What We Found

by Kris Bock

  We crossed the parking lot and the smells got stronger. Frying potatoes, meat. Somebody was putting together breakfast burritos already. My stomach rumbled, and I thought I might manage breakfast after all. A full stomach would make it easier to get through the day.

  I smiled at Ricky. “All right, breakfast first. You can have your fry bread if you want. I’m going for a well-balanced meal with all four major food groups—tortillas, meat, cheese, and green chile.”

  He practically skipped. “Me too! I want a breakfast burrito first. Chicharrones, eggs, cheese, and chile.”

  Fried pork fat for breakfast, yum. Of course, I was considering ordering bacon in mine. Something about the smell of fried food, which could be so overwhelming in an enclosed kitchen, got the appetite going on a cool, fresh morning outside.

  The breakfast burrito place was doing a brisk business among the workers setting up and a few early attendees claiming shady spots under the trees near the bandstand. A group of shaggy musicians walked by with instrument cases.

  I knew the schedule by heart. Some easy-going folk music to start the day, with a mariachi band and dancers a little later, before it got too hot for the poor girls in their heavy skirts. Then a juggler, and at midday a local rock band that was mainly popular because the various members counted half the town among their relatives. In the afternoon, a talented bluegrass quartet that worked cheap because their style of music wasn’t in great demand in New Mexico, a magician who was mediocre but managed to entertain the children, and the high school jazz quartet.

  Evening would bring back yet another mariachi band and some of the audience would join the dancing. A folk-rock band, also very danceable, would finish off the night. All through the day, vendors would sell food, charities would hand out flyers and ask people to sign petitions, and children would play on the giant inflatable waterslide. An ambulance was standing by to treat heatstroke and any heart attacks brought on by the overabundance of deep-fried foods.

  It was going to be a long day.

  I’d attended the event often enough in the past, but then I’d been able to hang out for a couple of hours and leave. At least I didn’t have specific duties, other than keep an eye on things and pitch in if something went wrong. Eslinda was still in charge; I was in training.

  I was nibbling at my hash brown, bacon, and cheese burrito, and keeping an eye out for Eslinda so I could report in, when Ricky whispered, “You talk to the resort people, since you know them. I’ll walk around and see if anyone’s talking about the murder. Do you think Thomas or Lia Bain will be here today? I found pictures online so I know what they look like. Oh, we should watch the woods! They say criminals return to the scene of the crime.”

  For a moment I’d put it out of my mind, focusing only on my job. Now I couldn’t make myself look toward the woods. I managed to swallow the bite in my mouth. “Ricky, I do not want you to go into those woods. Do you understand me? Not for any reason.”

  He shrugged, avoiding my gaze.

  I had to find a way to keep Ricky busy and out of trouble. “Why don’t you grab a spot under the trees?” I gestured that way without turning my head. The cluster of trees at the end of the golf course had a great view of the bandstand. Beyond that lay the woods. “Those people have parked there for the day, and they don’t have anything to do but gossip. I bet you’ll hear lots of interesting stuff.”

  “Okay. I found a tape recorder app for my phone, so I can record anything good.”

  “Be discrete,” I warned. At least a twelve-year-old boy playing on his phone shouldn’t raise any alarms. “If you see or hear anything suspicious, call me. Stay by the trees so I’ll know where to find you.”

  “Got it!” He ran off and my heart constricted as I watched him. I wished he weren’t so interested in mysteries. I wished I could lock him away from all danger. But danger had a way of finding you even when you were minding your own business.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. The image of Bethany Moore lying in the ditch rose up in my mind. I opened my eyes but even bright sun and bustling crowds couldn’t erase the vision. I could no longer tell if the ache in my stomach came from hunger or emotion. But I didn’t think I could choke down any more of my burrito. I looked around for a trashcan. I knew we had fifteen extras set up for the event.

  I turned around and almost ran into someone. I stumbled back, dropping my burrito.

  Jay stepped forward, looming over me.

  Chapter 15

  Before I could turn and dart away, Jay grabbed my arm. “Hey, bitch. Ruin anyone’s life today?”

  I struggled to breathe. I told myself he couldn’t hurt me—not here, in the middle of everyone. I forced words out. “It’s not my fault.”

  “Is that what you think? Well I think it is your fault. And I’ll make sure everyone else knows it.” His lips stretched in what might pass for a smile in some alternate world where smiling was a bad thing. “I’ll tell them you’re jealous.”

  “Jealous?” That made no sense.

  He leaned closer. “Jealous because I didn’t want you. Spreading rumors because I turned you down.”

  That was so ridiculous I let out a short laugh, though it sounded more like a croak. I clenched my fists, trying to still my trembling. “Sure, everyone will believe that. Except the police. They’ll probably pay more attention to the evidence in your car.”

  His grip tightened on my arm. “You could have planted that.” His eyes shifted toward the man at his side—his father—then back to me. “You did plant it.”

  “Is that your story?” My voice wavered, but I met his eyes. “Good luck with that.” I wanted to storm off, but I wasn’t sure I could pull away and didn’t want to get into a public arm wrestling match.

  His father edged closer. “I warned you about causing trouble for my son. He’s told me how you had a crush on him all through high school. If I’d known you applied here to get close to him, I never would have agreed to the hiring.”

  I stared at him. It was like I’d entered some alternate reality where people spouted nonsense and assumed you’d understand.

  “Don’t think your job is safe just because Eslinda has taken a liking to you. She won’t be around much longer.” He nodded in satisfaction and Jay gave me a triumphant smile.

  “Audra!” a voice called. I went weak with relief as I turned to see Nascha and Eslinda.

  Jay released my arm as the women hurried up to us. “Hey Nascha,” he said with an easy smile as he looked her up and down. She looked cool and elegant in pale linen slacks and a butter-yellow shirt. Her dark hair swung loose over her shoulders. “You look great. How’s it going?” Was he actually flirting with her? Right after bullying me?

  “Fine.” She shifted her body toward me, subtly excluding him. “Audra, we’ve been looking for you. We have some things to discuss.”

  “I wanted to be here earlier,” Eslinda said, “but my car was vandalized. Someone threw a huge rock at the front window! The rock was still sitting in the middle and it’s all cracked. The window, not the rock.”

  Jay grinned. “Really? That’s too bad.”

  His father looked at him, his expression confused and a bit troubled. He turned back to Eslinda with false cheerfulness. “I’m sure you have plenty to do here. We’ll let you get to it.” He jerked his head in a gesture for Jay to follow him, and they walked away.

  I would have leaned against something had there been anything to lean against. My legs felt weak and my arm still throbbed from where Jay had gripped it.

  “Are you all right?” Nascha asked.

  I nodded. I had yet to process everything Jay and his father had said. Two things were clear, though. My job might not be as safe as Eslinda had suggested, and Jay was planning a smear campaign. Would anyone believe his rumors?

  They might. He was well known in the community and at the resort, which could work for me or against me, depending on how other people saw him. The bit about me having a crush in high school was true. Would a
ny of our classmates remember that? Would they believe I had come back home desperate to see him and had turned into a crazy stalker when he didn’t want me? Would anyone think that possible of me?

  I wasn’t sure anyone knew me well enough to say for sure.

  Something wet touched the back of my knee and I leapt half a foot. A dog had been enjoying the remains of my burrito and apparently wanted to thank me by licking my legs. Eslinda leaned forward and rubbed the dog’s ears. “Ooh, aren’t you a sweet boy!” Eslinda was wearing a white cotton dress with colorful embroidery around the neck and hem. The straight cut evened out her various bulges, and it ended above the knee, showing off pleasantly rounded calves.

  “That’s a nice dress,” I said.

  She straightened, beaming at me. “I got it in Mexico. They understand large women there.”

  I tried to put everything else out of my mind and focus on my job. “What did you want to talk about? Should I be doing something?”

  “No, except be handy if I need you. We were only trying to get you out of the Preppard clutches.”

  She was like a plump, Hispanic fairy godmother, and I wanted to hug her. Instead I just said, “Thank you.”

  “I need to check out a few things. You girls will be all right?”

  “Sure.” I decided not to tell her about Lewis Preppard’s threat. It would upset her, and if he was right, she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway. The way things were going, maybe I’d be glad to leave the resort, regardless of the consequences.

  Eslinda bustled off. Nascha and I walked slowly through the growing crowd. “Are you all right, really?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “As good as can be expected, I guess.” I thought about the nightmares. If I told Nascha, she’d sympathize. But she probably wouldn’t really understand. I’d always been an outsider, standing on the edge of life looking in. Now I felt more cut off than ever. Few people could imagine what it was like to find a murder victim. Few people wanted to. I didn’t want to burden anyone else, or deal with platitudes from someone who didn’t know what it was like. I wished I could talk about my feelings with someone who truly understood, but the one person who had shared the experience with me was not an option.

  “They’re trying to intimidate you,” Nascha said. “If you don’t let them scare you, they can’t hurt you.”

  I made a vague noise. I wasn’t convinced of that. “Jay isn’t going to make it easy for me. I got a stupid prank phone call last night. I figured it was Jay, since he’d be able to get my number.” I came to a sudden halt. “Nascha, how did you know my phone number?”

  “I saw it on your résumé. They passed it around to all of us before your interview.”

  I stood still as the crowds brushed past us. “But—that was a month ago. Why would you memorize my number then?”

  She shrugged. “I remember numbers.”

  “For months?”

  She frowned, considering. “As far as I know, forever. They just stick with me. You want to order a pizza, make a doctor’s appointment, or get the ski report? I know the number.”

  Wow. I couldn’t remember a phone number from the time I looked it up until I picked up my phone. I had to have the number right in front of me and go over it piece by piece. “Do you have a photographic memory?”

  “Not for anything but numbers. It’s handy in my job.”

  Yes, it would be, since she handled purchasing for a resort that had daily deliveries of everything from salmon fillets to golf tees. It hardly seemed fair that she should be beautiful and elegant, and have a mind like that.

  I sighed. “It’s a good thing you’re so nice.” When she shot me a puzzled look, I added, “Because otherwise I’d hate you. At least now I can keep my jealousy to a sullen grumble.”

  She laughed and linked her arm through mine. “Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  “Thanks again for coming to my rescue.”

  “We women have to stick together. Especially when there are so many crazy men out there.”

  “Funny, that sounds like something my mother would say.”

  Nascha wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure I like being compared to your mother. I’m not saying all men are bad. But when things this bad happen, there’s usually a bad man involved. Jay is one. Whoever killed that woman is another, assuming Jay didn’t do it. Either way, you can bet it was a man.”

  “Probably, though I guess it could be a woman.”

  “I took a Women’s Studies class in college on women who kill. The numbers aren’t large, but when it happens, women almost always kill a husband or lover, usually in self-defense. Or else they kill their children.”

  “That’s horrible!” I’d heard one or two news stories along those lines, but I didn’t think it was common.

  “Often that’s an attempt at protection, in a twisted way. An abused woman kills her children and herself, to protect them all from the abuser. Though some women have killed their children in order to get a new man who doesn’t want a woman with baggage. One way or another, there’s nearly always a man involved somehow. If a woman tries to kill another woman, it’s usually jealousy over a man.”

  I made a face. “I’m not sure I want to know all this.”

  “The point is, with women, the victim is almost always someone very close to the killer, so it’s easier to track down the criminal. Women don’t kill strangers. But men kill for many reasons. For jealousy, for control, for revenge, out of drunken anger, even for fun. That makes it much harder to find out the truth.”

  The truth. Where was it in all this muddle? Would we ever know? Ricky still thought investigating crimes was fun and easy, but many murders never got solved.

  Ricky. I’d meant to keep a closer eye on him. I studied the area around the trees and spotted him standing at the back of the crowd, turned in my direction. He lifted his hand and I waved.

  He frantically motioned me over. At that distance I couldn’t see his expression, but the way he was wriggling like a fish on a line, he’d attract attention quickly. “I need to talk to my brother,” I told Nascha. “I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”

  I headed for Ricky. With one last wave, he trotted away from the group of people. Where was he going? Not toward the woods! I broke into a run, my heart racing even though logic told me the woods held no particular dangers today.

  He darted around a small building used for equipment storage. I jogged up to it and found him waiting on the other side, where the building screened us from the crowd. I tried not to look at the woods fifteen feet away.

  Ricky started talking before I closed the gap between us. “You would not believe the stuff I heard! I don’t know if I got it on tape recorder, though, they might’ve been too far away. But everyone’s talking about the murder.” He frowned down at the phone in his hand.

  I tried to keep my expression calm. “What are they saying?”

  “One lady said there have been five other missing women around the state in the last year, and one unsolved murder of a woman whose body was found in the desert. At least, they think that was murder. It was hard to tell because she’d been there so long.”

  My stomach churned and I had to concentrate on my breathing. But to Ricky, it was just a series of clues to plug into the equation. It wasn’t real.

  “So this lady? She says her cousin’s with the sheriff’s office, and the reason the state police are involved is because maybe all these cases are connected. Maybe it’s a serial killer who moves around.”

  Huh. So the girl from the lunchroom might get her wish after all.

  “Maybe it was a resort guest!” Ricky went on. “What do you think? Maybe some guy is staying at different hotels and killing women wherever he goes. We should find out if any of the missing women worked at hotels.”

  “Wait, Bethany Moore didn’t work at the resort. Did she?” I didn’t recall hearing anything about her job.

  Ricky shrugged. “Pretty much everyone in town does at some point, r
ight? Anyway, it doesn’t all have to be hotel employees. Just someone around the hotel, playing golf, eating in the restaurant, whatever.” He frowned. “That’s hard to track, though. If we’re lucky, we’ll find a more obvious connection.”

  “Sure, that would be nice,” I said weakly.

  I had to get him to calm down. I tried to think clearly about the serial killer angle. “Look, Ricky, if it’s a serial killer, I don’t think there’s much we can do.” The thought cheered me up.

  “We know the night she disappeared, so you could check on the hotel guests at that time.”

  “And do what? That would be hundreds of names. We can’t investigate them all.” I tried to let him down easy. “Your idea was that we could help with the investigation because we’re local. But if it’s somebody who moves around, we can’t help.”

  “That’s just one possibility! Some people think it has to do with drugs.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that one.” I wished I had someplace to sit down. “Look, why don’t you keep listening. Make notes and we can talk about it all later.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He was quiet for a moment. “You don’t sound like you really want to find the killer.”

  “Of course I want to find him! Or rather, I want him to be found. But I—”

  I broke off as someone stepped around the building behind Ricky. He was an average-looking man, maybe in his forties. I didn’t think I’d met him, but something tugged at my memory.

  I gasped and stepped back. It was Thomas Bain.

  Chapter 16

  “Ricky, come here. Now,” I said.

  Ricky glanced back and started to turn, but Thomas Bain placed a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t run away. I just want to talk to you.” He looked past Ricky and met my eyes. “You’re the girl who found Bethany’s body, right?”

  I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. I might be facing a murderer. Spots danced before my eyes and the ground seemed to shift.