Shame ON You

by John W. Mefford

  “Did I say that? She’s a part-timer.” I glanced over my shoulder to look at Amber, who was bouncing on her toes a little as she spoke to Ivy. “Okay, maybe I did see her personality as being not so serious about the job.”

  She gently poked me in the chest. “Goes to show, you can’t judge a book by its cover. Right?”

  “Yes, Mom.” I gave her a salute, and she quickly rolled her eyes and gave me a fake smile.

  “She has it, Oz.” Ivy waved me over. “Amber has this Melvin guy down pat.”

  I shuffled her way and looked at the sketch. A near-perfect rendition. “Wow. Nice work, Amber.”

  Her smile was wide and very toothy. “I’ll send this into the precinct. I think one of the officers can run a basic face-recognition software program. It’s kind of, like, archaic, but it does a decent job if the sketch is close to the real person.”

  “Thanks, Amber,” Brook said.

  I’d already grabbed Ivy’s hand and started marching toward the stairwell.

  “You two aren’t sticking around?” Brook asked.

  “You’ve got the entire force looking for Cobb. We’ve got more to learn about Chantel’s family.”

  “We do?” Ivy asked as we walked outside.

  “We do.”

  13

  Ivy made the phone call I’d asked for without pushing back too much, and then we went through a drive-through to pick up lunch for the road. She insisted on Taco Cabana, so I obliged.

  “Best flour tortillas outside of an authentic Mexican restaurant,” she said, biting into her burrito.

  “So, you’re basically saying it’s still nothing more than fast food. Just quality fast food.”

  She picked up her drink and took a pull on the straw. “Not all of us were silver-spooned growing up.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “What did I do to deserve that jab?” I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and noticed a gash on my forehead.

  “Nothing personal. It’s just that some of us had to actually get used to eating fast food…and even that was considered a luxury.”

  “Of course. Nothing personal.” I arched an eyebrow. Ivy had this odd thing about her. A warm, gushy inside—her conversation with Saul was a good example—but her exterior had a hard edge. She was right, though. Compared to her upbringing, I was sheltered. I was fortunate on many levels. Despite everything I’d been through in recent weeks—and I still missed that bond with Nicole—I couldn’t overlook the blessings. Starting with my daughter.

  She pointed at the cut on my forehead. “I thought you were knocked out cold when Melvin slammed the door in your face,” she said through a full mouth. I touched the edge of my lip. She understood the signal and used a napkin.

  “News flash: it looks like you actually used makeup on one cheek and not the other. A nice purple blush, as it were.”

  She looked at me with no expression and bit into her burrito.

  “I guess you were hungry?”

  “Protein,” she said, holding up the burrito. She sounded like a cavewoman.

  We had more than an hour’s drive to reach Marble Falls, northwest of Austin, so I indulged myself by eating a chicken taco while I drove. We were headed to the home of Chantel Gibson to visit with her parents.

  We again lamented the fact that we’d let Melvin slip away. That segued into a broader discussion about Chantel’s drug use and the reasons behind it.

  “We all have our demons, Ozzie.” She’d just finished her second burrito and dropped her hands in her lap. She stared straight ahead.

  “I don’t want to pry, but have you ever…you know?”

  She looked at me. “I had plenty of opportunities and even more excuses to do every drug out there. But honestly, I realized at a pretty young age that I could only rely on one person to make sure I made it to the next day. And that was me. So, when you’re in survival mode, you don’t really think too much about screwing yourself over. Everyone else is already doing a pretty good job.”

  I laid a wrist on top of the steering wheel as we hit a comfortable speed moving north on Highway 281. “Your life…they might make a movie about it someday.”

  “For what? Just getting by? Doesn’t sound too sexy to me.”

  “I bet Saul might disagree.”

  She smiled and smacked my leg. “Don’t go there.”

  We reminisced a bit, recalling that day at the Belmont a few months earlier, when a bomb had gone off. Both of us had thought we’d lost someone in our lives. We’d felt immense relief when Ivy’s friend, Cristina, and Nicole exited the smoky concert venue—alive and well.

  “And now look at us,” she said, with some energy in her voice. “You’ve quit a job you hated, just like me.”

  “Actually, the job quit me. But I get your point.”

  “And we’re both PIs, trying like hell to make the world a better place.” She gave me a wink. If I’d described this scene to Tito, he might think we were driving down Flirtation Lane. But I knew it was the opposite of that. She was just Ivy. Flawed, but passionate. There should be more Ivy Nashes in the world.

  I saw a sign for Lake Marble Falls. We were getting close. Ivy said they lived just outside of downtown, off Avenue J. We both glanced east and west as we crossed the river. “You ever going to teach me to swim?” she asked.

  “Sure. I taught plenty of kids at the country club when I lifeguarded in high school.”

  She shook her head, smiling. “Country club.”

  “Please don’t. I can’t undo my life and put myself on the street.”

  “I’m just giving you a hard time.” She paused a second. “By the way, I’m not sure I want to know how to swim. The water kind of scares me, you know. There’s something about not being able to stand on firm ground.”

  I was going to say something about her having trust or even control issues, but I thought that might hit too close to her core. A couple of minutes later, we pulled up to the Gibsons’ home.

  14

  Marilyn Gibson was standing like a statue just inside the screen door, holding a wad of tissue. Her nose and cheeks were pink. They happened to match her pink floral apron. It was obvious that she’d been crying.

  “Come on, Marilyn,” a man said, pulling up behind her and putting a hand on the screen door. I assumed he was Adam Gibson, her husband. “Let’s not keep these folks waiting.”

  We stepped inside and stopped in the foyer. The ranch-style home smelled old, as if the wooden plank floors were actually roots from a tree. “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me again.” Ivy extended an arm to me. “I want to introduce you to Ozzie, the person I told you about who’s helping me try to locate Chantel.”

  As I shook hands, I could sense their solemn moods. Adam switched his gaze between Ivy and me a couple of times. He was tall, thin, only a slight paunch. He was wearing a tight-fitting T-shirt with the words “Semper Fi” on the front.

  “Marine Corps?” I asked.

  “Yes sir. Served two tours in Iraq.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For serving our country.”

  He and Marilyn exchanged a glance. She led us into the living room, where there was a pendulum clock on the hearth of a small fireplace. Ivy and I sat on a loveseat, Adam in a leather chair, and Marilyn in a rocking chair.

  “I was just trying to see if I could keep myself busy by baking a couple of pies,” Marilyn said, her voice drifting. “I used to bake all the time, but not so much anymore.”

  I picked up sweet scents of blueberry and sugar. My mouth began to water.

  “Marilyn makes the best pies,” Adam said. “The Blue Bonnet Café gets all the press in town for having the best pies. But they don’t compare to Marilyn’s pies.”

  She tried to crack a smile, but she only squinted. Her eyes nearly disappeared.

  “So, we don’t want to take a lot of your time—”

  Adam held up a finger. “If it helps bring back Chantel, you can interrupt us all
day long. Have you made any progress?”

  Ivy glanced in my direction.

  “Listen,” Adam said, “I knew this wouldn’t be easy. When she doesn’t want to be found, she’s almost impossible to find. But you’ve got to have hope. Right, Marilyn?”

  She nodded, her eyes looking more through us than at us. Her mind appeared to be in another time, another place of her life. It was like she’d wrapped a cocoon around herself. She was coping in her own way.

  “So, we’ve spent today trying to locate that person you named in that note.”

  Adam inched up in his chair. “Psycho C. So you figured out who he was?”

  “Cobb is his last name,” I said. “George Herman Cobb.”

  “What the fuck?” He looked at his wife. “Excuse my language. But that’s a combination of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth…well, Babe Ruth’s real name.”

  I’d known that, but I simply nodded.

  “Is there some type of weird baseball angle to all of this that I hadn’t thought of?” Adam asked.

  “Nothing at this moment points in that direction.”

  “So, how did you figure out his last name?”

  We explained how Brook and her captain had helped us out.

  “Hot damn. Finally, a law-enforcement officer who gives two shits about us. Ozzie, is that your connection?”

  “Brook is a friend, and she was nice enough to help us out a bit. But this Cobb person has been known to deal drugs.”

  He smacked his leg, looked at Marilyn again. It seemed as though he wanted to say something to her, but he held back. Perhaps he knew she wouldn’t respond.

  “So,” Ivy said, “Cobb had three places that he was known to frequent. We went to all three, saw no sign of him. But the police have now gotten involved, and they’ve put out an APB for him.”

  Adam opened his lips and then closed them again. He seemed confused. I knew Ivy had tried to slip past the murder at the apartment complex, but maybe not successfully, based on Adam’s reaction. He looked skeptical.

  Adam turned his hands toward the ceiling. “Cops don’t just do that unless they have reason to believe he committed a crime. What am I missing?”

  Taking in a deep breath, Ivy explained the dead girl we found in the apartment complex. Almost immediately, Marilyn began to whimper.

  “But it wasn’t Chantel. So, we’re still hopeful,” Ivy said, rubbing her hands on her jeans.

  That comment didn’t stop Marilyn’s emotional response. In fact, tears began to flow more freely.

  “Did you hear that, Marilyn? It wasn’t Chantel,” Adam said.

  Marilyn dabbed a tissue against her face but never acknowledged what Adam had said. She just looked off into the corner. Adam looked down for a moment, wringing his hands.

  I said, “I wanted to ask you a few questions about your family. And while we’re at it, would you mind if we looked inside Chantel’s room?”

  “Sure thing.” Adam pushed out of his chair, took another look at his wife, who hadn’t moved, walked us down a hallway, and opened a door. “This here was…is Chantel’s room.”

  Was that a slip of the tongue? He’d said “was.” Past tense. As if she were no longer living. I made note of it for our ride back to Austin.

  We walked inside. There were a few knickknacks on a dresser that had a cracked mirror attached to it and a desk with a set of colored pencils and a drawing pad. Other than that, the room was rather drab. Her mattress was disheveled.

  “We found the note under the mattress there,” he said.

  “Not much in the room,” I said.

  “She used to have all sorts of stuff out. Pictures, posters, a few soccer trophies from when she was younger. But she threw all of it away one night when she had one of her many tantrums.” He shook his head, reset his feet.

  I peeked inside a dresser drawer. Lots of dark clothing. My eyes went back to the cracked mirror.

  “That was another Chantel tantrum. Or was it when she was high on something? It’s hard to remember.” He sounded a little bitter, but who could blame him?

  “Can you tell us more about Chantel’s sister and the time when she disappeared?”

  He’d been scratching the back of his head, but he stopped mid-scratch. “Why drudge up those memories about Ally?”

  “Chantel changed when Ally disappeared,” I said in the kindest voice I could muster. “It helps provide more context.”

  He took in a fortifying breath and licked his lips. “You can take a look at Ally’s room while we talk about her.”

  He led the way as Ivy and I exchanged a glance.

  Ally’s room was completely different. It looked like she’d made her bed and headed off to school earlier that morning. There were plenty of colors, lots of pinks and yellows. Throw pillows and stuffed animals were placed “just so” on the bed. Pictures with and without frames hung from the walls. Lots of goofy pictures with friends. I eyed one picture that looked like a younger version of Chantel.

  “Yep, that’s the two of them. Separated by five years, but they were the best of friends.” He cleared his throat.

  Ivy sifted through some papers on Ally’s desk. “College acceptance letters?”

  “Yep. Ally was smart as a whip. Structural engineering was going to be her focus. You might be wondering why we keep the room like she left it.”

  “Oh, no...I get it,” Ivy said.

  “It’s just that it’s hard for Marilyn to move on, if you know what I mean.”

  Ivy and I both nodded, and then I looked again at the letters and thought more about the timeline of Ally’s disappearance. “What college did she end up choosing?”

  “Texas A&M.” It was Marilyn. She’d walked up next to Adam, her face solemn, but her voice finally had a little verve to it. “She always wanted to be an Aggie. Just like her papa.”

  I tried to think of a positive memory. “Did the two of you meet at A&M?”

  “What? Oh, no.” Marilyn shook her head while moving a finger between her and Adam. “Ally’s father passed away several years ago. We’d been divorced for a while, but he couldn’t deal with her disappearance. He had a heart attack almost a year to the day after she disappeared.”

  I looked at Ivy. I could tell this was new information for her.

  “How long was she in school before she…?” Ivy asked.

  “Never started her freshman year,” Marilyn said, dipping her head a moment.

  “I’m confused,” Ivy said.

  “She was taken while she was at freshman orientation. I thought you knew that.”

  Ivy shook her head. “I guess it never came up.”

  Marilyn released a deep sigh as her eyes fell on Ally’s bed. I got the sense that, normally, Marilyn was one of those mothers who truly enjoyed doting on her daughters, and kept herself busy sewing personalized pillows, keeping things tidy, or baking their favorite meals. Ally had been gone for ten years, though. I wondered if Chantel had to deal not only with the loss of her sister but also with at least a partial loss of her mother.

  “I really don’t want to create more emotion for you, but would you or Adam mind sharing with us what happened to Ally?”

  “Is this really necessary?” Adam’s weathered skin turned red. “I mean, rehashing the past and all…I just don’t see the point. And you’re right, it’s only going to upset—”

  Marilyn reached out and put a hand on Adam’s arm. “It’s okay. You don’t have to protect me every minute of the day.”

  My mouth went dry. I wasn’t sure which shocked me more—her actually touching her husband or the fact that she suddenly seemed lucid.

  Adam crossed his arms and remained silent.

  “Ally was so excited about college.” A smile split Marilyn’s face. “She was popular in high school and participated in a hundred things, but she was also eager to take that next step in life. She wasn’t one of those nervous types who was afraid to be out of her element. She embraced those opportunities,” she said, rocking her clasped
hands in front of her. Her energy level had definitely gone up.

  Neither Ivy nor I said a word. Instinctively, we knew to hold off on any questions. Let the information flow freely and naturally.

  She extended a hand toward Ally’s desk. “She loved getting letters from all the colleges. That’s just the pile of the colleges that accepted her. A whole bunch more recruited her. Tiny schools, big schools, in-state schools, even schools in Alaska.”

  Adam coughed. We all looked in his direction. Was that his way of signaling to his wife to get to the point? Or something else?

  “So, she settled on A&M. We visited the campus four times. She had the whole layout memorized before she graduated from high school.” Marilyn giggled and put a hand to her mouth. “Never had to push that girl once. She just always had a knack for figuring things out on her own. All of those online applications, the recommendation letters, everything. Quite a young lady she was…”

  We waited for her to continue, giving her space.

  “I’ll never forget the day she left for orientation. She had her car piled with stuff, even though she was only going to be gone for three days. She hugged me extra tight. That smile never left her face, even as she pulled out of the driveway.”

  “Was it day or night when she left?” Ivy asked.

  “It was the middle of the day. I can still remember how hot it was. Sticky hot. I recall hearing the locusts buzzing.”

  “But she made it to College Station just fine,” Adam said.

  Marilyn nodded, but her luster had faded — as if she knew now was the time to recall the moment it happened.

  “She called us each day she was there, right before dinner. She told us everything that she’d done, all the friends she’d made. She talked about the classes she signed up for. Just so excited.”

  Marilyn stopped, pressed her lips tight. Was she unable to go there?

  Ivy tried to confirm a couple of facts. “You said that she was supposed to stay for three nights and that she called you each of those three nights.”

  A single nod, but no verbal response.