown long, and weeds grew unchecked on the bank. He put
Clean around pond
on his mental checklist.

The playhouse his grandfather had built on the bank still stood, but it looked as if it had taken a beating during that last winter storm. Nick pushed the door open and stepped inside. The smell of musk and dry rot hung in the air, and he added another mental note to ask Herb if he knew a good carpenter who could come out and take a look at it, see if it could be salvaged. He hated the thought of having to take it down. Wendy had moved most of the furniture up to the house at the end of the summer before she died. Belinda was too old for a playhouse, she'd told Nick,
but a glance at the contents of an old bookshelf made him wonder.
Pippi Longstocking. Nancy Drew. Anne of Green Gables
. He picked one from the shelf and opened it, recognized the
BH
written in the fancy, curly script Belinda had affected when she was younger. He replaced the book on the shelf and went back outside, noting that the doorframe was rotting and the door itself loose on the hinges.

Better make that
Call Herb today
.

He checked the barn on his way to the house, the old door squealing like mad on its rusty hinges. Belinda's boxes were still stacked inside the door, and he carried them, one by one, up to the house where he placed them in the front hall. As he carried out the last of the cartons, he saw that the barn, too, could use some repair. He placed the box on the ground and walked back inside, taking note of the work that needed to be done. By the back door, he spied his grandfather's old John Deere tractor, the one he'd had for as long as Nick could remember. He'd retired it when Nick was in his teens, having decided that renting out his fields and having someone else plow and plant and harvest gave him more time for the things that really mattered to him.

The things that had mattered most to Dominic Perone—after his family, of course—were housed in the sturdy block garages he'd built, one after another, to accommodate them. By the time Nick was five years old, he could rattle off the names of every one of the occupants of those garages.

The 1955 Chevy. The 1959 Cadillac. The 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk. The 1953 Oldsmobile Fiesta.

“These are the modern classics,” his grandfather would tell Nick as he cleaned a spark plug. “Yes, sir, these and the American muscle cars, they're going to bring in big bucks one day. You mark my words, Nicky.”

He'd point to the cars, ten years old or so, that he'd bought for cheap.

“GTO, Camaro, Charger, Mustang,” he'd prophesized. “These babies breathe fire.”

And then he'd open the garage that held his two very special loves. “Sixty-three Corvette Stingray split-window coupe, Nick. Instant classic. Only produced one year. Damn, but she's a beauty, isn't she?”

The other—“Sixty-eight Shelby Cobra GT 350 fast-back. This little sweetheart could shake the ground under your feet and rattle the teeth in the back of your mouth”—he'd worked on restoring only when Nick was available. It had taken two full summers to complete. Nick had never had a better time in his life. Every minute he spent working on that car had been golden, magic.

Hell, that whole summer he'd been seventeen—the summer of '89—had been magic. There'd been the hot August night he and his granddad had been glued to the TV to watch the replay of Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers pitching that mystical five thousandth strikeout to the Oakland A's Rickey Henderson. Five thousand strikeouts! The thought of it had made Nick's head spin. His grandmother had been sitting in her favorite chair reading
The Joy Luck Club and
had paused to watch the replay and peered over the top of her glasses to murmur, “I'm not sure I understand what all the fuss is about.”

The next year, Dominic sold the Shelby Cobra to pay Nick's college expenses after his mother died and his father had gone off to look for wife number three. Nick would never forget the sense of loss he felt when he found out that prized car soon would be parked in someone else's garage.

“You did
what?”
Nick had come very close to shouting at Dominic, something he'd never done.

“Sold it,” his granddad replied with more nonchalance than he'd probably felt. “Got a great price for it.”

“We spent two whole years on that car.” He was close to going into shock. “How could you sell it?”

“It was an investment, Nick. It was always meant to be an investment. Nothing more.”

Nothing more?
As young as he'd been at the time, Nick had known rationalization when he heard it.

Even now though, almost twenty years later, the car and his grandfather both long gone, Nick almost believed he could open that garage bay and he'd see that blue car—Acapulco blue, to be precise—up on the lifts, his grandfather underneath it, a small part in one hand, the other hand gesturing for Nick to come see, to watch and to learn.

Magical days, indeed.

But if he had that car back now, what would it be worth? The last one he'd seen go at auction topped $110,000 and hadn't been in as good condition as theirs had been. But what was the point in looking back?

Try as he might to keep his focus on the present, sometimes looking back was unavoidable.

He entered the house from the side porch and
noted two of the steps were sagging. Just something else for the list to go over with Herb. Once inside, he got himself a glass of water and a kitchen knife and went into the front hall where he'd stacked Belinda's boxes. He opened the front door and the side windows to let the stiff, settled air escape and hopefully allow some fresh, dust-free air in.

His eyes went from one box to the next and wondered where to start. He didn't really want to start at all, he realized. If she were to come back, would she be annoyed that he'd rifled through her belongings? And if she wasn't coming back, it seemed macabre to him to go through the clothes she wore and the books she read and the things that mattered to her. The thought that she might not come back at all was one he'd avoided as much as possible, because it was too sad to think about.

Buck up, Perone
.

With the knife, he cut through the tape on the top of the first box and peeled back the cardboard. Determining that the box held only clothes, Nick put it aside and turned his attention to the next one. Same thing: clothes. The third and fourth boxes were filled with more clothes.

“How many times a day did this kid change?” he muttered as he moved the unopened boxes to the living room.

Ah, this was more like it—books, papers, tests, more papers, notebooks. Nick took out a stack and shuffled through them, but he found no reference to anyone named D.S. nor anything that would give him a sense of where she was going on January twenty-fourth.

“Come on, Belinda. Help me out here,” he muttered.

On to the next box. More textbooks—had he known she'd been taking a class in genetics?—and a blizzard of index cards scattered throughout. He reached into the box and pulled out the one thing he could see that had color. The orange folder held some printed sheets, which proved to be Belinda's cell-phone bills. He recalled that the police had requested copies from the carrier, but they hadn't been much help in identifying D.S. He put the file back in the box, stood and stretched, thinking about where he might go to grab some food. His stomach had begun to loudly remind him that he'd skipped lunch and it was well past the time when he usually ate. There was the Friendly Diner down on Wilkins Road; they were always good for a decent meal.

He was out the door and behind the wheel of his car, about to make a K-turn, when he hesitated. Something nagged at him, something about the phone bills. Nick turned off the ignition and returned to the house, to the foyer, to the box he'd just closed up. The orange folder was visible through the crack made by the top flaps, and he stuck his hand in and pulled it out. The most recent bill was on top, and he scanned it for the date.

July, 2008. Then he remembered that she'd gotten a new phone, a new plan, a new carrier—and a new number that summer. What had she said at the time? Something about an old boyfriend who wouldn't stop calling. Deb would know.

He flipped through the pages, taking note of all the out-of-state calls Belinda had made over the 2007-08
school year and into the summer of 2008. Maybe Deb knew something about those as well.

He tucked the bill back into the folder with the others and took the whole thing with him. Back in the car, he plugged his phone into the charger to give it a little more juice. He had a feeling he'd need every one of those bars before the night was over.

S
o how'd your first day go?” Mallory said, as she stopped in Emme's office on her way home for the night.

“Good. Really good, actually.” Emme ticked off her accomplishments on the fingers of one hand. “I met with Nick Perone, Chief Dietrich, Debra New-house, and got back in time to pick Chloe up from school, though just barely.”

“I'd say that qualifies as damned good.” Mallory dropped her briefcase near the door and came partway into the room. “What's the uncle like?”

Emme thought it over for a moment, considering how best to answer.
Tall, dark, and oh-my-goodness
first came to mind, but this being her first case, she went for something a little more professional.

“Seems smart. Smart enough to run a profitable business. He's what a cop I used to know would call a gearhead.”

“A what?”

“A gearhead. Really into cars. He repairs—excuse me, he
restores
old ones. Excuse me twice, that would
be classic automobiles. He has this spiffy garage that doesn't look anything remotely like a garage from the outside. It's brick, Federal looking. Very nice.” She paused before adding, “I'd say he cares a lot about his niece. I think he suspects she might be dead, but he needs to know for sure. I don't think he's deluding himself, where she's concerned. He pretty much reiterated everything in the report he had submitted, but I did learn something very interesting. I asked about getting in touch with the girl's father, you know, thinking maybe she took off with him, but according to Nick, he's never known who the father was. That had been in the report, but I thought it had been miswritten or something. I mean, you'd know who your niece's father was, wouldn't you?”

“The girl's mother is his sister, right?” Mallory frowned. “How could he not know?”

“That was my reaction, too, but he said that his sister never told him, and when he hinted around about it, she shut down the conversation. So he let it go, figuring it was just something she didn't want to talk about.”

“Like maybe a relationship that didn't work out?”

Emme nodded. “I suppose. He said the only thing she ever told him about Belinda's father was that he would never be a factor in her life.”

“So maybe she never told the guy she was pregnant, and decided to raise her baby on her own.”

“That's what it sounds like to me.” Emme rested her head against the back of her chair.

“Any chance the father might have found out somehow, and came looking for her?”

“There's no way of knowing. Wendy—the mother of the missing girl—died in a car accident five years ago. Who knows who she might have been in touch with before she died?” Emme swiveled the chair slowly, side to side. “Now, the roommate did say that Belle—Belinda—once said that she didn't have a father, but she assumed that meant the father was dead or was AWOL.”

“Did the roommate have anything else to say?”

“Only that while the police report reflects that Belinda took her laptop with her, Debra says that isn't so. She claims that the laptop was still on Belinda's desk when she woke up, hours after Belinda left the room. It was gone later that day, but she can't pinpoint when it disappeared.”

“Did she report that to the police?”

“No, but I called the chief on my way back and told him. He was going to speak with the reporting officer about that. Debra thinks he merely misunderstood what she said.”

“Any other little gems surface?”

“Not that I can think of offhand.”

The sound of two small feet running drew their attention to the hall. Seconds later, Chloe and Susanna appeared in the doorway.