“As soon as something happens,” Skeet said, “the locusts from the big cities will be back. And you’ll be several steps ahead of them. In any case, you’ve had that weeklong series that could be a good start on an article in some high profile magazine down the road.”
“Thanks to you.” With Skeet’s help, Joel had enjoyed one full week of front-page stories and his own byline. It was a heady feeling, and Joel was disappointed to learn that the paper was pulling back on the coverage now that there wasn’t much to report.
“I only made the assignment,” Skeet told him. “You did the work. Damn fine work it was, too. And you’re still building the backstory, right?”
Joel nodded. He’d interviewed Miranda Saxton’s sister, a couple of local guys who’d known Brian Riley, and the woman who ran the household for Walter St. John’s summer compound. He’d found a number of other people who’d known Miranda, but far fewer who’d known Brian, although most of the old-timers in town had heard of him. Joel had managed to track down a neighbor of the family, now living in a retirement home in Florida, and a high school classmate of Brian’s who claimed she’d been the target of unpleasant and unwanted romantic overtures from him during their last year of high school. Joel found her stories so outlandish that he was inclined to dismiss them.
Some of what Joel learned had been incorporated into his newspaper reports this last week, but more of it had ended up in his files. If and when the story grew legs again, Joel would be ready. Miranda Saxton’s disappearance was something that had caught Joel’s interest the way reporting on city council meetings and falling school tests scores hadn’t.
It wasn’t just the crime itself, although that was certainly a big part of what intrigued him. As he’d dug deeper into the story, Joel had come to feel he’d known Miranda and Brian and the other key players personally. They lived in his mind, like imaginary companions, even while he slept. That last part wasn’t such a good thing because Joel was sometimes exhausted by morning, but the details and anecdotes he’d collected made the events of twenty years ago as vivid to Joel as parts of his own life.
“Good,” Skeet was saying now. “Keep on digging. But for the present, I want you to concentrate on that supposed drug thing at the junior high. What’s with kids these days? And where the hell do twelve-year-olds get pot to sell?”
“All good questions,” Joel said. He’d been as incredulous as Skeet when he first heard about it.
“Anyway,” Skeet concluded, “I want something about this on my desk by the end of the day.”
“You’ll have it.”
Five minutes later Joel was out the door on his way to talk to the school principal, who, as luck would have it, had been a math teacher at the junior high when Joel himself was a student there. He’d only gotten a C in the class—due in large part to the fact he’d sat next to Jane Beaumont, who had flaxen hair and dimpled cheeks and the sort of girl-witchery that made paying attention to anything else all but impossible. Still, Joel and the teacher had gotten along just fine.
*****
At four-thirty, Joel made the final edits to his drug article and put it on Skeet’s desk. He decided to call it a day and head home to spend some time with his father. The past ten days had been long ones, all of them crazy with phone calls and research and deadlines. Joel had hardly talked to his dad except to pat his knee or kiss the top of his head on his way in and out of the house.
Not that Joel ever did much of the actual work involved in caring for his father. That task fell to Mrs. Albert, the latest of a string of caretakers he’d hired when it became obvious Joel couldn’t leave his father alone. Mrs. Albert’s predecessors had been as careless and unreliable as his father, and none of them had lasted very long, but Mrs. Albert was a gem. She’d been with them for two years now and Joel constantly worried she’d leave them for a better position.
He’d called Mrs. Albert and told her to take the night off—no need to have dinner ready, he’d handle that as well. Joel enjoyed these evenings with his father. They’d eat a simple meal, then sit in front of the television until his father started nodding off, which was fairly early these days. There wasn’t a lot of conversation, but in its place was a companionable silence Joel found comforting. It was the sort of evening he’d wished he’d had with his family growing up. The kind of evening his friends had taken for granted. But a fisherman’s work never ended, and his father had spent most nights out in the shop repairing nets or cleaning equipment.
“What’ll it be?” Joel asked his father as he scanned the contents of the refrigerator. “Fried pork chops or an omelet?”
“That’s good,” said his father, buttoning the old brown cardigan across his chest in a mismatched fashion. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
Joel decided on the omelet and began chopping green onions and mushrooms.
“Is Julia coming for dinner?” his father asked.
“No, Dad. Just the two of us tonight.” Julia had been last year, and Joel had only brought her home for dinner once. But she’d made an impression, probably because Joel’s life had previously been devoid of female company. As it was now, again. Julia had moved on to bigger and better things, and richer men.
“Why don’t you call her?” his father asked. “Tell her to come on over.”
“We broke up, Dad. Remember? It was a while ago.”
“That’s a danged shame. You need a girl. Someone like your mother. She’s one of a kind, she is.”
Joel ignored the use of the present tense. His mother had been dead for almost ten years.
“Too bad she couldn’t be with us tonight.”
“Yes, it is,” Joel agreed as he cracked the eggs into a bowl. He wasn’t sure if his dad was referring to his mother or Julia.
“But I know she’s in a good place.” His father rocked gently back and forth in his chair causing it to squeak. “Probably settled in real nice by now.”
“And where would that place be?” Joel asked, willing to go along with wherever his father’s mind had taken him.
His father looked at Joel with a scowl, the same scowl with which he greeted all stupid questions. “Why heaven, of course. Where else? Your mother was one of the kindest people who ever walked this earth.”
Joel nodded and blotted the corner of his eye with the back of his hand. It was the onions, he told himself. “I know that, Dad.”
That was the funny thing about dementia. You could be in la-la land one minute and back here on earth the next. Joel wondered if it wasn’t something like being in a dream, where things made perfect sense even when you knew they didn’t.
As difficult as it was to watch a parent slowly lose his mind, Joel found that he’d come to know his father through the candor of dementia far better than he had before. His father had been a distant and emotionally reserved man while Joel was growing up. To have asked what his father felt about something would have struck Joel as being impolite. But in the last couple of years, Joel had been able to catch glimpses of the man inside. The man who loved and cried and laughed. The man who was, at the core, his father.
“You still with the newspaper?” his father asked.
“Yep.” Joel set aside the bowl of whisked eggs and showed his father the paper from Monday. “Front page,” he said.
“That’s you?” He squinted at the byline. “Doggone. Good work, son.”
“I’ve been following the Miranda Saxton story. She was—”
His dad brushed the air with his hand. “I know who she was. I lived through the whole thing, remember? You were only a kid then.”
In all his research, Joel had never thought to ask his father about Miranda. “Did you ever see her? Around town, I mean?”
“More than that.” His father settled back in his chair, a smile on his face. “She spent a day on my boat once. St. John chartered us for the day. He and the senator and a bunch of the other self-important clowns who vacationed out at the compound. They brought that poor girl along, althoug
h it was clear she didn’t want to be there. She was sick as a dog until she got her sea legs.”
“What was she like?”
“Pretty. Not in-your-face stunning, but she had a lightning smile and an animated way of talking. You’d think hanging out there at the compound with all those fancy-pants she’d be impressed with herself and kind of stuck-up. But she wasn’t. She was real down-to-earth.”
Joel was sautéing the onions and he had to strain to hear over the sizzle of the pan. “Did she happen to mention Brian Riley?”
“Why would she do that?”
“There was talk they were seeing each other. That he killed her.”
His father shook his head. “Hogwash. I knew the boy’s father. He killed himself, you know. I used to think he was a pretty decent man but I fault him for that.”
“For taking his own life? I gather he was embarrassed when suspicion settled on his son.” Joel wasn’t sure where the conversation was headed but he wanted to keep his dad talking.
“The boy was never charged. That tells you something, doesn’t it?”
Joel nodded, although in truth, it told him little.
His father took the nod as agreement. “I figured there was a lot of pressure from those high-and-mighties out at the compound to pin it on someone, and young Riley was an easy target.”
“I take it you didn’t think much of the crowd that hung out over at St. John’s place.”
“You take that right.” His father chuckled. “They’d swoop in here every summer like a flock of magpies, using the town as their plaything and turning up their pointy noses at those of us who lived here.”
Joel knew his father wasn’t the only one in town who thought that way. “I don’t suppose you ever met Brian Riley?”
“Can’t say as I did. But your cousin Max was in school with him, if I recall.”
The son of his mother’s older sister, Max now living up north somewhere. Chicago, Joel thought. Maybe he’d give Max a call.
“Are those pork chops almost ready?” his father asked.
“Just about.”
Joel could only hope that by the time the omelet was done, his dad would assume he’d been waiting for eggs and not chops. Or even, God forbid, a horse.
Chapter 24
“But I have to watch a network station,” Chloe wailed.
The sales clerk at Best Buy gave her an exasperated look. “Which television set were you interested in seeing?”
Chloe pointed to midsize model, picking it at random. She wasn’t interested in the Discovery Channel or high definition football, which the clerk assured her were better programs for gauging the quality of the picture. “A local channel,” she added.
The clerk sighed and went to a panel on the wall to switch feeds. Chloe’s heart was racing. She had to know what had happened, but she knew it wouldn’t be good.
She’d remained with the small crowd of bystanders on the street outside her building until it had grown dark and the last of them drifted off to the comfort of their own homes. Chloe hadn’t known what to do next. She’d never in her life felt so lost.
The police had been screening the residents of the apartment building before letting them inside. Chloe didn’t think they’d let her back into her unit even if she made it past the cop at the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t really want to be in the empty apartment she’d shared with Trace, anyway.
What she wanted was Trace. She’d called the three local hospitals but none of them would tell her anything. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she’d tried to think what to do. She was growing cold and hungry and desperate for news. Finally, she’d remembered the big Best Buy store across the mall parking lot from the Craft Connection.
“Any channel in particular?” the clerk asked her.
“One showing local news.”
“There isn’t local news at this hour,” he said impatiently. “You’d have to wait until ten and we’ll be closed then.”
Panic swelled in Chloe’s chest. “No, you don’t understand. I have to—”
“Yeah, you told me. If you want the news so bad, why don’t you try the Internet? We’ve got a few computers that are hooked up.”
Chloe practically ran to the other side of the store and clicked onto a news link.
The police didn’t identify Trace by name, only as a prime suspect in the recent shooting of Alameda County DA Roy Walker. And they confirmed her worst fear—that the suspect had been shot and killed while fleeing from police.
“Taken to Highland Hospital where he was pronounced dead” were the exact words of the official police statement.
Fighting the rise of choking sobs, Chloe raced to the privacy of the restroom. There she locked herself in a stall and cried until she had no more tears left. She thought she’d been alone in the past, but it was never like this. There’d been social workers and foster parents and Rose at the group home, and then Trace. Now there was nobody. Just her and her baby.
She rubbed her belly, mentally messaging the tiny limbs of the child inside her. “Lisa,” she told her daughter, “I’m all you have, and you are all I have.” And that set her off on another round of tears.
By the time the store announced it would be closing in ten minutes, Chloe had come up with a plan for the night. She’d stay in the restroom until everyone had gone, and then she’d have the store to herself. She’d once read a library book about a girl who lived almost a whole week inside a Walmart. Best Buy didn’t offer quite the same variety of goods as Walmart—no food or sleeping bags—but Chloe was sure the employee rest area would have a snack machine, maybe even a cot. If not, she could curl up in the big black recliner she’d seen positioned in the high-end electronics section. For tonight she’d be warm and secure. She’d figure out later what to do after that.
Just when she decided it was safe to venture from the restroom, she thought of something. Wouldn’t a store like Best Buy have security cameras and motion detectors and alarms? Maybe even a night watchman? If she went out into the store, she’d have the cops down on her in no time.
Chloe felt faint. She grabbed the sink to steady herself. Why hadn’t she thought of this earlier? Now it was too late. She was trapped inside the stupid bathroom for the rest of the night. Why didn’t she ever think things through from the beginning?
She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror—her eyes red and puffy, her nose raw from the wads of toilet paper she’d used for tissue. She remembered how Rose used to stand girls who’d screwed up in front of a mirror and give them sixty seconds to verbally beat themselves up. Then she’d remind them that what was done, was done. “There’s no point looking back when where you’re headed is forward,” Rose would tell them. And then she’d ask, “Which direction do you want to go?”
Chloe didn’t have the energy for sixty seconds of recrimination but she knew she needed to go forward. With a gnawing ache in the pit of her stomach, she lowered herself onto the hard tile floor, pulled her knees to her chest, and began counting the hours until morning.
*****
Chloe was almost half an hour late for work. Which was pretty ironic considering she’d been awake since six and had only needed to walk across the street to get to the Craft Connection. She’d overlooked the fact that Best Buy didn’t open until ten o’clock, half an hour after she was supposed to be at work.
Mr. Black glared at her when she signed in. “You’d better have a good excuse.”
“I’m sorry,” Chloe said. “I really couldn’t help it.” She didn’t elaborate. There was no way she could tell the truth, and she was too tired and too scared to fabricate a lie.
“I expect you to work through lunch to make up the time. We’ve got a new shipment of scrapbooking supplies that need to be shelved.”
“That’s fine with me.”
“For now, give Velma a hand at the register.”
Chloe pinned on her name badge and walked stiffly to the front of the store. Her neck had a crick in it from sleeping
upright, and her butt was sore from the hard tile floor of the public bathroom where she’d spent the night.
“You doing okay?” Velma asked Chloe as she slid behind the next register.
“Just a little tired is all.”
There was a long line of shoppers, most clutching the coupon that had run in yesterday’s newspaper, and for the next half an hour Chloe and Velma didn’t have time for conversation.
When there was a break from the steady flow of customers, Velma said, “You feel like talking about it?”
Chloe looked up. “About what?”
Velma raised her eyebrows the way Rose used to when a girl played dumb. “The young man the police killed last night, that was your boyfriend, wasn’t it?”
“How’d you know?”
“Just putting two and two together from things you’ve said before.” Velma came over right there in the store and put her arms around Chloe. “I’m so sorry, honey. I know I’ve said bad things about him before, about how he treated you and all, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad for you now.”
Chloe felt tears spring to her eyes. “I can’t believe it’s real. That Trace is actually gone. Dead.”
“I know, I know.” Velma rubbed Chloe’s back before releasing her. “You’ve got a bit of rough road ahead of you.”
Chloe nodded. Velma had no idea how rough.
“You talked to the police yet?”
“Why would I do that?”
“They want to talk to you, I know that much. They said so on the news last night.”
Chloe’s heart leapt with alarm. She looked around the store, hoping the manager wasn’t watching. “Why me? What did they say?”
“Just routine stuff, I imagine. They said the cops wanted to talk to his ‘live-in girlfriend.’ They didn’t mention you by name.”
“I can’t. I—”
“What do you mean, you can’t? You didn’t do anything wrong, did you?”
Chloe thought she might be sick. “Oh, Velma. My whole life is wrong.”
Velma stepped back and looked at her sternly. “You didn’t kill anyone, did you?”
Lying With Strangers Page 16
