Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  The evidence. I needed to see the case file.

  I pushed away from the truck. “Is your bike at the store?”

  Travis hesitated, then said, “Yeah. Why?”

  “I need your help with something.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And I need you to promise me you’ll keep your mouth shut about it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Promise me first.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “Mom’s expecting me back at the store in an hour. She wants me on the register again tonight.”

  “It’s about Taylor Bellweather.”

  “Sam—”

  “No, listen to me. I know you think I’m crazy . . .”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  “ . . . but Bear didn’t kill her. I know he didn’t.”

  “I think you should just leave it alone.” He kicked at a small rock. It bounced under Zeb’s truck and disappeared.

  I said, “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s my father, Travis.”

  “Not a very good one.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Travis folded his arms and shrugged.

  “You don’t know Bear the way I do,” I said. “No one does. If they did, they wouldn’t have arrested him in the first place.”

  “Maybe you’ve got it backward. Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do. You only see him, what, once a year?”

  “Twice,” I said. “He comes home for Christmas.”

  Travis shrugged again. “How much can you really know about a person you spend so little time with?”

  “Are you going to help me or not?” I asked.

  He sighed and nodded. “But only because I don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning and hear about how you were sneaking around some abandoned warehouse and fell off a staircase and busted up your leg and then had to lie there by yourself for hours until the night-shift security guard found you.”

  “We’re not going to an abandoned warehouse.”

  “You get my point.”

  “It’s a stupid point.”

  He laughed.

  I pulled the folded-up newspaper from my skirt pocket and went around to the passenger side of the truck. With a ballpoint pen I found in the glove box, and using the dashboard as a flat surface, I wrote a note for Zeb in the empty margins, then tucked the paper under the windshield wipers where it was impossible to miss.

  “Ready?”

  Travis glanced down at my skirt. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

  “Unless you brought me a change of clothes, then yes, this is what I’m wearing.” I flounced past him, walking in the direction of the Attic.

  Travis caught up with me quickly. “So,” he said. “Where are we going?”

  20

  ollie

  Papa Zeb returns to the house alone. He tosses a crumpled newspaper into the trash and goes upstairs. When I am sure he’s not coming back down, I take the paper out of the trash and spread it flat on the counter.

  Went to the movies with Travis. Don’t wait. I’ll get a ride from him. Be back before dinner.

  Lies written out in my sister’s slanted hand.

  She hates going to the movies, says the speakers are always too loud, the picture too close, the smell of stale popcorn too disgusting. The last movie she went to was three years ago, when Mom made her come—“It’s your sister’s birthday. Do it for her.” She brought earplugs and sat in the back row and complained the whole ride home. She might be with Travis, but I know for a fact she’s not at the movies.

  I ball up the note and throw it back in the trash.

  Nana Fran comes into the kitchen and sees me scowling at the table and mistakes my anger for boredom. She says, “There’s a deck of cards in the closet under the stairs. Go grab it and I’ll teach you how to play rummy.”

  There are more than just cards in the closet under the stairs. There are blocks and dominos and plastic tubs filled with broken crayons. There are stacks of board games teetering together on narrow shelves. Chess and checkers and Monopoly and Life.

  To get the cards, I have to stand on tiptoe, and when I pull them down, other things come too. Boxes and dice and boards and cards and plastic army men collapse around me.

  “Everything okay in there?” Nana Fran shouts.

  I bend and start picking up the pieces.

  She pokes her head through the kitchen door and, when she sees the mess, comes over to help.

  “I keep meaning to clean this old closet out,” she says, picking up a box that has been torn in many places and taped back together.

  I recognize the letters on the side and take the game from her.

  She laughs a little. “A girl stayed with us once who claimed she could channel the spirits of all the dead presidents. Papa Zeb brought this home for her one day, and I don’t think a minute went by that she wasn’t doing some kind of hocus-pocus.”

  I open the box and take out the board, lay it on the floor. The letters are worn and scuffed, but they are clear enough. The wooden planchette slides smoothly, my fingers pushing it from one corner of the board to the other.

  The one who follows me laughs, and I know she thinks it’s just a stupid kids’ game, but maybe there’s something more to it.

  I think, Are you mad at me for what I did?

  The planchette doesn’t move.

  I think again, Are you mad?, and this time look straight at her.

  She stops laughing, crouches down beside me, and puts her hand over mine. The planchette shivers. She moves the planchette under our hands to the word NO at the top of the board.

  I think, Do you still love me?

  Her hand moves my hand again, over the YES. She whispers, For always.

  Franny says, “It’s yours if you want it.”

  I do.

  21

  sam

  Travis stopped the bike in front of Deputy Santos’s driveway, but he kept the engine running. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “What are we doing here?”

  Her driveway was empty, and the curtains in the front window were drawn. The garage door opened at the house across the street, and a black Suburban backed out. A few houses down, a woman in a blue bathrobe watered her roses. She lifted her hand, shielding her eyes, and looked in our direction.

  I leaned close to Travis, slipped my arms around his waist again, and shouted, “Park down the street. Behind those bushes.”

  At the very end of the cul-de-sac, a yellow post marked the start of a narrow dirt path that cut behind the houses. There was a culvert back there, too, the perfect cover. Travis parked his bike up next to a row of overgrown laurels.

  I climbed off the seat and straightened my wrinkled skirt, then removed the helmet he’d let me borrow and, handing it back to him, said, “Thanks.”

  He hung the helmet from the handlebar, then got off the bike and pulled on the collar of his T-shirt, shaking out the places where it had gone damp and flat, where I’d pressed up against him, clinging tight the whole way here. It was my first time on a dirt bike, on any kind of motorcycle actually, and at every turn and bend in the road, I’d clung to him, certain we were mere milliseconds from a very fast and spiraling, painful death.

  “So,” he said. “You going to fill me in now or what?”

  I stretched my arms above my head, clenching and unclenching my fingers, trying to work out the numbing, tingling sensations, the feeling that my soul, if there even was such a thing, was peeling away from my body, already half gone.

  “We’re breaking into Deputy Santos’s house,” I said, and stepped around the yellow post toward the culvert.

  “Wait, what?” Travis hurried after me.

  The path went about a hundre
d yards before dead-ending against a waist-high chain-link fence. On the other side was a narrow dirt ledge that dropped off into the culvert, an open half-pipe, about fifteen feet wide and eight feet deep. Beyond the culvert was another chain-link fence and beyond that, a vast stretch of undeveloped land. Scrub mostly, dirt and loose gravel, a few scraggly trees that were barely hanging on.

  I cut left and, sticking to the path that ran between the chain link on one side and cedar plank fencing on the other, followed the culvert toward Deputy Santos’s house. The weeds were all trampled down, and there were cigarette butts scattered everywhere. Behind me, Travis kicked an empty beer can and it clanked against the chain link.

  I glared at him over my shoulder.

  He shrugged and mouthed, Sorry.

  I counted the houses as we passed behind them and when I reached eight, I stopped and stood on tiptoe to peek over the fence.

  “This is it,” I whispered. “Give me a boost.”

  “No.” Travis crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “No way.”

  “You said you’d help.”

  “Not this. I’m not going to help you break into a police officer’s house!”

  “Fine,” I said. “You can wait with the bike.”

  I inched onto the support beam, a two-by-four that ran parallel to the ground along the back of the fence boards, reached up, and grabbed the top of the fence. It would have been easier if I’d been wearing jeans, but even with the skirt knotting around my legs and catching on splinters, I somehow managed to heave myself up and over the top into the yard below.

  Travis cursed. Then he grabbed the top of the planks and swung himself over into the dead grass beside me. Wiping his hands on his pants, he said, “Do you have any idea how much trouble we could get in for this?”

  I ignored him and jogged to the patio. Flowerpots lined the brick edge, but all the plants were brown and wilted. I tried the sliding glass door. Locked, but the curtains were open, and I could see into her empty living room. The television was off. A dirty plate and fork had been left on one of the couch cushions, three coffee cups sat on the end table, and there was a pile of laundry heaped in the middle of the floor, like she’d been about to fold it, but something had distracted her.

  Footsteps crunched in the dry grass behind me and Travis whispered, “It’s locked? Let’s take it as a sign and just go.”

  Along the back wall of the house there were three windows. One was too high and narrow to even consider, the other two were closer to ground level and big enough for me to slip through if I went in sideways.

  To reach the bigger windows, I had to squeeze behind a row of tall hedges and through a sticky cobweb mess. A broken branch raked across my calf. The first window was shut and wouldn’t budge. The second was cracked open, just barely. I popped out the screen, pressed my fingertips against the plastic edge of the window, and wiggled the crack wider, enough to slip my fingers around the frame and push the window all the way open.

  Travis shoved through the bushes after me. He said, “Sam! This is a really shitty idea.” He swatted at a branch blocking his way. “They can put you in jail for this, you know? Breaking and entering. It’s a felony.”

  I lifted my skirt up around my knees and swung my legs over the ledge.

  “What if she has an alarm?”

  I froze half crouched on the beige carpet in Deputy Santos’s bedroom, listening, ready to spring back outside and run like hell if any alarm went off. In the kitchen, the refrigerator clicked and thrummed. Somewhere outside a car horn honked once. No other sounds. No alarm. No panicked beeping. No one was coming, and we were alone.

  I stuck my head out the open window and waved at Travis to come inside. He shook his head.

  “You’ve already come this far,” I said.

  He glared at me, glared up at the sky.

  “Come on, I need you to keep a lookout.”

  “Sam?”

  “What?”

  “What the hell are we doing here?”

  “I need to know what they have on Bear,” I said. “I need to know why they think he’s guilty.”

  I ducked inside again.

  Travis climbed into the room after me but hesitated at the door.

  “Hurry,” I said.

  We crept through the living room and into the kitchen. The table was still strewn with papers and files, even more than I remembered from a few days ago. There was too much to go through all of it right now. I’d need several hours, maybe even a whole day. I ran my fingers over the top layer of papers, my eyes blurring the letters and numbers, overwhelmed by the staggering amount of information here, the impossibility of finding the answers I needed.

  Travis whistled softly through his teeth. “You think there’s something important in all that mess?”

  I nodded and picked up one of the reports. A quick glance told me it was a statement from the manager of the Meadowlark confirming Taylor Bellweather had rented a room for four nights and paid with a credit card. He said he might have seen a man coming out of her room late Sunday night, but he couldn’t be sure, he hadn’t really been paying attention. I tossed the statement aside.

  Travis reached for a slip of paper. He held it close to his face and then put it down again where he’d found it. “What exactly are we looking for?”

  “I am looking for whatever they haven’t told the public yet,” I said. “What has them so convinced it was Bear. You are looking out the front window. So you can tell me if anyone’s coming.”

  Travis looked over at the entryway and the long, slim window set in the wall parallel to the front door. Then he looked back at the piles of paper on the table. “You sure? This is a lot to go through by yourself.”

  I nodded.

  He went to stand in the shadows, where he could see out onto the street, but someone looking in would only see reflections. “I don’t get it, Sam. Why now? Why like this?”

  “Because I need to know what happened.”

  “But why not just ask Deputy Santos?”

  “She won’t tell me.”

  “So why not just wait for the trial?”

  “By then it’ll be too late. A judge will award custody to my grandparents, Ollie and I’ll be living in a Boston retirement community or someplace even worse, and no one will ever know the truth. They think Bear did this,” I said. “And they’ve stopped looking for any other suspects. If I don’t do something, they’ll just build a case around Bear being guilty whether it’s true or not. They’ll twist the facts to make them fit.”

  I sifted quickly through a stack of phone records and credit card receipts.

  “What makes you so sure?” Travis asked.

  I looked up from the statement I’d been reading, a small paragraph from a gas station attendant confirming that two days before Taylor Bellweather’s body was found she had filled up her Toyota Corolla, a white four-door like the one they pulled from Blue Heron Pond.

  “That Bear’s innocent?” I said.

  He nodded.

  I shrugged. “I just know.”

  Travis was quiet for a second and then said, “Sometimes the people we love most are the people we know least.”

  “You’re supposed to be watching the street.”

  He turned his face to the window. “Hurry up,” he said and settled into mumbling about how stupid this was and how much trouble we’d be in if anyone found us here, how his mom was probably calling the sheriff right now to file a missing person’s report and if they didn’t catch us here first, when he finally did get back to the store he’d be grounded for the rest of the goddamn summer and what was I thinking dragging him into this shit, if we got busted for this, there went his clean record and any chance for a college scholarship and then what would he do, run the cash register at his parents’ store for the rest of his life, never making more than
minimum wage? This was a bad idea, a really bad idea.

  I sifted through the paperwork faster, skimming over insignificant notes and shorthand, chicken scratches only Deputy Santos understood. Whenever I saw my father’s name, I slowed down and read a little more carefully, but though everything seemed important, none of it was exactly what I was looking for, nothing clearly pointed to Bear as the suspect.

  I found the autopsy report and scanned to the bottom where the medical examiner had written in the cause and manner of death. Blunt force trauma to the head, homicide. Deputy Santos had also highlighted other sections of the report noting Taylor Bellweather had multiple contusions around the throat and chest as well as defensive wounds on her hands and arms. Fingernail samples had been taken, but here in the margin, Deputy Santos had scratched a note that any physical evidence had probably been destroyed, washed clean in the river. I set the report down and kept looking.

  There were notes scrawled on loose sheets of paper, things like Victim’s purse is still unaccounted for, as well as several pieces of jewelry, and Suspect’s alibi unconfirmed, and Victim’s clothes torn, but no sign of sexual assault. There were statements from both of Taylor’s parents, saying they had spoken to her two days prior to her death and had no reason to fear for her safety. There was my statement, too, the things I’d told Deputy Santos the day Bear was arrested, typed and printed out in damning black ink. Reading over it now, my own words shouting back at me, I realized how bad this was for Bear, how it seemed like even his own daughter believed him guilty. Maybe I did for a brief moment in time, barely a blink, but not anymore. I pushed the papers aside.

  There had to be something else more substantial than pages and pages of meaningless words, a connection between Bear and Taylor Bellweather, a chain, a rope, a thread, even a wisp, something linking them together that would be impossible to ignore.

  I came across Joe Mancetti’s statement, the one he’d given to Detective Talbert over the phone. Here, in black and white and plain text, Mancetti told Detective Talbert that Taylor Bellweather had been in Terrebonne to interview Billy Roth about his upcoming show. It was supposed to be shocking, raw, unlike anything he’d ever done before. It was supposed to put him back on top.