Mourning Gloria Read online

  “Actually, I’m the one who turned in the alarm. I happened to be heading home on Saturday evening and saw it burning. I was standing in front of it when it exploded.”

  “No kidding.” He squinted at me. “Jeez. So that’s where you left your eyebrows.”

  “Yeah,” I said ruefully. “Got a little scorched. But not as bad as the woman who was in there. She burned to death.” I shuddered, remembering. “Did you know her?”

  “Don’t think so.” He turned away to pick up a parts catalog and add it to a stack beside the register. “Nobody’s told me who she was. Don’t guess the cops have identified her yet. Hell of a thing,” he added gloomily, shaking his head. “Hadn’t had that place more’n sixty days, and now it’s gone. Burned to the ground—nothing left to salvage, even.”

  “Insured, I guess,” I said, taking the paper bag.

  “Yeah, it was insured. Won’t get near enough to replace it, of course. Now I gotta figure out what to do with that property. Maybe I’ll see if I can find a cheap used trailer to turn into a rental. A repo, maybe.” He put his head on one side. “Why’re you asking about that reporter?”

  Was there a suspicious edge to his question? “Because she was going to get in touch with me after she talked to you,” I said. “She didn’t turn in her story, and nobody’s heard from her. Since I was going to stop here anyway this morning, I thought I’d ask. I believe she was trying to get a line on the people who were living there when you bought it?” I put a question mark at the end of my statement, suggesting that I wasn’t too sure about any of this.

  My tentativeness seemed to reassure him, and he relaxed a little. “Yeah. Well, she stopped in here twice.” There were some business cards in a bowl by the cash register and he fished through them. “Here it is. Her card.” He pulled it out and handed it to me. “Her number’s on it, in case you don’t have it,” he added.

  I took the card. “Twice, huh?”

  He put the bowl back. “Yup. When she talked to me the first time, she was asking how long I’d had the trailer and who was renting it when I bought it, stuff like that. I gave her the girl’s name, but I couldn’t remember the guy. Told her I’d have to hunt it up. So she came by on Monday afternoon to see if I’d found it.”

  “And you did?”

  “Yep. Larry Wolff. Two fs. I didn’t get a forwarding address for either of the kids, the boy or the girl, though I guess maybe I should’ve.” His grin was crooked. “Didn’t figure I needed addresses. Didn’t reckon anybody’d ever ask. The cops didn’t.”

  “The police asked you about the trailer?”

  He straightened up. “Yeah, sure. But not about the renters.”

  That struck me as a bit sloppy on the part of the investigators, since it might’ve been a good idea to check out anybody who had recently been involved with that place. But I didn’t say anything, and Sheridan was going on.

  “Deputy just told me it looked like arson and wanted to know if it was rented when it burned, and if it was, who was living there. I said the place was empty, so whoever it was got burned up in there, wasn’t somebody I’d rented to. Fact was, I was gonna rent right away as soon as I got the kids out. But after they was gone, I found a plumbin’ problem. Figured I’d get it fixed and do a few other repairs while the place was still empty.” He frowned. “Guess that turned out to be a good thing, huh? Might’ve been my renter in there when it burned. That would’ve been really bad. Might’ve got my ass sued.”

  I could see his point, although it seemed to me that it was pretty bad as it was, at least for the person who had died. “Was she a student?” I asked, remembering what Bob Godwin had said.

  “Somebody at Beans’ said maybe she was,” he replied vaguely, “but you couldn’t prove it by me.”

  I nodded, thinking that there probably wasn’t any way to track down that bit of information—or misinformation. Could’ve been somebody speculating. “My husband mentioned that you evicted the former renters.”

  “I sure did,” he said emphatically. “Dopers, both of ’em. I’ve got a couple more rental properties, y’know, students mostly, and I don’t stand for that kind of shit. I make it clear up front. You wanna use, you can live someplace else.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “How did you figure out what the renters were up to?”

  “How?” He snorted. “How’d you think? I could smell the stuff. Pot, and lots of it. High-grade, too, from the smell of it.” He paused, casting his eyes upward in a gesture of humility. “I ain’t no saint, mind you. Done my share of foolin’ around. I just don’t aim to have it happenin’ on my property, that’s all.”

  “Just pot?” I persisted. “No needles or anything like that?” I was trying to get a fix on what kind of dope they were doing. If what had happened in that trailer was a drug deal gone wrong, it might be useful to know what might’ve been involved.

  “Well, yeah. I didn’t happen to notice, but the deputy said they found some stuff like that. Which made me glad I’d kicked’em out.” He frowned defensively. “I was perfectly within my rights. They didn’t have no lease.”

  I nodded. “I suppose you changed the locks after you evicted them?”

  He looked chagrined. “Guess I should’ve done that, too, but I didn’t think it was necessary. They was students. I figgered they’d be gone—and anyway, the place was empty, except for furniture and appliances. I didn’t think they’d come back and steal that. I was meanin’ to rekey it after I fixed it up. Makes people feel better, hand ’em a new set of keys.” He eyed me. “I told all this to that reporter girl, and she wrote it down in that skinny little notebook of hers. You say you’re lookin’ for her?”

  I nodded. “She was going to interview me again for her story. Human-interest angle, you know. I haven’t heard from her.”

  “Yeah, well, she was here, all right.” He turned to a pot keeping warm on a hot plate, picked it up, and poured coffee into a crockery mug. “If you don’t mind me sayin’ so, Miz McQuaid, I’m glad it was you that came along and saw the place burnin’, rather’n me. The deputy said that woman was still alive in there when you showed up.”

  I shuddered, the image suddenly clear in my mind again. “Yes, she was,” I said softly. “I wish I could’ve helped her.” The door opened and another customer came in. “Oh, by the way—I was wondering. Do you drive a Mustang convertible? A red one? New?”

  He hooted a laugh. “Do I look like the type to own a Mustang convertible?” he asked sarcastically. “I got me an F-150. Why’re you askin’?”

  “Because one of the neighbors noticed it parked at the trailer recently,” I said. “Just thought I’d mention it.”

  “Not mine. No idea whose, neither.” He put his mug on the counter and looked over my shoulder, raising his voice. “Mornin’, sir. Can I help you?”

  Out in the lot, I dropped the bag with the additive behind the seat, saying a little apology to my car for bad-mouthing its engine and another for lying. But I had learned a couple of things that might turn out to be useful, including the name of the other person who had previously rented the trailer. Larry Wolff. Wolff with two fs. I made a note of the name on the same piece of paper on which I’d written Lucy LaFarge’s name and address. I thought briefly about Scott Sheridan. He’d seemed a little edgy when I asked about Jessica, but maybe that was my imagination. He’d certainly been forthcoming enough with the other information.

  And whoever the new red Mustang convertible belonged to, it wasn’t Sheridan’s—or at least, so he said. So who had been there? Why?

  I put the key in the ignition and started the car. The sheriff’s office wasn’t far away. It was my next stop.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jessica

  It could’ve been a moment later when Jessica opened her eyes again, it could have been an hour, it could have been a day. She thought it must have been a pretty long time, though, because she was terribly thirsty. Her mouth was dry as cotton and her tongue felt as if it were swollen
. It was hard to tell, though, because her mouth was taped shut, so tight it hurt. And there was no way to tell time because there was nothing but blackness around her, except for a faint smudge of light, somewhere off to the right, over her shoulder. She couldn’t see where it was coming from, exactly. But her head hurt less, and when she risked turning it slightly toward the light, the pain wasn’t any worse than it was when she held it still.

  Her head was the only thing she could move, though. Her ankles were tied and her hands were bound behind her, so tightly that she couldn’t feel her fingers. She was lying on her right side, her right shoulder under her, her trunk twisted and knees bent, her cheek pressed against what felt like a cement floor. Around her there was nothing but dark, heavy and smothery, with that faint smudge of light somewhere out of her range of vision, high up.

  But if she couldn’t see, she could smell, and as she pulled in a shuddery breath, she recognized the smell, and images flashed through her mind. The fruit cellar under her grandmother’s old frame house in Louisiana, which had one of those slanting wooden doors, where she and Ginger had slid down like it was a sliding board and got splinters in their butts. To get to the cellar, you had to lift up the heavy door and go down the wooden steps that led into the shivery dark, where there were snakes and spiders and creepy things that Ginger loved to scare her with. The floor was cement, always damp and cold and smelly, and the concrete block walls were lined with boards stacked on bricks for shelves, loaded with rows of canned peaches and tomatoes and green beans. And one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, turned on by a string pull, and one wall was bare, scraped earth. Damp earth, underground.

  At the thought, Jessie’s stomach muscles clenched and she was convulsed by a shudder of fear that ran through her entire body. Underground. Underground! She was in a hole somewhere, alone in the dark, with her hands and feet tied. She struggled against her bindings, seized by a sudden panic as sharp as a lancing pain that froze her breath and numbed her brain. But she at least had the sense not to cry out, because if she did, he might come—the man who had put her here—and do whatever else he was planning to do with her.

  He—who? Jessica stopped struggling. Who was he? Why couldn’t she remember? She concentrated, trying to recall the exact moment when the man—she was sure it was a man, wasn’t she?—had slammed something hard against her head and she’d gone down into the dark.

  But she couldn’t bring it back. Her brain was filled with a dense gray fog that obscured the past, and all she could think of was what might happen next. What was he going to do? Was he going to shoot her? Or torch the place and let her burn to death, like the victim in the trailer, like Ginger and her mom and dad, like the girl in her fiery nightmares?

  The image, lit with flames, made her shudder almost uncontrollably, and she squeezed her eyes shut and waited until the shivering had mostly passed and she could think again. Or maybe he didn’t mean to kill her outright. Maybe he’d just go away and leave her here, so he wouldn’t have to risk a gunshot or attract attention with a fire. If he left her here long enough, she would starve to death. No, she wouldn’t starve, she would die of dehydration, wouldn’t she? When had she last had anything to drink? How long could a person live without water? In earthquakes, didn’t they find people who had been buried for four or five days without water, longer than that, even? But not everybody, of course. A lot of people died.

  She lay very still and tried to breathe slowly. There weren’t any answers to those questions. Letting herself go there—letting herself imagine how he planned to kill her—would just send her into a panic, and panic would keep her from thinking. The best thing was to try not to feel, try not to be afraid. To numb herself in the same way she’d numbed herself after her family’s death. Stop feeling. Feeling hurts. Turn off the feeling, turn off the pain, anesthetize herself. Breathe deep, just breathe, the way her yoga teacher said. Breathe in, breathe out, listen to her breath, focus on her breath.

  After a few moments, she was calmer. She opened her eyes again, willing herself not to feel, not to be afraid. But she could think, could at least try to grope through the dense gray fog of confusion in her head. Could try to remember what had happened.

  She took another breath, slow and steady. Okay, think. Remember. Start with this morning. But which morning was that? She didn’t know what time it was now, or even what day it was. Well, then, go back to the last morning she could remember. Which was . . . which was . . .

  Tuesday morning? She wasn’t sure. Maybe it would be better to start with Monday. Ordinary Monday. She had gone to Thyme and Seasons, but China had forgotten about making lunch, so they’d driven over to Beans’, where China told her that the girl had been burned alive, like Ginger, like her mom and dad, which she hadn’t known until that very moment. Until then, it had been just a story, but when China had told her about the girl’s screams, it had suddenly become real. It had become her nightmare.

  Her stomach clenched, and she made herself leave that moment and go on. She had left China at the shop and then she drove to the trailer to take some photos, then—

  The trailer. Where did she go after she’d left the trailer? Her head was hurting worse, but she took another deep breath, forcing herself to remember. The auto parts place. Yes, that was it. She’d talked to the owner again, Scott somebody, and he’d given her the name of the other renter. The guy, with the name that ended in two fs, which she couldn’t think of at the moment. After that, where?

  Oh, yes, to the sheriff’s office, where she’d seen the crime scene photos—oh, God, those awful, unspeakable pictures, which made her want to throw up. She hadn’t seen her family’s bodies after the fire. Had they looked like that? She’d seen the bracelet with the initials, and she’d written them down in her notebook. She remembered wondering whether she should tell the sheriff about the guy, the other renter, and the girl, Lucy LaFarge, but decided not to. That was part of her exclusive human-interest story. Anyway, that stuff was before. Before the girl died. It had nothing to do with her death. It wasn’t connected to the sheriff’s investigation.

  At the thought of the girl, and the gruesome photos she had seen on the computer, she began to shake again. The girl who had burned to death, all alone in that trailer, screaming for help. And suddenly she was swept by a grief so breathtakingly heavy and compelling that it seemed to press down on her chest like a physical force, and she gave in to the rush of hot tears.

  Was she crying for her family? Was she mourning the girl? Was she mourning herself, still alive, still breathing, but maybe not for long? Was she mourning all of them, all the sad, forgotten dead? She didn’t know. All she knew was that it was the first time she had cried since she’d made herself stop crying all those years before.

  But she couldn’t make herself stop now, so she cried until the pain in her head became so brutal that she couldn’t cry any longer, and she fell into an exhausted sleep that was lit by the fires of nightmare.

  Chapter Twelve

  You’re probably not growing a kola nut tree in your garden, but its primary active chemicals, caffeine and theobromine (the chemical in cocoa), are likely to be an important part of your day. The kola nut (Cola spp.) is a genus of about 125 species of trees native to the tropical rain forests of Africa. For tens of centuries, kola nuts have been used by humans as a stimulant, a euphoric, and a medicinal, in the treatment of respiratory ailments, headaches, poor digestion, and depression. In many West African cultures the seeds are chewed, individually or in a social or ritual group, and are often ceremonially presented to tribal chiefs or guests.

  In the West, kola nuts are best known as a flavoring and as the source of caffeine in Coca-Cola. In Dr. John Pemberton’s original 1886 Coca-Cola formula, the two key ingredients were caffeine (from kola nuts) and cocaine (from fresh coca leaves). After the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, the company began using decocainized leaves.

  China Bayles

  “Mood-Altering Plants”

 
Pecan Springs Enterprise

  Until a few years ago, the Adams County Sheriff’s Department was housed in a nineteenth-century building on one corner of the courthouse square. The old place had its problems, to be sure: small rooms, gloomy halls, antique restrooms, limited parking, even bats in the belfry—Mexican free-tailed bats whose guano created a terrific stink that made the tourists complain. But it also boasted beautifully polished wooden floors, dark oak woodwork, and tall windows with stained glass panels at the top and a view of the courthouse kittycornered across the street. It was a genteel place, built in a time when life was lived at a mannerly pace. When you came into the office, it was like stepping back into the old, slow days. People smiled at you. They knew your name and they said hello. They were friendly.

  There’s nothing friendly about the new building on the outskirts of town. It’s a two-story gray concrete bunker with few exterior windows, built to withstand almost any imaginable twenty-first-century assault—a terrorist’s car bomb rammed through the front door, maybe, or a Stinger missile attack by unfriendly agents from a neighboring county. You have to show your driver’s license to the grim-faced guard at the door, and once he’s let you inside, you might wish he’d told you to go away. It’s not a comfortable place. The hallways and rooms all have the same gray-white walls, gray tile floors, gray steel desks, gray filing cabinets, everything washed in the chilly, featureless glare of fluorescent lighting.

  I flashed my driver’s license at the guard and waited while he noted my name and TDL number in his big black book and gave me a Visitors badge, so I wouldn’t be shot on sight. Classified and properly tagged, I made my way to Blackie’s office at the far end of the corridor, passing staff offices as I went. All the people I saw were wearing dour expressions and several of them had their heads together, whispering. I guessed that they had heard the shocking news. Sheriff Blackwell was hanging up his star. It was the end of three generations of Blackwell law enforcement in Adams County, the end of an era. It was also the beginning of a political storm, and they didn’t like the idea one bit.