Authors: Unknown
made-up eyes.
“Are you okay?” the woman shouted.
She nodded yes, but the woman’s forehead was still crinkled
with worry, so she gestured for the Good Samaritan to move back
so she could open the car door. She unlocked the door, stepped out
into the cool night air, and smiled reassuringly at the woman.
“I’m fi ne. Th anks for stopping to check on me.”
“Sure, okay.” Th e woman pulled her jacket closer around her body.
Aroostine noticed she was wearing a sequined leotard under it.
Gray yoga pants and fl ip fl ops completed the outfi t. She examined the woman’s face more closely. Th ick eyeliner, lots of blush, and
bright red lipstick couldn’t hide her tired pallor.
“Are you a cocktail waitress up at the casino?” she asked. It was
the only explanation for the attire.
“Yeah. Ruby Smith.” Th e woman stuck out her right hand to
shake and her coat fell open.
Aroostine took her extended hand. “Aroostine Higgins.”
“Are you having car trouble or something?” Ruby jerked her
head toward the Jeep’s engine.
“No, nothing like that. I’m just waiting for my husband.”
While
he stomps around in the woods or communes with nature or whatever
he’s doing.
Ruby cocked her head and glanced over at her car.
“Uh, okay. Listen, I don’t know if you’re from around here or
what, but a guy was killed tonight. It’s probably not safe to just be hanging out on the side of the road, you know?”
So word of the murder was getting around.
47
MELISSA F. MILLER
“No, I’m not from here. I’m sorry to hear about the death.” She
considered Ruby’s tense face. “Were you . . . close to him?”
“Not like that. He lived next door to me. He was a completely
harmless, nice guy, and he took a bullet right between the eyes . . .”
Ruby trailed off and took a long, shaky breath. Th en she frowned
and gestured toward her own car, moving her hand in a downward
motion,
“I can see how that would be disturbing—” Aroostine began,
then she turned to look where Ruby was gesturing and stopped
midsentence.
A tiny face was pressed up against the rear passenger side win-
dow, grinning. Its owner waved excitedly at her.
Th e pieces began to fall into place. She turned back to Ruby.
“You’re Lily’s mom?”
“How do you know Lily?” Ruby’s voice was raw with suspicion.
“I met her when I was leaving the steak house. She was playing
fairy in the bushes while she waited for you,” Aroostine hurried to explain.
Ruby’s posture softened just a bit.
“Oh, okay,” she said with a nod. Th en her eyes widened and her
voice shook. “I don’t usually bring her up to the casino. I just . . . I didn’t know what else to do.”
A twinge of guilt ran through Aroostine for her earlier judg-
ment of the woman. “First of all, you don’t owe me any explana-
tions. Second of all, I’d say you did the right thing. Your next-door neighbor was murdered. You couldn’t very well leave her home alone
after that.”
Ruby gulped down air and nodded again. “Yeah.”
Ruby’s rear car door opened slowly.
“Lily Lotus Smith, don’t you dare!”
Th e door closed. Lily made a sad face out the window.
Aroostine tried not to laugh.
48
CHILLING EFFECT
“She seems like a great kid,” she told Ruby.
“She is. She’s so smart and hardly gives me any trouble. She’s a
little bit fl ighty, though. Always living in her make-believe world.”
Ruby paused for a moment. “I think it’s her way of dealing with
living on the reservation. She pretends she’s in some faraway land
or something to escape.”
Aroostine thought of another little girl who used to pretend she
lived on the moon, under the sea, anywhere but where she really
lived—a place of limited opportunity but no end of misery.
“Th at’s normal. She’s just creative.”
Ruby gave her a sidelong glance, as if she knew she was receiv-
ing parenting advice from the childless. “She’s got to keep her head on straight. Th at was one reason I liked her spending time with
Isaac. He . . . he made something of himself. He got a degree, had
a good job. I thought it would show her that it wasn’t a fantasy—a
better life was a real possibility for her, even if she never got off the res . . .” Ruby choked back tears.
Aroostine gnawed her lower lip. She had no idea what to say
to comfort the woman. She was obviously shaken up enough to be
confi ding in a complete stranger who she met on the side of the
road. Before she had the chance to frame a response, Ruby wiped
her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing mascara and eyeliner
across her face, and sniffl ed.
“Sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” She straightened her
back like a woman who was used to doing hard things and pushing
back fear and doubt.
“Please, don’t be,” Aroostine said. Th en she plunged in, unwill-
ing to let the opening pass. “You know, I found him.”
Ruby blinked. “Found him—Isaac?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a friend of his or something?”
“Not exactly.”
49
MELISSA F. MILLER
Ruby eyeballed her. “Th en who are you,
exactly
?”
Aroostine exhaled slowly. If she was going to stick around and
try to get to the bottom of Isaac Palmer’s death, she’d need an ally.
And, so far, the cocktail waitress seemed like the most viable candi-date, if only because she was actually willing to speak to Aroostine.
Her inner lawyer took over and blurted out the words before she
could second-guess herself. “I’m an attorney with the Department
of Justice. Do you know any reason why someone would want to
kill Isaac? You said he was well liked.”
Ruby stepped back as if putting physical space between them
would shut down the line of questioning. “I think what I said was
he was harmless. And he was—he was just a numbers cruncher for
the casino.”
Ruby’s words were neutral, but her tone was saying
I know more
about this than I’m letting on.
Aroostine decided to push her, just a little.
“So in his position he had access to the casino’s fi nancial infor-
mation, bank accounts, and a lot of money, right?”
Th e other woman shrugged and glanced over to check on her
daughter again. “I guess. I wouldn’t know. In
my
position, I hav
my
e
access to the casino’s watered-down rail drinks and domestic bottles.”
Wrong approach. Aroostine dropped the all-business lawyer act
and appealed to the mother standing in front of her.
“Ruby, listen, you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I get
that. But I can tell you’re a good person.”
“Oh, yeah, can you read minds?”
“No. But I can interpret what I see. You stopped on a dark,
rarely traveled road to check on me. You didn’t have to do that.
You’re worried about your daughter’s future. A daughter who, by the way, is delightful. So I can tell you’re doing a good job raising her on your own. And you’re upset about Isaac’s death, which is more
than I can say about your tribal police. I don’t need to be a mind
50
CHILLING EFFECT
reader to know that you’re a good person. I want to fi nd out who
murdered your friend and why. Help me.”
Ruby’s eyes fl itted to her car again. Lily had abandoned her win-
dow vigil and was waving her wand around the backseat, probably
casting some sort of spell. She watched her daughter for a moment
and then glanced back at Aroostine with a hard expression, like she’d made a decision.
“You have to keep my name out of it.”
“I will.”
“I need your word. I have Lily to worry about.” She said her
daughter’s name with heavy emphasis, driving home the point that
Aroostine’s promise wasn’t for her benefi t, but for the girl’s.
“I understand. You have my word.”
Th ey regarded one another for a silent moment that seemed to
stretch endlessly into the night. Ruby gave a small nod, like she’d seen something in Aroostine’s face that satisfi ed her.
“Okay. Isaac said someone was siphoning off money from the
casino.”
“He told you this?”
“Yeah. A couple weeks ago, I ran into him when I was going to
pick up my paycheck. He was all excited about it.”
“Do you know who else he might have told?”
Th e woman shook her head fi ercely, swinging her high-combed
hair wildly around her head. “No one. No way he would have told
anyone else.”
“But he told you.”
“Right. And I told him that running around saying things like
that was a great way to get himself killed. Looks like I was right, too.” Her voice cracked.
Aroostine stopped herself from pointing out that if Isaac really
hadn’t told anyone other than Ruby then she was going to fi nd herself 51
MELISSA F. MILLER
the principal suspect in a murder investigation. “How can you be so sure, though, that he didn’t confi de in someone else?”
“I think I really scared him when I said that. He started to get
paranoid, fearful of everything. I just know he wouldn’t have. Plus, who else would he tell?”
“I have no idea. Why’d he tell you? Th at seems like an odd thing
to share with a neighbor.”
Ruby pursed her lips and grappled with how to respond. She
let out a small sigh. “Isaac had a crush on me, okay? He was try-
ing to impress me. I liked him, I liked how he was with Lily, but I didn’t feel that way about him. So I acted like I didn’t know about his feelings, even though they were pretty obvious. But he wouldn’t have told anyone else. I know it.”
“Okay. Understood. Did he tell you any details—how he found
out about the embezzlement, who he thought might be behind it,
anything?”
Another pause and another breath. Th en Ruby said, “Yeah. I’d
gotten angry with him about the whole mess and told him not to
talk to me about it. Th en, about a week ago, Lily was at his house—
he was teaching her how to play chess. I went over to pick her
up, and I could tell something was wrong, you know? He had this
real tight expression on his face. He was a million miles away even though he was laughing at Lily’s jokes or whatever. I was worried
about him. So after I put her to bed, I walked back over and invited him to my place for a drink.”
“And?”
“And he got drunk, sloppy, because he’s not—wasn’t—a big
drinker. And he started running me this wild story about how he
thought the stolen money was somehow related to the missing drones.”
Aroostine tried to make sense of the words Ruby was saying,
but it was as if the other woman were speaking some language other
than English.
52
CHILLING EFFECT
“I’m sorry, did you say drones?”
Ruby stared at her, disbelief and panic fl ooding her face.
“You mean Washington doesn’t know?”
“Know what?”
“I can’t believe they haven’t noticed. Listen, I have to get Lily to bed. Come to my house in the morning and I’ll tell you all about
the military drones that have disappeared from the testing facility here.” She started back to her car and her sleepy daughter.
“Wait. Which side of Isaac’s house?”
“I live to the left as you’re looking at the houses. Lily leaves for school at seven thirty. Come any time after that.” Ruby looked at
Aroostine over her shoulder and then shook her head. “You really
didn’t know?”
“About the missing drones? No.”
Ruby shook her head again as she slid behind the wheel of her
late-model Buick and started the ignition.
Aroostine stood motionless beside the Jeep processing the news
that Ruby had just dropped on her.
Missing military drones?
53
Joe parked the Jeep two houses to the right of Isaac’s front door,
with its bright yellow X of crime scene tape. Aroostine made out
the silhouette of Ruby’s Buick parked in front of the house to the
left of Isaac’s. Her house was still and dark. Aroostine imagined her sitting on the edge of Lily’s bed telling her a story as she smoothed the girl’s hair over her pillow.
“Now what?” she asked Joe.
She hadn’t fully understood his change of heart—something
about a bird and a man named Boom, but he’d come out of the
woods with a lead on accommodations for the night and a desire to
stay—so she wasn’t complaining.
“Uh, I’m guessing it’s unlocked,” he said defensively.
She arched a brow at that, but the response forming on her tongue
melted away when she noticed the sky. “Look up,” she breathed.
It was as if someone had thrown a blanket of stars over the
earth. Small pinpoints of light stretched overhead, almost dizzying CHILLING EFFECT
in number and brightness. No moon, no clouds. Just stars, some
clustered close together in the black sky and others sprinkled far-
ther apart.
“Whoa.”
He reached for her hand, and they stood together in silence—
their breathing the only sound—and drank in the sight. Th en as if
by unspoken agreement, they walked across the road to the meadow
where just hours earlier she’d found the dead jackrabbit. Th ey settled on the fallen log, and she leaned back against his warm chest and
tipped her face to the galaxies, planets, and constellations swirling above them.
After a long silence, he said, “Th at Boom guy knew about the