Trace

by Archer Mayor

  “Anyhow”—he spun them into the road again, made a U-turn, and headed west—“love it or hate it, three thousand state office workers call it home and we’re stuck with it, and survivors like Center Square and its neighbors have thrived. So it goes, yet again.”

  With the discordant weirdness of the capitol area behind them, the view ahead settled down to a more predictable, beaten-down urban landscape. “Arbor Hill’s to our right,” Gagne said, “where Robinson ran away from the burbs now and then to get in touch with her roots, but I thought we should start with her old roommates. Maybe one of them kept in touch after she hooked up with Wylie.”

  They ended up traveling along Madison, into what he called the “student ghetto.” Sam took in block after block of brownstones and row houses, some well kept, others less so, the scenery occasionally interrupted by a park or a stand of trees. As ghettos went, it looked pretty good. But Gagne had earlier demonstrated that Albany was a changeable town, often block by block. He’d also pointed out that along the Montreal–New York trail so popular among drug runners and illegal immigrants, Albany was a rare oasis for bad guys to pause and blend in. North of town was the long, affluent Lake George–Saratoga recreational stretch—not a great place to hide—while along the eighty miles to the south, until reaching comfortably down-at-the-heels Poughkeepsie, were the Berkshires, the Hudson Valley, and places like Rhinebeck and Kinderhook—all lousy hangouts for the average street gangster.

  Albany may have been the state capital, the home of five major hospitals, and the anchor of the state’s university system, but it remained a town with some serious, chronic, and malignant problems.

  Which, as Gagne had said, made it a great place to work.

  On a block of houses that reminded Sam of the old Archie Bunker TV show, Gagne pulled over one last time and finally killed the engine. “Let’s see if we get lucky.”

  “You call ahead?”

  He opened his door and got out. “Yeah, well. Students…”

  At the building’s entrance, tellingly flanked by multiple mailboxes, Scott stood aside to let Sam enter first, telling her, “Just so you know, I’m riding shotgun here. This is your case.”

  Sam stepped into a lobby blocked by a locked glass door flanked by a row of intercom buttons.

  “There.” Scott pressed the one with three names opposite it, written in tiny, childish writing.

  “What?” a peeved young woman’s voice answered.

  “Police,” Sammie said, instantly irritated by the tone. Having never attended college, she acknowledged the chip on her shoulder about what she saw as a campus’s built-in aura of privilege.

  The buzzer let them in, and they trudged up the stairs beyond. The house was dirty, didn’t smell clean, and looked tired, heightening Sam’s distaste.

  On the second floor, they found a barefoot young woman in a loose tank top, high-cut gym shorts, and no bra. She watched them reach the top of the staircase with undisguised contempt.

  “Did I forget to pay a parking ticket?” she asked.

  Scott didn’t respond, no doubt distracted by the view. Sammie walked up close to the woman, forcing her to adjust her affected slouch, and said, “Funny. Never heard that one. We’re homicide detectives. Who’re you?”

  “Jamie Winslow,” the girl said, caught off guard.

  Still inches away, Sam asked, “You want to do this out here or inside?”

  Winslow stepped back, confused, and waved her hand vaguely. “Sure. Come in. What’s this about? What homicide? Who died?”

  Sam waited until Scott had shut the door behind them. The central room fit the setting—messy, cluttered, clothes scattered across worn, mismatched furniture, walls decorated with posters, flags, pictures cut from magazines, thumbtacked souvenirs.

  “Do you know Jayla Robinson?” Sam asked without preamble.

  Winslow’s voice became a whisper. “Sure.”

  “How?”

  “She was my roommate. Is she the one who died?” Winslow reached behind her and groped for the edge of an armchair for support.

  Sam kept her eyes locked on to the girl’s. “Yes.”

  Winslow’s legs weakened and she sat on the chair’s arm. “Oh, my God.”

  “That’s why we’re here. Not a parking ticket. Do you understand that this will be a serious conversation?”

  “Yes.” Again, the small voice. Behind Sam, Scott was very still, taking it in.

  “Are we alone here?” Sam asked, quickly glancing around.

  “Yes.”

  “But you have two roommates?”

  “They’re at class. Well, Lizzie’s away for the semester, studying abroad. Greece. She’s a classics … I don’t guess that matters. Sorry.”

  “And the other?”

  “She is at class.”

  Sam pointed at the armchair. “Sit down.” She lightly took the girl’s elbow and steered her around to the front of the chair and eased her onto the cushion. She then sat on the coffee table directly before her.

  “When did you last see Jayla?”

  Her eyes down, Winslow touched her face lightly, as if exploring it. “We saw her a few weeks ago, for dinner. That sucked.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing then. It was afterwards, when we all got flamed on Facebook. She totally trash-talked us, for no reason. Bitchy shit—really upsetting.”

  “Back up. Who was at dinner?”

  “The three of us, minus Lizzie—the old roommates and her. It was like a reunion. We had a good time. At least till later.”

  Sam cut her off to avoid a repeat. “How was she at dinner?”

  “Fine. Funny, happy. Having a good time.”

  “Did she talk about what she’d been doing?”

  Winslow looked like she’d bitten into something sour. “She’d moved in with Mister Smooth. To hear her, it was pure Cinderella. Not sure if I believed it, though.”

  “Mr. Smooth?”

  “Jared Wylie. She met him when he gave a talk at SUNY. One of those guest-speaker things. I saw him, too—looked good, talked good, smelled good. Too good to be true—that’s what I told Lizzie. But he swept Jayla off her feet, for sure. She was a goner.”

  “But you said you didn’t believe it,” Sam reminded her.

  Winslow appeared thoughtful, and for the first time since they’d met, Sam saw a glimmer of intelligence flicker across the young woman’s face. “Something was wrong. She’d cut us off after she split from here to be with him. Then, out of the blue, this dinner? And she acted weird—to me, at least—like she was trying too hard to be having a good time. You know how people get sometimes? Laughing too hard, almost hamming it up? Seemed … out of whack.”

  “She’d been living with Wylie for a year by then, more or less?”

  “I don’t know the exact timing, but that’s where she was when we all met.”

  “She talk about him at dinner?”

  “Oh, sure. Jared this and Jared that. Like I gave a damn. She dropped out, for Christ’s sake. What kind of woman does that anymore? Prince Charming? I don’t think so.”

  “You said something happened after? Something about Facebook?”

  Winslow’s manner had evolved by now, from attitudinal sulker to engaged conversationalist. She frowned at the memory. “Yeah. Maybe a day later we all got slimed. She posted stuff on our Walls making us look bad. And we knew it was her, ’cause it was stuff only she could’ve known about, dating back to when we were roommates. It was so random—and really mean.”

  “You ask her about it?”

  “I tried to. Got nowhere. Left messages, texts, you name it. Nothin’. Might as well have saved my breath.”

  “Why did she reach out in the first place?” Sam asked. “I’m guessing she was the one behind getting together.”

  “She said it was ’cause she missed us. That was the only dark part of her walking advertisement about life with Jared—the implication that he was kind of a control freak. I even asked her if
there was something going on she wasn’t telling us. That just got a big denial. Maybe I was right, huh?”

  “How so?”

  “You said she was dead. Did he kill her?”

  “I didn’t say that, and we’re still conducting our investigation. She ever mention going to Vermont to you?”

  Winslow shook her head. “I don’t think so. I mean, it might’ve come up, for skiing or something—in conversation—but nothing sticks out.”

  “Apart from you three,” Sam asked, “do you know if she was keeping in touch with anyone else from the old days? It might help to get a better angle on her most recent activities.” Sam thought back to her conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, and added, “Her parents, maybe?”

  But Winslow reacted immediately to that suggestion. “Not them. That was pretty much a clean break for Jayla. They were too old-school for her. That’s why she changed her name. You know Jayla isn’t her real name, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. Charlotte Anne.”

  “Oh. You got that. Well, anyways, she told us they weren’t in touch anymore. I always felt bad for them about that. I got the feeling the break was her thing, not theirs. Must be tough for your own kid to cut you off.”

  “So,” Sam redirected her, knowing her fair share about alienated families, “anyone else?”

  “Right. Sorry. Yeah. She had an old boyfriend. Aaron Goldman. They were a hot item before Jared. I heard later that she reached out to him, too, about the same time he got mugged. That’s how I learned about it—somebody told me they’d seen him in the hospital.”

  “How do we get hold of Mr. Goldman?”

  “You don’t. He was way too radical and save-the-whales for me. You could call the Albany Alliance. He was tight with them. But I heard he took off. Probably charging at Japanese fishing boats in a rubber dinghy by now.”

  For the first time, Scott Gagne made his presence known, sighing gently from his spot by the door.

  “We know them?” Sam asked him.

  “Oh, yeah. They won’t talk to us.”

  She returned her attention to Winslow. “Is there anything else you can think of to add, Jamie? You mentioned Lizzie a couple of times, for example. You think she might know something?”

  “I doubt it. I’m the one who knew Jayla best. This place has only two bedrooms, and she and I bunked together, so we got to know each other pretty well.” She stopped to shake her head sadly. “I still can’t believe she’s gone. She had her problems—fighting where she came from. She hated feeling like she was an Oreo, to use her word—black outside, white on the inside? But she was really good people, and I think she was wrong. Maybe her parents overdid the whole living-in-the-burbs bit, but Jayla was her own woman. I think the only screwup she ever made was that Jared Wylie creep.”

  “You said they met when he was guest teaching, that right?”

  “Just for a day. A guest speaker at a class on local government for a poli-sci course. From what I could see, he took one look at her and figured he wanted her. She was like a fish in a barrel. I told her so, even though it pissed her off. But he was good. I’ll give him that.”

  “You saw them a fair amount at the start?” Sam asked.

  “Not really. It was super fast. After that, they were on their own and I have no clue what they were doing. She moved out pretty soon afterwards.”

  She lapsed briefly into silence before adding, “Men. Such assholes.”

  Sammie glanced at Scott, who merely smiled and shrugged.

  * * *

  The plan following the Jamie Winslow interview had been for Sam to stay overnight in Albany, and then return to Burlington to further debrief Rachel Reiling, now that she’d had a day or two to decompress.

  But given her meeting with the Robinsons, and the references to parenting with Winslow, Sam wanted to get back to her daughter. Willy was already at home, according to his recent texts, so a familial fix was calling out as a priority.

  Sam’s feelings about motherhood were deepening as time elapsed. Given her childhood, she’d been surprised at her pleasure with becoming pregnant—she’d once thought that never having children would be her gift to the world. And now that Emma was undergoing such radical changes from week to week, being her mother had mutated from novelty with benefits to almost heart-wrenching love affair. It had been a transformation of soul-shifting proportions, and shaken some fundamental if simpleminded core beliefs.

  No longer able to see herself solely as a wannabe Ninja overachiever—military- and SWAT-trained, athletic, rugged, aggressive, and resistant to pain and discomfort—Sam had been forced to deal with a new reality as a sensitive, caring mother and mate. That these traits had been long apparent to most who’d worked with her—most tellingly Joe Gunther—never penetrated her outer defensive shell.

  Until Emma did so with no effort whatsoever.

  The dilemma was: What to do now? Sam was feeling torn between dual personalities—one the driven detective, careless of appetite, lack of sleep, or degree of challenge; the other the doting mother, concerned with doing the best possible job, encouraged by childhood memories soaked with failure. Whenever she was in the midst of one, she was forever sensitive to the pull of the other.

  The only useful aspect of all this was that it gave her some insight into some of Willy Kunkle’s demons. Most people had never fathomed the rationale behind their union; but to her—with time, Emma, some therapy, and a lot of work—it had become a good match.

  She couldn’t wait to get back to her family.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Hey, hotshot. I thought I was supposed to be reading about you in the headlines.”

  Sue was dressed in almost fluorescent purple scrubs this time, but entering instead of leaving the house as Lester was pouring milk over his cereal. She dropped the newspaper onto the breakfast table and gave him a kiss before crossing to the coffee machine. Night shifts had started two days ago.

  “Any kids underfoot?”

  “Watch it, Mom,” her daughter said, entering the kitchen. “Don’t say or do anything you’ll have to pay the shrink for later.”

  Her parents laughed as Sue hugged Wendy and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re a brat.”

  Wendy returned the kiss. “But you love me.”

  Sue smiled. “I do. You get that history paper finished?”

  “Handing it in this morning,” Wendy said, pointing to her backpack in the corner. “Pretty good, if I say so myself.”

  A horn blast from outside made her head for the door, scooping up the pack and waving with the back of her hand. “Gotta go. Love you.”

  Sue sat across from Lester, the steaming coffee between her hands.

  “Good night?” he asked.

  “Not bad. Not too busy, not too boring. Goldilocks would’ve been pleased. So—did your shit-hits-the-fan case go down the drain?”

  “Just the opposite. I’m just taking my time stepping up to the fan.”

  “The people who ran the case first screwed up, huh?”

  He took a spoonful of cereal before responding. “Could be. That’s one reason I’m taking my time—I think they were under more pressure than they should’ve been. Too many quarterbacks, maybe.”

  “You finding anything out of order?”

  “I am,” he said. “I just don’t know what it amounts to yet.”

  He took another bite. “This whole thing is gonna shift one way or the other. I can guarantee that. But as to where the final pieces are gonna fall?” He smiled and shrugged. “Stay tuned.”

  * * *

  Vermont is famous for its picturesque towns and villages, often outfitted with a common, a bandstand, even a Civil War monument, aging gracefully. The surrounding buildings look transported from a century earlier, as can the overall pace of life. Barring the occasional tourist bus or fall harvest festival, the more remote among these places appear quiet enough to defy survival.

  Which frequently runs to the heart of the matter. Many of them are b
arely hanging on, having become highly taxed virtual suburbs, dependent on larger neighbors for new identities as bedroom communities.

  To Lester’s practiced, jaundiced eye, each locale’s architecture often told of its general vitality. He had, over time, identified most municipalities—rich and poor—as having four basic ingredients in tellingly variable quantities.

  Most crucial were the businesses, spanning from plentiful to nonexistent. They were the most obvious and easily visible indicators of a town’s financial health.

  There were usually a few mansions, owned by urban transplants in L.L. Bean clothing, slumming in the countryside and either enjoying some time off or milking a windfall.

  Third came the largest and most economically flexible quadrant—into which he fit himself: the single-family homes. They covered everything from tidy split-levels and modest Greek Revivals to patched and sagging structures sporting plastic sheeting over their windows and hay bales around their foundations. These housed a sliding scale of residents, from community movers and shakers to electricians, plumbers, teachers, carpenters, bus drivers, store clerks, loggers, farmhands, day workers, machine operators, and blue-collar wage earners who drove the pickups and rusty Subarus so common to Vermont’s roads.

  And last, and usually located downtown, were the ancient, sometimes remodeled buildings whose former function as hotels, rooming houses, or turn-of-the-century worker housing had been converted to partially state-supported apartment buildings for those less fortunately endowed, financially and otherwise.

  The residents of the final category were not commuters, the self-employed, trust-funders, or retirees. They were the socially marginal, burdened by mischance, misbehavior, infirmity, or simple bad luck. Often goodhearted, well intentioned, and hardworking, they were nevertheless restricted in options, and lived their lives within limited spheres.

  Lorraine Kennedy was one of them. At least, that’s what Lester had been led to believe through his research. He’d confirmed, for example, that Lorraine was on full and permanent disability for a back injury sustained while working several years ago at a hardware box store outside Burlington.

  The building she lived in was located in a village outside Ludlow, facing a green with an inoperative fountain in need of some paint. It was quiet and peaceful and looked faintly abandoned during the day, when he imagined most of its residents were working in the ski town and tourist attraction that was nearby Ludlow.