Surviving the Truth

by Tyler Anne Snell

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  “Josiah Linderman?”

  Lovett’s eyebrows came together in contemplation. “Linderman... I can’t say that rings a bell. Who is he?”

  “Some man who disappeared thirty-five years ago around here. There allegedly was no proof of foul play and many thought he’d left town of his own accord. Now I have a woman who believes he was murdered instead. Thinks she found some evidence that points to her conclusion.”

  “Hmm. If I recognized the name, I could throw in my two cents, but even if I hadn’t left town for over a decade before coming back, I’d say that’s a little bit before my time. But you know Sheriff Chamblin was here then. If you think there’s some credence to the story, I’d go talk to him tomorrow. He should be in-house for at least the morning before having to deal with more of the press.” Lovett smiled. It was a humoring one.

  Kenneth might not have worked previously under Sheriff Chamblin but he knew enough about the older man to know that talking to the press was his least favorite thing to do when it came to his duties. He also wasn’t big on sitting behind the desk, yet that’s what he’d been doing more and more lately. Though, after what had happened to Annie McHale, being transparent with the community and making damn sure the department was completely aboveboard might have been the most boring aspect of his job, it was now one of the most important.

  Still, that didn’t mean the sheriff had to like it. He might actually welcome the change of talking about a potential cold case.

  “All right,” Kenneth said. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow to see if he knows anything.”

  “Sounds good to me. Are you about to head out?”

  Kenneth nodded and rolled his chair back. He already had Delilah’s leash in his hand. “If I don’t get her home and take her for a walk, I’m sure there’ll be hell to pay later on when I’m trying to fall asleep.”

  Lovett laughed again.

  “Same goes for me and not relieving Millie from Mom duty soon,” he said. “She loves our son a whole lot but you should see her pass him off like a football as soon as I make it to the property line. Not that I blame her. I don’t think she’s slept since he was born.”

  It was meant as a way to end the conversation on a casual note. Something polite to say instead of just saying “Okay, I’m headed out because it’s the end of my shift.” But it struck a chord that often got played when people around Kenneth spoke of their families.

  No matter how many years went by, there were some moments that reminded him of his own lost family.

  Of Ally’s death.

  Of her murder.

  Of a man in a mask who had, for no reason that anyone knew of, decided to kill her while she’d been out for a jog.

  Kenneth balled his fist, the leash in his grip and pen in the other hand.

  He glanced down at the top of his desk and at the pad of paper he’d been writing on that day.

  There were names and cases that filled the small page.

  Yet there was one name that Kenneth eyed with ease among the others.

  Josiah Linderman.

  Chapter Four

  The sheriff had been surprisingly absent the next day.

  So Kenneth spent that Tuesday night sitting on his back porch, in a patio chair that had seen much better days, and watching Delilah run around.

  All the while thinking about freckles and sunshine. About how something nagged at him about Willa Tate.

  Kenneth had intended to talk to the sheriff today about Josiah, but when it had become clear that talk was going to have to wait, he’d dug into the files in his office, searching for any hard-copy records of cases from 1984 through 1986. Surprisingly there weren’t many cases that had been challenging or unsolved from the timeframe. A robbery turned deadly. A bike theft. A complaint of harassment by an anonymous source against a man who’d owned the hardware store in town at the time.

  In most small towns that would be normal—the whole “not having a lot of cases that piqued much interest”—but Kelby Creek wasn’t normal. It hadn’t been for years.

  Delilah barked and then shot across the yard to the corner of the fence. Just as quickly as her attention had diverted to it, it switched again to the other side of the yard. She bounded playfully, just enjoying being outside. Kenneth imagined she was mostly happy to no longer be sitting in his dusty office. She was free here. At least, free from all the violence and wrongdoing that surround them both in the storage room at the department.

  Kenneth reached for the beer that he had opened an hour ago. It was no longer cold but it was completely full. He rubbed his thumb along the label and snorted as a memory floated through.

  I’ve never met a man who has such a hard time learning to relax. If bad guys can sit back and drink beer, and not worry about the law like you catching them, then I think you can enjoy a drink every now and then, too.

  Kenneth hadn’t heard Ally’s voice in almost eight years. And that was only because, on the anniversary of her death, he’d finally mustered up the courage to listen to a voice mail he’d been diligently saving. The last one she’d left him. But sitting here now, it was like she was standing at his ear and repeating something she had often told him throughout their marriage.

  “I know how to relax,” he would always say, trying to defend himself.

  “Whatever you say.”

  Ally’s lips would then turn up at the corners and she would smile a brief, beautiful smile, and Kenneth would slowly start to relax. She’d always been good at that. While he was in his own head about work, about cases, she’d remind him that there was more than just what was in his head.

  Kenneth put the beer bottle back down.

  He looked at his cell phone and then at the card lying against the thigh of his jeans. Willa Tate’s name was in bold.

  After he’d gotten home last night, he had done a social media search of the woman. Mostly to see if she was the kind of person who posted all over the internet about wild, outlandish things but partially because he was curious. Kenneth had grown up in Kelby Creek but he’d spent his summers in Georgia at his grandparents’ home. After he’d graduated high school, he’d moved there for a few years to go to school for criminology. Then he’d gone to the academy and right back to Kelby Creek, accepting a job as a deputy.

  In his absences, he’d missed a few new faces, forgotten some old ones, and had run into several he’d wished he’d never see again. Small towns were like that. At least, he felt that way. You couldn’t go to the grocery store without running into at least three people you knew, but you could go to a football game and stare into the crowd and not know at least twenty of the people staring back.

  That’s who Willa Tate was to him. A local in the crowd he’d just managed to never meet.

  According to the internet and her public posts, she was a few years younger than him, seemed to like to laugh a lot, and was surprisingly single.

  The last detail shouldn’t have mattered but he found himself making a note of it anyway. A small piece of information that held no bearing whatsoever on her interest in Josiah Linderman and the box she’d brought to the department. Yet he’d wondered why a person who was like sunshine didn’t have someone in her life bathing in her light. It seemed a damn shame, if he was being honest.

  Apart from those small facts that he gleaned off the internet, Willa seemed like a normal woman. And by normal, he meant not the type who would try to dig up someone else’s tragic past for attention or any kind of fame.

  That was why he was on his back porch this Tuesday night in the first place. Watching his dog run and play, his mind coming back to Josiah Linderman, the box and the nagging feeling that he’d missed something during his conversation with Willa Tate yesterday at the department.

  It took him another hour or so to realize that what he was feeling had less to do with what she’d said an
d more to do with what she hadn’t. Also, the box itself. If it did contain the clues to an unsolved murder, why put them in a box so big? It was almost like something was missing, and that bothered him.

  It bothered him as he lay awake in bed later that night. It continued to bother him on Wednesday morning as he drank his coffee and took Delilah out for one last walk. As he talked to his neighbor and thanked her for keeping an eye on his golden pooch while he was at work. And all the way to his office with the Storage placard on the door.

  So he grabbed his pad of paper, pen and coffee thermos, and marched down the hall to the door that read Sheriff.

  He knocked and was glad to hear a callout in response.

  “Come in!”

  Kenneth opened the door to reveal a burly man with laugh lines, gray hair, and a cowboy hat on the desktop. He had a folder open in front of him with a stack of papers on top. He didn’t look displeased to see Kenneth, but it wasn’t hard to tell that, if given the choice to teleport to some faraway tropical island versus continue to do whatever paperwork he was looking at, he’d be on some sandy beach drinking mai tais.

  “Hey, boss. If you didn’t mind, I was wondering if we could talk for second?”

  Interim Sheriff Brutus Chamblin dropped the pen like it was a snake ready to bite him.

  “No offense, Gray, but talking to a wall right now would be preferable to doing this paperwork.” He shook his head. “You know there were days during retirement where I’d get so antsy that I felt like I was about to run out of my skin. Now that I’m back until this town can get a new sheriff I think about fishing with an ice-cold beer in one hand and my no-good brother-in-law complaining about being too hot at my shoulder, and I’ll be a daggum monkey’s uncle if I don’t miss it something fierce.”

  Kenneth laughed. “Everyone’s got something to say about working, but no one really tells you what to do with retirement. Though I do think that’s the point.”

  Chamblin chuckled then shrugged. “Well, if that ain’t the truth.”

  His posture went from casual to a little more stiff. The humor that planted the crinkles at the edges of his eyes was gone. In its place was a man who was good at his job and wanted others to be good at theirs, too. “Now, what brings you here to me before you’ve even finished your first cup of coffee?”

  “I met with a woman two days ago who claims that she might have information on an unsolved murder back in the eighties. The murder of a Josiah Linderman. I looked through the files, but couldn’t find anything on him, not even a missing persons report, so I was wondering if you knew Josiah or knew of him?”

  Chamblin took a moment to think. Then he nodded.

  “It’s been a while since I heard the name but, yeah, I knew Josiah. Well, I’d gone to church with him and his wife before she passed. We’d said a few words here and there but weren’t close. Let’s see... When he went missing, I would have been a deputy here. Not on the job too long. I can’t speak to anyone filing or not filing a missing persons report, but I do remember helping our church along with others to look for him.”

  “And you didn’t find anything,” Kenneth suggested.

  Chamblin shook his head.

  “One Sunday he was there and the next there was an empty seat in one of the pews. After a while, the name and what happened just kind of faded. Sad to say it but true.” His eyebrow rose, even more curious than Kenneth had been when Willa had first told him her theory. “This woman, did she find a body?”

  It was Kenneth’s turn to shake his head.

  “No, sir. But she thinks she’s found enough for me to look into. Before I made my decision, I wanted to see what you knew.”

  “I’m afraid that’s all I have. It was a long time ago and, as much as I like to say my memory is a steel trap, just as it had been when I was a deputy or a detective, I’d be lying.” He gave Kenneth a small but genuine smile. “I trust your judgment on this. That’s the whole reason why you are the only man we had fingered for the cold case unit. You’ve got good instincts and a drive that a lot of people just don’t have. Let me know what you decide.”

  Kenneth, ready to leave after he’d said a quick thank you, paused before he made it to the door.

  “You know, throughout my career, at least up until this point, I’ve noticed that when people say someone has ‘disappeared,’ it’s because they can’t decide if that person left of their own free will or was forced. Now, if it’s clear the person didn’t leave of their own volition, they usually say ‘taken.’ And then there are people who use the word ‘missing.’ In my experience that typically means they’ve made up their mind and believe the person in question didn’t just run off, that something happened to them. Something most likely that was bad.”

  The sheriff’s brow furrowed for a moment. “I’m guessing I said ‘missing,’ didn’t I?”

  Kenneth nodded. “Yes, you did. You think Josiah Linderman was killed, don’t you?”

  Chamblin sighed. “I guess I do, despite there not being a lick of evidence to support the idea.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  The sheriff didn’t have to think on it this time.

  “Grief or not, he loved his kids. You didn’t have to know him that well to see that they meant the world to him. I don’t think there’s any way he would’ve let them willingly go into the system. He was all they had.”

  It wasn’t a fancy answer, but it didn’t have to be fancy to be a good one.

  “Thanks, Sheriff. I’ll let you know if anything progresses on this.”

  Kenneth went back to his office. He had to take care of a few things and then make a call.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE big boss’s birthday and after lunch everyone went home. Well, everyone was told they could go home but instead the party continued on at the only bar in Kelby Creek.

  The Rosewater Inn was a smattering of weird decisions.

  In the first stage of its life, it had been a motel. In the second stage, it had been partially renovated to a bed-and-breakfast. When that hadn’t gone anywhere, the next life stage took an even stranger turn, and the Rosewater was divided into three pieces. To the left, when standing in the parking lot facing the building, there was the portion that had been made into the bar. The middle section, transformed into storage, had been closed off to everyone but the owners for the last several years. The right portion of the building had been converted into rental office suites. At the moment, there was a salon, an accountant and a bona fide psychic—according to her sign in the window.

  All in all, the Rosewater was just one of those places that was definitely unique.

  It was also a place where you could find trouble if you had too many of their specialty drinks. Last time Willa had gone with Ebony after work she’d sent a text to one of her exes saying that she still wanted to kiss his face, somehow lost a shoe, and had woken up with one the worst hangovers she’d had since college. So when the party went from celebrating her boss turning seventy with cake, soda and a sandwich platter to being at the Rosewater at 2:00 p.m. on a Wednesday with a bunch of construction workers grateful for paid break, Willa made sure to enjoy herself while staying on her best behavior.

  Though that plan wobbled its way out the door when her phone rang. The Caller ID read Unknown. She excused herself from Ebony’s side to go out to the parking lot to take the call.

  “Hello?”

  Before the voice came through the line Willa had hoped it would be Detective Gray on the other end but when she actually heard his voice, her stomach still fluttered.

  “Miss Tate? This is Detective Gray, with the Dawn County Sheriff’s Department. We met on Monday.”

  “Oh, hi, Detective! What can I do you for? Did you find anything about Josiah?”

  There was no hesitation on the other side of the phone.

  “No, but I would like to meet with you again.
Today, if possible. Would you mind if I swung by your work? I’m out of the office on some business and thought it would be easier.”

  Willa had a rule about not letting anyone make her feel embarrassed unless she’d earned it, but the heat of a blush was making its way up her neck and into her cheeks. Unfortunately, there was no way around where she currently was.

  A bar.

  On a Wednesday afternoon.

  Not exactly normal operating hours.

  Also not something she wanted being spread as gossip around the department if he repeated the information.

  “I... I’m not at work right now. How about meeting at the coffee shop on Main? I can be there in twenty?”

  Detective Gray wasn’t as quick to respond, but after a moment she felt like he nodded into his answer of okay.

  “I’ll see you there in twenty, Miss Tate.”

  Chapter Five

  Half an hour went by. Then another ten minutes. Before another five could pass, Kenneth gave Willa another call.

  Her phone rang and rang and rang.

  Then her voice mail played with her telling whoever was calling that she must have stepped away from her phone, to leave a name, number and reason for their call, and she would call them back. It was a professional message yet... There was a tone of happiness he assumed was her natural state as she said to have a good day at the end of it.

  This time Kenneth left a message.

  “Hey there, Miss Tate. This is Detective Gray again. I’m at the café and got a little curious as to where you might be. Give me a call back. I hope to see you soon.”

  Another few minutes went by and there was no Willa Tate to be seen.

  Kenneth paid for his coffee, asked the barista if Willa came in to tell her to call him, and tried to walk around the feeling in his gut he was not liking at all.