Tilly continued. “I remember the parents, John and Karen McKenzie, and Mark and Sarah McKenzie, they were everywhere that summer. Putting up posters, hosting folks who’d come in from out of town to help search… the newspapers interviewed them every week it seemed.”
She paused and for a moment I thought she was finished. Then she smiled sadly again and said, “And I couldn’t see that it made a damn difference. It was like those boys went up in smoke. They were here and then they were gone.”
She stopped stroking the parrot, her eyes locked on something very faraway, lost in the summer of 1985, the hottest summer on record in Cedar Valley, a summer where the sky was bright and children disappeared.
I asked her the same question I asked Darren Chase. “Did Nicky ever say why he was so interested in the boys?”
Tilly shook her head. “Nope. I’m a librarian. You’re the cop. It’s none of my damn business why people are here. I just show them how to access information and do good research. Nicky was polite and he treated the materials with respect. He was a good boy. This town loses more good boys than it keeps.”
Chapter Twenty-two
I left Tilly with the promise that either I, or a charming young man by the name of Sam Birdshead, would return soon and go through the materials in the cubicle. I added a second promise; when we were finished, truly finished, Tilly could pack it all up and place the whole dang caboodle back where it belonged.
The clouds could contain themselves no longer; it was pouring when I emerged from the library. I dashed as fast as I could to the car and climbed in. The rain beat down on the roof of my car like a drummer on a drum set, pounding out a steady tempo, drop-by-drop, beat-by-beat.
I called Sam. As it rang through, I held the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I undid my belt buckle. Something I’d eaten that morning wasn’t agreeing with me, and my stomach was making noises like a diesel truck at a stop sign.
Sam picked up on the fourth ring.
“How’s it going over there?” I asked.
“Not bad. The reporters are about done. The chief was awesome, he gave ’em exactly what they needed to know and not a drop more.”
“Good. I’ve been at the library. There’s a ton of stuff we need to go through here, Sam. You know the Bird Lady? It turns out she is the librarian that Darren Chase, the basketball coach, referred Nicky to three years ago. She’s kept Nicky’s work exactly as it was when he went over Bride’s Veil.”
“No kidding? You find anything?”
“Sam, there’s so much stuff there, I didn’t know where to begin. But I’m going to come back tomorrow. Darren Chase was right; all of it is about the disappearance of the McKenzie boys, the Woodsman murders. Nicky could have been writing a dissertation on this stuff, for all the original material that’s there. I’ve got a little project for you: comb through the original files on Nicky’s accident, would you? I’ve got the basic report here with me, but I know there’s another report or two at the station. We need the inventory of what was found in Nicky’s room when the police first visited the Bellingtons.”
“Would they have done a search of his room? Wasn’t his fall tied up as an accident pretty quickly?” Sam asked.
I said, “Ellen Bellington said something strange yesterday when I spoke to her on the phone. She said she’d boxed up his things after the police inventoried his room. Finn Nowlin and Louis Moriarty are no fools. They may have missed some things-this library angle, for instance-but I’m starting to get the impression they were maybe a little more thorough than you’d expect on a routine accident report.”
Undoing the buckle had helped; I lowered the seat behind me and lay back, taking the pressure off the small of my spine. My stomach gave another rumble and I shifted to the side.
“Are you thinking there was something going on?”
I shook my head and then remembered Sam couldn’t see me.
“Not exactly. To be honest, I’m not sure what to think. I found the bodies in November of 2011. By early spring of 2012, at a point when we were scratching our balls and admitting defeat, Nicky was obsessed with the case, to the point that he was spending all his free time poring over newspapers from 1985. But by July, he tells the librarian he’s done, that he’s found what he needed.”
“What did he find?”
“I have no idea. But two days later, he’s gone over the waterfall and the world thinks he’s dead,” I said.
I heard a thump outside and looked out the car window but the rain came down in sheets and all I saw was the blurry red hatchback of a Saab that was parked next to me.
Sam was silent a moment. “So if we find what he found, maybe we find what happened in those two days to make him fake his own death.”
“Fake his own death… or take advantage of an accident,” I said. “Nicky was a smart kid. There are easier ways to fake a death than to jump over an eighty-foot waterfall. In fact, doing that just about guarantees a real death.”
“What kind of other ways?”
“Oh, car explosion… house fire… there are ways. You pay a guy at the morgue enough money and you can buy a body that fits your description. Burn it bad enough, bam. You’ve convinced the world you’re dead.”
Sam laughed uneasily. “It sounds like this is something you’ve given a lot of thought to, Gemma.”
“Not really. Let’s just say I’d put money on Nicky being incredibly lucky to survive a fall, and then maybe deciding to take advantage of it.”
Sam said, “So, this other report on the original investigation, would it be in the records room?”
He murmured something else and then I heard the dull clink of metal on metal, followed by a low fizzing noise.
“Should be.”
“Okay, I’ll get on it,” Sam said. I heard a grin in his voice.
“What?”
“I just opened a Coke and I couldn’t help reliving that moment a few hours ago when you sprayed Finn with the Sprite,” he said.
“That was terrible.” I laughed. “Just terrible. Speaking of the devil, is he there?”
“Yeah, hang on…”
I waited and then Finn’s voice came on the line, still angry.
“Gemma? What the hell? I thought you were changing your shirt, not going out. I’ve been waiting here all morning. You got to keep me updated, remember? That’s what partners do,” he said with an emphasis on “partners.”
I groaned and popped the seat back into an upright position.
“That’s why I’m calling you right now,” I said. “I’m going to call on the Bellington family. Come with me. I could use the extra eyes and ears.”
“Uh-huh. You going now?”
“Yep, just leaving the library. Meet me there?”
He sighed a heavy sigh. “All right. But tell me, what are you doing at the library?”
I filled him in on my conversation the day before with Ellen, and subsequent chats with Darren Chase and Tilly. “I want to know if the family was aware that Nicky was looking into the Woodsman murders. And when I ask them about it, I want to see their reactions, face-to-face.”
“I don’t understand why they never mentioned the library,” Finn said. “I specifically asked them if they had noticed anything odd in his behavior; you know, in case it was a suicide.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think they knew, Finn. Remember, Ellen Bellington pointed me to Darren Chase. She told me Nicky was with him all the time, at practice with the basketball team.”
I thought again of the strange tone in her voice, the implication that there had been something more to Darren and Nicky’s relationship than strictly coaching, and I wondered if that was Nicky’s doing. Maybe he was planting seeds, throwing misdirection. Purposefully keeping his mother away from what he was really doing.