Dead Girl Moon (8 page)

Mick hurried to retrieve the sandwich fixings. His dad was mad. Mad at Mick, mad at the body, mad at the world. Mick didn’t get it. If his dad had stayed put and just worked, he could have had his own shop by now. Maybe even his own home. You don’t make money stealing. Can’t ever fence it for what it’s worth, but arguing with his dad had never changed anything.

Fitz’s credo was live by your wits. If you’re smart enough to find it and keep it, it’s yours. Boasted that he’d never been arrested. “Dumb crooks get caught.”

Was it the drugs that screwed up his dad’s thinking? Lots of thieves got caught. Got jail time. For what? Nickels and dimes. His dad had a streak of outlaw in him. Gave Fitz pleasure to poke the law with a stick. Mick could feel it. Just a matter of time before “luck” ran out and one or both of them went to jail. Mick could kiss his life goodbye. What was a college degree from a penitentiary worth?

*   *   *

After the meal, Fitz left in the car, a familiar pattern. Making connections to sell what he took, Mick guessed, but his dad could have been looking for people who sold his kind of pills. Or maybe he just went to different bars, drank and played cards. Usually Mick smelled liquor on his dad’s breath in the morning. Did his dad go looking for women? Did he give them money?

Mick was surprised to think that in several major ways, he hardly knew the man. As Mick got older, he and Fitz had sort of evolved into roommates. His father came and went, did as he pleased, rarely told Mick what he was thinking or doing. If his dad fled again, Mick wondered if he’d even miss him.

24

M
ICK ASKED
G
RACE TO GO UP
to Skinny’s with him to see if there happened to be any news about the body. JJ went, too, but at a distance. She wandered behind, looking at the sky and the illuminated signs along the highway.

He could smell the french fries cooking a hundred yards away. Knots of kids were hanging out together around the building, swatting bugs and sipping Cokes. As Mick got close, he could hear the buzz.

“From Plains … last year … Evans? Edmonds?… graduated…”

Mick glanced at Grace. No sign. Had she seen the girl before? He knew he hadn’t. They stood around. Listened. Mick bought a coffee and shared it.

“Sounds like she could have worked in the café. You know her?” Mick talked low, right in Grace’s ear. He wished he’d visited the café. At least once. Bought a cup of coffee. Watched Grace work. Left her a good tip.

“I might’ve seen her. Probably not,” she whispered back, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

He knew right then she was lying. Didn’t he? Wanting Grace, acting cool to impress her, kept him from asking more questions that could have made a difference. Mr. Hammond owned the Rock Point Motel and Grill on the north end as well as the motel and café in town. He was somehow connected with county social services, assisted with foster care placements, and provided a fair number of jobs to teenagers. He liked to hire good-looking girls. The more Mick thought about it, how could Grace not have at least met the girl?

“Didn’t she even look familiar?” he asked.

“I didn’t really look at her,” Grace said. “Too creepy.” She shook her head. “Nobody’s safe,” she said, annoyed.

A girl in the group of kids next to them said, “You got that right,” not realizing that Grace was talking to Mick.

They’d been whispering, maybe not soft enough. Mick looked around but everybody seemed zeroed in on their own friends. He took Grace’s hand and they edged a little closer to one of the bigger groups, blending, catching the news. “… Drowned?… waitress … reputation…”

He tried one more time. “Think one of the Cassels killed her?”

If Grace heard him, she gave no sign.

Mick remembered JJ and scanned the crowd. Spotted her sitting out by the highway on the concrete block that anchored the drive-in’s sign. Waiting for the sliver of moon to clear the clouds, watching traffic, the kind of thing she usually did. JJ was right. She was almost invisible. She didn’t usually join in and nobody paid her any attention.

A quick movement at the edge of the parking lot drew his eyes. Younger kids, squirreling around among the trees in the nearest yard. Mick could see the flash of Jon’s face darting in and out among five or six others. He didn’t tell Grace. She would think she needed to do something about it, grab him and haul him home or something. Mick knew that wouldn’t work. Jon would hit her and run off until she gave up trying to deal with him.

In a corner of Skinny’s in the same direction, Mick saw Tim Cassel and his lineman buddy, Cunneen, talking with some other ballplayers and a couple of cheerleaders. He and Grace continued to comb the crowd but avoided that bunch. Nobody at the drive-in seemed to know who the dead girl went out with, or what her dad did for a living. After another fifteen minutes, they collected JJ and went back home, knowing that they’d hear a lot more in the days to come.

Not telling Grace or JJ about seeing Jon was another mistake, one more little thing that caught up with him.

25

JJ
LIKED TO WATCH
the night traffic, follow the patterns of moving lights. More, she was happy waiting for the moon to clear the clouds, sneaking around like it had a secret. The evening sky had a washboard look, clouds thin, stretched by high winds. The moon made a soft glow traveling above them, peeking from time to time through small rifts. This moon … Banana? No, it was more special than that. A bright curve, pointed on both ends … like sideways horns. Longhorn Moon.

Her concentration was interrupted by something stinging the side of her thigh. Horsefly? She brushed her leg. Felt it. Inside. In her pocket. She drew out the dark jewel she’d found by the river. What could it have come from? A necklace? A ring? And how long had it been lying by the river? Who lost it? A fisherman? A rafter? Did he even know it? Could it be a woman’s? Didn’t seem like that kind of jewelry.

She looked at the stone more closely but the light wasn’t really bright enough. Square, dark, glossy, the silver inlay a “V” with a small sparkly gem in the very middle. The pattern reminded her of a logo, or a crest, like in her castle. Or Egypt, that god-eye shape. She didn’t think she’d seen this exact design before. She’d have to ask Gary.

Another thought. When she’d seen the body, it looked like a girl she’d seen Larry Cassel talking to three or four times. Once, basket to basket in the grocery store. Another time the girl looking in his car’s passenger window as if he’d just honked at her. Last week, him smiling at her as they stood on the sidewalk in front of the café. That’s why she’d said Cassel’s girlfriend, but she had no idea whether it was true.

She held the jewel up in Skinny’s neon illumination. Sell it? It looked valuable, exotic. Too beautiful to trade for cash. A wedding ring? No. Nobody had such a dark wedding ring. That was probably bad luck or something … and in that moment she had another thought. Could the jewel belong to the dead girl? Upriver, right by the water. But if she took it to the police, she’d have to tell them the whole story. No, she’d better ask Gary.

26

W
HEN THEY GOT BACK TO THE COMPOUND
, Mick was too restless to sleep. His dad was still gone. Mick lay on his bed, tried to read. Gave up and went to look at the river. Once in a while at night you’d see otter playing in the current. None tonight. Just JJ. Mick sat on the ground near her and stayed quiet, imagining that she never spent time in the trailer if she didn’t have to.

She spoke first. “That girl. I tried to sleep but I kept seeing her.”

“Up at Skinny’s they said she was from Plains,” Mick told her. “Waitress. Grace said she didn’t know her.”

“Somebody could kill me and nobody would notice,” JJ said, picking up a small rock and throwing it in the river.

“No way. Me, Grace, the Stovalls. You don’t think she drowned?”

JJ shook her head. “Alone, naked, no car? You think somebody could have dragged her to the water? Upstream a ways? Pushed her in?”

“Maybe. Did you see something?”

“Maybe.” She looked up at the sky. “I need to ask Gary … I don’t even know who my father was,” she said.

Mick was losing her. Did the dead girl spin her out?

She went on, “I don’t know how come I can play softball. Gary played catch with me maybe five times total. Think my real dad was a ballplayer?”

He didn’t know what to say.

“I just tried it at recess one day and I could do it. I was as surprised as everyone else. I’m pretty good, but you came to the games. I don’t think the girls on the team even know my name.”

It could have been true. Mick never saw anybody but the coach talk to her.

“I was chubby until seventh grade and then I grew taller. Everybody in my classes for years? They didn’t notice.” She shook her head. “Nobody would take me…”

He saw tears in the corners of her eyes.

She gave him a weak smile, rose to leave.

Mick felt bad for her. Girl who didn’t think she was pretty enough to kill. “What kind of moon is this?” he asked, shifting his look to the sky.

“Waning,” she said. “Past gibbous.”

Mick thought “gibbous” was a monkey. He didn’t say that. “Name?” he asked.

She smiled again. “Um, Longhorn Moon,” she said. “Or maybe it should be Death Moon. Dead Girl Moon.”

She was right about that.

Mick reached out and touched her arm to stop her. He told her how he got his scar that went from the corner of his mouth to over by his ear. How he’d had it since he was ten. How he got it from one of the motels he and his father lived in after his mom split. How he was running, chasing a butterfly and not looking down, and tripped on a small brick wall the owner had put around a tree, probably so people wouldn’t back their cars into it. How he fell headlong and crashed his face into the edge of the bricks and cut the whole side open. How his mom was long gone, but he still missed her.

“Zipper,” she said.

Somehow Mick didn’t mind it coming from her.

He still didn’t tell her that his dad was a thief. He didn’t think to tell her about seeing Jon when they were up at the drive-in, and he didn’t talk about Grace. Mick liked JJ, but it wasn’t the same. Grace had something he wanted. Mick was afraid to put a name to it.

27

T
HE
H
IGHWAY
P
ATROL
got the car and the probable site of the killing. Tuesday morning the ranch owner living at the end of the dirt road with the mailbox made his daily trip to town. Saw a red sedan in the narrow clearing. The car was small, not likely used by hunters, and the man thought little of it; someone walking a dog or taking pictures in the woods, whatever. That afternoon on his return trip he was surprised to see it still there. Lived down this road twenty years. Never seen a car parked in that spot.

The river was nearly a mile away through impassable brush. No ponds in the area. Not a destination by any means, so what was the car owner doing? He stopped, listened, walked to the car. Had a feeling. Stolen? A suicide with the body thirty feet into the woods? He called the Highway Patrol.

The first responding officer leaned in, saw the keys still in the ignition, and became very careful. Looking more closely, he saw spots and a dark stain at the sharp edge where the driver’s window joined the frame. He backed away and radioed Cassel, his lieutenant, who immediately phoned the Missoula office for crime techs.

The tech team arrived by late afternoon. The car’s door handle and steering wheel had been wiped clean of prints, but what was almost certainly blood remained on the window and doorframe. Following the tire prints, the traffic expert discerned the car had first been parked or stationary out by the highway and moved from there back to the nook in the trees.

A careful search where the car was first parked yielded a disturbed area where a scuffle might have taken place, a dark patch, still damp, probably blood, and a small off-white button from a shirt. The car itself, a ten-year-old Subaru, was registered to a man in Plains who told authorities that it was his daughter’s car and that she commuted to Portage for work. He said she hadn’t returned home last night and that he and his wife had assumed she was staying over with friends.

*   *   *

Mick’s 911 call set the county sheriff’s investigation in motion. Within forty minutes Sheriff Paint with his camera and a deputy carrying fishing waders were at the gravel beach on the river looking across to the body. Living this close to rivers and lakes, Paint had dealt with batches of drownings over the past thirty years. When his deputy got the girl to shore, Paint didn’t notice the head injury, but the puncture wound in the stomach was obvious. Not drowning. He, too, called the state police in Missoula for crime scene help and found his was the second request from Sanders County in the past hour.

The fact that the body was snagged on a submerged limb on the far side of the river didn’t necessarily mean that the body had been dumped there. Paint knew there was no access to that side for miles, plus objects in the water naturally drifted from one bank to another, depending on how the currents caught them. Since the body had apparently not been in the river all that long they decided to search the west bank, the roadside bank, upstream. It was close to dark by the time the state investigators arrived. They set up lights over a large perimeter and began a grid search of the beach area.

Six a.m. Wednesday a team member located the probable dumping site approximately a thousand yards upstream from the gravel beach. Examination led to a puzzle. Marks at the riverbank indicating the girl had been disrobed there and then dragged or pushed into the water. Underneath the willow and berry cover at water’s edge a deputy recovered blond hairs and white thread.

Broken branches, bent vines, and gouged earth in the immediate clearing suggested a struggle had taken place. There was surprisingly little blood on the ground, given the nature of the stomach wound. The signs of violence were inconsistent with the Highway Patrol’s initial report that the girl was probably killed miles away on Highway 200. They had most of the blood there, so how did a dead girl put up such a fight here?