Murder Road (17 page)

The long drive back to Coldlake Falls left us exhausted. Eddie was keyed up; he was used to constant physical activity in the army, and exercise was how he got out of his head. Almost as soon as we parked the car in Rose’s driveway, he said he was going for a run.

I nodded. Rose wasn’t home, and the house was empty. “I’m going to call the bowling alley,” I said. “They’re expecting me back. I’ll tell them it will be a few more days.”

Our honeymoon—the one we’d originally planned—was almost over, but there was no discussion of going home yet. Eddie nodded and said, “I should call Paul, too. I’ll do it later. He won’t mind.” Paul was his boss at the garage.

After Eddie left for his run, I took a seat in the phone nook in the corner of the kitchen. This was a chair with a padded seat next
to a table with a telephone on it. Predictably for Rose, the phone was the ornate kind, the headset resting on two upstretched hooks. She probably imagined it was the kind of phone they had at Buckingham Palace. Still, even as I squeezed into the fussy space, I realized I was getting used to Rose and her aesthetic. It was almost calming. I let my gaze rise to a picture of Princess Diana on the wall as I picked up the phone and dialed. Since the number was long-distance, I made a mental note to pay Rose for the charges.

My boss at the bowling alley in Ann Arbor wasn’t happy to hear what I had to say. “I had you scheduled for tomorrow night,” he complained.

“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve been delayed. I won’t be back by then.”

“This is inconvenient. I was counting on you, April.”

“I know it’s—”

“You’re being irresponsible.”

I stared at Princess Diana, and suddenly I was gripped with an exhaustion so deep it was almost transcendent, an exhaustion I had never known I was capable of. How many arguments had I had in my life, with how many useless bosses, at how many dead-end jobs? I wasn’t being paid for my days off—it made no difference to his bottom line whether I showed up or not. I was disposable, and yet I was treated like a disappointment for acting that way. Just like every other job I’d ever worked.

The thought bubbled through my mind, unbidden:
I don’t want to do this anymore. I want more.

Surviving to tomorrow wasn’t good enough. Not anymore.

“I’ll be back when I’m back,” I said, unable to keep the sharpness from my voice.

“I might have to let you go.”

I should care. I had to pay rent, bills. The bank account had been emptied. I needed a job. I should care.

Rhonda Jean had bled out in the back seat of my car, scared. Her bloody hand had gripped mine as the life seeped out of her. And the Lost Girl was still on the road, murdered and unidentified, begging for help.

“I’ll be back when I’m back,” I said again, and hung up.

I let the silence seep into my brain as I steeled myself. If I was let go from my job, we would need money while I looked for another one. I picked up the phone again and dialed a number I knew by heart, one I had been dialing for years.

It took a few minutes to connect. I had to talk to an operator, then another, and then wait as beeps sounded in my ear. But finally, at long last, the phone on the other end was picked up and I heard the familiar voice.

“Hello?”

“Mom, it’s me,” I said.

There was a beat of silence, enough to tell me everything I needed to know about the money. “Hi, baby.” My mother’s voice was rough, a smoker’s voice. She had been a smoker for as long as I’d known her. I supposed she still smoked in prison, too.

Even though I was angry at her, maybe as angry as I’d ever been, the first words out of my mouth were the usual ones. “Are you all right?”

“As good as I can be.” This was her usual answer. “How sweet of my girl to ask about me. I tell the others here that my daughter calls me regular. I don’t know if they believe me, but it’s true.”

My throat was dry, and I licked my lips. I had to get this call
finished before Eddie came back from his run. “Mom, I’m calling for a reason.”

Her voice went cold. “Don’t start.”

“I’m starting.” My voice was as icy as hers; she was the one I’d learned it from. “I went to the bank. You cleaned the money out of the account.”

The money was ours, Mom’s and mine. Seven thousand dollars, sitting in a bank account that had both of our names on it. It had been nearly twenty thousand dollars once, but I’d withdrawn half of it over time to pay for Mom’s first set of appeals. It was a mistake I wasn’t going to make again.

Where did the money come from? If you asked Mom, you would get a different answer each time. She’d say it was left to her by a distant relative, or it came from the sale of her dead mother’s jewelry. She’d never even told me the truth, most likely to protect me—and herself—in case I was ever questioned about it. One of Mom’s rules was that whatever I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell the police under questioning.

But since Mom had left my life when I was eighteen, taken back to California to stand trial for what she’d done the night we left, I’d done a little digging. I couldn’t trace most of the money, but some of it, incredibly, was my father’s life insurance. I didn’t know how she’d gotten her hands on it, or how she’d managed to siphon it into a bank account the police couldn’t find. The rest—well, I didn’t know exactly where it had come from, but as my mother’s daughter, I could make an educated guess.

She’d had plans for that money, I was certain. Then the police had found her when we lived in Fort Lauderdale—they’d tracked
her somehow through the life insurance check. She’d been arrested while I was working a shift at Olive Garden. When I got home to find her gone, I’d had to pack up and get out of town. Alone.

After spending half of the money trying to free Mom, I’d been careful with the remaining half, reluctant to use money that dirty unless I had to. I’d withdraw a hundred or two at a time, only when I needed it. The fact that it was my father’s blood money didn’t bother me—I had a cracked molar and a badly healed broken pinkie finger because of him. It was the rest of the money that made my conscience stir.

And yet that money, that number in the bank, was my buffer against starvation, against homelessness. Just knowing it existed helped me sleep at night. It was the barrier against me taking a man home and taking his fifty bucks so that I could eat. I earned my own way, but if things ever got bad, I could still withdraw a hundred bucks’ worth of dignity. And now that dignity was gone.

“My lawyer says we can appeal. But appeals take money,” my mother said.

Cold sweat made my hand slick on the receiver. “We spent so much on the first appeal, and we wasted it. It isn’t going to work.”

“It could work,” she argued. “My lawyer says it could be self-defense. People pay more attention to that than they used to. Ever since that woman cut her husband’s dick off. And O. J. is on TV nonstop. It’s all over the news.”

Here’s one thing: I loved my mother. It sounded crazy after all she’d done, but I did. I really, truly loved her. For most of my life, she was the only person in the world who understood me.

Here’s another thing: My mother was a murderer.

My earliest memories were of my father hitting my mother, my father hitting me. I had lived in a constant state of fear, the only state I knew. All I had ever wanted, as a child, was to get out of that house.

So maybe it was self-defense. If Mom had shot Dad while he was coming at her, it could have been.

But that night when I was twelve, Mom had bludgeoned Dad to death with a baseball bat while he slept. She’d set the bed on fire to try and cover it up. Then she’d pulled me from the house and we’d escaped, my mother driving, me egging her on.

I’d told Eddie we had escaped my father and changed our identities that night, that my mother was dead. Because when you tell a lie, you should stick to the truth as closely as possible. We
had
escaped that night; we had just left behind a dead body instead of an angry abuser. Years later, after they’d finally caught her, when she called me collect from California, her instructions to me were clear:
Cut your losses, baby. I’m dead to you now. Do you understand?

I’d disobeyed her, just a little. I called her regularly in prison, made sure she was all right. I couldn’t help it; she was all I had.

But if I had followed her instructions—if I had withdrawn our shared funds from the bank account and never contacted my mother again—I would still have the money. How hilarious was that?

“How did you do it?” I asked her now. “How did you get the money out from inside? You’ve never been able to access the money before without me.”

“People help me,” Mom said, and in her voice I could hear my
own flat inflection, the tone I used when I was a shiny, hard surface that no one could penetrate. I hated myself so much in that moment that I felt bile in my stomach. “It doesn’t matter how I did it, honey. We always said that money was for emergencies. This is an emergency.”

“I needed that money,” I croaked.

“For what?” She waited, and when I didn’t answer, she kept talking. “You don’t tell me anything about your life, do you know that? Not ever. You think I don’t notice?”

“I have told you,” I argued. “I live in Ann Arbor. I work in a bowling alley.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s the money for? Rent? A house? Clothes?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Is there a man?” Mom paused, as if I’d spoken. “My God, there is, isn’t there? Who is he? Tell me everything.”

My temples were pounding and my eyes stung. Leave it to Mom to be able to smell a man from prison a thousand miles away.

“There’s no man,” I said.

“There’s a man.” She was sure of it now. “Who is he?”

“There isn’t a man,” I said again. “I date every once in a while. That’s it.”

“Liar.” Her voice was flat with anger. “That’s what you wanted the money for? To spend it on some man? I taught you better than that. I taught you the hard way.”

She had. The way she taught me the lesson of her life—never let anyone in—was very, very hard. She had been beaten bloody for that lesson. She had killed for it. She had fled her life, changed her name. She had left her old self dead by the side of the road,
along with the husk of the little girl I had been. She was sitting in prison now for that lesson. She had sacrificed everything for it.

She had taken all of our money in her final lesson to me. I should never let anyone in—even her.

And for what? The day I married Eddie, I had gone against everything she taught me. I’d thrown away every word of her hard-won advice. I’d done it the day I’d first seen him in the hall outside my bedroom, to tell the truth.

If she knew about Eddie, I had no idea what my mother would do. But I knew her first instinct would be to destroy him in any way that she could. Now that she’d stolen my money and was asking about my husband, I was relieved that I’d never told my mother the name April Delray. She still didn’t know it, and she didn’t ask. When she used my name—which was almost never—she called me by the name of the dead girl she’d given birth to, who I’d left behind in California.

“There’s no man,” I repeated, because she had to believe it. She simply had to. I had finally learned my lesson. “I wanted that money. I earned it as much as you did. I never told on you. I never went to the police. I kept your secrets. You know that.”

“Then make more,” Mom said. “I taught you to be resourceful. This appeal is life or death. I hate to be a Prime Bitch, but if I lose this time, I lose. I looked out for you long enough. I have to look out for me.”

I closed my eyes. She had robbed me—my mother had robbed me. I didn’t know why even a small part of me was surprised. I didn’t know why it stung. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t know why it mattered.

“I’m in a situation,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll get out of it.”

My mother’s words were sure, her confidence the only mothering she could give me. “You’ll get out of it. Do you know how I know? Because I made you, in more ways than one. And if it was me in your situation, no matter what it is, I’d get out of it. I’d do whatever it takes.”

Eddie and I slid the dresser against the bedroom door again. Rose wasn’t home, but she could be here any minute.

He was sweaty after his run, but I didn’t care. After the phone call with my mother, I needed him. I met him halfway across the living room when he came through the door, put my hands on his damp shoulders, kissed him, and said, “Eddie Carter,” in his ear. He was happy to oblige.

Afterward, we lay catching our breath in the twisted sheets. Eddie had a dazed expression on his face that made me smile.

“Okay,” he said at last. “That was like a real honeymoon.”

I stared at the ceiling and said nothing.

“We should probably shower.” His voice was lazy. “I’m so goddamned tired.”

My heart was thumping in my chest, and it wasn’t only because of what we’d just done. I felt raw, exposed. Panicked. The money
being gone, then the conversation with my mother, had shaken something loose in me. I hated it, and I couldn’t stop it.

I was so good at not thinking about the things I didn’t want to think about. Except right now, I wasn’t.

Tell him
, I thought.
Tell him.

If I told him, I’d lose everything. I didn’t have much, but I wasn’t willing to risk it. Not yet. Not now. I had worked too hard for it. It
mattered
. Eddie mattered. This marriage mattered, and I wasn’t used to having something in my grip that I didn’t want to let go of. Something I wasn’t willing to leave behind.

“Do you ever wonder about your parents?” I asked into the quiet. “Your real ones?”

Eddie’s voice was slurring. He was drifting off into sleep. “I used to. Not so much anymore.”

“Do you ever wonder if you’re like them? If being like them is inevitable, even if you don’t know who they are?”

“That’s an intense question,” Eddie said, but of course, he answered. “Yeah, I’ve wondered that. I don’t even know if I look like either of my parents. I don’t have a picture of my mother, and I don’t remember my father at all.” He rubbed his forehead slowly. “Maybe one of them was a genius. Or a psychopath, you know? Maybe that’s why there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I would be like this, even if I hadn’t gone overseas.”

I was quiet, staring at the ceiling. My eyes were dry as sand.

“It was getting better for a while,” Eddie went on, his voice quiet. “But lately . . .” He trailed off.

“Lately what?”

“It isn’t getting worse, exactly. It’s changing. I don’t see the stuff I used to see. I see different things—or at least, I think I do.
The nightmares have stopped, but sometimes I feel like I’m dreaming.”

“Dreaming?” I asked.

“Dreaming everything,” Eddie said. “That I’m here, living this life, with you. Like I woke up and I was just here one day, and I don’t know how I got here. Logically, I know that I came home, I met you, we got married. But I get confused. The police kept asking me why I made the turn and ended up in Coldlake Falls, and I don’t have an answer for them. I don’t know, because I don’t really remember. I honestly don’t know how I got here.”

My heart was still beating in my throat. Because I didn’t remember, either. I had dozed off when we made the turn onto Atticus Line. Or had I? Did I remember that, or was it the story I told myself? What did I really remember for sure?

I was here, with this man, and I didn’t know how I got here, either. How well did we even know each other? We had met less than six months ago. I had changed so much since we met. How much had he changed, too?

“The memories I have of my mother,” Eddie said, “maybe I dreamed those, too. I remember her holding my hand at a playground, urging me to climb the ladder to the slide. I remember the feel of her hand in mine, the way I never wanted to let it go. I had no way to tell her that I just wanted to hold her hand, more than I wanted to play with the other kids, more than I wanted just about anything. I wanted to be wherever she was and hold her hand. And she thought I wanted to slide down the slide, like any other kid. So eventually, I did.” He paused. “Maybe that memory isn’t real. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“I know you think it makes you crazy, but to me it sounds nice,” I said. “I don’t dream.”

He shifted next to me. “What do you mean? Sure you do. Everyone does.”

“Not me. I wish I did. I remember everything.” I blinked at the ceiling, thinking about my mother, the years of our life together. If that were a dream, I would gladly wake up, but it wasn’t. I remembered every gritty detail, every exhausted late night on the road, every cheap apartment, every time I ate a candy bar for breakfast. I remembered the face of every man my mother dated, no matter how briefly. The facts of my life were relentless, unending, and none of them would leave my head, even for a minute, to leave room for a nicer dream.

I remembered the churning fear in my gut that one day I’d come home and my mother would be gone. Then it had actually happened, and I remembered that, too.

So, yes, I remembered everything. Until I met Eddie, and for the first time my life slipped by me like water. Until we’d made the turn onto Atticus Line, which I didn’t remember at all.

“What brought this on?” Eddie asked me. “The question about my parents? It was the conversation with Carla, right? About Shannon leaving her son.”

I was supposed to be the calm one, the one that soothed Eddie through his panic attacks. I wasn’t supposed to quietly fall apart while he lay next to me. “It’s a coincidence,” I said. “The fact that she left her son, like your mother left you. Carla said he went into the foster system. It has to be a coincidence, right?”

“I know,” Eddie said. “As soon as she started talking, I
wondered . . . I guess that’s how my mind works, how it’ll always work. Always looking for clues. I remember living out in the country—I don’t remember Midland. Even being there today, it wasn’t familiar to me.” He stared at the ceiling, thinking. “The math doesn’t add up. Shannon had a baby, not an eight-year-old in 1976. That was some other kid. Not me.”

His hand moved across the bed and took mine. Maybe it was supposed to be a gesture to comfort me, but it felt like a gesture to comfort himself. To reassure himself that I was still there.

“There’s nothing wrong with wondering,” I said.

He squeezed my hand. “I guess you think about the same things since your mother died. Wondering how things could have been different if she’d lived.”

I closed my eyes. They stung with guilt. “I don’t want to think about my mother,” I whispered.

“But you do think about her.” He sounded so certain. “You always will. You went through a lot with her.”

“Eddie.”

“I’m going to have a nap.” His thumb moved over the back of my hand, stroking it. “Then we’ll talk about it some more.”

When he had drifted off, I got up, showered, and dressed. When I came out of the bedroom I found Rose sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, a magazine open and unread in her hands. She stared at me hard.

“Don’t give me that look,” I said. “We’re married.”

“I have to wash your sheets, missy,” she said.

“Fine.” I grabbed a glass from the cupboard to pour myself some water. “I’ll wash them myself. Weren’t you married to your precious Robbie for years?”

“You leave Robbie out of this. Where were you both this morning?”

This morning? It felt like a long time ago. “Midland,” I said, taking the cheap plastic ice cube tray out of the freezer and twisting it so the cubes would pop up. “We had a lead that the Lost Girl might be from there. We found out there’s a missing girl from Midland named Shannon Haller.”

“That hitchhiker from the seventies?” Rose said. “That’s what you’re up to? You’re not going to get anywhere. Robbie never did.”

I put my glass down on the counter. “Robbie investigated the hitchhiker murders?”

Rose made a sniffing sound that eloquently told me I was an idiot. “Of course not. I told you, they wouldn’t make him detective because he was Black. He was a beat cop. They give detective jobs to men like Quentin. Didn’t mean that Robbie didn’t know what was going on, though. It’s hard to miss a bunch of murders happening in your town. He had his own questions.”

“And what did he think the answers were?”

“If you think you’re going to solve it, you’re not,” Rose said without answering my question. “We don’t have a crazed killer running around Coldlake Falls. We have irresponsible kids who hitchhike to Hunter Beach and back, and sometimes they get in trouble.”

I sifted her words in my head. “So you think it’s random, but Robbie thought there was a killer.”

“He had to knock on doors and ask questions,” Rose said. “That’s what beat cops do. No one knew those kids, and none of them had family here. I always told him—they’re just kids who had bad luck.”

I pulled up the chair next to her and sat down. “And he never agreed with you.”

Rose put the magazine down and adjusted her glasses. “He said that those kids were perfect victims,” she told me, reluctantly. “Old enough to have left home by their own choice. They were on the outs with their families, or they’d told everyone they were going on a trip, so no one expected them to come home. Hitchhiking on a remote road, sometimes at night. Robbie said it was the perfect setup for someone who’s hunting.”

Hunting.
It made sense, except that you’d have to drive Atticus Line every night for years, looking for a hitchhiker. Who did that? Wouldn’t they be noticed?

And as Eddie had said, if a man is hunting, why wouldn’t he bring a knife or a gun? He’d strangled them or bludgeoned them with rocks. Max Shandler had supposedly used the knife he kept in his car in case of an accident. I was no cop, but that sounded impulsive to me. Like Max—if it had been Max—had seen Rhonda Jean hitching, and had suddenly decided she was going to die.

And then each victim had been left, forgotten. Like Eddie said, the death was the point.

I looked at Rose. She was pretending to read her magazine, like she didn’t care about this conversation. “I heard a rumor,” I said. “I heard that the Coldlake Falls PD know exactly who the killer is, but they’ve covered it up all these years. Did Robbie ever say anything about that?”

Rose snapped the magazine shut. “Beatrice Snell,” she said, angrily. “And her crazy sister.”

That surprised me. “Um, maybe.”

“I worked with her at the grocery store.” Rose sniffed. “It’s
hard to shut that girl up and get a word in edgewise. UFOs, Roswell, the CIA giving people drugs—I never got a minute’s peace. Beatrice is morbid, but Gracie is the really crazy one. I’m not surprised they got their hands on you somehow. They’re going to get in real trouble one of these days, talking like they do.”

“Who does Gracie think the killer is? She had a theory she wasn’t telling us.”

“Probably because she doesn’t trust you enough, and she knows she’ll get in trouble if she repeats it too often. She thinks the killer is Detective Quentin.”

My jaw dropped open. “Holy shit.”

Rose looked like she smelled something bad. “I don’t like swearing. I had to remind Robbie all the time. I don’t care what you say outside my house, but leave your swears at the front door, under the mat.”

“It fits,” I said, ignoring her lecture. “He might be old enough. He’s in good shape. No one would suspect him.” Gracie, in her way, was kind of a genius. “It would explain why the murders haven’t been solved. It would also explain why he showed up at the hospital so fast at three o’clock in the morning, already dressed.”

“Wasn’t Beam there, too?” Rose asked.

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t in the mood for holes in the theory. “So the police have covered up the fact that one of their own is a killer. Maybe they needed someone to blame this time, so they framed Max Shandler. They could have put Rhonda Jean’s backpack in his truck, planted the knife they say they found.”

“Quentin isn’t a murderer,” Rose said. “Robbie was Coldlake PD. He would never have taken part in a cover-up like that—never. He would have died first.”

The bedroom door opened and Eddie came out, dressed in jeans and a tee. “Mrs. Jones,” he said, greeting Rose. Rose pressed her lips together and nodded at my husband without speaking. Eddie ducked his gaze away, embarrassed, and opened the fridge. Honestly.

“Mrs. Jones, would you like us to make dinner?” Eddie asked, still staring into the fridge. “I see hot dogs in here. I could barbecue them.”

“That grill out back hasn’t been used since Robbie died,” Rose said. “Two years.”

“Then I’ll clean it up and get it going for you.”

An hour later, we were finishing our meal and stacking the dishes. I was rinsing plates in the sink when I felt the light touch of a hand on my shoulder. “What is it?” I asked Eddie, not lifting my head.

“What is what?” Eddie asked. He was standing at the kitchen table five feet away, crumpling the used napkins.

My hands went still. I stood there, wondering what had just happened. Wondering who had touched me. Wondering why.

Eddie frowned at me. “April? Are you okay?”

Why?

My hands dropped to the counter. My stomach twisted. Cold sweat started on my back, but it wasn’t the same cold I’d felt on Atticus Line, the icy breath in the hot, sweltering air. This was a different cold, the cold of pure dread. The cold of fear blooming inside me.