What We Found (18 page)

“Audra, you’re really okay? And Ricky?”

He thought to ask about my brother. I softened a little. “We’re both fine.”

“Thank God. I’m so sorry.”

I tensed. Was that some kind of admission? “For what?”

“When the police came, I could see the stain where your brake fluid started leaking while you were parked. If I’d been paying attention, I could’ve caught you before you reached the gate.” I could hear faint thumps in the background, as if he was pacing in heavy boots. “I was right there! I walked you to your car and stood there watching you—um, making sure you got out of the gate okay. I should have noticed something was wrong.”

I felt a smile tugging at my lips. I could see him as a person who felt guilty about something that was in no way his fault, simply because he was a protector at heart. “It’s not your fault.” I really hoped that was true.

“Gran and Daniel feel terrible, too. Like you haven’t been through enough in the last week.”

“We all have, I guess.”

“Yeah. Well….”

The silence stretched. I could still hear Ricky talking in the kitchen. He would probably tell me to use this opportunity to get information. Maybe that beat having nothing to say. So far Kyle hadn’t seemed upset that I’d sent the police to question him, which seemed a little weird. “Did the police have anything interesting to say?”

“They wanted to know if we had any other trouble. We checked our vehicles, but they’re all fine. I hate thinking that somebody was sneaking around the place. We don’t usually even lock our doors.” Ah, of course he’d assume it was a trespasser, if he was innocent. Or he’d blame an outsider, if he was guilty.

After a pause, he added, “The police wanted to know exactly what we were each doing the whole time your car was parked here. Audra, I hope you don’t think we would do anything like this to you. I have no way to prove it, but I swear we don’t want to hurt you or Ricky. You found Bethany’s body and reported it—you can’t even imagine how grateful we are for that.”

I swallowed and found my voice. “Okay. I mean—” I gave a weak laugh. “I’m not sure what I mean. I don’t—it’s not your fault.” I could believe that. I wanted to believe that.

“Are we all right then? I’d still like to take you out with the birds sometime. Or … we could do something else.” His voice held hope and fear, and somehow that gave me confidence. I wasn’t the only nervous one.

“Okay.” I wanted to see him again. I wanted to look in his eyes and see if I could judge the kind of person he was. Maybe it was stupid to go near someone who might be a murderer, but I had to know the truth. This wasn’t just for Bethany anymore—this was for me. “How about tomorrow?”

“Really? Great! We can take the young hawk out after work, if you’re interested—and bring your brother, too, of course, if you want.”

“We’ll see. He might be busy.” I’d make sure he was. I wouldn’t take chances with Ricky.

“Okay. Can I pick you up?”

My car was in the shop, and I wasn’t sure if the police were done with it or how long it would take to get fixed. Mom could drop me off in the morning. “Pick me up at work.” I’d have to figure out where to have him drop me off if I didn’t want him to know where I lived. Of course, in a town this size, it wouldn’t be that hard to find out.

We confirmed time and place and said goodnight. I lay back on my bed, struggling to make sense of my feelings. I had a date. I was pretty sure it was a date. With a fascinating man—who might have something to do with his sister’s murder.

Had I done something stupid by agreeing to see Kyle? Maybe the sensible thing would be to avoid seeing Kyle and Nascha, anyone who might be involved with Bethany’s murder, until the case was solved.

But what if it never was solved? By refusing to be friends now, I might lose the opportunity later. I had a life to live, and it went beyond being the person who discovered a dead body. Ultimately, I had to make my own choices about people. If I never went near a man who might be flawed, who might have done something bad in the past or be capable of doing something bad in the future, I couldn’t go near men at all. Even Mom, for all her complaints about men, still seemed to want to find one, so she must still believe there were decent ones.

And what about Nascha? Looking at her behavior one way, it seemed suspicious—knowing my phone number, going out of her way to spend time with me, asking questions, and having a connection to the case. But looking at it another way, you had a few coincidences, not uncommon in a small town, and the overtures of someone who could be a very good friend. If I wanted to be the kind of person who deserved a good friend, then I needed to be a good friend. That meant taking some chances and going a little bit on faith.

That didn’t mean I had to be careless. When I was out with Kyle, Ricky could be my backup. I’d tell him where I was going and turn on the GPS tracking function on my phone so he could see my location. Not that I expected anything to go wrong … but just in case.

I gazed around the room at my posters of cute kittens and puppies. A child’s room. Never even a teenager’s room, since Mom hadn’t approved of posters of cute actors and rock stars. I wasn’t a child any longer. It was time to take on the responsibilities of being an adult. I hoped to get an apartment of my own before long, after I’d saved up enough money for the security deposit and some furniture. In the meantime, I didn’t have to live like this.

I got up and started taking posters off the wall. It was time to take charge of my life. I’d wipe down the walls, vacuum, wash the window—get the place spotless, and then start over and make it mine.

The door pushed open. “Audra, are you okay? Ricky told me—” Mom glanced at the pile of posters on my bed. “What are you doing?”

“Redecorating my room.”

“Oh.” She studied me for a moment. “I’ll help.”

Mom asked me to drop her off in the morning and said I could take her car. She said she’d walk the two miles home, because she needed the exercise anyway, but I remembered her rule from when I was a teenager—make sure you always have your own way home. Maybe she was looking out for me. If so, she didn’t make a fuss about it, so neither did I.

The best thing I could do at work was to learn my job well. I did, however, manage to get some information from Eslinda as we finalized plans for an event the following weekend. Eslinda had no trouble chatting while going over schedules or sketching diagrams, though my head spun from all the details, work and non-work related.

Mrs. Moore had been a nice girl, but timid. Eslinda didn’t like Mr. Moore. He was domineering, though not, so far as she knew, physically abusive. Bethany had been rebellious and often in trouble, but she never heard much about Kyle until he joined the military, which had surprised a lot of people but seemed to please his father. Things “had been rough” when Kyle came back with his injury.

When I prodded for any rumors of drug abuse, Eslinda merely looked mysterious and said some things were private. “I wouldn’t normally be telling you all this other stuff,” she said, “except you’re already so involved, and maybe understanding people better will help it all make sense.”

She knew less about the Bains, but she confirmed that Thomas wasn’t married to Lia’s mother—never had been, she thought. Lia lived with her mother and several younger siblings from other fathers. Jay’s parents were divorced. Jay’s mother had left town with two younger kids, but Jay, then seventeen, had elected to stay with his father to finish high school.

I felt dirty, prying for gossip, especially about unhappy families. Still, I told myself it was better to know. Somehow I had to make sense of everything that had happened.

When Nascha asked if I wanted to grab some lunch, I said, “Sure, if we make it quick. I want to go to the thrift store.”

“Looking for anything in particular?”

“I’m redecorating my room.” I studied her outfit, a simple but elegant olive-green silk top and slim skirt, with a chunky necklace of silver and dark green stones. “Given that you’re the most stylish person I know, maybe you could help?”

She persuaded me to start at the artists’ co-op, so I returned from lunch with a framed art print and a quilt with a design of irises that picked up the purple in the painting, each for less than I would have spent on something half as good in a department store. I was going to enjoy having a shopping girlfriend.

I spent the afternoon dealing with one hysterical bride-to-be, a cranky caterer, and a large, loud family planning for their daughter’s quinceañera. I knew that the “coming out party” for a Hispanic girl’s fifteenth birthday was a big deal, but I didn’t realize how fancy and expensive they could get until I was involved in planning one.

And then it was time to meet Kyle. I texted Ricky that I was leaving, turned on my GPS, and checked that he would be able to see me on the mapping program—just in case.

Kyle’s truck was screeching again, but this time I knew it must be coming from the bird in the back. I tried to think of conversation as he maneuvered through the parking lot. “Is that a falcon or a hawk?”

“Red-tailed hawk. We take the falcons out in the morning. They’re easier to lose, so that gives you all day to find them.”

“Lose?” I had an odd image of someone forgetting where they had put down their falcon. Hard to imagine, if they made as much noise as the hawk did.

“They start chasing something and get out of sight, or go where you can’t follow, like over a mountain or across the river. All the birds we fly have radio telemetry on so we can track them, but if they hit something hard it can break the telemetry, or it might come off on a fence or something. This is a big state and tends to swallow up birds.”

We headed down the hill out of town. I imagined what might have happened if my brakes had gone out on that slope and I’d had to make the sharp turn onto the main highway at high speed, with traffic. I shook the thought away and tried to focus on birds. “That sounds bad. Can they survive on their own after they’ve been captive?”

“Sure, it happens all the time. One guy in Kansas lost his bird and got a call four years later from Fish and Wildlife. They found a bird with his band number nesting on a building in Milwaukee.” He shrugged. “It’s good, in a way. Those birds are adding to the wild population. Falconers take birds out of the wild to breed them and hunt with them. Then birds go back into the wild, either intentionally released like the Peregrine Fund did when peregrines were going extinct, or sometimes by accident.”

The forest opened up into the dryer lowlands with scrub desert ranchland. I remembered seeing Kyle from up on the ridge. Of course his actions that day made sense now—he was working with the hawk I’d seen soaring above. “I didn’t realize they’d been almost extinct,” I said. “I thought peregrines were one of the common kind.”

“They are now,” he said. “They were nearly killed off in the wild because of the pesticide DDT, but falconers came together and bred their birds, and ended up releasing four thousand peregrines in North America. Some people get upset about captive falconry, but it’s because of falconry that we still have peregrines today. Falconers are big on conservation. We want to see wild lands preserved and the sky full of birds.”

I smiled. “You don’t have to convince me. I think it’s great.”

He glanced over and grinned. “Sorry for the soapbox. Anyway, back to your earlier question; if you’ve trained the bird right, it can return to the wild, no problem. That’s why apprentice falconers can only take two types of birds, red-tails and kestrels, and can only trap them out of the wild. Red-tails and kestrels are very common, and if you trap them wild, they’re already hunting, they’re not human imprints. If the apprentice loses them, the bird just takes up where it left off.”

I thought about that as he pulled off to the edge of the road and got out. Nancy had mentioned that the falcons and hawks weren’t exactly pets, they were more like partners. But still, her affection was obvious, and Kyle’s, too. It couldn’t be that easy to let one of your birds go.

I met Kyle at the back of the truck. “Have you ever lost a bird?”

He shook his head as he opened the back window and lowered the tailgate. “This is the first bird that’s really mine, the one we’re flying today. I apprenticed in high school, but I’ve only really been getting into it since I came back. Nancy lost one once, though. It headed over the mountain and then went on to White Sands Missile Range. She had the telemetry signal, but they wouldn’t let her go out to pick up the bird. She went every day for a week, hoping it would leave the restricted area, but eventually the battery went out on the telemetry, and she had to give up.”

As he talked, he dug through a bag one-handed and pulled out a heavy leather glove—or maybe gauntlet was a better term, as it covered most of his forearm. He pulled it onto his bad arm; the fingers of the glove had been folded over and taped down. He tightened the straps with quick, competent moves and then picked up a leather satchel and hung it across his body from one shoulder to the opposite hip. The whole time, the hawk screeched and ruffled her feathers.

“Should I do anything?” I asked. He didn’t seem to need help, but I felt rude just standing around while he took care of everything.

“Almost done.” He flipped open the latch on the cage and the bird hopped out, then up onto his leather-covered forearm. The hawk finally stopped screeching, glad to be free, I guess. She peered around with fierce black eyes. I had the urge to run my hand down her feathers, a gorgeous reddish-brown with white mottling. I wasn’t sure if it would be okay with Kyle, though—or with the bird. As beautiful as she was, the beady glare and hooked beak didn’t exactly invite cuddling.

Kyle stepped back from the truck. “Okay, let’s go.” He glanced down at my feet. “I should’ve warned you to wear good shoes.”

I would have said these were good shoes, comfortable beige flats that didn’t make my feet look huge. But to him, good shoes probably meant something like his hiking boots, which did make more sense for tramping through the desert. “How far are we going?”