“Were you driving or was he?”
“I was.”
“When did you drop him off?”
Darrell said he wasn’t sure. Maybe midnight, maybe a little later. No one saw them at the laundromat, although somebody did dump his first load out of the dryer, leaving it on top of a washer. “Pissed us off, whoever did that.”
“Why would they? Do that?”
“The other dryers were out of order.”
Donna said, “I’m telling you, that boy wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not after what happened to his family earlier this year.”
“What was that?”
Donna’s eyes looked like black currents, set deep in unrisen dough. “His younger brother died. The whole family’s been devastated.”
Wendy said, “His brother was Terry Cottle—T.J.”
Laura looked from one woman to the other.
Wendy said, “T.J. was the boy who drowned in Cataract Lake.”
*
Laura waited a little longer for Richie Lockhart, then walked to the Mother Road Bar and Grille for a quick dinner. In a way, she was glad to be alone; there was a lot to think about. Shana’s evasiveness, the fact that she’d gone to Las Vegas and lied about it, the act of selling her horse and trailer a day after her twin brother was found shot to death in a tent with his new wife. Pocketing twelve hundred dollars, closing the door on her old life. Reasonable explanations for all of it, but Laura felt Shana was hiding something.
And Jamie Cottle. She asked about him at the Mother Road. Nice kid, good guy, quiet; one of the waitresses called him “sensitive.” All of them commented on the tragedy at Cataract Lake earlier this year, when his brother, accompanied by his high school coach and math teacher, dove into a dark lake late at night and never resurfaced.
Common knowledge that Jamie had a crush on Kellee. But he’d never acted on it, as far as anyone could tell. The waitress who called him sensitive, a girl named Lilly Brawley, mentioned that he never said anything, but the crush was painfully obvious. He would blush and stammer when Kellee talked to him. He had it bad, Lilly said, but she couldn’t see him doing anything overt to get Kellee to notice him. And he knew Dan, who worked there, too. It was laughable to even picture them as rivals. Dan was an adult, and Jamie was a boy—despite the fact that there were only three years or so between them.
Jamie Cottle either was or wasn’t tied to this case. On the surface, he didn’t seem capable of an act like that, but one thing bothered her: the coincidence. Jamie’s brother had died earlier this year at Cataract Lake. Dan and Kellee had been shot to death at the same lake. Superficially, the two cases didn’t appear to be linked; the boy had drowned early in the summer, and Dan and Kellee had been shot to death. T.J. Cottle had been accompanied by a teacher in suspicious circumstances—a man and boy out on a lake late at night. According to Richard Garatano, the teacher, T.J. had dived into the lake voluntarily.
Wildly different cases.
But Frank Entwistle had taught her that there was no such thing as a true coincidence. There was always a link somewhere, even if it was tenuous and unimportant, and it was her job to track that link down and decide if it had merit.
Back at the motel, she divested herself of her gun and phone, placing them on the bed, and turned the local TV news on low. She caught the tail end of a report on the shooting at Cataract Lake, a glimpse of stock footage of the lake itself.
She glanced at the phone on the bed. Tom would be done for the day, the horses fed and taken care of, no more tourists to wrangle. She made a move for the phone, but stopped herself.
What did he say, just before she left? “I’ll call you.” But he hadn’t so far. She’d heard the “I’ll call you” line countless times during her single years, and they never meant it. But Tom lived with her. She wondered if he’d said it just to placate her. Or maybe out of guilt?
He said he’d call her; let him call. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of going first.
A loud rumble reverberated off the motel walls, punctuated by one ear-splitting roar before clean silence.
Laura heard the car door slam, heard Richie unlock his door and go inside, heard the TV come on. Some thumping, the sound of the shower turning on.
Not long after that, he knocked on her door.
He leaned against the doorjamb, the look on his face triumphant. “Got something,” he said, walking past her into the room and sitting in one of the chairs by the window. He crossed his leg over his knee, wriggling his foot. Wired. “We’ve got a witness.”
“We do?”
“Yup. Some guy slept out by the lake, saw the whole thing.”
“Where’d you hear this?”
“Somebody heard him talking and reported it to Williams PD. A Sandra Bell, B-E-L-L, heard him bragging about it outside the Mother Road B and G last night.” He shifted in his seat, pulled out a crimped notepad from his jean pocket. “Guy’s name is Luke Jessup.”
“You have an address?”
“According to my notes, he’s a drifter, does odd jobs for folks. Delivers water.”
“Delivers water?”
“You see all those tanks around town? In the back of pickups, people hauling them around on little trailers? Place has a water shortage in the outlying areas. People outside the city limits have to come in for water. Fill up their tanks just like they’d do with propane.”
Laura remembered the tanks. White ones, mostly, some shaped like propane tanks, only they looked plastic. She wondered why Richie had noticed that and she didn’t.
“Has an old truck, a ‘67 Chevy, pals around with a guy named Dave Soderstrom. I do have his address.”
*
On the way to Dave Soderstrom’s house, Richie gave her the rundown on Dan’s two roommates.
“He just moved in a month ago. They had no idea he was getting married, and from what I gathered, one of them—that’d be Steve Banks—wasn’t a happy camper. Took it personally that Dan was planning to split and didn’t bother to mention it.” He shrugged. “Either way, they’re looking for a new roommate.”
“Did you get a look at his room?”
“Wasn’t much there—Danny Boy hadn’t got around to unpacking. Looks to me like they threw his things—clothes and toiletries and stuff—in the boxes he already had and hauled them all down to the garage.”
“That was quick.”
He turned onto a road leading out of town. “Life goes on, I guess.”
He described what he had found in the boxes. Dan’s financial statements, credit card information, checkbook, phone records, etc. Posters and things he never got around to putting up. Sports equipment, college texts, clothing, CDs.
“Usual stuff for a college kid. I was surprised there was only one credit card, though. College kids love the plastic. I’ve got it all in the trunk of my car. So then I went to Kellee’s apartment. Her roommate—Amy—she’s a piece of work. She knew they were getting married, but was sworn to secrecy. I looked at Kellee’s room, pretty much what you’d expect. Left it the way it was, put a seal on the door.”
“Amy’s a piece of work? What makes you say that?”
Up ahead was a small, shabby trailer court called the Rainbow’s End. They turned onto the first lane and Richie looked at mailboxes.
“I dunno, just a feeling I got. She acted like it didn’t affect her at all. Of course, Kellee hadn’t been there long. She and Dan worked all summer at the Mother Road. Maybe Kellee and her roommate met through a college ad. Here we are.”
They pulled up in front of a yellow house trailer with a patch of yard. A GMC truck of similar vintage to Shana’s was parked out front on a scabby bit of lawn.
As they emerged from the car, an ear-splitting cry cut through the night air—a baby.
Richie sighed. “Just like home.”
Richie and his wife had five children, one just recently out of the baby stage.
Richie pushed the bar up on the gate and they walked up to the trailer and knocke
d. The baby wailed, a counterpoint to a boom box somewhere, a thumping bass. Butter-colored light fell from the curtained window on one side of the door.
A harried-looking woman in shorts and an extra-large T-shirt with an American flag on it shoved the door open, jiggling the baby on her arm. Cute little guy. At least Laura thought it was a boy, but she could be wrong; she was going by the blue blanket. The woman was large, tired, and pale with stringy brown hair pulled up in a clip that had big, nasty-looking teeth.
“We’re looking for Dave Soderstrom,” Richie said.
“He’s in his room. Last door.”
Music coming from behind the door. Or rather, the bass beat. Laura couldn’t hear a tune.
Laura said, “Have him come to the door.”
The woman looked at her funny, but then yelled up the hallway. “Dave, get out here!”
The music turned down abruptly and a couple of moments later a string bean of a man with a ponytail and a goatee appeared in the doorway. He looked to be in his mid-to-late thirties.
The smell of pot rolled off him. He wore a frayed Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops despite the chill in the house. Red nylon running shorts—circa 1980—peeked out from under the shirt.
He smiled vaguely and said, “Hi there.”
Richie showed him his badge and introduced himself and Laura. The woman, who had retreated into the trailer, suddenly reappeared. “Aren’t you going to take out the trash?”
“Sure.”
“Now?”
“Okay.” He sounded just like a teenager. “You mind?” he asked, motioning for them to follow, tramping down the uneven carpeted floor to the cluttered kitchen area. He opened a cupboard and pulled out a kitchen bag from its box, and walked with deliberate slowness around the trailer emptying waste baskets, Richie and Laura trailing after him. He pulled out the full kitchen bag—a Top Ramen wrapper on top—and painstakingly twisted a tie around it and the other bag, then motioned them to follow him outside.
He led them through the gate and up the lane toward a dumpster under a poplar tree at the end. The tree shimmied overhead, fat heart-shaped leaves mirroring the light on the pole above them.
Richie asking him questions about his friend Luke Jessup.
“Luke?” he said, hefting the second of the two bags into the dumpster. “Is this about what he saw? Those kids getting shot?”
“That’s what he said?”
The man leaned against the dumpster and scratched his nose, oblivious to the garbage smell. Shook his head. “Ol’ Luke. I hate to say this, but he’s usually full of shit. Nobody listens to what he says. But this was something you just can’t discount.”
“You believed him?”
“He did seem unusually worked up. I told him he shouldn’t cry wolf like that, but he kept talking about it, like he felt he had to convince me.”
Richie asked, “What did he tell you?”
He swiped at his nose. “Sometimes he drives down to the lake and camps there. He was just getting to sleep when he heard a shotgun blast.”
“Just one?”
He rubbed his jaw deliberatively. “More than that. He said maybe two or three. He sits up and he sees this guy walking around, shooting into a tent. Just shooting into it, you know? I mean, that’s just not cool.”
Laura asked, “The guy walked? He didn’t run?”
“That’s what Luke said. That’s what made it so scary. Somebody who’s that cold, man. You know?”
“Where does Luke live?”
“Right now, nowhere. He’s kind of a mountain man. Goes wherever his feet take him.”
“Does he work?”
Dave shrugged. “Odd jobs. A couple of people around here hire him by the job, but it’s kind of hit-or-miss.”
Richie asked, “Is there anything he does regularly? Some place he goes to eat? Some place he crashes?”
“He never misses church.”
“Church?”
“It isn’t much of a church. More like a ministry. The Staff of Life. It’s over on Third Street.”
*
On the way back to the motel, Laura called the Staff of Life Ministry. As she’d expected at this time of night, she got their voicemail. She left a message, then glanced at Richie. Might as well try to get along with him, since they had to work together. “That was a cute baby,” she said. “Couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, though.”
“It was a girl. I’m surprised you couldn’t tell that.”
“But she had a blue blanket.”
He rolled his eyes.
“How’s yours doing?”
“Oh, man, she’s a little pistol. Cutest little kid you ever saw. Sleeps through the night. Always has, which is a great thing for Gail.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. Gail and I are having so much fun with her. I’m telling you, you don’t really grow up until you have kids.”
Laura didn’t reply to that. She thought she was a grownup now.
“How’s your boyfriend? Tom, right? You thinking of tying the knot?”
“That’s not even on the radar.”
“You should think about it. There’s nothing like being married, having kids. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I mean, sure, it’s a lot of work. But it’s worth it. These kids, they can make you so proud. Did I tell you Chris is the star of his soccer team? Kid’s gonna be a natural on the football field. Wide receiver. You can take that to the bank.”
Laura glanced at Richie, short and built like a rubber eraser. She couldn’t picture him running down any field, let alone a football field.
“Our anniversary is coming up,” Richie was saying. Looking at her, actually engaging. “I want to go to Colorado, but Gail’s got her heart set on San Diego. She’s always wanted to stay at the hotel on Coronado Island, you know, the big old one? I’ll probably give in, as usual.”
He talked about his family all the way back to the motel—his three girls, his two boys, Gail dragging him to an opera and how he’d actually kind of liked it. Listening to him talk made her wish for a family of her own—something she normally didn’t think about. “Family” had not been part of her lexicon for the past eleven years. She realized she had forgotten what it was like to be part of a family, to have someone who loved you no matter what. That mainstay had been gone so long that now she barely felt its absence; her life had evolved into something else. Like an old road, the memory of her own family had been almost erased by time and neglect. What would it be like to have that kind of support system again? Someone who was always there for you?
She’d hoped Tom would be that someone, but now she wasn’t so sure.
Richie parked in front of his room, yawned. “I’m dead. Let’s reconnoiter tomorrow morning and see where we’re at, maybe check out that church.”
*
But Laura couldn’t sleep. After lying awake for what seemed like hours, she was wide-eyed. Maybe the mountain air would make her sleepy. She got up, pulled her jeans on under her nightshirt, put on her shoes and walked outside into the chill night air.
Cigarette smoke permeated the air. She could see the tiny, red glow over by the office across the way. Someone sitting in one of the plastic chairs outside the first room, the manager’s office. A slim woman with dark hair, waving at her.
Laura walked over. She wasn’t crazy about cigarette smoke, but the idea of company trumped the potential bad effects. Wendy said, “Pull up a chair.”
Laura did so, careful not to tread on the sleeping chow.
“You making any headway? On the case?” Wendy asked.
“Not really,” Laura said truthfully.
Wendy put out her cigarette in the sand-filled coffee can at her feet. “I knew Dan a little. From what I could tell, he was a really nice guy. This is just incredibly sad.”
Laura silently agreed.
Wendy caught her long brown hair, brought it over one shoulder, and stroked it absently. “Poor Shana. Who’s going to look out for her now?”
“You know Shana?”
“We were on the quadrille team together in high school.”
“She sold her horse today.”
Wendy stared at her. “Mighty Mouse? Are you kidding me? She loved that horse.”
“She sold the horse and horse trailer to Barbara Wingate.”
“Wow. That’s unbelievable.” Wendy stared straight ahead, working it out in her mind. “She must have been really upset. People do weird things when they get upset. Stuff they wouldn’t normally do.”
“I suppose she has other things on her mind,” Laura said. “Dan’s death. Her children. Her boyfriend.”
“She still running around with that creep?”
“You mean Bobby Burdette?”
“That’s the one.” Wendy shook another cigarette from the pack sitting on her lap, stuck it between her lips. “Although sometimes it’s hard to keep track. Shana always did run through men like babies through diapers.”
Laura closed her eyes, enjoying the cool air on her cheek. She heard the flare of a match and smelled the smoke. Turned her head so she didn’t breathe it directly in, even though it probably didn’t make any difference.
Wendy said, “Barbara Wingate must have bought Mighty Mouse for Erin. I hope it perks her up. Maybe it will get her mind off everything she’s been going through.”
Wendy moved her hair to the other shoulder, and Laura noticed the gold-colored name tag pinned to her tunic catching the light. The name tag said WILLIAMS HEALTH CARE CENTER above the name WENDY BAKER.
“Are you a nurse?” Laura asked.
“No, I do intake. Part-time.”
“Is Erin very sick?”
“If she isn’t, she sure gives a good imitation of it. Nobody knows what’s wrong, though; there are so many different symptoms. All she’s been through, and Mrs. Wingate’s just beside herself.”
Chelsea the chow stretched, groaned, and went back to sleep.
Wendy added, “I can tell it’s beginning to wear her down. She’s a real fighter. So persistent, always asking questions, being real proactive, you know? That’s important. When it comes to patient care, a lot of people don’t realize they’ve got to ride herd on the health care providers. I could tell you stories…” She shook her head. “At least Barbara Wingate knows what’s going on, how important it is to watch out for Erin. She should, considering.”
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