by Jamie Mason
Composure is a wily thing and, in the absence of physical danger, can sometimes attempt a comeback without express permission. Automatically, she sat up straight and folded her hands into her lap. The color receded to the expected borders of her cheeks, and her eyelids pulled the shades over her glare. “I mean, of course I care about Reid. It’s just that’s not what I was talking about. It’s not what I meant. That sounded terrible.”
Ford looked down at the papers spread over the desktop to grant her another moment to regroup in as much privacy as the setting allowed. “It sounded true.” Before she could protest beyond an urgent squeak, he smiled and leaned in on his elbows toward her. “It’s okay. I’ve long since stopped guessing at people’s stories. You do that after being wrong a couple hundred times. Everyone has their reasons. I know you have yours and it’s none of my business.”
She searched his open face for judgment and found none.
Ford leaned back and his chair squealed its effort. “So, let’s start over, shall we? What can I do for you, Ms. Tamblin?”
She stared at her hands gripped together in her lap. “He died with another man’s wife. He died in their house. He was buried there. I just want to see it. I just want to know what it looks like.”
“Mind if I ask why?”
“Once I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it. I don’t need to keep trying to make it up in my head.”
Ford gathered a stack of papers and tapped them into alignment against the desktop. He squared the corners on a pile of files. “I’m sure Detective Bayard has mentioned that someone else lives there now. Someone who has nothing to do with what happened to your—what happened to Mr. Reynolds.”
“Yes. He told me that.”
“He also told you that there is still an investigation in progress on that property?”
“Yes, but—”
Ford held her to a midsentence stop with an extended palm. “In a case like this we’d be risking trespassing, harassment, and maybe even crime-scene contamination. I can’t have that. It’d put me, and everyone else, in a heap of trouble.”
“But I wouldn’t—”
“I can’t endorse you troubling Jason Getty. He’s a nice enough fellow, but if he were to lodge a complaint . . .”
“But—”
“I know there’d be no way for me to prevent you from taking a drive down Old Green Valley Road when none of us are there working. I will trust that you understand my position on this.”
Leah closed her mouth and blinked at the information still charging the air between them. “Where’s Old Green Valley Road?”
Ford stood up and offered his hand to shake by way of dismissing her, but not without a kind smile and a wink. “Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Good day, Ms. Tamblin.”
• • •
“You’re gonna love this,” Tim said, squaring the shoulders of his jacket over the back of his desk chair. “Kyle from East County is downstairs. He tried to call me earlier, but—”
“Well, he’s not the only one,” said Ford. “You had a visitor.”
“Hang on, hang on. You have to hear this.” Tim dropped into his chair and scooted back to prop his feet on the bottom drawer he’d opened as a footrest. “So Kyle’s dropping off some stuff for court, but he was trying to get ahold of me anyway. Seems after we left, all hell broke loose over at the Montgomery compound.”
“What happened?”
“Well, he didn’t know exactly how it all went down. Either that or he didn’t want to tell it exactly as it happened, so as not to make his colleagues look like a choir of jackasses. Apparently, good Mr. Montgomery didn’t realize how big a heap he’d gotten himself into by cashing his brother’s checks. When they started making arresting noises, he flipped. Those damned dogs, it turns out, work on hand signals, too. However it played out, it ended up with three impounded dogs, at least one East County detective missing a chunk of his ass, and Bart Montgomery flying out the back door, never to be seen again—as yet.”
“Holy Moses. Did a runner?” said Ford.
“Yep.”
“It’s getting to be the mess that just won’t go away. That’s what I was going to tell you—”
“Detective Watts?” The intercom snapped to life from the speaker of Ford’s phone. “Your four o’clock appointment’s here. He’s waiting for you in conference room one.”
Tim’s cell phone rang from the desk drawer. He caught it before it connected to voice mail. “Hey, sweetie.”
And as with so many conversations started between them, their work pulled Ford and Tim in opposite directions. The workday closed over the unfinished business of Leah Tamblin’s tenacity.
12
It was already late in the day when she’d set out to find the place. The big detective had given her nothing but a name and a street and the strong counsel not to be noticed. Searching for Getty in the phone book turned up a blank, and the information operator confirmed a J. Getty in Stillwater, but that the number and address were unlisted by request. The map showed Old Green Valley Road as the winding, three-and-a-quarter-mile crossbar of an H of state roads.
On her first pass, the sky had been coral pink in the twilight, damping everything below the tree line into a soft gray-blue haze. She’d been looking left when she should have been looking right and had missed the house entirely. On the way back, she would have missed it again but for the glow of neon-yellow police tape winking at her in the rearview mirror. She marked out an ill-advised U in rubber on the asphalt to get back and get it over with. Her hands trembled as she slid the gearshift to park, across from the house where Reid had died.
The plain, little house was set far enough back from the road and deeply enough into its sickle of trees that the dusk ate the details. Her eyes strained in the gloom, while the now pink-and-lavender sky pulled up all the remaining light for its finale.
The anger that had sometimes diminished Reid in her mind slid away at the sight of the last place he’d been. The best of him came back to her without warning. She faced Jason Getty’s house, but she saw only Reid smiling, all dimples and carelessness and too long hair. She saw him at thirteen, taking her trembling hand in his in the dark of the trees. She heard his halting humming, and his fingers plucking out chords as he worked out a song on their sunken sofa. She thought of how many, many of those songs had been written for her: love songs, complaints, promises. An ache expanded in her throat as she remembered how the last thing she’d felt every night for so many years was the heat of the circle of Reid’s arms and kisses in her hair as she drifted off.
Awash in belated panic, Leah wondered if he’d been afraid, if he’d hurt and fought to live. Without a trace of jealousy, she weighed Reid’s sense of gallantry and knew full well that he would have tried to save her, the other woman, from her own husband’s fury. She would never know if he’d got half the chance to fight for that girl.
Leah didn’t realize until she was across the street that she meant to do just exactly what the detective had cautioned her against—intrude upon a stranger’s property and disrupt a crime scene. She wanted the dirt in her hands. She craved to sink to the wrists in it and hold handfuls of it to her eyes, to see the truth of it, and to forgive it. She wanted to offer her own remorse to whatever echo of Reid remained there. Leah was sorry, too; so sorry that she had ever imagined he’d deserved it; sorry that she’d been such a coward to take comfort in playing the martyr. The lawn shimmered through her tears as she strode toward the house, but two things brought her up short. In the last of the light, she saw two yellow-taped plots, one on either side of the house. She hadn’t thought about that, and there was no way to know which one had been Reid’s. As this puzzle stemmed the flow of grief in favor of analysis, she heard a screen door at the back of the house creak open and slap shut.
Her heart leaped up and scattered a wild, jumping pulse into her eyes and throat. Her trespassing feet backed up without consulting her brain, so that Leah kicked her own ankles in the strugg
le to get them back under her command, and she stumbled back to the car. She cranked it to life and forced the pedal down in a tire-screaming hurry. Glancing into her mirrors as she swept out of sight, relief shuddered through her and faded to hot embarrassment. No one had rounded to the front yard. She hadn’t been seen.
Leah’s retreat was only temporary. She fled to an overlit delicatessen and let a cup of coffee go cold between her hands. Even calmed, she knew she still had to have her moment at the house on Old Green Valley Road. That’s just the way she was. She’d wring what little bit of a story there was to be had from the scene, and then she’d be done with the town of Stillwater forever. What did it matter which grave had been his? She’d sift the dirt of both of them through her hands and cry for him and for her, and for herself, too. But she’d do it late and she’d do it quietly. And the poor man who lived there now would never even know she’d been there.
So, Leah bought a romance novel at the bookstore next to the deli. She tried to check her voice mail to see if either of the detectives had called back to scold her off her errand, but the battery was stone dead. She double-checked herself for any craving to be talked out of it anyway. The ceremony was bound to be a flimsy stand-in for knowing the whole truth. But instead of bitter complaint for what she wouldn’t know, she found the first green shoot of acceptance, which made her smile. Perhaps she’d managed the first rung of maturity in the few years she’d been all on her own. Could be.
For now, though, she would do this thing and take whatever peace it brought her. Leah sat in her car, in the town-square park, and watched the skateboarders bedevil the last few ambling couples under the streetlamps. Once they’d all drifted away to the things that called to them, hearth and home or petty vandalism, she read by the dome light of her car, until her eyelids first begged, then demanded, to fall closed. Then she switched it off.
• • •
“Daddy, telephone. Think fast.” Bayard’s daughter tossed the handset over the book he had propped on his thighs. His reflexes beat the phone to impact, and he caught it just short of manly injury. He goggled at her as if she were crazy. She stuck her tongue out at him.
“Mr. Mosby. What can I do for you at this fine off-peak hour?” he said after checking the caller ID and waving his daughter away.
“Heh. Sorry about that,” said Lyle. “I’m going to be in court probably all day tomorrow, but thought you might want a little extra time to chew on this bit of weirdness.”
“And who doesn’t like a little bit of weirdness before bed?”
“Please. Let’s keep your sex life out of this, shall we?” Lyle waited for his due laugh before clearing his throat back to business. “It’s that suicide note you sent over.”
“Weirdness and suicide. Charming. Sweet dreams to you, too, Lyle. What have you got?”
“Didn’t even need to put it under the microscope to see it. It’s the ink. It’s on top of the blood. You can see it with just a magnifying glass and a strong light.”
“I don’t carry a magnifying glass in my pocket, Lyle. I’m not Sherlock Holmes,” said Bayard.
“So I see. So. I. See. Anyway, unless you’re suggesting the guy shot himself and then wrote this weepy note, there’s something off about your story.”
“It’s not my story. It’s his brother’s.”
“Oh, hang on, I gotta hand something off to this guy here before he’s gone for the night.” Lyle thunked down the phone, and the background noise blurred into a conversation Tim couldn’t make out.
Bayard watched his daughter twist gracefully into her jacket and reach for her purse, which hung on a peg by the front door. Megan looked so much like her mother in certain postures and lighting that he sometimes felt as if he lived in a time machine. They were alike in other ways as well and enjoyed a closeness he didn’t like to admit envying. Megan never asked to use his car, only her mother’s. They shared clothes, iPods, shoes, and hairbrushes. They went shopping separately and came home with half a carload of the same things. He feared for his wife when their girl headed off to college.
“That’s your mother’s bag,” he called.
“No, it’s not. It’s—oh, wait. It is. How did you—? They look exactly the same.” Megan glared and smiled in astonished appreciation.
“Hey, it’s me!” He pinned the phone between his cheek and shoulder and spread his arms wide, grinning at his gaping daughter.
She pulled aside a wool coat that was hiding her own identical bag and replaced her mother’s on its hook. “Yeah, and you’re a freak of nature. Be back soon.” At the door she turned away before she’d pulled it open and trotted back to kiss his head. Then she was gone.
Tim pinched his bottom lip, and his concentration drifted to blend into the indistinct hum flowing from the earpiece. Christine’s purse always bulged with an extra pair of glasses, with tissues, with a paperback, and a diet soda and a snack for later, while Megan’s identical bag sagged loose, the bare necessities weighing down the bottom, always hanging wide with plenty of room for hauling her impulse buys. What they carried whispered of a catalog of differences that other people didn’t see in any light.
He’d always been intrigued by what you could guess about a woman in the arrangement of her handbag—in how she carried it, and where she laid it. His thoughts lit on the subtleties to be read in the size of the purse, the material it was cut from, the order of it, or the disorder, the little flairs and extras that younger women often clipped to their sides . . . Katielynn Montgomery’s purse sprang to mind, and how it came to be ruined.
And, anyway, just how many people in a single family, or in all of Carter County for that matter, would have the stomach to bury their own messy dead? The likely percentages seemed to be off in this saga.
A scrape and a rattle preceded Lyle’s return. “Sorry about that.”
“Did you run any fingerprints?” Bayard asked.
“Fingerprints?” Papers shuffled noisily on the other end of the line. “Nope. Bart Montgomery wasn’t arrested. He ran first, right? There’s no booking card.”
“Can you lift some from somewhere?”
“Sure. What are we looking for? What do you want me to check?”
“It doesn’t matter. Anything from that house that he would have touched recently will do just fine, you know—the sink taps, the doorknobs, whatever. Then run them and see if they hit,” said Bayard.
“I thought this guy didn’t have any priors.”
“He doesn’t.”
Lyle left a beat open for a better explanation, but when none was forthcoming, he asked, “So you just like tasking me with Chinese fire drills?”
“Well, that, too. But fingerprints will be faster than finding that body out there at the Montgomery place. Bart Montgomery shouldn’t show up in the system. Up until he lost his mind and started burying bodies and cashing checks that weren’t his, he’d been an angel. Neither should Boyd Montgomery show up off those doorknobs, strictly speaking, since by all reports he’s been dead a good long while. But somehow, I’m thinking he just might.”
13
Marking the moment when a bland man goes mad is an exercise in not blinking at the wrong instant. With the exception of one notable scuffle in his living room, there wasn’t usually much to see when watching Jason Getty go about his business. His enthusiasms and upsets rarely played on the outside, and his wedding-picture face didn’t look all that different from his driver’s-license photo. Jason’s gestures were generally mild, his voice pitched to match, and his handling of conflicts nearly always deferential. So the true snap in his psyche, the rip cord that yanked him free of reality, didn’t roll out on a terrified scream or rise to heaven on a cry of despair. It limped out on a whimper, wriggling past waxen lips in a face greased with sweat and grave dirt. It launched Jason into an inner space well out of the reach of reason at a time when reason was mostly likely his only hope.
He’d waited until ten o’clock to get started, and a fat, lopsided moon took awa
y the risk of a full border of camp lanterns. As it was, he got by with only two. And it was probably better that way. Some things are better left in the half-light.
Once Harris had turned the corner from trifling mean to cunningly cruel and had taken to showing up whenever it amused him, Jason had started wishing him dead. He had some guilt in thinking it and a little bit of a twinge for wanting it. But the true wrestling with the shoulder-devil came when he began picturing it. There were your basic single-vehicle crashes, lightning strikes, and aneurysms that kept all but Harris out of the soup. But then Jason watched more elaborate scenarios develop in his imagination: a rogue neighbor cut free of conscience and flaunting his right to bear arms; a bar fight with a good old boy the size and temperament of a B-movie Cyclops all done up in flannel and denim; a hit-and-run as Harris strutted unheedingly outside the crosswalk as if he owned the whole goddamned street. The unsettling detail to this brand of daydreaming was that Jason could always see the hands holding the shotgun, balling the fists, gripping the wheel, and he had to resist the urge to examine his own knuckles for comparison.
Once it had been done, the violence realized, and the stream of abuse cut off in mid-harangue, Jason couldn’t get Harris out of his sight fast enough. It had taken two layers of extra large garbage bags, overwound in an old bedsheet, to hide Harris’s loose joints and broken head. The need to erase him from the foreground had ignited a vigor in Jason’s limbs. The shovel had felt weightless in his grip, the soil parting like the righteous Red Sea.
The scent hounds that Detective Bayard had threatened to bring down on Jason’s land were far more tangible than the demons that had whipped him to bury Harris as fast as he could, but they were no more real. The plain, bloody fact of the dead body had spawned a troop of shadow imps that rode Jason’s kidneys all that night and howled inside his head until he’d smothered the evidence under a literal ton of dirt.
