Lyn Benedict - Ghosts & Echoes

“But you work for someone, right? Or do you just follow the police around, looking for trouble?”

“Wrong way round,” Sylvie muttered. When she had Meredith’s attention again, she said, “The people I work for don’t need details. They only care about results.”

Still nothing, though Meredith bit at her lip, gnawed at it as if she could swallow the words that wanted to erupt back.

Sylvie said, “I was there, last night.”

Sometimes all she needed was to poke people in their curiosity. Meredith knew something was wrong; she just didn’t know what.

“What happened ?” Meredith asked. A weight of desperation laced her voice, all her fears surfacing at once. The remote dropped to the driveway with a click that she ignored, stepping over it to take Sylvie’s arm, shaking it. “It wasn’t a hit-and-run; it couldn’t have been a hit-and-run. There’s no damage. There’s never any damage.”

Sylvie latched onto the interesting word in the babble. “Never?”

Meredith pulled back, her face a giant billboard for “oh crap.”

Sylvie let her breath out, slowed the urgent voice that wanted her to shake the information out of the woman. This was a mostly nothing case. Theft, a little property damage, and a sleeping spell or two did not make for strong-arm tactics.

Easy does it, she reminded herself. Self-control. And smile. The woman smiled back, but it was tentative.

Reassurance wouldn’t go amiss here, but only a little. Too much, and the woman might stop talking. Just because the case wasn’t life-and-death didn’t mean Sylvie wanted to waste man-hours, especially since she had a bitch of a case on hold in her apartment.

“It wasn’t a hit-and-run,” she said, patting the woman’s forearm. “No one got hurt.”

Meredith started to relax, then her back stiffened, her jaw came up. Sylvie short-circuited the woman’s dawning indignation with a steely, “ This time.” She firmed her grip on the woman’s arm, and said, “Whatever’s going on has nothing to do with you—” A gamble, but the woman just didn’t seem the sort, didn’t twig any of Sylvie’s very well-tuned senses. “That doesn’t mean you can’t help.”

Meredith took a breath, and said, “I didn’t say anything to the police because I knew they wouldn’t believe me. My husband doesn’t believe me. Why would a set of strangers?”

“Sometimes a stranger is the only one who has the luxury of being able to,” Sylvie said.

Meredith fumbled through her purse for a cigarette. “You have a light?”

Sylvie reached into her pockets to show willing and was surprised to have her search pay off. She passed the pale pink lighter over, and remembered, Oh yeah, Zoe smoked.

Meredith looked at the lighter, and her tense brow relaxed. She handed it back to Sylvie, and Sylvie added Chanel lighters to the list of “items to soothe suspicious Grove women.”

Meredith smoked her cigarette halfway, then pinched it out, the automatic habit of a woman who’d spent most of her adult life in financial difficulties. Then she hesitated and dropped the rest of it, and Sylvie thought, Yeah, she married up but is having a hard time adapting.

“I don’t understand it,” Meredith said, turning and drifting toward the open garage. She paused on the lip, visibly waiting for Sylvie to catch up.

Once inside the dim garage, Meredith hit the door button, sealing herself and Sylvie in. Sylvie rested her hand on her gun. She didn’t think that Meredith was a part of the burglary ring, but caution rarely hurt.

Meredith shrugged. “The neighbors are curious enough about the police coming here. I don’t want to give them any more gossip.” She opened the driver’s-side door, climbed up, and gestured for Sylvie to come closer, until she was practically on top of the woman, could smell scented shampoo and the faint line of sweat at her hairline. The woman was honestly afraid. Of her car . Or of what it was being used to do.

“I noticed it when I kept needing to get gas, nearly twice as often as usual. Andreas thought someone might be si-phoning it off, so I started keeping it locked in the garage at night.”

“But nothing changed,” Sylvie said.

“What was I supposed to tell the police? That someone’s breaking into our locked, alarm-protected garage and borrowing the car on a regular basis without my knowledge? My husband doesn’t believe it. But right here!” She tapped the odometer with an agitated fingernail. “Forty miles just last night while we slept!”

Sylvie dropped back out of the car, took in the clean lines of the garage, the gap where the second vehicle should be, and said, “Your husband, Andreas? He’s not borrowing it?” It didn’t seem likely, not when he was making suggestions on how to stop it, but people played mind games for all sorts of reasons.

Meredith shook her head, confident in that at least. Sylvie said, “Pop the doors.”

When the side door opened, Sylvie grabbed a flashlight off the wall hook, crawled into the car, and began an inch-by-inch search. “Anyone overly interested in your daily routine? Who’d know when they could borrow the car at times you wouldn’t notice?”

“My husband has enemies; he’s a criminal lawyer—”

“No,” Sylvie said. “They’ve made hash of your alarm code. If they wanted in your house, wanted to harm you or him, they’d have done so already.”

A new quality of silence reached her, and she glanced up. Meredith had blanched. Sylvie mentally reran her last words, judged them too blunt. Too scary. Too pragmatic.

Her little dark voice chimed in. Too bad. Truth is brutal.

“Look,” Sylvie said, “this isn’t about you or your husband. This is about your car being convenient.” It had to be the burglars, the glory-seeking teens. It was one thing to sleep through your car being stolen when it was parked on the street, when the engine sound could be mistaken for a neighbor leaving—most of them had upper-range SUVs also. It was another thing to sleep through a locked garage door rising, a car being backed out and driven away. Homeowners had twitchy nerves for out-of-place sounds.

Either the Alvarezes were heavy nighttime drinkers, Ambien poppers, or they’d fallen prey to Sylvie’s sleep-spreading burglars. Sylvie bent her head back to the search, pleased. It was always nice when she was on the right trail.

“So—” she prompted. “Any nosey parkers, gawkers?”

Meredith said, “I don’t know what you want to know.”

“Who pays attention to you? Have you seen anyone lurking?”

“We have the neighborhood watch,” she said.

Sylvie let out a frustrated breath. “Work with me, Meredith. You’d call the cops if strangers were nosing around. What about locals? They keep taking your car. It’s not ’cause of the spiffy paint job. People are lazy by nature. They want easy. They want close.”

Meredith fiddled with the strap of her purse, ran her fingers up and down the snakeskin. “Isabella asked me once if it was a stick or an automatic, and her boyfriend asked me if the rear seats came out.”

“Isabella?” Sylvie asked, dropping flat to her belly and worming forward for a better look. Something glittered from beneath the third row of seats. She scrabbled for it, collecting carpet fluff beneath her short nails, and the ever-present limestone sand.

“Martinez, the neighbor’s girl. She said she was going to be car shopping.”

“Yeah, like her mother’d buy her a car with her grades—” Sylvie jerked her head up, her brain catching up with what her mouth knew. “ Bella Martinez. High-school girl? Ittybitty bleached blonde, a fondness for shiny clothes and cheap cigarettes?”