Wolfhunter River

by Caine, Rachel

  There’s a strange emphasis, the way he puts that, and something I can’t quite unwrap. I let it go. “Okay,” I say. “What if she asks to see me?”

  “Don’t put ideas in that girl’s head,” he tells me. “She’s not the fragile little thing you seem to think she is. And I guarantee you she doesn’t need your protection.”

  “Funny,” I say, “I remember the same things being said about me when I was in jail, waiting for my trial.”

  Fairweather doesn’t respond to that. He stops the recorder on his phone, pockets the device, and stands up to open the door. “All right, ma’am.” he says. “Well, I thank you kindly for your assistance. Would you mind if I contact you again, if I have some more questions?”

  “No, sir, I don’t mind at all.” Aren’t we just the picture of southern cordiality?

  He gives me his business card. “Don’t forget to email me permission to get your cell phone records, and have Mr. Cade send me a timeline and the same letter granting permission. It speeds things up considerably.”

  “I’m not sure speeding things up is in that girl’s best interest,” I tell him. “You seem to be moving awfully fast already.”

  “Just because it looks like an open-and-shut case doesn’t mean I won’t put in the work. But I don’t expect any twists in this story, Ms. Proctor. Bad blood between them, Marlene even reached out to you for help on her situation, and it blew up before she could get it.” His expression loses a little of its aw-shucks-country-boy charm. “And the longer I’m on this case means the less time I put in looking for that little girl.”

  “Ellie White,” I say. “The kidnapping. You were on the task force?”

  “Until this mess,” he says.

  “I hope you find her.”

  “With respect, ma’am, I’m almost hoping I’m not the one who does,” he says. “Because that girl is almost certainly dead.”

  8

  SAM

  After we drop Gwen off—and I hate leaving her there alone—I take the kids back to the motel. Connor is fidgeting with the desire to get at his assigned job: tracking down the case of the missing young women of Wolfhunter. Lanny tries to pretend she’s massively uninterested, but I know she is.

  She also asks a lot about Vee Crockett, which worries me a little. Normally Lanny can be skeptical and a pretty good judge of character, but there’s something about Vee’s situation that seems to have gotten past her natural defenses. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s afraid Dahlia Brown’s getting tired of their relationship; teens run hot as hell, then cold as ice, and that’s normal. But Vee’s not someone I’d like her to be fascinated with. Not, I remind myself, that I have any say in the matter. I may be in the household, but I’m not family.

  No matter how much I’d like to be.

  Lanny, predictably, tells Connor he’s going to have to wait an hour, grabs her laptop, and asks me if she can use my room to call Dahlia. I tell her yes, and leave her alone for whatever drama plays out. Connor, grumpy, loses himself in a book, and I check messages on my phone, leaning back in the armchair in the corner of their room.

  It’s under an hour when Lanny comes through the connecting door and hands her laptop to Connor. “Here,” she says. “Keep it.” She flops onto the other bed and rolls over on her side.

  She sounds angry and hurt, and I turn my attention to her as Connor shrugs and starts mining for internet gold. She’s been crying, no question. Her eyeliner’s a mess, her cheeks flushed, and from the red in her eyes, she’s been at it a while.

  I sit down beside her, but far enough away that she doesn’t feel like I’m in her space. “So?” I say. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.” She sniffles wetly and shoots me a sidelong glance. “Have you ever been dumped?”

  Hoo, boy, this is that conversation. I briefly wish her mom was here, but she isn’t, and I am. So I say, “Yeah. Absolutely.”

  “And?”

  “There was a girl. Her name was Gillian.”

  “When was this?”

  “High school.”

  “Was she beautiful? Did you love her?”

  “She was gorgeous, and yeah, for a while. Then one day she just wasn’t interested anymore. Next thing I know, she’s dating someone else on the same baseball team.”

  “Well, that’s awkward,” Lanny says.

  “Especially when she told everybody I’d been sleeping around on her.”

  This time I get the whole stare. “Did you?”

  “No. But that’s what she said.” I shrug. “It happens. My foster mom once told me she got thrown out of a car on a date with her boyfriend and had to walk a mile back to town, in heels, in the dark. That’s how her breakup happened.”

  “Seriously?” Lanny blinks. “He just left her?”

  “When you say dumped, she got dumped. Right by the side of the road,” I say. “She told me she never wore high heels on a date again. So I didn’t feel so bad after that.”

  “I guess.” The way she says it means she doesn’t believe she’ll ever feel good again. I remember those years, where everything came in overwhelming waves and was destined to last forever. There’s a lot great about it. Even more that’s dangerous.

  “Something happened with Dahlia,” I say, which isn’t a genius guess.

  She takes a deep breath and lowers her voice to a tense whisper. She doesn’t want to say this with Connor in the room, clearly. “Dahlia says she can’t see me anymore. Her mom’s pissed off about the rumors going around, the documentary, all that crap, and she thinks I’m a bad influence or something. It’s not even my fault!”

  “It may not be permanent. Let things settle.” But that’s adult advice, and I know it feels useless to her. “Did she say she’d still talk to you?”

  “Yeah.” Lanny blinks back more tears. “When her mom wasn’t home.”

  “Then maybe it’ll work out.”

  “Maybe.” Lanny doesn’t sound too optimistic. She scoots closer and leans her hand against my shoulder. I put my arm around her. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime, kid. These rumors she mentioned. Like, what kind of rumors?”

  “That mom helped Melvin kill people. That she’s some kind of sicko.” She swallows when her voice falters on that last part.

  “Your mom had a fair trial. She was acquitted. Not guilty.”

  “Yeah? Tell that to the Sicko Patrol that follows us around on the internet,” Lanny says. “They still believe she’s guilty. It ruins everything.”

  I think about Miranda. The Lost Angels. She’s absolutely right. Some things leave a stain, even after all the scrubbing in the world. I feel it like a slow knife to the guts, because I also know how much guilt I bear for that.

  “Sam?” Connor’s voice. I look over at him. “Uh, maybe you should look at this?”

  I kiss the side of Lanny’s head and go over to him to see what he’s got. He swivels the laptop toward me.

  “That’s something, right?”

  A third young woman, reported missing not from Wolfhunter, but from the Daniel Boone National Forest that Wolfhunter clings on the edge of like a burr. I pick up the laptop.

  It’s another entry like the ones he found before. Same blog.

  ANOTHER WOMAN MISSING FROM NEAR WOLFHUNTER

  Earlier I covered the suspicious disappearance of Tarla Dawes, eighteen. Then Bethany Wardrip, twenty-one.

  Now there’s another one. Sandra Clegman, who lives in Sioux City, Iowa, but was vacationing in the nearby Daniel Boone National Forest. Her friends saw her zipped up in her tent one night, and she was missing the next morning, leaving behind everything she’d brought with her, including wallet and cash.

  People get lost in the woods. But Sandra Clegman was a country girl with a history of camping in forests, and the idea that she wandered off to be eaten by bears without a trace is pretty sketchy, if you ask me. Forest rangers conducted a thorough search, along with the state police and even some FBI. No traces were found: not a drop of blood or a snag of
fabric on a branch.

  Sandra Clegman, like Tarla and Bethany, just vanished.

  If you draw a circle from the center of Wolfhunter, Tennessee, with a ten-mile circumference, you’ll find all three of these disappearances fall inside that circle. I made a phone call to the Wolfhunter PD and asked what they thought.

  They told me I was talking about two runaways and a hiker who’d probably had a bad fall and died in the wilderness. Nothing to see here, move along.

  Well, I’m not moving along. Because something’s off.

  “It’s weird, right?” Connor says. “Three women now. That can’t be just luck, can it?”

  “Strangely enough, it can,” I tell him. “Weird things happen. But more than that, the police may actually believe something’s wrong and not want to put the word out to the public just yet. There could be an investigation going on that this blogger doesn’t know about.”

  He doesn’t seem thrilled with that. “I still think it’s weird.”

  “I’m not saying it isn’t,” I tell him. “Keep looking. You could be onto something.”

  He nods, a little happier, and I give him back the laptop. I check my watch. Gwen’s been at the police station for two hours now, and I haven’t gotten any calls from her. I wonder if she decided to use the traditional one phone call (presuming they offered; they’re not required to) for a lawyer, and she trusts me to call and ask after her.

  “I’m going to check on Mom,” I tell the kids, and walk into the other room. I close the connecting door and dial her cell.

  I get voice mail. I leave a message asking her to check in, and then I look up Wolfhunter PD’s central number in the tiny phone book on the nightstand. I get a smooth southern voice asking me how to direct my call, and I ask if I can speak to Gwen Proctor.

  She hesitates, then transfers me without another word. This time, a male voice. “Detective Ben Fairweather. Who’s this?”

  “Sam Cade,” I say. “I was looking for Gwen Proctor.”

  “Hello, Mr. Cade, nice to talk to you. I had a good chat with Ms. Proctor, but she left out of here about ten minutes back.”

  I don’t like that. “Heading where?”

  “Most likely to see Vera Crockett’s defense lawyer,” he says. “You got time to stop in and give me a statement? I understand you were in the room when Ms. Proctor took that call from Vera. I’d like to get your account of it, and a timeline for the past forty-eight hours or so.”

  He sounds friendly and reasonable. I don’t like it, and I don’t trust it. “Sure,” I say. “Later today, once Gwen’s back. I can’t leave the kids.”

  “Of course.” He pauses. “So you all came up.”

  “Family trip,” I say. “We might visit the forest.” Almost certainly not, but it gives a decent excuse. If Gwen hasn’t mentioned it, I don’t want him digging into reasons we left Stillhouse Lake. Miranda’s crew is, I hope, still in Norton. They’ll have a lot to say. Some of it might even be true.

  “Okay,” he says. “How about two? That okay for you?”

  “I’ll give you a call,” I tell him. “I just need to find Gwen first.”

  We end it politely, and I find a note from Gwen with two lawyers’ phone numbers that Kez had texted her sitting on the bedside table. I call the first one, and I get a recording by what sounds like an ancient man who says he’s out of the office.

  The second one gets a pickup and a crisp greeting. “Hector Sparks’s office. This is Mrs. Pall. May I help you?”

  There’s something about it that sets me back a little, and it takes a second for me to identify what it is. Mrs. Pall. Not many women answer the phone with that form of address in the office anymore. They normally use their first names. “Hi, I was wondering if Mr. Sparks might be having a meeting with a woman named Gwen Proctor? She was heading over to talk with him. Is she there?”

  “May I ask who’s calling, please?” She sounds very uptight.

  “Sam Cade,” I say.

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Cade, but Mr. Sparks’s meetings are strictly private, and I won’t be able to confirm that for you.”

  “Then can I speak to him?”

  “I’m afraid not,” she says. “He’s asked not to be disturbed. But I will give him a message that you called.”

  “And if Gwen is there, please ask her to call me,” I say. She doesn’t acknowledge that at all. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says, but not in any way that makes me feel it, and hangs up the call.

  I open up the connecting door again. Lanny’s lying on her bed, headphones on, looking miserable. When she sees me, she turns her back. I don’t push it. “Connor,” I say, “can you look somebody up? Get a little background?”

  “Sure!”

  “Hector Sparks,” I say. “He’s an attorney here in town. I just want to know a little more before . . .” Before what, exactly? There’s no real reason for it, but something about that conversation set me on edge. Just like the one with Ben Fairweather. Maybe it’s this town. Missing women. A dead mother and a jailed daughter. Wolfhunter just doesn’t seem safe for Gwen. And I feel like having her out there on her own is dangerous.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m on it.”

  It takes him about fifteen minutes to report back that Hector Sparks is an attorney who lives in town—he gives me the address—and his father was a lawyer too. Connor’s found a couple of local newspaper articles he shows me—old ones, since the local newspaper expired years ago—and it all seems normal enough. One of the articles has a picture of a surprisingly nice, large house that seems like far better construction than the normal Wolfhunter real estate. Old, too—maybe built in the early 1900s. A family posing in front: an old man in a wheelchair, a son standing tall next to him. A mother and daughter are also in the photo, but they’re off to the side, definitely just bystanders to the men’s special moment. The mother’s expression is blank. The daughter’s looking away. It’s an odd photo to put into a newspaper, even one as amateurish as this publication obviously was. The write-up is clumsy, but it’s apparently celebrating the retirement of the father—Donald—and the takeover of the attorney business by the son, Hector.

  The women aren’t even mentioned in the caption beyond “accompanied by wife and daughter.” The dateline is 1992, but the sentiment is pure 1950s.

  But the point is, Hector Sparks is legit, and I shouldn’t be worrying about Gwen.

  Yet I am.

  I text her. Even if she has her phone on silent, she usually answers within a few minutes.

  Then I sit straight up, staring, because I have a voice mail that’s come in while I was on the phone.

  I know that number from memory. It’s Miranda Nelson Tidewell, and immediately on seeing it on my screen, I’m plunging off a cliff into an abyss.

  “Hey,” I say to Connor, “got to make a call, okay? I’ll be right next door.”

  He nods, not even taking his eyes from the page, but I think he looks when I turn away. He probably notices my tension.

  I leave quickly and take some deep breaths standing in the room I’m sharing with Gwen. The connecting door is shut. I realize it feels warm in here, so I get the air-conditioning going again.

  Then I place the call that will send me straight to hell.

  Miranda doesn’t say hello. She never does. “Sam. Did you even listen to my message?”

  “No,” I tell her. My voice sounds different when I talk to this woman. I can’t remember if that’s always been true. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I think the real question is, what do you think you’re doing, Sam? You’re living in her house. In her bed. That is, without any question at all, the most monstrously perverted thing I’ve heard in years, and my God, that’s quite saying something.”

  Her voice. It’s both honey and ice. A hint of huskiness, still; while she was being treated for a breakdown after her daughter’s murder, she screamed so much she permanently altered it. Her damage starts there, but it’s ju
st a hint of the chasm underneath.

  Miranda is rich. A multimillionaire, the ex-wife of a hedge fund manager. A former Junior Leaguer who’d had life handed to her on a succession of silver platters . . . until the day her daughter, Vivian, disappeared at the mall. The second of Melvin Royal’s known victims.

  She’d met me at the airport coming home from deployment. I’d still been in my fatigues. She’d looked like a perfectly composed mannequin draped in designer fashions holding a sign with my name printed on it.

  We have something in common, Mr. Cade, she’d said. My daughter, and your sister. Let me drive you. We’ll talk.

  I’d been shell-shocked, raw, angry, devastated, and vulnerable at that time in my life. And Miranda had been far worse than I was. The toxic relationship we’d formed . . . I’ve seen her unkempt, messy, wearing clothes that stank of days of drinking bouts. I’ve carried her back into her three-story, six-thousand-square-foot mansion and helped her to the toilet when she needed to vomit. I’ve listened to her rages. I’ve taught her to shoot a gun.

  We’ve done awful things together.

  “How did you get this number?” I ask her. That’s not the most urgent question, but it’s the only one I can stand to ask at the moment.

  “Money and contacts,” she says, and I hear the amusement in the words. It’s her answer to most things. “You’re not at home. I know. I visited there yesterday, along with my film crew. I did leave a note. I even signed my name, remember? Did you tell her that?”

  I hadn’t. I’d taken the goddamn note and run it through the shredder.

  When I don’t respond, she keeps going. “Where exactly are you hiding, Sam?”

  “I’m not hiding,” I tell her. It’s half-true, anyway. “And we’ve got nothing to talk about, except how you’re going to back the fuck off and leave us alone.”

  “Us.” The contempt and scorn in the word feels like a lash against my back. “My God, Sam, really? This is insane.”