by Karen Pullen
“Beautiful car,” I said. “Is it new?”
“Thank you. Actually, it’s William’s, my fiancé. My car is why I called you.”
“You said it was important. It’s about your car?”
She leaned toward me, so close I could see every bead of mascara on each perfectly separated eyelash. Her voice was low, almost a whisper. “Do I have your word: you’ll tell no one?”
“No,” I said. As badly as I wanted to know what she had to say, I couldn’t very well promise to keep a secret. “I can shield your identity as an informant, but that’s about all.”
“I don’t know where to turn then. I can’t have any publicity, not a whiff. William despises scandal.” She pushed a button and her seat slipped back. As she stretched, her dress slid up over smooth white thighs.
“Help me out here,” I said. “Has a crime been committed?”
“Yesterday my daughter disappeared, and my car is missing. She got her license a week ago, and I’m worried about her driving. I suspect she’s with Bryce Raintree. She’s been hanging out with him.” Zoë rolled her eyes.
“Did you talk to Bryce’s father?”
“I did. The two of us went into Bryce’s apartment last night. He wasn’t there.”
“Do you want to report her missing?”
Zoë shook her head. “Of course not. I want you to find her.”
It was my turn to frown. “I’m a sworn police officer, not a private investigator.”
“No, but Nikki is crucial to your murder case. You need to protect her.”
“Her affair with Mercer—is it important?”
“I think she knows more than she told you. I mean, I don’t know, but she’s not been herself. And William is irritated with her. We’re getting married in a few weeks and Nikki is being so difficult. I wish . . .”
“Wish what?” I asked.
Zoë frowned. I knew the answer—she wished Nikki were more successful. Better grades, nicer friends, fewer piercings. Zoë seemed so fully in control of all aspects of her life that I didn’t quite understand why Nikki was such a loose end. Many mothers with an irritated fiancé and Zoë’s resources would have shipped a problematic daughter off to boarding school. June Devon had mentioned Nikki’s intense hatred of Zoë’s third husband, Oscar Schubert. Would it be any different with William Newell?
“Nikki left a note,” Zoë said. “She was going camping in Pisgah Forest and she needed to be alone, not to worry. She borrowed my brother’s camping gear.”
“Erwin Devon?”
“Yes. He and June used to camp quite a bit, took Nikki with them a few times. She loved it.”
“Seems the worst that could happen is a few mosquito bites.”
Zoë sat up straight. “Like I said, I don’t trust Bryce Raintree. He could be drugging Nikki. He’s got her alone in the woods and I might never see her again! You can find them—I heard you have a tracking dog!” No doubt Zoë would prefer to be begging for help from a man, someone who would react to her thighs and lovely smell with a burning desire to be her white knight.
Was Nikki in danger? Probably no more than she’d been a week ago. Was Bryce a bad influence? Yes, terrible. So what would be gained if I put my time and energy into a search? I had an idea.
“I’ll ask the Highway Patrol to put out an APB for your car. No one needs to know why. We can trace any credit card usage.”
“She uses my AmEx. And she’s driving my Lexus.”
“If I get a lead on her whereabouts, I’ll look for her. But first, I want to search her room. Top to bottom.”
Zoë nodded. “For clues.”
“Right,” I said. Clues that would lead to a murderer. I didn’t care where Nikki was pitching her tent.
On the way to Zoë’s house, I called Hogan and asked him to look up the numbers, then trace her credit card and car, without making waves, as a favor.
Zoë led me to Nikki’s room and let me rummage. “Don’t worry about making a mess. You could hardly make it worse.” The ferocious little white dog, Tiny, skittered around the floor like a wind-up toy, yapping at my feet. When he nipped at my ankle, Zoë took him to another room. Merle could teach Tiny some manners, I thought.
Nikki’s room reminded me of an archeological dig, with sedimentary layers of clothing, papers, shoes, books, and magazines. If I dug down far enough, I’d reach her prepubescent period, with its artifacts of Barbies and sparkly stickers and Jonas Brothers CDs. A narrow path led from the door to the bed, which is where I started, lifting the mattress, shining my flashlight underneath, and inspecting behind the headboard. I piled stuff from the floor onto the bed, giving each piece of paper a look and shaking the magazines to see if anything fell out. After twenty minutes, I was down to bare rug. Next I opened the closet, and pulled out every item—games, ice skates, make-up, balled-up t-shirts, underpants, stuffed animals, more books and magazines. I rifled through the clothes, poking into the pockets of jeans and jackets. I found three little zip-lock baggies of pot, showed them to Zoë, who flushed them.
Then I found something I didn’t share. At one end of the closet, behind a pile of shoes, there was a panel, an attic access, down low in the wall. The panel gave way as I pushed it, and I snapped on my flashlight for a look into a dusty unfinished space with a partial plywood floor, a maze of air ducts and pink insulation. And just inside, an open shoebox containing four eighty-minute mini-CDs, dated with a green marker: March 15, 25, 28, 29.
Mini CDs, like the ones Kent had made of the conversations he’d bugged. I slipped them into my pocket, based on quick reasoning: (A) Zoë could refuse to let me have them, then destroy them; (B) if they were recordings of bugged conversations, they were inadmissible anyway; but (C) they had to be important. Why else would Kent give them to Nikki? Why would Nikki hide them? I crawled out of the closet and began to sift through the papers in her desk. There weren’t many—Nikki wasn’t a student or a letter-writer—and after a few minutes I was finished.
Zoë took me to her kitchen—a basketball-court–sized room with acres of cherry cabinets, granite counter tops, and a six-burner cooking island. She pushed a napkin-wrapped basket toward me. “Please, take a muffin. I want them out of here. I gained two pounds last week. William and I have so many social obligations, all those tempting foods.”
“You seem to have plenty of self-discipline,” I said, helping myself to a blueberry muffin topped with a buttery cinnamon streusel.
“I wish! This morning the scale said one fifteen. I think it was the chocolate cake at Il Palio’s last night. I can’t resist chocolate! If I go up a dress size, I’d have to spend a fortune on clothes!”
Lest the subject of my dress size arise, I changed the subject. “You have a housekeeper?” I heard the distant hum of a vacuum cleaner.
“He’s here now, comes three times a week. June recommended him. Iggy Curran.”
“Ah, I know Iggy,” I said. “He’s observant.”
“That’s right. He told me he’d discovered ‘the booty’ at my brother’s house.” She frowned as if recalling I was a working woman, not her equal, and here she was giving me muffins in her kitchen.
“Do you mind if he takes a break? I’d like to talk to him.”
She disappeared into a long hallway, and soon the vacuum cleaner ceased its roar. Iggy stuck his head into the kitchen. “Why, look, it’s Miss Stella!” He started to turn the twig chairs upside down on the table, another twig creation supporting a one-inch slab of beveled glass. “Care if I do a bit of sweeping in here?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“You do get around! Did y’all put June Devon in jail?” he asked.
“Briefly.”
“My, my. I can’t imagine her in jail. I think of her painting or working in the bookstore, not sitting in a cell. What’s it like?” Iggy attached a dust cloth to a pole and began to wipe down the walls. I had never seen anyone dust walls before.
“I don’t want to know. How long have you worked here?�
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“Oh boy, this dog hair. I pick up a bucket of it every time. Well, let me see. So Zoë was looking for a cleaning person and I was looking to add more people. So June Devon and Zoë are related, you know? June gave my name here. I try to keep about twenty people on my list. Most are twice a month, but some, like Zoë, are more than that—she wants me nearly every day. Everyone’s different, you know?”
“True,” I said, nodding to encourage him to move on.
“So what did you ask me? Sorry, my mind wanders.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“Oh, right. It’s been about a year. The way I remember is . . . this is April, right? Well March 5 is Michael’s birthday—that’s my friend—and he was thirty last year. So we were having a birthday celebration at Teeny’s—you know the barbeque place? I was thinking the other day how we all ate the slaw, and it had sort of a whangy taste.”
I waited. Iggy pulled a sponge mop out of the closet, dampened it in a bucket of water, squeezed the water out, and swabbed the oak floor. “So I thought we might all get sick and I worried about it, but no one did so I guess it was a little too much vinegar. And when I got home from dinner there was a message on the machine from Zoë, and she had the prettiest voice I’d ever heard. I played it over and over.”
“Do you ever talk to Nikki?”
“Why, sure, some. But she’s usually shut up in her room, watching TV or playing music. And that room—phew! It’s beyond me. I have to pile everything on the bed just to run the sweeper. And the bathroom!”
Iggy dunked the mop in the bucket. “Now, I guess Nikki’s left. You know—” He shushed as Zoë came into the kitchen. She had changed into a pastel-blue dress with a wide white collar, the picture of innocence. If she ordered wine with lunch, she’d be carded.
“I have to go out now,” she said. “Will you get started?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. Iggy was absorbed in his mopping, no longer talkative.
As I followed Zoë out the door, my cell phone chimed. It was Hogan. “I got a trace on Nikki Truly. She used her mother’s credit card for gas in Brevard yesterday. I called the park service and gave them the Lexus plate number.”
Brevard was about thirty miles from Asheville, on the edge of the Pisgah Forest. I liked the idea of a road trip. I could drive to Brevard in four hours. Listen to the CDs burning a hole in my jacket pocket. Merle could practice tracking. What else did I have to do? I would find the teenagers, bring Nikki home to her mother, and aim Bryce toward a new career.
“Thanks, Hogan. Let me know as soon as anything else turns up?”
“I will. Be careful, Stella.”
“You sound like Fern. She always says ‘be careful’ like I’m some sort of reckless risk-taker.”
I decided not to bother Richard. I’d told Hogan; that was enough. A little voice in my head nagged that I shouldn’t be going on expeditions into the woods without informing local authorities. What if something happened? The SBI doesn’t like surprises. I could get fired.
This is a personal trip, I whispered to the little voice, so shut up.
CHAPTER 25
Tuesday
I inventoried the contents of my backpack—sleeping bag, water bottles and filter, waterproof parka, flashlight, my Eureka Solitaire tent I love because it only weighs two and a half pounds. I added energy bars and dried fruit. Hogan had suggested a cook stove, fuel, and dehydrated meals, but I told him I wasn’t hiking the Appalachian Trail—I planned to be back tomorrow. With a substantial first-aid kit—practically a mini-hospital—the pack weighed thirty-one pounds. Merle would also carry a small pack containing his dog chow and bowl. I didn’t want to load him down. He had work to do.
It had been over a year since Merle’s initial wilderness training. Since then, I’d taken him out in the woods every weekend to track someone, usually Hogan, and more recently, Fern, so he should perform well on this search. I had the scent article—one of Nikki’s socks—in a baggie in my backpack. I even took a piece of jerky out of the freezer and cut it into chunks, to give him as a reward when we found Nikki. That’s how optimistic I was.
I checked out the CDs from Nikki’s closet on my computer but they seemed to be blank. Or maybe not? There was a file structure, according to iTunes, but only silence came out of my speakers. Odd. They shouldn’t be blank—they had dates written on them, like the ones Fern had found, and why would Nikki hide blank CDs? I detoured to the SBI and left them on Hogan’s desk with a please help note.
The drive to Brevard, on I-85 then I-40, passed slowly. I had to concentrate on my driving, due to tractor-trailer monsters whipping past at eighty-plus miles per hour. In high school, I didn’t pay much attention to physics, but it stuck in SBI training, especially some simple formulas about mass, velocity, and force that apply whether a bullet is exploding through a barrier, or two moving vehicles collide. I stayed in my lane at the speed limit, muttering curses as each eighteen-wheeler gusted by.
As I approached Hickory, Hogan called to tell me a forest service ranger had seen Zoë’s Lexus near the Pisgah Forest entrance. Two hours later, that ranger gave me a trail map and showed me where he’d spotted the car, at the start of Brenner Creek Trail. According to the map, it ran up Brenner Mountain along an old creek bed for three miles, and then connected with several other trails. There was a primitive campground about six miles further along one of them. Nikki and Bryce might be camping out there, avoiding life for a few days. Merle would be able to tell me. The ranger showed me posters warning of black bear activity in the area and made me promise to store my food away from my tent.
I drove my car to the foot of the trail, where Zoë’s Lexus was still parked. I sat on its rear bumper and dabbed on bug repellent.
“We’re going tracking, Merle. A girl is missing and it’s up to you.” I buckled him into his harness, reached into my backpack, and pulled out the baggie with Nikki’s sock. He obediently waved his nose over the sock, I took him off the lead, and Merle put his nose down for the scent, which he found immediately, to my relief. It had always been a possibility that someone else had taken Zoë’s credit cards and car. Judging from Merle’s behavior, the scent trail was strong. Off-lead and nose down, he trotted up the narrow trail.
I followed. The trail was little used, overgrown with brambly vines that scratched my legs. In places I had to clamber over rocks, or shove aside the underbrush to get through. We hiked for two hours, stopping every thirty minutes to give Merle some water and a rest. He was tireless, unstoppable as long as he detected the scent. I was not so tireless. Sweat dripped down my neck and back. The backpack straps rubbed my shoulders, and my legs weren’t used to the climb. Each time I sat down it was harder to get up. I forced down a few bites of a trail bar that tasted like raspberry-flavored cardboard.
Around seven p.m. we reached a small clearing where the trail forked, and I called Merle back. The sun was setting as I looked at the trail map. The left fork went south, toward a pond. The scent trail led to the right fork, which continued five miles up the mountain to a campground and a spring. I envisioned Nikki and Bryce, sitting by a fire, holding hands, murmuring about their golden future together. It might take me more than two hours to reach that far, and in the dark they could be nervous about anyone approaching. I decided to wait until morning.
I had about a quart of water left, and gave a pint to Merle with his dinner. The food I’d brought went into a bag that I tossed up into a skinny tree about a hundred feet from the spot I’d selected for the tent. In case a bear got interested in the food bag, it was far away from where we would sleep. I nibbled on an apple, and treated myself to a wash with a baby wipe. It felt good to get the sticky sweat-salt off my face and neck.
I put up the tent and crawled in with Merle. The temperature had dropped into the fifties once the sun set, and though my sleeping bag kept the chill off, I couldn’t sleep. My aching muscles protested the hard ground, and the noises of the forest had me on edge—a m
ockingbird running through his extensive repertoire, leaves rustling as little creatures scampered about.
I wondered if I would hear a bear. I worried what would happen to Merle if a bear came along and they got into a fight. Anxious, then vexed with myself for my silly worries, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
Then I heard a growl inches from my face, on the other side of the tent wall, its fabric so flimsy that the merest brush of a claw would slice its fibers like a cobweb.
I put out my hand and touched warm fur.
Forget about rational thought and evaluation of options. I screamed as loud as I could scream, despite the paralysis seizing me. I screamed so loud I woke myself up.
I was clutching Merle. I had turned over to face him, and the growl I’d heard was his snore, a few inches from my nose. He licked my face, as alarmed by my scream as I was by the dream.
It was a long time before my heartbeat returned to normal. Eventually I fell back to sleep for a bit, then dreamed again. In this one, Fern and I were on a ferry docking at Marseilles as seagulls screeched and sailors shouted colorful French curses. She was extolling the European way of life—the cheese, the wine, the chocolate, the lusty Mediterranean men. I was feeling dubious about it all, as I do about many of Fern’s enthusiasms. Then Merle started moving around and woke me. It’s hard to sleep with ninety pounds of restless dog in your one-man tent.
The dawn air was cool, humidity low. The birds were in full chorus, a din of noise. I had Merle on a lead to keep him close while I packed up. When I eased my pack onto my shoulders, my muscles started talking to me, but after Merle checked the sock and, nose down, trotted along the trail leading up to the campground, I got into the rhythm of the hike, calling Merle back when he shot too far ahead, out of sight. I hoped the spring hadn’t dried up—I was out of water.
