Neely Tucker - The Ways of the Dead

“??? Stores???” was written in Lorena’s hand on the sticky note on top of them. “Didn’t go through-I don’t know what these are/where they’re from.”

He removed the clip and they fluttered out onto the table. None of the receipts had any identifying information, hence Lenora’s shorthand. Most appeared to be from an old-fashioned cash register, narrow slips of paper with a serrated edge at top and bottom. The receipts listed prices, with a date and time at the bottom, but no store name or what the purchased items were. There were something like two dozen of them, the amounts small, $.99, $2.25, $1.39, $4.58, and the like.

Dealing them out across the table like playing cards, killing time while waiting for editing questions, he started making piles by date.

It was clear after the first ten or eleven receipts that they were all from April 1998, the month Noel disappeared. There were a couple dated the third, one on the seventh, the eighteenth, the fourth, the twenty-second-he was putting them in a line, left to right… and then he stopped. The receipt dropped to the desk like a flaring match.

The date on the receipt was April 25. The day she was last seen.

There were three items on it-$2.49, $3.39, $3.39-but it was the time that glared out at him, radiating.

The time was 4:47 p.m.

Speckles of sweat burst out on his back, the palms of his hand.

Noel hadn’t died the night she came home from Halo, and she didn’t die shortly after her phone call to Reese that morning.

No, no, she was still alive and shopping that afternoon. Not only that, but she’d come back to her apartment after buying whatever it was in a calm enough state of mind to put her daily receipts in the record-keeping coffee can.

How late did that make it? Five thirty? Six? Eight?

Frantically, he finished assembling the other receipts by date-the twelfth, the seventeenth, the third, the twenty-first, the second-but none came after the twenty-fifth. He counted them all again-twenty-two purchases for small things in twenty-five days, apparently from the same store.

As soon as the thought flickered, the tumblers of his mind, the ones that had been rolling, clicking, never settling down, finally stopped, a combination that clicked.

Pushing back and sideways in his chair, he reached in his back pocket for his wallet and yanked it open. He pulled out a tumble of paperwork, dollar bills, a couple of twenties. Here they were, the tab for Halo… gas for the motorcycle… drinks with Eva at Stoney’s.

And then there was a simple till receipt, for $0.99 and $1.29. Total of $2.46 with tax. He placed it against the final receipts from Noel’s. It was an exact match.

Sully sat back against his chair, dazed.

“Peanuts,” he said flatly. “Peanuts and a Coke.”

The bike roared out of the garage and he redlined it at the first light, revving, popping the clutch, and wham , he was hitting sixty, moving the needle to seventy, blowing through traffic, his mind moving faster than the bike.

David Reese wasn’t the last one to see Noel. He’d lied. He hadn’t volunteered information. He’d covered his ass. But he wasn’t the last one to see her, and he wasn’t the only one covering his tracks.

Noel had been to one place over and over again that last month. Sully was certain she’d been to it several times a week for the entire time she’d lived in the neighborhood, someplace she was known as a regular: Doyle’s.

It all came screaming at him now. Doyle had said he barely recognized her when Sully had shown him the pictures of the three girls-yet he knew her well enough to recognize her on her front porch with Reese. What if his rage that day hadn’t been fury at being slighted by Reese, but jealousy of the man? What if half of the “D’s” in the diary were for Doyle , not David, and Noel, silly, giggling, had written in the double meaning to amuse herself? What if he was the boyfriend with the money for the photographer?

No, sweet Jesus, no.

And then it came to him so clearly he nearly dropped the bike: When he’d shown Doyle the pictures of Lana, Noel, and Michelle? What had he said? “ They’re the three dead girls .”

Lana and Noel were dead, yes, but Michelle was missing. Nobody said she was dead.

He slowed the bike with the thought, on a straight shot of Georgia now, the commercial low-rise storefronts and the prewar four-story apartment buildings populated by fortysomething immigrant men driving taxis and their dour women and their children loud as shit on the playgrounds.

His breath came back to him, slowly, one inhalation at a time. By the time he pulled into the neighborhood, the mixed wave of euphoria and revelation was wearing off, and self-doubt and paranoia were settling in.

Doyle had said they were three dead girls? So what? Two of the three women were dead. Doyle might have lopped Michelle in with the rest out of laziness, or by a simple mistake. It wasn’t some irrefutable Freudian slip.

And the receipts? So what?

It was important to know Noel was alive later in the day, absolutely. But maybe Doyle didn’t have any idea she’d come in the store that day. Maybe he happened not to work that weekend. Maybe he had, and the encounter was so routine that its very familiarity blinded him as to the date of its actual occurrence. And even if he had recalled her coming in that day? Maybe he’d decided to keep his mouth shut for the same reason a lot of witnesses in this town did-to stay out of it, to avoid the possible retribution from suspects. Hadn’t he already said that business in the store was half off?

The bottom line was, how could he know? The presses were going to roll in an hour and, suddenly, he had no fucking idea.

God dammit .

There was only one thing to do, and he’d known it as soon as he saw the matched receipts. He’d started out of the paper’s garage at a hundred miles an hour, and where had the bike taken him? He was already turning onto Rock Creek Church, the blinker on without a conscious thought, the bike slowing in front of Sly’s dilapidated house.

You wanted to know what was happening in Park View? You dealt with the devil and you paid the price.

Sly listened to his spiel, to his hunches, then pushed back on his bar stool, balancing it on the rear two legs.

“So you thinking we ought to go sweat this photographer, Eric.”

“At least two of the dead women posed nude. We know he photographed one of them.”

“Carter. Eric? Known him since back in the day. Got to be the gayest motherfucker this side of Luther.”

“Amber said he had a hard-on during the shoot with Noel.”

“Eric probably gets a hard-on buying groceries. Back in third grade? He had a hard-on then, too.”

“So I don’t hear any brilliant ideas from you.”

“You been yapping.” Sly set the stool back down on all four legs. “So, if you’re done? I been taking this sort of hard, you see what I’m saying here, the judge tipping in my backyard.” Only dim lights along the kitchen wall were illuminated, the stereo was off, Donnell was asleep by the couch, and Sly’s voice seemed to rise from the shadows.

“So me and Lionel, we been pushing. Beating the pavement. Making it known we want to hear from people, that we better hear from people. And so this female who’s been in the lockup for a few weeks comes to see me. She’s what your paper would call a working girl, right, walking Georgia between Princeton Place and the Show Bar? She comes by to tell me she saw this ‘Missing’ poster about that girl Michelle, and then she saw the thing you wrote in the paper, about them girls missing or dead or whatever, and she said it gave her this fucked-up feeling, because she saw Michelle a few weeks ago in the back room at Doyle’s.”