Crooked Little Lies (13 page)

Cooper seemed to know it would be of no use to argue. He walked out with her, Rufus at their heels, and when she headed up the alley toward the café, he ordered Rufus to go with her.

Annie went to her knees and embraced the dog’s neck. “Thank you,” she said, meeting Cooper’s gaze. “I can use his company.”

“You call me if you need anything,” he said, backing away. “Take good care of her, Doofus,” he ordered the dog.

Annie got to her feet. The tug of her smile was unexpected, and touching her mouth, she was somehow reminded of Cooper’s kiss. When he returned her smile, she saw in his eyes that he remembered, too. She knew if she made even the slightest move toward him, he would come to her, and she was pierced with sudden longing. Her permission was what he waited for, all he needed. The understanding of this was clear, and it hovered between them, and then it was gone, and a moment later, Cooper was gone, too, walking quickly away to his truck.

Annie watched him go, then with Rufus at her heels, she went into the café.

Inside the larder, she took stock of the shelves and found the ingredients she needed to make loaves of orange-cranberry bread and several dozen sausage kolaches. By the time she was pulling baked goods from the oven, the flour-clouded air was tinged pink with morning light and redolent with the smell of breakfast. Setting the kolaches on racks to cool, she put together the batter for a double batch of pumpkin muffins, and she was spooning it into greased muffin tins when she glanced up and saw Hollis Audi. The sheriff’s tall, rangy frame filled the doorway, blocking the light, throwing his face into shadow, making it impossible to read his expression. But he had his hat in his hands, and something about that, a tremor in his fingers perhaps, caused Annie to go very still. A glob of muffin batter dropped unheeded from the spoon she held, half of it falling onto the tin, half not.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“No. I don’t know. Aw, Jesus, Annie, they found a body. Down in Houston. Victim of a hit-and-run. Nobody knows who it is, but it might be Bo. We can’t know for sure until someone makes an identification.”

The sheriff came toward her as if he meant to comfort her, but she let go of the spoon, letting it clatter onto the countertop, putting up her hands, warding him off. She would shatter if he touched her, and she would not trade her composure for his sympathy.

Sheriff Audi stopped, looking disoriented, as if he had no idea how to proceed. “I tried calling JT,” he said.

“Oh, no, you can’t tell him a thing like this over the phone.” Annie met the sheriff’s gaze. “What if it isn’t Bo? I think I should go and see before anyone says anything to JT.”

“You want to go to the morgue?” The sheriff eyed her doubtfully.

“Yes. Can you take me?” She didn’t think she could drive herself.

“You’re sure?”

She wasn’t, but she nodded, untying her apron. She asked him to give her a minute and went into the washroom where she splashed cold water on her face and ran a comb through her hair. When she came out, she said she was ready, but that was probably a lie.

“My car’s in front of the community center,” the sheriff said when she reappeared.

“That’s fine. I need to walk Rufus down there anyway.” She beckoned to the dog, and he sat upright, alertly watching her. She beckoned to him again, and he came instantly.

Twenty minutes later, as she and the sheriff were leaving the center, Cooper drove up beside the patrol car. “You called him?” Annie asked the sheriff.

He looked sheepish.

“I’m coming with you.” Cooper got into the backseat.

“What about Rufus?”

“My mom will take him home with her.”

Annie wasn’t happy to have Cooper along, but whatever breath she might have had to protest was lost to the clamor of her panic. She had never seen a dead body before, other than on television. She was spared the viewing of her mother’s body. There had been no doubt as to her mom’s identity for one thing, but then the coroner and the funeral director had gently suggested the family might want to remember the pretty woman Annie’s mother was when she was living. Annie didn’t know if it was better not to have seen, to be left to wonder about the extent of her mother’s injuries.

She hadn’t suffered, the coroner said. Death was instantaneous. He’d said that, too, as if that made it all right.

11

I
t was early on Wednesday afternoon when Lauren got into town, and traffic was light as it usually was on any ordinary weekday at that hour. What was unusual was the number of cars parked along Prescott, the street running in front of the community center. The adjacent streets were parked up, too. Lauren finally found a space three blocks down from the center, in front of Kim’s Needle and Book Nook. Ordinarily, the shop door would have been standing open, Kim would have been inside, and Lauren would have waved to her as she passed by. But today, the door was closed and the lights were off, and while Lauren was aware of the window display that combined a number of fabric pumpkins with groupings of children’s books featuring an assortment of witches and other hobgoblins, what arrested her eye was the flyer posted prominently in the window’s center.

“MISSING!” The red-lettered word seemed to shout from the page.

Lauren looked up the street in the direction she was headed and saw there were flyers pinned up everywhere, wrapping the light poles, papering every window. She counted three mounted in a row in the window of Shear Heaven, the beauty salon where she got her hair cut. The salon itself, like Kim’s shop, was dark. No one was working. Had they closed because of Bo? Was everyone out looking for him? It seemed wonderful and terrible all at once that the town would drop everything and pull together to find this young man.

But where were we before? Lauren wondered. Which ones of us ever stopped for him, thought about him, thought of asking what he might need—before he disappeared? Why did it always take a calamity to get people moving, to make them care, make them do the right thing?

The flyer posted on the community center door was larger than the others, poster-size, and Lauren paused to study it. The photo of Bo in the center showed him leaning against a porch post, smiling with such open-faced happiness at whoever was taking the picture that Lauren thought he must love the person with the camera very much. She touched the crown of his head, smoothed the tip of her finger down the line of his cheek. He looked so bright, so endearing and likable. But the intensity, the vulnerability she’d seen in him when she’d spoken to him last Friday was there in the photo, too, and it made her heart ache.

She ran her eye down the bulleted list of statistics:
Birth date: May 6, 1991; Height: 5’11”; Weight: 155 pounds; Build: Slender.
A paragraph following the list noted he had wavy brown hair and light blue eyes and that he was last seen on Friday, wearing the exact clothing and in the exact location Lauren had described earlier for Detective Cosgrove and his partner.

Lauren paused, her hand on the door, wondering if she could handle running into them again. She looked back down the street in the direction of her car. It would be easy enough to walk away, but she didn’t.

Pushing open the door, she stood inside it, scanning the crowd, and while she didn’t see Cosgrove or Willis, there were a lot of other people, more than she’d expected, including several she recognized, answering phones or gathered, talking, in loose knots. But the hum of voices was quiet, the wrong sort of quiet. The hair on Lauren’s neck rose. Had they found him, then?

Spotting Madeleine Finch across the room, she walked over to her. The usual greetings would have seemed out of place; she didn’t bother with them. “I came to see if I could help,” she said. “Am I too late?”

Madeleine lifted her hand—in helplessness, pleading?—Lauren didn’t know. She was trembling, though. Even her head wobbled on her neck like an overly heavy flower on its stem.

“Maybe you should sit down.” Lauren cupped Madeleine’s elbow and slid her hand down her forearm, feeling the rigidity of bone through the looser tissue of her flesh. She hadn’t seen Madeleine in a while. It might have been longer than a year, Lauren guessed. She couldn’t remember. She and Tara had used to come to the café for lunch quite often in the days when they were still working together. They’d always commented on how spry Madeleine was, close to eighty and still full of pepper. But she looked exhausted now.

“Why don’t I take you home?” Lauren suggested.

“No,” Madeleine said. “It’s very kind of you, but I can’t leave.”

A woman came to Madeleine’s side. “She’s as stubborn as the rest of us.”

“Carol, right?” Lauren recognized her. “I was just out at your farm.”

“Len said he waited on you.”

Lauren smiled. On another day, she and Carol might have chatted. Lauren might have said how hospitable Len was, that he’d offered her tea and a mini croissant. They didn’t run in the same circle; Carol and Len weren’t aware of Lauren’s fall from grace. They might have carried on talking as if Lauren were her old self. But this wasn’t the day for idle conversation. “This is such an agonizing situation,” she said instead. “I can’t imagine how the family is holding up.”

Carol and Madeleine exchanged a look that worried Lauren.

“Do you know Annie, Bo’s sister?” Carol asked. “She left with Sheriff Audi a while ago. He’s taking her to the morgue in Houston.”

“Oh, no,” Lauren said.

“A young man was found dead in the street last night on the north side of the city,” Madeleine said. “Word is that someone hit him and left him there. He’s the right age, wearing similar clothing . . .” She broke off.

Now it was Carol who took Madeleine’s arm, who told her she needed to sit down. “You need a cookie, too, and a cup of tea, something in your stomach. And no arguing,” she added. She looked at Lauren. “Would you like to join us?”

Lauren thanked her, declining the invitation, head swimming with the memory of how close she had come to hitting Bo herself.

“What sort of person leaves someone to die in the street?”

It was a woman behind Lauren who asked. More than asked, demanded, Lauren thought.

“Some kind of monster.” A second woman answered in a voice that was as hard and affronted as the first woman’s.

“Well,” said the first woman, “if they catch the driver, I hope they kill him.”

“Not me,” the second woman answered. “I hope they lock him up in prison for the rest of his life, where he has to wake up every day and remember what he did, you know?”

Lauren didn’t know which punishment was right. She only knew that neither one would bring Bo back.

12

Y
ou won’t have to see him,” the sheriff said as if he could discern Annie’s thoughts, the thready pulse of her fear. “The actual body, I mean.”

Annie looked over at him.

“They’ll show you a picture of the face, or if that’s not . . . They’ll try to find an identifying mark, something else that’ll . . .” The sheriff lifted his hand, letting it hover above the steering wheel, obviously flustered.

Annie didn’t need to hear the words he couldn’t bring himself to say. She understood that if the victim’s face was battered beyond recognition, the way she imagined her mother’s face had been, they would hunt for some other distinguishing mark to photograph. She felt Cooper’s hand on her shoulder, and she wanted to turn to him, to look into his eyes. She wanted to climb over the seat and into his lap. She wanted to tell Sheriff Audi to stop. To say I can’t do this. But she didn’t move. She kept thinking of JT, that a father shouldn’t have to see his son dead.

“Sometimes, when nothing else is available, they match dental records,” the sheriff said.

Annie wouldn’t ever remember whether anything was said after that, and she wouldn’t recall very much about the actual morgue visit, either, other than a handful of details: the waxed sheen of the floors through an endless network of corridors, the sparse furnishings of the room she and the sheriff and Cooper were eventually led to, the flat black hands on a wall clock that jerked with the passing sweep of each minute.

A man joined them eventually, introducing himself, inviting them to sit. She wouldn’t ever recall his name or his face. She didn’t look at him but at his shirt cuffs. They were pin-striped and just visible beyond the hemmed sleeves of his starched white lab coat. In particular, she noticed his wrists, the space where they joined his forearms. The knobs of bone there seemed large, excessively so. The man, possibly a lab technician although she’d never know, slid photos out of an envelope and set them in a row, directing her attention to them, but she only wanted to study his wrists.

Cooper, sitting next to her, laid his hand on her arm, looking from her to the photos and back at her, and his glance was meaningful, somehow urgent. She kept his gaze, aware of the ringing in her ears, of her blood passing, thick and logy, through her veins. Cooper nodded once at her, and she took strength from that, from him, enough so that she was able to turn her attention to the photos. There were three altogether, and in each one, the face was peaceful. There wasn’t a flaw, not a mark on it.

He looks like he’s sleeping
. Did she actually say it or only think it? Or was it merely that she’d heard it a hundred times on television? It was another detail that would elude her.

Looking up at no one in particular, Annie said, “It’s not him.”

“You’re sure, Miss Beauchamp?” the tech asked.

She was, she said.

“It’s not,” the sheriff said.

“No,” Cooper said, and Annie realized he and the sheriff had known before her the man in the photographs wasn’t Bo. That was why Cooper had been so insistent that she look. He’d wanted her to know it, too, as quickly as possible. She imagined Cooper expected her to feel relief, but she was uncertain of what she felt.

Sheriff Audi scooped the photos into a pile and handed them to the tech. “Thank you,” he said.

“Thank you for coming.” The tech returned the photos to their envelope. “Good luck with the search.” He looked at Annie. “I hope you find your brother.”

She looked at the envelope. “I hope you find his family,” she said. “It’s harder, not knowing.”

But she wondered, riding back to Hardys Walk, if that was true. Maybe it was better this way. At least when you didn’t know for sure, you could invent whatever story you wanted, to explain the circumstances, like Bo was buried in the stacks of a library in another town, having forgotten the world, or he’d hopped a train that was headed to California.

She had Sheriff Audi drop her off at the café. Facing the mess she’d left there was preferable to facing the folks at the community center. Many of them teared up at the sight of her, as if her very presence brought them pain. She didn’t know what to do with that or their kindness, the scope of their sacrifice. She didn’t know the answers to their questions.

She picked up the bowl of pumpkin-muffin batter, and giving it a stir, decided she might as well finish spooning it into the tin. Who knew? Maybe the muffins would turn out. She was surprised and somehow gratified when she pulled them from the oven to see they were fine. After they cooled, she stowed them under a glass dome and set to work washing up the small mountain of bowls, pans, and utensils she’d used. She was hanging the kitchen towel when a man said her name: “Ms. Beauchamp?”

Her back was to him, and she wheeled.

He apologized for scaring her, flipped open a badge. “I’m Detective Jim Cosgrove,” he said, “with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office? I wonder if you have a minute?”

Annie was still clutching the towel, and she twisted it now in her hands, searching his gaze for some sign of what he might have come to tell her. She nodded at him, mute in her alarm. He wore a suit instead of a uniform, but his civilian clothes only made him seem more intimidating.

“Is there someplace we can sit down?”

Cosgrove’s apparent concern flustered Annie, and instead of answering him, she asked whether he’d like a muffin. “They’re fresh,” she said.

Cosgrove declined.

She went past him into the café, sliding into a booth.

Cosgrove sat opposite her.

“Do you—? Have you found him?”

“No,” he said kindly. “Nothing like that. I need to ask you a few questions, is all.”

“I’ve told Sheriff Audi everything I know.”

“Yeah, but I’d like to hear directly from you, you know, things like who his friends are, where he likes to hang out, whether you ever knew him to use or sell drugs.”

Annie made a sound at once rueful and annoyed. “I knew this would happen.”

“What?” Cosgrove asked.

She leveled her glance at him. “Bo’s disappearance has got nothing to do with drugs, okay? He’s not taking drugs now, or selling them.”

Cosgrove kept her gaze, and she squirmed slightly under his regard. She had the sense that making her nervous was his intention. “I know he’s taken drugs in the past, but he stopped, last summer.”

“What happened last summer?”

She hadn’t told Sheriff Audi when he asked, but she had to say it now, Annie thought, no matter how it pained her, in case it meant anything at all. “I dated a man, Leighton Drake.”

Something flickered across Cosgrove’s expression.

He knows,
Annie thought, and looked at her hands. Why should it surprise her? Probably everyone in the whole town knew what Leighton was, except her. She’d learned the hard way. “He wasn’t who I thought,” she said, wishing Cosgrove would let it go at that.

He didn’t. “What do you mean?”

It irritated her that he would make her say it, what he already knew. “He’s a drug dealer. Bo told me he was when Leighton first asked me out, but I didn’t pay attention. Not until Bo made me go with him to Leighton’s condo, and there it was—the proof.” Annie remembered her first sight of Leighton’s inventory. The stacks of small cartons—packed with everything from marijuana to pharmaceuticals, amphetamines, cocaine, and even heroin—had been stored alongside neatly rubber-banded bundles of cash, so much cash she had not believed her eyes. Her brain kept telling her it was a mistake. Leighton had said he sold pharmaceuticals, all right, but legally.

“Where in the condo was it?”

“Under the stairs. He made a place there and painted it so you’d never notice. I didn’t.”

“How did you pull that off, though? Finding the drugs without Drake knowing?”

“We waited until he was out of town and used the extra key he kept hidden outside to go in. I broke it off with him after that. He didn’t take it well. He made threats against Bo, called him names, idiot, retard—” Annie stopped, not wanting to say the rest.

Her ignorance about Leighton felt as huge and terrible now as ever. It angered her the way she had fallen for him, the way she’d let all his talk of her prettiness, her sweet innocence sway her. She’d treasured the tokens he’d left her along with a generous tip on the table at the café after she’d served him: a single rose, a heart-shaped charm, a tiny violet suspended in a bubble of glass. Her heart, her unknowing, unschooled heart, had thrilled to every masterful move. The first time they made love, Leighton had entered her with such reverence and tenderness, she’d been mesmerized. He had said she was unique, a rare and delicate flower; he had said there was no other woman like her. It was laughable, really, and she was a fool.

“Did you contact the police?”

Annie looked at Cosgrove. He knew she hadn’t. “I was afraid of what he’d do if I did. Anyway, he left town, went back to Chicago, I heard.”

“Maybe not.”

“He’s not here?” Annie sat forward.

“I think you’d be smart to keep an eye out.”

“Has he done something to Bo? Is that what you think?”

“There’s no evidence of that. But there’s a history between them. Aside from you, I mean, and the truth is we’re not sure of Drake’s whereabouts.”

Annie pushed out a breath, biting her lips. What had she done, bringing that man into her life and Bo’s?

Cosgrove took out his phone, thumbed it, then held it out to her. “You recognize this guy?”

Annie looked at the photo on the tiny screen, her glance registering a man in his thirties with a strong jaw and a haunted look about his deep-set eyes. She shook her head. “I’ve never seen him. Who is he?”

“His name’s Greg Honey. You sure you didn’t meet him when you were going out with Drake?”

“He’s a friend of Leighton’s?” She hadn’t met many of Leighton’s friends. They’d stayed mostly to themselves, which made sense now.

“More like an associate. Honey’s a sometime dealer, but unlike Drake, he’s a user, too—heroin mostly.”

“Bo doesn’t like needles.”

Cosgrove fanned his fingers, as if that was of no consequence, or maybe he was like a lot of people who thought if you’d try one drug, you’d try them all.

“Why are you asking me about him?” She nodded at the cell phone.

“They know each other, all three of them, your brother, Drake, and Honey.” Cosgrove pocketed his phone, bent his weight on his elbows. “And here’s the thing—they’re all missing.”

“I told you, Bo isn’t involved with drugs anymore.”

“What makes you so sure of that, Ms. Beauchamp?”

“When I was dating Leighton, Bo was scared I’d start using. It made him realize how much he’d put me through, worrying over him. So he quit.”

“Like that.” Cosgrove snapped his fingers.

“I knew it wouldn’t make sense to you.”

Cosgrove took out a business card and pushed it across the table toward her. “If you think of anything else—” he began.

“You heard about the text Bo sent me on Friday, the one where he said he was with someone he referred to as Ms. M?”

“Yeah. It’s not much use, though, having only an initial to go on.” Cosgrove stood up.

So did Annie.

“We’re following up on that kid, Sean Hennessy, too,” the detective added, but with so little enthusiasm Annie knew he didn’t think that lead was much use, either.

She said, “You think something terrible has happened to Bo, don’t you? Something to do with drugs.”

Cosgrove pushed a finger alongside his nose. “We’ll be in touch, Ms. Beauchamp. You call now, you hear, if you need anything or think of anything.”

She didn’t answer, and he left her there to watch him go, holding his card in her hands.

She was sitting in the booth and the business card was on the table when Cooper came in with Rufus a while later.

“Come here, old doggie,” she said, and bending over him, she buried her face in the thick fur at the back of his neck, feeling his joyful wiggle. When she straightened, he went under the table to lie at her feet. Cooper sat across from her, and she felt his regard, felt him waiting, giving her the chance to speak first.

“A detective was here, asking me questions.” She pushed the card over to Cooper.

He studied it. “What sort of questions?”

But Annie didn’t want to go into it. “Have you ever watched
The First 48
?” She named the television show that chronicled real crimes committed in cities across America from the point of commission through the first two days and nights of investigation. That harrowing, hysterical, fraught-with-hope, and torn-with-despair passage of time that, once it was gone, if there was no resolution, meant the chances of arresting a perpetrator or finding a missing person unharmed were practically nil.

Cooper said he had.

Annie said, “It’s been five days since anyone saw Bo.”

Cooper kept her gaze; there was nothing he could say.

“Sheriff Audi said they’ll probably be closing the command center later today or tonight.”

“I heard that,” Cooper said. “Most of the volunteers won’t quit, though.”

“They can’t keep at it forever. They have jobs and families, obligations and lives of their own.” Annie looked into her lap. “Detective Cosgrove is like Sheriff Audi. He thinks Bo was involved with drugs, too.”

“But you don’t?”

“It’s possible,” Annie admitted, and then, despite her misgivings, she went on, telling Cooper more than she’d ever expected to or wanted to about her relationship with Leighton, the threat it had posed and might still. She felt her face burning, but she was unable to stop.

And when she was done, Cooper said he was sorry for what she’d gone through. He seemed to Annie to be as flustered and uncomfortable as she was. “There are fresh pumpkin muffins,” she said. “I’ll get them.” She left the booth, but before she could get away entirely, Cooper caught her hand and, locking her gaze, searched her eyes.

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” he told her.

She nodded, slipping her hand from his grasp, afraid she would cry. She was back in a few minutes, and Cooper helped her unload the tray she’d laden with muffins and mugs of strong coffee.