“But what?”
“He started missing a lot of practices. We talked and decided it would be best for everyone if he dropped out. I don’t think his parents even noticed, they were so busy with that campaign,” Darren finished.
“So, where was he if not at practice?” I asked. “What was he up to?”
Darren gave me a smile. “Would you believe he was at the library? He was working on a special project.”
“Which was?” I pressed.
He sighed. “Look, I told him I wouldn’t tell anyone, okay? I can’t break a promise, not one I made to a dead kid.”
“The dead don’t give a damn about loyalty, Darren. Would it surprise you to know that Nicky’s been alive and well these past three years?” I asked.
The coach’s reaction was nearly identical to the one he’d had a few minutes earlier. Another jolt, another drop of the jaw.
“It’s true. Alive and well, that is, until he had his throat torn open Monday afternoon,” Sam added.
Darren’s face turned ashen. “I don’t believe it.”
“Oh, believe it,” I said. “The mayor will be holding a press conference today.”
Michelle returned with three white mugs of steaming coffee, and a small pitcher of milk and a bowl of sugar. I pushed one of the cups toward Darren. He took a quick sip and then swore as the hot liquid burned his mouth.
Tears welled in his eyes and I wondered if it was the coffee or the news of Nicky that brought them forth.
“We obviously can’t give you any more details, but you can see, right, how it might be important to get a picture of Nicky’s last few weeks and months? Before he went over that waterfall?” Sam asked.
Darren dipped a napkin in his water and brought the cool cloth to his lip. He shook his head and blinked away the tears so fast I decided they must have been from the burn after all.
“Look, Darren,” I said. “I don’t want to subpoena you.”
“Are you sure? It might be fun,” he replied with a smirk. “Look, all I can say is that Nicky was interested, and I mean, very interested, in some local history. He asked me about it once, and I told him to get with Tilly over at the public library.”
Sam glared at Darren. “Could you be more vague? What exactly was this local history?”
I glanced at the bikers as I waited for Darren’s reply. They seemed to have finished their rides for the day, as they were huddled en masse at the bottom of the slope. A few peeled off their jerseys, revealing lean sweaty torsos and a solitary sports bra.
The restaurant was quiet and when I turned back to the table, I saw Darren staring at me.
“What?”
He laughed. “I was just thinking how ironic it is, you asking what Nicky was researching.”
“Ironic?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, it means-”
I lifted a hand. “He knows what it means. Why ironic?”
Darren Chase stood and jammed the baseball cap down on his head. He threw a ten-dollar bill on the table and stretched and as his T-shirt lifted, I caught a glimpse of another lean, tan torso, this one fringed with tiny dark hairs that trailed down into the waistband of his jeans. I swallowed and blamed my raging hormones, and the fact that Brody had been gone for so long, on the thoughts that flitted across my mind.
“Because you were the one who found the bodies, Gemma. Nicky was fascinated with the Woodsman murders. He couldn’t get enough of them. From the time you found that skull in what, November? December? Until his death, that kid was obsessed.”
I pushed back from the table, shocked. “You’re kidding. Why?”
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Darren said. He shook his head. “Like I said, he came to me one day and asked how someone would go about researching cold cases, old crimes. It wasn’t hard to guess which crime he was talking about, so I pointed him in Tilly’s direction.”
Darren left. Sam and I silently watched him walk away. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get the McKenzie boys out of my head.
Chapter Seventeen
By the time I dropped Sam back at the station, I was so tired I didn’t think I was going to make it up the canyon. As I watched him walk into the building, his short blond hair turning amber in the setting sun, I was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu, and for a moment, I waited to see if he would come back, and tell me that Ravi Hussen was on the phone, and the whole damn thing would start over like that Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day.
But he didn’t come out and I headed home. The last swatches of sunlight were chased across the sky by the deepening twilight. A couple of bats flitted high above me, on their way out for an evening meal. I pulled into our gravel driveway and stared at the house. It was, as it should have been, dark and silent. Immense woods flanked the narrow two-story house on three sides like an open mouth, gaping and black and ready to swallow up the place at any moment.
As I got out of the car, the chilly mountain air hit my bare forearms and I shivered; the intense heat of the day was already a distant memory. I hurried inside and got the lights on and some potatoes and salmon in the oven. I let Seamus out into the yard and left the back door open for him.
We’d spent a grand building the fence; it was nine feet high and reinforced with discreet steel planks hidden behind pine panels. Since its completion a year ago, we hadn’t had a single problem with bears in the garbage. And I had stopped worrying that Seamus would become a snack for a mountain lion.
The house was quiet save for the ticking of the timer I used for the fish and potatoes, and the sound of Seamus coming and going through the back door. He’d come in, whine a bit, and then go back out. After his fourth rotation, I pushed myself off the couch and went to the door.
“Seamus?” I called to him. “What is it, boy?”
The backyard was dark and I heard him snuffling in the garden at the side of the house. I flipped the switch for the porch light and waited for the thing to come on but it didn’t and I flipped it up and down and then cursed, remembering. The bulb had burned out during a dinner party we’d thrown a month ago.
I thought Brody replaced the light but he must have forgotten.
“Seamus! C’mon boy, come here,” I called. The snuffling stopped, and then started up again with another funny little whine. “Seamus! Get in here.”
He emerged from the dark with dirt on his nose and a guilty look on his face, and as I pulled the back door shut behind him, I got the sense that something, or someone, was in the yard.
I don’t scare easily but the silence was eerie and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I held my breath and listened and heard none of the usual nighttime sounds of the forests: the screech of crickets, the breeze in the pine boughs or the scratch of rodents.
A deep silence descended over the yard, so deep I could hear my heart thudding in my chest. I stepped back into the kitchen and bolted the back door and drew the curtains on the windows above the sink. I thought of going upstairs and getting my gun but the feeling passed. It was likely a raccoon or bobcat up the street; the prey all seem to play freeze when they sense a predator in the neighborhood.
I ate my dinner on a tray in front of the television and with every news story, grew more and more depressed. Another war in a faraway country, another parent doing something horrible to their child, more bloodshed, more sadness. I switched to a local news station and saw Terence and Ellen Bellington standing at a podium, holding hands, and I upped the volume.
They were in the pressroom at City Hall; I recognized the heavy velvet indigo curtains that hung behind them, embroidered in gold and scarlet thread with the state and town crests. The mayor’s chief of staff, a somber old bird whose name I couldn’t remember, stood to his left. To his right stood Chief Chavez.