So the sentence didn’t mean anything by itself. Hardly anything meant anything by itself. It was like building a wall brick by brick and some of the bricks were a little wonky. But this brick was solid. This coded message was important. Drug dealers were talking about Sammy.
***
By Thanksgiving, Phoenix Police had monitored hundreds of conversations, but they still hadn’t built the wall. The slow pace was wearing on Joya.
She had begun this story like she always did, thrilled and excited and convinced it was going to be such fun. At first blush, it was. But that wore off quickly when the real work to get the story set in. She’d overlooked this part of investigative work—the fatiguing, uninteresting, stupid, dull, humdrum part. Surviving this is what separated regular reporters from those who earned the title of investigative journalist. Regular reporters spent a day to a week on one story, then moved on to the next topic. They never spent enough time on one thing to get bored. Investigative journalists spent months, sometimes years, developing the information that blew the lid off something. Joya had been through this before, but always forgot about it when the next story came around. It was like women who forget the pain of childbirth and get pregnant again.
She wondered how cops did it, day after day, week after week, always dealing with the ugliness of crime. Not all her stories were about this underbelly of the law. She wrote about wonderful, beautiful things, too.
She’d spent a week at a burn camp in northern Arizona with children with hideous outer appearances but whose inner souls were beautiful. This camp was a haven where others resembled their wounds and nobody cared. Joya had never been more touched.
She knew what it was like to write about good things that made people feel better. Here she was writing about a murdering criminal who’d gotten a ridiculous second chance and turned back to crime all over again and what was the point? You can’t change the stripes on a tiger—who didn’t know that?
She wanted this story so much because it was so explosive, it had a guaranteed readership; it would give her great street creds; her “inside” status would be the envy of every other reporter; her paper would show up every other news outlet in town; and she’d show up Peter. That a criminal would be put away wasn’t the end all for her, it was the delivery system of her ego dope.
But over the last month, only a few bricks were in place, and Joya knew her editor wouldn’t let her hang on here forever. She’d fudged a little in her reports to him, making little things sound bigger than they were. Making tiny steps appear as Size 12s. She was in deep now and could never justify throwing away a month of her time—this story had to pan out. They had to catch Sammy selling drugs. And as the days passed and the clues got harder to see, she got more and more anxious.
The first one to suffer was Rob.
“Why is everything taking so long?” she asked him one night in bed, and he didn’t like the question.
“Oh, maybe because we’re not doing our job and are just playing around for the fun of it.”
“Okay, Mr. Sarcastic. That’s not what I meant. I mean, if there’s really a big drug ring out there that Sammy’s running, shouldn’t you be catching them selling drugs? So far I’ve sat through hours of wiretaps and heard only hints. I haven’t heard one drug deal set up. I haven’t heard Sammy utter a word. Maybe the captain is right and this is all smoke and mirrors.”
Rob threw back the chenille bedspread and sat on the edge of the four-poster bed.
“I tried to tell you that stakeout work is tedious. You want the version you see on television. You want action and you want it delivered on a silver plate. Sorry, babe, that’s not how it works. If you think we’ve got nothing, then maybe you shouldn’t be wasting your time hanging around the fifth floor.”
He got up and she could hear him getting a drink of water in the bathroom.
She knew she’d gone too far. Damn it. She’d fooled herself into the fantasy that she and Rob would come home at night and talk about the case and salivate over the evidence, and laugh about the FBI. None of that happened. It couldn’t be farther from the reality of fighting about this case every time they opened their mouths.
She’d vowed she wouldn’t talk about it anymore with Rob, but that was ridiculous, too. What else was there to talk about? She spent her days and nights studying Sammy the Bull, and Rob was out scouring the hillsides, trying to find the links, and when you’re that consumed with one subject, not talking about it reduces you to silence.
She felt him slipping away. He felt her slipping away. She feared she was pushing him away. He was pushing back. None of this was good. A sex life that had taken up three out of five nights was down to—maybe—one night a week. Weekends when Rob went off with his kids were a giant relief from the strain both endured.
She turned the volume up to ten. That’s the way she thought of her manic attempts at normalcy. If she walked farther on Saturday mornings and shopped more intently at the Farmer’s Market, and gardened until her hands were chapped, she could set things right. When that didn’t work, she started baking.
“I always cut out those delicious recipes from magazines, but I never bake them,” she told a friend. “Well, I’m going to bake them now.”
She bought exotic ingredients that were useful for one dish and stocked up on spices she couldn’t always pronounce, and she baked her heart out.
Cakes. Pies. Lemon bars. Date-filled cookies. Brownies. Muffins. Madelines. Popovers. Strudels. Bars.
She’d carry her latest creation to a neighbor because, God-forbid, she’d eat this fattening stuff herself. On a stroke of genius, she started taking her sweets to the police station with her. It’s almost comical how the way to a man’s good graces is through a piece of chocolate cake.
“Hey, Joya, what am I, chopped liver?” Chief Tomayer asked her one day when he came up to the monitoring room. “I hear my detectives are getting fat on the goodies you’re bringing in, but I never see any.”
“I won’t make that mistake again, Chief,” she cooed, and started preparing special plates for him.
None of this relieved the anxious feeling that this would blow up in her face. What if they never caught Sammy? What if she’d wasted all this time? How could she justify her salary if she wasn’t producing anything? How long would her editor be patient?
Even the Sunday calls home to her folks were strained. She couldn’t tell them about the story she was working on and some weeks it took too much energy to make up a story they’d believe. She’d ask about one relative after another and they’d give the latest. Sometimes it was rote.
“Oh, they’re okay.”
“Just the same.”
“Nothing new.”
In her turmoil, she yearned for the same, nothing new, okay kind of life.
“If I went back to Northville, I’d have my folks. Church on Sundays. The casino on Mondays. Coffee every morning at Cousin Alice’s bakery. I’d join the women gossiping and watch the men shooting dice. I’d have a garden with real vegetables. I’d never have to take another blood pressure pill.”
That wasn’t going to happen. So she usually fed off the Sunday calls that reminded her what life could be like. But something was off.
“Everybody here just feels shitty,” her mother announced one Sunday. Then she launched into another sad story about how Nettie wasn’t getting past Amber’s death.
“And Gertie has gotten so old, so fast, since Amber died.”
Joya understood grief and lost. What she didn’t understand was why these calls included an ugly undertone.
“So what’s really up?” Joya finally asked, coming out of her own fog to ask about her parents’.
“The town’s still reeling over Amber,” her mother announced, and Joya was surprised. Amber had died in mid-October. It was almost Thanksgiving. Shouldn’t things have calmed down by now?
�
�Still?” she asked, before she could catch herself.
“Joya Ann Bonner, you may live in a world where good girls die needlessly every day, but we don’t.” Her dad spit out the words.
“No, of course not. I’m so sorry, that’s not what I meant. I meant it’s been a month or so since she died, and I would have thought the town would be healing by now.”
“Healing? How the hell are we supposed to heal?” She could see her dad’s contorted face in her mind and knew it was bright red in anger.
“Johnny’s still in a coma,” her mother said, as though that were all of it.
“Oh boy, that’s gotta be tough.” Joya felt ashamed she’d forgotten all about him. “That poor kid. Do they think he’ll be alright?”
“They don’t know. His mother says she thinks he will, but who knows? There probably will be brain damage.”
“He better wake up because the sheriff’s not going to do anything unless Johnny fesses up,” her dad declared.
“Fesses up about what?” How did she have so little information about a very big deal in her hometown?
“About the drugs. About how Crabapple sold him the drugs.” Her dad’s tone was now one of a man who thought his daughter was a dolt for not understanding the simplest thing.
“You’ve got a drug dealer in Northville and they haven’t caught him yet? It can’t be that hard to find a drug dealer in Northville. And what’d you call him? Crabapple? What kind of name is that?”
“He left town,” her mother noted, while her father bitterly talked over her, “No, they haven’t caught him. It’s that kid who works for Huntsie. It’s his nickname.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Nobody knows. He left the same night Amber died.”
“Oh, God. That’s terrible. He’ll probably never come back. If he sold drugs that killed somebody, I bet he just keeps running.”
“I hope so.” Her mother mumbled under her breath.
“That bastard better come home and face the music,” her father bellowed.
“We need to let the law take care of this,” her mother loudly interjected.
“Bullshit,” her dad said back. Joya knew she’d tapped into a continuing fight between her parents. But her law and order, NRA-member dad was objecting to the law taking care of a drug dealer? That didn’t make sense.
“I’m a little lost here, Dad. Of course the police—or it’s the sheriff there, isn’t it?—the sheriff should take care of this.”
Her dad yelled into the phone. “If we had a sheriff that got off his ass and did his job, yeah, but we don’t have that kind of sheriff. How can I expect he’ll do a better job this year?”
“Ralph, calm down. I’m sure he’ll do his job now that poor Amber is dead.” Her mother didn’t sound convinced, and her dad certainly wasn’t buying it.
Lights were flashing and bells were clanging as last year’s fiasco came back to Joya. Her dad and his pals were furious when the sheriff wouldn’t stop a kid they thought was pushing drugs. She could still hear her dad mimicking the sheriff. “No proof. You got no proof. All you got is what the little bird shot at.” Well, Amber was now dead, and wasn’t that proof? And if it were proof, then this Crabapple kid was in real trouble, which made him dangerous.
“Dad, I’ve done some stories about drug deals. These people are nasty. They don’t let anything get in their way. They’re dangerous. I agree with Mom that this is a job for the sheriff. Even a lazy sheriff isn’t going to let a death go unpunished—he’d never get reelected if he did. And in this case, he’s after….what is he after? Cocaine? Heroin?”
Even as she said the words, Joya thought it was absurd to think the Amber she knew had snorted cocaine or shot up horse. All she knew about Amber’s demise was her dad’s original pronouncement that “dope is dope.”
“One of those pills,” he told her now. “Those party pills. What do they call them? Estatic? Something like that.”
Joya stopped breathing. Now she was the one screaming into the phone. “Ecstasy? You mean Ecstasy?”
Startled, her parents in unison acknowledged that was it.
“Whoa, honey…” began her mother.
“Where’d it come from?” Joya pressed on, with horrible possibilities dancing in her head.
“Who knows?” her dad said. “I suppose Fargo or Minneapolis. They don’t make that stuff around here.”
“You know, kids don’t normally die from Ecstasy,” Joya informed them, thinking it was news they didn’t know.
“That’s what they say,” her Dad came back. “But Amber’s dead. And Johnny might as well be.”
“Don’t say that,” her mother admonished. “He could still come out of it.”
Joya missed the next couple of sentences as her mind chased the absurd possibility that the Ecstasy ring they thought Sammy headed in the Southwest had reached all the way to North Dakota. Was that even possible? But in her distraction, she almost missed her mother’s complaint: “The last thing we need is for somebody to take the law into his own hands.”
“What? What’d you say?”
Maggie Bonner said the words again. Joya’s father snorted in rebuttal.
“Oh, God, no! That would be terrible,” Joya declared, waiting for her father to agree that law enforcement must be in charge here. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. His silence sent a chill down her back.
She could feel her hands sting from hitting the pavement. The shot-backfire was fresh in her ears. She needed to scare her dad like she’d been scared.
“Dad, the Mafia is behind a lot of drug rings in this country. And the last people in the world you want to mess with is the Mafia. They don’t think twice about killing anybody who gets in their way. They go after families, too. You mess with the Mafia and everybody you know is in danger. Let the sheriff take care of this. They’re trained to deal with criminals like that.”
Her dad stayed silent. No wonder her mother was worried.
Ralph Bonner changed the subject, putting an ending the discussion. Joya’s nervousness hit on high alert. By the time she hung up, she walked out of the fog of her depression to a roiling stomach.
Ecstasy had found its way to Northville.
Her mom and dad were fighting over a drug dealer—a drug dealer—named Crabapple.
Her dad was ready to take the law into his own hands.
Maybe Sammy…?
All that was stone cold bad.
***
Joya immediately dialed Cousin Alice’s number in Northville. Sunday afternoon. The bakery was closed. She should be home. But she wasn’t. Joya left a worried message: “Hey, Alice, just had an unbelievable call with my folks. What’s this about Ecstasy and some guy named Crabapple? Is my dad turning into a vigilante? Call me. What the hell’s going on back there?”
Monday, when she got home from work, there was a voice mail from Alice.
“Things are a mess here, but there’s nothing you can do. Don’t worry. This is a bad time for us. You know what they say, ‘It takes a village to bury a child.’”
Joya felt chills up and down her spine.
Chapter Nine
Tuesday, November 23, 1999
Nettie Schlener had to learn to live a life she no longer wanted to live.
From the moment she heard the horrible words that her daughter was dead, everything had been sucked out of her. Joy. Hope. Happiness. Wonderment. Contentment. Delight. Cheer. Gladness. Enjoyment.
In its place were intolerable burdens. Grief. Sorrow. Anger. Worry. Distress. Misery. Heartache. Wretchedness. Gloom. Hatred. Despair.
Her sister Arlene told her she’d predictably go through seven stages of loss—from shock and denial to pain and guilt to anger and bargaining to depression to an upward turn and then reconstruction until she reached acceptance and hope.
B
ut Nettie never got beyond the anger. She never emerged from the depression. She never moved close to hope.
Her daughter’s death was even worse than her husband’s seventeen years ago. Although if anyone had told her that then, she would have screamed in disbelief.
“I had the perfect life,” she’d tell anyone who’d listen. When no one was around these days, she’d tell herself. “I married my high school sweetheart in an elaborate wedding with six bridesmaids in blue. I wore a lace gown with a long veil that trailed me as Dad walked me down the aisle of St. Vincent’s. Richard was so handsome, and everyone said I was beautiful. It was one of the best weddings Northville has ever had!”
If she had her druthers, she’d still be wearing that gown and dancing with her groom. And some days now, she thought she was.
“We had a good marriage,” Nettie announced, greeting family that rushed to her home at the news of Amber’s death. They looked aghast at her, knowing she wasn’t in this moment, but unclear what moment she was in. “Richard farmed and worked at Heartland Candies in Hankinson in the winter. You know, he made lollipops. That’s why they call Hankinson ‘the sucker capital of America.’ Isn’t that funny?”
Something was funny here alright, but it wasn’t a seventeen-year lapse in reality.
“It was the life we’d always imagined living. It was just perfect. And then, praise the Lord, I got pregnant.”
Her family let her talk because what else could they do?
“We announced the happy news at the two Thanksgiving dinners we ate that year, one with his folks, the other with mine. You were all there. Remember how thrilled you were? We didn’t even have a spare bedroom in the trailer, but we fixed up a nice spot we called the ‘nursery.’ Richard built a rocking crib in the barn—he started it the first day he learned we were pregnant.”
Nettie was almost dancing across her living room as she entertained her horrified family.
“My sisters gave me the most adorable baby shower! I bet half the town came to the Senior Citizen Center they rented. You know, the Center always has a fake Christmas tree in the corner that they decorate for each holiday. They have hearts for Valentine’s Day and pumpkins for fall, and of course, ornaments for Christmas. Well, my darling sisters got permission to remove the summer flowers and replace them with baby toys and trinkets. It was just adorable.”
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