Bitter Crossing (A Peyton Cote Novel) (23 page)

“Elise, was he seeing her last year? I need to know.”

“I really don’t know.”

“Whose decision was it to move here?”

“Jonathan’s,” Elise said.

“But it’s your hometown.”

Elise only nodded.

“He saw an opening on the District 3 website, sent his resume. Never got into specifics. Just came home one day and said, ‘How would you like to move back?’ In truth, by that time, Boston Catholic Country Day School had told him he wasn’t getting another contract. I was just glad he had another job. I didn’t finish college. I left to marry him. He’s the bread winner.”

Peyton thought of the future. How would Elise support Max? What would Lois’s reaction be?

Donna returned. “Are you ready to order?”

It was 2:40. Peyton nodded, asked for her usual chef’s salad. While Elise asked a question about the menu, Peyton tried to fill in the blanks of a bizarre home-hitting crossword puzzle. It was Jonathan—not Elise—who’d chosen Garrett, Maine. Logical reasons for selecting Garrett abounded: Lois was here, so daycare costs would be trimmed, and maybe Garrett was far enough from Boston for Jonathan to outrun his controversial 9/11 statements. She doubted that. After all, there was no mistaking what he said. School officials were apparently on record verifying the remarks.

“Did Jonathan interview in person?” Peyton asked, when Donna left.

“No. It was probably a phone interview.”

“You don’t know?”

“I told you, he came home one day, said he had the job. I didn’t ask questions. I was just relieved. There’s something else, Peyton, something that will force me to have that talk with Mom.”

Peyton waited.

“Jonathan left this morning. When he came back from seeing you, he dropped off Max, packed a couple bags, and took off. I left Max with Mom when I came here.”

“He’d better not have gone far. People are going to want to talk to him.”

“You know he didn’t shoot anyone. He wouldn’t.”

“I hear he broke a student’s arm,” Peyton said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Where is he?”

“No idea.”

“He with the Mexican girl?”

“I don’t know. He said …” Elise swallowed and looked down. “He said he couldn’t love me anymore. Said it was time to move on.”

They were words that could never be taken back. Peyton thought of Max. If Jonathan Hurley was as self-centered as she believed him to be, Max would grow up fatherless. She thought of her own son, Tommy, of his searching eyes during the soccer game. As painful as divorce was for adults, children suffered the most.

Donna returned a short while later with their meals. The sisters ate in silence. There was nothing more to say.

When she and Elise parted outside the diner, something tugged at Peyton, and she’d been an agent long enough to trust her instincts.

She climbed into her Wrangler and headed to Stan Jackman’s cabin overlooking the Crystal View River. Jackman wasn’t the type to skip a lunch date without a phone call.

The dirt road to Jackman’s home was a quarter-mile long. Six-inch potholes pocked the road, courtesy of winter’s freeze and thaw.

Jackman had invited her and Tommy to dinner when she’d first arrived at Garrett Station. She’d driven home that evening fielding the seven-year-old’s questions: Why hadn’t Mrs. Jackman eaten dinner? Why didn’t she have hair? What exactly did cancer do to someone? Peyton’s answers now seemed ludicrous. She’d told her son cancer attacked the body’s blood, a gross understatement: Karen was dead two months later.

Cancer attacked families. That was what it did.

Karen Jackman was gone now, but Stan still fought the effects of the disease. After more than twenty-five years as an agent, he’d lost confidence in his abilities, having nearly failed to qualify with his handgun. And there was no relief on the horizon: Jackman now blamed himself for the Jimenez shooting.

She parked next to Jackman’s GMC Sierra in front of the cabin he and Karen bought twenty years earlier. It had been a seasonal camp they’d renovated into a quaint, if remote, log home. It looked empty as she killed the engine. No smoke rose from the chimney. No lights shone within.

She got out and approached the front door. Behind the cabin, a long sloping lawn ran to the Crystal View River. Whitecaps danced on the purple water.

She knocked on the screen door.

“Stan?”

Unlatched, the door banged loudly against the doorframe. She pulled it open, tapped the glass. No sound from inside. She turned the knob and the door opened.

Hesitating to enter, she took in the cabin’s interior from where she stood, not wanting to violate the man’s privacy: A large main room with a woodstove near the door, its long black smokestack running to the ceiling; blond-wood walls, hinting at a woman’s touch, held framed photos, some with Monet prints, a layer of dust covering them now; and a tiny galley kitchen at the rear separated from the main room by a breakfast counter.

The
Bangor Daily News
was open on the counter.

A coffee mug lay overturned near the paper, its contents forming black rivulets, dripping to the scuffed wooden floor.

Plunk.

Coffee hit the floor every few seconds.

The sound, like a distant gunshot, echoed in Peyton’s ears. She did not hear the screen door slam behind her as she sprinted across the room because Stan Jackman was facedown at the counter.

TWENTY
-
SEVEN

P
EYTON HAD FOLLOWED
J
ACKMAN’S
ambulance to the hospital, stayed there until Hewitt had arrived, and then returned to Lois’s house. Shaken, she’d fixed herself a cup of green tea and sat at the kitchen table to catch her breath and help Tommy with his homework.

She needed to decompress, but green tea or not, her head was spinning: Jonathan Hurley had indeed left her sister, meaning the whereabouts of the lead suspect in the Miguel Jimenez shooting weren’t known. It was possible that the woman he’d been philandering with was the mother of the infant called Autumn, who was also now missing. And if that was the case, Hurley might well be the father. Miguel Jimenez had yet to be upgraded to stable condition. And, as a horrific side effect of it all, Jackman suffered a heart attack while apparently reading about the shooting in the
Bangor Daily News
; he was in stable condition in the same hospital.

After dinner, she sat with Tommy in the living room, reading with him, trying to focus on
Peter and the Starcatchers.

“Will Mr. Jackman be okay?” Tommy asked.

“I think so,” she said.

It was Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. The temperature was dropping and flurries had been predicted.

“Hold on,” she said to Tommy when her cell phone vibrated. She stood to retrieve it from her pant pocket.

It was Susan Perry from DHHS. “Can you talk?” she asked.

Peyton’s eyes fell on Tommy, who was looking up at her, book in hand.

“Is it urgent?” Peyton said.

“I think it might be.”

Peyton exhaled. “Then I can talk.” She leaned forward, kissed Tommy’s forehead, and went to the kitchen table.

Peyton listened as Susan Perry told her about a phone call she received and later followed up on at a local daycare. If the facts were true, Peyton had to admit, Matthew Ramsey was a four-year-old with one hell of a story.

“Matthew Ramsey went to daycare today,” Susan Perry said, “told his teacher, Linda Farnham, he was once in a box under a car. Said it was dark and scary and started rambling about spiders. Then he cried inconsolably. Linda met with her staff, found out he’s told them the same story, and she called my office.”

“A box under a car?” Peyton said.

“That’s what he says. He cries whenever he retells the story.”

“Traumatic.”

“Apparently,” Perry said. “He’s at an exclusive daycare for this area. I went there, talked to Linda, then to two women she employs. Turns out, the boy told each of them the exact same story. The part about the spiders in the box is when he always starts crying. I apologize for calling you at home. I could’ve gone through this with an agent at the station. But I thought of the baby you found, who seemingly has no ID, and now this box-under-a-moving-car story. I got suspicious, so I’m passing it on to you.”

“It’s fine,” Peyton said, but she was looking into the living room, where Tommy sat, staring at the book he held, his finger bumping along slowly beneath the words.

“Did Linda Farnham call his parents?” Peyton asked.

“Yes.”

“Not just a little boy with a vivid imagination?”

“I don’t think so,” Linda said. “I really think it’s something more. He told each woman the same story, three months apart. Identical. Recounted it three times over nine months.”

Peyton’s second cup of green tea was getting cold.

“Could this be connected to the baby you found in the field?” Perry asked. “It’s the box under the car that bothers me.”

It bothered Peyton, too. “I’ll look into it,” was all Peyton said, but she knew clever compartments in vehicles were used a lot in human trafficking.

“Can you go through it one more time?” Peyton said. “I want to make sure I have this straight.”

“He’s only four. I spent a half-hour with him today, did what I admit was only a cursory evaluation. But I work with half a dozen four-year-olds. He’s an average, very sweet four-year-old boy. Average, very sweet four-year-old boys can’t come up with a story like that and remember it exactly the same way every three months for nearly a year. And the crying was not part of some game. I’m thinking, in order for him to remember so many details, and to react as he did, something traumatic happened to him.”

Tommy dribbled Jeff’s soccer ball through the kitchen, dodging the wood stove near the front door like it was a defender. Winter hats and mittens were already hung on wooden pegs near the stove. In the coming months, when split wood lined the stove’s belly, the rising heat would dry Tommy’s mittens.

“It’s the adoption aspect that made me think of you, Peyton.”

“He’s adopted?” Peyton said.

A box beneath a moving car? And an adoption?

The phone felt hot in Peyton’s hand, her palm damp.

Peyton was in uniform, driving to Reeds to see the family of Matthew Ramsey, when her cell phone vibrated.

“Haven’t heard from you,” Scott Smith said. “Did I offend you when I left the diner to take that call?”

“No. Not at all. Are you following up on Kenny Radke?”

“Me? No. Mike hasn’t mentioned it. Why, did you hear I was?”

“No,” Peyton said. “Just curious.”

Lights from farmhouses and homes dotted the eleven miles between Garrett and Reeds as she traversed Route 1. Reeds felt like a peninsula, as the Crystal View River surrounded it on two sides.

Smith said, “Why would you be curious about that?”

“No reason,” she said. “I’m curious about a lot of things. Does that bother you?”

“Not at all.”

“You sure?”

“Certainly. I was calling to see if you wanted to have dinner tonight.”

She considered it, glancing out the window. Route 1 could be spectacular. During the weeks prior to the annual harvest, the potatoes produced tiny blossoms, indicating they were ready to be picked, resulting in vistas of white flowers that often looked like miles of rolling cotton puffs. The fields were barren now, and she could see only what her headlights offered.

“Sure,” she said. “Where should I meet you?”

“How about the little diner between Garrett and Reeds?”

“I’ve never been in there. Never seen any cars there.”

“It’s not bad.”

“Okay. What time?”

He told her, and she hung up.

Peyton’s rational mind told her two things.

First, she didn’t handle adoption issues; that was DHHS turf. However, in lieu of the mysterious abandoned baby found at the border—of whom local hospitals, adoption agencies, even US Citizenship and Immigrations Services had no record—she figured asking the parents of Matthew Ramsey some questions could do no harm.

Second, no matter who eventually took the lead on the abandoned baby case—DHHS, Immigrations, or even state police—Susan Perry would continue to serve as lead social worker, so if Peyton wanted future shortcuts past red tape, Perry could be a great asset, and she had brought this to Peyton.

Peyton was going unannounced in an effort to catch the family off guard. Visualizing what had happened, she imagined a small boy at a daycare, sitting in a tiny chair, looking across the breakfast table, and telling his teacher of “a plane ride.” Then, according to Perry, of high buildings and “rooms where they knock on your door with food.” Hotel rooms? That part probably drew no reaction; could’ve come from any four-year-old recapping a family trip.

What he’d said next, “It was loud and scary and dark in the box under the car,” was when Linda Farnham had spilled the orange juice.

Unlike Susan Perry, the spiders and tears didn’t bother Peyton. It was the box under the car that brought back El Paso and money-hungry coyotes stuffing men, women, and even children into storage containers with little air in the backs of 120-degree trucks to be smuggled across the desert to the US.

She drove to a cul-de-sac at the end of High Water Lane in Reeds. The homes were large and new. If her mother’s three-bedroom was 1,200 square feet, this place was 4,000—a sprawling Tudor with a three-car garage and a professionally maintained lawn. She could’ve been in a Boston suburb.

She came to a stop in the driveway and got out. A Toyota Sequoia pulled into the driveway next door, and a floodlight snapped on. A smallish man in a dark suit climbed out holding a briefcase, straightened when he saw Peyton, eyes taking in her uniform and running to the decal on the door of her truck. He glanced at his briefcase, looked down, and went quickly to his front door.

A motion light went on in the Ramsey driveway, and the front door opened before she could knock.

“May I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to the parents of Matthew Ramsey.”

“I’m his father.”

Dr. Matthew Ramsey wasn’t what she expected. A doctor, but he looked neither bookish nor preppy. In fact, she might have mistaken him for the guy responsible for the flawless lawn—black hair worn past his collar, brown eyes with pinpoint pupils behind wire-rimmed glasses, a Fu Manchu, and a dark complexion. If she hadn’t been told he was from the southern part of the US, she’d have immediately guessed he was French-Canadian. He had a diamond stud in his left earlobe and wore blue jeans with a ripped knee and a faded Carolina Panthers T-shirt.