CHAPTER 19
LUCY
I was grateful that Jamie was willing to tell me what he knew, even if it was for a price. He moved closer, his stringy hair hanging in his face, and I steeled myself for what was coming. I tried to pretend he was an ordinary guy from school, not a drug dealer a dozen years older than me. It wasn’t the wisest choice I’d made, to come here alone without telling anyone, but I didn’t want to have to explain myself, the things I was willing to do to get what I wanted. I’d never imagined myself as the sort of person who’d use my body in trade. But I was starting to think you were one kind of person until a situation arose that required you to be something else. It didn’t mean that I was on the road to ruin. It just meant that I would do what I had to. You didn’t wait for snakes to come out of their den, according to Birdie. You poured the den full of gasoline.
It was only a kiss, I reminded myself. That was all he’d asked, though not all he wanted. I could feel that much in the air between us.
“Just get it over with,” I said.
He leaned in, his breath sour. The breeze brushed his long hair against my arms, and I smelled his sweating body, acrid and earthy like burning leaves. He watched me for a long minute, his hand reaching up and smoothing my hair, trailing across my cheekbone. I kept my expression detached, tried not to shudder. His eyes stayed open as he tilted his head, pressed his lips against mine. He pulled back slightly to look at me again, and I thought he was done. It had been nothing, an instant of touching skin. Then his mouth was hard on mine, wet and open. I shrank away from him and he caged his arms around me, locking me in place. I tried to stay calm and focus on why I was doing this. I let my mouth soften and he pushed his way in. He tasted like smoke and liquor and an underlying bitterness I couldn’t identify. He loosened his grip and his hands traveled tentatively over my body, barely grazing the sides of my breasts, and then drawing my hips firmly against his. Tendrils of fear curled up my spine. I had placed my trust in a criminal and in my own belief that I could protect myself. He pushed himself against me more insistently, and for the first time, I gave in to thoughts of what would happen if he shoved me to the ground, held me down. I would fight him, of course, but I wasn’t sure I would win.
I risked his anger by pulling away, slowly this time, and he opened his eyes, dazed. Before I could say anything, he pressed his cheek to mine and spoke softly into my ear. Had anyone been watching, we might have looked like lovers embracing.
“Name’s Emory,” he said. “Don’t know if that’s first or last. Hear he’s got a place up on Caney Mountain, but I’ve never seen it and neither’ll you. Dogs’d eat you first. He sells things. Drugs, guns. A friend of mine told me a while back Emory was selling people. Girls. You remember Eldon Johnson? Found dead underneath his deer stand, everybody figured he got drunk and fell and broke his neck. Wouldn’t be unlike him. I believe your dad laid him to rest in his parents’ pasture. Eldon was the one flapping his mouth about Emory.”
Jamie nuzzled my hair and inhaled, long and deep, before letting me go. “People think I’m nuts,” he said, squinting at me like I hurt his eyes. “But I got enough sense to fear all the right things.”
I knew he was referring to Emory, that I should stay away, but I wondered if that was also why he let me go instead of taking what he wanted. If he feared my family would come after him, bury him in an unmarked grave. Or if he still thought there might be something to those witch rumors. My legs trembled but held. I resisted the urge to turn and see if he was watching me walk away. My breathing didn’t return to normal until I’d put some distance between us, and even then I could still taste him, his bitterness mingled with fear in my throat.
Daniel’s face turned new shades of red when I told him what I’d done. I considered not telling him at all, then settled for a tamer version of the truth, so I wouldn’t have to lie outright if it somehow got around that Jamie had kissed me.
“So all I had to do was give him a little peck. Creepy. And kind of sad that he’s so starved for affection. But I don’t guess anybody would kiss him for free.” I sat on my hands to hide their shaking.
Daniel looked about to boil over, like Birdie’s old coffee percolator. “Did you even stop and think what he might’ve done to you? For all we know, he’s the one who killed Cheri.”
No need to tell Daniel about my moments of doubt on the riverbank, from which I hadn’t quite recovered. One of Birdie’s sayings came to mind: If the wolf wants in, he’ll find a way. “If he wanted to hurt me, he’d do it whether I kissed him or not. And he didn’t kill Cheri. Whatever else he might be capable of, I don’t see him killing her.”
Daniel rubbed his hands over his face, as though trying to wipe away his annoyance. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not as sure about that as you are, but let’s just say Jamie’s not involved. So we’re thinking if this Emory guy sells girls, he might’ve taken Cheri and sold her. We still don’t know who he sold her to or who killed her. And I doubt that guy’s gonna tell us. How the hell does somebody live on Caney Mountain, anyway? It’s all conservation land up there.”
Caney Mountain rose out of the earth just north of Henbane. The park encompassed eight thousand acres of springs, caves, woods, and cliffs. Tourist maps proclaimed it to have the best views in the Ozarks. Bess and I had gone there on our fifth-grade field trip, made the pilgrimage to see Missouri’s champion black gum tree, the biggest in the state.
I shrugged. “It’d be a good place to hide.”
“Did you ever think it was something like that? With Cheri, I mean? People had all kinds of ideas, everything from satanic sacrifice to voodoo to an affair with the art teacher. But I never heard anybody mention her being sold.”
“No,” I said. “I kept a list. That wasn’t on it.”
“It’s just hard to believe, in a place like this where everybody knows everybody else’s business, there’re still secrets.”
I might have thought so, too, but I was uncovering more secrets every day. “Do you know how to pick locks?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“We’re at a dead end here. I have to get into Crete’s office, look through his files. We need to know who rented that trailer.”
Daniel sighed. “You know my brothers are serving time for robbery?”
I looked away, feeling guilty for having asked.
“We’re good at picking locks,” he said. “Not so good at getting away with it.”
“You don’t have to help,” I said. “Just teach me how to do it.”
He paced a slow circle in the dirt, hands in his pockets. “I can do better,” he said, sending up a plume of dust with his shoe. “I know where to find the keys.”
A half-moon silvered the parking lot as we crept toward Dane’s. A dark night would have been better, but it had to be done before Dad got back to town, and once I knew Daniel had access to the keys, I couldn’t get in quick enough.
Daniel ticked off the reasons he’d held back on telling me about the keys: He didn’t want me getting into trouble, didn’t want to lose his job, didn’t want his mom to have to visit all of her kids in jail. Still, he’d insisted on coming along. He used his key to get into the boathouse, where a ring of spare keys was hidden under a floorboard in the supply closet. He didn’t know which keys went to what, but he’d once walked in to find Judd returning them to their hiding place after locking the cash drawer in the office for the night.
I waited on the dark side of the building, listening to the scratch and clink of failed keys until Daniel called softly that he’d found the right one. When I scurried over to join him, he stopped me before I could slip inside. “Wait out here,” he said, holding on to the bell at the top of the door so it wouldn’t make noise. “You can be my lookout.” I started to argue, but he pulled the door shut behind him and locked it. He had broken into Dane’s without me.
I sat down to wait. It was still hot enough outside to make me sweat. The river beckoned from across the road, gleaming under the moon, and I wondered if I could convince Daniel to take a swim with me when we were done. Cheri’s tree hung over the water like it was bending to take a drink. Had her killer admired this same nighttime view when he disposed of her body? No, it had been cold that night, freezing, the air laced with fog. Surely he hadn’t taken the view into account.
The beam of a flashlight swept across the gas pumps and startled me to attention. I gave the front door two quick taps and sneaked around the corner to the patio, where a side door led out from the restaurant. We had planned to escape this way if anything went wrong. I hoped Daniel had heard my warning, though I wasn’t too worried about it. Most likely the light belonged to a camper wandering around in search of a soda machine. I waited for the flashlight or footsteps to move past me, but they didn’t. Then I heard the bell jangle on the front door.
Adrenaline surged through me, making my muscles twitch. I didn’t want to risk going back around to the front, so I pressed my face to the little window in the patio door, trying to distinguish shapes among shadows in the dimly lit store. One of the shapes darted toward me, and I stepped aside as Daniel burst out the door and hurriedly shut it behind him. The keys rattled in his hands as he sought the right one and relocked it.
“Let’s go!” I hissed. He pulled a folder from under his arm and reached around me, one hand lifting the back of my shirt and the other sliding the folder beneath it, pressing it against my sweating skin.
The door creaked, and there was no time to move. “Hey, now.” The unmistakable gruffness of Judd’s voice. “What the hell’s going on out here?”
Daniel turned around, holding out his arm to keep me behind him.
“Well, well,” Judd said. “Past your bedtime, ain’t it, Miss Lucy?”
“I was just—”
“I ain’t blind,” he said, spitting on the ground.
“I’ll take Lucy home,” Daniel said.
Judd frowned. “Maybe I ought to be the one doing that.”
“It’s okay, Judd,” I said. “I’ll get home on my own.”
“You supposed to be out in the woods after dark?”
“Straight home. Like a flash.” I backed into the darkness, tucking in my shirt to hold the folder in place, hoping Daniel would be able to smooth things over with Judd.
I headed upstairs when I got home, and even though I was alone in the house, I closed my door before opening up the folder. I sat cross-legged on my bed and scanned the first document. It was a lease agreement, but not for the trailer in Henbane, the trailer where Cheri had been. The lease was for an apartment in Springfield. So was the next, then the next. It wasn’t surprising to see that my uncle had so many rental properties, because he had his hands in lots of different jars and didn’t make a point of telling me about all of them. But when I reached the end of the folder, I hadn’t found what I was looking for. The whole point of breaking in to Crete’s files for the rental records was to find out who’d rented the trailer, because that person might know what had happened to Cheri. Crete kept records on everything. If he didn’t have a rental contract for the trailer, that was telling in itself. I sifted through the pages again, making sure none were stuck together.
There was a knock downstairs, and I knew it was Daniel. I hurried down to let him in. “It’s not in there,” I said. “Was that the only folder with leases in it?”
He looked distracted. “I don’t know. I didn’t see another one, but I was in a hurry. So there’s nothing on the trailer?”
“No. What’s wrong? Did Judd chew you out?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I’m not worried about Judd. I … I don’t think I locked the desk. I remember locking the cabinet, replacing the key, locking the door behind me, but I don’t remember the desk.”
“Maybe Crete won’t notice.”