by Emily James
Lillian straightened up from examining the final tire. “Why don’t you come back inside where it’s warm? I’ll call a tow truck and a cab to take you home.”
The icy air seemed to freeze my lungs. I couldn’t draw a full breath. She could call a cab for me, but I’d have nowhere to go if they hauled my truck away.
“I can just ride with the tow truck driver.”
Lillian shook her head. “There’s nothing open this time of night. The repair shop won’t be able to replace your tires until morning. You might as well go straight home.”
Nicole had figured out that I lived in my truck. She’d been the only one I’d ever admitted it to up until this point, not counting Dwayne and Carla, who’d figured it out on their own.
Now I had no choice but to trust that Lillian wouldn’t turn me in to the health department. Because I wouldn’t survive if I tried to sleep out on the streets tonight. I didn’t have the right clothes, I didn’t know where to find shelter, and I wasn’t conditioned. My body still wanted to be home in sunny Florida.
I wrapped my arms around myself. “I don’t have anywhere for the cab to take me.”
Lillian glanced between me and the truck. “Oh.”
She was probably wondering what a homeless person was doing volunteering at a mission. I could have fed her some line about how I was better off than most of her clients, and it would have been true. It also would have been a lie in that I wasn’t there to help those less fortunate. I was there to try to right a wrong.
Lillian waved me back toward the mission. “I’ll find you a cot if you don’t mind sleeping in a dormitory room.”
The dormitory rooms slept twenty to twenty-five people. I would have slept in a room twice that full so long as I didn’t have to hunker down on the streets for the night. “I appreciate it.”
She opened her mouth like she was finally going to ask why I was really there, but she closed it again before anything came out. Maybe it was going to work in my favor that she’d likely decided long ago not to ask too many questions of her clients or she’d end up hearing something she didn’t want to know.
Lillian called someone on her cell as soon as we were back inside and asked them to set out a cot.
She led me down the hall to one of the women’s dormitories. “Lights out in thirty minutes. Since you’re an overnight guest, you’re welcome to the hot meal we serve in the morning and use of the showers.”
She left without another word and with a small piece of my dignity still intact. A very small piece.
I hadn’t thought I was proud, but maybe I was a little. Until tonight, I hadn’t considered myself homeless. I’d had my truck. That was my home.
Now, for tonight at least, I had nothing but the clothes on my back. And I felt smaller than I ever had.
I slunk into the room. At the far end, two female staff members assembled a cot with sheets and a pillow. The cot looked heavy and awkward to move. Men must not be allowed in the women’s dormitories for any reason or two male staff members would have hauled it in.
I could look on the bright side. This might be the best night’s sleep I’d had since leaving Fair Haven and Nicole’s house. Jarrod wouldn’t be able to get to me here because someone would notice a man in the woman’s dorm.
I headed for the cot, then stopped. Halfway down the row, Carla sat propped up on a cot, playing on her phone, her feet crossed.
Feet that wore the same orange and green socks that Jimmy so proudly showed me a day before he died.
Chapter 9
My feet and legs seemed to have forgotten how to walk.
The image of Jimmy lying across the tracks with bare feet and his shoes lying nearby had bothered me even before Nicole confirmed his death was murder. There was no reason I could think of for him to take his shoes off and leave his feet bare. And he’d been so proud of those socks. They represented something more than socks to him. They’d represented a healthy step he took to earn something again. They represented him trying to better his life.
To Carla, they represented something he’d kept for himself rather than giving to her. She’d also known about the train tracks as a spot Jimmy went, and Dwayne had been confused by it. He’d never heard of Jimmy going to the train tracks.
It was possible the train tracks were a spot she and Jimmy went together. That night, they might have gotten into a fight, she’d pushed him, and then she’d staged it to look like he’d been drinking. She couldn’t stand to leave those new socks behind, though, when her feet were cold.
I forced my feet to move forward. I had to stay here regardless. I had nowhere else to go.
Carla barely looked up as I passed by, giving me a brief nod in acknowledgment. She didn’t seem surprised I was there. That could either mean she wasn’t surprised because she already knew I was living out of my truck and might need a warmer place to sleep. It could also mean she knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep in my truck because she’d slashed my tires.
I didn’t like not knowing whether I was sleeping next to a garter snake or a viper.
I leaned toward thinking she was a viper. The one part that I couldn’t make sense of was why Carla would have revealed the location of the body and then coerced me into helping investigate if she’d done it. Unless, of course, she thought that would make her look innocent, and we could find someone else who looked like they had a good motive to pin it on. Or perhaps she felt guilty after it was all over, and she couldn’t stand leaving Jimmy’s body there to decompose.
I sank down on my cot, untied my shoes, and shoved them underneath. I had to stay here overnight, but what I wanted to do was find Dwayne and present him with the evidence. There was no love lost between him and Carla. If he agreed with me that she’d likely done it, he’d say so and could tell the police.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to Dwayne tonight. I wasn’t allowed into the men’s dormitories any more than men were allowed into the women’s.
All I could do was wait for morning…and try to sleep in a room with a woman who might be a murderer.
* * *
I dreamed that Carla figured out I knew she killed Jimmy and she tried to smother me with a pillow. After that, I couldn’t sleep at all.
I was up before anyone else and went out into the hallway to wait for Dwayne.
If my luck was changing, I might be done with all of this today. As soon as my truck was fixed, I’d pick a new town and head on. This one had gotten too complicated. Too many people knew me and knew that I lived in my truck.
The looks some of the men gave me as they passed by made my skin want to crawl off my body and go into hiding.
By the time Dwayne came out, my hands were shaking, and I couldn’t get them to stop. I motioned frantically for him to follow me around the corner.
He didn’t hesitate.
“Did you find out what they were fighting about?” Dwayne asked almost before we were far enough away to avoid being overheard.
I peeked around the corner to make sure no one was coming our way. Too much more of this cloak-and-dagger stuff and I was going to have an ulcer before I turned forty.
“I don’t think it was the manager who killed him.” I glanced around the corner again. Even though there was no one around, my body wouldn’t shut off the adrenaline rush. It made me jumpy and queasy all at the same time. “Carla has Jimmy’s new socks. I think she took them off his feet after she killed him.”
Dwayne’s skin turned a shade of yellow-green I’d only seen before on an over-ripe avocado. “She wouldn’t do that. She loved him.”
Yeah. Jarrod claimed to love me, too, but he still beat me. “It could have been an accident during an argument. I got the impression that their relationship was a rocky one.”
It was only a guess. The way Dwayne’s posture drooped told me I’d been right.
“They fought. Mostly ’cause Jimmy’d stopped drinking and wanted to try to find a way to get off the streets, and Carla couldn’t seem to stay sober longer
than a week.” He shook his head like he didn’t want to give my suggestion a chance to settle in. “Their fights never got physical. Never.”
Never that he saw. Most abuse happened without witnesses. “This could have been the first time, especially if Jimmy wanted to move on and leave her behind. Carla admits she has a temper.”
Dwayne slumped back against the wall and tightened his ponytail. “I still can’t believe it. ’Sides, Carla knew Jimmy didn’t drink beer. She knew it even better than me. I met Jimmy at the AA meetings here when we was both trying to get sober. Carla was his drinking buddy when he wasn’t.”
I had to admit that was a good defense. But maybe I could explain that away, too. “Was she a beer drinker?”
Dwayne nodded slowly.
“Then maybe it was what she had with her at the time, and she didn’t have the money for something else.”
“She didn’t have to lead us to Jimmy’s body.”
I’d had half the night to think up possible reasons for why she might have. “How did she know he went to the train tracks when you didn’t?”
Dwayne pushed away from the wall. “We got to at least give her a chance to explain how she got his socks. This is America, and people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.”
I couldn’t take what I’d learned to the police myself, so that left me with no choice but to go along with Dwayne until he was convinced as well. “You’re right. We should at least talk to her first.”
* * *
We found Carla in the cafeteria. Carla and Dwayne both scarfed their eggs and sausage down almost without chewing, but I had a hard time swallowing any of it. I should have eaten as much as they’d give me, glad for a free meal. The tension seemed to block my throat. Dwayne kept eyeing Carla, Carla kept eyeing me, and I kept eyeing Dwayne, wondering how he was going to broach the topic once we were done.
By the time we finished eating, Carla’s shoulders were tight, and she carried her arms close to her sides, hands fisted like she wanted to punch someone and couldn’t.
We headed as a unit to return our plates.
“What did you find out?” Carla’s words came out in a loud hiss.
Another man returning his dirty plate glanced in her direction.
“Not here,” Dwayne whispered.
Carla must have assumed I’d found something that would point to Lillian as Jimmy’s killer because she clamped her mouth shut so hard it looked like someone had literally glued her lips together.
Dwayne led the way out the back door and into an alley behind the mission. If he noticed my truck wasn’t parked there, he didn’t say anything. Carla knew I’d spent the night, but he didn’t.
He let Carla enter the alleyway first. It was a dead end, blocked off on the opposite side by a high, wired fence. He moved into the middle of the end we’d entered and stopped.
Carla stopped and turned around. She must have sensed we weren’t following her anymore.
Her eyes narrowed to match the thin line of her lips. “What’re you doing, Dwayne?”
I instinctively backed up a step. It was like watching two boxers circle each other in the ring, and I didn’t want to be anywhere close if it came to blows.
Dwayne had made it clear that he didn’t want to talk to her until we were off mission property. No fighting was one of the rules, and he wanted to be able to continue sleeping there. At the time, I’d thought he meant verbal arguments. Now I wasn’t so sure.
If it’d still been dark out, I would have pulled out my phone to check for security cameras. Based on the fact that this was where Dwayne chose to confront Carla, my guess was there weren’t any.
He widened his stance a little more. “Show me your socks.”
Something flickered across her face. If I hadn’t been so familiar with it, I might not have been able to figure out what it was. But Fear and I were so close I could never mistake the evidence of his presence.
“I’m not showing you my socks,” she said. “They’re nothing special, and it’s cold out here.”
Dwayne took a step toward her. “Just pull up your pant leg.”
Carla didn’t move. She glanced back over her shoulder toward the fence, as if looking for an escape route. The chain-link fence was too high to leap over, and the links were too small to provide a decent handhold.
When she turned back around, she looked at me, not at Dwayne. Her gaze could have frozen a boiling pot. She knew I had to have seen the socks last night.
She leaned down and pulled up a pant leg. The garish socks were easy to recognize.
Dwayne was shaking his head again in that way that made me think he was trying to prevent the truth from sinking in. “I told her you couldn’t have done it.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “I didn’t do nothing other than take his socks, and those were mine by right as his wife. He was dead when I found him.”
“Tell me what happened, then,” Dwayne said. “Convince me you didn’t have nothing to do with this.”
He’d had a much softer tone when he’d defended her earlier, but he must have known she wouldn’t admit the truth if he didn’t push her. It was likely why he’d asked me to stay quiet and let him do the talking. I couldn’t push Carla the way he could and get away with it.
“There’s nothing to tell. I found him just like you saw, took his socks ’cause he didn’t need them anymore and he should’ve given them to me in the first place, and then went to tell you I was worried about him.”
Then they’d come to find me, in part because I had a vehicle and, in part, because Carla already knew what they’d find. They’d both sounded afraid the police would blame them. It’s why they wanted me to call it in.
“Did you put the beer near him?” Dwayne asked.
I almost corrected him that someone had poured beer all over Jimmy’s clothes to make it smell like he’d been drinking, but I clamped my lips shut. Carla already didn’t like me. If I interrupted to correct Dwayne, she might lash out. Or shut down.
Carla shook her head. “I’m not stupid. If I’d wanted to stage it to look like he’d been drinking, I wouldn’t’ve used beer.”
Dwayne’s stance had relaxed enough that he seemed willing to take Carla’s word for it. He didn’t want her to be guilty.
But he hadn’t asked one of the most important questions.
Dwayne moved aside enough to make it clear he wasn’t blocking the alley anymore. “You shouldn’t have taken his socks, no matter if they were yours now or not. It makes you look guilty.”
He wasn’t going to ask. Anger or no anger from Carla, I had to ask it. Dwayne had come at her strongly, but I wasn’t sure if that was the right approach for me. Maybe if I made my question softer, she wouldn’t jump me in the dark one night.
“If the police ever find out, you’ll need to explain how you knew where Jimmy would be to look for him,” I said. “They’re not going to believe it was one of his regular spots since Dwayne didn’t know about it.”
Carla stepped toward me. “You better not tell the police.” Her voice rose to a yell.
Dwayne moved toward me, presumably letting Carla know he wasn’t going to allow her to hit me to shut me up. “She’s not saying she’s gonna tell the police. She’d just saying that’s something they’ll want to know. It’s something I want to know, too. I walked Jimmy’s route with him all the time, and he never went to the tracks. Too much drinking happened there.”
“It wasn’t one of his spots.” Carla’s lips turned down. “I didn’t go looking for him. I went to drink where I knew he wouldn’t find me. But there he was.”
If Jimmy never went there, then it wasn’t a spot they were likely to have a fight that accidentally led to his death.
Even though Carla couldn’t provide anything that proved she was innocent, that one detail made me believe her.
The truth might also help us figure out who actually killed him.
“If Jimmy never went there, then someone moved his bod
y from where he really died. The person who did it knows that people go there to drink, but didn’t know Jimmy wasn’t drinking anymore.”
“I told you I thought the manager Jimmy fought with did it. She knows all about our spots, but she wouldn’t know what Jimmy liked to drink.”
“She knew Jimmy was attending AA, though.” Dwayne’s voice had lost all its confrontation. “I think we’re looking at the wrong person.”
“Isabel?” a man’s voice said from the end of the alley.
It wasn’t Jarrod’s voice, but it was one I’d heard before. Remembering and identifying voices had never been a strength of mine. I got people wrong on the phone repeatedly unless I knew them well.
I turned around.
Ethan.
He stepped one foot further into the alley. “I heard yelling. Are you okay?”
The look on his face as he glanced at Carla told me he’d heard more than yelling. He’d overheard enough to think that Carla might be a killer.
Chapter 10
Standing in the alley between Ethan and Carla felt a bit like watching a flame creep closer to a big puddle of gasoline. If Carla figured out that he’d been eavesdropping, I had no idea what she might do.
“Why don’t you two go?” I said softly to Dwayne.
I couldn’t tell if he knew what I was worried about or if he just didn’t want to talk anymore about who’d hurt Jimmy. Either way, he left the alleyway, and Carla followed his lead.
Leaving me to figure out how much Ethan knew and whether or not that made him a threat to Carla. And, in a way, a threat to me. If he went to the police with what he’d heard, he’d tell them everything, including who was in the alley, including me. He didn’t know my fake last name, but the police could get it from Lillian. I’d had to give it to her to volunteer.
My name in the system shouldn’t lead Jarrod to me. He didn’t have any way of knowing I was using the name Isabel Addington. But the police would know it was a fake name if they ran it. If they then asked for my fingerprints, everyone would know who I really was.
