“And what’s this Darren Chase got to do with it?” Sam asked.
“He’s the basketball coach at the high school. Ellen Bellington said that in the months before Nicky disappeared over Bride’s Veil, he was spending all his free time at practice with his coach. She hinted that perhaps there was something inappropriate going on.”
“Hinted?”
I nodded. “She didn’t come right out and say it, but she has her suspicions.”
“And do we? Have our suspicions, I mean? Is this guy on a list?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I checked before we left the station, he’s clean. Mr. Chase moved here from the Gulf about five years ago. He’s clean as a whistle.”
“Hmmm. Something to be aware of, at least. Just because there’s no record doesn’t mean something hasn’t happened,” Sam said. He stopped fiddling with the vents and began channel surfing the stereo. “Do you have any names picked out?”
I smiled. The name. Lately, the only thing Brody and I fought about.
“Well, it’s a girl. I like Elizabeth, after my mother. But Brody dated a girl named Eliza who was a real bitch, so he hates it. He likes Tara but spelled T-E-R-R-A, like the earth kind of terra, nerdy scientist that he is.”
“Different. I like it. But the name Brody’s different, too. His parents must have been hippies.”
I shook my head. “Nope. They were missionaries in China in the sixties and seventies. His mother came down with a terrible fever while carrying him and she almost died. They were in a remote outpost hundreds of miles from any kind of hospital, but the Buddhist villagers saved her life. They’d already settled on the name Matthew but his dad was so grateful to them that he switched it to Bodhi, after the Bodhisattva. But back in the States, when she delivered, the nurse misheard her and wrote Brody on his birth certificate.”
“Wow. That’s a crazy story,” Sam said, shaking his head. He settled on a country-western station and George Strait filled the Olds, singing about an oceanfront property in Arizona.
“After they returned to the States, they had four more children, all girls: Rachel, Mary, Naomi, and Sarah.”
Sam laughed. “Biblical names.”
“Except for Brody. Can you imagine? I think you guys would like each other; you’ll have to come over for dinner once he gets back from Alaska,” I said.
Just a few more days and he’d be home; unless, that is, he was planning to shack up with Celeste Fucking Takashima. Maybe she would take him back to Tokyo and they’d eat sushi naked, holding intense conversations deep into the night about geological anomalies and surface-level fissures.
Sam was looking at me funny.
“Sorry, I missed that?”
“Your house is up canyon, isn’t it? Sort of isolated up there.”
“Brody bought it ten years ago. Once we started dating, and fell in love, I sort of fell in love with it, too. It’s just beautiful and peaceful. And the wildlife is amazing; we’ve seen deer, of course, but also black bear and even a mountain lion once.”
“Is it on the grid?”
“Yes and no. We’re on a propane system and our own septic, but we’ve got Internet and cable and electricity,” I said with a laugh. “It’s not as out there as you might think.”
I pulled into the parking lot at Rick’s Café. It was empty save for a beat-up Subaru wagon. A tall man leaned against the driver’s door, a Red Sox ball cap pulled low over his ears. By his hip, the Subaru’s side mirror hung at an angle, held in place with duct tape. I noticed a rear fender was dented, as well.
We met him halfway between our cars and the restaurant. Late-afternoon heat rose from the asphalt. At the edge of the lot, two crows pecked at a dead squirrel. Their loud cackles filled the air and I turned away from the sight of them diving into the squirrel’s abdomen, their sharp beaks bobbing back up with bits of flesh.
“Mr. Chase? Thanks for meeting us. This is my partner, Sam Birdshead. I’m Detective Gemma Monroe,” I said. I had to crane my neck to look up at him. He was my age, give or take a year or two. His eyes were dark and framed with long lashes, the kind any woman would kill for. When he spoke, I again heard the Gulf in his voice, a low drawl that trod softly over the harder consonants and vowels.
“Darren. And it’s no problem,” he said. “Look, am I in some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know, are you?” I asked. My intent had not been flirtation, but it sounded that way.
Darren just smiled and shook his head.
Inside Rick’s, we took a seat at a table by a window that looked out at the ski slopes, brown and drab and dusty in the summer heat. The ski lift chairs swung gently in the breeze, giant swing sets suspended high up in the air. A handful of mountain bikers crisscrossed their way down the slopes, small clouds of dirt and dust bellowing up from their back tires. We watched as two of the bikers almost collided. At the last second, one angled uphill and the other downhill. Darren and Sam watched them and made small talk while I leaned back and watched Darren. I was curious what he’d have to say about Nicky.
A waitress with hips like a Chevy dropped three menus in front of us. The laminated pages were sticky, as though they hadn’t been wiped down after the lunch crowd, and Sam put his down in disgust. He wiped the tips of his fingers on the edge of the tablecloth.
The waitress, whose nametag read “Michelle,” came back and placed three glasses of water on the table. The water was iceless, the glasses filled only halfway. Her right hip jostled the table as she shifted her weight. She waited silently, her pen poised above a small notepad in hands that were red and chapped and dotted with age marks.
“Three coffees, please,” I said.
She gave me a skeptical look.
“Two regulars and a decaf, then?”
I shook my head. “Three regulars, please. With some cream and sugar on the side.”
“Honey, you sure? I don’t think you’re supposed to have coffee if you’re expecting a little one,” she said.
She’d taken a step back and placed her reddened hands on her hips. In her black-and-white-striped polo shirt, she looked like a referee, and I expected to hear a whistle pierce the quiet restaurant.
“Hey, Michelle. How ’bout those coffees,” Darren said without taking his eyes off the mountain bikers.
The woman’s hands dropped from her hips and with a shake of her head she turned back into the kitchen.
The basketball coach took off the Red Sox cap and his hair, dark and thick, fell at an angle down his forehead. He finally turned from the window and looked at me in a way that I hadn’t been looked at in a long time.
“So, I think you mentioned a former student, right?” Darren asked. “Is it someone who graduated?”
I swallowed. “Sort of. Nicholas Bellington. Remember him?”
Darren jolted in his seat, and his mouth fell open. “Nicky?”
Sam jumped in. “So you knew him?”
In response, my partner got a withering glare from Darren.
He answered. “Of course I knew him. Not only did I coach him, he was one of the most beloved students at the school. And then, of course, when he died… well, let’s just say it would be pretty squirrely if I didn’t know who Nicky was.”
“Would you call him a good player? It sounds like he was at the gym a lot that spring.”
Darren’s eyes met mine again. He put his hands flat on the table and leaned forward, holding my gaze two seconds longer than what most would consider polite.
“Look, what’s this all about?” he asked.
Sam Birdshead started to reply and I kicked his leg under the table.
“Please answer the question, Mr. Chase,” I said.
“It’s Darren. My dad is Mr. Chase,” he replied. “This was three years ago, you know.”
I nodded. “I get the feeling you’re not the kind of man who forgets things, Darren.”
“You’d be right about that. Well, someone’s been telling you tall tales. Nicky quit the team right before Christmas. He wasn’t that great of a player. I would have tried to get him to stay, but…” He trailed off.