by E M Kaplan
“It was Ryan who attacked him, wasn’t it?” Drew asked. “We were just talking to that little creep this morning.”
“I think so.” She turned to the cop to explain. “We suspect the bartender from the Omni downtown has a grudge against Billy for firing him. He also gave us this tooth bridge this morning, claiming he found it at Smiley’s in the fire pit when he was working there almost a decade ago.” Josie handed the dental appliance over, relieved to be rid of it. The thing was disgusting, even though it was possibly the closest piece of evidence of the missing woman so far. It carried a lot of bad mojo as far as Josie was concerned—which wasn’t the same thing as being haunted. It just felt…nasty.
The cop took the baggie and also wrote down a few things in a notepad. Josie felt confident he’d follow up on some of the leads they gave him, not only judging by his attentiveness, but by the way he’d treated Marion the previous night, as if he were a human being. As wary as she’d been of cops in the past, she found that she was extremely in favor of this particular one.
Josie neglected to mention the tooth bridge to Skip when he eventually came out of Marion’s room. She figured his possessiveness with the file was enough to put him over the top when it came to something that came directly from the victim’s mouth. She didn’t want to witness that kind of enthusiasm over something so nauseating and personal a possession as that. But she did feel bad about it since Skip had trusted her with so much information.
“I don’t get it,” Skip said. “Why would someone beat up our beauty queen in there and then fire bomb the Blake house? Or…did he set the explosion to go off and then accidentally discover Marion sleeping next to the pool?”
Josie had a million questions herself. Had Ryan been working alone? Did someone hire him? All of this violence and destruction couldn’t have been the result of a simple vendetta against Billy for firing him.
“Crap,” she said as another mini-realization struck. “Ryan had black paint on his fingers. I’d bet you a million bucks he was the one who painted the graffiti on the side of the restaurant.”
Chapter 35
“Who is this kid and why is he suddenly behind everything about this case?” Skip asked, his normally dry, wrinkled brow furrowing even more. He had a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand.
He had a reason to be confused. Ryan probably hadn’t even been born yet while Skip had been busy assembling his beloved case file about Mary Clare. Ryan wasn’t even a blip on Skip’s radar, so there was no way he could have factored him into the puzzle of Billy Blake’s messed up life.
“Ryan was a busboy at Smiley’s a long time ago. He quit.”
“And…?” Skip asked.
“And nothing,” Josie said. “He was just a busboy. Product of a single-parent household. Currently works as a bartender downtown while he creates ironic steel sculptures.”
“That makes no sense. Why would he graffiti the restaurant, act like a homophobic skinhead and beat up Marion, and set the house on fire—and do all of this decades later?”
“I don’t know.”
Even with the added evidence of Ryan possessing the dental bridge and possibly resenting Billy Blake for having anger issues—and Josie stirring up the subject while chatting with him in the hotel restaurant—there didn’t seem to be enough that was trigger-worthy to set him off all these years later.
It made absolutely no sense.
Unless…something else was motivating him. What would a young starving artist want? A showing in a gallery. Connections in the art world. Cold, hard cash. All definitely possibilities. And all ones that could be traced in time, through money trails or sudden and unexpected success in Ryan’s future. However, Josie didn’t have time for that. Two days remained in her Texas vacation. Her clock was ticking down, and fast.
She turned to Drew. “How about we go check out the house now?”
Any evidence left at the house might help another piece of the puzzle fall into place. Right now, however, it seemed like she might never find the missing parts.
#
The drive through the twisted roads of Billy’s neighborhood was just as challenging in daylight as it had been the night before, mainly because Josie had been a passenger in Lizzie’s car the first time. But what made it difficult were the lack of road markers and recognizable landmarks. Every gnarled live oak tree looked the same as the last.
Skip followed their rental car in his ancient Datsun truck, which looked like it was about to be eaten through by rust. She’d offered him a ride with them, but he’d declined, saying he needed to run errands afterward. As she glanced in her review mirror at him, she wondered what he did in his spare time. Hot yoga, maybe. That would dry a body out faster than he could say, “Namaste, electrolytes.”
She rounded the last corner, expecting to see nothing but the burned out husk of the house, like Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre. Instead, nothing seemed out of place from the front view of the house. The tower thingy—cupola—was still intact, flanked on either side by the stone wings of the house. Other than yellow police tape winding around the entire front perimeter, it didn’t look any different than before.
“Didn’t DJ say the house was pretty much destroyed? He said the west side was almost entirely gone and—oh.”
She was cut off in mid-sentence as they followed the slightly rounded curve of the driveway and she saw the front of the house was nearly all that was left other than the garage. Charred half-walls stood in a shaky semblance of the house’s former footprint. The pristine landscaping had been stomped, chopped, and otherwise demolished by both debris and, Josie assumed, firefighters, people doing their darnedest to try to save the structure.
“Wow,” she said as they climbed out to join Skip beside their cars. They stood in silence, mouths hanging open. Now she was seeing ghosts—the specter of the majestic house in her mind’s eye as it had stood in its full glory just the night before.
The smell of smoke and damp ash still hung in the air, along with a weird chemical odor she hadn’t been expecting. What was that? Insulation? Fibers from inside the house? She’d never been on the scene of a structure fire, and all she knew was that it definitely didn’t smell like a barbecue smokehouse—which was savory spices, meat, and clean wood fire. No, this was…ruin. Destruction. Entropy. Chaos and disorder.
“We shouldn’t go any closer,” Drew, the voice of reason, said.
Skip raised his eyebrow at Josie as if to say, Is this Nervous Nelly for real?
True, the last thing she wanted to do was to interfere with any potential investigation, or get arrested for once again trespassing. Not only was this the site of a possible arson, it was also where Marion had been attacked. Ryan might have left evidence in that matter as well.
But she was here now. And the authorities weren’t, at least for the moment.
She took a step toward the house, but Drew laid a hand on her arm.
“It’s not about clues or evidence,” he said. “It’s about your personal safety.”
And now would have been a great time to start listening to him, to begin taking his loving advice. Yes, loving. But, man, she really wanted to explore the wreckage of the house.
She took one more step with his hand still on her arm.
Behind them, engine noise grew louder as another vehicle pulled up the driveway.
Chapter 36
“What in the hell are y’all doing here?” DJ yelled as he climbed out of his truck.
In the passenger seat, Billy Blake sat staring at the ruins of his house, rendered dumb with what Josie took for shock.
“I thought you said Billy was in El Paso,” Josie countered, ignoring his question. Obviously, she didn’t want to answer his question because they were snooping where they didn’t belong.
DJ strode toward them after a cursory glance at his boss. “He was in El Paso this morning. It’s an eight-hour drive, but only an hour and a half flight. He left his truck there and caught a flight home after I called him and to
ld him what happened. I just picked him up at the airport. He’s kinda shellshocked. Speaking of which—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” He swept off his baseball cap as he looked at the house. “This is…this is crazy.”
She had to agree. Just last night she’d been traipsing around inside of the place with Lizzie, imagining Errol Flynn on the staircase, for crying out loud. How ridiculous was that?
“I don’t even know what to say,” he said. “I mean…”
Billy still sat in the car. He rubbed a hand over his face and paused, covering his mouth, as he blankly stared at the ruins of his mansion. As he slowly got out of the truck, Josie watched the frozen numbness turn him into a statue as he stood on the blacktop of the driveway looking at the wreckage.
Skip had turned away and was speaking to someone on his cell phone. He’d already snapped a few pictures, but it struck Josie as being ghoulish to capture this particular moment in time, though the sun was shining. The bright blue sky made the burnt house stand out in stark relief, conflicting emotions of happy daylight and dead dreams clashing harshly.
After all, Billy and Mary Clare had built this behemoth together, and had at one point moved in with the optimism of newlyweds. Or so Josie imagined. Time and troubles had worn away its newness. Addiction or rifts of the psyche had taken its toll on the couple, whichever problem it had been. But now, it was nothing but a façade barely hiding a life in shambles.
Drew had released his hold on her arm, and she took a couple of cautious steps to the side for a better look at the garage, which seemed mostly untouched. DJ walked with her and Drew paced behind, his steps sharp and tight, tension rolling off him.
She realized how precarious the carved out stone walls of the house were without the rest of their support beams, and she wasn’t about to go spelunking through the cavelike blackened timbers in back. She just wanted to peek in the side window of the garage to see if Mary Clare’s car was still inside. Though she had poked around inside it by flashlight, she thought maybe, just maybe, she had overlooked something…
Behind them, yet another car pulled into the drive. Officer Gorgeous, this time. He parked his patrol car behind DJ’s truck. She could see him through the windshield swiveling his head side to side, warily assessing all them behind his dark sunglasses. She could only imagine what he was telling the dispatcher over his two-way radio. As he exited his vehicle, yet another car pulled up behind his, effectively blocking them all in as if they’d gathered for a backyard wedding…or a funeral procession.
“It’s a regular Tupperware party here,” DJ said, his voice taut with stress.
This most recent car was a sleek black Lincoln with a livery license plate, the type of car driven by a private limo service. Josie’s gut reaction was to wonder what in the world Greta Williams, her sometimes-boss, was doing here at this burned out house in Texas. The woman who got out from the car in her oversized bug-eye sunglasses, however, wasn’t Greta.
Well-coifed white hair in what Josie thought resembled a newscaster’s hairdo—a solid state, with not a hair out of place—emerged first, followed by the big, round movie star eyewear. The rest of the woman was a woolen, plaid fortress, accessorized by pearls, hose, and black pumps. Despite what Josie thought were balmy late-fall temperatures, this woman was committed to her November attire, body and soul. Make no mistake, though, she was no frumpy matron. She exuded wealth and conservative sensibilities.
Next to Josie, DJ swore. “What’s she doing here?”
“Who is that?” Drew asked, confusion evident in his one-eyed squint of suspicion.
But Josie knew—it could only be one person. “It’s Bunny Rogers.”
#
DJ stalked toward the older woman and met her just as she caught up to Billy Blake. Josie lightly whacked Skip’s arm with the back of her hand as she stared at the trio next to Bunny Rogers’s limo. Seeing them together, Josie suddenly knew who he was and why his name, his initials, stood for nothing. Though Billy was taller and broader, the physical resemblance between the two of them was undeniable.
Why didn’t I realize it sooner?
Both stood over six feet tall. Though DJ wore his customary farmer’s cap, Josie had seen how fair his hair was at the restaurant when he’d swept his hand through it. Billy’s hair, though almost white, was also fair. Both men had ruddy skin that tended to turn pinker when they were upset or otherwise riled up. Standing beefy shoulder to beefy shoulder now, they had almost identical posture.
“I don’t know what DJ’s last name is, but I bet you ten-to-one it’s Ruby. How could they not be cousins? Just look at them,” she said to Skip. “I think he’s Levar Ruby, Billy’s first cousin who started Smiley’s with him. They had some kind of fight. He up and quit for a while to work in San Antonio.”
Josie had learned that whole story earlier in the week from her pink-lipsticked friend, Georgia, who worked at Ruby’s, the local barbecue rival of Smiley’s. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d warned Josie that all the local smokehouses were interrelated. The smokehouses themselves were cousins, in fact.
“Oh for crap’s sake,” Skip said. “He worked in a club as a deejay. And he calls himself DJ now. Why did I not see it?”
“Well, just look at them. They could be freaking descendants of Thor. I didn’t figure it out until just now.”
The fact of the matter was, Billy’s sheer size and explosive temper intimidated her—enough to the point that she had avoided speaking directly to him. DJ, with his awshucks manner and blond farmer charisma, on the other hand, was friendly and easy to approach. Flirtatious, even. She hadn’t had the tiniest blip on her fear radar from him. The difference in their personalities had temporarily blinded her. They were night and day.
This discovery of their familial relationship, however, put a whole new spin on things. If DJ was involved in this latest arson and beating, maybe he was a whole lot more than just Billy’s general manager. Maybe he was also his confidante and was privy to exactly what Billy had done with Mary Clare.
As Josie watched the two men and Bunny Rogers a little bit more, she wondered suddenly why the ground was moving. She looked down, catching a weird, undulating feeling of standing in the ocean waves, like a tide was rolling in.
Oh crap, she realized, as the black spots suddenly came into her vision. She was about to pass out.
Not a good time for this. Such an inconvenient moment for panicking.
She looked back at the trio and realized that she’d subconsciously transformed them in her mind into two brothers she’d known in the past—the Williams brothers who had nearly killed her before. In Josie’s panic-stricken mind, Bunny had become Greta Williams. While Greta was an ally now, she’d been an imposing matriarch when Josie had first met her.
Take a deep breath. Hold it. Count to twelve. Let it out.
She did her in-and-out breathing trick for two cycles of breaths, but the black spots were still dancing in and out of her vision. Only when she felt Drew’s hand on the back of her neck did they start to subside.
“Geeze, I gotta get this taken care of,” she muttered, as if her PTSD were the Check Engine light coming on in her car. As if it were that easy.
“You will,” he said.
Her doctor. Her life coach. Her best friend. Though she hadn’t spoken much about it, he totally knew what she was going through. And he had patiently waited for her to realize she needed to talk with someone and sort her head out. Well, she was ready to get that help now.
Except, just as she had that thought, an explosion ripped through the garage.
Part 5: Ashes
Sometimes when you cook, the magic occurs after the flames die down. Not every piece of meat requires an open flame to achieve tasty perfection.
A traditional Hawaiian pig roast requires that you dig a big hole in the ground and fill it with river rocks, which turn white-hot from the heat. A banana leaf cover locks the heat in until you have a succulent, roasted delicacy.
Carcinogens aside,
many cultures have also been known to cook with ash, from South Americans cooking meat or fish in large pits like the Hawaiians. Native Americans used to add some ash to the water when they cooked corn. And it’s even used in making cheese.
You could say that ash, in some cases, has the unique quality of giving life after death.
—Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food
Chapter 37
Debris rained down around them. The garage—what was left of it—was burning. A plume of dirty smoke blew out sideways from the garage and was taken westward by the wind toward the lake. The side of Josie’s face, from temple to jawline, was mashed against the gritty blacktop of the circular drive. Her ears had blown out—temporarily, she hoped—but her eyes were fine. In fact, she’d seen a lot more than she had realized right before the explosion.
“Are you all right?” Drew asked her, though she could barely hear him. He pulled himself up from where he’d been pressed on top of her.
“Did you just…throw yourself on top of me?”
“Yeah, sorry about that. Did I squish you?” He helped her up and brushed some gravel off her cheekbone.
“No, I’m fine.” He’d just put himself between her and an exploding building. Like freaking Superman.
“Stay here. I’m going to check on them,” he said, heading toward Billy and the others. The police officer was also jogging toward them.
How could he hear anything? Officer Handsome appeared to be barking orders at them, but all she could see was a pantomime of him telling them to stay back—no sound filtered through. She stretched her jaw to try to get some sound to filter through what felt like cotton stuffed in her ears. While she yawned and tugged on an earlobe, she turned to see the charred remains of the garage.
