“He could have had an accomplice who owns a car.”
“Oh, please,” Bridget groaned, not breaking her stride. “Sonny doesn’t have any friends. He’s just a sweet, simple, slightly off-beat guy. He’s McLaren’s Boo Radley. Didn’t you ever read
To Kill a Mockingbird
? Sonny wouldn’t intentionally harm anyone. You’re way off, Mallory.”
Bridget saw the barbed-wire fence up ahead, and thanked God she was almost out of there. She thought Mallory would have been more sympathetic toward another friendless outsider. Instead, she seemed to have utter contempt for him. Her accusations made no sense.
“I know he killed those boys,” Mallory insisted. “I’m going to prove it. And it’ll be in my book.”
“That’s swell,” Bridget muttered. She was looking at the opening in the fence.
“I might have the whole book be about Gorman’s Creek,” Mallory said, trailing after her. “And I’ll call it
The Devil’s Gulch
, like I said. It’ll be a best seller, just you wait. It’ll put me above the crowd. . . .”
Bridget remembered that afternoon in the woods, and felt a pang of regret in her gut. If she hadn’t gone there with Mallory Meehan that day, things would have been different. Strange, how Mallory Meehan had been so obsessed with Gorman’s Creek, and that was where she would die.
Bridget stared at the quote under Mallory’s portrait in the yearbook:
To riseth above the crass and common crowd is never easy.
She heard the school bus pulling up in front of the house. Then someone tapped on their car horn a couple of times. Bridget glanced at her wristwatch: 3:45. Setting aside the yearbook, she got up from the sofa and went to the front door. Outside, the school bus was pulling away, and Brad’s BMW was just turning into the driveway. Eric waved at him. And David had put down his schoolbooks to signal and direct his uncle as if he were working in a plane hangar. Watching him, Bridget cracked a smile.
Brad climbed out of the car, then hugged David and Eric. He was wearing a suit and tie, but that didn’t stop him from horsing around with them on the front lawn for a couple of minutes.
Finally, the three of them headed for the front door. The boys, both out of breath, filed in first. Bridget gave them both a quick kiss on the forehead. She threw her brother a wry smile. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you on the phone earlier,” he said under his breath. “And I couldn’t call you back. Something’s come up. It’s not a good idea to talk about Fuller Sterns over the phone—or even in the house.”
“What do you mean?” Bridget whispered.
“Uncle Brad, I want to show you my Power Rangers!” Eric interrupted. He grabbed Brad by the hand and started to drag him inside.
“Honey, not now,” Bridget started to say. “Uncle Brad and I—”
“It’s okay,” Brad assured her. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“C’mon!” Tugging at his uncle’s arm, Eric led him into the den.
Bridget shut the front door and wandered into the room after them. Eric already had Brad parked in front of the TV while he got out his CD-ROM game. David sat on the sofa with the McLaren High 1985 yearbook in his lap. “God, Mom,” he cackled. “You and Uncle Brad had some really dorky-looking people in your graduating class!” He turned the book around and pointed to Zach’s photo. “Who is Zachary Matthias? How nerdy can you get?”
“Actually, he was a very nice guy,” Bridget said. “And I ran into him today—at the funeral of another high school friend.”
Brad shot her a look.
She stared back at him, but kept talking to her son: “Zach is working for the
Examiner
now. He was at your Little League game on Saturday, David. In fact, I’ve seen him around a lot lately. I just hadn’t recognized him. Turns out he’s doing a story on me—for his newspaper.”
Brad slowly shook his head.
Frowning, Bridget gave a secretive nod.
“Ugh! Who is Mallory Meehan?” David laughed. “Talk about a loser! Was she your friend, Mom?”
Bridget turned away from her brother, then sighed. “Yes, we were friends—for a very short time.”
“What happened to her?” David asked.
Bridget didn’t answer.
“She disappeared the summer after our senior year,” Brad replied. “Isn’t that right, Brigg? She disappeared, and no one ever knew what happened to her. Right, Brigg?”
Bridget didn’t look at him. “I better get dinner on,” she said quietly.
Then she headed toward the kitchen.
With dusk creeping over the horizon, Bridget and Brad stood in her backyard. She was watering the bushes with the garden hose. Through the picture window, they could see David and Eric in the den, playing a video game on TV. Just a few nights ago, a stranger had been watching Bridget through the same window.
Brad said it wasn’t safe to talk inside their houses or on their phones—not until they’d conducted a “sweep check” for bugging devices. Brad’s campaign manager, Jay Corby, had a source on Foley’s team. Jay’s
source
was a spy—a
volunteer
at Foley campaign headquarters. Foley had planted Wes Linderman in the Corrigan-for-Oregon camp, so this was tit for tat. According to Jay’s spy, Foley had investigators who uncovered some potentially damaging information about Brad’s past. “No word on what it is,” Brad explained. “But Foley was in his office dancing a jig over what they’d found. He must be waiting for the right time to spring the news.”
“Do you think it might have anything to do with Gorman’s Creek?” Bridget asked.
“I’m not sure. But I wonder if our pal Zach Matthias has a hand in this. You said he’s with the
Examiner
? Foley has the
Examiner
kissing his ass. The son of a bitch could burn down an orphanage and
eat
the children, and the goddamn
Examiner
would still be singing his praises. I wouldn’t be surprised if Foley put one of their reporters on his payroll. What exactly happened with you and
good old Zach
today?”
Bridget directed the hose on a hydrangea bush, and she told him about her day—all of it. She told him about meeting with her estranged husband, reading the article on Fuller’s bizarre death, the incident in the alley, and finally, running into Zach Matthias at Fuller’s funeral.
“I don’t think Zach is the man who was in this yard the other night,” she said. “And I don’t believe he was in that alley this morning. I’m pretty sure it was someone else.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this
stalker
character works for Foley too,” Brad said.
She frowned. “Why in the world would Foley hire someone to
stalk
me? What kind of strategy is that?”
“They’re probably trying to get personal stuff on you, Brigg.”
“Well, I have nothing to hide,” she said, sighing. “Except the truth about something that happened twenty years ago.” She gave the hose nozzle a twist and shut off the water. “Brad, sooner or later, we’ll have to face up to what we’ve done. And I think we’ve run out of ‘later.’ ” She tossed aside the hose. “There were five of us with Mallory that night at Gorman’s Creek—”
Brad started shaking his head, refusing to listen.
“Five of us,” Bridget repeated. She grabbed his arm. “You, me, Cheryl Blume, Fuller Sterns, and Olivia Rankin. Two weeks ago, Olivia contacted Fuller. She had new information about what happened at Gorman’s Creek—”
“You know, we’ve already had this discussion—”
“Hear me out. Please. Two days after Olivia got a nice bundle of cash out of Fuller, she was found on a beach with a bullet in her head—an
apparent suicide.
It doesn’t make sense.”
He shook his head again. “A lot of suicides don’t make sense. You have no idea why Olivia might have taken her own life.”
“Yes, well, we can rule out money concerns, can’t we?” Bridget retorted. “I don’t think she killed herself, Brad. And I don’t think Fuller’s death was an accident. Zach has been looking into it, and from everything he told me, there’s something awfully suspicious about that car wreck—like it was a setup. Fuller told me just a few days ago that he was being followed—watched. The same thing is happening to me. It could be happening to you too, Brad, only you’re too busy to notice. You already have so many reporters and curiosity seekers on your tail, you might not see the one face in the crowd. Then again, I’ve never seen his face. Fuller said he never got a good look at his face either.”
“I think you’re shaken up,” he said. “And that’s understandable, considering what you’ve been through. But you’re leaping to a lot of wrong conclusions here—”
“I am not, and you know it,” she growled. Bridget snatched the hose off the ground, then dragged it toward the side of the house.
“Here, let me.” He reached for the hose.
“I’ve got it,” Bridget snapped, jerking the hose away from him. “At this point, I think the smart—the prudent—thing to do is track down Cheryl Blume. And if she’s alive, if she hasn’t recently fallen off some bridge or gotten hit by a car, maybe we can find out from Cheryl if someone has been following her around lately.”
Brad shook his head again. “But with Foley’s people watching our every move—”
“I’ll do it,” Bridget assured him. She dropped the hose by the side of the house and shut off the water. “I’ll get myself a roll of quarters and call her from a pay phone. I’ll be discreet—if I can track her down.”
They’d lost touch with Cheryl—as they had the others. Cheryl had been Brad’s girlfriend through most of their senior year. She’d been a prototype for Janice: pretty, blond, and a bit pushy. She didn’t exactly lead Brad around by a ring in his nose, but at times it might have seemed that way.
“Do you know if Cheryl’s parents still live in McLaren?” Bridget asked.
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“Do you remember her parents’ names?”
“Mike and Janet.” His cell phone rang, and he automatically switched it off. “What do you plan to do about good old Zach?” he asked. “If he keeps picking away at this thing, he might just find out about Gorman’s Creek—that is, if Foley’s team doesn’t already know about it.”
Brad looked into the den and gave one of his nephews a little wave. “You’ll have to keep him off course,” he continued. “If Zach Matthias is working for Foley’s newspaper, he can’t be trusted.”
Bridget frowned. “What exactly did you have in mind? I mean, what would you have me do?”
“Do whatever you need to do to keep him off track. The guy’s poison, Brigg. He’s poison.”
“Order dessert for yourselves,” Bridget said. She scooted out of the booth at the Mexican restaurant where she’d taken David and Eric for dinner. “Anything you want—except, Eric, you can’t have the deep-fried ice cream.”
“But, Mom—”
“No way,” she said, cutting him off. “Last time you had that here, it gave you gross-out stomach, and I was up all night with you. Remember? Nix on the deep-fried ice cream. And stop kicking the table.”
Frowning, her younger son stopped swinging his feet at the table leg.
“I’ll be right outside, okay? I just need to make a couple of calls.”
“Why don’t you use your cell phone?” David asked, looking up from his dessert menu.
“Can’t. The batteries are low. Behave yourselves, guys.”
Bridget hurried to the cashier at the front of the restaurant, where she asked for three dollars in quarters. At home earlier, she’d gone through her change jar and come up with seventeen quarters. She figured she now had enough for a few long-distance calls. She’d already done a name/address search on
Google.com
and found nothing. She hoped to have better luck on the phone.
She ducked outside—to a pay phone by the front door. Through the window, she could see David and Eric in the booth. The waiter was taking their dessert order. Eric was kicking the table again.
Bridget rolled her eyes and dialed directory assistance for area code 564. She asked for Michael, Janet, or Cheryl Blume in McLaren, Washington.
“I’m sorry, there’s no listing for any of those names,” the directory assistance operator said.
She didn’t have any luck finding Cheryl or her parents in Longview—or Vancouver, Washington. Bridget asked about some other cities.
“Ma’am, Portland is area code 503,” the operator said. “For seventy-five cents, I can connect you. . . .”
Bridget ended up talking to an
M. Blume
in Tigard, outside Portland. The M was for Mildred, and she sounded like a cranky old lady: “No, I don’t have any relatives in McLaren! Why in God’s name are you bothering me?”
All the while, through the window, Bridget kept an eye on David and Eric. The waiter had arrived with their desserts, and now they were almost finished with them.
Working with yet another directory assistant in a third area code, Bridget had $2.25 left in her fist when they found a Michael and Charlotte Blume in Olympia, Washington. There was a chance that Mr. Blume had remarried—or perhaps it was Cheryl’s kid brother, Mikey, who by now had to be about thirty.
Bridget took down the number, then deposited the rest of her quarters and dialed. She counted the ring tones. Through the window, she watched another waiter approach the boys’ booth. David looked up and nodded at him. Bridget and the boys were regulars at this restaurant. She knew most of the staff, and chatted with them in Spanish. She didn’t recognize this waiter, a tall, thin, pale man with wavy red hair. He wasn’t dressed like the other waiters, who all wore white short-sleeve shirts and black pants under their red aprons. This guy had the red apron on over a dark shirt and khakis.
An answering machine clicked on the other end of the line. Over the recording, a young child recited the greeting—with considerable difficulty. Her parents kept coaching her in the background—and cracking up as the child fumbled over her lines. It was excruciating. Bridget prayed they were screening calls and would soon pick up the phone. She couldn’t leave a message and ask them to call her, because Brad said her home and cell phones could be tapped.
She peered into the restaurant again. The red-haired waiter was still hanging by the booth, talking with David and Eric. Bridget wondered why he wasn’t carrying a tray, and why he hadn’t removed anything from the table.
Finally, she heard the beep on the other end of the connection. “Um, yes, hello,” she said, eyes still on the tall, red-haired waiter. “I’m trying to track down a member of the Blume family who lived in McLaren. I went to high school with—”
There was a click on the other end. “Yes, hello? Who’s calling?”
“Um, my name is Bridget. I’m trying to get a hold of someone who went to McLaren High with me.”
“I went to McLaren High, and so did my older sister,” the man said.
“Michael, I’m Bridget Corrigan. I was in Cheryl’s class.”
“Oh my God, this is a blast from the past.” He chuckled. “Your twin brother’s running for senator down in Oregon. He used to date Cheryl.”
“That’s right, on both counts. Is—um . . .” She hesitated. She was afraid to ask if Cheryl was all right. “How—is Cheryl doing?”
“Fine. At least she was doing great when I last talked with her a couple of weeks ago. She’s single again. Lives down in Eugene. Why are you trying to track her down? A reunion or something?”
“Yes, something like that. Do you happen to have her phone number handy, Michael?”
Bridget was jotting down the phone number for Cheryl Blume Lassiter on Van Buren Street in Eugene, when she looked through the restaurant window for a moment. She didn’t like what she saw. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have bothered her—especially if she’d known the waiter. But this stranger was still standing at their table, talking to her sons. David appeared a bit nervous, and he was shaking his head. The waiter reached over and patted Eric on the shoulder. Then he mussed his hair.
“I just saw Brad on TV yesterday,” Michael was saying. “Some election coverage thing. We have a satellite dish and get the Portland stations too. Sure looks like a tight race down there. Tell me, does Brad—”
“Um, Michael, I have to go,” Bridget said, looking through the restaurant window. “I’m sorry. One of my kids just got into something. Thanks so much for Cheryl’s number. You take care.”
She hung up the phone, stuffed her notepad in her purse, then swung open the door to the restaurant. As she made a beeline for the booth, the red-haired waiter glanced over his shoulder at her.
He quickly turned away and headed for the kitchen.
Obviously confused, her two sons stared up at her. Their empty dessert plates were still in front of them.
“Are you guys okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” David said. “Where were you?”
“What was that man saying to you?” she asked.
David shrugged. “I dunno—”
Bridget didn’t wait for him to elaborate. She hurried toward the restaurant’s kitchen. The double doors were still swinging back and forth as Bridget entered through them. She saw the back door slam at the other end of the kitchen. A couple of cooks and a startled busboy looked at her from behind a stainless steel counter.
“¿Acaba de pasar corriendo por aqui un hombre de pelo rojo?”
she asked them, which translated to:
“Did a man with red hair just run through here? Do you know him?”
Bridget headed to the back door and opened it.
One of the cooks told her that a total stranger had indeed just raced through there—like someone was chasing him.