Crooked Little Lies (11 page)

Annie rubbed her eyes. There had been dozens of sightings reported to the hotline since Monday, maybe hundreds by now. Every one had proved worthless. It was the same with Bo’s cell phone. Tracing that had proved useless, too. According to the records law enforcement obtained from Bo’s provider, his last call was to Annie more than a week ago, the same day he’d come to the café and they’d had tea. If he’d used the phone since, there wasn’t documentation of it.

Madeleine was saying something about dogs. Search-and-rescue dogs, Annie realized, and her breath hitched. Weren’t dogs brought in as a last resort? When most everyone figured the lost person was dead? Weren’t those dogs sometimes called cadaver dogs?

Cooper looked at Annie. “They’ll need something that belonged to Bo, something that will give the dogs his scent.”

Annie pulled Bo’s earmuffs from where she’d been wearing them around her neck. “Will these work?” She was reluctant to give them up, even for a good reason. She wondered if she would get them back. She wondered if she put them over her ears right now, would she finally hear Bo. Would he tell her where he was?

Cooper took them from her. “I don’t know, since you’ve been wearing them. Maybe these and something else. A shirt or something?”

“I’ll go home,” Annie said, “see what I can find.”

“I’ll drive you,” Cooper said.

But Annie said no, she had her own car. “You’ve done enough.” She went in search of her purse.

Cooper followed her. “You aren’t in any condition to drive.”

“And you are? Have you slept?”

“You’re missing the point,” Cooper said. “I’m not as emotionally strung out.”

“I didn’t ask for this.” She meant his concern.

He misunderstood. “No one asks for stuff like this.”

She averted her gaze.

He cupped her elbow. “Annie, let me drive you.”

“All right,” she said, and she thought she agreed because she was too weary to argue further. But probably, mixed in with that, was a wish not to be alone, and she was annoyed at herself for it. It didn’t pay to rely on anyone, to need them, because eventually they left. They always left. Or they betrayed you, like Leighton, and then they left.

Cooper drove through town, along the quiet streets, past still-darkened houses, where porch lights burned at random, surrounded by the shadows of doomed moths. Annie imagined the papery whisper of their wings, beating and futile. They flew at the light, heedless of the risk, the way Bo walked the streets, without regard for the danger. Stopping him was no more possible than stopping the moths. Hadn’t she tried, a hundred, a thousand times? Would it have worked if she had tried once more? Had she given up on Bo too soon?

She directed Cooper into the driveway that led to her tiny bungalow, and when he started to get out of the car, she asked him to wait. He settled back and said, “Okay,” but he looked unhappy.

So much so that she said, “I’m sorry,” but then letting herself into the house, she wondered what she was sorry for. She wondered what might have happened between her and Cooper if the circumstances were ordinary. Probably nothing. Guys made her nervous. Other than Leighton Drake, she’d never had more than a fleeting relationship with maybe two or three of them. She hadn’t even had a date to her senior prom.

She went quickly through her living room and into the tiny room that Bo shared with her sewing machine when he stayed with her. The narrow twin bed was made; there was nothing out of place, a sure sign he hadn’t been there. He was messy, and once he was gone again, she would set about picking up after him, usually muttering to herself, things like she ought not to have to put up with it, him and his stuff he left everywhere, and why couldn’t he at least toss his dirty clothes into the hamper?

She went around the foot of the bed, not out of hope that she would find some unwashed article of his clothing, but because she was thorough, and there it was, the twisted wad of green knit. Annie yanked on it, recognizing it was a T-shirt of Bo’s, laden with his scent, and relief flooded her. She sat on the end of the bed and spread the shirt out across her knees, smoothing the creases. It was one of Bo’s favorites, dark green, lettered in a pale shade of gold with a quote from his idol, Henry David Thoreau, that read:
The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow
.

Annie’s mother had bought it. She had thought it was perfect. She had thought in another time, a simpler world, maybe Bo would have only been considered eccentric, like Thoreau was in his day.

“Annie?”

She looked up as Cooper crossed the room and sat beside her.

“He tested off the charts in some ways,” she said. “Reading comprehension and writing, especially. When he was little, they said his IQ was really high. One hundred thirty-five, I think.”

Cooper kept his silence.

“He wanted to take me to my senior prom, but I said no, because by then he was starting to get weird and people thought I was weird, too. By association,” Annie added. “All through school, I blamed him for why I never had a date or any friends.” A sound broke from her chest. She bit it back, balling the shirt in her fists.

Cooper slid his hand over hers. She felt his palm, warm against the bones of her knuckles. He was close enough to her that she felt the warmth of his breath stirring the hair at her temple, and when she turned to him, he kissed her. It wasn’t a demanding kiss, or she would have pulled away. It wasn’t passionate but tender and filled with mercy. It was a kiss that commiserated, if that was possible. And it was more than that, more than words she knew to describe it, and then it was over.

He lifted his mouth from hers, searching her gaze, and she was afraid he could see the naked longing in her eyes to burrow into him, to let him hold her.

She ducked her chin, running her fingers around the cup of her ear. “I can’t do this now,” she said softly.

“They’re waiting for this.” Cooper touched Bo’s shirt. “We should go.”

Annie led the way from the room. She didn’t know Cooper’s feelings, whether he hadn’t heard her or if he was giving her space. She felt disconcerted, somehow irked and torn with longing all at once. She didn’t need this, she thought. Didn’t need Cooper Gant. She got into his truck, and she waited for Rufus to push his nose between the seats, then remembered they’d left him at the community center. She missed him.

Cooper got into the driver’s seat and switched on the ignition. He looked at her. “Is that your phone?” he said.

She found her purse and fished out her phone. “There’s a message,” she said, tapping the screen. “Oh, my God!”

“What?” Cooper was backing down the drive, not looking at her.

“It’s a text from Bo.”

“What?” Cooper hit the brake.

“It says he’s at the library in Houston. Downtown. He rode there with Ms. M.”

“Who’s Ms. M?”

“I don’t know. I thought his phone was dead. How could it send a message?”

Cooper said, “We should call Hollis.”

But Annie said no. She had a sick feeling in her stomach. “We have to go there.”

“To the library? It’s four in the morning. I think we need to let the police know—”

“No,” Annie repeated. “We can’t wait for them. We don’t have time.”

9

T
wo years ago, when Lauren found the small, two-story country church on a bright, chilly day the week before Christmas, she’d been driving to her grandparents’ farm. She hadn’t taken the usual route but instead wound her way along a network of tar-drizzled, sun-dazzled rural roads—ranch roads—that uncurled through the woods. She marked the little church from the corner of her eye as she passed it, and stopping, she backed up some fifty feet to have a longer look, feeling somehow drawn to the place. In retrospect it would seem eerie, given all the church would take from her. But the day she found it, she was intrigued.

It was close to the road’s edge and surrounded by a crooked lacework of wrought-iron fence. The gnarled canopy of an ancient live oak bowed over the small building, as if it meant to lift it into its embrace. The effect was magical, a habitation for fairies despite the evidence of dilapidation: white clapboard that was rotting, a roof that sagged. The four Queen Anne–style windows Lauren could see were cracked and broken, puzzles rendered in jeweled colors of stained glass.
What a shame
, her mind whispered.

The gate screeched, piercing the silence when she opened it, and she winced. A paper taped to the padlocked entry doors indicated the property was scheduled for demolition, giving a date and a number to contact. Lauren took down the notice, folded it, and tucked it into her coat pocket. She stood back a bit, looking up at the steeple, catching her first sight of the bell behind the louvered enclosure. Even then, she knew she would be the one to go up there, to determine what would be necessary to dismantle the tower and bring down the old bell. Her heart leapt at the prospect.

She thought Jeff would say the job was too small, and he did, but once he saw how much she wanted to do it, he made time on the schedule, lined up the crew and the equipment, mostly hand tools. Lauren wanted to preserve as much of the church’s architectural history as she could.

It took a couple of weeks to make the arrangements, locate the property owner, halt the demolition, and gain the proper permits for deconstruction. In the meantime, an old parishioner Lauren spoke to, a woman in her eighties, said her grandfather had built the church and his brother had fashioned the furniture, but then the nearby farms had fallen on hard times and were sold, and most of the congregants moved away.

Standing outside on the day they were to start work, remembering the old woman, Lauren thought how she would like to take her a souvenir and wondered what it should be. She was still thinking about that when she climbed the stairs and then the ladder that led into the steeple. The light filtering through the rotting louvers glistened like opals; the dust-laden air smelled musty, reminding Lauren of the attic at the farm. She called down to Jeff that she was within sight of the bell, and it was right after that, when the bat flew at her, startling her, that she fell.

Like a bird shot from the sky, she plummeted to the floor of the church narthex, landing with a wet-sounding thwack—poetically it would seem—dead center inside yet another church treasure, a marble-tiled wreath of white lilies. Jeff, who had stepped out of sight into the sanctuary, said later that when her body hit the floor, the sound it made reminded him of the summer day when, as a kid, he’d dropped a ripe watermelon off the back of a truck. He told the ER doctor that when he first knelt beside her, he thought Lauren was dead.

But she was only broken, cracked up worse than Humpty Dumpty.

She would never clearly recall the hours she spent in the emergency room or in surgery. Jeff told her later she hadn’t been expected to live. He said he prayed for her, an act she found hard to believe. She’d never known Jeff to pray. She had a faint memory of him pacing beside her bed, saying how terrified he was of raising their kids alone, but she didn’t know if it was real. Even when she was fully wakened from a medically induced coma, when Dr. Bettinger spoke to her about the damage to her brain and her body, she couldn’t take it in. She thought she was dreaming.

But it wasn’t as if she could pretend it was someone else who was strung up like a joint of beef on a spit. The metal rod attached to a contraption above her bed was skewered through her knee, not the knee of another patient. Bettinger explained it was intended to stabilize her smashed pelvic and hip bones, giving them an opportunity to knit themselves together in some fashion that might once again support her.

But understanding of that came later. Initially, Lauren’s single awareness was of pain. Pain and Jeff. The touch of his work-roughened fingertips across her brow, the calluses on his palms when he cupped her cheek. His mouth at her ear murmured a nonsense of words meant to comfort, to pull her through. He basted her cracked lips with an ocean of soothing balm. Sometimes as she lay immobilized, trapped and grunting like an animal in her agony, he held her hand. The nurses marveled at his devotion.
Isn’t it something?
they whispered.

But devotion borne out of a sense of duty was not the same as devotion that rose, helpless and unbidden, as the extant and unstoppable side effect of love. While Jeff’s devotion in the days and weeks following the accident had been unflagging, what else could he have done? Given the gravity of her injuries, how would it have looked if he were to desert her?

But he must have wanted to. He must have looked at her broken, damaged body and been sickened and overwhelmed at the enormity of her need. What sort of wife could she be to him? What did she have to offer when she could barely walk or lift a hand to help herself? It was nearly four months before they had sex again, and even then, every moment was fraught with their mutual anxiety that he would somehow reinjure her or cause her fresh pain.

Still, he never spoke of leaving her, not until almost a year after her fall when her use of the Oxy got out of control, when it was only fair. But suppose now that the worst was behind them, he continued to stay out of obligation, for the sake of appearance? Because playing the hero came naturally to him? Suppose love had nothing to do with it?

Lauren glanced sidelong at him, where he sat at the granite-topped island in their kitchen, sipping coffee. He’d lost weight in the past two years; she could see the blades of his cheekbones. The shadows under his eyes stood out against the fresh-shaven pallor of his skin. He was different since her accident, altered in ways she didn’t know, struggling with burdens he refused to share, and in all honesty, no matter how she protested, maybe she didn’t want the weight of them. Maybe she couldn’t stand up to the truth if she knew it. Maybe he would get fed up one day and walk out because of all she’d cost him, all she’d put him through. The idea sat in her head as ugly as it was regretful.

Was it trustworthy?

Who knew?

Her mind was so full of tricks.

She turned her attention to the breakfast dishes, finished loading them into the dishwasher. Drew and Kenzie had already caught the bus for school, and she wondered why Jeff was still here. Ordinarily, he left before they did.

“I’ve got a meeting with Kaiser at nine,” he said. “When are you going to be ready?”

Ben Kaiser, Lauren remembered, the owner of the Waller-Land building. Jeff was counting on its demolition to make their fourth quarter. But she was drawing a blank in regard to a meeting with the building’s owner. “You’re waiting on me?”

“Well, yeah.” Jeff seemed faintly amused. “You don’t have your car?”

She blinked. She had no clue what he was talking about and felt an inkling of alarm mixed with despair.

“It wouldn’t start after work last night?” Jeff prompted. “We had it towed to the dealership?”

“I rode home with you.” Lauren spoke through her hands that she’d tented over her mouth, as the memory, in all its vivid audacity, swaggered out of some mental closet, taking its own sweet time. She turned from Jeff, wanting to hide her distress.

“It’s all right,” Jeff said, and it angered her. It so obviously wasn’t.

She rinsed the dishcloth. “You don’t have to wait,” she told him, lifting her voice over the sound of the running water. “I’ll call the dealership and have them deliver the car if it’s ready. I have things to do here anyway.”

“Suit yourself.” Jeff shrugged into his jacket and pulled his truck keys from his pocket, kissed her, lightly, perfunctorily—it was their usual ritual even in the worst of times—and catching her gaze, searching her eyes, he said, “I’ll see you later?” Translated, what he really wanted to know was whether this was going to be one of
those
days. The sort of day when she and everyone else would be better off if she stayed home.

He would probably prefer it. What use was she with only half a brain? Jeff must wonder.

The door closed behind him.

A moment later when the landline rang, Lauren answered it without checking the Caller ID, and she was greeted by a man’s voice, calling her by name. When he identified himself as Detective Jim Cosgrove and said he was with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, specifically the criminal-investigation division, her heart started to pound as if in anticipation of bad news.

“I understand you called last Friday, asking for a welfare check on a young man. Bo Laughlin. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Lauren answered, and although she realized it wasn’t a member of her family who was in jeopardy, her anxiety wouldn’t settle.

“My partner and I are in the area. We’d like to stop by and ask you a few questions about your encounter with Mr. Laughlin.”

Lauren sensed he wasn’t asking. “No one’s found him yet?”

“No, ma’am. We’d like to talk to you,” he repeated.

“When?”

“Now, if it’s convenient.”

Lauren walked quickly from the kitchen and down the hall to the front door, where she could look out to the street, and there they were. Two men in a plain dark-brown sedan. She could see the passenger, Detective Cosgrove, she guessed, had a phone pressed to his ear, waiting for her answer.

She flung the door wide, wanting to catch his attention, wanting him to see that she wasn’t intimidated, even though she was. “Come right in,” she said into the phone. He met her gaze through the passenger window, and she thought she saw one corner of his mouth lift, a fraction of a smile.

She led them into the formal living room, a room she disliked. It was uncomfortably furnished for one thing, and set apart from the rest of the house, seeming far removed from its heart, which was the combined kitchen/great-room area. Lauren had never known what to do with the space and had lately thought of making it into a room for herself. An idea had germinated recently that she might write about her experience with antiques and salvage. She didn’t plan a lot of text, rather she would tell the story through photographs of rooms she’d helped her clients create using old, rescued furniture and architectural remnants. She wanted Tara to help her. It would be a great project for them. A sister project. Now she wasn’t sure Tara was even speaking to her.

Lauren asked the officers if they would like coffee. They declined. Detective Cosgrove, the evident spokesperson, opened a notepad and set it on his knee. He and his partner looked a bit uncomfortable with their respective woolen-suited bulks wedged into the narrow-armed embrace of the two matching pink silk-upholstered wingback chairs Lauren had installed across from a small brocade sofa. Perching on the edge of one of the sofa’s cushions, she wondered why she had brought the chairs home, how she could have ever thought they were stylish, much less serviceable.

“I was going to call you,” she said, “after I heard about Bo’s disappearance on the news last night.” She hadn’t managed it after all. Before the call could go through, Kenzie had wakened, crying out from a bad dream, and Lauren had gone to her, forgetting her intention.

“Can you tell me what you were doing in the area where you spoke to Mr. Laughlin last Friday? You did speak to him, right?”

Lauren said she had and repeated the gist of their conversation.

“We don’t advise that motorists approach unknown pedestrians as a rule.” Cosgrove straightened his knee and brought it back.

“I know,” she said, “but I nearly hit him.” She added in defense of herself, “I wanted to be sure he was all right.”

Cosgrove’s look seemed commiserating.

“He was so close to the edge of the road.” Lauren flattened her palm on her chest, feeling her breath shallow in memory of her alarm. “Anyway, it isn’t something I would do ordinarily, but—I’ve seen him before, around town, walking. Do you know anything about him? Why he—? Is there something wrong with him? He mentioned his sister, Annie, but does he have parents, other family?” She looked down, distressed suddenly, and fiddling with her wedding rings, she apologized. “It’s none of my business.”

Cosgrove didn’t confirm or deny it, and neither did his partner.

“I would stop for a hurt animal, you know? Why not a person?” Lauren felt compelled to say this.

“Was anyone else with you at the time, Mrs. Wilder?”

Cosgrove shot her a look from under his brow, one Lauren couldn’t interpret. It gave her an odd feeling. “No,” she answered.

“Can you describe what he was wearing?”

“Gray pants, chinos,” Lauren answered, “and a blue-plaid cotton shirt. Short-sleeved and buttoned to the neck. And tennis shoes. They were dark-colored, navy or black, maybe. He was very neat, neat as a pin,” she said.

“The car you saw him get into, you say it was a Cadillac, but could it have been a Lincoln, a Town Car?” Cosgrove’s partner, something Willis—Lauren hadn’t registered his first name—spoke for the first time.

Lauren looked at him. He was older than Cosgrove, and unlike Cosgrove, who was wiry and thin, Detective Willis was fat. His meaty cheeks fell in folds to his neck. A thick scallop of flesh lapped his belt. Lauren couldn’t imagine how, if the occasion arose, he would chase down a criminal. Answering him, she said she was pretty hopeless when it came to identifying cars. “It was a sedan, long and black. I know that for sure.”

Cosgrove jotted a note and looked up at her. “Did he get into the car willingly? Was there anyone around him? Did anyone else get in the car?”