Cab joined her at the bar. ‘You’ve never told me much about what happened to you that night.’
‘I don’t remember it,’ she said. She pulled away from him, and the casualness in her voice was unconvincing. She was a bad actress when she played herself. ‘I fainted, Cab. I woke up in the hospital. The night was erased from my brain.’
‘You were inches away from the killer. Closer than anyone else who survived.’
‘I don’t remember him,’ Tarla insisted. ‘People tell me I protected Diane, but I don’t even remember doing that.’
He kissed the top of his mother’s head. ‘I’m sorry. I know it must have been awful for you.’
Cab didn’t push her for answers, because Tarla wasn’t a person who could be pushed. If you poked her, she shrank like a turtle deeper into her shell. He also knew that his old axiom was right again. You could learn more from lies than you ever could from the truth.
Tarla was lying.
There was something about that night that she didn’t want him to know.
5
The deer sprang out of nowhere, like a monster from the closet. It wasn’t there, and then it was.
Peach gasped in surprise, and her foot dove for the brake. The Thunderbird jerked to a stop, throwing her against the safety belt. The young doe, momentarily frozen, stared curiously into the car’s headlights, and when Peach switched the lights off, she saw its spindly legs clip-clop casually between the trees toward the lake.
See the little white cross? she’d told Justin on their weekend getaway to Lake Wales last month. You have to be careful when you drive here.
Peach closed her eyes.
When she touched her hands to her face, she realized she was crying. She pushed open the car door and climbed out into the darkness, her knees buckling. She grabbed the door to steady herself, then took uneasy steps into the grass. Insects descended on her, buzzing and biting. She looked around for the deer, but it had already disappeared toward the water. Her feet were wet. She imagined for a moment that she was standing in blood, but when she looked down at the dirt and pine needles, she saw that it was just rain pooled on the ground from an afternoon squall.
Peach was alone on the sprawling trails of Lake Seminole Park. She and Deacon lived in a pink bungalow on 98th Street in Seminole, which was a straight shot across the Gandy Bridge as she headed west out of Tampa. Their house, where they’d lived for ten years, was on the other side of the fence that marked the park’s eastern border. She wasn’t supposed to be in the park at night, but the security guards all knew who she was. To them, she was Peach Paranoid, but she was also the girl who had lost her parents in Colombia and her oldest brother in the Labor Day shooting. Let her be paranoid. Let her park wherever she wanted.
She didn’t like to have her car seen at her house. She didn’t want anyone knowing who she was or where she lived. Instead, she drove the T-Bird to the very end of the park’s paved roads, near deserted picnic grounds. Twenty yards away, a sidewalk led to an open gate in the fence. She got out and slipped between the squat palm trees. She heard rustling and cackling from a brood of chickens that wandered in and out of the park from a nearby hobby farm. A peacock screamed not far away. She ducked through the gate and hugged the fence for another block until she was across the street from their house.
Overgrown oaks crowded the roof. The house dated to the 1960s and was surrounded by a warped wooden fence that Deacon was always promising to fix. The roof needed help, too; it was missing shingles from the last big storm, and it leaked over the toilet in her bathroom, dripping on her head. A sign warned trespassers against dogs, but they had never owned a dog. She didn’t see the Mercedes in the driveway, and she didn’t expect Deacon for hours.
She let herself inside. The house smelled of the fish she’d microwaved for dinner the previous night. The two of them weren’t the best housekeepers, especially during campaign season. Junk mail and newspapers filled the counters and tabletops. The open wooden surfaces were gray with dust. Rather than turn on a light, she made her way in the dark toward her bedroom on the south side of the house, looking toward the park. There, she pulled the heavy curtains shut and switched on an overhead light.
Half a dozen white department store mannequins stared at her with empty eyes. She could see them in the full-length mirror, too, as if the bedroom were populated with ghosts frozen in odd poses. Deacon thought it was weird. She’d named them when she was a teenager: Ditty, Sexpot, Petunia, Rickles, Harley, and Bon Bon. They wore different wigs and outfits, suitable for disguises. A longhaired hippy. A blonde bombshell. A punk-tattooed biker chick with fire-red hair. She’d been all of those women in the past year.
She hadn’t spent much time being herself.
Peach kicked off her Crocs and flopped backward onto her twin bed. She spread her arms and legs in an X and stared at the ceiling, which was webbed with hairline cracks in the plaster. She knew she should eat, but she wasn’t hungry. All she wanted to do was sleep, but she hadn’t slept for days.
Her phone rang. Sighing, she squeezed it out of her pocket. The number was blocked.
‘Hello?’
‘Is this Peach Piper?’
‘Who is this?’ she asked.
The Georgia-accented voice on the phone drawled at her. ‘Ms Piper, my name is Detective Curtis Clay of the St Petersburg Police. I’d like to talk to you about a colleague of yours named Justin Kiel.’
They sat on the beach on the shore of Lake Wales, surrounded by children splashing in the water. Across the lake, they could see the expensive shoreside homes climbing the shallow hill, with manicured lawns that reminded her of antebellum plantations. The air was filled with the motor whine and gasoline smell of powerboats pulling inner tubes across the lake.
Peach wore a one-piece yellow swimsuit, and she had her arms wrapped around her knobby knees. Justin wore trunks that lay like a tarpaulin across his long, skinny legs. They were both damp from bobbing in the lake. He took off his pork pie hat and plopped it on top of her wet hair like a crown.
‘There, that looks good,’ he said.
Peach giggled. ‘You’re silly.’
As they sat with sand on their bodies, Justin took her hand, and in the silence, she realized: He’s my boyfriend. They’d worked side-by-side at the foundation for a year, and she’d grown as close to him as she ever had to another person, but she’d never thought of it as being anything more. Except now it was.
Peach had never met anyone like him. He was quirky, with his little round hats and his old-fashioned mustache. He had a pimply face that most girls probably wouldn’t like. Paper-straight bangs tickled his eyebrows. He was only two years older than she was, but he talked older, like someone who had lived a long time. He had an opinion about everything, delivered with the pompousness of a professor giving a lecture. He was hacker-smart about computers, but he kept almost his entire life off the grid. No cell phone. No credit cards, not even a checkbook. Cash only. He loved visiting antique stores and estate sales and buying hundred-year-old bric-a-brac – anything without a power cord, anything with dents and bruises and water stains, anything with a history of people who had owned it and had a story to tell.
All these years alone, and Peach had finally found a kindred spirit.
‘So do you think I’m wrong?’ she asked him. She realized she was nervous about what he would say.
‘You are never wrong. About what?’
‘Well, I mean, the celibacy thing.’
‘You decided that a long time ago, right?’ Justin said. ‘It’s what you believe in. I respect that.’
‘Don’t you want sex? Men always do.’
Justin scratched his head. His wet hair stood up like matchsticks. ‘People can be really close without having sex. I think it’s cool that you want something different.’
It wasn’t the first time he’d told her that, but if they were really going to do this – boyfriend, girlfriend – she wondered if he’d feel that they needed to be
physical. If she was going to do that with anyone, it was him, but the very idea of sex made her feel unclean. It was okay being naked, if he wanted that. It was okay kissing and holding. She’d just told herself as far back as she could remember that she would always be a virgin.
‘Does it bother you being here?’ Justin asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Lake Wales. Where your brother was killed.’
Peach hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have suggested it.’
‘No, that’s okay, I told you I would come.’
‘Have you been back since it happened?’
‘I haven’t, but it’s a beautiful place. It should mean something other than death.’
‘Do you remember that time?’ he asked.
‘Bits and pieces.’ She thought about it, and then she said: ‘My parents have mostly faded from my memory. Now Lyle is fading, too. I can’t really hear him in my head anymore. He’s going away. That’s why I work at the foundation. It keeps a little bit of him alive.’
They were silent for a while. The intense sun dried their skin, and she could feel her face and shoulders pinking up and freckling. A jogger with a golden retriever ran along the shore in front of them, spattering water and damp sand.
‘Do you like what we do?’ Justin asked.
‘Like it?’
‘The work. Do you enjoy it?’
‘I don’t really think about that. I’m good at it. It’s important.’
‘Is it?’
She turned her head and shadowed her eyes with her hand to stare at him. ‘What are you saying?’
Justin took a slow breath. ‘It’s just that some days I wonder who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and whether there’s any difference.’
‘We’re the good guys,’ Peach said.
He smiled. ‘You are, that’s for sure.’
The sky was blue, but there was a cloud crossing his face. ‘What’s going on, Justin? Is something wrong?’
‘No, nothing.’
He leaned closer and kissed her cheek without saying anything more. She was surprised. Usually, Justin beat a subject to death before he would let it go. He would talk and talk until she raised a white flag. Not this time. It made her a little unhappy. She didn’t like the idea that he might be keeping something from her.
‘I only got us one motel room,’ he said. ‘Are you okay with that?’
‘Sure.’
‘One bed?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
‘But no sex,’ he told her. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘I’m not worried.’
‘You trust me that much?’ he asked.
‘You’re about the only person in the world I trust,’ Peach said. She stared at him with all the intensity she could find, because she wanted him to realize she was serious. ‘You can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Did you know Mr Kiel well?’ Detective Clay asked.
Peach lay motionless in bed, with the phone at her ear. The vacant eyes of the mannequins stared at her, wondering what she would say. She was silent for so long that the detective repeated the question.
‘No,’ she said finally. ‘I didn’t know Justin well at all. We were basically strangers.’
Her answer prompted an awkward pause. ‘That wasn’t what I heard.’
‘Well, that’s how it was.’
‘You worked regularly with Mr Kiel, didn’t you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘But you were strangers?’
‘We were colleagues,’ Peach said. ‘That’s all.’
His drawl got a little cooler and less Georgia-friendly. ‘Ms Piper, you do want to see us catch whoever did this to Mr Kiel, don’t you?’
‘Sure.’
‘So if you can help us with information, you’ll do that, won’t you?’
‘There’s not much to tell.’
The detective breathed into the phone, like a sigh. ‘Did you know that Mr Kiel sold drugs? He was a dealer?’
Peach wanted to scream. Her breath felt ragged in her chest. He wasn’t! That’s a lie! ‘No.’
‘Did you ever see him selling drugs? Or using drugs?’
‘No.’
‘Did he sell you drugs, Ms Piper?’
‘No.’
‘I’m not in narcotics. You can be honest with me.’
‘I said no.’
‘You’re aware that Mr Kiel was shot in a drug sale gone bad, aren’t you? Drugs were hidden in the motel room where his body was found.’
Peach felt the bed going round and round in circles. She got to her feet, made it to the wall, and slid down to the floor. Her free hand clenched into a fist. Her eyes squeezed shut.
‘I only know what I read in the newspaper.’
‘Do you know if Mr Kiel had any enemies?’
‘I don’t.’
‘What were you and he working on when he was killed?’
Peach wiped her nose. ‘What?’
‘I said, what were you and he working on when he was killed?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You weren’t working together?’
‘No, I hadn’t seen him in days. We hadn’t talked.’ That much was true. He’d dropped off the radar for a week. She’d been in a panic. Where are you? What’s going on?
‘Was Mr Kiel working on his own? Did he tell you anything about that?’
‘No, nothing.’
He never said a word. Whatever was going on in his life, he’d left her out of it.
‘Is there anything else you can tell me, Ms Piper?’
‘No. I don’t know anything.’
‘Well, I appreciate your help.’
She thought he was being sarcastic with her. There was nastiness at the back of his throat. When he hung up, she pressed the phone to her lips and wondered why she’d lied to him. She did want Justin’s murderer caught. She did know things that no one else knew. Without her, the police would write it off as another drug killing. A cocaine statistic. Everyone would believe that he was something that he wasn’t.
Justin would say: It doesn’t matter, Peach. We all die, we’re all dust. Legacy is a fiction.
But it did matter.
She could tell them something important to help them find the truth. They were searching his apartment, but that wasn’t where the answers were. He had another place, but she didn’t know where it was. A safe house. A hideaway.
Peach looked up the number for the St Petersburg Police Department, and she called, still sitting on the floor. When the receptionist answered, she asked for Detective Curtis Clay. She would talk to him; she would give him what he wanted this time. Everything she knew.
‘One moment, ma’am,’ the woman on the phone told her. And then: ‘What was that name again?’
‘Detective Curtis Clay.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s no detective working here by that name. Maybe you have the wrong location. You may want to try Tampa or one of the other Gulf cities.’
‘He said it was St Pete,’ Peach insisted.
‘I’m very sorry, ma’am, we don’t employ a Detective Clay. Would you like me to ask another—’
‘It’s my mistake,’ Peach interrupted sharply. She hung up the phone.
6
Like thousands of other foreclosure homes around the Tampa peninsula, the house on Asbury Place was slowly becoming an eyesore. The previous owners had abandoned the property in April, leaving Florida to move in with family in Salisbury, North Carolina. Grass in the yard had grown six inches high, mixed with weeds that had gone to seed. The fifty-year-old elm tree bending over the roof had dropped thick crooked branches that littered the driveway. Rust stains dripped down the stucco from sagging gutters. The windows were boarded over and spray-painted with graffiti.
For the bank, the house was one more property on a long spreadsheet. It was the fifth house in the same neighborhood to suffer the same fate. No one had time to look afte
r all of them.
The house was two blocks from the placid bay waters.
Two blocks from Diane Fairmont’s walled estate.
That was the crazy democracy of Florida, where million-dollar mansions were next-door neighbors to garbage homes with pickups rusting on the lawn.
He’d parked half a mile away, near a condominium complex just off Bayshore Boulevard. No one would notice or remember his car. It was after midnight on a hot evening alive with the song of katydids. He followed the street beside the bay with a Dolphins baseball cap tugged low on his forehead. Sunglasses, even at night, covered his eyes. The headlights of a few cars lit him up from behind like a silhouette, but otherwise he was alone. At West Alline, he followed the sidewalk in the darkness to the abandoned home on the corner.
Most of the other houses around him were unlit, but he heard the blare of party music from open windows half a block away. There were voices from people in the garden, but he couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see him. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted down the street.
He dodged the fallen branches on the driveway. The front door was sheltered by overgrown hedges, and the lamppost near the steps had been shattered by rocks. NO TRESPASSING signs were posted on the door and the front windows. He’d first broken in three weeks ago, and since then he’d replaced the lock, so he had his own key. It would be weeks before the bank discovered the invasion. Or maybe the police would arrive first. Either way, by then it would be over, and he would be gone.
He let himself inside and closed the door behind him. The shutup house was musty and hot. The power and water had long since been turned off, leaving the house to cook in the humid summer. He followed a hallway on his left through the mud room to an attached garage, where he slid a backpack off his shoulder and turned on an emergency lantern. Cockroaches scattered, disappearing under the metal shelves and into the rafters. Spider webs made silky nests in the corners. The concrete floor was smeared with oil where cars had been parked for years.
He’d hung a cork bulletin board on the nearest wall, covered with a collage of thumbtacked articles copied from Florida newspapers. Some were only weeks old. Some went back for years.
Season of Fear Page 6
