Wayward

by Gregory Ashe

  “If your sister has a pattern of leaving and coming back,” Hazard said, “maybe the best thing would be for Dolly to stay with her father.”

  “Absolutely not. You should have seen Mama and Papa yesterday. Mama cried so hard I thought she’d give herself an aneurysm. And Papa just sat in his chair and didn’t say a word, not the whole day, after they took Dolly.” Pointing with the emery board, Courtney said, “I want you to find Donna May and bring her back. Then we’ll see what the judge has to say about parental responsibilities. She is that little girl’s biological mother,” she pronounced the words like reading them out of a textbook, “and she has some rights too, I think.”

  “Miss Vega—”

  “I brought a picture,” Courtney rummaged in the clutch again and produced a folded four-by-six. “And I’ll write you a check for the retainer.” Out of the clutch came a single blank check, with unicorns printed in the background, and an enormous, bedazzled pen. Flattening the check on the desk, Courtney waved the pen like a baton. “I read your rates online. How much do you need to start?”

  Hazard hesitated. He hadn’t liked dealing with Savanna Twilight—Donna May—the first time he had encountered her; there was something about the woman that unsettled him, and he was sure that Courtney was leaving out unsavory elements of the story. But he also thought about Glenn Somerset saying, He has to put a roof over your head. He has to put food on the table for my granddaughter. He has bills to pay, although I don’t suppose that’s a topic any of us would enjoy. And he remembered the way Somers had blushed and ducked his head at that. Somers had borrowed money from his parents to help Hazard start this agency, and although business had been steady, it had barely been enough to stay afloat. They hadn’t managed to pay back any of the loan.

  Was that what Glenn was holding over Somers? Was that the leverage that had made Somers pack up and leave without even the semblance of a struggle? Hazard didn’t know, but he knew one thing: whatever power that loan gave Glenn, Hazard wanted to wipe it out. And that meant making more money so he could pay back what they owed.

  “A thousand-dollar retainer to start,” he said. “I’ll send a report every week with an updated account until I find her, I decide we’re at a dead end, or you tell me to stop. If I don’t earn the full thousand, I give back whatever’s left.”

  Joggling the bedazzled pen to get the ink flowing, Courtney said, “Will you take five hundred? She’s probably not very far, and—” A hint of a blush worked its way under the makeup. “Well, court was expensive.”

  After a moment, Hazard nodded.

  She wrote out the check in huge bubble letters, shading in the A of Astraea, the name of Hazard’s agency. Then she slid it across and smiled like she was in a chewing gum commercial.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me where Donna May has gone in the past, places she frequents, friends, etc.” Hazard folded the check and tucked it into his pocket. “The last time you saw her. Anything you think might help.”

  “Where she’s gone in the past?” Courtney rolled her eyes. “Um, like, nowhere. She goes to Columbia and smokes weed, sometimes something a little harder, and sleeps on a friend’s couch. She did that for two years, this last time.”

  “What’s the name of this friend?”

  “Natalie. I don’t know her last name, but she has a tattoo parlor. Um, it’s just called Natalie’s Tattoo Parlor, which is totally basic, I think. I went there one time. She did this really cute one for me. It’s a dandelion, and some of the little fluff is getting blown away. I’d show you, but—” She gave him that chewing gum smile again, only this time it had a little something extra. “Oh, and one time Donna May did take a Greyhound to St. Louis. That’s it, though. I don’t think she’s ever left Missouri. She’s all talk. It’s always about finding herself, joining a cause, becoming an activist. You know when she came back, she kept talking about being antifa. Girl, please.”

  “You mentioned marijuana,” Hazard said. “I’ve seen her on something a lot stronger.”

  “Glass.”

  “Methamphetamines. Yes.”

  “Oh God, she’s so stupid.”

  “Is it possible she’s just out on a binge?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s been gone almost two months. The last time anybody saw her was the night before Valentine’s. Actually, that’s the night we took that picture.”

  Hazard glanced at it. The photograph had been taken at a bar; two men, whom Hazard didn’t know, and two women, Donna May and Courtney, were all squeezed together in a booth. A third woman leaned in from the edge of the frame. This woman might have been another sister; her face and hair and body type were in line with Courtney’s and Donna May’s.

  “That’s Josh,” she said, pointing to a blond guy layered in Vineyard Vines clothes, a pair of sunglasses hanging from a strap around his neck, a baseball cap on backwards. Then her finger shifted to the next guy. “That’s Daniel.” He was dark, with strong, almost rough features. Not pretty like the blond guy, but even in the photograph he had a distinctly raw, sexual appeal that went with the metal band T-shirt and the leather necklace. “Oh my God, he looks like such a dork with that necklace, but he’s actually super cool.”

  The way her voice lilted on super cool checked a mental box for Hazard.

  “Joshua Dobbs, and Daniel . . .”

  “Minor. Oh, hey. You might know him. He’s a deputy for the Sheriff’s Department.”

  Hazard didn’t raise an eyebrow, but he felt a flicker of surprise. Even when he’d been a police officer, he hadn’t known all the deputies, and there had been significant turnover in the recent months. But he thought he would have remembered Daniel if he’d run into him before. He looked like the kind of guy who left an impression—good or bad.

  His attention turned to Donna May. She wore a white button-up blouse with some sort of silver fringe at the shoulders; her dark hair was back, and her face was bright and alive with happiness. She didn’t look like the kind of woman to up and disappear, but she obviously had a history—and Hazard remembered her in the city jail, remembered her on the floor of the sheriff’s office. There was a lot to Donna May that hid under the surface.

  “She looks healthier than the last time I saw her,” Hazard said.

  “Well, she’d been going to NA for a while. She was seeing a therapist—that’s her, actually.” Her finger tapped the third woman. “And she really felt like her life was getting better. She had a job working third shift at Tegula, and she was finally spending some time with Dolly. Well, not a lot of time, but some. I know I’m stupid, but I actually thought she’d finally turned things around. I thought the scare, being caught up in that murder thing, I thought she’d finally gotten enough drama.”

  “Go back for a moment,” Hazard said. “This is her therapist? They went out to a bar together?”

  “No, no, no. I mean, yes. That’s her therapist. But they didn’t go out together. Melissa just happened to be there. That’s the Maniacs, you know, Meramec Maniacs. It’s a bar out on Route 17.”

  “I know it.”

  “They really did it up after it burned down a couple of years ago. It’s not what it used to be.”

  From what Hazard could see of the inside of the bar—raw wood paneling the back of the booths, the corner of an enormous TV—the dive bar did look better, but the improvement was definitely relative. “So this woman, Melissa, she just happens to be at the Maniacs, and she bumps into Donna May.”

  “Well, yeah. Melissa’s there all the time. She’s really cool about it, too. Doesn’t go up to anyone who’s a client and, like, you know, gives it away. Like Josh. She and Josh pretend like they’ve never even met.”

  “Josh is a client too?” Hazard studied the picture more closely. Joshua Dobbs didn’t look like a kid in therapy, unless therapy was the name of a bar his frat brothers had dragged him to. Hazard didn’t recognize the family name, but Josh looked quite a bit younger than Hazard, which mea
nt they had probably never overlapped in school. “That seems strange.”

  “Not really. I mean, when Donna May got out of county, Josh was super supportive. He was coming around all the time. He took her shopping to get some stuff, you know, clothes and bathroom stuff.” Courtney’s nose wrinkled. “Not that anybody asked me if I needed anything. And they really hit it off again. The last few months, things were really good between them.”

  “Were?”

  “You know what I mean, until she ran off. He’s going to have a broken heart all over again. Even when they’re together, she treats him like crap, but her leaving is really hard on him. Seriously, I don’t know what Josh sees in her. She’s my sister. I know I’m not supposed to say things like that. But she’s a bitch to him, and he’s actually not that bad of a guy. It’d be nice if he could bring over some diapers once in a while, but I mean, he’s basically just a kid too. He’s still figuring everything out.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-five.” Then Courtney blushed. “I mean, I think.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Courtney blushed harder, picking at the arm of the chair again. “Anyway, that’s all I can think of.”

  “This was taken the night before Valentine’s?” Hazard asked, tapping the photograph. “That was the last time you saw Donna May?”

  “That’s right. That was the last time anyone saw her.”

  “She didn’t have plans to celebrate Valentine’s with anyone?”

  “I don’t think so. She and Josh are, you know, casual.”

  “They have a kid together. How casual can it be?”

  “I mean, his parents don’t really like her. I guess something was changing, though, because it seemed like Donna May wanted to settle down. And even though she treats him so awful, honestly, I think Josh would have gone for it, screw his parents.”

  “What do you think Donna May did?”

  “Did?”

  “After she left the bar. Did she have a car?”

  “No.”

  “Were you driving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “We went home. The next morning, she was gone.”

  “When people leave, they usually take things with them that make it easy to find them. A phone, for starters. Credit cards. A debit card. Or a bank withdrawal slip. Or a check.”

  “Donna May didn’t have any of that,” Courtney said with a shrug. “I mean, she had a prepaid phone, but she left that at home. And she didn’t have credit cards or a bank account or anything. She just cashed her paychecks.”

  “Is it possible she had an account you didn’t know about? Even a savings account? Has anything come in the mail for her?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  Struggling to conceal a sigh, Hazard nodded. “Why don’t you look through her mail again? Actually, it would be better if you brought it here. You can go through it with me, if you’re worried about privacy.”

  “We don’t keep it.”

  “What?”

  “Oh my God, she’s gone for years sometimes. We don’t keep it. We just chuck it.”

  “That’s a federal offense.”

  “Yeah, well, I mean, it’s not like it’s my fault.”

  That, Hazard thought, was a decent opening to get into a debate about individual accountability, the ethics of the modern justice system, and the dwindling efficacy of defense from ignorance in the Information Age. He opened his mouth to point out the logical flaw in Courtney’s reasoning, and then he thought of what Somers would say—or maybe he’d just smile and shake his head a little. And then Hazard felt sick again, pins and needles sweeping through him.

  “Let me know if anything new comes, then,” was all he said. “Can I keep this?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Do you have addresses and phone numbers for these people?”

  “Umm.” Courtney whipped out her phone, which was also bedazzled in pink rhinestones, and read off a number and address for Daniel Minor and another one for Josh Dobbs. “I don’t have Melissa, sorry.”

  “Do you have a last name for her?”

  “No. Just Melissa.”

  “That’s all right. Any chance your parents have been in contact with Donna May? Do they ever send her money? Even Western Union transfers could be helpful.”

  “Uh, yeah. They send her money all the time. Why do you think I had to drop out of college so we could afford everything?”

  “Have they sent her any money since she left?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t tell me that kind of stuff anymore. We had a huge fight about it one time, and now they act like it’s a secret.”

  “Ask them again. If they won’t tell you, I’ll stop by and see if they’ll talk to me about it.”

  They talked for a while longer, but Hazard couldn’t get anything else out of Courtney that was useful. He walked her to the door, and they said goodbye, and then he stood there and took out the check she’d written. Five hundred dollars. Why the hell had he been so soft? He might as well be trying to pay back Glenn Somerset with pennies from a lemonade stand.

  Folding the check again, Hazard slid it into a pocket, and then he grabbed his jacket and keys and locked up the office. His options were two: stay in the office and drive himself crazy, or go out and work. He got in the Odyssey and drove toward Columbia, looking for a woman named Donna May Plenge.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MARCH 26

  TUESDAY

  5:59 PM

  HAZARD MADE THE DRIVE to Columbia and back. His investigation didn’t yield anything. After tracking down Natalie’s Tattoo Parlor and the eponymous Natalie, he asked about Savanna. Natalie, who looked like she weighed ninety pounds sopping wet—maybe ninety-five, if you added in all the piercings—was more than happy to talk while she worked. She was shaving a man’s hairy back, the safety razor whicking through thick gobs of cream.

  Hazard gave her the truth, or a version of it: custody battle, and he’d been hired by the family to help Donna May keep her daughter. Natalie had started talking. Couldn’t seem to stop talking, actually, as she toweled off the guy’s back and prepped the skin with a stencil. Apparently the man with the hairy back thought his life would be drastically improved if he had a tattoo that made it look like the flesh over his spinal column had been ripped open and then partially stitched shut again.

  Natalie hadn’t seen Donna May in almost six months. She gave Hazard a list of names, places and people Donna May had stayed with before, and then she eyed him up and down and suggested he get a tattoo.

  “Something tribal,” she said, gesturing up and down her arm and shoulder. “Geometric. Really masculine. It’d be super hot.”

  Thinking of Somers’s dark ink, the calligraphy that turned him from vanilla white boy into a dark furnace of desire, made Hazard consider the offer. What would the two of them look like, together, both of them marked like that?

  He left. In a hurry. Before he could make a rash decision.

  But working his way through the list of names that Natalie had given him led Hazard nowhere. Some of the places were by-the-week motels, one step up from flophouses. They didn’t keep any kind of record that would help Hazard. One of the names on the list was a woman’s shelter, and they refused to disclose any information, which Hazard understood but found frustrating. Another name took him to a white guy with locs down to his waist, who was wearing Crocs and board shorts and nothing else except a skinny strip of fuzz down the center of his wiry chest. The weed skunk made Hazard’s eyes water. He offered Hazard a hit off the dab he was smoking, and when Hazard refused, he tried to convert him to the majesty of concentrated THC. By the time Hazard got out of there, he’d heard the word bummer so many times he thought about going back to Natalie and getting it tattooed on his face.

  Nobody had seen Donna May in six months. Hazard finished Natalie’s list by three, spent a few hours driving around bad neighbor
hoods, calling up rat-shit motels, walking the university campus. He spotted a lot of quick scores, easy, overhand passes, like the kids didn’t care who was watching—which, to be fair, they probably weren’t even thinking about. But he didn’t see anyone who remotely resembled Donna May.

  It was almost six, and rush hour was finished when Hazard started back to Wahredua. He pulled out his phone, called Somers, and then ended the call before it could connect. He dropped the device in the center console. No point in letting Somers know he’d be late for dinner. Not when Somers was living at the Hare and Tortoise, a fucking Alice-in-Wonderland themed confection, like a Victorian tea party had collided with a busload of spinsters. For two weeks. Two whole weeks.

  If it wasn’t for longer, a little voice suggested. If Somers didn’t realize he liked the space, or if he didn’t get an outside perspective on their relationship, or if Glenn Somerset didn’t somehow twist his brain so that he didn’t want anything to do with Hazard anymore.

  In the center console, Hazard’s phone buzzed, and Somers’s name showed on the screen. Hazard let it ring three more times before he grabbed it and answered.

  “Let me guess,” Somers said, and it sounded like he was smiling. “You’re going to be late for dinner.”

  Hazard’s throat was so tight that he couldn’t speak.

  “Ree, I’m really sorry about last night.”

  A mile marker ticked past; Hazard blinked his eyes clear. “Yeah, me too.”