What We Found (4 page)

I crept toward the door and paused before it. Was Jay inside? I knocked lightly. No answer. I tried the handle and pulled open the door to reveal an office, small and cluttered with boxes on the floor and piles of paper stacked high on a desk. And next to a computer, my phone.

Finally, something was going right! Relief flooded me as I grabbed it.

I swung toward the door, caught my foot on the desk chair, and stumbled. How did a big guy like Jay maneuver with all the stuff in here? Two four-drawer file cabinets were stuffed so full the doors wouldn’t close all the way. Long, plug-in lights—grow lights, maybe?—leaned against the wall next to a golf bag. Boxes were stacked three and four deep, some labeled and some not. Jay might have a green thumb, but he didn’t have organizational skills.

I crossed the room and slipped out the door—and found myself face to face with a stranger. He was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and gardening gloves. “What are you doing?” he snapped.

I instinctively hid my phone behind my back and then realized that carrying a phone wasn’t suspicious but hiding something was. I dropped my hand and gave a casual shrug. “Looking for Jay. I guess he’s gone for the day?”

“You just missed him.”

I smiled and edged past the guy. “Okay, I’ll catch him tomorrow.”

When I reached the outside door, I glanced back. He was still staring at me, his face suspicious and grim. I fumbled with the door handle and ran the first few steps away from the building.

I forced myself to slow. The man probably wasn’t suspicious at all. Why would he be? I was just suffering from my own guilty feelings.

Halfway to the parking lot, a bench sat beside the building, facing the golf course. I slumped onto it, tipped my head back, and closed my eyes. What a day. I was going to be late for dinner, but I needed to collect myself before I faced going home.

I opened my eyes and looked across the golf course toward the woods. What was going on in there? What clues were the police finding—and how many of them led straight to me and Jay?

A man stepped out of the woods. I jumped, even though he was a couple hundred feet away. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, and I didn’t think I’d seen him before.

He paused, head bowed, and lifted a hand to cover his face. He stayed like that for a full minute. It was only when he dropped his hand that I noticed his other arm. It ended just above the wrist.

I shivered. So he’d had some kind of accident and lost his hand. Big deal. That shouldn’t be creepy. But combined with everything else that had happened, with seeing him suddenly appear from the woods where a dead body lay, it was.

He straightened and strode toward the parking lot. What had he been doing in the woods? Just a random tourist heading that way by chance, or a busybody who’d seen the police and wanted to learn the gossip? Neither possibility explained his reaction.

I got up and followed him. I had no plan, just a strange curiosity about this mystery man. Maybe the woman in the woods and the investigation of her death were none of my business. But I was involved, as much as I’d been involved in anything in my life. If her death wasn’t natural—if it might be, as the officer had hinted, murder—I wanted to see it resolved.

My gut told me this guy was involved as well. But how?

I lost sight of him for a minute in the parking lot, but then I heard a door slam. I headed in that direction, past SUVs, minivans, and nice sedans—the typical vehicles of our mainly upscale tourists. Two police cars had pulled into the fifteen-minute parking spaces. A faint, strange sound, like a rusty door closing, drifted through the air.

An engine started. The battered old truck stood out like a janitor at the prom. It was dark blue, splattered with mud and probably decades old, with a cap on the bed. The evening sun glared off the side window, but as I walked slowly past the front I saw a figure inside—the one-handed man. He had his hand on the wheel but his head back, eyes closed.

I paused, studying his face. I guessed he was in his twenties, with short, light brown hair and pleasant features in a mask as still as death.

He opened his eyes and looked straight into mine.

I couldn’t move as he held my gaze. My heart thumped against my ribs. He studied me without expression, no smile, no frown, nothing in his face but weariness.

Finally I had to blink, and once the eye contact was broken, I jerked my gaze away and kept moving. I quickly turned between the next two cars, to get out of his view. I’d have to cross behind his truck to reach my car, which might look odd if he was still watching, but I didn’t care so long as I got out of there, fast.

I noticed the rusty screeching again. It was coming from his truck. I stumbled to a stop, staring at the back of the truck. What could be making that sound? The tailgate and back window on the cap were closed, hiding the sight inside, but the screech came again and again like someone—something—screaming.

The screams seemed to echo in my head. I couldn’t take any more. I turned away with a hand over my mouth to hold back my own scream and hurried to my car.

I pulled up in front of the house and turned off the car. For a minute I just stared at my home, as if seeing it for the first time. The three-bedroom bungalow had seemed so big and beautiful when we moved in twelve years before, after Mom got married. Now the wood siding looked faded, and a lonely stump in the front yard was all that remained of the tall pine that had to be cut down after suffering damage in a heavy snowstorm. The evergreens around the sides of the house were dropping needles on the patchy grass, which needed to be mowed.

I sighed. My escape had been temporary. I’d been so excited and terrified moving to Albuquerque, where the student body at UNM was three times the size of my entire hometown. Mom had warned me of all the dangers there, but despite a few scares, I’d emerged unscathed—only to return home, let my guard down, and stumble on death.

The heat started to build up in the car, and the smell of fried chicken tightened my throat, but I took a moment to rehearse my lines. I wanted to collapse in my room with the lights out and hide from the world, but that wasn’t going to happen.

I pushed my hair out of my face, grabbed the grocery bag, and headed up the walk, trying not to let my shoulders slump.

I had a smile in place by the time I entered. Ricky was on the couch, messing around on his phone while the TV murmured about some science topic. He grinned at me, his cheerful face still chubby with baby fat despite a recent growth spurt, and my smile became a little easier. Jay was wrong about one thing. I did have a friend in town, even if it was just my little brother.

I set the bag on the coffee table and sank down next to him, putting my arm around his shoulders. He snuggled against me, affectionate behavior that was probably abnormal for a twelve-year-old boy, but no one had accused Ricky of being average.

Mom stepped into the room. “You’re late. It’s your turn to make dinner and it’s already after six.”

“I know. I got delayed at the resort.” I was glad I had practiced the words so I could avoid the truth without actually lying. “I picked up dinner on the way home. Didn’t you get my text?”

“I got it,” Ricky said. “Mom, I told you.”

She glared. “I should never have let you get him that phone.”

I was careful not to smile. Texting meant I didn’t actually have to talk to Mom, but the disadvantage was she could pretend she hadn’t gotten the message. Copying Ricky was my backup. I wasn’t sure if he’d caught on to that or just thought he was doing Mom a favor by notifying her when a message came in. It was a complicated system, but it worked for me.

She sniffed the air and turned her scowl to the bag on the coffee table. “What is that?”

“Fried chicken. And potato salad and coleslaw.”

“Cool!” Ricky leaned forward and peered in the top of the bag. As my mother opened her mouth, I tapped Ricky’s back and said quickly, “Take it into the kitchen and set the table.” He dashed from the room.

I stood, but Mom blocked my way. “I expect you to fix healthy meals, not bring home junk. Ricky’s fat enough as it is.”

“He’s fine, Mom. He’s still growing. An occasional treat won’t kill him.” I took petty pleasure in the fact that my extra five inches forced her to look up at me. I had inherited my mother’s delicate bone structure and bland coloring. So far as I knew, only my height came from the father I’d never met.

Ricky was his father all the way. And that was something our mother couldn’t forgive.

We got through dinner somehow. Mom peeled the skin off her chicken, skipped the potato salad, and snapped comments at Ricky about his table manners, which were better than any man or boy I’d ever known. Ricky chattered, seemingly immune to the moods around him, or simply so used to Mom that he thought this was normal. Maybe I should have been grateful that he didn’t show more obvious scars from being raised by a woman who hated men. But the scars had to be there, so I was determined to be there too, trying to balance out my mother’s influence.

I picked at my food. My stomach rumbled, but somehow hunger wasn’t translating into appetite. I had to figure out what I was going to tell them. Part of me wanted to say nothing, but the story would come out eventually. It would be worse if Mom heard it from someone else.

Ricky cleared the table and started washing the dishes. Before Mom could start in on me again, I said, “I need to change,” and headed for my room.

I stripped out of my clothes and stuffed them in my laundry bag, grimacing as they touched my other laundry. I wanted to throw out the clothes I’d worn that day, burn them even, so they couldn’t taint anything else, but I couldn’t afford to lose a good office outfit.

I stood in the room where I’d lived from age eleven to seventeen. I hadn’t gotten around to redecorating, so it had the same faded posters of kittens and puppies on the wall, the same pink and gray quilt on the single bed. I wanted to burrow under that quilt and hide. I wanted to run screaming from the house and never return. I was back where I had started. I’d thought I was stronger, that I could make my own life and help Ricky get started on his.

I’d made nothing but mistakes.

I pulled on sweatpants and a T-shirt and forced myself to leave the room before the urge to lie down overwhelmed me.

I stepped into the living room as a news bulletin interrupted the local broadcast. A woman’s body had been found at the resort.

She had been identified.

They showed a picture of her. Not as I’d seen her, but as she had been in life. And then I recognized her.

I’d never met her, but I’d seen the “Missing” fliers around town. The newscaster reminded me of the details: Bethany Moore, twenty-seven, missing for almost a month. I remembered glancing at the poster in the bank window, feeling vague sympathy for the family and hoping the woman had only run away. I hadn’t paid too much attention, because of course I’d never see her myself. Those things just didn’t happen.

Her body had been found by “a resort employee” in the woods. She’d been identified by her brother. I let out a shaky breath. They hadn’t named me.

They cut from a shot of the woods across the golf course to the sober face of the newscaster. “Ms. Moore’s disappearance has been under investigation for several weeks. Police have already interviewed several people associated with the case, including her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Bain. Ms. Moore had filed a restraining order against Mr. Bain two years ago. He admits to being in contact with her recently, but claims an alibi for the weekend she disappeared. There were also rumors of other boyfriends and drug use. The death is being investigated as a homicide.”

Mom was shaking her head. “Poor girl. That man must have killed her.”

“Which man?” I asked. “The ex-boyfriend?”

“You can’t trust men. Let this be a lesson to you, Audra. Men are no good.”

I glanced at Ricky, whose attention seemed to be focused on the TV, but how could he not be affected by comments like that? “Not all men are the same.”

“They’ll find some way to destroy your life. Trick you, abandon you, lie to you.”

“I found her.” Anything to interrupt the rant.

“What do you mean?”

“I found the body. I was the resort employee.” For once I’d rendered her speechless. They both stared at me. I wanted to explain how horrible it had been, I wanted sympathy, but I also didn’t want to say another word about it.

“And you’re just now telling us?” Mom demanded.

I sighed. “I didn’t want to … spoil dinner.”

“A woman is murdered and you’re worried about dinner?” She shook her head. “What happened? How did she die?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell.” I rose. “Look, it was awful, and I don’t really want to talk about it. The police are going to interview me later tonight. They said I’m not supposed to talk to anybody before then.” I didn’t remember them saying any such thing, but it sounded reasonable. “I’m going to go lie down for a while.”

I left them staring after me. All in all, I’d gotten off easier than I’d expected. I could only hope Mom didn’t keep up her litany of the evils of men to Ricky. He’d heard it all before, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be damaged further.

I collapsed on my bed, determined to speak to no one before the police called. Fifteen minutes later, a knock came at my door. “Audra, there’s a man here to see you.” Mom’s tone of voice would have been more appropriate for a man-eating lion. Unfortunately, in this case she was right. The door opened and Jay pushed past her. At least I had the satisfaction of seeing him close the door in Mom’s outraged face.

“You little bitch. You called the cops. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

I sat up, swallowing hard. “I didn’t realize trust had anything to do with our relationship.” I swung my legs off the bed, but he leaned over me before I could get up.

“Do you realize the trouble you’ve caused?”

I forced myself to look into his face. “I didn’t tell them about you.”

He straightened and crossed his arms. “But you will. That’s the kind of idiotic goody-two-shoes you are.”