A Drunkard's Path (7 page)

“Paint what?” I was now the one with the scrunched-up face.

“Whatever you want. Something to do with the shop, or whatever.” I could see she was hopeful.

I stared at the wall. A mural. Suddenly I was filled with ideas—coffee cups and a New York skyline, blacks and browns and creams, with bright colors like teal showing up in unexpected ways. But when I glanced away from the wall at Carrie’s excited face, reality set in.

“What if I screw up?”

“You’re an artist. You won’t screw up.”

“I’m an art student.”

Carrie wasn’t going to take no for an answer; I could see it in her eyes. “There’s no pressure. I’ll paint over it if you don’t like it,” she said. “But I won’t have to, because it will be amazing.” She put her arm around my shoulder, and we both stared at the wall, imagining the possibilities. “Do you think you can have it done in four weeks? With school and everything.”

I nodded.

“Then at least
something
will be ready for the opening.” She sighed and took a sip from her coffee.

Carrie was in her forties, a former hotshot stockbroker who had moved to Archers Rest, married the local pediatrician, and now had two kids. After years of talking about it, she was finally opening her own business. But her ever-present insecurities were getting the best of her. I smiled as reassuringly as I could.

“You’ll be fine. The opening will be great, and the place will be a huge hit,” I said.

“Well, you’re my role model.”

At that I nearly did a spit take. “Me? Good Lord. You have Bernie with the pharmacy, my grandmother with the quilt shop, Maggie who raised seven kids and served as town librarian for something like forty years, and I’m your role model?”

“You came up here a heartbroken wreck of a thing, jilted by your fiancé, bored with your life,” she said. “And now look at you.”

I got up and gave myself an exaggerated once-over in the store’s window. “All I can see is that I could use a facial,” I said.

She threw a napkin at me. “You’re going after your dream. That’s huge. When I saw that you were willing to do whatever it took—”

“You said, ‘If that idiot can do it ...’ ”

She laughed. “Exactly.”

Of course I hadn’t really done anything yet, except attend one day of class. But I didn’t bother explaining that to Carrie and dampening her hero worship.

I headed back to the shop with two paper cups of coffee balancing in each hand. When I saw Susanne out front, I was relieved. But then I saw the near-panicked expressed on her face.

“What? Is something wrong? Has Kennette done something in the shop?”

“No, heavens. She seems lovely. Don’t you like her?”

“I guess. I don’t really know her. She needed a job and I figured—” I couldn’t get the last words out before Susanne interrupted.

“That’s nice of you, dear.” Susanne pulled me farther from the shop. “I’ve been mulling this over all afternoon. I knew I couldn’t say anything in front of your grandmother, so I’ve been waiting for you to come in.”

“There is something wrong.” I tried to wriggle out of Susanne’s grasp but couldn’t. She was holding tight.

“No. I don’t know. I want you to talk to my nephew.”

I stopped struggling. “The one who discovered the body?” Susanne nodded. “I’m not going to say anything. I don’t want to color your view of what he told me. I want you to listen to Richie and judge for yourself.”

“If he knows something about the girl’s death, he should go to Jesse,” I said. I was curious, and even a little tempted to run over to see her nephew immediately, but I also knew that if I did Jesse would kill me.

“That’s the thing that’s so weird,” Susanne whispered, as if the whole town were bugged. “He tried. Jesse won’t believe him. In fact he just ignored him.”

I nodded. It seemed Jesse was doing that a lot lately.

 

 

 

 

T
he teenagers of Archers Rest had no mall to hang out in, so they usually gathered by the river in the summer and the local bowling alley in the winter. At least that’s what Susanne told me as we drove to the alley after closing up at the shop.

It had been difficult enough to convince my grandmother that I needed to take Susanne home, especially with Susanne’s car parked right out front. Add in Susanne’s nervousness, and I worried that Eleanor was on to us. If not for Kennette’s presence, I don’t think we would have gotten out of there.

And I had another problem. I knew it was going to be difficult to keep the conversation I was hoping to have with Richie from getting back to Jesse. Archers Rest is a small town where gossip is king. The hope that somehow it would escape Jesse’s notice vanished when Greg walked into the bowling alley not a minute after Susanne and I arrived.

“Hello, officer,” I said, trying to seem casual and not up to anything he would have to report to his boss. “Has Jesse given you the night off?”

“Wish he hadn’t,” Greg lamented. “There’s a full-blown murder investigation going on, and he won’t let me be any part of it. He doesn’t know what a keen investigator I am.”

“He’ll see it eventually. Jesse’s a pretty smart cop.”

Greg scowled. “He’s not as smart as he thinks he is.” Then he turned and walked toward the snack bar.

“Come on,” I said to Susanne. “Let’s try to do this without drawing too much attention.” I nodded toward Greg, who was comforting himself with a beer.

Susanne nodded. “I won’t interfere. I’ll stay completely out of the way.”

“You don’t think he’ll talk in front of you?”

Susanne hesitated. “He’s a teenager,” she said, obviously choosing her words carefully. “I think he’ll be worried about saying something in front of me that might get back to his mother.”

“Doesn’t his mother know that he found a body in the river?” It was bad enough that Jesse and Eleanor would be mad at me for talking to this kid. I didn’t need some irate mother coming after me as well.

“Yes,” Susanne said. “She knows about that. She just doesn’t know everything. She’s kind of a nervous person.”

“Runs in the family.” I smiled, but Susanne looked confused, so I dropped it.

She spotted her nephew in the middle of a group of boys laughing into their Cokes and trying to look above it all. Not that it was working. I think you can only look so cool in bowling shoes.

“Richie,” Susanne called out.

I could see him blush even from across the room. He looked up and nodded, said something to his friends, and made his way through the crowd to us.

“Hey, Aunt Susanne,” he said. He was an average-looking kid with a friendly, unassuming smile.

“Richie, this is Nell. I was telling her about you,” Susanne whispered. “I want you to talk. I won’t interfere.”

“I’m Rich.” I noticed how strongly he emphasized that his name had only one syllable.

Susanne looked around before shepherding Rich and me into a corner. “I’ll get us something to drink,” she said, then stepped away as if she didn’t have security clearance for the conversation.

“She’s a little dramatic.” Rich rolled his eyes.

“You must trust her,” I said. “You told her stuff you didn’t tell your own mother.”

Rich blushed. “I told Natalie. She told Aunt Susanne,” he said, “which is cool. Aunt Susanne doesn’t get on my case about hanging out.”

“Is that what you were doing at the river?”

He nodded.

“She said you saw something, and she wanted you to tell me.”

He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I don’t know.” Now he looked as uncomfortable as Susanne. “My friends and I were just . . . hanging out there that night.”

“The night the girl was found.”

“Yeah. We weren’t doing anything.”

“It’s January, and you were hanging out by the river.” It was my turn to roll my eyes. “You must have been doing something.”

He sighed. “A few beers. That’s all. Aunt Susanne thinks that’s why Chief Dewalt didn’t take me seriously.”

“He thought you were drunk.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“Okay.” I could see that whatever it was weighed heavily on him. “What happened? Just go through it step-by-step.”

“Artie Collins, Blimper, and I were hanging out, just having a couple of beers . . .”

“These are friends of yours?”

He gestured back toward a group of boys. “Artie had a flashlight, ’cause it gets pretty dark by the river at night.”

“Pitch-black,” I agreed.

“So he’s flashing the light and we’re drinking. Nothing serious. And he sees something in the water. So we walked over to check it out.” Rich stopped and took a deep breath. “And it was, you know, that lady.”

“The woman they fished from the lake?”

He nodded. “So I called the cops from my cell phone and we waited until they came. In case, you know, she floated away or something.”

“Did you touch her?”

He shook his head. “We could tell it was too late to help her.” He sat up and looked at me. “We would have helped her if, you know, she was alive. We’re not jerks.”

“I know,” I said. “You waited for the police, which was the right thing to do. And then you told Jesse what happened.”

“We didn’t tell him about the drinking. In case.”

“I don’t think he would have done anything, Rich. He had his hands full that night.”

He shrugged again and looked back toward his friends. “I guess.”

“Is that it?” It hardly seemed like the kind of information worth all the fuss Susanne had made.

“No.” Rich looked down at his shoes for a moment. “I’m not making this up, so I don’t care if you believe me. When we were waiting for the police, I saw this picture—a photograph—on the ground. When they all got there, this cop from Morristown made us go wait on the street and no one would talk to us until they got the lady out of the water.”

“I think I met that cop.” I smiled. “He’s very insistent.”

“When they finally came over, I told Jesse about the picture and he made me take him to exactly where I said it was.” He paused. “But it wasn’t there.”

“Maybe someone picked it up. One of the other officers.”

“He said it wasn’t in evidence, and it wasn’t any big deal anyway, since he doubted it had anything to do with the case.”

That seemed odd. I knew Jesse was a thorough officer, a good cop. Why would he dismiss possible evidence so quickly?

“What did the photograph look like?”

“Old, really old. Ancient.”

I could see Susanne hovering within earshot. When she caught my eye, she used the excuse to jump in. “He’s sixteen. Anything from the eighties he considers ancient,” she said.

Rich frowned. “No, really old. Black and white.”

“A black-and-white photo of what?” I asked.

“A woman. She was kind of like your age. And wearing this big dress, sitting on a bed or something and staring, like, far away.” He stopped for a moment. “She had kind of a weird expression.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Weird.” He took a cola from Susanne and took a long sip.

“Do you remember anything else?” I asked. “Anything specific about the woman or the room or what she was wearing?”

His stared into the air for a moment. “Yeah. She had dots on her dress.”

“Polka dots?”

He shrugged. “I guess. That’s all I can think of.” He nodded to me and took off toward his friends.

“He said all of this to Jesse and got nowhere,” Susanne said. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“Well, maybe Jesse’s right. Maybe the photo has nothing to do with the woman in the river,” I said.

“Then where is it?”

Good question. And I had another one. I walked over to Rich and his friends.

“Did anyone else see the photo? Artie and . . .”

“Blimper.” A tall, thin kid with a wide smile reached out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“You’re Blimper?”

He patted his flat stomach. “It’s meant to be ironic.”

I nodded. “Well, Blimper, did you or Artie see the photo that Rich saw?”

“No. Once I saw the body I couldn’t see anything else. And Artie was busy trying to keep in his lunch.”

“Screw you,” said a kid I assumed to be Artie.

“Did you tell anyone else about the photo?”

“Like who?”

“One of the other officers at the scene,” I said. “Maybe Chief Powell.”

“The guy from Morristown?” Blimper laughed. “He’s a piece of work.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“My sister’s boyfriend got caught drunk driving in Morristown.” Blimper leaned in as if telling me a state secret. “And the guy wouldn’t cut him any slack. He’s like some ex-military guy turned cop and he’s hard core. Strictly by the book.”

Rich looked at me as if he were about to cry. “I swear I’m telling you the truth. I don’t care what the cops believe.”