Deadly Silence

by Mary Stone

  “Hi, this is Kylie Coulter. I’m a patient of Dr. Ling’s,” she said, gnawing on her lip. “And I think I might be pregnant.”

  The receptionist didn’t waste time. “Congratulations! How long since your last period?”

  “Um…well…probably about five, six weeks?”

  “And you’ve been to the office before. Your name again?”

  “Kylie…well, you have me under Kylie Hatfield, but I’ve since married. I’m Kylie Coulter now.”

  “Ah. I see. You haven’t been to our office for a routine exam in several years.”

  And she thought she couldn’t feel any more guilty.

  “Yes. Well, I’ve been busy. I meant to get in, but with the wedding, and—”

  “Is all your health history the same?” the receptionist asked, obviously not interested in her excuses.

  “Um. Yes. Well, except for the baby I think’s inside me.”

  The woman laughed. “No major surgeries or…?”

  “Well. Actually. I did have surgery on my shoulder last year.”

  “Oh. Arthroscopic, or…”

  Kylie gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Actually, it was for a bullet wound.”

  “Ah.” For several seconds afterwards, the nurse seemed to be at a loss for words. She probably wasn’t going to win any Mom of the Year awards for that admission. “Is this your first pregnancy? No abortions or miscarriages in your past?”

  “No. None.”

  “We have an opening tomorrow at eleven. Will that work?”

  “Yes, that’s perfect. Thank you.”

  Kylie hung up, and only then did she realize that Linc would probably look on her schedule and wonder exactly where she was headed, just like he’d done this morning. She decided she’d have to make something up, another mysterious client appointment, and then felt guiltier yet.

  Agnes Mott lived in a trailer park in a remote, wooded area outside of Asheville, in a little town close to the Tennessee border. It was the same place where the baby had been kidnapped, and where Elise had once lived, although, when she started dating Cody, she’d left the trailer park and moved into his apartment in downtown Asheville, which was closer to her employment at the Sunset Diner.

  As she drove along the wooded highway, Kylie spotted the Luxury Acres Trailer Park from the road. Several of the homes butted right up to the road, though there were some scraggly looking pine trees set up at intervals on the side of the street, which were trying and failing to provide privacy. There was also a sign that said, FOR RENT, LUXURY HOMES, but the trailers weren’t exactly luxurious. Most of them were rusted and broken-down, with windows covered with bits of fabric and dirty, holey screens. They were all arranged in a circle, and there was a little girl in a bikini sitting on the side of a bald tractor tire, playing with a hose, surrounded by a mud puddle.

  Kylie parked on the side of the driveway and walked around a white fence, to where the child was squealing in glee, all skinny arms and legs. Her bathing suit was too small; the top was riding up over her tiny chest, not that she cared. She appeared to be the only person around.

  “Excuse me,” she asked the little girl, nearly hopscotching on tufts of dried grass to avoid the mud. “Could you tell me where Agnes Mott lives?”

  The girl regarded her warily, flipping her sopping ponytail over her shoulder, then pointed to a powder-blue trailer with red flowers— undoubtedly plastic—in the window boxes.

  “Thank you.”

  She walked across the courtyard, being careful not to step on the child’s muddy toys, which were scattered amidst the puddles. It was a little like a minefield. She climbed the small wooden staircase, rapping on the metal door.

  “Come in!” a gravelly voice called.

  Kylie turned the handle and pushed, but nothing happened. She pulled, and nothing happened either. Finally, after jiggling it some, she managed to yank it open. She walked inside and immediately smelled burned toast mixed with something medicinal, what she thought was Bengay. It was stuffy and unbearably hot too.

  For a second, she wondered if she’d forgotten her saltines, but then she remembered sticking a whole sleeve in her purse the night before.

  When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, they fell on an overweight woman with gray-white hair that resembled a mop, who was sitting at the kitchenette in a ratty pink housecoat. To add to the ensemble, she wore striped sports socks pulled up to her knees, and the skin of her upper arms was covered in giant freckles.

  She squinted in Kylie’s direction. “Who’s there?”

  “Hello. I’m Kylie Ha…Coulter,” she said, speaking loudly because the woman had been hard of hearing on the phone. She moved through a narrow opening and into the kitchen area. “Ms. Mott, I’m the private investigator who was hired by Elise Kirby. We spoke on the phone, if you’ll remember.”

  “Yes, yes, hello, Kylie Hacoulter,” she said, patting the bench. “You sit right on over here and we’ll talk.”

  In her phone conversation with the old woman, she’d gotten the feeling that Agnes Mott was very lonely. She’d kept Kylie on the phone far after they’d arranged the appointment, just talking about, well, nothing. The weather, which was much hotter than it ever was when she was a kid. The sorry state of kids today, who had no respect. How everything about the world was going to hell in a handbasket.

  Based on that experience, Kylie expected this meeting would probably drag on well into the afternoon. As a chatterbox herself, Kylie didn’t think she’d mind, but now, she felt uneasy. Sweat was pouring down her ribcage, her stomach was queasy and unsettled, and now she had tomorrow’s appointment to think about, and of course, the guilt and uncertainty she felt about keeping it from Linc.

  She squeezed into the bench seat across from Agnes, noticing the woman’s large cleavage was resting on the table. Actually, on the plate that was there, filled with toast crumbs and little globs of jelly, which were already staining the front of her housecoat. She reached over and pulled the plate a few inches away. Agnes didn’t seem to notice.

  She pulled out her notebook and smiled. “Nice of you to meet with me!” she yelled.

  “Oh yes. So, what are you selling? Is it cosmetics?”

  Kylie blinked. “No. I’m a private investigator, remember. Elise Kirby secured my services. I was hired to—”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. I was looking for something to get rid of this.” She unzipped her housecoat a little, and Kylie could see that she wore nothing underneath as she showed Kylie a large, brownish mole on the pockmarked flesh of her collarbone. That, and waaaay too much cleavage, considering this was their first meeting.

  “Oh, um…” Mentally shrugging, Kylie leaned forward, studying the mole. “You know, that could be cancerous. Melanoma can be bad. You should have it checked by a dermatologist.”

  The woman waved the idea away. “Well, then, let it take me. I ain’t going to no doctors.” She sipped her coffee, making loud slurping sounds. “Now, what are you selling then, dear?”

  Kylie inhaled a deep breath, then wished that she hadn’t. Ms. Kirby needed a bath. “I’m not selling anything. I’m a private investigator looking into the disappearance of Daisy Kirby.”

  “Daisy…Kirby?” The woman scratched at one of her chins. “Now, why does that name sound familiar?”

  She looked down at her bag, and then realized that the woman’s eyes were still trained on the floor. Was she…blind too? And Elise had trusted her baby to this woman?

  “Uh, you babysat little Daisy? For Elise Kirby? About two years ago?”

  “Ah! Yes,” she said, and then her face fell. “Oh. That was not a good time. I’d rather not talk about that. I felt terrible. Are you sure you’re not selling anything?”

  Kylie sighed. She wished she had a little tub of Vaseline in her purse. She’d give it to the woman so they could get on with it. “Well, I’m hoping I can ask you a few questions about it?”

  Agnes nodded, but the gesture was slight. “I wasn’t as broken do
wn as I am now, you see. I could move a lot better, hear a lot better, see a lot better…but I’ve gone downhill since that baby went away. It really hurt me, you see. I guess you could say I blame myself every day, and that guilt’s taken its toll.”

  A tear appeared in her eye, and Kylie reached out and touched her arm. “Oh, you shouldn’t think that. It’s not your fault, Ms. Mott. How were you to know?”

  The woman hung her head in response. “It’s just that she had looked like a very respectable, wealthy, important woman, so I just assumed…” She wiped at her eyes with a paper towel. “I suppose I should’ve called Elise and asked, but I knew she was always so busy at work, what with that diner, and this was the middle of the dinner rush.”

  Kylie positioned her pen to take notes. “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

  “Yes. I’d been with the baby since the early afternoon, since Elise was going to work the dinner shift. She came over from her trailer, which was that yellow one right over there.” She tilted the blinds and pointed to one across the courtyard. “It was actually her brother Hal’s trailer, but he went off to the army. When he left, she lived there alone. Last I heard, Hal was back, but he’d gone off somewhere else. Don’t live there no more.”

  The trailer was smaller, falling apart, like the rest of them. There was a BEWARE OF THE DOG sign in the window. Kylie studied the trailer more closely, almost pressing her nose against the screen until she realized how dirty it was. There was a spider weaving a web in the corner of it. She quickly backed away.

  “Daisy was asleep, so I just put her down on the bed at the back of the house, and off Elise went to work. We’d gotten into a little groove, that Little Miss Daisy and me. She was an easy baby, that girl. Mostly just slept, right back there.” She extended her fleshy arm behind her.

  Kylie craned her neck to view the bedroom in the back of the trailer. Everything was dark-paneled wood, so it made the insides very dark, but she could just make out an unmade bed down the narrow hallway, past a small living area with a sofa and an old television set.

  “You’d babysat for her before?”

  “Yes. Only about a dozen times by then. Daisy was about two months old. Smiley little kid.” She wrapped both hands around her mug and stared into it. “Well, it was about four hours later that a woman came knocking on the door. I answered it, and she told me that Elise was going to be late at work, but she’d just gotten back in town, and Elise had told her she could watch the baby. I said I didn’t know anything about that, but she said it was fine, her flight had gotten in earlier so that’s why Elise didn’t know, and not to bother her at work. Elise always works so hard, she said. She said she lived right down the street and she’d watched the baby before. So I said okay. She went and collected the baby, and then off she went in her fancy Mercedes, quick as that. Never saw her again.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Well, that was the thing. She was so sweet and grandmotherly looking, she looked like she couldn’t hurt a fly. She was wearing a nice suit, heels, rich looking, you know? Lots of expensive pearl jewelry. Platinum blonde hair, done up in a lot of spray. And she smelled like a perfume store. She was older, but she had pretty, young-looking hands with bright pink nails, so long and pretty like she’d never worked a day in her life and had servants to do everything for her. So, I thought, this woman’s grandmotherly and rich, she ain’t gonna harm the kid.” She shook her head sadly. “I was wrong. I guess appearances can be deceiving. And now, come to think of it, I doubt Elise would have an aunt like that. So rich and pretty and fancy looking like that.”

  Kylie scribbled down the description in her notebook: Rich-grandmotherly-suit-heels-pearls-perfume-long fingernails. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Elise’d lived here for a while with her brother, Hal, when her momma kicked her out after getting pregnant. Then her brother went off and enlisted and left her alone in the trailer. She kept saying she was all alone and was worried about what she’d do with a baby. Never mentioned an aunt, let alone a rich one who lived nearby. I should’ve questioned it.”

  Kylie absently stroked her stomach. It was flat now, but even just having life inside her made her feel for Elise. Right now, Kylie knew nothing about babies. But at least, she had her mother and Linc and so many other people to help her out. Poor Elise. “It’s not your fault. You said this woman drove a Mercedes?”

  She nodded. “Or something like that. All shiny and silver, like a million dollars. She looked like one of them ladies that sits in the front pew at church. All done up. And she had the car that says, I’m someone.”

  “I see. And she didn’t strike you as the babysitting type.”

  “No. Not at all. In fact, when she came to pick the baby up, it seemed almost like a business transaction.”

  “A business transaction?”

  “Yes. Cute little baby makes everyone smile, right? She didn’t smile. Not once. The baby was sleeping, but I remember that she woke when the woman lifted her up. And she started to cry. But rather than comfort little Daisy, or make silly faces, the woman just kind of went along with her, almost like she was holding a piece of meat. I found that odd. Detached. You know?”

  Kylie wrote that down. “And you’d never seen the woman around here before that? Perhaps snooping around or at the supermarket?”

  Motts shook her head. “Would’ve noticed her. Would’ve stuck out like a sore thumb ‘round here.”

  That was Kylie’s reason for asking. She tapped her chin, thinking, but before she could ask whether Elise had had any other visitors, Agnes added, “But honestly, I don’t go out much. The sun disagrees with me. And I have a bad ticker. And I don’t do my own shopping. Elise used to go out and do that for me, but now I have Edgar next door. He helps me out. I’m not a snoopy snooper, like some people around here are. Always looking through windows.”

  That was probably a shame. A snoopy snooper would come in really handy right then. She looked down at the paper, where she’d written the kidnapper’s description. “Is there anyone else around here who might have been living here during that time? Who might have seen something?”

  The old lady shook her head, her jowls jiggling. “We get pretty high turnover around here. I’m the only old-timer.”

  “Oh. Okay. Right,” Kylie said, trying to think of anything more she could ask. Her mind was a blank. “Well, I think that’s all I have to ask you for now.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t selling anything?” the woman asked, looking hopeful as she rubbed her hands together. “I’d like to get some of those scented oil warmers. You know the ones? They make the air smell so pretty. I like the ocean ones. Been a long time since I got to the ocean. Used to go to Myrtle Beach with my sister, oh, about twenty years ago.”

  It was almost like she was creating some reason to get Kylie to stay longer, which broke Kylie’s heart. It was so tempting to just give in and stay much longer, just to give the woman some company.

  Ignoring the tug of her heart, Kylie closed her notebook and slipped out from behind the table. “Yes, Myrtle Beach is beautiful, but I’m sorry. I’m not selling anything.” She pushed a business card over to her. “If you do think of anything else that could help me, please call.”

  Agnes nodded, sadness filling her expression. “Nice meeting you, sweetheart.”

  Kylie swallowed and said, “You too,” then pushed hard to open the door before stepping out into a mud puddle from the little kid who was still playing with the hose. She looked down and realized her pants were streaked from knee to ankle with grime. Great.

  Although a bit irritated, she smiled at the little girl as she walked to the car. When she slid into the driver’s seat, she took off her shoes and grimaced, pitching them into the passenger floor. Before tossing her notepad onto the seat beside her, she scanned what she’d written down. It wasn’t much of anything. The description of the aunt was pretty good, but there were about a million Southern Belles in this state who looked like that.
There was nothing to lead her anywhere else, no threads of a lead to grasp on to.

  She decided she should go and see Elise. Maybe there was some more info she could give her to help her search. It was just after lunchtime anyway. She was starving, and her nausea had begun to come back.

  Kylie turned the key in the ignition and realized she had a message on her phone from Linc. It was sent only a few moments before. It said: Had to go into town to get a part for the dishwasher. If you’re done early, maybe we can meet up for lunch?

  She pressed her lips together, thinking. She’d been feeling guilty about being so short with him earlier. If they went to the Sunset, she could casually ask Elise questions without making him think she was spending too much time on the case. Probably.

  She typed in: I’m done now. Sunset?

  His response came in a few seconds later: Be there in ten. Love you.

  She smiled. He was such a good husband. He’d make a good father. She was so lucky to have him. She needed to remember that and stop getting annoyed by every little thing he did.

  Love you too, she typed in, then threw her car into reverse.

  As she was driving, it occurred to her that there were probably angles to the case that she was overlooking. She decided to put in a call to Greg, her former boss and mentor. Now retired and living in a condo on Lake Norman, he’d always been able to help her out when she was stuck.

  She thumbed in a call to him, and when he answered with a garbled, “Yello,” she could already tell he was drunk. He was either really enjoying his retirement or else in the process of drinking himself to death.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, genuinely worried.

  “Hey, short stuff. What’s up? How’s the investigations business without me?”

  This was where they’d normally shoot the shit for an hour. But after the frustrating day Kylie was having, first blowing up on Linc, then learning her business was falling apart, then making no headway on her investigation, she came right to the point. “Oh, it’s going. But I have some questions to ask you, if you’re not busy.”