It was always possible that the van and the signs were a new hobby, something Wil Vines had taken up to get his mind off his breakup, but Stella figured this added to the list of questions she’d have to ask Brandy.
Stella was letting herself out of the garage when her phone went off, making her jump. She still wasn’t used to her new ringtone, a trill of instrumental flute music that she thought would be a nice change from the head-banging crap Todd put on every time he got his hands on her phone, but which was turning out to be surprisingly annoying.
“Hello?”
“Stella, this is Irene. I just thought you might want to know that that Detective Simmons just took off outta here, headed back to Fayette.”
A warm little goody-goody sensation ticked in Stella’s stomach, but she kept her voice neutral. “Ain’t that a shame. Guess she didn’t care much for our local color, huh.”
“That ain’t quite it, hon. She took Neb Donovan with her. And he’s headed for jail.”
Donna Donovan’s
hysterical call followed not twenty seconds after Stella hung up with Irene.
“Stella, they cain’t take him off to jail like this!” she wailed. “He didn’t do anything wrong!”
Stella kept her thoughts on the matter to herself. The unsettling visit with Dr. Herman had changed her perspective on her favorite parolee, and not in a good way. “Calm on down, honey,” she said soothingly nonetheless. “Just ’cause he’s arrested, doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”
“But they don’t have any, any evidence!”
As a matter of fact, Irene had let slip that they did, but she wouldn’t say what it was.
“Listen, Donna,” Stella said. “There’s a couple of names I’d like to run by you. All’s I want to know is whether these names mean anything to you. Even if you just think you might have heard them somewhere, and you don’t know where, I want you to tell me.”
“Why? What’s that about?”
“It’s about … just maybe ways of helping me prove Neb didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Like alibis or something?”
“Uh, yeah, kind of like that. So one of them is Ashley de Boer.”
There was a brief pause, during which Stella could hear Donna breathing on the phone. She sounded winded, like she’d jogged up a flight of stairs, but Stella knew it was her nerves. It was a wonder the woman didn’t fly into pieces, she was so upset.
“No,” she finally said. “I’ve never heard of her.”
“All right. How about June Dunovich?”
“Well, sure, Stella, everyone knows about her—she gambled away her and Rex’s savings and ran off with a fellow that worked on the riverboats. Don’t tell me they think she’s the one dead out at the track?”
“It’s been suggested,” Stella admitted. “But just as a, you know, remote possibility.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s June. Everyone says she and her new man went out to New Mexico. I knew her from when the boys were in Little League, and she was a hot one even then. Sticky fingers, too, we always figured she was stealing the money she collected for the team parties. I mean, I doubt anyone got mad enough over
that
to kill her.”
“Okay.” It had been a distant possibility anyway. “There’s just one more—Laura Cassel.”
This time Donna didn’t even hesitate. “No. I have
never
heard of her. Is she another one that’s missing?”
“Yes, she was from up in Picot, never showed up to work one day. Thirtyish gal, single. The timing’s about right. There wouldn’t be … uh, any reason that Neb might have met someone? You know, away from work?”
Stella chose her words as carefully as she could, but there just wasn’t any pretty way to say it. She was thinking drug dealer, maybe someone who hooked Neb up with the black market OxyContin he’d been hoovering up back then, but given the fact that all these names were women, she feared she knew exactly where Donna would go.
And she was right. “Are you saying there was a woman?” Donna demanded, voice rising in pitch. “That he was having an affair?”
“No, I am not saying that, Donna. There could be a thousand reasons he might have met some woman, and I mean just
met
her, all innocent, like maybe waiting in a doctor’s office or I don’t know, ordering supplies for work or, or maybe shopping to buy you a birthday present—”
She was reaching, and they both knew it. “Neb isn’t like that,” Donna said, voice hoarse. “He doesn’t—he’s
shy
, Stella, when he ain’t with me. That’s why we always go everywhere together. He’s not one to go and introduce himself to any strangers or like that. He prefers it if I make the small talk. He just, you know, he likes to listen and—and—”
“What about … maybe who he was getting his Oxy from? Could that have been a woman?”
“Oh, no, Stella,” Donna said. “I don’t think so, Neb would of told me.”
She ended up, as Stella had feared from the start of the conversation, in sniffles. At least she wasn’t sobbing, but Stella still felt like a real heel when she begged off the phone, promising to check in again later and extracting a promise from Donna that she would call her niece, the fresh-minted law school graduate, and get her started on some sort of defense strategy.
“You just
find
the person who
did
this,” Donna wailed. “You find ’em, Stella, so I can get Neb home where he belongs.”
Stella stood indecisively on the walk between Wil Vines’s house and garage for a moment and then shrugged—Neb wasn’t going anywhere, and it would be a shame to cut this snooping expedition short.
Stella slipped around the side of the house and, after looking both ways, out to the street. In the time that she’d been inside, the sky had darkened; there were traces of blue here and there, but an accumulation of white clouds rolled into a ridge of gray and purple. It looked like rain again. Stella remembered her little footprint project and considered calling Todd to go get it into the house, as it should have been hardened by now, but she didn’t want to risk having him come over until Jelloman was in place.
Which he wouldn’t be for quite a while, as the football game was in full swing. She could hear it wafting from the house to the left of Vines’s, where a woman in a fuzzy pink sweatsuit swung lazily on a glider, sipping on a glass bottle.
When Stella got a little closer, she saw that it was a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Stella knew from experience that there was a kick in that bottle. “What’s the score?” she called, producing her friendliest smile.
“Hell if I know,” the woman said. “I come out here to get away from it.”
“Oh. Ah … I was looking for Wil Vines. Have you seen him around lately?”
The woman glanced up from her magazine and regarded Stella suspiciously. “You trying to sell him something?”
“Oh—no, ma’am. I’m his … second cousin. I thought he ought to know that my, uh, dad’s on life support. His great-uncle?”
“That wouldn’t be his great uncle,” the woman said doubtfully. “If you’re Wil’s second cousin, then your dad’s his second cousin once removed.”
“Oh. Yes. We just say great uncle to make it all simpler. But they were close, those two.”
“He into the model trains, too?”
“The … trains?”
“You know, the model trains Wil’s got in the basement? Them train guys are always over here lookin’ at that setup he’s got. Wil’s just awful proud of them. He keeps sayin’ how he’s gonna have the whole neighborhood over to see them, time he gets it all set up just so.”
Stella hadn’t seen so much as a single length of miniature track, despite a thorough scouring of the house and basement. Visitors to Wil’s place might have been enthusiastic, indeed, but it wasn’t itty-bitty trains that were getting them all hopped up. “Is that right. No, um, we’re just a close-knit family. Why, we do
love
that Brandy he took up with … such a shame those two split.”
The woman raised her plucked and penciled eyebrows. “Is that right? I didn’t find her to be all that friendly, myself.”
“Well, maybe if she’d managed to get settled in,” Stella gambled. “After all, how long were they together, just…”
“Near upon two years,” the woman said. “I believe that’s plenty long enough to make a civilized call on a person’s next-door neighbor. I tell you, I don’t know what Wil saw in her.”
Oops. “Seeing as he’s such a gentleman,” Stella guessed, crossing her fingers behind her back.
The woman nodded. “Uh-huh, that’s right. And working two jobs, no less, when
she
couldn’t hang on to a job to save her life. Why I think she was out of work more than she was in it, layin’ around that backyard in her bathing suit while decent folk are out trying to earn a living.”
“Oh? I forgot Wil got that other job. The uh, uh, what was it…”
“Cozy Closets,” the woman said. “He does the measuring for them, on top of all that construction work. Course there won’t be so much of that now that winter’s coming.”
Well, that was interesting. If Vines was measuring for closets, that was taking him into lots of folks’ houses, where he could get a real good look around at their valuables, figure out their coming-and-going schedule, and then make another call a few weeks down the road when the hapless homeowners didn’t even know they needed the services of a plumber or a furnace repairman. And meanwhile, Vines would be relieving them of whatever goodies he could sneak out to the van.
“He always was the industrious one,” she said.
“Isn’t that the truth.” The woman sighed, giving the glider a good solid shove with a pink-sneakered toe. “I tell you, I wish my mama would of sat me down before I got married and explained that pretty don’t count for near as much in a man as decency and hard work.”
“You’re telling me,” Stella said. On the way to the car, it occurred to her that she ought to have business cards made just for occasions like this.
Of Course
, then she’d have so much business that she wouldn’t have time to sleep, Stella realized as she headed up the interstate toward Fayette. She was practically halfway there already, and figured Neb might appreciate the visit.
She queued up her
Driving & Thinking
playlist, one she saved special for times like this. The iPod and the interface kit for the Jeep had been a get-well present from Noelle, and Stella had to admit it sure did beat carrying all those old CDs around. Eliza Gilkyson started up “Coast,” her sittin’-on-the-porch-with-you voice dancing in and out of the gentle guitar picking.
Did you ever think that it would be like this?
Ah, the price you pay for lo-ove …
Stella’s thoughts wandered ahead to her visit with Neb. She wasn’t exactly keen on visiting the jail, a place she half figured she’d be calling home someday, what with all the varieties of lawbreaking she found herself having to commit.
Why was she bothering with Neb, anyway? At this point, it seemed pretty certain that the man was guilty. It was a shame if it was the demon Oxy that made him do it, but Stella figured that taking a life was serious enough business that she ought not get in the way of the law on this one.
On the other hand … he wasn’t proven guilty yet. And Stella wasn’t confident that Priscilla, Donna’s attorney niece, would be much help.
A thought nagged distressingly close to the surface of Stella’s mind, tickling her guilt buttons. If this was one of her regular clients, which was to say one of her
woman
clients, nothing would get in the way of Stella making sure she got exactly as much defending and protecting and avenging as Stella could possibly provide, long hours and personal danger be damned. If the waters were muddy, if the gal appeared a bit guilty of this, a little responsible for that, Stella would disregard those factors in her quest for the overriding balance of good stomping the crap out of evil.
Of course, her clients generally had a fair amount of beat-down victimhood stored up that made them significantly more sympathetic in the harsh light of Stella’s consideration. What about Neb? Fond of the man as Stella was, much as she’d thought of the Donovans as practically an extension of family, you couldn’t exactly make the case that anyone had beaten or threatened him onto the troubled paths that led to addiction and cult involvement. He’d more or less made his own bed and climbed on in.
The outskirts of Fayette came into view, alfalfa fields giving way to saggy-porched bungalows with wash hanging on clotheslines. A tall sign announced welcome to fayette Pride of sawyer county! courtesy of your elks lions kiwanis optimists fayette womens club.
The thing was, Stella had always wished for a brother. A big brother, preferably, a tough and scrappy boy who would have beat the tar out of anyone who picked on her. Neb, for all his faults, was the grown-up version of the boy Stella longed for. Generally a man of few words, get him on one of the topics for which he carried a burning passion—his wife, say, or the Cardinals’ chances for the play-offs, or the fact that Hinomoto and Sitoh were building circles around American tractors—and he’d hold forth with a fervent light in his eye.
In a way, that was what led to his entanglement with the Eternal Realm of the Savior cult. Neb was attracted to beauty and righteousness and fiery rhetoric. The fact that he’d gone overboard and thrown his lot in with a bunch of zealots—well, there’d likely been more than a few belts of corn whiskey, not to mention all those confusing warm feelings that drinking with distant relatives can bring on, where the folks you can’t stand the rest of the year suddenly strike you as kind of charming in their i survived the donovan family reunion T-shirts—Stella could see that. Not smart, but understandable.
What she could
not
see was the kind of brutality that led a man to kill. Stella sighed as she took the exit toward the center of town. Maybe she ought to call up Dr. Herman again. She’d asked him about what Neb might have forgotten—but what she really should have asked was if the drugs could so scramble a person’s brain that they’d mix up their fundamental principles and values to the point that a decent family man suddenly figured it was a good idea to bash or strangle or shoot some blond-bobbed gal and shove her into a pool of concrete, watching the gloppy gunk burble over her like so much Duncan Hines frosting and smoothing it over with nary a niggling bit of guilt.