Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (6 page)

As he talked, Nola couldn’t help noticing the way he moved. There was sureness in his stride. He had probably been an athlete himself in high school, maybe college, before he took up sports medicine. It took her a moment to refocus on his words. “The latest deal Culver’s working on? He bought up all that land where the old computer-parts factory used to be back in the ’70s before everything got outsourced overseas, and he’s putting in an affordable housing community—Greenbriar, it’s called. Unlike most developers of affordable housing communities, he’s insisted on top-quality materials. Everyone told him he was going to take a huge loss if he did that, but I’d be willing to bet he proves them wrong even on this. Culver makes things work.”

Nola listened quietly, trying to gauge just how much envy there might be in Grayson’s depiction of his older brother. His admiration sounded sincere; this was no Cain resentful of the glory bestowed upon Abel. As a physician in a popular field, Grayson could hardly be deemed a failure himself. However, if his portrait of Culver Bryant was accurate, the man’s disappearance and possible murder were even more puzzling than she’d originally thought. Who would want to kill someone like Culver? If he hadn’t been killed but merely abducted, why hadn’t there been demands for ransom? If he had run off on his own, what could explain the abandonment of wife, girlfriend, and business by a man who supposedly wanted to do right by everyone?

They had reached a busy intersection and, by some unspoken common impulse, turned simultaneously to walk back to Javaland. Grayson gave her a faint smile. “I take it all these questions are for your own private investigation, since the boys in blue no doubt weren’t too pleased with the false lead you gave them.”
            “The boys in blue—the girls, too, for that matter—know that most leads are false ones. They’re hardly going to expect me or anyone else to be right 100 percent of the time.”

“But you
do
need to be right 100 percent of the time, and you know that. Otherwise they won’t ever believe you. They didn’t believe you right from the start. Correct?” She said nothing. “They don’t listen. They don’t understand.”

“And you do?” she snapped.

“Maybe. Certainly, in one very important way, I understand you better than anyone else you know.”

This was impossible to deny, even if she would have loved to deny it. All her life she had felt like part of a freak show, separated from the normal world by virtue of this one strange thing she could do, like the guy who swallowed swords or the woman who twisted her limbs into complicated knots.

They were back at the Javaland parking lot. Leaning forward slightly, Grayson seemed to be reading her thoughts again. “We are different from other people. That’s always hard. It’s hard to try to fit in and it’s hard to decide not to fit in. Either way you feel like you lose. But it doesn’t have to be that way all the time, Nola.”

Nola knew she had to get into her car and leave now before her head exploded from everything Grayson said. Again she hesitated—what in the world could she say?

Grayson either rescued her or took advantage of the moment by speaking again. “There’s someplace I want to take you Tuesday night. It’s a special dinner party I’ve been invited to. I can’t describe it, not because I’m trying to be coy but because it’s a bit hard to describe. Honestly, I’m not all that sure what it’s going to be like myself—I prefer to think of it as an interesting experiment.”

“Dinner and experiment. Not two words I’d put together unless I was the one doing the cooking.” She was pleased at her quip, in large part because the invitation had flustered her.

He smiled but was clearly waiting for a definite answer. “I’m inviting you because I think you should come with me—I
hope
you’ll come with me—so you can see what I’m saying about this: you don’t have to play by everyone else’s rules.”

She had not thought of herself as a person who was especially rule-bound. After all, she did not have to be sitting here with Grayson, she had not needed to become a tracist, she could have just gone about the ordinary parts of her life very easily. But she was also suspicious of people who sneered at “the rules,” who proclaimed themselves rebels, when in fact most of the time they were merely privileged enough to escape the kinds of consequences other people had to suffer. And she was still suspicious of Grayson in general, for no reason she could put to words beyond the fact that she’d spent no more than a couple of hours with him over two days and already he seemed to have worked his way quite thoroughly into her life.

With all this going on in her mind, she simply said, “OK. I’ll go.”

___________

A few weeks after her presentation on ghosts, some students from her class dared Nola to go to a cemetery at night and dance on a grave. Everyone in this group of kids got a dare at some point, and they’d picked this task specifically for her because of her ghost report, though mostly they just thought it would be fun to make someone do something that would have scared themselves shitless. Funny thing was, they couldn’t have picked an easier dare. Nola was far more worried about being caught by the cops than anything else. As they gathered at the front gate once the last glow of twilight had faded, she insisted that one of them be on the lookout for patrol cars; the rest could watch, drinking their Cokes from McDonalds spiked with E&J brandy. The only other tricky thing would be taking care not to make it seem too easy—there was a fine line, she knew, between looking brave and looking like you enjoyed doing freaky things just a little too much. Jerry Dorpinghouse had taken such delight in eating dead bugs the last time this bunch got together that he could expect to find cockroaches Scotch-taped to his locker with notes (“Snack for you, Jerry”) from now until graduation.

But it
was
easy for Nola to take the dare. As she walked through the gates among the stones, she knew these were remains. Nothing here had died here. That had occurred elsewhere, and even if she didn’t know any of these people, how they lived or how they died, she knew what happened each time one of these deaths transpired. When she judged she’d gone far enough in to be really
in
but not so far that her darers at the gate couldn’t see her, she picked a random grave. Fredrick M. Garten, 1913-1978. Standing before the stone doing the Macarena, she offered a silent apology. It was hard not to, even though she knew Fredrick Garten was not there in the ground, or hovering in the sky above her, or wandering around the crosses and angels moaning like a specter in the movies. The apology, she knew, was more for herself than anyone living or dead. It was necessary to feel contrite, not because she was desecrating the dead but because she was doing something utterly ridiculous in order to be accepted. Fredrick Garten was not there, hadn’t been anywhere for a while, but Nola figured he’d probably gone through the same kind of thing while he was alive. Most everyone did, especially in towns like Redfort. Walking back to the gate, seeing the figures there ahead of her and wondering how they’d react, she knew the dead couldn’t hurt you nearly as much as the living.

She recalled all of this now as she drove home in a daze—one of those drives, she reflected as she suddenly found herself in her apartment parking lot, where you’re on autopilot and have no idea how you managed not to cause an accident. When she shut off the ignition, she immediately opened the door. No sitting around waiting for someone
else
to come around.

Her cell phone rang before she could get out, and she laughed out loud.

It was a local number, not one she recognized but clearly not a telemarketer either. Curiosity got the better of her. It could very well be Grayson again, after all, with yet more to overload her brain. She took the call.

“It’s Lynette.” She didn’t add a last name, though she didn’t need to. Nola knew only one person named Lynette, even if she would never have expected a call from her.

“Um . . . yes?”

“I need to talk to you about Culver Bryant. It’s important, really important, and I can only talk to
you
.”

5

Lynette Veesy worked at Tryst, a nightclub in the warehouse district. It was a place Nola had heard about but never been to, instinctively knowing it would not be her scene. The post-dinner crowd would be too yuppie and the late-night crowd would make her feel too obviously like a 27-year-old transcriptionist wearing her coolest outfit and trying to look like she always stayed up this late. Pretty easy to figure out which crowd Culver Bryant had been in when he’d met Lynette.

Of course, it occurred to Nola that this might not be the smartest thing she could do, that if Lynette was involved in murder or kidnapping, she could be walking into a trap. Just thinking those words, though—
walking into a trap
—sounded ludicrous. Still, she took precautions, telling Lynette that she was leaving a note on her desk at the police station saying when she expected to be back. If anything happened to her, they’d figure it out pretty quickly. She didn’t have a desk at the police station, but Lynette wouldn’t know that. Lynette thought she was a psychic, after all.

“Fine, whatever,” Lynette had said impatiently over the phone, “just don’t tell anyone what this is all about.”

“How can I when you haven
’
t told
me
what it
’
s all about?

Lynette hung up, either out of fear that someone was coming or because she was not used to being in the position of begging for help from people and hadn’t quite learned the etiquette it demanded.

Nola got there well before the place would open for the night, as Lynette had instructed, and let herself in through the unlocked front door. Without the music and black lights and well-heeled club-goers, the place looked like the warehouse it was—shabby, gloomy, cavernously empty. Lynette was waiting for her at the bar, sipping from a bottle of water. She didn’t offer one to Nola but instead began talking, urgently, before Nola even had a chance to take off her leather jacket. Something about going to a nightclub even for non-nightclub business made her think she should wear leather, though not
entirely
leather, from boots to beret, as Lynette was sporting. “We have to do this quick before my manager comes back,” she said. “I need your help. I can’t talk to the cops about this.”

“You do understand, if you say anything I think is relevant to the case—”

“I know, I know, you’ll go rat me out.” She made a sound like a gasp or a sigh and then scrunched her eyes tightly shut. When she opened them, she looked genuinely apologetic. “Sorry. I’m not the most tactful person on the planet.”

Nola decided to accept the apology. She was intrigued. “It’s OK. You’re dealing with someone who isn’t exactly on that top-ten list either. Go on.”

“Here it is. You probably wondered why I acted the way I did when you already knew nothing happened at my place, am I right?”

Nola nodded.

“Here’s the thing. Culver and I had this plan. We were going to run away together. His wife won’t divorce him, and one of his business deals . . . well, there’s stuff happening there and it’s not good and that’s all I know about that. Nothing illegal, Culver says, just, well, money problems. Big money problems. Like, I can’t even imagine how much money we’re—”

“I think I get it.” Another thing Nola was bad at, besides tact, was patience. She didn’t know how the detectives managed to deal with people who had nothing significant to say but made damn sure to take as long as possible to say it. “Please go on.”

“We were going to fake his death.” Lynette paused, either for dramatic effect or because she wanted to gauge Nola’s reaction before she continued. “You get it now, right? I didn’t want you on the case, because you’d know there wasn’t a murder.”

“Everyone would know. There wouldn’t be a
body
.”

“We were going to make it seem like he went out to the river to go fishing and got assaulted by some crazy person and was killed. The body would have gotten carried away. At first we thought maybe just an accident, maybe he hit his head and drowned. But we had to make it really convincing that he was dead so they’d give up looking for him, and we figured it would be easier to stage a violent murder than a simple accident.”

As absurd as it all sounded, Nola could see that the plan was plausible. She knew from her work with homicide detectives that the swamp the river drained into was almost impossible to dredge; something or someone could stay stuck down there for decades.

“The thing is,” Lynette said, “I wasn’t sure how the whole trace thing worked. You wouldn’t need a body for that so long as you knew where the death occurred—or where it supposedly occurred, right?”

Again Nola nodded.

Ruefully, Lynette tossed her copper hair. “If I’d known you were going to be on the case, maybe we could have done it a different way . . . but that’s not the reason I’m here.”

“And the reason is?” Nola prompted, resisting the urge to check her watch.

“It didn’t happen the way it was supposed to! None of the things Culver was supposed to do were done, because he disappeared the day
before
it was all supposed to go down. He’s
really
missing now, not just fake missing. At first I thought maybe something came up so he had to sort of, I don’t know, improvise and get things going early, but now . . . I’m not so sure.”

Nola digested that. It was certainly an interesting revelation, but she wasn’t sure quite what to do with it. “I gather you’re telling me this rather than the police because there might be some sort of obstructing-justice charge to admitting you were going to help fake someone’s death.”

“Yeah, you got it. And me with a DUI and some other stupid shit on my record. They hate me downtown.” This last was said with sneering pride, although Nola doubted anyone downtown could tell Lynette from countless other people with DUIs and stupid shit on
their
records. Half of Redfort was probably on that list.