Forever Road

by Catie Rhodes

  “Peri Jean!” Hannah widened her eyes and swatted at me. I moved out of her reach and engaged in a glaring contest with Dean.

  “It’s okay, Han,” he said.

  Han? Really? Who was he? Luke Skywalker?

  “My feelings about Ms. Mace are less than favorable. She has bad taste in friends—present company excluded, of course.”

  Hannah shifted her glare to Dean. He pressed his lips together and met her gaze without flinching.

  “It’s not her fault,” Hannah told him.

  “So? She’s breaking the law. She’s lying to me.” It might have been wishful thinking, but Dean sounded a little whiney like a kid caught doing something he shouldn’t. I almost preened but realized what this conversation meant. They’d discussed me. More than once. Hannah and Dean both fit right into the Gaslight City gossip mill, the busybodies.

  “Just give me the ticket,” I said to Dean.

  Hannah and Dean both ignored me, continuing their silent battle. Finally, Hannah spoke up.

  “There wasn’t any reason for you to come here and start over if all you’re going to do is drag the past around with you like a badge of honor.”

  Dean flushed brick red. His eyes narrowed, and I figured he’d say something nasty to Hannah. Instead, he dropped his eyes. Hannah turned to me.

  “And you. Tell him the truth. He only wants to solve your cousin’s murder. He’s a good guy and a good cop. Accept help when you need it.”

  My hand curled into a fist, and my face heated. Who the hell was Hannah Kessler to lecture me? She had all her big, fancy money to hide behind. She came back to this crummy, little town like a visiting celebrity. Did she really think she knew enough to tell me how to live? If she had anything better to do, anywhere better to go, she sure wouldn’t be in Gaslight City a wash-up. My hateful words beat at me, wanting to get out and blacken the air.

  “Go on,” Hannah said. “Talk to each other. And go to bed with each other and get it over with. Nobody else would have either of you.”

  Dean gaped at Hannah, freezing in place. My head swam as the back of my neck prickled. We glanced at each other and quickly looked elsewhere.

  “I’m sorry I ignored your call the other night.” Dean mumbled the words at his feet, but I understood them anyway.

  “I’ve got some stuff I need to tell you,” I said. I still wanted to kick Hannah Kessler’s butt, and I glared at her to let her know.

  Hannah clapped her hands together. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Neither Dean nor I said anything. Hannah beat it back to the museum. She closed the door and locked it behind her. Wise move.

  “You were right. I have been in touch with Chase.” My head swam as the blood rushed through my body. “Gonna take me to jail now?”

  “I didn’t want to in the first place. That anonymous tip got to Sheriff Joey before it got to me.” Dean still spoke to his feet.

  “Then…why have you been threatening to arrest me since day one?”

  “For most people, the threat of jail is a good incentive for telling the truth.” Dean finally looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “I didn’t want you to arrest Chase.”

  “But if he didn’t do this, the safest place for him might be jail. Let’s say Chase didn’t do it. The real killer is out there somewhere. It might be in that killer’s best interest to silence Chase permanently.”

  For once, I didn’t have a sassy comeback. Dean was right. Chase had seen Low_Ryder with Rae. He could identify him. Dean took in the expression on my face and grimaced in sympathy.

  “Still not too late. I’m here. You can tell me anything.”

  I barely heard Dean’s voice over the roaring in my ears. I remembered that final voicemail from Chase. Who had been out at the sawmill ruins with him? And why hadn’t I heard from him since then?

  “Have you been out to the sawmill ruins?”

  “Sawmill?” Dean frowned, watching me carefully. “What does that have to do with this?”

  “Can you follow me out there?” Urgency beat at me, even though I knew there was no hurry.

  Dean shook his head. “Not unless you want me to call it in. I won’t be off work until after dark. We could meet out there in the morning.”

  I drew Dean a sloppy map, which he insisted was good enough to help him find the ruins. Hands shaking, I got into my car and drove to the next job. Even though I worked until well after midnight, I didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. I sat up most of the night making a list of things I needed to tell Dean the next day. I slept a few hours and woke as the sky turned gray with dawn. Replaying my part in helping Chase evade arrest, I wished for a do over and cried because those don’t exist. I prayed for consequences of my ignorance not to be dire.

  16

  Morning dawned clear and bright with a deeper than usual blue sky. Beautiful day, horrible task ahead of me. My mind kept going over bits and pieces of the previous day.

  Rae’s using me to convince Hannah to do her bidding didn’t shock me a bit, but it bothered me all the same. Only two possibilities existed: I was in danger or I wasn’t. Let’s say Rae hadn’t been lying just to get her way, and I am in danger. From what? I’d never win a popularity contest but couldn’t imagine why someone would want to harm me. I’d once mistakenly dated a man cheating on his wife, but that happened years ago. I stayed to myself too much to make any real enemies.

  The other part of yesterday’s events coiled into a knot I could never hope to untie. Hannah’s mentioning my attraction to Dean (and his to me), like common knowledge, embarrassed the hell out of me. Now that I knew for sure they weren’t a couple, I could no longer justify ignoring the pull between us. I’d have to decide to act on the attraction or let it fester. The complexity of it all made my head ache.

  Unless we went out of town to do it, having a quiet fling was out of the question. Gaslight City might not have big city amenities, but our gossip grapevine surpassed the need for them. Everybody who was anybody would know Dean’s and my business five minutes after it happened. Everybody else would know a half hour after that. The idea of the town gossipmongers taking a personal interest in me brought back memories of my childhood as a pariah.

  Added to that, Dean had issues. He might as well carry a sign reading, “Damaged Goods.” A relationship with him would take hard work. My relationship skills consisted of knowing when a relationship had reached its expiration date and extracting myself quickly and painlessly. That was it. My common sense told me to let the attraction die on the vine. Find some uncomplicated male and forget Dean. No matter how many times I told myself that, I couldn’t quit remembering how he made me feel.

  At the appointed hour, I met Dean at the sawmill with a thermos of coffee. He brought a box of doughnuts. We ate in silence before we ventured into the woods. The attraction—now that Hannah had pointed it out—writhed between us, begging to be recognized, acted upon.

  “So why are we out here?” For once, Dean didn’t sound like a tight ass.

  “This is the last place Chase might have been. He called me Saturday night and asked me to meet him out here. I came out, and he wasn’t here.”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You talk fast when you get nervous. You didn’t even pause for breath when you said all that.” Dean stopped and faced me. The ruins stood around us like concrete sentries, their presence both spooky and comforting. The only sounds were the wind rustling leaves and the splash of the stream feeding the old millpond.

  “I got scared is all. I found a matchbook from Long Time Gone and went looking for Chase. I didn’t find him.”

  “That didn’t scare you. What did?” Dean’s eyes searched mine. I saw no malice or sarcasm on his face. Despite his cutting crystal ball remarks, I decided to tell him. Hannah had been right. We needed to work together.

  “There’s a dead deer over there. I saw—or maybe just felt—its last moments. The hunter who
killed it cut into it while it was still alive…” I stopped and shuddered.

  “Show me,” Dean said.

  We walked without talking, footsteps crunching on the bed of dry leaves and dead grass. I skirted around the building where I’d seen the dead deer.

  I braced myself for seeing a dead animal, but I wasn’t prepared for what I did see. The deer that had looked so fresh only days before was half-rotted, his bones picked clean by scavengers. He’d been killed at least a month ago. The smell was unreal. How had I not noticed this?

  “But there was blood here.” I turned to Dean, expecting him to make a nasty remark about my ability. “I got it on my hands. I’m not lying to you.”

  “My career has put me in the same room with a lot of liars. I know you aren’t one of them.” Dean looked as mortified as I felt about being allies for the moment.

  “Show me where you fell down.”

  I pointed to the spot, which was still stained red with something. At this point, I wondered if it was even blood. Dean knelt down and touched the ground gingerly. The half-rotted deer, the one that had looked so fresh the night I’d been out looking for Chase, was close enough to touch.

  Dean, still on his knees, peered into the patchy grass. His posture stiffened, and he drew his pen from his shirt pocket. He poked the pen into the grass and drew out a brass shell casing. In one fluid motion, he drew a plastic bag from his pocket and deposited the casing in it.

  My sanity wobbled on its axis. I knew what the casing meant. Deep down, I did. I was vaguely aware of some animal making a low, mournful noise out in the woods. Then I realized the soft howl came from me and made myself stop.

  Dean turned to face me. Whatever he saw made his eyes widen.

  “A-a-aren’t you even going to say it’s not what I think it is?” My lips trembled as I spoke, and my sentence came out all warbled. The world around me got very bright.

  Dean shook his head and glanced away from me. His eyes darted around before they settled on something. He gripped my arm and led me to a fallen log away from the deer, away from where he’d found the brass hull. Carefully, he helped me sit on the log.

  “Chase isn’t dead.” I needed someone to say it. Saying it didn’t reassure me as much as I hoped it would, so I heaped on even more reason. “Otherwise, I’d have seen him.”

  Chase wouldn’t go on without saying goodbye to me. Would he, though? He’d hated his life. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have tried so hard to destroy himself. He didn’t love partying. Dreams dashed, he was killing himself slowly. But Chase couldn’t die. I needed him. I needed our shared history. I needed someone to love me who didn’t have to. Dean gripped my shoulder, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Talk to me, Peri Jean. Let’s work together.” He frowned at me. “I don’t know about you, but Hannah embarrassed the hell out of me.”

  “Me too.” We smiled at each other. Dean’s smile made it all the way to his eyes. Despite my fear over Chase’s whereabouts, my heart beat a little faster. “Where do you want to start?”

  “Tell me the truth, everything you know about this whole, crazy thing.” Dean shoved his hands in his pockets and stretched his legs out in the leaves. Our mutual attraction sat between us, huge as a white elephant. No way I’d touch that. Not until I decided for sure how bad it could blow up in my face.

  “Whoever reported seeing Chase and me talking on the side of the road wasn’t lying,” I said. “But I think the person who saw us is the killer.”

  “Back up. Tell me why you think that.”

  “Chase said Rae had another boyfriend, a guy she listed as Low_Ryder on her cellphone. The morning Rae died, this Low_Ryder texted her, and she kicked Chase out.”

  Dean dug for his notepad, took it out, and scribbled in it. I leaned forward and peeked at what he wrote.

  “That looks like hieroglyphics,” I said.

  Dean elbowed me away. “Don’t lose your train of thought. Finish telling me what you know.”

  “I found the sketchbook and the blackmail note, which you already have. Saturday night, after I left here, I went out to Long Time Gone—”

  “What the hell for? That’s a rough place.”

  “I told you. I found a matchbook out here. One of Chase’s messages had music playing in the background. I guessed he’d been there. Thought maybe he went back.”

  “Do you still have the matchbook?” he asked.

  I dug in my jacket pocket and held the matchbook out to Dean. He produced another plastic bag and motioned me to drop it in.

  “Probably no useful fingerprints on it, but we can try,” he said.

  “That trashy old witch who runs it kicked me out, but I talked to the bouncer. He looked at the sketchbook and said the guy with the hat—the one I showed you—used to come into Long Time Gone with Rae. He said that guy owned a vintage black GTO, extensively restored. The night I talked to Chase on the roadside, a car like that passed us. The night I went to The Chameleon, a car like that followed me home. It tried to make me wreck.”

  Dean turned to stare at me. “You’ve been chased? Why have you told me none of this?”

  I took a deep breath. “Every time I’ve tried to talk to you, you’ve been an asshole. Somebody told you I can see the spirit world, and you make fun of me for it. Why would I go out of my way to talk to you?” My voice had risen unintentionally, and it echoed in the quiet forest.

  Long pause.

  “I deserved that,” Dean said. “I’ve never lived anywhere this isolated, and I’m having a hard time getting my bearings. I grew up in a small town, but Baton Rouge was right up the road. We were always driving in for something.” He paused and glanced at the dense forest around us. “Nothing here is what it seems. Everybody has histories, and those histories color how they interact. To an outsider like me, it seems like people make up the rules as they go along.”

  “We do make up the rules as we go along. That’s one benefit to living in the asshole of nowhere,” I said.

  “If you can’t beat ‘em, join em?” Dean asked. I shrugged and nodded and we stared at each other. The charge of attraction between us heated until I expected to smell ozone. I waited for Dean to make the next move, and he did. Just not the one I expected. “What else can you tell me about the case?” Dean turned to a fresh page in his notebook. I almost groaned in frustration.

  “There’s another part to all this, one I didn’t connect until the night we saw each other at The Chameleon. This woman—Veronica—came by the house and wanted to go through Rae’s things. I blew her off, and she got angry. The night I went to The Chameleon, the women who work there, the dancers, mentioned a woman who showed up and tried to beat Rae up. Then, last night at Long Time Gone, the bouncer mentioned that same woman and Rae got into a fight there…over the man with the black GTO.”

  “You’re shitting me.” Dean tapped his pen on his jeans and shook his head. “I am an asshole. That explains a lot.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Veronica Spinelli,” Dean said, “is a friend of Rae’s…from prison. She was released a couple of months ago. After thirty years locked up. She’s a murderer, a thief, someone you don’t want to mess with. Run an internet search on her. If what you read doesn’t scare you, nothing will.”

  “I don’t understand what she wanted with Rae.” My mind worked to piece things together, but I didn’t have enough of the puzzle.

  “I’ll have to see if I can find out. But you let me take care of this. Don’t go off looking for her.” Dean leaned forward. “She’s wanted by the Smith County sheriff’s office for parole violation. Veronica beat the living shit out of a woman at the halfway house where she’d been placed. The woman died from the beating.”

  That shocked me into silence. Veronica Spinelli could have killed Rae. From what I’d learned at Long Time Gone, she had a motive. Rae stole her man. I couldn’t believe it. All this time, I’d thought Rae’s killer to be a man.

  “Call me if you see her. If she appro
aches you, run. She can and will hurt you.” Anger flashed in Dean’s eyes. He stood in a quick motion and brushed off his jeans.

  “I want to collect some of those leaves where we found the blood,” Dean said. “It might be animal blood. If so, I can rule this out as a crime scene.”

  I wanted to tell him again that Chase wasn’t dead because I hadn’t seen his ghost, but I said nothing. I helped Dean put some bloody leaves in one of his endless supply of plastic bags. We walked back to our cars. Dean walked in silence, his brow furrowed in thought. Once we reached the cars, Dean opened the Nova’s door and held it while I got inside. His mouth worked as he tried to think of a suitable goodbye for me, but something had been flitting around my mind, and I wanted to ask him about it.

  “What did Hannah mean when she said it wasn’t my fault?”

  Dean jerked and dropped his notepad. He bent to pick it and plucked absently at his jeans leg on the way back up. His lips pressed together, and his eyes darted away from mine. “A stupid decision I made that got somebody killed. I blamed everybody but myself and even moved away to escape it. Then I met you, and I’m reminded of it every time I see you. Makes me feel stupid all over again.”

  I nodded. Sometimes there was nothing to say.

  “You’re not going to tell me it’ll be all right?” Anger danced in Dean’s eyes.

  “Nope,” I said. “Sometimes it’s not all right until you tell yourself it is.”

  The anger faded from Dean’s eyes, and a crooked smile took its place. “You’re an enigma. Has anybody ever told you that?”

  “My ex-husband said I was an enema. That the same thing?” It made him laugh. I started the car, and he closed the door.

  To my complete and utter shock, the search on Veronica’s name turned up pages of results. Judging by the short previews available with every result, she had been responsible for a notorious crime spree back in the early 80s.

  I clicked on a link to a reasonably well-known website dedicated to profiling criminals and crimes. The bold headline read, “Romance and Murder: The Couple Who Kills Together Is Arrested Together.”