Poisonous: A Novel (34 page)

Except this time, would Paula Wallace even care about the truth? Would she change her opinion about Tommy or would she still keep her children away from him?

“Meet me at the bookstore and we’ll go together to the Wallaces’ neighbor’s house,” Max said. “And then we’re going to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Bill Wallace.”

“Sounds to me like this won’t be a friendly conversation,” David said.

She ignored his comment. There was a pattern—parents complained to Ivy’s parents about her behavior, yet the behavior didn’t change. Ivy was old enough to be responsible for her own misbehavior, but the parents had known. Had they even tried to stop her? Try to get her counseling? Take away her phone? Her computer? Ground her? Toss her in a dungeon? Maybe that’s what it would have taken to knock sense into that kid. Max actually understood Ivy and her motives. She craved attention, any kind of attention. Her popular blog convinced her that
she
was popular. Her thousands of followers on Twitter and Instagram fed into that belief.

It must have been difficult, as a teenager, to see the numbers and believe you were popular, yet have no real friends. Ivy was smart, she must have sensed that disparity. And then what did she do? Pile on more shit for the gossip mill? Was she confused? Frustrated? Lonely? To have all those cyberfriends and to feel like the most isolated person in town. She hadn’t made the connection. Would she have, had she lived?

They would never know.

What else did Ivy’s parents know that they hadn’t told the police? Because they hadn’t told Grace Martin about Stephen Cross or any of the other people who spoke to them about Ivy. While the fact that Stephen moved his family out of the area might take them out of the suspect pool, the Wallaces should have informed the police about everyone and everything in Ivy’s life. But then, as far as Paula Wallace was concerned, Ivy was an average teenager who didn’t do anything that any other teenager wouldn’t have done.

And now the situation between Tommy and Austin had gone from bad to worse. Before Max came to town, at least they could see each other—even if Austin had to defy his mother to do it. Now Paula was making it a legal matter.

It wasn’t right.

“Thirty minutes, David. Thanks.” Max hung up and got out of the neighborhood before the junior high students left the building.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Based on the recording of Mrs. Dorothy Baker, both David and Max had first assumed that when she said she was a neighbor of the Wallaces that meant she was a neighbor to Paula and Bill Wallace, who lived closer to town. But Dorothy Baker lived down the street from Jenny Wallace, Bill’s ex-wife.

She was in her eighties and petite. Two dogs greeted Max and David as Mrs. Baker opened the door—Pomeranians, which matched Mrs. Baker in both size and temperament. They barked nonstop; one growled.

Mrs. Baker glared at David through narrowed eyes. “Becky and Cassie don’t like men.”

As if being a man was David’s fault.

“Come in, come in, I can’t be chasing these girls down the block at my age.”

They walked into the foyer and Mrs. Baker closed the door behind them.

“Mrs. Baker, you have a lovely view—maybe if we sit out on the deck?” Max suggested.

She turned to Max and looked up at her. “You’re taller than you look on television.” Her tone suggested that Max had been deceptive.

“I’m five foot ten.”

Mrs. Baker looked at her feet. “Then why do you wear heels? Landsakes, you must be over six feet tall in those shoes!”

Max liked being tall, except when she wanted to go undercover. Height, especially on a woman, stood out. She squatted and put her hand out for the dogs to sniff. One ran down the hall, turned around and continued barking. The other sniffed, turned around in three circles, and licked Max’s hand.

Mrs. Baker nodded sharply, as if Max had passed some sort of test, but with a suspicious expression that maybe she’d cheated. “This way,” she motioned toward the sliding-glass doors.

The house was decorated in old lady clutter—antique furniture, plastic on couches, doilies on every surface. Glass-enclosed cabinets filled every available wall space, their insides crammed full with every possible knickknack.

Mrs. Baker told them to sit, then she left them and went back into the house.

“I should have come here alone,” Max said.

“We shouldn’t have come here at all,” said David. “You’re a total softie, Max.”

“Me?”

“Little old lady wants to meet you, you rush out and meet her. Not that you don’t have a dozen other things you need to be doing.”

“I want to talk to Amanda anyway, about her friend Madison. We’re not that far. In ten minutes, get me out of here.”

“If I can survive ten minutes with that barking.”

“They’re annoying, but they’re cute.”

“A golden retriever is cute. Those things are fluffy rats. Rats aren’t cute.”

Max almost laughed, then Mrs. Baker emerged from the kitchen with a tray of cookies and tea.

Max didn’t want anything, but she didn’t want to be rude. Too often, families neglected their elderly relatives, and all they wanted was a little company. When she’d been undercover at a senior care facility in Miami—the year before she started “Maximum Exposure,” when she could still go undercover
—
she’d learned that many children and grandchildren left their elderly parents in a home and rarely, if ever, came to visit them.

David stood to help, but Mrs. Baker told him to sit back down. She took her sweet time pouring hot tea and, with shaking hands, passed cups and saucers to David and Max.

Finally, she sat. Max sipped, then put the tea down.

“Mrs. Baker, thank you for your hospitality. We have another meeting this afternoon, so I was hoping you could share with us why you called the hotline last night.”

“Right to it, aren’t you? But that’s the way you are on your show. I thought that was an act. Guess not.” She sipped her tea. “I watch the NET shows on Thursday and Monday—your show and Ace’s shows. I like Ace Burley, he has a good voice.”

“Yes, he does,” Max said, restraining from saying anything negative about her coworker. She didn’t hate Ace, but he could be extremely difficult.

So can you, Maxine.

“And watching your show, I remembered that night the retarded fellow tromped through my yard again.”

“The night of July third?”

“Yes.”

“You can remember the exact day fourteen months later?” Max asked.

“I may be eighty-three, but my memory is intact.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This wasn’t the first time. His mother had to put alarms on their house because of his sleepwalking.”

Sleepwalking?

“Tommy Wallace sleepwalks?”

“Has since he was a little boy. Nearly got himself killed once or twice. Before they got the alarms, his mother found him sitting at the bus stop at the corner three times in the middle of the night. All ready for school, but in a daze. He’s not right in the head, that boy.”

“The bus stop? Doesn’t he ride his bike to school?”

“This was a while ago, when he went to a special school for those kids, before high school. The high school has a special education program, I’ve heard. My granddaughter is the girl’s PE teacher, she told me about it.”

Max bristled. She didn’t like that she hadn’t known about the sleepwalking, but she also didn’t like the way Dorothy spoke about Tommy.

“When was the last time you heard him in your yard?” Max asked.

“I saw him. Last month. It was midnight. I couldn’t sleep. I was sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire. Saw him clear as day walk across the front yard, like Frankenstein.”

Max resisted the urge to correct Dorothy that Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster he created.

“I called Jenny right away. Told her her alarm didn’t work, her boy was out wandering again. He did it as a little boy, then it stopped. Jenny explained it all to me one day in the garden, so I paid it no mind. Then it started up again when his father left poor Jenny for that Seattle floozy.” She harrumphed clearly, looking thoroughly disgusted. “Jenny said the sleepwalking was stress-related and the doctor said it would stop on its own like it did when he was six, but it hasn’t. That alarm is so loud it wakes me up! Anyway, I think most nights she forgets to set it. She’s one of those people who forgets everything. She’d forget her head it if weren’t attached to her body. I may be turning eighty-four next month, but I don’t forget anything. Prunes. My papa ate prunes every morning, lived to one hundred and two, his mind all there. I plan on doing the same.”

“In your call last night, you said you had information related to Ivy Lake’s murder.”

“Well, I just told you! That boy is out at all times of the day or night. When I was a girl, people like Tommy Wallace were put in institutions so they wouldn’t be a danger to themselves or others.”

Max had just about had it with the woman. “Mrs. Baker, I think you’re—”

David cleared his throat. “Ma’am, you said you saw Tommy out the night of July third last year?”

“Yes.” She glanced at Max, her mouth in a tight line. “I heard him.”

“You recognized his voice?” Max said through clenched teeth.

“The dogs were barking. In the middle of the night! It was after one o’clock in the morning. Woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I went to the kitchen to warm some tea and heard his bike. His old bike—he got a new one for Christmas, I believe. His old bike made this godawful sound when he shifted gears. A
clunk-clunk
sound.”

“Are you suggesting that Tommy, a sleepwalker, was riding his bike in his sleep?”

“Stranger things have happened. But he was out and about that night, the night his stepsister died, and everyone knows that boy isn’t right in the head.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “My bridge partner Meredith Moore told me Paula Wallace thinks he killed her daughter, but the police won’t do anything about it. Political correctness and all that. And I know for a fact that she won’t let him in the house unless her husband is there, and he’s traveling on business half the year. No wonder those kids are all over town doing God knows what. They need a firm hand, and they don’t have one in Bill Wallace. Tommy and his stepbrother. That kid is even worse that Tommy. At least Tommy has an excuse, being retarded and all. But that kid—Adam. Andrew? No, no … whatever his name is. The one with the skateboard, sneaking around all the time. He doesn’t even go to Jenny’s front door. Hides his bike in the bushes and jumps her back fence all the time. I can see from my sewing room upstairs, clear as day. Why don’t his parents do something about him? I know he trampled my flower beds last spring.”

Max was glad that David had prevented her from verbally assaulting Dorothy Baker. She had always liked the elderly—they had lived history. They deserved respect and appreciation, even this old biddy who reminded her of Miss Gulch in
The Wizard of Oz.

Old or not, Max did not like this woman.

It was all she could do to say goodbye and thank you.

“Last year, you would have given her a tongue-lashing,” David said when they were in the car.

“It wouldn’t have done us any good.”

“She knows some truths.”

“About Paula Wallace? She hasn’t kept quiet about her opinion on her stepson Tommy.”

“Ask his mother about the sleepwalking,” said David.

“Do you actually believe it’s possible Tommy killed Ivy in his sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

David didn’t have to say anything else. If Tommy was prone to leaving the house, sleepwalking or not, his mother may not have always known when he did it. Or she may be covering for him. Jenny Wallace was overprotective of her son, and it wouldn’t be the first time that Max had encountered a mother who lied to protect her child.

“Tommy is not a killer,” Max said.

“It could have been an accident.”

“Tommy wouldn’t have been able to lie about it,” Max said. “I haven’t met many people incapable of lying, but Tommy cannot lie. If he killed Ivy, he’d have confessed.”

“We don’t know a lot about his condition,” David said. “Maybe he doesn’t remember.”

“Oh, please.”

“I never thought I’d say this, Max, but you’ve grown too attached to a suspect. You’re not objective.”

“My feelings about Tommy are irrelevant,” she said. “I know he’s innocent. The evidence at this point doesn’t support it, and nothing he has said or done has made me think he’s lied about anything. Mrs. Baker said one in the morning. We know Ivy was killed two hours before that.”

“She said he was returning after one in the morning. On a bike. He might not know what he did.”

“Then there would have been evidence. He’s not a criminal mastermind. Kill Ivy at eleven, hang around her dead body for two hours, send a tweet using words and phrases Ivy used, then return home?” She shook her head. “No.”

“He has a protective mother who may have destroyed evidence. A knife. Dirty clothes.”

“I can’t believe you are saying this.”

“And I’m just as surprised you aren’t considering it.”

Why was she so upset? Max had no stake in this case. All she wanted was to identify whoever killed Ivy Lake.

Except … she wanted the truth because of Tommy. She wanted Tommy to have a normal life, as normal as possible considering his challenges and his dysfunctional family.

“I would be more apt to believe that Austin killed his sister than Tommy,” she said. “He’s a smart kid. Cunning. But he has no real motive, and he was twelve at the time. While a twelve-year-old can kill … I don’t see him bringing me in to investigate if he’s the killer. It was his idea.”

“It was Emma’s idea,” David corrected. “And Austin may not have expected Tommy to be accused. Maybe he didn’t see the potential ramifications. Ivy hurt Tommy, Austin hurt Ivy. Austin was the last person to see her alive. And based on the new timeline, she died less than an hour after he said she left the house.”

“Just because I’m more inclined to believe Austin could do it doesn’t mean I think he did.”

“What are you going to do now?”