Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  Travis, untying his grease-stained apron, approached our table. He didn’t smile when he said, “Surprised to see you here today.”

  It felt strange being this close, seeing him now, going on with life as usual after leaving things so unfinished by the river. Even though it felt like an eternity had passed, it had only been three days since our almost kiss, since we ceased being acquaintances who barely said two words in passing and had become something else I didn’t yet know how to define.

  “I guess you’ve heard about Bear?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah, it’s all anyone’s talking about.”

  I pulled my coffee cup closer, wrapping both hands around it, wishing I’d said yes when Belinda asked if I wanted cream. Bear always drank his coffee with just a single spoon of sugar stirred in—that was still too bitter for me.

  Travis cleared his throat. “You know it’s in the papers, right?”

  “It is?”

  He held up a finger—wait—and left our booth, dodging between tables to the front counter, where he plucked a newspaper from a wire stand near the register. He returned and laid the folded paper down in front of me. Bear’s mug shot took up the top half of the front page. He looked startled, half crazy, and his beard reminded me of a tangled nest of barbed wire. The headline in bold and all caps read WILD MAN FRANK “BEAR” MCALISTER ARRESTED AS PRIME SUSPECT IN LOCAL MURDER.

  I turned the front page facedown on the table without reading the article. Ollie grabbed for it. I tried to slide it away to keep her from seeing, but she pulled the newspaper from my grasp and flipped it over again.

  I sagged against the vinyl bench. “They arrested the wrong person, you know.”

  “This whole thing. It sucks,” Travis said, twisting his apron in his hands. “Really sucks. But they wouldn’t have arrested him if they didn’t have proof.”

  “What proof?”

  Travis shrugged. “I don’t know, but they must have something.”

  Ollie started to kick her feet against the bottom of the bench. I glared at her, but she just kept kicking. Thump! Thump! Thump!

  I said, “Yeah, well, I’ve got something, too.”

  Travis stopped twisting his apron. Underneath the table, Ollie kicked my shin.

  I yelped and pulled my leg out of reach. “What was that for?”

  She blinked at me, but stayed silent.

  I shrugged at Travis, said, “Sisters,” and then immediately wished I could take it back. I started to apologize, but stopped, shaking my head, motioning him closer to me instead.

  “I found something by the river,” I said. “Evidence that proves Bear’s innocent.”

  “Sam . . .” Travis drew out my name too long. He thought I was making it up.

  “No, really. I’ll show you.” I started to reach into my pocket for the sketches I’d made of the boot print and tire tracks, for the necklace safe in its plastic bag.

  Ollie lifted a straw to her mouth and blew. A spitball flew fast from the end and struck Travis’s forehead. Hard.

  He took a step back, rubbing his brow. “What the hell?”

  “Ollie!”

  The straw came up again. Ollie puffed out her cheeks.

  “Stop it!” I lunged across the table and grabbed her arm.

  She pulled away from me and shot another spitball. Travis ducked, and it flew harmlessly past his shoulder.

  I caught Ollie’s arm and yanked the straw from her fingers. “Apologize.”

  She turned her face to the window.

  I said it again: “Ollie. Tell Travis you’re sorry.”

  She ignored me.

  Travis touched my shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  “She knows better.”

  Travis shrugged. “She’s just a kid.” He glanced behind him at the swinging kitchen door like he’d heard someone calling his name. “Listen, I gotta get back to work. You staying with Zeb and Franny?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe I’ll come by after my shift is over. You can show me what you found?”

  “Yeah. Sure. If you want.” I tried another sip of coffee. It was lukewarm now and tasted even more disgusting than my first sip.

  When Travis was gone, I turned to scold Ollie, but she was smiling, just barely—a hint there at the corners of her mouth—and I decided to let the whole thing go.

  Our waitress came with food a few minutes later. She set plates down in front of us and then stood beside our booth for a stretched-out moment, tapping her pencil against the palm of her hand. She was a heavyset woman and every time she took a breath, she wheezed a little. Her bottle-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her dark roots starting to show.

  I pulled my plate closer.

  Belinda stopped tapping her pencil. She said, “You should be careful who you talk to about that woman.”

  Ollie’s spoon clinked against the side of her bowl.

  Belinda continued, “There are a lot of folks around here that don’t like your daddy and this whole situation, his arrest . . . well, it has them even more riled up than before.”

  “He didn’t—” But she wouldn’t let me finish.

  “Now. I like you girls. And I liked your mama. And even though I probably shouldn’t, I’m going to tell you what I remember, but you keep it to yourselves, you hear? Don’t go telling anyone I told you or I could get in some real trouble.” She waited until Ollie and I both nodded, promising our silence, and then she said, “As far as I can remember, that poor girl came in here two nights in a row. Saturday and Sunday. Sat right over there. Same booth both times. Ordered meat loaf the first night and a club sandwich, hold the fries, the second. Drank a lot of coffee. Two pots’ worth, easy. Each night. And she was writing on something, always had her hand going. When she wasn’t writing, she was flipping through a stack of old newspaper articles.”

  “Did she talk to anybody?” I asked.

  Belinda scratched behind her ear with her pencil. “Well, she asked me if I knew anything about your daddy.”

  “And?”

  “And I told her I didn’t know any more than what those articles in front of her said.”

  The Bulletin had run some features about Bear when he first set up camp in the meadow. They praised his return to the land and quest for a minimalist life. Some even compared him to Henry David Thoreau. After he set up his hives, there were a few more articles about his honey business and how to care for bees, but the last article I knew about had been published over four years ago, and I didn’t see any good reason why Taylor Bellweather would have come all the way from Eugene to write about someone as uninteresting as Bear.

  “Was there anyone else she talked to?” I asked. “Maybe someone she seemed uncomfortable around? Someone she didn’t seem very happy to see?”

  “I know what you’re getting at, and no. There was no one like that.” Belinda shifted all her weight onto one foot. “Though, now that I think about it, I did see her talking to Pastor Mike. That second night she was here. But it wasn’t for very long and she was smiling at him the whole time, so stop looking like that because he didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  I leaned closer to her. “Did you hear what they were talking about?”

  Belinda scowled at me and dropped her pencil into the front pocket of her apron. “Wasn’t any of my business then, and it’s none of your business now.”

  “It is,” I said, pushing the newspaper, Bear’s mug shot facing up, across the table to her. “Now it is.”

  She sighed and her expression softened. “I know he’s your daddy and all. And I know you love him. And maybe he didn’t have anything to do with all this. Maybe he didn’t do a damn thing wrong. But maybe he did, and all I’m saying is you’ve got to be careful. Sometimes when you think you’re looking straight at something, you’re really looking at it sideways.” She r
apped her knuckles twice on the table, then smiled at Ollie and said, “Eat up, sweetheart, before your soup gets cold.”

  As she moved away from us, I had a clear view of the table where Pastor Mike had been sitting. His chair was pushed back and empty. His plate of food, abandoned.

  Outside it was so hot our shoes stuck to the pavement.

  “Hurry up,” I said to Ollie, but she didn’t walk any faster.

  The sun was bold and the asphalt mean. My T-shirt was damp, clinging to my skin.

  “Ollie, let’s go!”

  She had stopped in front of the Attic and was staring through the front window at the toy monkey. I grabbed her hand and tried to pull her away. Ollie shook me off and crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to leave.

  “Please, Ollie. It’s important.”

  I’d called the number on Deputy Santos’s business card before we left Patti’s. No one answered. I didn’t have her home phone number, but she didn’t live that far from here, about a mile give or take, on the north end of town in a cul-de-sac near the fire station. It would take us maybe twenty minutes to walk there, and twenty to walk back. Plus, if Deputy Santos was home, I’d need at least a half hour to show her everything I’d found and ask her what she was going to do about it, forty-five minutes because she might need convincing. If we wanted to be back in time to meet Zeb, we had to hurry.

  I tugged Ollie’s arm. “We can come back later.”

  Ollie stepped closer to the window. She lifted her hand and, with one finger, traced the stenciled letters on the window: D-E-L-I-L-A-H. When she reached the H, she went back to the D and traced it again. She ignored the ’S and the word ATTIC that came after.

  On the road behind us, a car drove slowly past. The engine rattled the way Zeb’s truck did, and I turned quickly, thinking maybe it was him—maybe the forensic guys had finished early—but it was a burgundy minivan and no one I recognized.

  I grabbed Ollie’s elbow, saying, “Let’s go,” and dragged her a few steps along the sidewalk.

  She pulled back against me, digging in her heels, throwing her whole weight into going the opposite direction, back to Delilah’s Attic. She’d gotten stronger in the past few months, taller, too. I used to be able to pick her up under her arms and swing her around in a circle. I used to be able to lift her onto my shoulders and carry her around for hours. I used to be able to make her do whatever I wanted.

  I released her. She stumbled backward but didn’t fall.

  “Fine,” I said. “You want to go inside?”

  She nodded.

  “Go, then.”

  She took a step toward the door, then stopped and glanced back at me.

  “I’m going to go talk to Deputy Santos.”

  She pushed her glasses up high on the bridge of her nose, and worked her lips between her teeth, and it seemed like she was getting ready to say something and I thought, Finally. It’s about goddamn time. But then she just shrugged. And said nothing.

  “You can wait for me here,” I said. “Inside.”

  Her nostrils flared a little.

  “Either that or you come with me.”

  She looked at the door, then back at me, and I wanted to ask her what was so pressing about this place, what couldn’t wait another hour? What was more important than our family? But I knew she wouldn’t answer.

  “I’m going,” I said and turned away.

  I walked to the end of the block slower than I normally would, giving Ollie time to think about it, change her mind, and catch up with me. When I reached the edge of the sidewalk, I stopped and looked back over my shoulder.

  Ollie was gone, the sidewalk deserted. Maybe it was better this way—letting her hide inside books and imaginary worlds. Mom was always saying kids should stay kids for as long as possible. They shouldn’t be in charge of the hard things. I guess sometimes I just forgot how young ten really was and how much growing up Ollie still had to do.

  I hurried across the street in the direction of Deputy Santos’s house, promising myself I wouldn’t stay long.

  Where did you find this?” Deputy Santos turned the plastic bag over, then brought the necklace close to her face.

  Her eyes narrowed on the pendant, and she moved her thumb over it, smoothing the plastic, trying to see the details better.

  “In Crooked River about a mile from the meadow,” and I told her about chasing the bee and how I was going to take the service road back to Zeb and Franny’s, but the gold chain had been glinting in the sun, begging me to wade out and see.

  “It’s hers,” I said. “She’s wearing the same one in that picture the newspapers printed.”

  Deputy Santos frowned.

  “Right?” I pressed her. “It’s the same one. Isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” She set the bagged necklace on the table among a cluttered mess of scribbled-on notepads, photographs, file folders, today’s newspaper still rolled and wrapped in plastic, and empty mugs stained dark with old coffee.

  When I first came into the kitchen and saw her table like this, I thought she was busy with one of the cold cases she was always working during her off-hours. She’d bring home stacks of dusty boxes and sort through everything again, because sometimes it wasn’t new evidence that solved a case, rather someone with a fresh perspective coming along and taking another look, staring at it from a different angle. She told me once that working cold cases was the best thing she could think to do with her spare time, that it was important to never forget about the victims. That they deserved answers. “We owe it to them to keep trying,” she’d said. And that’s what I thought she was doing today, when she opened the door and invited me in. But then I saw Taylor Bellweather’s name scribbled on some of the papers, and my father’s name jotted down on others, and knowing this case had become her most important one encouraged me.

  Deputy Santos skimmed her fingers over the plastic bag, lingering a few seconds on the pendant. “You should have left it there. You should have gone straight back to the Johnsons’ and called me right away.”

  “I did call,” I said. “You didn’t answer.”

  “You should have left a message.”

  “By the time you got there, it would have been gone.” I wasn’t lying, just stretching the truth a little, because I needed her to focus. “The current was pulling at it too hard.”

  “Why didn’t you call the tip line, then? Or 911, for Christ’s sake?” She folded her arms, cradling her elbows. “Someone would have come out right away.”

  “I put it in a bag as soon as I could. And I kept it with me the whole time.” I shrugged. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal.”

  She rubbed her eyes and sighed.

  “You can still use it, right? You can dust it for fingerprints or something, can’t you?”

  She didn’t answer me.

  “Look.” I took the sketches from my back pocket, unfolded them, and laid them on the table side by side in front of her. “There were these, too.”

  She picked up the drawing of the boot print, studied it a second, then put it down and picked up the sketch I’d done of the tire tracks. “Where?”

  “In the mud a foot or so back from the waterline.”

  She set the tire tracks back down, too, and looked at them both together.

  “I didn’t touch the boot print or the tracks,” I said. “They’re probably still there. Exactly how I found them.”

  She stared at my sketches. The ceiling fan in the living room clattered loudly, like a bolt was loose or the pull string was slapping against a blade.

  “So?” I touched the corner of the boot print sketch. “This proves it, right? Bear’s innocent. You can let him go now?”

  “This doesn’t prove much of anything,” she said. “Other than a possible dump site.” And then she bit her lower lip like she regretted using those words
in front of me.

  “But it does.” I pushed the boot print across the table, closer to her. “Bear doesn’t wear boots like these.”

  “You don’t know everything about him, Sam. There are things he doesn’t tell you.” She tried to say it gently, but it still felt like a punch to the gut.

  “No. You don’t understand,” I said. “He doesn’t wear boots. Period. He says the laces make him feel trapped, like he’s walking around in chains. He doesn’t own a pair of boots. He hates boots. He refuses to wear them.”

  Deputy Santos picked up the boot print sketch again, turned it upside down and then sideways. She said, “They’re the right size.”

  “He wears moccasins.” My voice pitched shrill. “Or he goes barefoot. Never boots. Never.”

  “That you know of.” Deputy Santos laid the sketch down.

  “You searched the meadow, right? You went through all his things. Did you find boots like this?” I jabbed my finger at the drawing. “Did you find any boots at all?”

  She pinched her lips together between her teeth, and the creases in her forehead deepened. She said, “The arraignment’s tomorrow. You know that, right?”

  I nodded. Zeb had already promised he’d take me.

  “So it’s too late for me to do anything about it today.”

  I nodded again, even though it didn’t really make sense to me how they could keep a man locked up like that when he was now so obviously innocent.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you’ll take another look? Come at it from a different angle?”

  I could tell by the sudden tightening corners of her mouth that she recognized her own words.

  “I can’t make any promises,” she said. “But I’ll do what I can.”

  I almost hugged her. Instead, I took the sketch out of her hand and brought it close to my face, trying to remember if I’d gotten all the details right. “I have some ideas, too,” I rambled. “About other people you might want to look into. Run a background check on at least.”

  “Sam, listen to me.” She pushed the paper away from my face. “Things still might not work out the way you want them to. I’m going to look into the boot prints and the tracks not because you’re asking me to, but because it’s my job. Because they’re an important part of this investigation. But they might just lead us straight back to Bear. You know that, right?”