With a dip-at-the-knees-and-reach maneuver like a cocktail waitress in Atlantic City, I collected empty glasses, deposited them on my tray. The soundtrack for the strippers had switched to a languid saxophone number, but it was still loud. I could barely make out what Vance, who’d have to turn around to see me, was saying.
“…telling you, man….I can pick up where he left off….”
“You forget, Vance…weren’t coming to me…for a reason.”
“I know, but…didn’t work out. Look…give me a shot….They know what I did…not cool.”
I leaned closer to get an earful, mopped up condensation rings with a napkin.
And that’s when a slob one table over pinched my ass.
“Same again, sugar,” he slurred, and waggled an empty beer bottle at me.
I crushed the urge to shove my tray down his throat sideways, smiled, and moved to the bar. I rested my tray next to Marc, off-loaded my empties, and gave my order to a bartender. He was too busy to look at me twice, and I couldn’t wait while he filled the drink orders ahead of mine.
“Give me your beer,” I told Marc. “I’ve got to get back over there.”
The drunken fool who’d pinched me didn’t notice the bottle I set before him was only half full.
But when I turned away—and back to Vance’s table—he wasn’t satisfied.
“Hey, sugar? Don’tcha want your tip?”
I ignored him, made a pretense of removing the pretzel bowl at Vance’s elbow.
“Look, sugar,” the drunk bellowed. “I’ve got a tip for ya. S’right here!”
He grabbed his crotch with one hand, seized the crook of my arm with the other.
Pretzels flew everywhere.
Burns looked up. His eyes met mine. And something deep within them told me he’d been a combat soldier. His slack face went hard as he took in my lamb’s-wool top and trousers—and registered that the real waitresses wore tank tops and short shorts to showcase their assets. My wardrobe may’ve been sleek and formfitting, but it still made me the odd one out.
Suspicious, Burns stood to leave. The drunk hauled me between his knees. I twisted, slammed my tray into his face like I was swatting a fly.
The slob released me.
Burns’s goons flanked him now. Each had a pistol in his hand—because they smelled a setup. And they knew the best way to avoid anyone moving in on them was to incite a panic that would move outward.
So the goon on Burns’s left fired into the air.
Pop, pop, pop!
And the club erupted in motion and noise.
The strippers started shrieking and they didn’t quit. Men scrambled to get away from Burns and his men. Vance dove for cover under his table.
In the pandemonium, a strong arm circled my waist.
A man began to drag me through the crowd—backward.
I fought against him, caught him in the shin with a sharp kick of my heel. I jabbed him in the gut with my elbow, felt him grunt, but he didn’t let go. I aimed for his nose this time, and he blocked the blow with his palm.
And that’s when I realized he was Barrett.
Together, we barreled toward a side door. It was a fire exit. The alarm started screaming the second Barrett hit the bar across its middle.
We burst into the night. The Cherry Bomb’s parking lot was roiling with men. They surged from the club like ants from a ruined anthill. All of them wanted in their cars. All of them wanted to be gone. Before more shots were fired. Before the cops came. Before their wives and girlfriends could find where they’d been.
“Let’s go!” Barrett yelled.
He gripped my hand tightly, towed me across the road at a loping run as vehicles tore away from the strip joint. He didn’t stop until we were behind the long log structure of the Roadhouse. And beside my Jaguar.
I had it unlocked and the driver’s door open in a breath.
“Get in,” I ordered.
“Get going,” he countered.
“No man left behind, Barrett.”
Which made me wonder where Marc could be. Until a Chrysler 300 slid to a stop alongside us. Marc was behind the wheel.
“Ride with Jamie,” Marc told Barrett, “or ride with me, but move. The fire brigade and half the state patrol will be here any second.”
As if on cue, we heard sirens wailing in the distance. But Barrett insisted on driving himself in the vintage blue-and-white Chevy I’d seen in his grandmother’s barn. So as we tore out of the Roadhouse’s parking lot, we made an unlikely caravan with Barrett in the lead, my Jaguar in the middle, and Marc’s Chrysler bringing up the rear as we headed for Fallowfield.
Once we were on the interstate, Marc called my cellphone, eager to know if I was all right. And he wanted to know what I’d learned in the Cherry Bomb, too. I told him all about Vance’s cryptic conversation with Burns, how it could’ve been about moving illegal drugs, how it could’ve been about Eric Wentz, and how Vance seemed fearful that someone shady knew he’d done something bad.
Whatever that bad thing was.
“But could’ve doesn’t mean he did,” I reminded Marc at the end of my recitation. “There’s no certainty. Except I know one thing for sure. That guy with the cigarette burns on his hands was a serious soldier. He could’ve crossed paths with Vance and Eric.”
“Don’t forget the jarhead. He’s military, too.”
“His name’s Barrett, Marc. And whatever’s happening in Fallowfield, he’s not a part of it.”
Not now, I thought, with drugs in the mix. And not years ago when Pamela was raped.
Marc wisely refrained from contradicting me, but I wasn’t sure he was convinced. Still, before he signed off, he made sure I knew his room number at the Fallowfield chain motel I’d seen behind the Apple Blossom Café. And at the three-way stop that led into town or to the Barrett orchard, Marc went his way, and Barrett and I went ours.
We weren’t the only ones, however, in that neck of the woods that late at night.
About a mile from the orchard’s lane, a pair of the sheriff’s cruisers, with red and blue strobes firing, blocked the driveway to another farmhouse. And when I followed Barrett down the drive to his grandmother’s home, we found another patrol car there. This one was stationed in front of Miranda Barrett’s front porch.
Chapter 19
When Barrett shot out of the truck and into the house, I was half a step behind him.
“Gram?” he called. “Is everything all right?”
Barrett’s boots echoed on the hardwood of the foyer. But I heard other noises, too. Like the steady drone of conversation.
I picked up Miranda Barrett’s birdlike warble. And Luke Rittenhaus’s low rumble. Both were coming from the parlor.
We walked in, found Mrs. Barrett seated in the middle of her overstuffed sofa. She was pale and wan and her knobby hands kneaded the lawn handkerchief she held on her lap. The sheriff loomed by the fireplace and Deputy Dawkins shifted from foot to foot by the old upright piano.
“What’s going on?” Barrett demanded.
“Miss Sinclair,” Rittenhaus said, “did you drive Kayley Miller home this evening?”
“No.” Every eye in the room pinned to me. “I offered her a lift, but she turned me down.”
And I’d wanted to see Barrett in the barn more than I’d wanted to take Kayley home. So when she’d assured me she was happy to walk, I’d lent her my coat. And I was glad to let her go.
But Rittenhaus didn’t need to know how motivated Barrett made me.
And Barrett didn’t need to know it, either.
“Luke,” he said, “what’s this about?”
His grandmother drew a shuddering breath. “Kayley never made it home. She’s missing, Adam.”
How a teenage girl could go missing between one farm and the next, I didn’t know.
But in Fallowfield, it had happened once before.
I glanced at Barrett. His face revealed nothing. He’d withdrawn into himself the way cops do when they refuse to let an eve
nt cloud their brains—or mess with their hearts. But I knew he was thinking of Pamela Wentz. I knew we all were—including the sheriff.
He said, “Adam, where were you about six o’clock tonight?”
“With me,” I said. “In the barn.”
Rittenhaus’s cool gaze drifted my way and settled there. Dawkins opened a little spiral-bound notebook. He made a note in it.
“Adam,” the sheriff said, “how’d you spend the rest of the—”
“With me,” I said just as firmly as before. “We were—”
“If you don’t mind, Miss Sinclair, I need to hear this from—”
“She’s right,” Barrett interrupted. And his chocolate-brown eyes grew black with anger. “I was with Jamie, and I was nowhere near Kayley. Is that what you want to hear, Luke?”
“Sure. If it’s true.”
For a split second, I thought Barrett was going to launch himself at Rittenhaus’s throat. But before he could, Mrs. Barrett piped up. The old lady’s voice was shaky—but her will was strong.
She said, “Let me make this clear to you, Sheriff. I have every confidence my grandson hasn’t hurt Kayley. Or any other girl.”
And there it was. The elephant in the room. Kayley Miller wasn’t Pamela Wentz, but that didn’t mean we weren’t envisioning one when we talked of the other.
Rittenhaus had the grace to blush to the roots of his hair.
“The search for Kayley resumes at daybreak,” he told us. “We can use all the volunteers we can get.”
“I’ll be there,” I promised.
“So will I,” Barrett said.
And when dawn came, we joined a dozen other neighbors down the road, in the lane running to the Millers’ modest home, where the patrol cars we’d seen lighting up the night waited.
Word of Kayley’s disappearance had traveled fast. And so had speculation. I could see it in the way the men and women who’d gathered to search looked at Barrett askance.
I didn’t like it.
If Barrett noticed the reception these people gave him, however, he didn’t let on.
Under Luke Rittenhaus’s watchful eye, Dawkins lined us up, moved us out as soon as there was enough light to see by. We were to sweep the cornfield on one side of the road, an eighth of an acre by an eighth of an acre, while a handler and his search-and-rescue dog worked the ditches and laneways before we set foot in them. Anything that caught our notice was to be marked with a red flag on a wire—and any sign of Kayley was reason to start shouting.
I’d seen plenty of cornfields while growing up on an army post in the Garden State, but I couldn’t claim I’d ever been in one. This particular stretch of countryside, however, was no lush, green band bordering a field of dreams. The cornstalks towering over me were dry, the leaves brittle. Like brown paper, they rattled whenever the breeze blew. And like bony fingers, they plucked at my clothes and at my ponytail as I made my way down the row assigned to me.
Underfoot, the ground was chunky and eager to turn my ankles. I was glad I’d borrowed a pair of boots Elise had left behind for visits to her grandmother’s home. Still, I watched my every footfall, disentangled myself from the cornstalks carefully. And I moved slowly as Dawkins had instructed. If Kayley had come this way, I didn’t want to ruin any indicator that would lead us to her.
The entire morning passed with us searchers sweeping back and forth through the field. Barrett kept pace with me despite the wall of stalks between us. I kept pace with the stranger in the next row. Systematically, she kept pace with the person in the row beside her. And on and on we went—but still we turned up nothing.
By noon, we’d reached the far end of the field once again. Many of my fellow volunteers paused to flex weary feet or stretch stiff shoulders before we dove into the cornfield for another trip. Dawkins had informed us our group would take a meal break—and a rest—when we emerged onto the road after this pass. And as I rolled my neck to relieve the tension of looking for footprints, broken leaves, or anything else that could offer a bit of hope, I knew he was right to order a halt. Trooping through the corn was tedious, and many of the folks around me had done their best. But many of them weren’t used to walking rough terrain for hours. And none were used to the stress of such a precious reason why.
I myself was beyond tired. Because there’d been no sleeping once Rittenhaus had dropped his bombshell. Instead, Barrett, his grandmother, and I kept uncomfortable company in the kitchen—and watched the clock all night.
Now, after a fruitless morning of searching, my sleeplessness was catching up with me.
I bumped my glasses out of the way, rubbed my gritty eyes, and glared at the woodland marking the boundary of this portion of the field. Most of the trees had shed their leaves, and the ones that held on to theirs clutched at dry, shriveled things in red and rust and brown. The deciduous undergrowth had died back, too, revealing a tangle of branches—and something else.
A rustic shed of weathered slats stood just within the cover of the trees.
Admittedly, I didn’t know a lot about corn, but I was familiar with gun sports. And while my favorite gun sports didn’t involve hunting, I knew a hunter’s blind when I saw one. This rough little structure—in the woods, not far from a field where game might come to browse, and with a long, skinny window cut into its wall—was certainly a hunter’s blind.
It was vacant, as far as I could tell. Deer season was still a couple of weeks away, and wild turkeys could breathe easy, too. But something about that blind made my skin prickle.
Before I could figure out why, a great bird swooped over the roof of the little shed. It settled on the eave and cocked its head at me. That head was bald, the body black, and the hook on the end of the large bird’s beak was for one purpose and one purpose only.
Because this bird was a vulture.
And the sight of it electrified me.
With every thought for Kayley, I left the cornfield behind, tramped through the summer’s dying grass. I pushed aside branches and brambles and thorns, and entered the cover of the autumn woods. I could hear someone calling my name, but I didn’t stop to answer.
The vulture watched my approach with interest. He blinked a beady eye at me. And when I reached the little building, he flapped his wings in warning.
The span had to be six feet wide from tip to tip.
Undaunted, I rounded the shed, bent on finding a door. But when I did, I saw three more vultures across a clearing, perched on a mossy log. Past them, I heard the burble of a brook. Whether it was the same brook that wound through the Wentzes’ meadow, I had no idea. But that possibility and more drove me to the bank.
I saw the toes of her right foot first. She’d painted her nails a lovely shade of lavender. She still wore my suede jacket, too. She’d liked my suede jacket. But now it was waterlogged and it weighed her down beneath the stream’s rush.
The rest of her was naked.
And the chill of the creek had turned her blue from the waist down.
“Jamie!”
Barrett grasped my shoulders, pulled me away from the water’s edge.
Then Dawkins was there, barking into his radio. Rittenhaus materialized at my side. I could hear his teeth grind.
“Damn it,” he muttered. “Poor girl didn’t deserve this.”
No one does, I thought.
A man with a rumpled face, gray with worry, pushed past a deputy trying to block his view. “No, no, no. That’s not my daughter….”
Rittenhaus intercepted him, rushed him back to the middle of the clearing. “I’m sorry, Jed, but you shouldn’t be here right—”
“No, no,” the man insisted. He’d made it close enough to the stream to see what I’d seen. “That’s not my daughter. Kayley doesn’t have a coat like that.”
“I lent it to her.” My voice was so strained, it took me a moment to recognize it as my own. “It was turning cold, and she wanted to walk home, and—”
“Wait,” Rittenhaus said. “You lent her your coat
?”
“Yes.”
“See?” Jed said. “The coat’s not Kayley’s.”
But the implication and the situation finally forced their way past Jed Miller’s shock. His hands balled into fists as understanding caught fire and burned in his brain. He pressed his fists to his temples like the contact was the only thing that could keep him sane.
Kayley’s father staggered. He dropped to his knees. And he moaned one question over and over.
“Who would do this to her? Who would do this?”
Even as Barrett held on to me, my heart tore in two. Because I didn’t have an answer for this suffering man. And neither did anybody else.
Chapter 20
“Let me get this straight,” Rittenhaus said. “You offered to drive her home, and when she refused, you loaned her your coat and she walked away.”
“That’s right.”
Rittenhaus drummed his fingertips on the roof of his cruiser while he considered my response. He’d asked me this same question at least half a dozen times. And half a dozen times, I’d given him the same reply.
In the meantime, he had me warming a spot on the patrol car’s backseat like any ordinary suspect. The car, along with his deputies’ cruisers, the coroner’s station wagon, an ambulance, and the SUV belonging to the search-and-rescue dog’s handler, clogged the Miller family’s lane. Here, where Kayley had lived, was the staging area for the investigation into her disappearance and death.
Until we knew how Kayley had ended up near that hunter’s blind and who’d made sure she’d died there, that investigation was far from over.
To that end, Rittenhaus questioned me. And he loomed over me, one hand on the doorframe, which made me feel like I’d just been busted for spray-painting my name on the wall of the high school. Dawkins, standing in Rittenhaus’s shadow, scratched down my every word in his spiral-bound notebook each time I spoke.
Of course, I knew this little confabulation was necessary. Rittenhaus needed to establish Kayley’s movements in order to put together a timeline that would point to contact with her assailant. But since he’d written off Eric Wentz’s death quickly and easily, I didn’t mind being detained.
The Kill Box Page 15
