Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

She got up, went to a stand by the window that was filled with family pictures and small houseplants. The picture she handed him was a worn five-by-seven in a simple frame. It was a close-up, showing two little girls and a mom, the girls’ hair done to perfection, a plane in the background. They must have been on the tarmac.

“This is the trip to the U.S.?” he asked.

She came to sit beside him. “Yes. Noel and I had never been to an airport before, much less on a plane. You’d have thought we were flying to the moon, we were so excited. I had bought-look, see right there? I had bought Noel that necklace with the charm on it, her name, for the trip. You can’t see the rest, but we were in blouses, skirts, white lace socks, black patent leathers.”

“When people dressed to travel.”

“I thought the streets here were made of gold. I really did, the way people in Maidstone talked about America. You have to realize this was a place of maybe four hundred people, without a streetlight or a traffic signal. There were five or six shops on the main street, with tin roofs. Two of them were pink. Mrs. Bailey ran one. Hers was one of the pink ones. Then we came to America.”

“And?”

“And we lived on Kennedy Street. Don’t get me started. Point is, Noel loved that necklace. Wouldn’t do anything without it. And when I was cleaning out her place, it wasn’t there. She must have been wearing it when-when-”

“-she died-”

“-she died. But it wasn’t with her, her body. It’s just gone.”

“Could have been stolen. Could have been lost there at the bottom of that house.”

“Or whoever killed her could have snatched it off her neck, thinking it was worth a lot more than it is. But that’s what has been sending me over the edge all afternoon. Her necklace. I can’t find her necklace. Since she died, it’s been like my temper, my patience, goes off in weird directions, and today it’s this. The damn necklace.”

“Maybe it got lost in-in the dirt down there.”

“It was silver. I asked the police to do the metal detector search. I asked them to go back and look.” Her body turned awkwardly and her hands fluttered.

Before he could stop himself, he reached out to touch her hand, catching himself, then leaning forward, going ahead with it, but then he felt a rush of heat to his face when her shoulder twitched away from him, just half an inch. She looked at him, then down.

“So-so I’ve pretty much got the receipts in order, the ones close to the date of her disappearance. I just haven’t keyed them in yet,” she said, sniffling, blowing a strand of hair away from her eyes, getting it back together, giving him cover to pull his hand back. “There are some others that don’t have a store name on them, so I didn’t really know what to do with those.”

Sully turned and saw a stack of receipts on the floor. The laptop was on the coffee table. He started thumbing through the receipts, sweat pooling in his armpits. He pulled his arms away from his sides to keep the sweat from showing in the folds of his shirt, embarrassed in a way he hadn’t felt in years. Had he really been reaching out to touch a murder victim’s grieving sister?

He looked through a box of sheets and papers she had set out apart from the others and came across the story written in the campus paper, the Hilltop , about Noel’s disappearance. He’d seen one piece they’d done, but not this.

Noel had made her last class of the week, MKTG 544, Marketing Research and Strategy. It was on the third floor of the School of Business, at 2600 Sixth Street NW. The story noted she carried an A average and quoted a classmate, Alicia Mabrey, who said she sat next to Noel and had seen her walk out of the building and into the courtyard. He entered this on the chronology, then went on with the receipts Lorena had left out, immersing himself in building the timeline.

He had lost track of time when he got up, went into the kitchen.

“Bourbon, by any chance?” he called out.

“Chardonnay’s in the door of the fridge. It’s all I got.”

He found a glass, opened the refrigerator door, noting the paucity of food inside, and saw the wine front and center. All that was left was a slosh at the bottom. He turned to see if she was looking, then turned the bottle straight up, draining it. The digital numbers on the microwave showed it was almost nine.

Dusty was supposed to be working at Stoney’s tonight. To go or not to go. She was great, sure, but… the gap yawned wider. He didn’t want it to be so but it did. Who made him this way? God? Darwin? He wasn’t particularly fond of either at the moment. Flicking off the light in the kitchen, he walked to the opening that led to the dining table on his left, and the wider open area of the living room off to his right. Lorena was still there, not looking up, keying in more facts, more figures, all in the belief that it would help him write something that would lead to the arrest and conviction of her sister’s killer.

There was a remote buzzing.

“You left it in there,” she said.

He hitched himself up and limped back into the darkened kitchen, the stone floor cool beneath his feet.

The number was Eva’s cell. He called her back, turning his back to Lorena and walking to the far side of the kitchen.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Meet me at Stoney’s,” Eva said. “I’ll be there in ten.”

“What? What is this? Christ, it’s-it’s nine at night. I’m sort-”

“You’re wasting time,” she said, and disconnected the call.

Half an hour later, he was slouched back in the booth, a bourbon in front of him. Eva leaned forward and asked, “So how close are you to publishing?”

She meant the story on the missing girls, he was pretty sure of that. She did not know about Reese, and there was no way he could tip her to that. He sipped the whiskey, snuck a look over at the bar, trying to get Dusty’s eye, stalling.

“Maybe not for another week. There are some leads I got to run down. It got a little complicated.”

“It’s about to get a little more.”

“Yeah?”

“We have a confession from one of the Reese suspects,” she said.

He looked at her. “Bullshit.”

“Reginald Jackson. Seventeen and wants to be sentenced as a juvie.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Says it was a robbery. They bumped into Sarah in the store, she got spooked and ran out back in the alley, they cornered her. She bucked.”

“Oh, come on. I could make this up and I was sitting here with you when it happened.”

“Deland, the oldest, grabbed her and spun her around, pulling her up against him, getting his hand over her mouth. Highsmith put the knife to her throat to keep her still. But she was shaking her head side to side, trying to get Deland’s hand off her mouth. She apparently didn’t see the knife. Ripped her head to the right and-”

“-cut-cut her own throat. How much of this fairy tale do you believe, Counselor?”

“The ‘cut her own throat’ is nonsense, but I do buy the ‘she resisted’ thing and they got pissed.”

Sully was about to say that his information from the coroner’s office was that her throat was cut postmortem, but that was not in the public sphere. She already knew that. She was telling him what Jackson’s story was, without telling him the specific holes in it. If he let her know that the throat was postmortem, it might burn Jason as his source.

He said, “It takes three dudes to hold down one fifteen-year-old chick?”

“She was trying to scream, so the man says. Deland was choking her to get her quiet.”

“And they got out of there without blood on them.”

“Says they had some blood to deal with, but not a lot on them. I already told you there wasn’t a lot on the ground out there. Most of it was in the dumpster. It’s plausible. Says they trashed the clothes, changed, and burned the old ones.”