Something Borrowed, Something Bleu (14 page)

The newspaper had no
idea who I was talking about when I asked to speak to Carrie Romain, the reporter who had written the article about Gwen Miller. I was shuttled back and forth for a while, until it became obvious she didn’t work there anymore. I hung up and frowned at Barr, sitting at the kitchen table across from me.
“Now why would I think a reporter would still be at the same job after all this time?” I stifled the urge to thump the heel of my hand against my forehead.
He took a bite of spicy zucchini bread spread with cream cheese and washed it down with a long swallow of iced tea. Cold droplets ran down the glass where his fingers had disturbed the condensation.
“You think she’s still in town?”
“Who knows?” I grumped. “Probably not, the way people move around any more.”
“Check the phone book, crankypants. Romain isn’t that common a name.”
He was right. There was only one Romain listed. Grant Romain.
“She’s moved,” I said. “She could be anywhere.” I picked up the phone and dialed the number, though. Perhaps Grant was a relative and could tell me where to find Carrie.
The man who answered confirmed that his name was Grant. When I told him I was looking for Carrie, there was long pause, and I wondered whether I’d happened into a family feud.
“Um, were you a friend of hers?”
I closed my eyes and covered them with my hand.
Were
. I’d done it again. Carrie Romain was deceased.
“My name is Sophie Mae Reynolds. I, uh, was trying to track down some information from one of her newspaper stories from several years ago, some information that wasn’t included but that I thought she might have in her notes.” I stopped and waited for him to tell me.
“I’m afraid Carrie passed away fourteen years ago. Cancer.”
“I’m so very sorry. Are you … were you her husband?”
“Thank you. Yes, she was my wife. Um, perhaps if you tell me a little more about which story you were interested in, I could check her notes and get back to you? I still have all of them, and she was religious about keeping them in order.”
Hope flickered on the edge of my awareness, but I kept my voice even as I said, “That’s very generous of you, Mr. Romain. The story was about a girl who fell in the river east of town. She was rescued but then died on the way to the hospital. Hypothermia.” I told him the date the story had appeared in the
Courier
.
A sharp intake of breath, and then its slow release. “Gwen Miller,” he said.
The hope flared bright. “Yes.”
“Why are you inquiring into her death?”
Lying was all well and good, but I usually had better luck with the truth. Besides, I wasn’t on the defensive with a reporter or anyone in law enforcement here, merely talking to a widower. “My brother was involved with Rancho Sueńo. He killed himself, and I’m trying to figure out why.”
Barr’s head jerked up at my bald words.
Grant Romain said, “Um, Sophie Mae?” Something in his voice.
Now trepidation bordering on dread swirled into my emotional mix. The hand holding the phone trembled, and the handset knocked gently against my ear. Barr’s eyebrows furrowed and concern sharpened his gaze.
“Yes?”
“I think you’d better come to my house and see those notes for yourself.”

_____

Questions poured out of Barr as we drove to Romain’s home.
“Yes, he seemed to know exactly what I was talking about,” I said. “And I certainly got the feeling he had more information that he’s willing to share, but other than that we just have to wait until we get there. Turn left at Cheyenne Avenue. We’re almost there,” I said, peering at the directions I’d scribbled down.
We pulled up in front of an older ranch-style home in the neighborhood known locally as Indian Hills. The lawn was neatly mowed, the landscape tidy, and flowerbeds along the front of the house shone forth in a flurry of brilliant color. Zinnias hovered behind delicate moss roses, and above them towered flirty hollyhocks. Roses were interspersed with freeform evergreen topiaries along the sides of the curving cement pathway leading from the public sidewalk in front. The beds on each side of the driveway boasted hardy perennials, among them wild geraniums, purple larkspur, yellow potentilla, brilliant California poppies and clumps of ornamental grass. An apple tree shaded the open garage. The air smelled green.
A tall woman with hair more salt than pepper answered the door. Her smile crinkled the skin around clear blue eyes, and her colorful East Indian print sundress set off a deep tan.
“Um, hi. I’m Sophie Reynolds,” I said, stumbling over the words. “This is my fiancé, Barr Ambrose.” I made a vague gesture to where he stood behind me.
“And you’re here to see Grant,” she finished for me. “I’m Lorrie Romain. Come on in.”
I crossed the threshold, glancing down at the ring on her left hand. Well, people did get remarried, didn’t they? I was, after all. My first husband, Mike Reynolds, had been gone six years now, and he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“He’s down in the basement, going through Carrie’s old files. Seemed pretty excited after you called. Follow me.”
We did, down a short hallway painted red-orange and decorated floor to ceiling with funky African art and masks. At the bottom of the stairs we discovered an unfinished basement, surprisingly clean and dust free. Shelves all along the walls held boxes and bins with lids, each displaying a neat label marking the contents. Toward the back of the space a man stood hunched over a card table strewn with file folders.
“Grant, they’re here,” his wife said.
He looked up and waved us farther into the room. The impatient gesture was at odds with a man who looked like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Santa Claus. Cherub cheeks smiled under twinkling eyes and a thick, heavy mass of white hair. He wore denim shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt with leather sandals.
“So you’re Sophie Mae,” he said. “Welcome to the archives.”
“Thanks for being so willing to show me your, er, Carrie’s notes. This is Barr Ambrose.”
He shook Barr’s hand vigorously, and then my own. “Pleasure to meet both of you.” His arm stretched out over the table, encompassing all the paperwork. “These are all of Carrie’s notes from the Miller girl’s death and what she could find out about Rancho Sueńo. I was just looking over them again to familiarize myself with the story.”
“Grant was very interested in Carrie’s work,” Lorrie said. “She often discussed what she was writing and bounced ideas off him.”
I looked at her, curious.
“Oh, Carrie and I were good friends. I miss her dearly. And her work fascinated me as well.”
“This story was special, though,” Grant said. “As soon as you mentioned Rancho Sueńo and your brother, I knew I had to pass on the information she’d gathered. Carrie became ill shortly after she wrote it, and she had to leave the paper. But this story bothered her until she passed away.”
In a careful tone, I asked, “Why was that?”
“Because enough things about it were fishy that she suspected there was a cover-up of some kind. She could never prove anything, though.”
My pulse quickened. “Do you remember what she found ‘fishy’?”
“There was a discrepancy between when the Miller girl went in the river and when she went to the hospital. Then two of the witnesses just up and left before talking to anyone, managing to disappear into thin air, despite the fact that they were teens on the run.”
“The authorities tried to find them, figured they must have given Dunner false names.”
“True, even believable. But it was still …”
“Fishy.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m interested in the time discrepancy you mention, between the accident and the hospital. That does sound suspicious. Is it possible it wasn’t an accident at all? Why wouldn’t the sheriff’s department have pursued the investigation further?”
Romain’s lips twisted ironically. “The problem kind of took care of itself.”
I looked the question at him.
“Without the kids who took off before anyone could talk to them, the only witnesses were Ray Dunner, Ogden Dunner and another girl who was there.”
“The mystery girl,” I breathed.
He nodded. “Her story changed within an hour of getting to the hospital.”
Intriguing. I plunged on. “Her name wasn’t in any of your wife’s articles. Did she know who she was?”
Grant Romain’s head inclined a fraction. His next words seemed chosen with care. “According to Carrie’s notes, the girl’s name was Krista Jaikes.”
It took a moment for that to sink in.
“Sheriff Jaikes’ daughter.” I glanced over at Barr.
“He wasn’t sheriff then,” Romain said. “He was a deputy. A deputy with ambition, but still a deputy.”
My hand crept over my mouth. “Oh, my God. The sheriff covered something up, and …” My eyes welled. “… Bobby Lee—”
Romain held his hand up as Barr put his arm around my shoulder. “No, no, no. There’s no proof of that at all. If there had been, Carrie would have gone with it. Krista was seventeen, so Carrie agreed to keep her name out of the article. And the sheriff’s investigators believed her. It wasn’t only her father.”
“But it’s still
fishy
.”
He hesitated. “Yes. It was.”
I leaned against Barr, reeling from this new information. It could be the key, the absolute key to everything.

Grant handed us a
stack of paper, saying, “I had time to copy the file notes, but not the two notebooks. Take those with you, if you’ll promise to bring them back when you’re done with them.”
I was speechless in the face of his generosity.
“Thank you,” Barr said with feeling. “This means a lot to us.”
“It’s what Carrie would have wanted,” Lorrie said.
Romain nodded. “She’s right. Carrie would have wanted you to have this information if there’s any way it can bring you peace.”
I managed to stammer out a thank you, and we took our leave loaded with more information from this one meeting than I’d managed to glean the whole time I’d been in Spring Creek.
In the passenger seat I rifled through the paper the Romains had given us. “Let’s get this stuff home and spread it out, see what else is here.”
“Of course,” Barr said, driving just as sedately as ever.
I was about to tell him to hurry, but when I looked over, the expression on his face stifled any thought I’d had about commenting on his old lady driving.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything for a while. I waited, knowing he would eventually.
“Corrupt law enforcement pisses me off.”
“Well, of course it does. But we don’t know yet if that happened.”
“If it did—”
“Then we’ll deal with it when the time comes.”
It wasn’t his jurisdiction, and he didn’t even live in the same state, but I knew if there was something awry in the local sheriff’s department Barr would dive right in to fix it. I had to admit, the thought didn’t exactly thrill me.
Maybe I’d change my mind if it turned out Sheriff Jaikes had jeopardized my brother.

_____

When Dad walked into the living room, he found us sitting on the floor surrounded by the copies of Carrie Romain’s notes. A lot of the information was repetitive; she’d kept her written notes even after she’d typed them up. It looked like she had actually used a typewriter for some of them. Others were dot matrix or laser printouts—presumably from a printer at home and another at work.
Dad spied the two reporter’s notebooks and folded himself to the floor in front of them. “What do we have here?”
“These are the notes the reporter took who covered Gwen Miller’s death.”
His jaw slackened. “How on earth did you manage that?”
I explained about Grant and Lorrie Romain wanting to help us.
“Trust you to go with your instinct and have it turn out right, Kiddo.”
Barr smiled. I looked at the floor, pleased with the compliment but unwilling to say so.
“So let’s see what we have here.”
For the next forty-five minutes we sifted and sorted and read and commented. I told Dad about Krista Jaikes, but he didn’t know what to make of that information any more than we did.
“We need more.” He flipped a page in Carrie Romain’s notebook.
“What about the time discrepancy that Grant Romain mentioned?”
The three of us scooted together on the carpet, comparing notes. The official story was that the girl had fallen in the water, and Ray had rescued her. Everyone immediately hustled her back to Rancho Sueńo. Tom and Jane Smith slipped away, but Ogden Dunner didn’t have time to go after them. He’d loaded Gwen Miller into his truck and rushed to Spring Creek General.
But when Carrie Romain had talked to Krista Jaikes, the girl told her everyone had tried to get Miller warm at the house first. It hadn’t worked. Krista had been sent to draw a warm bath for the girl, but when she came back the only ones left were Ray Dunner and his father. Mrs. Dunner was visiting her sister. They’d wrapped the girl up in blankets and were getting ready to take her into town.
Then Ray Dunner had pulled the Jaikes girl away, and the next thing the reporter knew the story was that Ogden Dunner had immediately bundled Miller up and driven her into town.
Other than that, most of the information wasn’t new, or didn’t seem important. We did get a fuller picture of Rancho Sueńo, and a more well-rounded construction of the character of the man who owned it began to form in my mind.
Ogden Dunner was married to Constance Dunner, and they had one son, Ray. He’d been a pastor in a small church in Spring Creek for decades when he inherited a sizeable chunk of land east of Spring Creek. By selling off part of the land he was able to build Rancho Sueńo, a home he’d dreamed of for years. It was big enough to host homeless teenagers, whether runaways, addicted, or abused. He wanted them to feel safe and to find a sense of community. Dunner also wanted them to come to Jesus, but even though he prayed with them before mealtimes, he didn’t insist they convert. I found this last interesting, especially given what Anna Belle had said about him. It turned out the evangelist was more open-minded than I’d originally given him credit for. Before Gwen Miller died, he’d owned Rancho Sueńo for three years without any kind of run-in with the law.
After she’d gathered so much information, it was too bad the
Courier
didn’t have Carrie Romain write all the articles about Ogden Dunner. Of course, her husband said she’d fallen ill and left her job, so she hadn’t had the chance.
“Whoa. This might be something,” Dad said.
I dropped an interview with one of the Dunners’ neighbors on the floor. “What?”
“According to this, Krista didn’t only change her mind about what time Gwen Miller fell in the river. She also changed her mind about the relationship between Gwen and Ray Dunner.”
I leaned back on my elbows on the carpet. Beside me Kitty Wampus erupted into a purr and stretched to his full length in a splash of afternoon sun.
“Do tell,” I said.
Barr put down the file he was looking at, too, and watched my father with interest.
“At first she said Gwen was Ray’s girlfriend,” my dad said. “Then Ray denied that, and Krista changed her story. Said they were all just friends.”
“Any other notes about that?”
“Only that no one wanted to talk to any reporters—not the family, and not Krista Jaikes. Romain was already at the hospital, following up on that story about the woman who beat up an intruder.”
Right. The panty raider.
“When they brought in the Miller girl, Romain started asking questions about what happened. That’s how she got the chance to talk to the Jaikes girl in the first place.”
“Hmm.” I smiled. “I wonder whether Krista would talk to us now?”
My dad looked skeptical. “Wouldn’t count on it. But you never know. I never would have thought you’d get all this information, either.”
“I might not have if the reporter had still been alive.”
“The point is that you did. Is Krista Jaikes still in Spring Creek?” Dad asked.
Barr already had the phone book out and answered him. “Not unless she has an unlisted number.”
“Check the web,” Dad said.
I dutifully retrieved Barr’s computer. Soon he was typing away. “At least it’s a fairly rare name. I only show two of them when I do a search in the U.S. One is 54 years old, though. Ah, here we go: Krista Jaikes, thirty-two years old, listed both in Spring Creek and in—” He flourished with his left hand.
“You’re killing me, here,” I said.
“Youngstown, Ohio.” More typing, and then he looked puzzled. “But she’s not listed in the white pages there, either.”
“Try a general search on her name. Use quotation marks around it,” Dad said.
Clickety clack, clickety clack. Then, “Bingo. Here’s an engagement announcement in the Youngstown
Vindicator
.” His face glowed with the pleasure of the hunt. “She married Logan Madden five years ago.”
Dad looked pretty happy, too. My two favorite guys had a lot in common. I, however, was more than a little creeped out by how easy it was to find people. But I didn’t have anything to hide, and it sure made life easier when you were trying to track down someone from the past.
“Let me check the phone number … yep, here you go.” He read off the digits.
Hurriedly, I copied it down.
Barr closed his laptop and looked over at me. “Okay. Now what do you want to do?”
I looked at my watch, surprised to find it was nearly five o’clock. “What’s the time difference?”
“If I’m not mistaken, they’re two hours ahead of us,” Dad said.
Meghan, Kelly, and Erin trooped through the front door. Everyone was getting a tan by now, after spending all that time in the Colorado sun, and Kelly and Meghan were breathless with praise for the bike-friendly community of Spring Creek.
“We spent all day riding the different trails, stopping by the river, having lunch. You can get anywhere you want to on a bike here,” Meghan said.
Kelly nodded his agreement. “If one of the trails doesn’t go where you want to be, all those wide streets and bike lanes sure make it easy.”
My dad grinned. “It’s pretty great, isn’t it? Did you have fun, Erin?”
“Sure.” She stomped up the stairway without another word. Her exit left a pall on the room.
“What happened?” Dad asked.
Kelly shook his head in bewilderment. “No idea. It seems to come and go with her. Say, what’s all this?”
“Reporter’s notes about Rancho Sueńo and the girl who fell in the river there,” I said.
He started to ask another question, then saw the look on Meghan’s face. She was still upset about Erin. He gestured to her, and they excused themselves to go out to the backyard. Barr and I exchanged looks, and he grimaced. Erin wasn’t making things easy on her mother and her new beau.
I’d check in with her later. Check in with Erin, too, for that matter.
We’d finished organizing all of Carrie Romain’s notes when Anna Belle breezed in from an afternoon at the university terrorizing new students during orientation. We gathered in the kitchen, and I updated her while Dad and Barr began dinner preparations. When I was done, my mother went up to her room to change out of her skirt.
I grabbed the cordless telephone handset and held it behind my back. Barr nodded at me, and I slipped around the corner and ran lightly up the stairs to the bedroom, the slip of paper with Krista Madden’s phone number clutched in my hand.