by Jessa Archer
Which meant I needed to schedule a serious conversation with two of the most important people in my life. Come to think of it, with all three, since Wren had chimed in to support Ed today when he insisted that I keep the phone call open so he could listen in.
Wren had known me the longest and had been my sounding board for most of the key decisions in my life. She had been all about me taking back control of my life during the divorce and move to Thistlewood. So I’d test out my Declaration of Independence on her. If it went over like a lead balloon, that would give me time to make adjustments before talking to Cassie and Ed.
✰ Chapter Thirteen ✰
I unlocked the back door and stepped into the press room. Stella, my ancient printing press, and Blanche, the slightly younger Linotype machine, stared at me woefully, reminding me that they were still waiting for me to find either the time to figure out how to make Stella’s repairs myself or else fork over the exorbitant sum to have the one expert in the country who still worked on dinosaurs like her fly here to get it back into order.
Blanche was still working fine, but it didn’t really help to have the typesetting capacity if I couldn’t print the paper in-house. I’m pretty sure the workers at the company in Knoxville that currently cranks out my print edition each week would be rolling on the floor laughing if I carted in eight giant printing formes instead of submitting my copy online.
My one attempt at DIY had failed miserably. After waiting several months for the replacement part to arrive, I carefully read the Heidelberg manual I’d found online, watched a few online videos from a printing museum, then rolled up my sleeves and got to work. Halfway through, the spring grew tired of my amateur efforts and sprang for the nearest exit—which happened to be into the belly of the beast itself.
I still haven’t found it. I’d swept out dozens of pens and paper clips and more peanut M&Ms (Mr. Dealey’s addiction) than I could count, along with a red star-shaped earring. Mine were red, Tanya’s were blue, and Wren’s were white, and we’d bought them from one of the booths at the annual celebration in Thistlewood Park, the very last time the three of us were together.
We’d spread a blanket out on the lawn and watched the fireworks, with the smells of hot dogs, funnel cakes, and the ever-present mosquito spray filling the air. The thing that made me a little crazy was that I couldn’t remember anything we’d talked about or done, aside from buying the earrings. We’d probably joked about guys we were crushing on or talked about our upcoming exit from Thistlewood. It was just another conversation, one of many we’d had, and one of the many more that we all assumed we’d have.
When the last smoky plumes of the finale faded away, we’d split up. Tanya had only managed to get an hour off for the fireworks, and she had to be back at the diner to help with closing. Then she’d meet us at Jolly’s for the second round of fireworks—the illegal, decidedly less-professional variety that would sound off along the river from midnight until two or three in the morning, or whenever a deputy arrived to tell us someone had complained. The official story was that we were spending the night at Tanya’s house, which meant curfew was nonexistent. But then she never showed at the party.
Was there a pair of blue star-shaped earrings in the trunk of that Mercury? I was pretty sure that was the case. Blevins would never confirm it, but maybe Billy would at some point. It wasn’t that I needed confirmation that the body was hers. Obviously the lab report would confirm that. But it would give me a sense of whether she wound up in that trunk on the night of July 4th or at some later time.
I glanced over at the rows of font cases that lined the walls, knowing I’d need to go through Mr. Dealey’s list to find an original font for Tanya’s obituary. I already had an idea, but it would require a little online detective work to figure out what font was used on the cover of the last Bonnie Tyler album she owned. And I’d need to come up with one for her mother’s, too, although I didn’t plan to expend a lot of effort on that one, given how little effort she’d expended on finding her daughter. Like Mr. Dealey, I’d print every obituary in a font we hadn’t used elsewhere, even if I hadn’t particularly liked the person. But it would be something fairly standard—like Century Gothic, Palatino, or Arial.
My thermos of coffee was still in the front office. I decided to grab it and one of Wren’s brownies before diving in, since I’d sort of skipped lunch. It was a good thing I did, because someone was at the front door.
Not Blevins, as I’d feared, but the younger of the two brothers who’d found Tanya’s car. He was about to walk away, since the sign was flipped to CLOSED. I waved both hands, one of which was now holding a brownie, to catch his attention and then hurried to the front to let him in.
“Sorry,” I told him. “I was in the back and forgot to flip the sign.”
“I’m Jack,” he said. “We spoke yesterday outside the diner?”
“I remember. Please come in. Would you like a brownie?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry about yesterday. Rich can be obnoxious, especially when he’s upset. And even though he didn’t want to admit it yesterday, he was upset. He took off for the surface as fast as I did when he saw that, even though he tries to act all cool now.”
“That’s pretty typical,” I said. “People process things differently.”
“I don’t think he processes things at all. But I’m not here to talk about Rich.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
Jack snorted. “He does not. But he’s met some girl who came to the reunion with Zoe, our cousin. Told him I was going drive in to get something from the diner. As long as I bring them back pie, I’m covered.” He glanced down at the floor. “You said you knew the victim?”
“I knew one of them.”
“There was more than one?”
At least the comments on the website had relieved me of the need to avoid speculating on the information that Billy gave to Ed. “Rumor has it there was a body in the trunk,” I told Jack. “I’m pretty sure that’s the girl I knew since the car belonged to her. The guy you saw, the one behind the wheel—the police still don’t have an identification on him. Or if they do, no one has told me yet.”
“Do they know why your friend was in the trunk?” he asked.
“No. Her name was Tanya Blackburn. She just…disappeared without a trace more than thirty years ago. Everyone thought she ran off to Nashville. She was going to be a singer. I never believed it, but I’ll admit there was a tiny part of me that hoped I was wrong and she was still alive somewhere.”
“Sorry,” he said.
I shrugged. “There’s also a part of me that’s glad to have closure, to be honest. To know that I hadn’t been wrong about our friendship.”
“So what did you want to know?”
That was a good question, and I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. I had felt there was something I could learn from talking to the brothers back at the diner. I still felt that way as we sat there, even though I couldn’t really put my finger on it. That had often been the case when I interviewed people, though. It was an instinct, a sense that even if you weren’t sure why you were digging, there was something under the surface.
“I just want to know what you saw,” I said. “In your own words.”
“Okay.” He sighed, and his shoulders seemed to sink inward. “We got some new snorkel equipment for Christmas. We wanted to practice diving under so that we could see more, and that area is kind of still.” He took a breath. “Rich is bad about wanting to get up early. We had gotten into town late the night before, and the thing I remember most about that morning is how much I was dragging. He practically had to put me in the truck. I tried to get him to go alone and leave me back at the cabin.”
He looked at me. “But that’s dangerous, so I went anyway. We hadn’t been at it long. Maybe twenty minutes when I first saw the car. The river is deeper out there in the middle than you would think, and at first, I had no idea what I was looking at. It looked like a hunk of mud, o
r a huge boulder of some sort.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything, and he stared beyond me to the paintings propped up on my desk. “That’s—um. Isn’t that the spot where we found the car?”
“Yes. It’s something a friend of mine gave me. I was just…looking at it as I started writing the story. To kind of set the scene.”
I felt bad because that was mostly a lie, but I wasn’t sure what else I could tell him that would make sense.
“Anyway,” he said after a moment, “the sun was shining down, and there was this one perfect ray…I’ll never forget it. It shot through the water like a sword, and everything around me just kinda shimmered. It was beautiful…until it wasn’t anymore. There was a glint of metal, and I realized I was looking at a car. I decided to dive down for a better look. Didn’t even think about the possibility that there might be someone in it. Rich followed me, which was a little surprising. As you probably noticed, he likes to play the boss because he’s older. But truth is, I’m the better swimmer. And he’s probably regretting following my lead. I’m pretty sure that sight followed him into his dreams just like it did mine, even though he’ll never admit it.”
“I worked for the Nashville News-Journal for years,” I told him. “And I saw quite a few things that followed me into dreams. It will be rough for a bit, but it fades.” Most of the time, I thought, but I decided not to add that. There were definitely a few sights that still made the occasional cameo in my dreamscape, but those were usually connected to cases that were never solved.
He glanced down at my hand, still holding the brownie. I was having second thoughts about eating it given the topic of discussion, but apparently he was having second thoughts about refusing my offer. Maybe talking about it was helping. Or maybe it was just that teenagers are bottomless pits, and it takes more than a skeleton in a submerged car to kill their appetites. So I motioned to the plate behind him again, and this time he grabbed one.
My phone signaled a call from Ed. “I need to take this,” I told Jack. “There are some bottles of water under the desk over there if you want something to wash down the brownie.”
I stepped into the back room. “What’s up?”
“I can’t just call to hear your voice?”
I laughed. “You can, but you don’t. Not in the middle of a writing session.”
“Busted,” he said. “Just wanted to give you a heads-up that Bud has apparently taken off. I don’t know if he’s got something to hide or if Blevins just scared the living daylights out of him, but Billy tells me they’re putting out an APB. His mom had a whole bunch of prescription meds in her system. Mixing Vicodin and Valium is a bad idea, especially if you wash them down with vodka. No clue whether it was accident, suicide, or foul play, but running off doesn’t look good.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. I don’t think he killed her, though. Why would he have called me to come over?”
“No clue.”
“Listen, I’ve got one of the two snorkelers out in the front office. He just dropped by…”
Ed laughed. “Out of the blue.”
“Okay, no. Like I told you before, I saw them at the diner and asked if they’d talk to me. But I didn’t try to track them down. The younger one just showed up. So…let’s both get back to work.”
“Yes, ma’am, right away, ma’am.”
I cut the call and then went back into the front office.
“Sorry about that. Where were we? And you can definitely have another brownie if you want. They’ll probably go stale otherwise.”
That was a total lie. Cassie, Ed, and I would polish off every single one of those babies. But we didn’t really need all of them, so I was glad when he grabbed a second one.
Okay, kind of glad.
“I was telling you about finding the car,” Jack said. “The weirdest thing, though, was that we hadn’t really planned on going to that spot. Everyone else was swimming down at the location near the campground, on the other side of the marina, and we could have practiced with the snorkels over there just as easily. Rich and I had to hike down to this place, a good fifteen minutes. But we had an entire day to kill, since most of the adults had gone over to the casino. My cousins are…” He rolled his eyes. “Let’s just say we don’t have much in common. And the night before, over at the marina snack bar, some guy had told all of us this dumb local legend about a bootlegger who buried one of those old army chests down there, full of money, rather than turn it over to the government.”
“I never heard that particular legend,” I told him, smiling. “The one I heard was that there was a trunk of Confederate gold that they didn’t want to turn over to the Yankees. I think old people make those things up just to give kids something to do.”
He laughed. “Yeah. The man who told us was pretty old and really into it. Even drew us a map. My cousins just blew him off. I mean, Rich and I didn’t believe him for a second…the river’s not that deep, even in that section. If there was actually treasure, someone would have found it, especially if he had a map. I even asked the guy why he didn’t go look for it himself if he had a map. He got that look…the one people get when you catch them in a lie. And he actually had to think about it for a good two seconds before coming up with the excuse that he couldn’t swim. But to be fair, I think he’d been drinking.”
“Could you describe the guy? The one who gave you the map?”
He thought for a moment. “Like I said, kind of old. Maybe sixty? And he’d been drinking. His eyes were all bloodshot, and he smelled like stale laundry. Which probably should have been our cue not to trust him.”
I stopped to think for a moment. The man he’d described was almost certainly Bud. It would have been fairly obvious even if I hadn’t suspected that he was the artist behind my newly acquired paintings.
“And…you told all of this to the sheriff yesterday?”
Jack nodded. “Most of it, yeah. Maybe not all of the details. You ask more questions than he did.”
A prickle of unease crept along my arms and back. “Do you still have the map?”
“No. Rich gave it to the sheriff.”
As if on cue, Steve Blevins strolled through the front door. I hadn’t flipped the sign, so it still said Closed, but in retrospect, I should have locked the darn thing since I knew there was a two-legged skunk in the vicinity.
“Pretty sure I told you not to bother these guys, Townsend.” Blevins glanced down at Jack’s hand. “And here I find you luring kids in with gingerbread, like that witch in Hansel and Gretel.”
“It’s a brownie,” Jack said. “And she didn’t lure me in. I looked up the local paper online last night to see if there was any more information about the car. Saw a pretty cool story from a few months back about a murder case. Since you never called to give us an update, I decided to see if she had any details.”
“Su-u-u-re,” Blevins drawled. “But maybe you should get back down to the campground and keep out of trouble, hmm? I have to take her statement about an entirely different crime scene.”
Jack hesitated for a moment, then got up. “Thanks, Ms. Townsend. It was nice talking to you. And again, I’m sorry about your friend.”
✰ Chapter Fourteen ✰
I really wished Jack hadn’t said the last bit, because I was pretty sure that Blevins wouldn’t be happy that I’d mentioned Tanya. But my mind was still back on the last two words the sheriff had spoken: crime scene. Last I’d heard, Mrs. Blackburn’s death was precisely that—a death. No hint of foul play. There was a decent chance that Blevins was just blowing smoke, but now I wondered if something might have changed.
But Blevins was looking past me, exactly as Jack had done a few minutes ago.
“That’s Lover’s Leap. Where did you get those?”
“At the estate sale. Like I told you before.”
He crossed over to the desk, grabbing a brownie without even asking. Then he crouched down to examine the canvas more closely. “Lucy McBride painted this?”
He didn’t answer, just kept staring at the painting. “Did you buy this before or after we pulled up the car?”
“Before,” I said, although I couldn’t see what difference it made.
“Seems kind of a weird coincidence, doesn’t it? And you didn’t think this was something I should know?”
“And you didn’t seem to think I should know Tanya’s body was stuffed in the trunk,” I said, glaring at him. The words were out before I even thought about Ed’s caution that I needed to find another source, but it was too late to pull them back now. “And before you tell me you’re under no obligation to share information with the press, I was under no obligation to deliver that news to Mrs. Blackburn yesterday.”
“How did you know that?” he asked.
I floundered for a moment and then remembered that I did have another source for that information. Not a solid one, but it would have to do. “I didn’t know it until you confirmed it just now. But hold on a sec and I’ll show you.” I turned my chair around to face my computer.
Once I had the Star Online loaded, I clicked the button to turn on comments and pushed the laptop toward Blevins.
“I turned the comments off last night so that we wouldn’t get any more speculation,” I said. “But face it, Steve, you can’t keep a secret in Thistlewood. Not unless you plan to close down the diner and confiscate cellphones and computers. And still, everyone would probably gather in the park, like blackbirds on a telephone wire, to dish about the latest. It’s just human nature.”
