Raveled (29 page)

“I’m plannin' on takin’ a good, long look once she’s back on the loft.
Can hardly see her without my glasses, though,” he lied. “You got any more rope up here, Bobby?”

“Shoulda seen her flying around before,”
Bobby said. “Titties bouncin’ all over the place.”

Jasper and Smitty laughed with lustful envy,
Jasper’s forced, Smitty’s sincere.

Bobby
lay back on the floor and stared straight up. He decided that yes, that was definitely the image he was going with when he told this story in the locker room. Shelby Anderson, flying around the barn, buck naked and loving it. Maybe he’d even act it out in gym class while hanging from the climbing rope. It cracked him up just thinking about it.

“So Bobby, any rope?”
Jasper repeated.

“Nope.”

Jasper checked around, spotted a short piece at the far end of the floor. He walked over and picked it up. “Whaddya call this?”

Bobby glanced at it.
“That ain’t gonna reach her. Let’s call the fire department. They’ll get ‘er down.” The idea struck him as incredibly funny and he slammed his fists to the floor again as he laughed. “Be the best fuckin’ call they get all year.”

Jasper headed back towards the ladder
to climb down. “I’m gonna go look for more rope.”

“
Go get it from my car, why don’t you?” Bobby said, a challenging tone filling his voice as he propped himself up on his elbows.

“
Seriously?” Jasper said. “You have some?”

“Yup.”

“Well gimme your keys, genius.” Jasper used the taunt so frequently, it had almost become a nickname.

“Can’t,” Bobby said, wiping drips of vodka from his chin. “Car’s in the shop.”

“At Artie’s? That’s right over Garbage Hill.”

“They’re closed
,” Bobby said through a burp.

Jasper knew
that neither he nor Smitty had the nerve to break into Artie’s Autos, but the thought gave him the angle he needed. He walked back to his friend and spoke confidentially. “Bobby, you know you’re the only one with balls big enough to break in to Artie’s and get the hell back out. Me and Smitty, we gotta defer to you when it comes to balls and brawn and such. You game?”

Bobby s
plashed vodka on Jasper’s pants. “Nah.” He swigged another gulp, then stood up, felt lightheaded, and braced himself on his knees. “Hot damn, Smitty, that stuff is potent. You steal that from your daddy’s top shelf?”

“Sure did!” Smitty said withou
t looking at him. He’d relit a joint and was staring at Shelby, enjoying the occasional flash of nudity when she adjusted her position.

Shelby couldn’t hear their conversation over the music, but she could see a whole lot of nothin’ going on in the way of efforts to get her the hell down. “Bobby!
Jasper! Goddammit! Do something!” she shouted. “My legs are stickin’ to this seat out here, my arms are spent, and I gotta get home ‘fore I get grounded for a month!”

“
Christ, her voice
is
annoying,” Bobby said.

“Bobby,” Jasper said
with authority, “I can’t stand the whining. Now take Smitty’s car, drive over to Artie’s and get the rope outta your car. In the meantime, we’ll try to get her down. Leastways, it’ll shut her up.”

“
All right already! Christ!” Bobby turned to Smitty. ”Yo, gimme your keys.”

“No way
,” Smitty said. “I may be high and three sheets to the fuckin’ whatever, but I ain’t stupid enough to let you take my car when you’re breakin’ in to Artie’s. Again.”

“
Just gimme your fuckin’ keys. Artie prob’ly left my car outside, hoping it’d get ransacked. Guy hates my guts.”

“Nuh-uh. No way. My parents’d kill me if I get messed up in anything like that. Screw up college and
all that.”

“Bobby,”
Jasper said, his voice growing urgent as he glanced repeatedly at Shelby. “You run that football field a hundred times a day no problem. You can handle a half mile to Artie’s. Now go. I promise we’ll have an awesome night once we get her in here.”

Jasper let Bobby’s mind go wherever it wanted
to with that vague suggestion. Who knew what sick shit raced around in his frenzied head?

Bobby’s glassy eyes tried to focus on
Jasper. Jasper was right. Always was. That’s why Bobby kept him around. Plus, he grew the best pot in town and figured out complicated stuff, like fractions and whatever.

Bobby approached Smitty and
grabbed the joint out of his hand. He took a long, slow toke, held his breath, then released the smoke in leisurely tufts. He ran his fingers through the wasted wisps of his high, trying to push some of it back into his mouth. Finally, in no rush at all, he sauntered to the ladder and began the long climb down. As he descended, he heard Jasper take charge of the situation. Good ole Jasper. Still a faggot, though. And wait’ll he saw what Bobby had planned for Shelby once they got her back in.

“Shelby,
” Jasper said, “Bobby’s going to get more rope. Then you can start swinging to help shorten the distance we have to throw the rope. It’d help if you can jerk that swing back this way a little while he’s gone.”

“I’ll try,” Shelby said.

All Bobby could hear was
I’ll traaaaaa
. It echoed painfully in his head. God, she was a complainer. Made them titties almost not worth it. Almost.

A half
mile away, just over Garbage Hill, the shooting had stopped. In fact, it’d gotten so quiet at Artie’s Autos that Enzo, picking up remnants of Lionel the stinky bear, thought he heard rock music blaring in the distance. Eh, maybe his ears were just ringing from the gunshots. He turned to enter the garage and finish locking up for the night. Man, with the lights off and the moon making itself scarce, it was dark as pitch inside the garage.

Chapter
42

Allison… present

Halfway through Jasper’s letter, I set it aside and looked at the camera, in awe of what it might contain. Jasper had so far explained how he and Smitty had shown up at the barn, drunk and high, to find Shelby Anderson suspended forty feet in the air. What a trip that must have been.

The rumor mill proved itself worthwhile, too
. That barn had been in play the night of Shelby’s disappearance, and the infamous threesome had been there. Yet none of them had spoken up when Shelby was reported missing the next day. Granted, Bobby couldn’t have spoken up because he was bleeding to death on Dad’s garage floor. But Jasper and Smitty knew. Their silence was unfathomable. Unless something compelling was revealed in the remainder of the letter that explained their lack of character.

I tried to imagine the gyrations Bobby had g
one through to get Shelby dangling up there like a spider who’d run out of silk. A frightened, half-naked girl up against the burliest guy in the high school. A guy she’d probably allowed herself to fantasize about on nights when she was feeling confident, maybe admiring herself in a new bra in a cheap mirror behind her closet door, thinking that maybe, just maybe, she’d get some attention now that she was becoming a woman. Maybe even, well probably not, but just possibly, that drop-dead gorgeous Bobby Kettrick would notice her.
Can you even imagine
, she’d say to herself. And then her mind would drift.

Something told me her fantasies had
ended better than this letter would.

I
grabbed the camera and turned it over in my hand, this same cheap device that Jasper had held sixteen years ago. The very thing that may have gotten Jasper killed. It couldn’t have weighed more than a few ounces, yet it held such power. Why hadn’t Jasper developed the photos? Then again, where could he have gotten them processed without getting into a heap of trouble? All it would have taken for him to get thrown in jail would have been some perverted, minimum-wage employee who snooped through the developed photos in the hope of scoring some home-grown porn to jerk off to. As soon as they realized the girl in the photos was the missing Shelby Anderson, they’d have called the cops quicker than a jackrabbit.

Look, Officer! Look what I found for you. I took the liberty of flipping through these photos ‘cuz I thought that Jasper fella looked a mite suspicious. And I was right. Here it is, in the flesh if you know what I
mean. He was messing around with that Shelby girl, and something went awry, and he plum killed her
.

It would have been quite the scandal.
Trailer Park Trash Kills Trailer Park Trash
. The mayor would have spun it, too. Would have strung together some narrative implicating Jasper, even though Bobby would have been right there in the pictures. He’d have claimed Bobby was trying to save the poor girl. Jasper’s hide would have been cooked, his skinny ass hanged from the very rope Bobby was on his way to retrieve.

Oh my
God! The rope. I hadn’t even put it together. The rope in Bobby’s car! The rope that was found around Shelby’s waist when she was pulled from the creek was cut from the same length of rope in Bobby’s car. Everyone had assumed that Shelby had been tied up somewhere, maybe tortured, maybe raped, and then killed. Or that the rope had been tied to something heavy in order to weigh down her dead body in the creek. But no, the rope was actually her anchor to life. It was meant to keep her from falling to death while she swung in that barn.

So
Bobby must have been tied up with the rope from his own car, which was the main thing that linked my father to Shelby Anderson. It had tied the two victims together in death forever—and my dad to both of them. Why hadn’t this come out in the trial? Did anyone know Bobby had that rope in his car? Probably not. No one even knew about the swing.

Well,
two people had known. Jasper and Smitty. And they hadn’t said a word. They’d watched my dad go through that trial without so much as a peep. I could understand Smitty not standing up and doing the honorable thing. But Jasper? I’d have thought better of Jasper.

My eyes drifted to the
camera. I needed to find a place to develop those pictures. Would the film still be viable? Did Jasper’s strange metal box protect it from the elements and preserve the evidence within?

My phone rang,
making me jump and jolting me back to the present. I grabbed it.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Allison,” Ray said in a muted voice, as if the line were bugged and he thought it wouldn’t pick up a slow monotone. “Ray here. I’ve got some information you might find interesting. Is this line secure?”

I almost laughed, but refrained. “Yes, Ray. It’s all good. What have you got?”
I was tempted to tell him to speak in his normal voice, but if the thought of being a spy made him more informative, he could mimic Porky Pig for all I cared.

“I have some information on a certain
Shawn Smart.”

“
Shawn Smart?” I said. “Who’s Shawn Smart?”

“Well you’re not much of a detective, are you?”

Actually, no. Bartender. “I guess not.”

“
Shawn Smart was the visitor who signed in to visit Dr. Graft the day Jasper died. But Dr. Graft wasn’t here, remember?” Ray had returned to his usual, animated voice.

“Yes, of course. What’d you find out?”

“Only that Dr. Graft has never heard of a Shawn Smart from Brissel Pharmaceuticals, nor did she have an appointment with him, nor did she receive any samples from him. On my own, I did a search for Brissel Pharmaceuticals and guess what?”

“No such company?”

“Exactly.”

“So a guy with a fake identity was allowed to enter your facility and walk around unaccompanied?”

Ray lowered his voice. “I’m not going to confirm that as it might leave Ravine in a rather precarious legal situation. But draw your own conclusions. And don’t you think I should be going to the police with this?”

“
I’m not going to stop you, Ray.”

“But so far, we just have a guy dying from a heart attack. I don’t want to bring
any more negative publicity to Ravine, especially after the incident in Room 331.”

“I understand. It’s up to you. And I really appreciate you helping me like this. By the way, what was that about a heart attack?”

“That’s what Jasper died of, officially.”

“Did he have a history of heart problems?”

“Not that I know of. But let’s just say that most people checking in here have a history of substance abuse, which can damage the heart.”

I thought back as hard as I could.
Had Jasper’s dad died of a heart attack? A vague memory tried to resurface. When we were growing up, some kid’s dad had suffered a heart attack while bowling. I couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, but I remembered Kevin telling me the guy was a miner and he’d died right after the ball left his fingertips. It stayed with me because the sum total of Kevin’s feelings about the matter were: “Rolled a strike and never even knew it.” Perhaps at the time, Kevin thought that had to be life’s biggest disappointment. Little did he know.

“
His dad might have died of a heart attack,” I said. “In his thirties or forties.”

“Well, that could be it, then,” Ray said. “Of course, if I was going to kill someone and I knew his family history, I’d try to make it look like a heart attack, too.”

Ray presented his insight with a throwaway lightness but it hit me like a boulder. Everyone in Lavitte would have known how Jasper’s father died, including, and most especially, Smitty—the guy who took off in his Jeep Grand Cherokee the day before Jasper died, in an outfit that would pass for a pharmaceutical salesperson.

“Hey Ray,” I said, “
you may be on to something. You guys have surveillance cameras?”

“
Not on Jasper’s floor. Voluntary patients.”

“How
about the elevators?”

“Yes.”

“And by the reception desk?”

“We do, but it’s been broken for a year. Can’t see anything but cracks through it.” He lowered his voice. “Between you and me, I think Julia took a hammer to it so they wouldn’t be able to snoop on her.
She’s quite the sneak.”

“
Could you check the elevator cameras for a person who entered the building around the time Shawn Smart signed in?”

“Sure. I’ll check. If he was trying to go incognito, though, he might have used the stairs and then we won’t have him.”

“Okay, do whatever you can. The guy I’m thinking about is early thirties, suit and tie, plain face, kind of ashy-looking. Someone you’d cast as a waiter.”

“Got it.
I need to finish the paperwork for that warranty claim, then there’s a conference room to prepare, and then I’ll have time. I’ll call if I find anything.”

“Thanks, Ray
.”

“Over and out.”

I picked up the letter to finish reading and realized I was no longer reading with the hope of clearing my father’s name. I was focused like a laser on finding out what happened in that barn. If Bobby never returned from my father’s garage, that left Jasper and Smitty alone with Shelby. What the hell had happened?