Her old curfew. Twelve o’clock. The magic hour when, according to her mother, carriages turned into pumpkins, parties became unsanctioned occasions of sin, boys transformed to sex-crazed fiends, and good girls lost their clothes and their morals.
If you’re innocent, you don’t have anything to worry about
.
Still fully dressed, Bailey slunk toward the steps.
“How was the viewing?” Dorothy asked in a distracted tone.
“Oh.” Bailey pushed her hair behind her ears. She didn’t really want to explain to her mother she’d missed visiting hours at the funeral home because Steve Call-Me-Anytime Burke was searching her employer’s home for a murder weapon. “It went all right, I guess. What are you still doing up?”
“My
chi
is blocked,” her mother said. “I’m making room for new opportunities to come into my life.”
“Your
chi,
” Bailey repeated. The last project she had edited before she quit her job had been a feng shui guide for Paragon. Was her mother attempting self-help through better
bagua?
Dorothy waved at the half-emptied shelves. “There’s too much clutter in this house. I need to free the flow of positive energy.”
Bailey blinked. Her mother thrived on clutter. Doll collections and tea sets, candles and candy dishes, the relics of clearance shelves and QVC . . . Why change? Why now?
Why not?
“Positive energy is good.” Bailey edged towards the stairs. It was late. She had work to do. Just because her mother had decided to turn over a new leaf didn’t mean she had to give up her sleep or disrupt her own life.
Dorothy grabbed a vase and rolled it vigorously in tissue paper.
Bailey paused with one foot on the steps. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”
The paper crackled. “In a while.”
“Is Dad, um . . .”
Dorothy nodded toward the living room. “He’s up.”
There, but not there. Only the red glow of his cigarette and the muted sound of ESPN in the darkness beyond the hall indicated his presence in their house. In their lives.
Bailey sighed. “Do you need any help?”
Dorothy’s distraction dissolved in smiles. “That would be wonderful. If you could just hand me that bowl. . . . Oh, and can you put that box over there?”
“Sure.”
And forty minutes later, as Bailey taped the last carton to go into the attic, she had to admit the entry appeared lighter, cleaner, and more elegant.
“Looking good, Mom.”
“That wall opposite the door was blocking my ability to move forward in my life,” her mother asserted.
“Yeah, I know how that goes.”
Dorothy surveyed the space, her head to one side. “I was thinking a mirror would help.”
Bailey’s satisfaction suffered a jolt. “What?”
“A new mirror. To redirect my energy. And a fountain to activate my
chi.
I saw some really darling ones at Marshall’s today that would be perfect.”
“A fountain,” Bailey repeated. Her mother hadn’t really changed. She’d just . . . redirected her energy.
“You could go with me tomorrow,” Dorothy suggested. “To pick one out.”
Right.
Or she could take a sharp stick and jab herself in the eye. She hadn’t gone shopping with her mother since she’d rebelled against matching outfits at the age of ten.
But Dorothy looked so happy. So hopeful.
Bailey swallowed. “That would be great. But I, um . . . the funeral’s tomorrow, Mom.”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Dorothy scrambled past the pile of cartons to the closet. “I bought you a purse.”
Maybe lack of sleep was making her stupid. “A what? Why?”
“A new purse,” Dorothy said, rummaging in a shopping bag. “Your old one looks so worn. You want to look nice tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Mom. That’s—”
Hideous,
Bailey thought, staring at her mother’s latest bargain, a huge shapeless bag with an adjustable strap, gleaming with gold hardware and bristling with zippers.
“—great,” she finished weakly.
“And it’s black,” Dorothy declared. “I know you like everything to be black.”
It was certainly black. Bailey slung the purse over her shoulder.
Dorothy smiled.
Obeying impulse, Bailey put her arms around her mother, feeling the purse slide and bump between them, feeling Dorothy’s start of surprise.
Her mother’s shoulders were thin and bony, the skin of her upper arms soft and loose. But she smelled the way she always had, like Dove soap and White Shoulders perfume. Bailey breathed in and held on, fighting unexpected, inexplicable tears.
“It’s really great,” she repeated. “Thanks.”
She trudged up the stairs to her blue-flowered bedroom, the dusty yearbooks lining one shelf and the faded posters of Melissa Etheridge and Lisa Loeb decorating the walls. Paul’s evidence cartons were stacked beside the white painted desk where Bailey used to do her homework.
She refused even to look at the three-ring notebook on top, the manuscript Paul said wasn’t ready to show anyone else. That she hadn’t touched in almost four months.
Too much clutter, she thought, blocking my
chi.
Or maybe it was the ghosts of the departed Dawlers—Shirley, Tammy, and Tanya—held to this place by this forlorn collection of their possessions, the grisly mementos of murder.
Was the murder weapon in there?
She hadn’t checked.
She didn’t want to know.
But she was powerfully tempted to look, like a rubbernecker slowing to stare at an accident on the highway. She eased the lid off the top box to find . . . paper, a long row of manila folders and photocopied pages grouped by grubby rubber bands. She exhaled in relief and disappointment.
One item stuck out. Literally. A spiral-bound notebook was crammed along the box’s side, its silver coils rising above the sea of paper like some exotic ocean creature.
Bailey tugged it free and turned it to the light. Bold black letters marched across the purple cover: TANYA DAWLER. MY DIARY. KEEP OUT.
Bailey felt a tickle at the back of her neck, a prickle in her fingers. Billy Ray’s fifteen-year-old sister.
His victim
.
Curious, she carried the book to the bed with her. Propping her pillows against the headboard, she curled her legs under her and began to read the childish, rounded handwriting.
Detention again. I’m always in trouble even when I haven’t done anything. Which I didn’t. This time, anyway!
Bailey smiled.
But it’s like the teachers expect it. Dawler trash.
The words were underlined.
Dawler trash
. Even after twenty years, she could see the mark where the pen dug into the paper.
You can see them thinking it. Like they know my brother and they know my mom so they think they know me. The male teachers mostly stare at my tits
.
Bailey’s smile faded. She didn’t believe Steve’s charge that Paul exploited his subjects. But until now, Tanya Dawler hadn’t been quite real to her—a research subject, a sad chapter of the Billy Ray story. With every word and exclamation point, Tanya took on depth. Substance. Personality.
Did Bailey really want to start identifying with a teenage murder victim?
But the loopy purple handwriting drew her on and drew her in.
So, anyway, in detention you have to do homework, even if you don’t have any, which is totally unfair!!! Mr. D. keeps coming by my desk to say, “What are you doing, young lady?” and squeezing my shoulder in that fakey fake way. What a perv.
So I’m writing in this notebook,
Tanya continued in her defiant scrawl.
That’ll show him.
Bailey turned the page.
NINE
T
HE Stokesville Police Department wasn’t
CSI: New York
or
Miami
or anywhere else glamorous with television cameras and inventive scriptwriters and swarms of evidence technicians. Hell, it wasn’t even the Metropolitan Police Department, which at least had its own crime lab.
Steve hefted the carton containing his selection of potential murder weapons into the trunk of Wayne Lewis’s Crown Victoria, dropped and locked the lid, and initialed the shipping manifest.
“Is that everything?” Wayne asked.
“Not quite.”
“I didn’t see the tray. In the box, I mean.”
“That’s because I returned it to its owner.”
“Ellis?”
“Nope.” Steve folded the manifest and put it in his pocket. “Mildred Wheeler.”
Wayne digested this as they retraced their steps. “So the girl’s story checks out.”
Steve opened the back door of the station house. “So far.”
“Did you, like, dust it for fingerprints anyway?”
“I dusted.”
“And?” Lewis asked eagerly.
Steve rubbed the back of his neck. He appreciated the rookie’s enthusiasm. He appreciated him volunteering to make the drive to the state crime lab in Raleigh even more, especially since the chief resented the time his officers were putting in on this case. But . . .
“Turned up prints on damn near everything from damn near everybody, including the cleaning lady and the deceased.”
Wayne frowned. “What about blood?”
“Nothing visible.”
“You spray with Luminol?”
Steve shook his head. “I’m not going to jeopardize the evidentiary value by doing my own testing.”
“So you think there’s something there.”
“Not really.” Steve nodded a greeting to Sergeant Darian Jackson, writing reports at his desk.
“Why not?”
“There are multiple prints on everything,” Steve explained patiently. “If Helen Ellis’s attacker wiped her blood from the object he struck her with, he would have wiped away the prints, too.”
“But the lab might still find something,” Wayne insisted.
“Maybe.”
Maybe not. He’d had one chance, one shot, to find the murder weapon, and he’d blown it. If he didn’t come up with something soon, Walt would have his ass and his job. Unless the chief was so relieved at being able to drop this case he only demoted Steve to crossing guard.
Steve forced a smile. “We’d need SBI to do the DNA testing anyway.”
Which the State Bureau of Investigation would get to in their own sweet time. DNA results took weeks or months, not hours. But juries were more and more reluctant to convict without high-tech forensic evidence. Steve blamed it on television.
Wayne nudged a box with his foot. “What about the computer?”
Steve managed to back up his own files. He even paid his bills on-line. That didn’t qualify him for the Geek Squad. “I don’t have the expertise to conduct a search of electronic data. It’s too easy to destroy or tamper with the evidence. The computer should go to an evidence preservation lab.”
Darian spoke up from his cluttered desk. “You really think it’ll help your case to find out Paul Ellis bookmarked a bunch of porn sites?”
“Porn sites, no. Unless he’s making assignations in private chat rooms. If he’s having an affair—”