Wet.
Dickie wasn’t quite what I expected. More sympathetic. “I was a… friend of Caroline’s,” I said impulsively. “I’d love to see those pictures on the staircase. We held a small memorial for her the other day and we had no mementoes of her past to display. Do you mind?”
“Sure, ma’am. Let’s take a look. I never understood why Caroline didn’t take those pictures with her. Guess she was in such a damn hurry. Haven’t thought about them in years.”
Dickie led me to the staircase. Mike followed, holding his Ziploc bag of grisly drawings and staring a burning hole into my back. I began to climb the steps slowly, wondering why this had seemed like a good idea. It was impossible to see the details of the photos arrayed on the walls. The dust was so thick it appeared to be squares of brown woven cloth.
“Here.” Dickie tossed me a grimy T-shirt retrieved from the dining room floor. “That should help clear things up.”
I caught it, deciding to be grateful that he threw me a shirt and not his underwear. I dusted off the first picture. A charcoal rendering of a young Caroline and a baby. She held the infant awkwardly, or else the artist was a novice, still inept at sketching human shapes. Arms are notoriously hard to draw.
I moved up a step, took another tentative swipe, sneezed, and uncovered the actual photograph used for the painting in Caroline’s dining room, the one of her astride the horse. Every detail of the painting seemed identical. Had she been photographed at her parents’ place? How far from here was that? I couldn’t remember whether Mike said, just that it was essentially an estate.
Another step. The next three pictures recorded a boy growing up. Surely Wyatt, Caroline and Richard’s son. A boy whose life would make perfect fodder for that dysfunctional modern fiction that Lucy so hated.
At two or three, Wyatt seemed impish, normal, unaware of anything worse than a transient wasp sting, posed in that silly way professionals insist on, leaning forward, two hands under his chin. A baby pinup.
At nine or ten, the blue eyes and blond hair were going dark, the nose sharpening, the smile not quite reaching his eyes. He gripped a wriggling dachshund puppy with about as much affection as his mother held him with, two pictures down. Maybe he’d wanted a less wimpy dog and more normal parents.
The next photo leapt several years ahead. I leaned in to see the writing etched in the corner with black pen. Wyatt, 14. Close to the time he’d been sent to the juvenile detention center. Tall for his age, a cut-off shirt baring lean muscles, jeans riding low, a hand-rolled cigarette dangling out of his mouth. Appalachian cool.
Wyatt was not classically good-looking, but cocky and magnetic and rife with hormones. The kind of guy who scared the shit out of me. He looked as if he knew I was on the other side of the glass and could yank me right into his world. His choice, always, not mine. I reminded myself he was alive somewhere on this side of the glass and approaching middle age, probably with a prescription for Crestor.
I fluffed the shirt at a few more pictures of dead ancestors before turning abruptly and bumping into Mike.
“Careful,” he warned, grasping my arm. In my ear, he whispered, “We’re leaving. Now.”
Richard Deacon was nowhere in sight.
“Where the hell did he go?” Mike muttered under his breath.
A wavery apparition appeared in a square patch of sunlight on the floor below. Mike instantly, firmly, placed one palm on the back of my neck, ever alert, ready to push me out of the way. His other hand, I knew, was on his holster.
Dickie emerged from the hallway.
“You can have this,” he told me, holding a fat photo album. “To show her friends.”
I stepped onto the landing, and Dickie nervously thrust out the album, like maybe I wouldn’t want it. I couldn’t tell what color the album was, for all of the dust and age. Maybe green. Maybe not. My fingers grasped the edges, because it would have been rude not to.
A few gold letters broke through: AM and BUM. Perfect.
“Caroline kept up her picture albums and diaries pretty good. I used to say to her, ‘Nobody could have that much to say about hisself.’ She always told me I had ruint her dreams about being a writer or a movie star. Anyway, I don’t want it back. I’m washin’ myself of her, too.”
A pale brown spider was traveling up and over the corner of the album, on a speedy route to my hand. Mike caught the album in the air as I let it go, flicking the spider to the floor and crushing it with the heel of his boot.
Mike stuck out his hand to Dickie, and this time it was caught in a firm grip.
“When you find our son, you’ll let me know?” Dickie asked, his eyes, the ones Caroline once stared into, still wet with tears.
“You’ll be my first call.”
33
It was ninety minutes from Richard Deacon’s place to the home of Caroline’s sister. The tail end of the drive played out like a dreamy film reel of red and gold leaves, graceful horses, and white fences that stretched over rolling land into foggy infinity.
I knew it had been a stupid move to walk into Dickie’s house on my own. I should have risked the chiggers and spiders and poison ivy and the possibility of mooning two strangers. Those troopers probably examined bare asses every night in the local strip joint and wouldn’t think mine was anything special.
But Mike’s mind was apparently not on me as we swept down the mountain curves. At the bottom, where the two-lane highway began, Mike pulled in at the Kitty Cat Quik Mart for gas. We had already checked out of The Mountain Motel, a place I never needed to see again.
The proprietor, a heavyset man who kept hiking up his pants, cheerfully pointed me to a bathroom that seemed like Shangri-La. There was plenty of light and soap. So what if the water was like ice and I had to shake my hands dry? At the counter, at my request, the owner obligingly gave me a few plastic bags and a large rubber band to package up the grimy photo album destined for the overhead compartment on the plane.
Mike had thoroughly brushed it off, and my fingers itched to explore the pages. Both of us had recognized the spider. A brown recluse, the kind that prefers to live in the dark, like vampires. His bite didn’t hurt much at all. You died later, when the poison ate through your skin and ran around in your blood. Long after the eight-legged killer had retreated to dust and shadows.
The album, though, was stubbornly clinging to its mysteries. Prying open its pages was going to be a delicate, painstaking process. Definitely not a job for the car. The photographs were sandwiched between cheap, plastic sticky sheets popular before scrapbooking became a designer sport, the ones that yellowed and then melted the pictures to them. All the pages were stuck together. It was as if the book had been dunked in water, then broiled in the oven to a fine crisp.
Back on the road again, after prying off my shoes and tossing back my virgin swig of chocolate Yoo-hoo, I asked: “Are you going to make me beg for details?” I tipped the drink again. Not bad. And fifteen percent calcium.
“No. You just seemed happy for a while there, so I didn’t bug you. What do you want to know?” Mike’s voice was easy.
“Your cop instinct about Dickie.”
“Depressed. Accommodating. Edgy.”
I wasn’t in the mood to play. “You didn’t say murderer.”
“No, I didn’t. As for the missing little girl, his story doesn’t veer far from what Billie and the local cops told me. She disappeared from her poor mountain family. Not unusual in an area with so much poverty and desperation. But Wyatt was seen with her before she vanished.” So, Mike had known about the little girl before we got here. From Billie, the relentless digger.