Dead and Gone

by Norah McClintock

  “My wallet,” she said as soon as she knew it was me. “I want it back.”

  Okay, so the one I took must have been the real deal—the one I had looked in, the one with my fingerprints on it. Otherwise why would she want it back?

  “But you said—”

  “There’s something in it I need. Meet me tonight.” Take-charge, rich-girl Emily. Telling, not asking. Telling me when and where and, by the way, “Be there or I’ll call the cops.”

  It was always a pleasure talking to Emily.

  Riel was quiet on the way back to town.

  “Did you tell him?” I asked after a while.

  “Who?”

  “Detective Jones. Dave.”

  No answer.

  “You’re not a cop anymore,” I said.

  Nothing. Well, okay. I looked out the window. Looked and thought about Riel and his partner Marty and about what had happened. About Riel getting taken to emergency and, what do you know, meeting Susan. What some guys won’t do. About Riel in rehab with pretty Kate—all the women he knew were pretty. About the girl he had shot. About Emily and her mother too. About Tom Howard, Emily’s stepfather, who Detective Jones thought had arranged to have Emily’s mother killed. About—Wait a minute. Detective Jones thought maybe Tom Howard had hired someone to kill Tracie. But—

  “Tom Howard didn’t have an alibi,” I said.

  Riel glanced at me. He waited a moment before he said, “He had one. It just wasn’t a good one.”

  That’s what had been bothering Riel. Howard had said he was at a cabin. He had also said that no one had seen him there, no one could back up his alibi.

  “That’s what you don’t like, isn’t it?” I said. “A guy hires someone to kill his wife so he can score a lot of insurance money and get all that jewelry to sell, and he doesn’t establish an alibi for himself? An airtight alibi?”

  He smiled. John Riel actually smiled. “Like I said, Mike. I wasn’t exactly Officer Stupid.”

  After we left the hospital we went to a restaurant—a pretty good one—and had lunch. Then, on our way back to town, Riel said, “What the heck,” and we went to the movies. He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go. He just pulled off the highway at the nearest mall we came to and took me to the Cineplex and bought two tickets for an action picture that was just out, my kind of movie. For a while I was really into it. Then I glanced at Riel and saw that although he was staring straight ahead, he wasn’t really watching what was on the screen. He was chewing over the Tracie Howard case. I think he forgot I was even there. When the movie was over he said, “Not bad,” like he’d been paying attention all the way through. I didn’t call him on it. It was late in the afternoon by the time we got back home. When he got close to the house, he said, “Well, that’s a nice change.”

  I took a look. Rebecca was sitting on the porch. Was that what Riel meant? It turned out it was—sort of.

  “No press,” he said. He stopped the car and got out. I scrambled out on my side.

  Rebecca seemed flustered when she saw Riel. She gave me a panicky look. I guess she’d been hoping to catch me alone.

  Riel went up the path first. He said hi to her. Her cheeks turned pink. She glanced at him and then looked down at the ground as she mumbled, “Hi, Mr. Riel.”

  Riel glanced over his shoulder at me, one eyebrow raised, maybe wondering if he’d done something wrong. I just shrugged. He kept on going, up the steps and into the house. Rebecca turned to make sure he was gone. Then she threw herself into my arms.

  “I don’t know why he makes me so nervous,” she said. “I think because he used to be a cop. And because he always looks at me like he knows something, even when there’s nothing to know.”

  He made me nervous too, sometimes, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead I said, “What’s up?”

  “You weren’t at school. I was worried.” She glanced up at the house again. “Everyone’s still talking about Mr. Riel, about what happened.”

  I shivered. The sun was dropping fast and, with it, the temperature. “You want to come inside?”

  “No,” she said, fast and loud, as if I had asked her if she wanted to be tortured or something.

  “Jeez, Rebecca, he doesn’t bite. He helped you out when you were scared about what happened to Robbie.”

  “I know. Hey, Mike? Why don’t you come over to my place?”

  I looked up at the house. Riel was in there, but I didn’t know what he was doing.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Not today. Anyway, I have to go into work early today.”

  She took my hand and held it for a moment. “Is everything going to be okay?”

  I said yes because, at the time, I couldn’t think of a single reason why it wouldn’t be. Goes to show, huh?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Riel was at the dining room table when I went inside. He was going through the thick file folder again, the one that Detective Jones didn’t think was such a good idea. But there were no beer bottles on the table in front of him.

  “I’ve got a few things to do before work,” I said, “so I’m going to take off, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. He was thumbing through some papers. Then he looked up at me. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” I told him again. He glanced at his watch and nodded.

  I ran up to my room and got Emily’s wallet, which was still in the baggie. I shoved it into the pocket of my jacket and left the house.

  When I found Neil, he was restocking the shelves in the Family section at Blockbuster. He was wearing a blue-and-yellow T-shirt tucked into chinos and a name badge that said NEIL. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

  “I guess you heard,” he said. “You know, about the body they found. They think it’s related to what happened to Emily’s mom.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you seen her?” he said. “Is she okay?”

  I shrugged. The longer I knew Emily, the more I got the feeling that she was someone who was hard to know, which is why I was at Blockbuster—to find out what Neil could tell me about her before I saw her for what I hoped would be the last time. To make sure it was the last time.

  “To tell you the truth, Neil, I don’t know how she is. She’s hard to read, you know. How long did you go out with her, anyway?”

  “Emily?” Now he looked surprised. “I never went out with her.”

  That threw me. “But I thought—”

  He glanced around. “I’m supposed to be working.”

  “So show me the latest Bruce Willis movie,” I said.

  He made a face but led me over to the Action section. “Okay,” he said. “So I wanted to go out with her. Boy, did I ever. But she always said no. She has a new life now, that’s what she said every time I asked her if maybe she wanted to go to a movie or something. She used to really like to say it, and the worst thing was, she’d say it right in front of Sarah.”

  “You mean, her sister?”

  He nodded. “I used to live just down the road from Emily and Sarah when their mother was still alive.”

  I remembered asking Emily about her sister the first time I was at her house. “Emily doesn’t like to talk about her, huh?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Sarah died last year.”

  “I know. She was paralyzed, right?”

  “A cop shot her.”

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Neil said, bitter. “I bet that’s what he says. But he shot her, severed her spinal cord. She was twelve years old. She spent the rest of her life in a home for people with chronic conditions. I was a year older than Emily when it happened. Afterward, I lost touch with her and Sarah. Their real dad suddenly showed up to claim them.” He sounded even more bitter now. “He had no contact with them at all after the divorce. But the minute Emily’s mother died, there he was. He packed them up and moved them out, and I didn’t see either of them again until about eighteen months ago. I needed to get my volunteer hours in, you know? So I volunteered to help at
this long-term care place. It turned out to be the place where Sarah was.”

  He stopped and glanced up at the front of the store. I looked too. A guy behind the counter, a guy who wasn’t wearing a blue-and-yellow T-shirt, which meant he was probably the manager, was staring at Neil. “Why don’t we try this section?” Neil said in a voice that was loud enough to carry the whole length of the store. He steered me toward the Sci-Fi/Fantasy aisle.

  “Sarah wasn’t doing too well by the time I saw her again. People like her, people who can’t move around, they get all kinds of health problems. I used to read to her. She really liked that. I read Pride and Prejudice to her, and then Great Expectations. Boy, that took forever. I think that’s the longest book I ever read. That’s how I ran into Emily again. She used to come and see Sarah. I never saw her dad.” The look on his face said, Thank God. “But Emily was there every Wednesday afternoon like clockwork. Sarah said she came by on Sundays too.”

  “But her dad never visited?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “Sarah said he used to come pretty regularly for a while. But she said he had trouble handling the fact that she was paralyzed.”

  He had trouble?

  “She said he’d come and always sit in this one spot where she could hardly see him and he’d talk about how Emily was doing and what Emily was up to. She said he never asked her how she was doing. She said she knew he cared, but he was afraid, you know?” I didn’t. “She said after about a year, he’d only show up every now and again. He’d get Emily to say he was busy, he couldn’t get away—that kind of thing. She said, after two years, he never came again.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “Sarah said she didn’t care, but I could tell she did. She said she understood, but I knew she was hurt. But Emily always showed up, and she always had something for Sarah—magazines, a book, something to eat. She used to do Sarah’s hair for her too, and put mascara on her. She used to bring videos too, and books on tape so Sarah could listen all by herself. She liked to do that. Emily would do anything for Sarah, which I guess is why I fell for her. But then she’d go and say really insensitive things, like how she had a new life now with her dad and how she had put the past behind her, like she’d forgotten that Sarah couldn’t do the same thing.” He shook his head. “Sarah told me one time that she worried Emily was going to turn out just like her dad, caring about things more than about people.”

  I felt like saying that Sarah had it about right, but I didn’t.

  “Sarah was nine when her mother left her father. Emily was only four. Sarah said maybe that was why Emily acted like she did—she had no idea what it had been like between her parents. But Sarah remembered. She told me she used to hear them fighting. Then, after her mother started seeing Tom, her dad couldn’t believe Sarah’s mom was going out with a mechanic. She said the way he said mechanic, it sounded like garbage man or sewer worker.”

  To a guy like James Corwin, with his big house, his Jaguar, his library, and his diamond stud, a mechanic probably was like a sewer worker, someone who was dirty all the time.

  “She said when her father heard that her mother was going to marry Tom, he told her good luck raising a couple of kids on what a mechanic makes. She said he never called her or Emily, not even on Christmas or on their birthdays. Never. Not once. When Sarah’s mom said she wanted sole custody, he went along with it. Didn’t bother to contest it, is what Sarah said. She said she heard her mother tell Tom, he’s just waiting for us to fall flat on our faces, he’s waiting until one of the kids needs braces and we can’t afford them or until they’re old enough to go to university and we can’t pay for it, he’s waiting for me to ask him for something, anything, so he can tell me, I told you so.”

  “Nice guy,” I said.

  “The whole time her mother was divorced, Sarah’s father talked to Sarah exactly once,” Neil said. “He called her after her mother married Tom Howard. Sarah’s mother was going to change Sarah and Emily’s names legally to Howard. She had to notify Sarah’s dad. He called Sarah and asked her if that was what she really wanted.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Her dad told her, you’re a Corwin. Once a Corwin, always a Corwin.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. A couple of weeks later, Sarah and Emily’s mother was killed. And a few months after that, that cop shot Sarah, and I never saw her or Emily again until I started volunteering at the long-term care place.”

  When I left Blockbuster, I thought I was going to be late. But I wasn’t. I got to the restaurant before Emily did. I slipped into a booth near the window that gave me a good view of the door and an even better one of the community center and ordered a Coke. Then I thought, Wait a minute. I pulled out the baggie and shook the wallet out onto the table. I took a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table and carefully wiped the wallet all over. That was how they did it on TV, right? A guy leaves fingerprints at the scene of the crime, so he takes a rag or a cloth and wipes them away. I wiped the wallet all over on the outside, then I opened it up—because I had opened it up that time too—and I wiped all over the inside. I tried to remember what I had touched. The outside and the inside of the wallet. Also, her student card and her transit pass. I checked, but those weren’t in the wallet now. She must have taken them out before she bagged it because, of course, she needed those and they would have been a hassle to replace. She didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who liked a hassle, even when she was blackmailing someone.

  I had checked the money compartment that time too, so I checked it again now. The money was still in there—if there was something she had plenty of, hasslefree, it was money. I wiped the inside of that compartment and then wondered if they could pull fingerprints off money. Probably they could. But there would be lots of other prints on the bills too, so probably it wasn’t a big deal. At least, I hoped it wasn’t.

  I hadn’t touched anything else, so I gave the whole wallet another wipe. And then I remembered what she had said: she wanted the wallet back because there was something in it she needed. But what? There was nothing in there except money. What was she up to? Maybe she just wanted the wallet back so she could have something on me again. She seemed to like that. Or maybe I was wrong about the money. Maybe she did need it. Maybe her daddy gave her an allowance—here’s what you get, and you don’t get any more. Then I remembered her room and all the stuff—expensive stuff—that was in it, and I decided, no, that couldn’t be it.

  I opened the wallet again, still holding it in the napkin—I’d learned my lesson. There was one compartment I hadn’t looked in. A little zippered compartment. I unzipped it.

  There was something inside. Something folded up that looked like it had been cut out of the newspaper. I pulled it out—it had been folded over and over, too many times, and had been kept folded for too long. I unfolded it carefully. The paper was yellowish and brittle, coming apart along a few of the fold lines.

  It was a newspaper article about Emily’s mother, the investigation of her murder, and the arrest of Thomas William Howard. Included with the article was a picture of Tom Howard—a nice, average-looking guy with the kind of face you see almost anywhere. Tom Howard, who had shot Riel after Riel shot his stepdaughter. Tom Howard, who had been acquitted in the end because the prosecutor hadn’t been able to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that he had killed his wife. Tom Howard, who had got all that insurance money but never had a chance to enjoy it because of all his legal fees. I looked at the photo, yellowed with age. If he really hadn’t done it, boy, he’d sure been through the grinder for nothing. And if he had done it, well, he’d got away with it.

  “What is it with you?” Emily said, startling me, making me jump. I’d had a good view of the door, but I hadn’t been looking at it. She snatched the wallet out of my hand and then grabbed the newspaper clipping. “Who said you could go through my wallet—again?”

  “Is that what you needed?” I said, nodding at the clipping.

&nb
sp; She stared down at it.

  “You think he did it?” I said.

  Her head came up, and she gave me a cold look. “What do you know about it?”

  More than you think, Emily. Hey, I live with the guy who shot your sister, the guy your stepfather shot. Boy, what don’t I know?

  “It’s just a question,” I said. “I mean, he’s your stepfather, right?”

  “He’s nothing to me. I have a father. And you know what? I’m glad they sent me back to live with him after Tom was arrested. And I’m sorry my mother ever married Tom Howard.”

  “I heard your dad never contacted you once after your mother left him.”

  She didn’t like that. It was okay for her to know stuff about me, but she didn’t like that I knew stuff about her.

  “Who told you that?” she said.

  I just shrugged.

  “He told me he was sorry,” she said. “He said he was so mad at my mother that it blinded him. He said he wished now that he hadn’t given up custody. He said maybe things would have turned out differently. He says, who knows, maybe my sister wouldn’t have … maybe she never would have found …” Her expression was fierce. “It just might have been different, that’s all.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened. With your mom, I mean. And your sister.”

  She still looked angry, but she said, “I guess you know what it feels like.” She sat down opposite me and stared at the clipping for a long time, reading it, I think. Then she smoothed it out, refolded it, and tucked it back into her wallet. “I found it in Sarah’s things,” she said, “after she”—she hesitated—“after she died.” She looked directly at me, as if she were daring me to say something or to ask her something about her sister. When I didn’t, she slipped her wallet into her backpack. Then she leaned against the upholstered back of the booth. “So,” she said, “Why don’t you introduce me to that creepy guy you say is so interested in me.”

  “What?” Why did she care about that, especially now? Or maybe that was the reason—Mr. Henderson gave her something to think about, something other than her mother and her sister. “You want to meet Mr. Henderson?”