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Stalking the Dead

Page 18

by E. C. Bell


  My old bedroom was amazingly tidy. All of James’s stuff was folded and tucked away in the bottom of the nearly empty closet. I didn’t think I would have even realized it was there if the door hadn’t been open.

  On the little table at the far end of the room, James’s laptop sat beside Mom’s sewing machine. The chair was pushed under the desk, neatly. No notes lying about. No pens or pencils. No Post-It notes scattered everywhere. Just the computer, with a binder tucked beneath it.

  “That must be it,” I said, and hauled it out. I nearly knocked the computer to the floor, and the pen that he’d tucked into the binder flew out and clattered across the lino floor, ending up near the closet door.

  I could make a mess without even trying.

  I pulled the chair out and parked myself, opening the binder to the first page. Photos of people doing, I supposed, investigator-type things, and I snickered. This was going to be stupid, I could just tell.

  Flipped to the introduction. “Welcome to the Alberta Investigator Training Course,” it read. “Over the next nine days—”

  Huh. So James was supposed to be able to get this course done in nine days.

  “Only if he gets out of jail,” I muttered, scanning the rest of the page. Lots of learning outcomes, and tons of instructions on how to complete the course. I felt my eyes begin to cross and flipped to the first module.

  James had marked it up, with pen and highlighter. I idly wondered where he’d hidden the highlighter as I scanned the pages. I’d only lost the pen. Looked at Module Two, and then Three. Frowned when I read some of James’s comments on the edges of some of the pages. Things like “WTF” and question marks, sometimes more than three in a row.

  None of the information he had marked looked too terribly hard. I wondered why he was having such problems.

  “I thought he was smarter than that,” I snickered. I flipped through Modules Four and Five, and both of them were literally question-marked and WTFed so much that it was hard to read some of the paragraphs.

  “Use of Force,” I read the title of Module Five out loud. “Wonder why this one gave him so much trouble.”

  Then I shrugged and carried on. Module Seven was called “Communications and Report Writing” and I thought that looked like a good place to start.

  “This’ll be easy,” I whispered, flipping to the first page of the module and diving right in. “A cake walk.”

  ONE HOUR IN, I had done about half the pages I had thought I would, and felt like maybe this crap was going to make me insane. I didn’t know anything!

  “Maybe a drink would help,” I muttered, and went out into the kitchen. Stopped short when I saw Mom and Laurel and another ghost all huddled at Mom’s kitchen table. They turned as one and stared at me.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, heading to the sink.

  The ghost rose. “My name is Roy,” he said, and held out his hand like he thought I’d shake it or something. I ignored it and reached for a glass.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. Then I turned to Mom.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Just fine,” she said. Her lips were tight, and she looked white as a—well, as white as a ghost. “You can go.”

  Laurel turned to me and smiled. “Really,” she said. “Everything’s good. Roy and I are talking. Finally.”

  “Right,” Roy said. He wasn’t smiling, though. He looked as serious as a heart attack. But at least they were talking.

  I mentally crossed my fingers, hoping that it meant that Laurel would soon be gone and I’d finally have the couch to myself.

  I poured myself a glass of water, then went back to work on James’s stupid course. But I left the door open a crack, so I could hear Mom and the ghosts as they worked through a lifetime—and deathtime—of misunderstanding and miscommunication.

  It never got loud, though. All very civilized. Looked like Laurel was going to be gone. Finally.

  ANOTHER HOUR WENT by. I slammed the binder shut, totally confused and absolutely certain that I wasn’t smart enough to take the course myself. I shouldn’t have snickered at James’s question marks. I could have drowned in the sea of question marks I had wanted to mark down on those stupid pages, and hoped I hadn’t screwed up everything for James.

  “For sure I shouldn’t have used a pen,” I muttered as I carefully pushed the chair under the small table. “He’ll want to erase every answer I wrote. I’m sure of it.”

  I walked into the living room, to get the car keys. It was time to go to the Blue Ox Inn.

  My mother and Millie were both curled up under a blanket, sleeping to the soundtrack of another black and white musical.

  It looked like Laurel was gone.

  “At least one of us had a productive night,” I whispered. I grabbed the keys sitting on the coffee table, and walked out into the dark.

  Marie:

  The Blue Ox Inn, Part Deux

  THE PARKING LOT in front of the Blue Ox Inn was packed with half- and three-quarter-ton trucks, and I felt my heart drop into my scuffed-up running shoes. It wasn’t only the bartender who was going to remember me when I walked into that place. I was sure of it.

  I ran my fingers through my hair to smooth it, glancing in the rearview mirror and hoping against hope that somehow I didn’t look like myself—that somehow, the year spent in Edmonton had changed me so fundamentally that I no longer looked like the kid who’d run away from her abusive boyfriend and this place. Unfortunately, I looked the same. Maybe a little more tired, and my hair was definitely longer, but I looked enough like the old me to know, without a doubt, that whoever was in that bar was going to recognize me.

  I couldn’t believe how much I hated this.

  Sucked it up and walked into the place, my purse over my shoulder like a shield.

  The bluegrass music hit me when I opened the door. So, no football, baseball, or hockey, or—when the inhabitants of this particular bar were especially needy—no bowling finals. I glanced up at one of the televisions, just so I didn’t have to look around the dingy dark room, and saw a soccer game on the screen, with the sound off. Not even these guys could get too worked up about a soccer game.

  I hoped I could sneak up to the bar and speak quietly to the bartender, when I realized that, beneath the beat of the bluegrass music, the room had gone completely silent. I dragged my eyes down from the soccer game, and saw that everyone had turned to the door and all eyes were on me.

  Great.

  I stared at the floor as I skittered between the tables. I ignored the silence, which was starting to thicken around me like glue, and set my sights on the bartender, who was busily pouring drafts of beer and ignoring the heck out of me.

  After what felt like forever, I finally got to the bar.

  “Alex Randall?” I asked. “I have a couple of questions for you, if you have the time.”

  Randall poured another draft of beer, set it on the bar, then turned to me. There was no welcome in his eyes.

  “Marie Jenner?” he asked. “Rich told me you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I bet he did,” I said. I tried to keep my voice upbeat and light, and failed miserably. My guess was, Rich had told him a lot more about me and my nasty little history than just the fact that I wanted to talk to him. “You got time now?”

  Without answering, he turned away and mixed two drinks. Slowly. Handed them to the harried-looking waitress waiting impatiently at the other end of the bar. “Go ahead,” he called. “Ask your questions. I can hear you.”

  The last thing in the world I wanted to do was yell out questions about Arnie’s last night on earth. “Can’t you take five minutes?” I asked. “Please?”

  He stared at me for a long time, and I was sure I heard a couple of the idiots sitting behind me snicker derisively, but I didn’t look at them. Just kept staring at Alex Randall until he finally shrugged and walked over to me.

  “I can give you two minutes,” he said. “But I’m busy. Right?”

  “Right.” I dov
e right into dialoguing with the creep, using what I’d gleaned from the “Communicating with Uncooperative Persons,” section of Module Seven in James’s online PI course. Maybe I’d taken in more than I thought.

  “You were working the night Arnie Stillwell came home. Right?”

  “Right.” He glanced around the room as though checking to see who was following our conversation, but it appeared that no one was listening. Trust the Blue Ox Inners not to be able to pay attention for more than five minutes at a stretch. I had him to myself.

  “Who did he sit with?” I didn’t turn around and look in the direction of Arnie’s favourite table, but Randall did.

  “Those guys,” he said. “Behind you.”

  “Just tell me their names,” I said. There was no way in the world I was turning around and looking at that bunch. No way.

  “Everybody that was sitting with Arnie is there,” he said, a little too loudly. “Everybody but Joey Simpson.”

  I frowned. Why did I recognize that name?

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Just a kid. He used to come in sometimes. He’d buy a round, when he got paid.” He snorted something akin to laughter. “The boys liked him for that.”

  That didn’t help me. There were thousands of kids working the patch, and I’d been gone a year. Why did I know that name?

  “And he sat with the rest of them?”

  “No.” Randall shook his head. “He was at the bar. Had a big old conversation with Arnie, just before he left.”

  “Who left?”

  “Well, both of them. The kid first, and then Arnie a minute after.” Randall shrugged. “Maybe they were going to the peelers. I don’t know.”

  Still not being helpful, Randall.

  “Is Joey Simpson here now?” I asked. “Maybe I’ll talk to him.”

  Randall shook his head. “He died.”

  “Are you talking about Arnie?” I said, impatiently. “Because I know he’s dead. That’s why I wanted to talk to the people who saw him—”

  “No,” Randall said, just as impatiently. “Joey Simpson. The kid. He rolled his truck on 63. I heard it was a hell of a mess.” He shrugged again. “The boys are going to miss him.”

  Joey Simpson. He was the kid who had jumped into my car on my way into town. The dead kid. No wonder I recognized his name.

  Of course. The last person to see Arnie alive was a dead kid, trapped in his truck in the compound yard on the edge of town.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  Randall gestured at the table full of Arnie’s cronies behind me. “Don’t you want to talk to those guys?” he asked. “They were with Arnie most of the night.”

  “No, that’s all right,” I said. “I don’t need to talk to them. Not anymore.”

  “You should,” Randall said.

  I noticed he kept glancing behind me, at that table. I also noticed that the noise level had dropped down to nothing. Even the bluegrass music had stopped.

  “Even if you don’t have any questions for them, they sure have some for you,” Randall said. “Just turn around and answer them. Now.”

  I heard a chair scrape over the scuffed-up floor behind me and knew I was in an absolute tonne of trouble.

  “Tell them to sit down,” I said to Randall. “I’m not talking to them. I just want to leave.”

  Randall shrugged. “You’re on your own,” he said. “This isn’t my fight.” Then he snickered. “But it sure looks like it’s theirs.”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Randall! Help the girl get out of here.”

  The waitress had come up to the bar, probably to order more drinks, and had caught the last of our conversation. She glared her displeasure at the bartender, and then walked past me without giving me a glance.

  “You boys sit down,” she said. “Now.”

  “But, Tracy,” one of them whined. “Arnie was one of the good ones. And you know what her and that guy did. That shit cannot stand.”

  I glanced behind me and saw Nathan Fellows, Arnie’s drinking buddy, standing beside the table, glaring at Tracy. The rest of the slugs at the table hadn’t moved. In fact, most of them were staring down at the top of the beer-soaked table as if their lives depended on it.

  “Nathan,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened to Arnie. Really I am.”

  “You bitch,” Nathan growled. “You know very well what happened to Arnie. You broke his fucking heart and then ran away to Edmonton. Took him forever to get over you. Couldn’t talk about anything else, even when he brought that other girl in. What’s her name?”

  “Rosalie,” Randall said. “Didn’t catch her last name.”

  That surprised me. Hadn’t Rosalie told me she’d never been here? Didn’t know any of Arnie’s friends?

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Nice girl. Knows how to treat a man. But he never got over you, you bitch.”

  “That’s not my fault,” I said.

  “I think it is,” Nathan said. His face puckered. “All you had to do was marry the guy. Make a real man of him. But you couldn’t do that, now could you. Had to walk away from him and go to fucking Edmonton. Jesus, you even got him arrested.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said again, feeling like a broken record. I had to get out of there, before this drunk talked his buddies into “teaching me a lesson for my own good.”

  “I think it was,” Nathan said. “And then, when he tried to come home and start his life over again, well, then you and the male model killed him.”

  “Yeah,” said one of the others at the table said. It looked like Jesse Truman, and it looked like Jesse had lost most of his teeth in a recent brawl.

  “We had nothing to do with Arnie’s death,” I said, and threw a glance at Jesse. He shuddered as though a goose had crossed his grave and stared down at the table.

  “That is more than enough, Nathan.” Tracy the waitress’s voice had turned to ice, and she put her hand firmly on Nathan’s arm. He did nothing to shake it off. “We will not have an incident in this bar tonight. You got me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Nathan no longer sounded outraged. He just sounded drunk. He sat down, rocking his chair so far back his buddies reached for him, to keep him upright.

  “Tell her to get the hell out of here,” Nathan said. “We got nothing to say to her.”

  Tracy turned to me. “You heard him,” she said. “Time for you to go.”

  I nodded and quickly headed for the door. Keys in my hand so I could protect myself, if any of them decided to follow. But all I heard, as the door slapped shut, was Nathan drunkenly yelling, “You better never come back here, Jenner! If you do, we’ll mess you up!”

  Message received, drunken asshole. Message definitely received.

  My hands were shaking so badly, I dropped the keys—twice—as I tried to open the car door to make my escape. If this had been a horror movie, I would have been dead where I stood, but luckily, this was just the parking lot of the Blue Ox Inn, so all I got were a couple of broken nails and a crying jag that wouldn’t stop as I wheeled away from that place.

  Arnie:

  I Have to Get Back!

  I ENDED UP at Rosalie’s apartment. Didn’t surprise me, but it pissed me off.

  As a matter of fact, everything was pissing me off. Marie shouldn’t have said what she said. As far as I was concerned, she and I would be together forever. Rosalie didn’t count. She’d never counted.

  I had to make Marie understand that. Which meant I had to get to old lady Jenner’s trailer as quick as I could.

  I went out to the balcony and looked for Roy, down in the cemetery. Didn’t see him, but figured it didn’t matter. With a little concentration, I could get to the cemetery myself. I’d done it before, when he was there. No reason I couldn’t do it again, without him. From there, it was a small jump to the river. And then I was as good as in front of Marie.

  I looked at the cemetery and concentrated.

  Nothing. Didn’t even budge.r />
  Decided I was still upset because of the Rosalie-Marie thing. Calmed myself, and focused again.

  Still nothing.

  All right, that was weird. I was as focused as I’d ever been, but I hadn’t been able to move even a little bit.

  Had Roy figured out a way to cut me off?

  Was I really stuck, in this apartment, with only Rosalie as company? Really?

  If I was, I was going to go batshit crazy. No doubt about it.

  Marie:

  Where Is a Salvage Yard,

  When You Need One?

  I PULLED INTO the parking lot of the 7-11, to get my nerves under control and to check the time. James’s Volvo was in great shape, except for the clock in the dash. I was pretty sure the death of the clock was my fault.

  It had been working when I drove out of Edmonton. But, I had a little accident with a cup of hot coffee, and the blue-white numbers denoting the time had disappeared. They didn’t even blink 12:00. It was just a black hole, like a rotted tooth, in the pristine beauty of the dash.

  It felt like I’d been at the Blue Ox Inn for hours, and I was sure when I looked at my cell, I would have a series of increasingly nasty texts from James. Where was I? Why wouldn’t I pick him up?

  But the whole interaction had taken a grand total of twenty horrifying minutes, and there were no texts from James.

  That’s when I started thinking about Joey Simpson, the dead kid. He had been one of the last people to see Arnie alive, and I knew, more or less, where he was.

  As long as he hadn’t moved on yet.

  If he had, then I was SOL, and would have to go back to that damned drinking establishment and try talking to Nathan Fellows and Jesse Truman. Like that would go over well at all.

  However, if Joey was still stuck in the truck—and I’d seen him get in that truck before it was hauled away—then all I had to do was remember the address of the salvage yard.

 

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