Lie Still (37 page)

“We tried to question Misty last night. I asked her to drop by the station. She showed up, but that’s about all I can say. She said she hadn’t broken any laws and if we were arresting her, she wanted a lawyer. We let her go.”

“Mike, I’ll call you later.”

I punched out without saying goodbye. By this time, Misty and I were halfway across the living room on a steady path to the front door.

“Thanks for stopping by,” Misty said with false brightness. One hand shoved me out, the other rested on the door handle. The door was already shutting in my face.

“Misty, I know about Todd.” I blurted it out. I stuck my hand purposefully on the frame so she’d have to make a choice about whether to break my fingers.

“You need to talk to me,” I pleaded. “I can help. Mike can help. At least call me. Soon. Tomorrow. Before you leave.”

She moved her head slightly, an odd little smile, not a happy one, playing at her lips.
Yes or no?
I couldn’t tell. Certainly not a promise.

“Caroline was my last hope.” I could barely hear her. “I’m never going to know.”

Know what?

The massive door fell forward, like someone had shoved the lid of a coffin. My hand dropped away just in time. The door slammed hard, in my face. I stared at the wild, swirling oak grain, while the lock clicked.

I imagined Misty moving away, soft feet padding across the floor, back to the little girl waiting on the floor.

I wondered whether I would ever see her again.

T
hree days later.

Nine hundred and fifty-three miles away.

I am staring at a roll of yellow crime tape. Blurry. I can only make out the C.

My body is shivering so violently I wonder whether the baby is going to drop right here onto the cold tile, even with my knees pulled up and shut together tight, my arms wrapped around my belly holding everything in.

Breathe. Don’t look at him
.

His name is Wayne. I know this, because somebody said, “Hey, Wayne,” when he brushed by me coming in the door. I had immediately reached out for the wall and slid to the floor. The world had almost gone black, until I focused on the bright yellow circle under a desk.

“Emily, what’s wrong?” Mike is kneeling, breathing in my ear. “Is it the baby? Should we go to the emergency room?”

I shook my head. I’d been in this hell more than once. I needed him to be quiet, so I could time travel, imagine myself three minutes ahead of the moment, like a therapist once suggested. The same therapist who told me that almost every woman hid shame about a sexual encounter before age twenty-five. That they shoved it down, and never told.

Wayne leaned casually against a desk thirty feet from me, hat in hand. I am pretty sure that he knows exactly what is wrong. He isn’t about to budge from this room because that’s the kind of guy he is. He had touched me on purpose a few minutes ago, extending his arm ever so slightly as he passed so it grazed against my breast.

Most people would see a possible grandfather with slightly scratched wire-frame glasses and a belly that said he still liked to go out occasionally and drink on Friday nights. He might be that. But he is also something else.

I can smell a man who hates women. It is a very specific smell. It is sweet and sweaty and slightly acrid. That is how Wayne smells. Maybe Wayne has raped his wife. Maybe his high school girlfriend in the back of a pickup thirty years ago. He has stayed off the radar.

I can’t tell Mike this. It is crazy. Wayne is fifty-five, minimum. He is wearing a Kentucky state trooper uniform. I’ve never seen him before in my life.

“I can’t stay here.” My teeth chattered through the words. “You have to take me with you.”

Five Kentucky troopers were grouped around us, gauging how this was going to go. Two of them were supposed to drive up the mountain with Mike and provide an introduction to Richard Deacon. Backup. I was supposed to stay here, in this Kentucky state police office hanging off a hill, with Bridget-who-filed-and-made-the-coffee.

Because it was safer.

B
ridget brought me a Dixie cup of tepid water and an Oreo. By this time, I was sitting upright in a chair. My hand still wobbled enough that I gave up trying to bring the cup to my mouth. Bridget had draped a washcloth around my neck. It made my teeth click again, so it was hard to listen.

Mike stood within grabbing distance, grilling a trooper named Lloyd who was assigned to take him up to Richard Deacon’s house. Waiting for me to recover. Wayne had parked himself at a desk across the room.

“Dickie’s not real friendly, but he don’t bother anyone,” Lloyd drawled. “Keeps to hisself. Ain’t seen his son for years.”

“His wife, Caroline. Has she been around recently?”

“Nah. Not since she dumped him years ago. Carrie was one of them debutantes in high school. You wouldn’t know it to look at him now, but Dickie was a big state football star. Got her pregnant, and her parents set ’em up in that house on Butch Hill. Caroline came to town regular for her Valium. Always wore these real short skirts, like she wanted us to look. Their boy seemed OK, until that little girl went missing.”

Mike didn’t react at all to this information, not even a slight twitch. The man could have been telling him where the bathroom was.

Lloyd directed his attention to Wayne, ostensibly concentrating on a computer screen.

“Wayne, weren’t you on that case? How old was Dickie’s boy back then? Fifteen?”

Wayne grunted affirmation. “No real proof the boy took her, and he denied every minute of it. Things didn’t set right, though. I found a box of knives in his closet. We’d had a rash of pets gone missin’ that year, and people came forward to say they’d suspected Wyatt all along. You could tell his parents knew something.
The prosecutor got him sent to juvie ’cause of the knives. Right before Carrie run out.”

Lloyd stuck his hat on his head. “Ready to head up there?”

Mike didn’t ask the next, most obvious question.

Instead, he cast his gaze to me, hopeful.

He didn’t find what he was searching for in my eyes.

O
ur rental car climbed steadily at twenty miles an hour up an Appalachian mountain. We were spiraling toward the clouds to the house of the reclusive Richard Deacon, where Caroline had lived her other life.

I had refused to stay behind. I stared out the window now, silent, overwhelmed with guilt. I could feel Mike’s anger and empathy punching it out inside him. I wasn’t sure which one to root for this time. What could he do? It was all too much.
I
was too much.

An ancient forest hugged us on both sides. The paved road had long ago fallen into disrepair. Every pothole we hit made me think we were about to shimmy off the road and into the kudzu that draped and entwined the trees, determined to swallow the forest one leaf at a time. A blowout, and we’d careen in there, left for dead, strangled by the boa constrictor of green plants. Or, in a best case scenario, we’d have to change a tire on a slant. I pictured the car rolling back as Mike lay flat on the asphalt, struggling with the tools.

None of these awful things happened. The state police car with two troopers inside led the way, and we ascended gradually, rounding blind curves with mere inches between the car and a steep drop-off to a verdant valley of death.

Funny thing: Earlier, Mike had wanted me to stay back at the motel, a retro affair with everything original, including the semen stains on the mattress and the grandaddy of all roaches
that I met on the end of my toothbrush this morning. I chose, insisted really, to be left at the state police office instead.

“How are you doing, Emily? You look much better.” He squeezed my knee.
Empathy
, I thought,
must have a killer left hook
. “What are you thinking about?”

“Death,” I replied lightly. “Semen. Roaches.” Anything but Wayne. “How do you know Caroline’s husband is up there right now?”

“The troopers placed a live-feed camera at the bottom of the hill the day after we found Caroline. Deacon drove in last night around ten in his pickup and hasn’t come out. They don’t see him in town for months, except when he needs supplies. He’s a fan of blue Gatorade. Buys ten cases at a time.”

“What if it’s a trap? What if his son, Wyatt, is up there, too?”

“It’s a little ironic for you to be worrying about this now, don’t you think?” I felt the edge of his anger. So it wasn’t a complete knockout. “No one else has come in or out. We know that Wyatt picked up a wire transfer of two thousand dollars from his dad in Denver six months ago. He maintains no permanent residence, apparently pays cash for everything, and switches cars frequently.”

Mike braked abruptly. The state troopers’ car had slowed and was turning right at a dented mailbox almost hidden with fiery-red fall brush. The mailbox had met a drunken teenager wielding a baseball bat out of a car window, more than once.

The road sloped up to the top of a rise and the three-story brick and stone house nestled in the trees conjured up immediate déjà vu. Except for its age, the grime on the windows, and a general unkempt air, it reminded me of a mini-version of the house that Caroline eventually created—or re-created—for herself in Clairmont.

A tall, thin man appeared from behind a tree at the top of the drive, a shotgun gripped in both hands. It wasn’t raised, but he
was thinking about it. A bright orange cap, faded jeans, black work boots, a week’s worth of stubble on his chin. Maybe he’d been hunting. Maybe not.

The trooper parked the car and powered down his window.

“Hey, there, Dickie,” he drawled. Friendly.

“Hi, Lloyd. What can I do for you?” Deacon didn’t loosen his hold on the gun. A game of chicken, Kentucky-style.

Mike shoved my head down. Odd, how
this
situation didn’t make me shake at all.

The trooper spoke in a lazy, casual tone, as if most of the citizens of Perry County greeted him with their finger on a trigger. “This law officer behind me has come here all the way from Texas to bring you some news about your ex-wife. He’d like to get out and talk a bit. Probably in the house is best. That means you need to lay that shotgun on the ground.”

“I don’t care about that bitch. I want all of you off my property. I got a God-given right to carry this gun.”

“You’re sure right about that, Dickie. And it will be right where you left it after y’all talk. What is it? A Remington? Wasn’t that your daddy’s piece?”

Mike stepped out of the car without his gun drawn.

“Stay down until I get inside the house,” he told me tersely. “
Don’t move
from this car.”

“But how will I know …” Mike had already shut the car door. I heard his feet crunch on gravel. Two other car doors opened and slammed.

My stomach was already cramping. Logically, I wouldn’t be able to see when Mike went inside if my head was crammed at my knees. I rose up slightly and peered over the dashboard. The troopers leaned against the front of their car, arms folded, about ten feet from the old man. Master intimidators since grade school, I’d bet.

Mike was postured a foot away from Richard Deacon, with
his hand out, waiting for a handshake. It wasn’t reciprocated, and Mike lowered his arm, slowly.

“Do you know that your ex-wife, Caroline, was found murdered a week ago?” The first question, he’d told me, was sometimes the single best moment to assess the truth.

I couldn’t see Richard Deacon’s face, or see him crumple to his knees, but I heard the wail.

If he was faking, he was very good at it.