Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (14 page)

“The coroner made a preliminary identification at the scene. The body was taken to Delacroix Hospital, and the fingerprints matched with those on file for Culver James Bryant.”

Why would Culver do it there? He had to know it would be unlikely anyone would find him there for a while. Why would a man who supposedly cared deeply about the people in his life make them suffer by not knowing what happened to him for nearly a week?

“A note was found next to the body, apparently handwritten by Bryant. The handwriting is being assessed. The content of the note indicates that Bryant was distressed that his wife found out about his infidelity. Most of the note is an apology written directly to her.”

Nothing about the suggestion, offered by all those closest to him, of some sort of impending financial disaster.

“There will be an autopsy. The initial pre-autopsy report indicates the cause of death as carbon monoxide poisoning. There were no signs that Bryant had been abducted or held against his will.”

Could Culver have been drugged, his death made to look like suicide? That seemed unlikely. An autopsy would find traces of drugs in his system. Only someone incredibly foolish would think they could get away with that, and while foolish people committed crimes all the time, nobody involved with Culver Bryant seemed the type to overlook such an obvious mistake.

“Maureen Bryant had informed us that her husband had been taking antidepressant medication for several years, though he had not been seeing a mental health professional. We had reports from Mrs. Bryant and other individuals of unusual changes in Culver Bryant’s behavior before his disappearance.”

In short, Nola realized, everything pointed to suicide. As Dalton’s eyes swept the room, met hers briefly and then looked away, she realized she was the one being foolish. She had just been given the definitive answer to the puzzle and, out of personal embarrassment, refused to accept it, instead constructing an elaborate alternate reality so that she could live in denial of having been so thoroughly wrong. The case was over. She had to stop thinking about it before she made things worse.

And then things got worse.

“You
son of a bitch
!”

They were leaving the meeting room when Lynette Veesy’s voice shrieked through the building. Nola saw her ahead in the main hallway leaning threateningly toward Nadine, about to be restrained by two uniforms. “How dare you keep this from me!? Do you know how I found out? The
news
! The fucking
news
!”

“Ms. Veesy, calm down,” Nadine was saying, clearly without any expectation that Lynette would do so.

“I have the right to know what’s going on. Are you people so incompetent you can’t even do this one simple little thing?” Lynette looked up at that moment, caught Nola’s eye, and pointed at her. “At least
she
tried to help me, not like any of you assholes. She called me as soon as she found out something. She didn’t wait for me to hear it on the goddamn fucking
news.
”

Lynette must have mistakenly thought, after hearing the
news
, that Nola’s text was a precursor to a more detailed report that included mention of the finding of Culver’s body. It might have been the first time in Lynette’s life, Nola reflected, that she’d sided with a woman over men.
Lucky me
. Everyone, every single person present, turned to look at Nola. Dalton was behind her, and she could feel the weight of his stare on the back of her head. “Get her out of here,” he muttered, and for a moment Nola thought he was talking about
her
.

The uniforms were already escorting Lynette out the front door, though, of course, she had to pound one last nail into Nola’s coffin. “We’ll talk later, Nola,” she shouted over her shoulder.

After she’d left, the silence in the hallway went beyond awkward. Nola almost wished Lynette would burst in again screaming. At least then people would be focused on someone other than herself.

“I wasn’t going to tell her anything,” she said weakly, addressing Mutt and Jeff only, afraid to look elsewhere. “I didn’t
know
anything.”

For an awful moment, no one moved or spoke. Then she heard Dalton turn around and walk back to his office without a word. She dared not turn to look at him. The other detectives began to disperse as well, only Mutt and Jeff staying behind.

“It’s OK, Nola,” Jeb said with a grin. “We know her theatrics. This wasn’t anything surprising.”

Matt chuckled as well. “At least we know Lynette watches the news. Go figure.”

Nola knew they were trying to make light of the matter so she wouldn’t look so down, but she knew even that they had to be thinking less of her as a professional at this point and there was very little she could do to redeem herself in their eyes. She’d get over it and so would they, but as she contemplated the future, she realized that even being associated with criminal justice in her lowly role as court transcriptionist might still remind her of this fiasco. As she quietly took her leave of the men, she wondered whether a career change was in order. Perhaps, she thought wryly, Anna Villagomez could use someone to stock the shelves of her store with New Age schlock.

As she opened the door to leave the building, she was treated to one last surprise encounter: Maureen Bryant and Vincent Kirke, making their way together up the stairs toward her. There was another man in a suit between them, someone she didn’t recognize—probably the lawyer of one of the two. He was speaking at the moment, and when the three looked up simultaneously at Nola, he paused for a moment, just to register that she was no one he knew, before continuing to speak. Nola couldn’t catch what he was saying, and she wasn’t in the frame of mind to register it anyway. She was caught by the expressions on the faces of the other two. Vincent Kirke gave her a quick smile of acknowledgement, but there was something else behind that smile, like he was trying to figure something out about her just from looking.

Maureen Bryant locked eyes with Nola the longest of the three, but her face was an unreadable blank. If she recognized Nola and felt anything at all about the recognition, indeed felt anything at all at that moment about what she’d discovered about her husband, none of it showed.

As they passed each other midway down the steps and Nola heard their footfalls behind her as they entered the building, it occurred to her that neither Maureen nor Vincent looked like people who had just received terrible, shocking news. Lynette’s screaming fit had at least been understandable if uncomfortable to witness. Nola didn’t feel discomfort after seeing the dead man’s widow and business partner. She felt chilled to the bone, as if the fall breeze wafting around her had brought with it a gust of the winter to come.

13

During college, Nola avoided any connection with the people she’d known in high school. She wanted to move beyond Redfort, even if at the moment she’d only moved barely a hundred miles beyond it, so she had no interest in contacting that same group of people she’d grown up with, even though a number of them had done the hundred miles’ move as well and popped up all over the State U. campus. If she happened to meet eyes with one of them, she would give a cool nod and keep walking, hoping fervently that she wouldn’t be called back. They seldom did. Nola figured most of them were trying to get away from the past as well.

The one exception to her “no contact” rule was her old teacher Mrs. Boswell, with whom she had an old-fashioned letter-writing correspondence. She supposed that put her in a special category of nerddom, but she didn’t care. Mrs. Boswell had made high school bearable, something Nola couldn’t say about anyone else on earth. In her letters, she discussed personal stuff more with her former teacher than she ever did with her own parents, and Nola loved the way her teacher still talked about her husband with affection and respect, even after three decades of marriage. “Mr. B sends his regards, and would have sent his lasagna, except I ate it all. That man’s baked pasta is heaven in a Pyrex pan. Bakes lasagna and chases the spiders out of the bathroom for me—I think I have a keeper.”

During winter break of her third year of college, Nola went back to Redfort to see Mrs. Boswell in person, but not for any sort of happy reunion. Mr. Boswell had died just after Thanksgiving, from a brain aneurism in his sleep. Like a lot of people, Nola had thought dying in your sleep next to the person you loved would have been the best possible way to go, but now it occurred to her just how awful it would be for the loved one left behind. The marriage bed was now a deathbed, and even if you got rid of it and moved away, you might be plagued with guilt every time you settled in for the night.
If I had been awake, I could have saved him. How could I sleep while he was dying?

Indeed, the Mrs. B who met Nola at the door looked nothing like the lively, fun-loving woman who’d made even the dreariest of “dead-guy poems,” as she called them, seem exciting and significant. Her normally sleek silver hair was limp and gray, and her sweatshirt and sweatpants were neither matched nor clean. For a moment, Nola thought the woman must have lost a huge amount of weight, as her clothes were weirdly baggy on her frame. Then she realized: these were Mr. Boswell’s clothes. Mrs. B. let Nola in with a few mumbled words, her hands clutching the loose folds of cloth around her body. She was trying to hold on to him.

Nola felt panicky. This was true, raw grief she was seeing for the first time in her life, and she had no idea what to do. What could she say that wouldn’t sound stupid and trite? What if she ended up blurting out something that made things even worse? She couldn’t very well say nothing at all, as tempting as that was.

The dull-eyed woman turned to Nola with a sad smile. “Thank you so much for coming, Nola.” Still tongue-tied, Nola nodded. “I want to ask you something. Can you . . .” She faltered, looking away.

Nola saw where Mrs. Boswell was looking—at the door to the bedroom they’d shared and where he’d died—and understood what she wanted to ask.

It was obvious Mrs. Boswell had been sleeping elsewhere for a while—there had been a tell-tale tangle of sheets and blankets on the living room sofa—and when Mrs. Boswell opened the bedroom door, she didn’t enter, so neither did Nola. There was no need to. She felt it immediately, that same sensation she’d had at the hospice center, like walking through a mist. Nothing dramatic, no flashing lights or bright colors or sounds. It wasn’t scary or even creepy, even if it should have been, given the circumstances. “It’s fine,” Nola blurted without thinking.

She said this more for her own benefit than her former teacher’s, but it definitely had an effect. Mrs. Boswell looked at her curiously. “You feel it?”

“Oh yes. It’s faint, but that’s not surprising. If the death is violent and painful, it would be very different, but this is nothing like that. It’s quite gentle.” This left out the part about how older people seldom gave off much trace upon death, no matter how they died, and Mr. Boswell had been nearly seventy, but Nola didn’t deem it necessary to disclose every last detail. She’d spoken the truth in the reasonably straightforward way she’d always spoken about matters concerning trace, without embellishment or mystical-sounding hokum, and she hoped it would provide comfort.

As it turned out, mostly honest was the best policy. Nola’s coolheaded, no-nonsense approach was exactly what was needed to ease Paula Boswell’s sorrow. The results were immediate: Mrs. Boswell straightened her shoulders and smoothed her hair, and when the visit ended a little later and she saw Nola out the door, she was no longer clutching at her husband’s sweatshirt. She could, perhaps, let it go now.

___________

Now Nola had to pay another visit to someone grieving. She was back at the house on the leafy street.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” she said.

Grayson nodded. He looked tired but calm. “Thank you. At least, if nothing else, we know now.”

“And . . .”

“And . . . what?”

Nola looked carefully at him. He wasn’t being sarcastic, egging her on. He genuinely had no idea what else she had to say. “Well, I’m not supposed to say this in case you decide to sue, but I’m sorry if there was ever a moment where you were under suspicion by the police, or . . . by me.”

He shook his head. “Don’t apologize for that. It happens. If anything, I’m sorry for what
you
just went through.”

“What did I go through?”

He smiled faintly. “You look like you’ve been kicked in the teeth. It couldn’t have been fun to have all those officious law enforcement types treating you like you had no business being there ever again.”

He was exactly right, but all she could think to say was, “They weren’t all like that.”

“No, I’m sure your white knight wouldn’t be.” His smile broadened at her confusion. “The commander. He and I had a little run-in the other day. Didn’t he tell you?”

She stared stupidly at him. “Huh?”

“He came to see me here. He wasn’t pleased that you and I have had contact.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“He said, and I quote, ‘You stay away from her,’ like some B-movie hero.”

Nola continued to stare, her brain in thick fog. “He’s just . . .”

“Doing his job? So were you, and look what that got you. Nola, it’s what I’ve been telling you from the start: if all you do is try to please other people all the time, you’re doomed to fail. Why not try to please yourself? Why isn’t that just as important, if not more important?”

It was a solid point. She had tried so hard to achieve legitimacy among the detectives, and for what? She had been completely discredited because of her work on this case. What did it matter?

Grayson stepped back and opened the front door wider. “I’m being rude. Please come in, won’t you? I doubt it matters anymore who might see you here.”

Nola hesitated even though there was no reason for her to do so. He was right. The case was over, so it didn’t matter if she “had contact” with Culver Bryant’s brother. What’s more, even though their first meeting in this house had been deeply unsettling to Nola, it had nothing to do with the house. There was no trace here. The police had definitively determined that Culver had died elsewhere.