by Meg Muldoon
For example, people said that he made trips every other weekend to a fancy salon in Portland where he underwent vanity hair regeneration treatments – which was the only reason why he had such a full head of hair. Other people said while he was there, he stayed with his long-time mistress. Supposedly, he’d met her three decades ago and his wife – a city council member – either didn’t know about the affair, or didn’t care.
However, I suspected that the affair rumor came from the lips of a certain now-deceased gossip, and was more than likely pure fabrication. Moira Stewart, God rest her soul, had had a bone to pick with Rex’s wife, Suzy Dawson, ever since she snubbed the old woman by forgetting to invite her to the Dawson’s annual Christmas Party one year. Moira had never forgiven Suzy for that, and the salacious rumors about Rex over the years had increased because of it.
But whether Rex got hair treatments or really had a mistress over in Portland wasn’t my concern today. Neither was the supposed brunch date that we were on, although I was trying to be as civil as possible to the weatherman.
“I’ve got to tell you, sweetie pie – I am surprised that you picked this place. I mean, it’s not a bad joint. Decent food. But the clientele isn’t exactly…”
He looked around at the other customers – mostly men in broad-billed hats that smelled of cigarette smoke and too many days out on the road in their trucks.
“Well, it’s not exactly where I’d take a lady, is all.”
I forced another smile.
“Yeah – I admit, I’ve never actually been here. But the coffee’s good so far, don’t you think?”
“Oh, sure.”
He took a sip from his mug, then adjusted his big-framed glasses. He smiled.
“Anyway, I’m just glad you called and that we both found time in our busy schedules to do this. It’s not often that I get to meet admirers like you. I mean, I go to plenty of events in town, but it’s rare that I get to talk more than five minutes or so with a fan.”
I cleared my throat.
Rex seemed to have forgotten all about how I’d won this date – and how I’d saved his sorry face when an entire roomful of women had let out a collective sigh at the prospect of spending an hour with him.
But for the time being, I ignored his rewriting of history.
I took in a deep breath and eyed him for a short moment.
“Listen, Rex. There’s something I want to talk to you about. It’s actually the reason that we’re here at this diner on this side of town.”
Rex looked at me, clicking his tongue, as if he’d already guessed my question.
“Listen, honey. I’m flattered. Really. But the rumors aren’t true. That old bird Moira made it all up about the mistress in Portland. I don’t do that kind of thing. I’m not going to be unfaithful to my Suzy, no matter how tempted I might be—”
I felt my mouth drop into thinly-veiled frown of disgust. Rex paused for a moment, then let out a deep, throaty, bellowing laugh.
“I’m just joshing you,” he said. “Ask anybody at the station, and they’ll tell you I’m a josher. I like seeing what kind of wild reactions I can get out of folks.”
Rex laughed some more.
Just then, the waitress came by with our food. She set down a plate with a couple of eggs and some toast in front of me, and a plate loaded down with a massive stack of waffles drenched in butter in front of Rex.
“Thanks, deary,” he said to the waitress.
She smiled, looking a little star struck.
“Now, let’s be serious, Cinnamon. What’s this big thing you want to talk to me about?”
He grabbed his fork and knife and started digging into the first tier of waffles.
I didn’t meet his eyes for a long moment, playing with the handle of my coffee mug.
Then I looked over at him.
“I wanted to talk to you about Amelia Delgado and Laura Baynes.”
The knife slipped out of his hand, hitting the plate with a loud clang.
Chapter 27
For once in his life, Rex Dawson seemed to be speechless.
He’d gone pale, too, his skin turning to the color of the fog outside.
“I, uh… how did you…”
“I was reading some articles about them,” I said. “And I was surprised to see that you were the reporter who covered the case for The Redmond Register in those days. I thought you were always a weatherman.”
Rex swallowed visibly.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I worked at the Redmond paper for five years before taking the weatherman job at the TV station. I started out covering school sports. Then I moved over to crime.”
There was something in his voice as he spoke that I hadn’t heard before.
As if for the first time, I was hearing the real Rex – the one beneath the hokey, clownish façade.
“I wanted to be the next Tom Brokaw,” he said quietly. “I thought I had the talent. But…”
He trailed off, looking past my shoulder with a haunted expression.
“I wasn’t any good at it. And I failed those girls. I…”
He swallowed visibly, slowly setting his fork down on the Formica table.
“I couldn’t help them,” he said. “And I about damn near ran myself into the ground trying.”
He paused, deep in thought for a long while.
“The thing that really gets me? Is that that psychopath is still out there somewhere. All these years, he’s been walking around free. It’s not right. And if I think about it too much, I just...”
Rex trailed off, reaching for the glass of water next to his coffee mug. He brought it to his lips in a slow motion, as if he was trying to steady his hand.
I fell silent, surprised at Rex’s emotional response.
I was sure he had some memory of the cases, considering that he’d spent two years of his life covering them for The Redmond Register. But I hadn’t expected him to be so shaken by the mere mention of the missing women’s names.
He let out a sigh and eyed me.
“You really want to talk about all of this, Cinnamon?”
I bit my lip, nodding.
“All right. Then let’s talk about it. C’mon.”
With that, Rex stood up and headed for the front door of the truck stop diner, leaving his waffles to get cold.
Chapter 28
I watched as Rex took slow, deliberate steps around the parking lot, gazing past the rows of big rig trucks.
“Right about here,” he said, pointing to a nondescript spot. “Right here is where Amelia Delgado was last seen. There used to be a picnic table here. And this was all forest land. One of the other bus passengers said she came over here, presumably to smoke. And this was the last place anybody saw her.”
He let out an unsteady breath.
“And right about here was the last place Laura Baynes was seen a year later. She was getting into a car, but the eyewitness was this half-blind old lady on the bus who couldn’t tell police the make or model of the car.”
He stared out into the street.
“There used to be a gas station over there,” he said, pointing to what was now a Dutch Bros. Coffee drive-thru. “And the rest of this was wilderness back then.
“But that’s the story with about everything these days. It used to be wilderness. Now it’s a parking lot, the way Joni Mitchell said. Or a McDonalds. Or a Starbucks. The advance of civilization. Only I don’t think we’re as advanced as we think. Not when girls still go missing and people still treat each other the way they do.”
I followed his gaze out across the lot to where the gas station had once been, trying to imagine this whole place the way it used to look back when I was a kid.
“Who was the last person to see Amelia?” I asked.
The newspaper accounts had only referred to the person as a passenger – not giving their name.
“His name was Billy or maybe it was Bob,” he said, scratching his head and looking into the distance. “I int
erviewed him. A real creep of a guy, if you ask me. I didn’t like his vibe at all. He said he was a recovering alcoholic, but there didn’t seem much recovering about him.”
“Do you think he could he have had something to do with her disappearance?”
Rex shook his head.
“I doubt it. The other passengers vouched that he was with them the whole time in the diner. The cops never looked at him as a real suspect. He was very cooperative.”
Rex ran a hand through his white hair.
“Amelia wasn’t any angel,” he said, watching as one of the trucks began backing up and pulling out of the lot. “Her mother called her a nightmare to live with. But I’ll always remember one story I came across about her. I interviewed some people at the bar she worked at in Portland. There was this old alcoholic that frequented the bar. The owner would kick him around some, but Amelia would bring him homemade lunches most days and push rehab literature on him. Nobody else could give two hoots about this guy, but Millie tried to help him. There were other stories about her like that.”
I couldn’t help raising my eyebrows when he used her nickname. He noticed, and he looked away, shaking his head.
“I got obsessed with the story,” he said. “Especially after Laura went missing. I felt like I had to find those girls. It got to the point where I thought I could hear them talking to me sometimes. I know that sounds crazy, but something about it all really got to me. I can’t explain it. I got in too deep and things began falling apart. Suzy nearly left me, I was in such bad shape. I realized I couldn’t be a crime reporter anymore. I wasn’t cut out for it.”
He sighed.
“But they’ve always stayed with me, you know? Both girls were so young. Their whole lives ahead of them…”
He shook his head, and once again, I caught a glimpse of what was behind the clown mask.
Someone who clearly cared deeply, even all of these years later.
I had come to this brunch thinking I was going to get a few more pieces of information about the case.
I hadn’t expected Rex to be so involved.
Or so deeply disturbed by it.
“What do you think happened to them?” I asked.
Rex paused for a long moment, looking off into the mist.
“Someone killed them,” he said. “A serial abductor. That’s what I believe. And I’m pretty sure that’s what the cops believed then, too, though they never came out and said it. Sully Coe was tight-lipped about both investigations. He blackballed the media – almost like he wanted to see the whole thing quashed.”
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up at the mention of the former sheriff and my almost-murderer.
“Part of it was just Sheriff Coe’s style,” Rex continued. “If you look through the archives, you’ll see that Sully rarely told the media what was happening in any of his cases. He kept a lot of things under wraps and didn’t like sharing information with us. But then there was that fire that happened at the Sheriff’s station in the late nineties. Some of the case files related to the disappearances when up in flames. Witness accounts from when they disappeared. Interrogations, too.”
“Interrogations?” I said.
Rex nodded.
“Yep. There was this kid they thought might have had something to do with Amelia’s disappearance. Someone saw him hanging around the truck stop that day. He was in the area when Laura disappeared, too. That was the rumor. But like I said, Sully Coe wasn’t sharing information with anybody back then. And any information gathered from those interviews went up in flames.”
I looked down at the ground, gnawing on that bit of information for a long while.
“They never made any arrests in either case?” I asked.
“Nope. I guess they couldn’t make anything stick to that kid. Or to anybody else for that matter.”
A deep line of resentment appeared down the middle of Rex’s forehead.
“Sometimes I wonder if they even really tried,” he added.
Rex looked off into the distance for a long moment.
“I know I play the fool most of the time,” he said. “I tell people what they can expect from the skies in the week ahead. I tell them when to bring an umbrella or when to leave the jacket at home. I like to josh people and play the part. But I’ll tell you something, Cinnamon. A lot of it is an act. I have my dark moments, like anybody.”
He sighed.
“Maybe more than most,” he added.
Like so many people, I realized, Rex had hidden behind a facade – convincing everybody in this town that he wasn’t anything more than a bumbling television personality.
But underneath, at the heart of the man, I now saw that there was something else.
Pain.Sadness. And a feeling of failure.
Rex suddenly glanced at me with a look of suspicion, as if he’d sensed me analyzing him.
“How come you’re so interested in this, Cinnamon? I mean, what’s any of this got to do with you?”
I bit my lip, looking at the spot where Vicky’s sister was last seen alive 25 years earlier.
“Amelia’s older sister? She lives here in Christmas River now,” I said. “She’s a lieutenant with the Sheriff’s Office.”
Rex’s eyes grew a little wide.
“Vicky Delgado?” he said. “She lives here now?”
I nodded.
“I remember her. She came out here and talked to me once, years ago. I helped as best I could. Wished I could have helped her more.”
Rex rubbed his face.
“Please tell her if I can be of any use, just let me know. Really. It would mean a lot to me to finally find out what happened to Millie.”
He paused.
“And to Laura, too.”
That pained look came across his features again.
“I’ll pass it on, Rex.”
A silence settled over the conversation. Rex shifted his weight awkwardly between his shiny black shoes.
“I suppose our food’s cold by now,” he finally said.
“Suppose it is. But maybe we could get more coffee? On me this time.”
He nodded.
“That’d be nice. I could really use a hot drink.”
We headed back into the truck stop diner, leaving the mist behind.
Chapter 29
“How come they don’t have a Grandparent’s Day?” Warren said, digging into a slice of the Mother’s Day Lemon Raspberry Cream pie and shoveling it in his mouth. “Mothers and fathers get all the presents and praise and good things. But what about the grandparents? Shouldn’t we be recognized for our support? I mean, don’t we deserve our own special pie?”
“They have a Grandparents’ Day already, don’t they, old man?” I said, rolling out some sour cream pecan pie dough that had been chilling in the fridge.
“Yeah, but only children in elementary school celebrate that. Nobody in the real world treats it seriously. They don’t have Grandparents’ Day specials at any of the restaurants or stores, no fancy items on the menu just for us, now do they?”
I leaned back and put a hand on my hip.
“Say… I always treat you good, don’t I?”
“Oh, sure you do, Cinny Bee. You make every day Grandparent’s Day in my world. I’m just talking in general about the poor other saps out there. Old folks ought to be recognized for their wisdom and insight. In the old days, people revered the elders in their community. Nowadays, yougins can’t even be bothered to look up from their blasted smartphones to hear anything an old person’s got to say. Kids got themselves a real lack of focus in this day and age. Don’t you think, Cinny Bee?”
I paused, glancing at the screen of my phone.
“Huh? I missed the last part,” I said, smiling mischievously and having a little fun at Warren’s expense.
He didn’t seem as amused as I was.
He shoved the last bit of pie into his mouth.
“Would ya look at me… Here I am, sounding just like your average old geeze
r,” he choked out between chews.
“Oh, there’s nothing average about you, old man.”
He sighed.
“It’s just that I’ve been thinking about that beer show host nitwit and all them age-related questions he was asking me. I guess it got me thinking…”
“But you did such a great job handling it, old man,” I said. “You completely showed him up.”
“You think Cinny Bee?”
I nodded.
Warren smiled a little.
But then it faded.
“It ain’t easy being old,” he said. “By the time that little pipsqueak Harrison Gordon was born, I’d already fought in Korea, seen a man on the moon, and watched the Berlin wall come down. And he walks into my brewpub and has the gall to ask me how I can brew beer at my age.”
Warren clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“It just ain’t right.”
“No,” I said in agreement. “It’s not.”
I studied my grandfather for a long moment.
He didn’t often let other people get him down like this. He was good at keeping his flame and not letting what others thought or said affect him.
“Is something else bothering you?” I asked, having a feeling that Warren had come over here not so much for pie as to get a few things off his chest.
He shrugged, letting out a sigh.
“I guess too this robbery thing has me down a little,” he said, looking at his empty plate. “It all makes me feel so... old. Old and feeble.”
I furrowed my brow.
“Old and feeble? You know that bar that got robbed over in Pine Grove yesterday? It’s owned by a guy in his late thirties. Anybody can get robbed. At any age.”
“Sure. But if I was younger, I’da clocked that punk. Gun or no gun. And he would never have had the chance to hurt you, Cinny.”
I stopped what I was doing.
“Old man, only a fool would clock a robber holding a gun. So when you think about it, having the wisdom of old age might have just saved your life and mine the other night.”
His face brightened a little at the logic of that.
