Murder Road (24 page)

Detective Quentin leaned back in his chair. “That was impressive, Mr. and Mrs. Carter. You’ve spun quite a tale.”

It was the next morning, and we were back at the Coldlake Falls PD, sitting in an interview room. Quentin was talking to us alone; Beam was nowhere to be seen. Quentin was wearing black dress pants and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. When we’d called the police station to request a meeting with Quentin—we would talk to no one else—we weren’t even sure he would get the message, and if he did whether he would come. Maybe he was done with us. But within forty-five minutes, we got a call back at Rose’s to say we should come to the station because Quentin was on his way.

Eddie and I had decided to tell him everything—about Shannon Haller, about seeing the Lost Girl, about breaking into
John Haller’s house and finding the roll of film with the photograph on it. We’d told him about ghosts and Eddie’s adoption and the strange way we’d ended up here without really remembering it. It didn’t matter that we sounded delusional and possibly unhinged. Eddie and I were done carrying the mysteries of Atticus Line around, letting them weigh us down.

We had only left out one part of the story—the attack on me. Whoever Trish was, wherever she was, she didn’t deserve questioning by police and possible attempted murder charges. Quentin might not believe us, but if he could find Trish, he would sit her down in this very room and try to figure out the truth. I didn’t want her to go through that. She’d been through enough.

Quentin crossed his arms, looking at us with his uncanny blue eyes. He had listened to us in silence. As usual, he had taken no notes, as if every word we said was immediately locked into his brain. On the table between us was our only piece of evidence—the photos we’d taken from John Haller, including the one shot on Hunter Beach.

“Mr. Carter,” the detective said crisply, as if he was told ghost stories all the time. “You’re saying that this woman”—he gestured to Shannon in the photographs—“is your birth mother.”

“Yes,” Eddie said. As strange as this interview was, he looked more relaxed than he had when we started, as if he was unburdened.

“You also claim that this woman’s father possessed a camera with this photograph on the film, which means the camera was obtained after she left home. This, to you, proves that the father saw the daughter at least once after she left, contrary to his missing
person’s report. And from this, you conjecture that he must have killed his daughter on Atticus Line. In effect, your grandfather murdered your mother. Am I following this?”

“Yes,” Eddie said.

“Mrs. Carter,” Quentin continued, turning to me. “You have stated that your husband broke into the house of a man named John Haller in Midland, and that you followed him. Both of you illegally entered the man’s house through a window while he wasn’t home. In searching John Haller’s home, you found the camera with the alleged film inside, after which you produced these photographs.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And by the two of you committing this crime, you both claim to have solved one of my oldest open murder cases, a case that—please excuse my word usage—haunts my career even now, nineteen years later, as a blight on my record, even though it happened before my time.”

I looked into his chilly blue eyes as I answered him. “Yes.”

Quentin leaned forward across the table. “I can make one phone call. One. I can call the Midland PD and ask if a man named John Haller has reported a break-in at his home, and the answer will be yes or no. If it’s yes, I will tell the Midland PD that I have two suspects here who are confessing. If it’s no, your entire story disappears. Neither of those options is very good from your point of view. So please explain, Mrs. Carter, why did you tell me any of this in the first place?”

He was hard to read, but I read enough. It was in the undercurrent of anger in his voice at the idea that we were wasting his precious time. “You don’t believe us,” I said.

“Believe you?” He tapped the photograph. “This photo could be of anyone. It could have been taken at any time, and it could have come from anywhere. You could have brought it with you from Ann Arbor, for all I know. It isn’t evidence. To solve a murder case, I require evidence. You’ve given me nothing.”

Eddie shifted in his seat beside me, because he didn’t like the way Quentin was speaking to me. But I held still and kept my gaze on the detective’s. “You don’t scare me,” I told him, my voice almost as icy as his. “Make your phone call. Do it.”

“I am not susceptible to women like you,” Quentin said as Eddie shifted in his seat again, getting angry at the phrase
women like you
. “Maybe everyone else you meet is, including your husband. They react to your blond hair, your looks, your smile. Pretty, but not too pretty, correct? The way you dress manages to show off your legs without being too showy. You don’t talk too much or too little. You don’t push. You pretend to be agreeable and obedient, and then you do whatever you want. Women like you can keep secrets for years—decades. Until death, if they have to. They never get drunk and slip up or get stupid over a man and tell him too much. And woe to anyone who crosses you. You think I don’t see it? Because I saw it from the very first second I walked into the room the night that Rhonda Jean Breckwith died in your back seat.”

His words fell hard, and I kept my face from flinching. I’d thought I’d been so careful. I should have known.

“You get off on this,” I told him, firing back. “Unnerving people, scaring them. Keeping them off-balance so they talk too much. You think you’re so powerful, but this room gives you most of that power. If you weren’t a detective, we’d be even, which
drives you crazy. Because you like to intimidate women. You find that especially fun.”

“Unnerving people is how I solve cases, Mrs. Carter. On most people, it works.”

He meant that it didn’t work on me, but I didn’t care for the compliment. I pointed to the photo on the table, to Shannon Haller’s face. “That’s your unidentified murder victim from 1976. Her name is Shannon Haller. Maybe you believe that her ghost haunts Atticus Line, killing other hitchhikers, or maybe you don’t. But as we told you, we already gave this information to Officer Syed. He said he can check the dental records from the postmortem. If you can match the dental records—or her blood—then you have evidence. And the identity of your unknown victim is solved.”

His jaw tightened. He didn’t have to tell me that none of it would happen quickly, not in a case this old. Whether the results came in a month or a year, it would still be proof one way or another.

And in the meantime, John Haller’s missing person’s report matched the description and time frame of the murder of the unknown girl. It was a lead he hadn’t had before, and Quentin was a detective. He would follow it.

“Are you going to arrest us?” Eddie’s voice broke into our standoff. “I’ve never confessed to a crime before. I don’t know how this works.”

Quentin’s look was calculating as he turned to Eddie, and then he seemed to make a decision. He shook his head.

“I don’t have time for this.” He picked up the photos from the table and put them into his breast pocket. Eddie flinched, and I
knew he wanted to protest, because aside from the picture of Shannon and Eddie—which we hadn’t given up—those were the only photos he had of his mother. But we had the negatives, and we could print them again.

“What do you mean, you don’t have time?” I said.

“Old legends. Ghost stories. Unprovable theories.” Quentin pushed his chair back. “I don’t deal in those things. I deal in facts and evidence, and that’s all.”

“You’re not going to investigate?” I asked.

“Investigate what? There’s nothing here. What I’m going to do, Mrs. Carter, is go back to my other cases—cases that need my attention—and pretend this meeting never happened.”

Eddie and I exchanged a look. He didn’t have to believe us about the Lost Girl, but we had confessed to a crime. Didn’t he care?

“What do you want us to do?” Eddie asked.

“That’s easy, Mr. Carter. I want both of you to pack your bags, go back to Ann Arbor, and never come here again.”

“A few days ago, you told us not to leave town,” I snapped.

“I changed my mind. This is over. We have someone in custody for the murder of Rhonda Jean Breckwith, and both of you are cleared as suspects. Go home.”

What if John Haller reported the break-in?
I was about to ask it, but I didn’t. Maybe John Haller wouldn’t report the break-in if it meant questions about what was stolen. He had secrets to cover up.

Quentin stood, and Eddie pushed his chair back and stood, too, tense with anger. “My mother was murdered. Her killer is still out there, free.”

“That is your theory, Mr. Carter,” Quentin said. “It’s a theory
with no proof, and I’ve heard plenty of those—including the theory that I committed all the murders myself. Maybe you’d like me to investigate that one next?”

“So that’s it?” I stood, too, and the three of us faced one another over the table. “You just pretend that none of this ever happened?”

“Because none of it
did
happen. Nothing that you can prove.” Quentin looked from me to Eddie. “The two of you were drawn into a difficult and stressful situation the night you picked up Rhonda Jean. It made your imaginations overreact. Mr. Carter, you’ve wondered about your birth parents all your life, have you not? You’d grasp at anything that seemed to answer your questions and let wild theories fill in the blanks, especially considering your precarious mental state. It’s unfortunate, but it’s what happened. I’m not going to investigate this supposed break-in, and in return, you’re free to go.”

He didn’t wait for us to argue again. He turned and left the room.

Detective Beam was standing in front of the Coldlake Falls police station, smoking a cigarette and waiting for us. He took in our surprised faces and asked, “What did he say to you?”

Eddie and I exchanged a look. “We’re leaving town,” I said, skipping over the confession we’d given that Quentin had discounted. “He told us to go.”

“Oh, did he give his permission?” Beam gave a bitter laugh and tapped his cigarette ash to the sidewalk. “How generous of him.”

I took in his expression, his tired, bloodshot eyes. “Why do you work with him if you hate him so much?” I asked.

Beam exhaled smoke and dropped his cigarette to grind it out. “I don’t have much choice, do I? He closes cases, and that’s all that matters. No one cares that he’s a soulless bastard. Besides, it’s nothing to me anymore. I’m taking retirement next month. Some other detective can deal with the great, almighty Quentin.” He trained his gaze on Eddie. “I heard how he talked to you at Rose’s, tried to make you feel like you’re crazy. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. He doesn’t
know
.” He nodded at my husband. “I did two tours in Vietnam, son. I know what crazy is, and you aren’t it.”

Eddie held Beam’s gaze. “My discharge papers disagree,” he said quietly.

“Because they’re trash,” Beam replied. “Put them in the trash where they belong. Whatever’s going on, Carter, you’re not the crazy one, and neither am I. Men like us know the truth. It’s the world that’s crazy. We’re the only ones who are sane.” He took a step toward the doors of the police station, then turned back. “Don’t let anyone tell you different,” he said to Eddie. “Not doctors, not Quentin, not anyone. The things we’ve seen mean the world is crazy. Not us.”

Back at Rose’s, I pulled my small suitcase from the corner of the bedroom and opened it. I picked up clothes and started folding and packing them.

Outside in the kitchen, I could hear Eddie and Rose. Eddie was trying to pay Rose for our stay; Rose was arguing that we could mail her a check when we got home, after we “got our feet under us” as she put it. As I folded one of my bras and tucked it into the suitcase, I had no illusions—if it had been me negotiating our bill instead of Eddie, she would have given me one of her looks and demanded her money. I could at least give Rose credit for having good taste in men.

Their conversation continued, never quite blowing over into an argument. Eddie reluctantly gave in to the check-mailing solution, but he insisted on hauling the last of the debris from Rose’s backyard before we left.

We had no choice but to leave. Detective Quentin had shut us out, and we couldn’t afford to stay in Coldlake Falls forever, looking for answers. We had Shannon Haller’s name and the photo of her with Eddie. We knew who his mother was now, who his grandfather was. We didn’t have justice, but we were just two people with no connections and almost no money. I might not have my job at the bowling alley anymore, and we couldn’t afford for Eddie to lose his job, too.

Stories don’t always end the way they’re supposed to. They don’t always end at all.

I snapped my suitcase shut and walked out of the bedroom to see Rose folding her grocery store apron into her bag. “I’m going to work. I guess I’ll see you,” she said, not making eye contact and pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“Bye, Rose,” I said. “Thank you.”

She gave me a narrow-eyed look and made a disapproving sound in her throat. Then she left, and Eddie and I were alone.

I crossed my arms and leaned against the bedroom doorframe, looking at my husband. He was wearing the only pair of clean jeans he had left on this trip, and a gray tee with a brown plaid flannel shirt unbuttoned over it. He’d brought the shirt, I knew, in case the nights on our honeymoon got cool. His short hair was tousled and he had two days’ scruff on his jaw. He looked exhausted, and the whole effect should have looked disreputable, but somehow Eddie never truly looked disreputable. Even in the depths of chaos, while his life was falling apart, he looked like a man who would hold the door for you and ask if you were okay. It was just how he was.

He was looking at me, too, and I wondered what he saw. I
wasn’t that girl in the blue bra anymore, drifting aimlessly through life. I wasn’t even the same April who had gotten married in a secondhand dress. I wasn’t sure what I was anymore. What I was going to be.

“I’m sorry my mother stole all of my money,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway,” he replied.

Of course he wouldn’t. “It was a lot of money.”

“Too bad.”

I cleared my throat. I’d never told him I was sorry—I had never said the words. There was only one person that I was capable of apologizing to, and he was standing in front of me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my mother. It was the wrong thing to do. I should have told you.”

“Well.” He scratched his jaw, his gaze wandering up to the ceiling. “Considering I broke into my grandfather’s house and my grandfather murdered my mother, I guess I’ve dragged you into a few problems of my own.”

His tone was so casual I had to bite my lips to keep in a laugh.

“April, don’t laugh.”

“It’s uncomfortable laughter. Like at a funeral.”

“I know, but still.”

I put a hand over my mouth, trying to keep the amusement in. The urge was uncontrolled, and I felt my stomach squeeze. I lifted my hand long enough to wheeze, “Eddie, don’t ever take me to a funeral. I mean it.”

“April, this is very serious.”

Those words made me want to laugh even more, and my eyes watered. I kept my hand over my mouth. Eddie didn’t crack a
smile, but I caught the ghost of a twinkle in his eyes as he turned away.

“I’m going to the backyard,” he said. “We’ll leave in twenty minutes.”

I nodded mutely, still trying not to giggle. I took a deep breath and turned back toward the bedroom. That was when I saw the man.

He was fiftyish, stocky. He wore a red plaid shirt tucked neatly into a pair of light-blue jeans. I could see him so clearly that I could make out the gray at his temples and the wrinkles in the dark skin at the corners of his eyes. He was standing by the bedroom window. A breeze blew outside, and I watched the leaves on the tree outside the window move behind him, as if the man was made from transparent film.

His mouth moved, mute. Then I heard it.

“Get down,” the man said.

His hands rose. I didn’t see him move, but I felt two hands shove my shoulders, so hard I lost my balance. The hands pushed me to the floor.

“
Get down
,” said the voice in my ear.

I opened my mouth to scream.

There was a crack outside, and the bedroom window broke, shards of glass falling to the floor.

A second crack. A third. My ears hurt. Something hit the wall, and plaster exploded, sending decorative knickknacks falling to the floor. I stared at the hole in the wall and realized that someone was shooting through the window.

“Eddie!” I screamed.

There were footsteps outside the window. “I can hear you in there,” a man’s voice said, harsh and angry. “Stand up.”

The back door banged; Eddie had been in the backyard. His shout was hoarse. “April!”

“Get down!” I screamed as the gun went off again. The footsteps outside receded, running for the back of the house, and I cried out, “Lock the back door!”

I crawled on my hands and knees across the bedroom floor toward the doorway. Eddie was crouched in the corner of the kitchen, his hands on his knees. The back door was closed. His gaze crawled over me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. Eddie opened his mouth to say something else just as a blast hit the back door, making me jump.

“Come out, you two!” the man’s voice shouted. “You think I couldn’t track you down? You parked your car in front of my goddamned house while you broke in! I know exactly who you are!”

John Haller. My mind went blank with shock. Instead of calling the police on us, John Haller was here, right now, shooting at us. He’d come around the side of the house to fire through the window at me while Eddie was in the backyard. How close had he come? If he had walked a few more feet and looked into the yard, Eddie would have been an open target, defenseless. He would have died right where Robbie had.

Another shot hit the back door, but the door didn’t break. I watched Eddie’s gaze move to the front window, the front door. His eyes were blank, calculating. He had gone somewhere in his head that his training had taken him, somewhere he’d gone during his months in Iraq. He didn’t even look afraid. My hands were shaking.

A hot breeze blew through the broken bedroom window like a breath, lifting the fussy curtains. I heard the footsteps coming back, and I forced one of my trembling hands up to signal to Eddie. He gestured for me to get out of the bedroom, outside the door.

“It was Shannon’s film you took, wasn’t it?” John Haller shouted. I crawled outside the bedroom door and put my back to the wall. I wondered if the neighbors would call the police, how long it would take the police to come. “Took me a minute to figure it out. I bet you think you’re smart. I bet you thought I’d crawl in my hole and not say anything, didn’t you? Get out here.”

This was insane. We were under siege, right here in Rose’s house in the middle of a summer morning. The police had to be coming—but how many? Two cops? Three? I had seen the size of the Coldlake Falls PD. I pointed to the phone in the phone nook on the other side of the living room, but Eddie shook his head. “No time,” he said.

I heard an intake of breath outside as Haller heard Eddie’s voice. “This isn’t going to end how you think it is,” Haller said, his tone calmer. “I knew from the second that cop knocked on my door that it was over, and I’m ready. Are you? Because I’m not waiting around.”

The footsteps moved away again, this time toward the front door.

I heard a scraping sound. Eddie had taken a kitchen knife from the counter and slid it across the floor toward me. I stopped it with my foot and grabbed it by the handle. “He’s coming in,” he said calmly. “We can’t stop him. You have one chance, and then I’ll take him.”

I looked to the front of the house. Eddie was right—there were
both the front door and the front windows that looked out over the street. The door would be hard, but the windows would be easy. A couple of shots to the glass, and Haller could get inside, where Eddie and I were sitting here, waiting, unarmed.

“Should we go out the back?” I asked. My voice was weirdly normal, like it had been that first night, when I realized that Rhonda Jean was bleeding to death. I was still shaking, but it didn’t matter. My thoughts had stopped scattering like a flock of startled birds. Twelve-year-old April—born as Crystal Cross in Los Angeles, California—had taken over.

“He’ll just follow,” Eddie said. “Someone else could get hurt. I’d rather take him here.”

I was already on my feet, running in a low crouch toward the front of the living room, keeping clear of the picture window. Eddie moved behind the sofa, out of sight. For a big man, he moved with absolutely no sound.

I took in the window, trying to calculate my best position. I had to be where Haller wouldn’t see me before it was too late. I had just tucked myself against the wall under the left corner, behind a side table, when a shadow moved across the window.

I only had a split second to think before a gunshot smashed the glass, and I ducked so I wouldn’t get hit with the shards. The sound must have been heard through the entire neighborhood. Did he think he was going to walk away from this, whether Eddie and I died or not?
He’s insane
, I thought.
He must be.

“I reloaded,” Haller’s voice said. “Here I come.”

I could hear sirens in the distance. Someone in the street was shouting. I pressed myself against the wall, going still as I heard the scrape of something on the windowsill. Then John Haller’s
legs swung over and his feet hit the ground. He had a rifle in his hand, and his gaze was on the sofa, where he’d caught sight of Eddie. He hadn’t seen me. He raised the gun.

I pivoted and jammed the knife into the back of his thigh as hard as I could.

Haller roared and dropped to one knee. He kicked hard, catching me in the chin, and I dropped onto my ass, scrambling back against the wall. Haller turned to aim the gun at me.

But Eddie was already there. He knocked the rifle from Haller’s grip and picked it up, aiming it at him. Haller barely paused. In one quick motion he drew a handgun from the shoulder holster he was wearing and aimed it at Eddie, thumbing off the safety.

The three of us froze, Eddie standing and aiming the rifle, Haller aiming the handgun back at him from his position on one knee, and me against the wall, my jaw throbbing.

Eddie and Haller locked gazes, both of them breathing hard. Grandfather and grandson.

“Don’t move,” Eddie said, and whether he meant me or Haller or both of us, it didn’t matter. I stayed still. What if a movement from me made one of them pull the trigger?

The men didn’t move with gazes locked. Both of them had steady hands, used to holding guns. There wasn’t a tremble in either of them.

“Why did you do it?” Eddie’s voice was hoarse, but his gaze didn’t waver, and neither did his aim.

“It was an accident,” Haller replied. “She called me to come get her because she’d run out of money, couldn’t afford a bus ticket. When I got there, I found her hitching on Atticus Line. I pulled over and she told me to go home because she’d changed her mind.”

“So you killed her?” Eddie’s voice threatened to crack.

“Like I said, it was an accident. I tried to force her into the car. She fought me. I was goddamned mad. She’d been a problem her whole life, running wild, getting into trouble, just like her mother. She got high and got pregnant and stole my money. So what if she said she was turning her life around? She was probably lying. So I grabbed her, held her down, even though she was screaming. I was so goddamned mad. I’d had enough. Everything went wrong, and then she was dead. I took her things and I got out of there.”

He’d left her—left his own daughter, dead by the side of the road. But first he’d taken off her jacket and thrown it away, then ripped the tag out of her shirt. I’d written my name on my clothing tags plenty of times as I traveled. When you used communal laundry facilities in hostels or split the cost of a laundromat with someone else, it was the easiest way to determine whose clothes were whose.

John Haller had stripped his daughter of her identity, then left her there. She hadn’t been found for weeks.

“You’re Jeremy, aren’t you?” Haller said. Police lights flashed through the front window, and I could hear voices in the summer breeze blowing in. Someone was shouting that we should come out. “You’re her boy. I can see it in your eyes, in your face. You look just like her. She sent you for me, because she never left. She was never gone, all these years. Part of me knew it. I’ve been waiting. I thought she’d come for me herself, but she sent you instead.”