Bitter Crossing (A Peyton Cote Novel)

by D. A. Keeley

  Jonathan related well to teens? She considered that. He’d charmed Elise from day one. She wondered if he’d told Elise about his alibi yet. He had to know the story would be checked. Eventually someone would seek verification.

  On the floor, near Hewitt’s desk, lay a pair of worn Adidas running shoes. The tongues were pulled back to air out the shoes.

  “Run to work today?”

  “Every day, until there’s too much snow on the ground. Up here that means I can do it about three months a year.”

  “You can snowshoe the other nine months. Got to love snow to live here. What time did you get home?”

  “Five a.m. Slept a couple hours, came back.”

  He looked well rested. Come to think of it, she’d never seen him look tired. He wore his brown hair cut short, a popular look among ex-military men. His boots always gleamed of polish; the silver leaf on his lapel always shone. He was the type who could sleep four hours a night and function perfectly.

  “I’m going to talk to your sister, Peyton. Wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  She liked him telling her that. Not only for the advance warning, but it was a sign of trust: he knew she wouldn’t alert Elise, which was a tip of the cap to her professionalism.

  “I understand the position this puts you in. How much does your sister know about Hurley’s alibi?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know who he was with?”

  “No. I told him to come in, make a statement.”

  Hewitt glanced around the empty office. “I see he listens well.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  GARY’S DINER WAS AS close to a can’t-miss scene as Garrett, Maine, had to offer. Even on a Wednesday afternoon, the counter seats were all taken when Peyton and Elise entered. They had to wait ten minutes for a booth, standing alone near the coat rack, watching plates of gravy- and cheese-covered poutine pass them. The day’s special, according to the chalkboard, was potato pancakes for $2.99.

  “If it can be made with a potato,” Elise said, “they’ll make it here.”

  “Supporting the local economy,” Peyton said. She’d called Jackman but gotten no answer. “Wish people had done more of that when we were growing up.”

  Elise turned to her. “You’re thinking of Dad.”

  “I do all the time. I think about what it must have been like to lose the farm, to tell Mom we had to pack, to hand the keys to those bank bastards and watch them walk into the house.”

  “They left us one acre across the street from the farm,” Elise said, her voice trailing off. “I remember it all … being so afraid of the future …”

  Elise, who usually had makeup artfully applied, looked as if she was the member of her family who spent part of the previous night at Garrett Station answering questions, dark half-moons beneath her eyes, her complexion pale. Peyton couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Elise without mascara.

  “How’re you doing?” Peyton said.

  “Not so good,” Elise said, but didn’t elaborate.

  Had she told Lois the perception she’d had of her daughter for twenty-eight years was wrong? Or had Jonathan told Elise he’d been cheating on her during his late-night stargazing sessions?

  Donna Dionne led them to a table near the far end of the diner and asked if they knew what they wanted. Peyton told her they were waiting for a third and glanced at her watch. Where was Stan?

  “Place still smells like bacon grease,” Peyton said. “I better run after lunch.”

  A teenage waitress passed with a tray of bacon cheeseburgers.

  “My carotid arteries are clogging just looking at that,” Elise said. “Where’s your friend?”

  “Sleeping, I hope.”

  A strand of hair fell in front of Elise’s eye. She pushed it away absently, staring across the room. “Jonathan told me you know he was cheating again.”

  “Yes,” Peyton said, “he told me. You sound awfully casual about it.”

  “Guess I don’t blame him.” Elise’s eyes were focused on her silverware. She carefully realigned her fork and knife.

  “Well, I do blame him,” Peyton said and thought of Jonathan’s self-pitying remarks. “Did he ever ask why you were so unhappy? He ever ask why you were struggling with intimacy? If he cared, he’d have asked.”

  Donna returned with a Diet Pepsi for each sister. Elise was staring across the table at Peyton, face ashen, on the verge of tears.

  When Donna left, she said, “I don’t need you telling me my husband never cared. I mean, he was parking—parking!—with a Goddamn nineteen-year-old, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I’m sorry, Ellie. It’s just that your struggles weren’t his ticket to cheat.”

  “He’s done it before.”

  “I know,” Peyton said. “Who is she this time?”

  “Same girl he was with a couple years ago. The little slut followed us from Mexico.”

  Peyton stiffened and stopped punching at the ice with her straw. The muscles at her nape tightened. Her personal life—this time in the form of Elise—was again clashing with her career.

  “Is she Mexican?” Peyton asked.

  “Yeah.”

  A lemon slice straddled the edge of Elise’s dark plastic cup. She dropped it into the soda and stirred.

  Peyton watched the lemon spin, her thoughts not far behind it. She tried to piece it together chronologically: They’d lived in Mexico before the year in Boston. Where had the affair begun? How had the “little slut,” as her sister poignantly deemed her, followed them here?

  “Can you describe her, Elise?”

  Elise looked up from her soda. “What does it matter?”

  “I’m looking for a woman about nineteen, whose native language is Spanish.”

  “Good God, this gets worse and worse. Border Patrol is looking for her? Jesus Christ. Well, she looks about seventeen, which makes it even harder. Makes me feel like he’s traded me in for a younger model.”

  “This nineteen-year-old is who he’s been meeting on his late-night walks?” Peyton said.

  Elise nodded and sipped her soda. “To his credit, at least he admitted the whole thing.” Her hand shook as she set the cup down. Soda sloshed onto the Formica table. “I could be so tough when it came to your situation, Peyton. Remember how I used to console you when you’d call from Texas? Now look at me. I guess I drove him to it, but I can’t even hold the soda. Pathetic.”

  “Not pathetic. And you didn’t drive him to anything. Don’t blame yourself. Your situation wasn’t his license to cheat. He’s still your husband.”

  “Only technically.”

  Elise’s heartbreak came as no surprise. Hurley was famously self-centered. He’d once given Peyton a T-shirt with the American flag as background to the words FOREIGNERS USED TO BE WELCOME. The gift showed not only how he felt about her job—the laws governing which, as she’d pointed out to Professor Jerry Reilly, she had no control over—but also spoke volumes about his disregard for her feelings.

  “Who is she, Elise? How did he meet her? What’s her name?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  It wasn’t what Peyton hoped to hear. It put her in a precarious position.

  “It’s my job to ask.”

  “So this isn’t a sister-to-sister, cry-in-your-ice-cream lunch?”

  “It is,” Peyton said.

  “But you have your job, too?”

  “That’s right. And these situations might be connected. Someone—Spanish-speaking, around age nineteen—approached me the other morning.” Peyton shifted on the hard bench, cleared her throat.

  “When you chased the woman outside?”

  “Right. Elise, she asked about the baby I found.”

  “Jesus Christ. A baby? Hers!?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Peyton said.

  “Is that what you are telling me?”

  “I’m not telling you anything. Was the affair going on last year?”

  “What?”
r />   Peyton had done the math. She repeated the question.

  “All he told me was they met in Mexico, and she followed him here.”

  “You were in Mexico two years ago, Boston last year. Was he seeing her last year, too?”

  “She’s from Mexico, one of his former Goddamn students.” Elise turned away. “Not last year. He couldn’t have, not after he promised it was over between them.” Her head was shaking back and forth adamantly, but her frantic eyes told Peyton something else.

  Peyton watched silently, considering her sister’s words: … after he promised it was over. The marriage had soured in Mexico two years ago, the reason for that now obvious. Had they moved to Boston for Jonathan’s teaching career, as Peyton had been told, or to flee his teenage girlfriend? Why had the girlfriend shown up here, now? And most troublesome: If the baby was less than six months old, and if she belonged to the Spanish-speaking girl, who was the father?

  “Elise, was he seeing her last year? I need to know.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Whose decision was it to move here?”

  “Jonathan’s,” Elise said.

  “But it’s your hometown.”

  Elise only nodded.

  “He saw an opening on the District 3 website, sent his resume. Never got into specifics. Just came home one day and said, ‘How would you like to move back?’ In truth, by that time, Boston Catholic Country Day School had told him he wasn’t getting another contract. I was just glad he had another job. I didn’t finish college. I left to marry him. He’s the bread winner.”

  Peyton thought of the future. How would Elise support Max? What would Lois’s reaction be?

  Donna returned. “Are you ready to order?”

  It was 2:40. Peyton nodded, asked for her usual chef’s salad. While Elise asked a question about the menu, Peyton tried to fill in the blanks of a bizarre home-hitting crossword puzzle. It was Jonathan—not Elise—who’d chosen Garrett, Maine. Logical reasons for selecting Garrett abounded: Lois was here, so daycare costs would be trimmed, and maybe Garrett was far enough from Boston for Jonathan to outrun his controversial 9/11 statements. She doubted that. After all, there was no mistaking what he said. School officials were apparently on record verifying the remarks.

  “Did Jonathan interview in person?” Peyton asked, when Donna left.

  “No. It was probably a phone interview.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I told you, he came home one day, said he had the job. I didn’t ask questions. I was just relieved. There’s something else, Peyton, something that will force me to have that talk with Mom.”

  Peyton waited.

  “Jonathan left this morning. When he came back from seeing you, he dropped off Max, packed a couple bags, and took off. I left Max with Mom when I came here.”

  “He’d better not have gone far. People are going to want to talk to him.”

  “You know he didn’t shoot anyone. He wouldn’t.”

  “I hear he broke a student’s arm,” Peyton said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Where is he?”

  “No idea.”

  “He with the Mexican girl?”

  “I don’t know. He said …” Elise swallowed and looked down. “He said he couldn’t love me anymore. Said it was time to move on.”

  They were words that could never be taken back. Peyton thought of Max. If Jonathan Hurley was as self-centered as she believed him to be, Max would grow up fatherless. She thought of her own son, Tommy, of his searching eyes during the soccer game. As painful as divorce was for adults, children suffered the most.

  Donna returned a short while later with their meals. The sisters ate in silence. There was nothing more to say.

  When she and Elise parted outside the diner, something tugged at Peyton, and she’d been an agent long enough to trust her instincts.

  She climbed into her Wrangler and headed to Stan Jackman’s cabin overlooking the Crystal View River. Jackman wasn’t the type to skip a lunch date without a phone call.

  The dirt road to Jackman’s home was a quarter-mile long. Six-inch potholes pocked the road, courtesy of winter’s freeze and thaw.

  Jackman had invited her and Tommy to dinner when she’d first arrived at Garrett Station. She’d driven home that evening fielding the seven-year-old’s questions: Why hadn’t Mrs. Jackman eaten dinner? Why didn’t she have hair? What exactly did cancer do to someone? Peyton’s answers now seemed ludicrous. She’d told her son cancer attacked the body’s blood, a gross understatement: Karen was dead two months later.

  Cancer attacked families. That was what it did.

  Karen Jackman was gone now, but Stan still fought the effects of the disease. After more than twenty-five years as an agent, he’d lost confidence in his abilities, having nearly failed to qualify with his handgun. And there was no relief on the horizon: Jackman now blamed himself for the Jimenez shooting.

  She parked next to Jackman’s GMC Sierra in front of the cabin he and Karen bought twenty years earlier. It had been a seasonal camp they’d renovated into a quaint, if remote, log home. It looked empty as she killed the engine. No smoke rose from the chimney. No lights shone within.

  She got out and approached the front door. Behind the cabin, a long sloping lawn ran to the Crystal View River. Whitecaps danced on the purple water.

  She knocked on the screen door.

  “Stan?”

  Unlatched, the door banged loudly against the doorframe. She pulled it open, tapped the glass. No sound from inside. She turned the knob and the door opened.

  Hesitating to enter, she took in the cabin’s interior from where she stood, not wanting to violate the man’s privacy: A large main room with a woodstove near the door, its long black smokestack running to the ceiling; blond-wood walls, hinting at a woman’s touch, held framed photos, some with Monet prints, a layer of dust covering them now; and a tiny galley kitchen at the rear separated from the main room by a breakfast counter.

  The Bangor Daily News was open on the counter.

  A coffee mug lay overturned near the paper, its contents forming black rivulets, dripping to the scuffed wooden floor.

  Plunk.

  Coffee hit the floor every few seconds.

  The sound, like a distant gunshot, echoed in Peyton’s ears. She did not hear the screen door slam behind her as she sprinted across the room because Stan Jackman was facedown at the counter.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  PEYTON HAD FOLLOWED JACKMAN’S ambulance to the hospital, stayed there until Hewitt had arrived, and then returned to Lois’s house. Shaken, she’d fixed herself a cup of green tea and sat at the kitchen table to catch her breath and help Tommy with his homework.

  She needed to decompress, but green tea or not, her head was spinning: Jonathan Hurley had indeed left her sister, meaning the whereabouts of the lead suspect in the Miguel Jimenez shooting weren’t known. It was possible that the woman he’d been philandering with was the mother of the infant called Autumn, who was also now missing. And if that was the case, Hurley might well be the father. Miguel Jimenez had yet to be upgraded to stable condition. And, as a horrific side effect of it all, Jackman suffered a heart attack while apparently reading about the shooting in the Bangor Daily News; he was in stable condition in the same hospital.

  After dinner, she sat with Tommy in the living room, reading with him, trying to focus on Peter and the Starcatchers.

  “Will Mr. Jackman be okay?” Tommy asked.

  “I think so,” she said.

  It was Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. The temperature was dropping and flurries had been predicted.

  “Hold on,” she said to Tommy when her cell phone vibrated. She stood to retrieve it from her pant pocket.

  It was Susan Perry from DHHS. “Can you talk?” she asked.

  Peyton’s eyes fell on Tommy, who was looking up at her, book in hand.

  “Is it urgent?” Peyton said.

  “I think it might
be.”

  Peyton exhaled. “Then I can talk.” She leaned forward, kissed Tommy’s forehead, and went to the kitchen table.

  Peyton listened as Susan Perry told her about a phone call she received and later followed up on at a local daycare. If the facts were true, Peyton had to admit, Matthew Ramsey was a four-year-old with one hell of a story.

  “Matthew Ramsey went to daycare today,” Susan Perry said, “told his teacher, Linda Farnham, he was once in a box under a car. Said it was dark and scary and started rambling about spiders. Then he cried inconsolably. Linda met with her staff, found out he’s told them the same story, and she called my office.”

  “A box under a car?” Peyton said.

  “That’s what he says. He cries whenever he retells the story.”

  “Traumatic.”

  “Apparently,” Perry said. “He’s at an exclusive daycare for this area. I went there, talked to Linda, then to two women she employs. Turns out, the boy told each of them the exact same story. The part about the spiders in the box is when he always starts crying. I apologize for calling you at home. I could’ve gone through this with an agent at the station. But I thought of the baby you found, who seemingly has no ID, and now this box-under-a-moving-car story. I got suspicious, so I’m passing it on to you.”

  “It’s fine,” Peyton said, but she was looking into the living room, where Tommy sat, staring at the book he held, his finger bumping along slowly beneath the words.

  “Did Linda Farnham call his parents?” Peyton asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Not just a little boy with a vivid imagination?”

  “I don’t think so,” Linda said. “I really think it’s something more. He told each woman the same story, three months apart. Identical. Recounted it three times over nine months.”

  Peyton’s second cup of green tea was getting cold.

  “Could this be connected to the baby you found in the field?” Perry asked. “It’s the box under the car that bothers me.”

  It bothered Peyton, too. “I’ll look into it,” was all Peyton said, but she knew clever compartments in vehicles were used a lot in human trafficking.