“He worries about you being happy.” She thinks for a moment and adds, “I want to make sure I get this right. Your dad said, ‘I’m proud of Rory for wearing the white hat, but as a father, it’s not the life I would wish for my son.’ That’s how he put it: ‘wearing the white hat.’ I kind of like that.”
My eyes brim with tears.
“Some tough guy I am,” I say.
She smiles at me and her face is like sunlight through a church window.
“Rory,” she says, “if I told you all that and you didn’t tear up, I wouldn’t give you the time of day. You’re tough and sensitive. It’s the people who are tough and insensitive that I want to steer clear of.”
When the Pale Horse employees have put chairs on all the tables and turned out the neon bar signs, I walk Willow to her pickup.
The moon is nearly full, and it lights up the parking lot, the road, and the fields around us. Out of habit, I glance at the truck stop to see if Cal’s truck is there, but it’s not.
Willow looks beautiful in the moonlight, her skin the color of milk and her eyes sparkling and lupine.
“So,” she says, giving me her signature ornery grin, “when are we going on that real date you promised me?”
I answer her by taking her into my arms and kissing her. She wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me back, her mouth pressed hard against my lips, her body tight against mine. Our tongues dance, clumsily at first, but then they find their rhythm.
When our mouths separate, our bodies don’t. I hold her tight, looking into her big eyes, wide and wild and beautiful.
“I’ve been waiting for you to do that,” she says.
“Want to do it some more?”
I expect her to kiss me, but she gently separates her body from mine.
“I really like you,” she says. “But I’ve been hurt in the past when I moved too quickly.”
“We can take all the time we need,” I say.
When she’s inside her truck, she rolls down the window and says, “You want to come by tomorrow night after work?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” I say, and I watch her taillights retreat into the night.
Chapter 55
THE SUN IS rising as Cal walks into the convenience store at an all-night truck stop just outside Saint Louis. He catches a reflection of himself in a circular mirror at the end of one of the aisles. He looks haggard. His eyes are sunken into dark sockets, like golf balls stuck in mud. His hair is disheveled.
His mouth tastes like three-day-old coffee.
He plans to add a fresher coffee taste to his tongue. Although he rarely touches caffeine, this morning he plans to get an extra-large cup.
After dropping off Randy, he drove to the truck stop and tried—unsuccessfully—to sleep. He tossed and turned. He even tried to read a book to make himself tired, but his eyes kept swimming over the words without actually taking in their meaning. He played “Callin’ Baton Rouge” at least ten times. When the sun peeked through the curtains in his cab, he cursed himself and got up.
If he couldn’t sleep, why not drive?
Walking down the aisles of the store, he grabs a packet of powdered doughnuts and a Snickers bar, and then he heads toward the coffee dispenser. Along the way, he passes the beer cooler.
He stops and eyes the bottles and cans.
Budweiser.
Coors.
Miller.
He quit drinking when he was with Anne. She fell for him when he was still a partyer, but she quickly grew tired of his late-night shenanigans.
No drugs.
No booze.
Those were the conditions of her continuing to date him. He declined at first, and after they broke up, he let himself go out on a bender just to prove he was his own man. But that only made him hurt and miss her more.
So he quit drinking and smoking for a week, and then showed up at her door to say that he was sober.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.
There were times when he missed it. At the end of a long day, when he just wanted to unwind, or at social events, like weddings, where everyone was in a celebratory mood, it would’ve been nice to have the familiar comfort of alcohol.
But mostly he liked life without any sort of chemical impairment. He didn’t miss the hangovers. He didn’t miss the way alcohol lowered his inhibitions. He could trust himself more when he was sober. And once he quit smoking pot, he realized that it had seemed to sap his ambitions and his energy. Without it, he became more career-oriented and started working hard toward owning his own truck. He became so against drugs that he even steered away from coffee and over-the-counter medicines, like ibuprofen, unless he really needed it.
But when he and Anne broke up, he started drinking again.
And that, he was sure, was the main reason for what happened afterward.
Anne might still be alive if he hadn’t returned to the bottle.
But she was gone now, so what was stopping him?
Cal stands in front of the beer cooler. He begins to salivate.
His phone buzzes, and he looks down at it. Another call from Armadillo Shipping, no doubt wanting an update on his whereabouts, since he’s behind schedule.
He ignores it and looks one more time at the beer case.
He turns away.
But when he gets to the counter to pay for his food, he tells the attendant to give him a bottle of Jim Beam.
The kid behind the counter looks at his watch to make sure he can sell alcohol this early. Then he shoves a pint into a small paper bag.
Cal doesn’t even bother waiting until he gets to his truck. On his way across the parking lot, he tears off the lid and takes a long pull on the bottle.
The shipment can wait.
If he can’t sleep at night, maybe he can drink himself into unconsciousness now.
Or maybe—as was the case far too often in the past—the alcohol is going to get him into trouble.
But that’s a risk he’s willing to take.
Chapter 56
I PARK MY F-150 in the visitors’ lot at the high school and wait for the football team to come out for practice. When the team hustles onto the field in their pads, I get out of my truck and intercept the coach.
“Hey, Coach,” I say, extending my hand.
“Rory,” he says, his face lighting up.
Back when I was in high school, Dusty Rinker was a young assistant coach and the offensive coordinator who called all my plays. Now in his late forties, he has a bald spot and a paunch, but he’s the head coach of the team. In a Texas town, that means that more people recognize him than the mayor. He’s too small to have ever played college ball, but he is an excellent strategist, having led my high school team through several winning seasons even though our talent in those days aspired to be mediocre.
“I wonder if I could have a few minutes with your quarterback,” I say.
“Of course,” he says. “Anything I should know about?”
“Nah,” I say. “I thought he might know a bit about something I’m working on.”
“If he’s in any trouble,” Coach says, “you tell me. I don’t subscribe to this bullshit about football players getting away with everything. I ain’t afraid to bench him, if that’s what I have to do.”
I laugh. “I know, Coach. You benched me a time or two, if I remember.”
We laugh, and he calls over Jim Howard.
The kid comes over with his helmet in his hands. He’s shorter than Cal, which means he may be the right size for Purvis’s short man theory. But he doesn’t seem like much of a killer.
I ask him to sit in the cab of my truck with me. Once we’re inside, I say, “What were you up to last night?”
“Nothing,” he says. “I was at home.”
“And the night before?”
“Nothing.”
I ask him what time he went to bed and what time he woke up in the morning. Then I ask him if he’s ever snuck out at night.
He admits he has, and so I press him on whether he snuck out the night Patty was killed.
“Do you know why I’m asking you these questions?” I say.
“No.”
“You know there was another woman murdered, right?”
His eyes widen, and his skin turns pale. He can’t believe I’m questioning him about the murders.
“I didn’t do anything,” he says. “I swear. I hardly knew Ms. Barton.”
“You knew Patty?” I say, unable to hide my surprise. How’d he know I was referring to her?
He looks mortified, like he just walked into a trap.
“She subbed at the high school from time to time,” he says. “I never had her, though. She mostly subbed in honors English, and I’m in bonehead English with the other jocks.”
Now I fix him with a cold stare. He squirms in his seat. Sometimes you have to play good cop, sometimes bad cop. Right now, I’m going with bad.
“Jim,” I say, “just how dumb are you?”
He looks terrified, which makes him seem even younger than before.
“I said, ‘Just how dumb are you?’”
When he doesn’t answer, I say, “How many tutors do you got?”
A light bulb seems to go off. He knows where I’m headed with this.
“One,” he says sheepishly.
“Sara Beth?”
“Yes. Ms. Lansky.”
“And how many did you have two weeks ago?”
“Two,” he says. “Ms. Yates was also my tutor before she…”
He doesn’t want to say the word died.
“Are they the best teachers in the school?”
“Yes, sir,” he says enthusiastically.
“I bet they’re the prettiest, too.”
He clams up again. I stare at him, and he lowers his eyes.
Now I switch to good cop.
“Look, kid,” I say, my tone much more welcoming. “If I had teachers that looked like Ms. Yates and Ms. Lansky, I might have played dumb, too. You might have fooled them, but you don’t fool me for one second. I think you’d do just fine in school without them.”
I don’t speak for a few seconds, to make the moment more dramatic before I go in for the kill.
“It was a good plan to get close to a couple pretty ladies,” I say. “But the problem is, now you’re on a short list of murder suspects.”
He starts to cry, and as I hoped, he starts to confess. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I loved Ms. Yates. I love Ms. Lansky more. I’m in love with her. I would never hurt either one of them. I just…I just had too much to drink one night, and when the guys started teasing me about my tutoring, I just blurted it out. I never thought it would start a rumor that would spread like that.”
“What rumor?” I say.
He stares at me, again with a look like he just walked into a trap.
He yanks on the door handle and runs out of the truck.
Coach watches him run inside the building and then looks at me, as if to say, What the hell did you do to my quarterback?
“He’ll be okay,” I call to Coach, and then I head toward the school entrance.
Not to find Jim Howard.
To find Sara Beth.
And get some answers.
Chapter 57
I FIND SARA Beth outside her classroom, scrubbing the door with a sponge.
“Don’t you have janitors to do that?” I say, trying to sound playful.
But then I see more clearly what she’s doing: she’s scrubbing off the word WHORE, which has been written in Magic Marker underneath her nameplate.
“Hi, Rory,” she says, and for the first time I can remember, she doesn’t look happy to see me.
She looks embarrassed.
“I just had a chat with your tutee,” I say. “Jim Howard.”
She goes back to scrubbing.
“What the hell is going on, Sara Beth?”
She drops the sponge into a bucket of soapy water. The W and H are pretty faint now, but the word is still easily legible.
Sara Beth says, “After I get done with this, I’ve got a couple conferences with parents. Can we talk about this later?”
She tells me to come by her place this evening. She’ll make dinner.
“Just dinner,” she says, and for the first time this afternoon, her face breaks into a smile. “Nothing else.”
I figure I can always hit the Pale Horse after dinner, with plenty of time to see Willow perform and—hopefully—steal another kiss after closing time.
I offer to help Sara Beth scrub the door, but she says, “Please, Rory, I hate for you to see this at all. If you helped me clean it off, I think I would die of shame.”
I kill a few hours in the afternoon by checking in on Dad. I’ve brought him a gift he’ll need for his recovery: a box of toothpicks. But he’s asleep in his bed, so I spend the time thinking about the case.
WHORE.
The killer called Anne that. Now it’s scrawled on Sara Beth’s classroom door. Do the police know about this? Did Sara Beth keep it from me for some reason? Did Patty suffer the same kind of insults?
When I show up at Sara Beth’s house, the sun is setting.
She greets me at the door in the same dress she was wearing at school. Her eyes are red from crying.
“What’s wrong?” I say.
She gestures for me to come into the house and points to a package on the kitchen counter. The cardboard flaps have been opened, but I can’t see inside.
I take a step closer and smell the contents before I see them: manure. Inside the box is a plastic grocery bag full of cow shit.
“Was there a note?” I ask.
She points to a folded sheet of paper on the counter. I flip it open to a typed note.
Eat this, whore!
“Jesus Christ,” I say. “Have you told the police?”
She shakes her head, beginning to cry again.
“Has anything like this happened before?”
I can tell she doesn’t want to answer.
“Sara Beth, this could be the same person who killed Anne.”
She rolls her eyes. “It’s just kids, Rory.”
“Sara Beth,” I say, trying to control the emotion in my voice, “how long has this been going on? Tell me.”
“For weeks,” she says. “At least three. Maybe four.”
I pull out my phone to call DeAndre Purvis.
“Wait,” Sara Beth says, putting her hand over the phone so I can’t dial.
“This is serious,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I’ll go to the police tomorrow. I’ll take a sick day at school. I’ll go down to the station. I’ll tell them everything. I just…I just can’t do it right now.”
She asks me to stay at her place tonight—on the couch, she qualifies—to make sure nothing happens. Then she’ll report everything to the police in the morning. Her eyes plead with me. I want to tell her no, tell her that she should report this harassment immediately. But I know that’s a selfish request. There’s nothing they can do at this hour. The real reason I want her to report it tonight is because I don’t want to stay. I want to see Willow instead.
Willow would want me to do the right thing. And tonight the right thing is to give my friend protection and peace of mind.
And that’s what I wasn’t able to do the night Anne was murdered.
Chapter 58
SARA BETH CHANGES into the same bulky sweatshirt she wore last time, but now she’s wearing baggy sweatpants with it instead of showing off her bare legs. She’s washed her makeup off and put her hair into a ponytail. She looks tired but as pretty as always.
She pours herself a glass of wine, but I pass.
I ask her to tell me everything that’s been going on, and she asks me to first tell her what Jim Howard said.
“He’s a hormonal teenager with an unhealthy crush on you,” I say. “Some kids were giving him a hard time about the tutoring, and he was drunk and said
something. Probably that he’s sleeping with you. Maybe Anne, too. He wasn’t specific.”
Sara Beth nods her head in resignation.
“I figured it was something like that,” she says.
About a month ago, she explains, she started getting prank phone calls calling her a whore, or slut, or other names. Just like with Anne, the caller’s voice was disguised by some kind of phone application. Just like with Anne, the numbers were random and unrecognizable.
She says she knew that rumors were going around that she was sleeping with Jim Howard, and that she figured it was kids playing pranks.
“Why did you keep tutoring him?” I ask.
“Because it was the right thing to do. The rumors weren’t true, so why should I dignify them by changing my life?”
“The kid doesn’t need a tutor,” I say. “He’s just acting dumb to get close to you.”
“He might not be as dumb as he acts,” she says, “but he needs to get his grades up to get a football scholarship. His family can’t afford to pay for his college. And after I started working with him, his grades started to go up. The tutoring is helping him.”
“You didn’t have to tutor him in your home,” I say.
“That was probably stupid,” she says. “But he’s not the only person I’ve tutored here. I help half a dozen students every semester, most of them in my home. Anne was no different.”
I run my hands through my hair in exhaustion. I’m extremely frustrated with Sara Beth for not telling me all this sooner. But I’m even more frustrated with myself since I haven’t yet put together who could be doing this.
“Did you know Anne was getting threats?” I say. “Did you know the same type of shit was happening to her?”
“No.”
“And did you tell her it was happening to you?”
“No. I didn’t discuss it with anyone. I was embarrassed about it.”
I think for a moment.
“What about Patty?”
“What about her?”
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