"Just
about," said John Stone. There was another crackle from his radio. He
picked it up, spoke briefly before turning back to us. "That was the
dispatcher. Marine Patrol just left Burnt Harbor, they should be here in a few
minutes."
Gryffin
toyed with his coffee mug. "Then what?"
"He'll
ask you some more questions and take a look around. They'll arrange for someone
to bring the deceased over to the funeral home, and the State Medical Examiner
will take over."
"Christ."
Gryffin closed his eyes.
Stone
glanced over his notes. "Well. What I need to do now is take a look at the
deceased."
They
went upstairs. I poured the rest of the coffee and drank it, slung on my jacket
and went outside. The dogs ran over to me then raced off into the pine grove.
"Nice
display of grief," I said, and threw a stick after them.
The
sky was gray and unsettled, not a brooding dark but a bright pewter haze that
stung my eyes. I shut them and bright phantom bolts moved behind the lids,
shapes that became a face tangled in dendrinal knots, branches, blood vessels,
Kenzie Libby running along the road.
I
opened my eyes. Wind hissed through dead leaves, a sound like sleet. A few tiny
white flakes blew past my face.
Who
could live here?
I wondered.
I
thought of Kenzie, of Aphrodite dead, and the flyers I'd seen everywhere. Dead
cats. Missing kids. A new one now.
HAVE
YOU SEEN KENZIE LIBBY?
I
shivered. Maybe this was one of those places where people weren't meant to
live, like Love Canal or Spirit Lake.
Yet
it was beautiful. Not just the trees and water and sky, all those things you
expect to be beautiful, but the rest of it—stoved-in clapboards and flyspecked
modular homes, beer bottles in the harbor, houses cobbled from stuff that
everyone else threw away, a light that seemed to leak from another world.
I
could live here,
I realized. It
wasn't exactly a comforting thought.
There
probably isn't a bigger way of blowing a story than what I'd just done. Like,
if you were to take a photograph of Paswegas at that moment and ask,
What's
wrong with this picture?
the answer would be pretty clear. There was no way
I could stay.
I
thought of the film I'd hidden in the turtle shell and the stolen picture in my
copy of Aphrodite's book. I thought of Aphrodite herself, and how it wouldn't
take a crack team of investigators to dust for fingerprints under the bed and
find mine.
I
assumed John Stone wouldn't bother. Aphrodite had been lit up like Las Vegas
when I'd last seen her alive; the toxicology report would prove that. End of
story, unless I tried to write something up for
Mojo.
But
I kept thinking of Kenzie Libby, making jewelry out of broken glass and beer
cans; a kid in the middle of nowhere who knew the words to "Marquee
Moon." What must it have been like to hear those guitars for the first
time, here on a rock in the middle of the winter, everything around you black
and white and that music like a message in a bottle tossed to you from a city
five hundred miles away?
What
was it like to be so desperate to escape your life that someone like me looked
like a way out instead of a way down?
I
hunched against the cold and swore, and wished I had another bottle of Jack
Daniel's. I wasn't crazy about the idea of hitching a ride back to the mainland
with a cop. Or a corpse. I'd wait till everyone left then head down to the
harbor and see if I could find Toby. I already owed him money for the ride
over. I'd make it a round trip and call it even and get the hell out of Dodge.
I
glanced back through the window to see if Gryffin and John Stone had come
downstairs. The kitchen was still empty. I jammed my hands into my pockets. My
feet in the cowboy boots were already freezing. I headed toward the pine grove,
hoping to warm myself by moving.
That
was another bad idea. The wind blasted me, and the trees offered little in the
way of shelter as a flurry of snow whirled up. My ears throbbed from the
inside, like someone had jabbed a pencil in there. I swore again.
Above
me, something growled. I looked up.
An
animal crouched in a pine tree—cat sized, with blackish brown fur and
glittering eyes and a small red mouth, a sleek furry tail. It glared at me,
teeth bared in a hiss. I stared back, too stunned to run away. I'd seen foxes
and coyotes in the woods back when I was a kid, and once even a bobcat, but
nothing like this, all rage and teeth. It looked like the Tasmanian Devil in
the old cartoons. It crept to the edge of the branch, its back reared like a
cat's about to spring. For a moment it was silent. Then it snarled.
I've
never heard anything like that noise. It didn't even sound like an animal. It
sounded like a human, like a person growling in pure rage. The snarl grew
louder, the fur around the animal's face fanned out in a brown-gold halo. It
moved forward, gaining better purchase on the tree limb. It was going to jump.
I
took a stumbling step backward, heard a flurry of barks, and turned.
Aphrodite's
deerhounds ran along the top of the hill. Behind them strode a tall figure in a
police parka. Sighting me, one of the dogs broke away and raced down the
hillside. I looked back at the pine tree, but the animal was gone.
The
man walked toward me. "These your dogs?" He sounded pissed off.
"No.
They belong to them." I pointed at the house.
The
dogs rushed past us, sniffed hopefully then loped toward the beach.
"You
part of the family?"
"They're
inside."
The
man nodded. He was broad shouldered, with a square face and blue eyes,
close-cropped blond hair and a nick on his chin from shaving. Tom's of Maine
meets Tom's of Finland. His name tag read Jeff Hakkala.
"I'll
be doing the investigation," he said. "You said next of kin's in
there? And the sheriff?"
"Yeah."
He
headed toward the house. I let him get a few yards ahead of me then followed.
Gryffin
opened the door. Hakkala introduced himself and went into the kitchen to confer
with John Stone. Gryffin remained in the mudroom with me.
"You
look pretty bad," I said.
"I
am. God, this is awful."
I
hesitated then asked, "Do they have any idea what happened?"
"'They?'
Who's 'they?'" He glanced into the next room. "There is- no
they.
There's
John Stone, and now this guy. He'll call the medical examiner, they'll do an
autopsy. I have to arrange some kind of funeral..."
He
buried his head in his hands.
"I'm
sorry." I felt a real pang of grief—not for Aphrodite but for him. I
touched his shoulder. "Really. It's—well, I'm just sorry, is all."
He
nodded and put his hand on mine, just for an instant.
"Yeah,"
he said at last and looked away. "I gather this guy is going to ask us a
few more questions and then do whatever he does up there at the crime
scene."
The
back of my neck went cold. "Crime scene?"
"That's
what they call it. An unattended death—they treat it like a homicide. He didn't
think it was anything but her falling, three sheets to the wind, as usual.
That's what the autopsy will tell them, anyway. I guess it takes a few weeks
before they sign off on everything."
"Do
I need to wait around?"
He
shot me a grim look. "No. This guy'll question you, and the sheriff wants
to question us about the girl in the motel. Then you can go, I guess."
For
a minute we stood in silence. Finally I said, "Me being here ... I guess I
made it worse."
"No,
Cass." He started for the kitchen. "You just made it weird."
18
the
detective didn't spend much time with me. I answered his questions, he wrote
everything down. Then he went to see Gryffin in the living room. I remained
with John Stone in the kitchen, watching as he fed the woodstove. "Been up
here before?" He nudged the stove door shut with his foot. "No."
"Probably
won't be in much of a hurry to come back, now." I shrugged. "I dunno.
I kind of like it, except for the cold."
"Not
much besides the cold. For the next six months, anyway." He looked up as
Gryffin stepped back into the room. "He's on the phone," Gryffin
said. "This could take a while." John Stone glanced from him to me.
"Mind if I ask you a few
quick questions about Merrill Libby's
girl?"
Gryffin
sank into a chair. "Go ahead."
"Well,
did either one of you see her the other night? I gather you did—Everett said
his daughter was on the computer with Merrill's girl. She said she'd seen you
at the Lighthouse." He turned to me. "And that Robert Stanley, the
one works for Mr. Provenzano—he said you was talking to Merrill's girl. That's
what she told him, anyway."
"MacKenzie,"
I said. The sheriff looked confused. "Libby's girl—she's got a name.
MacKenzie."
John
Stone blinked. "Well, yes, of course she does. But she—did you see her?"
"She
checked me into the motel. Afterward, she came to my room…I'd asked her father
if there was someplace to eat. He said no, but she wanted to tell me there was
a place, that restaurant down at the harbor. The Good Tern."
"She
enter your room?"
"Yeah.
For, like, a minute. It was freezing, I didn't want to make her stand outside.
She told me about the restaurant. Then she left. End of story."
"Some
of the kids—well, one of them, Robert, he said that the girl— that MacKenzie
told him you were going to give her a ride somewhere."
Fucking
Robert.
I felt myself grow hot.
"I didn't tell her that. I didn't tell her anything. I said about five
words to her, and that was it."
John
Stone allowed himself a wry smile. "Five words, huh? Well, Miss Neary, we
picked up a lot of chatter—teenagers talking, you know. They may confiscate her
computer, see what shows up on there."
My
mouth went dry. "What do you mean?"
"Computer
records. We had a incident last year, a juvenile met someone online and was
abducted. Picked her up down in Portsmouth."
He
shook his head. "Least she was alive. Me, I wouldn't let my kids do that
stuff. God knows who they meet up with. So you were at the Good Tern that
night? Did you see her there?"
"No."
Stone
stared out the window again, brooding. "I talked to Toby Barrett yesterday
evening, he said you'd been there with him and Gryffin here.
He
looked at Gryffin. "You were at the motel too, right? You and Miss
Neary—you were in adjacent rooms? And Toby said you were at the Good Tern
afterward. But Miss Neary, you said you only met him yesterday."
I
stared at John Stone. So did Gryffin.
"I
forgot," I said at last. "I mean—I saw him at the motel. I bumped
into him."
"Really
bumped into me," said Gryffin.
"Outside my room."
"What
does this have to do with MacKenzie Libby?" I said. "Because my
father's an attorney, and if you're going to do any kind of questioning, I'm
going to call him right now."
John
Stone lifted a placating hand. "No, no—Merrill Libby said he hadn't seen
the two of you together when you checked in. He said he always rents those two
rooms out in the winter, something about the heat. We just—he's obviously
concerned about the young lady. MacKenzie. He says she's a good kid. A good
girl."
He
sighed. "These kids... I got a grandson that age, you don't want to think
of what can happen to them. Right now they've got the Game Warden searching for
her."
"Game
warden?" I broke in. "An old lady dies of natural causes and you send
out a homicide detective, but this kid disappears and she gets a freaking game
warden? Like she's a dog?"
John
Stone looked taken aback. "Well, it's standard procedure. They re starting
to organize people to search for her. Merrill Libby, he'll mobilize the whole
town. But I'll you the truth, Miss Neary—you wander off into the woods, you're
a lot better off having the warden service look for you with trained dogs. He
knows those woods better'n anybody."
"But
you just said she might have taken off with someone. Not that she's lost in the
woods."
John
Stone shrugged. "Well, probably that's all that happened. Probably she got
ticked at her dad and run off. Then it got cold, it got dark, she started back
but she got disorientated and she's out there now. I just hope she didn't take
a fall somewhere, like if she went down to that pier at Burnt Harbor."
He
made a grim face. "Probably not cold enough for someone to freeze to
death, long as she didn't go in the water, not a young person in good health,
anyway."