Don’t Talk to Strangers: A Novel Read online

  I started back down in the direction of the campground where my car was parked, sliding down slick leaves until I got to the poplar tree with the dead vines, Meltzer’s landmark. The trail began to even out there and thicken with privet and vines. I knew I was getting close. And then I smelled it. Smoke. Crap. Raymond.

  Just so you know, a nonsmoker can smell smoke a long ways away. Down here where the air is full of moisture, it doesn’t dissipate. It holds together, creeps like a slow-moving escalator, and sets fire to your sinuses. And it’s just stupid. If you want to stalk someone, wait until you’re finished to indulge your addictions. It was a lesson I’d learned the hard way when I was still indulging mine.

  I made a sweep of the area, moving a little slower, keeping a little lower. I wasn’t sure how far Raymond would go with his intimidation tactics. Out here in these woods with no witnesses, with Detective Robert Raymond telling whatever story he wanted, I wasn’t feeling particularly secure.

  I got to the tree line and stopped when I saw a figure standing at the mouth of the path. Raymond looked at me, raised his cigarette to his lips. I stepped out of the woods. “Thought I’d hang around and make sure you got out safely,” he said as I got closer. I saw his .38 in the holster. The strap was closed and snapped. A good sign. But nothing in his eyes put me at ease.

  “You’re just a one-man welcome wagon,” I said, walking past him toward my car.

  He followed me. “Nice wheels.” He slapped the palms of his big hands against the hood of my Impala. “Where you headed?”

  I felt a string of expletives lining up for their debut. I didn’t like being picked on and threatened, and I didn’t fucking like him touching my car. And I was hungry. Bad blood sugar goes straight to my mouth. I got in my car, looked up at him. “Offer’s still open if you’d like to join me for coffee.”

  “Nah. But I’ll be close by.”

  9

  I drove back into town, past the sheriff’s office and the bridge I’d come in on, and followed the blacktop to Highway 441. I went south toward Milledgeville, and fifteen miles of flat road later I found Muskogee Trail thanks to Google Maps—a narrow, cracked paved road with cornfields on one side and single-level brick houses with acreage between them and long, straight driveways on the other. I pulled in just past a chipped green mailbox with shiny, stick-on hardware store numbers that said 826. The 6 had heated up against the metal box in the baking sun and tipped sideways. I saw a woman inside an open freestanding carport. She was leaning over a plywood table with stacked-up cement blocks for legs. I stopped a few feet away and got out. She came out to greet me with a pair of needle-nose pliers in her hand.

  “Help you?” She had a sharp twang; long, frizzy bleached-blond hair; and a pair of black stretch pants that told me more than I wanted to know about her body.

  “Are you Josey Davidson?”

  “Yup. Come on in.” She turned back to the carport. We stepped over power cords. A small fan whirred on the workstation. “You buying?” She picked up the pliers and positioned herself on a stool.

  I really wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be buying. “My name is Keye Street. I’m a consultant to the Hitchiti County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “I guess that’s a no, then,” she said.

  “You’re a glassblower?” I saw a torch, mandrels, splitters, hoses. On her table, a plastic bin with thin leather bands and a roll of gold wire, pliers in different sizes.

  “Flameworker,” she corrected. “And jewelry maker.” She reached into a small wicker basket and pulled out a bracelet with a leather strap, a glass triangle on top in a gold wire setting. She handed it to me. A beetle had been preserved inside the glass.

  “Wow,” I said, handling the bracelet. It was all I could do not to fling it across the carport. I’m not really a bug person.

  She picked up a pair of pliers and unwound some gold wire. “What exactly does the sheriff’s department have to say for itself?” She was quick with the wire, twisting it into a setting for a glass triangle that held another unfortunate specimen.

  I put the bracelet on the plywood tabletop. “I’d like to speak to you about your daughter Tracy.”

  “My daughter’s been dead for eleven years.” Her hands kept working, nimble hands that moved from memory. Her daughter had been dead for ten years, not eleven. Tracy had lived for a year after her disappearance. With a sick feeling, I realized Mrs. Davidson hadn’t been told about the terrible discoveries made by forensic scientists in Atlanta. “Y’all gonna send me flowers now? I mean that woman on the phone was so warm and comforting when she told me they’d found her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

  She glanced up at me with suspicious eyes, tried to read me. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Keye Street.”

  “What do you want, Keye Street?”

  “Was Tracy active? Had she ever had any injuries, broken bones?”

  “Goin’ down that path again, are we? Y’all still trying to pin it on my husband? My ex was not worth anything and he got rough sometimes. But he didn’t have the sense God gave a mule. He couldn’t have gotten away with it. And no. He never broke anything on Tracy. But he did hurt all of us at one time or another.”

  “Where’s Mr. Davidson now?”

  “He’s in jail. Thank the Lord. And so is my son.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this woman. I wondered if she had other family, friends. From where I stood it looked like she’d lost nearly everything. “Tracy have a good relationship with her brother?”

  “They were close. My boy wouldn’t have hurt her if that’s what you’re getting at. He wasn’t a violent boy. But he did turn out to have an attraction for nice cars.” She put down wire and pliers and reached behind her for a thermos. “Unfortunately, they weren’t his. Want some coffee?”

  “Please,” I said to be polite. That’s what you’re taught in the South. Somebody offers, you accept and you choke it down if you have to.

  She poured coffee into a mug that said SIX FLAGS OVER GEORGIA, then filled the plastic top on the thermos and slid it toward me. “Might as well grab that other stool.”

  I walked past an aquarium full of bugs. Most of them were dead. Some were still moving, trying in vain to scrabble up the walls of their glass coffin. There was a plywood board covering the top, preventing escape. She was trapping them and letting them die, then entombing them in glass. I pulled the stool up to the other side of her plywood table, away from the creepy aquarium. The murky liquid in the thermos cap was a grocery store brand, lukewarm. Snobby Neil would have spit it out.

  “It tore Jeffrey up when Tracy disappeared. He and Tracy were two years apart. He was the youngest. They went to and from school together every day on the bus. He was home sick the day she disappeared. He never got over that. Girl just disappeared into thin air. Then that sheriff we had back then comes around with his deputies, and after he finished investigating us, they tried to tell me Tracy ran away. I don’t think a one of them ever thought about her again after that.”

  “I take it you don’t think it’s possible she ran away with someone she trusted.”

  “Not Tracy. And that’s not just a mother talking. Tracy was real responsible. Her mama and her daddy were drinkin’ and fightin’ but she cooked the dinner and cleaned house. And took care of me and her brother. Some might say she had good reason to leave. But Tracy wouldn’t go running off. I’m sorry to have to say it, but she was the grown-up around here back then.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” I asked.

  She looked away from wire and pliers. “I don’t even think she’d been kissed.” She finished setting the glass triangle with the dead bug inside and began attaching a leather band.

  I took another sip of coffee, watched her steady, agile hands work. “How long have you been sober?”

  Her fingers stopped for just a second. She looked at me. “Almost eleven years.”

  Her daughter’s disappearance
must have made her take a long look at her life, I thought. “Four years for me,” I said. I wanted to connect with her. She wasn’t going to open up as long as I was just someone else from the sheriff’s department who didn’t give a shit. “Some days are better than others,” I added.

  “I know that’s right.”

  “Mrs. Davidson—”

  “Call me Josey.”

  “Was Tracy close to anyone outside the family? Was there an adult she confided in, a counselor, an older friend, maybe? Did anyone give her rides home from school? Anything like that?”

  Josey shook her bleached-blond head. “Like I said, Jeffrey and Tracy rode the bus together every day. Tracy was tight-lipped about our business. I think she worried she and Jeff would be taken away if people knew what was going on here. She always had faith in me.” Her voice sank, wavered. “She always used to tell me I could quit drinking. She’d hide the booze sometimes or pour it all out, but her father didn’t like that much.”

  “I’m sorry to ask, but do you feel certain Tracy wasn’t sexually active?” Something I’d seen in the lab reports was bugging me.

  “I’m certain,” she said. “Tracy was just a little girl in a lot of ways. Plus, her father didn’t give the children a lot of freedom. And my husband never bothered our children that way. For sex, I mean. Thank the Lord for small favors.”

  We were quiet, Josey remembering and me imagining what their household must have been like back then. “I’d like to know the other little girl’s name,” Josey said. “They told me Tracy wasn’t alone when they found her. I’m sorry for the parents of that child, and I hope God forgives me for sayin’ this, but somehow it made me feel better to know my Tracy wasn’t alone.”

  “Her name was Melinda,” I said. “She was thirteen too.” I didn’t tell her Melinda’s body had landed there a decade later or that what Tracy had endured she’d probably endured alone at the hands of a violent predator.

  I stood up, laid a business card on the table. “My mobile number if you think of anything.” I paused on my way to the car, turned. “Thank you for talking to me, Josey. I’m sorry this happened to you. I really am.”

  The sun was sinking on a long, long summer day. I’d grown up like this in Georgia, long rides with my dad and brother, short ones with cute guys I couldn’t wait to kiss—top down on back roads, soft air on my skin. I felt completely exhausted after the visit with Josey Davidson. How badly that woman must want a do-over. The weight from those regrets must be staggering. Sometimes you only get one chance to do right by someone. I thought about Rauser, reached for my phone, then changed my mind.

  I could see the lights from downtown Whisper just ahead, and the glowing sign on the diner. I parked in front, saw cobalt-blue booths inside under the long glass wall. A couple of customers sat on metal stools with the same bright blue vinyl seats. A ladle-shaped neon sign lit up the roof, high enough to be seen from the highway. THE SILVER SPOON, it read. HOME COOKING 24 HOURS A DAY. I couldn’t remember when I had eaten. God, I absolutely hate it when I hear someone say that. Even worse when someone says they forgot to eat. How the hell do you forget to eat? I hadn’t forgotten. The clock had simply outrun me.

  I went in and took a stool at the counter. There was a cook behind an oblong opening and one server behind the counter. “What can I do you for, little lady?” He wiped the counter and handed me a laminated menu. He was weathered, twenty years past middle age. A lock of silver hair fell onto his forehead.

  “What’s good?” I asked.

  “Well, it all depends,” he said. “If you’re in the mood for dinner, the stuffed bass is excellent. Just came out of the lake today. Breakfast, we got some fresh peaches, and Harry back there has been folding them up in some mean pancake thing.” He looked side to side like he was about to give up a state secret, said, “Total food porn.”

  “Ah. Is it legal?” I whispered.

  “Barely.” He put a glass of water in front of me and a mug and saucer. I thought about the bug woman and her little thermos of coffee. “Harry, the little lady wants to try some of those pancakes you been making.”

  The cook gave me a nod from the kitchen. The server filled my coffee mug. “Name’s Gene,” he informed me. “You just passing through?”

  “Visiting,” I said, and took a sip of rank diner coffee that had been sitting too long.

  Gene persisted. Probably had this conversation with everyone new to his counter. “You’re a little ways out of the touristy areas, aren’t you?”

  “Business,” I said.

  “What kind of business you in?”

  “Consulting,” I told him, vaguely but politely. I think he took the hint. He polished the counter, then wiped down the booths before the cook called “Order up” from the back. Gene picked up a plate and set it in front of me—a huge pancake folded over like an omelet, peaches and whipped cream oozing from the center. Gene put out individually wrapped pats of butter and a small metal pitcher with maple syrup on the counter. I drizzled syrup over the pancake and cut a piece with my fork. It was dense and cakey and made to absorb the flavors around it—the syrup, the peaches that had been sautéed for just long enough to tease out the natural sugars, the stiff whipped cream with a hint of vanilla. My face must have registered the party in my palate.

  Gene grinned. “What’d I tell you? Harry wants to go to some fancy cooking school so he works a lot of shifts to save up. We got people from all over the county coming to eat here now. There’s a line for Sunday brunch and fried chicken night.”

  “Pretty quiet in here now,” I observed.

  “People around here eat supper early. It’s after nine o’clock.” Gene put down a small plate. “Applewood-smoked bacon. Local. On the house.”

  I heard the door open behind me, heard a puff of air escape the seat cover on the stool next to me. A manila folder appeared on the counter.

  I glanced over at Detective Robert Raymond. “Oh joy. You going to try to run me out of the diner too? A person has to eat, Detective.”

  I thought he might smile. “Try being the operative word. Medical records.” He nodded at the file. “Hey, Gene, how about a cup?”

  “How’d you find me?” I took a bite of the thick-sliced bacon.

  “That car of yours is easy to spot.”

  “You go over the medical records?” I asked.

  “Your instincts were right. Looks like neither vic had broken bones prior to their disappearance,” Raymond said. “Guess that’s gonna give you some ideas about who did this?”

  I took another sip of burned coffee. “Says something about his psychological requirements. And physical requirements. As in what kind of space he’d need to do what he does.”

  Gene put a mug in front of Raymond and filled it up. “Hey, Gene,” Raymond said. “This is that hotshot investigator from Atlanta I told you the sheriff hired.”

  Gene gave me a nod. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.” He moved quietly around the counter with his coffeepot. I heard him checking on the couple in the booth.

  I looked at Raymond. The scarlet veins under the skin on his cheeks looked like tiny explosions under the harsh diner light. I picked up the folder, opened it, took a minute to look it over. My phone jangled on the counter. The display lit up with Kenneth Meltzer’s name and mobile number. I picked it up. “Good evening, Sheriff.”

  Raymond swiveled on his stool and stalked out of the diner.

  “Evening, Dr. Street … Keye,” the sheriff said. “Sorry I had to bail on you today. Had to be in court. Let’s meet in the morning. You probably have some things to discuss by now.”

  After nine hours on the job I hadn’t exactly kicked in any doors. But I did have ideas. I told the sheriff that quietly while Gene hovered around the counter and did a bad job of disguising his interest.

  “You an early riser? Let’s say breakfast at seven-thirty. Silver Spoon makes a good one. You know where it is?”

  I didn’t mention I was sitting at the diner’s counter. “
See you then.” I clicked off and put my debit card on the counter. Gene collected it. I watched him work the card reader with fingers that looked arthritic. He came back with my ticket. I wrote in the tip and stood up. “Great pancake,” I said loud enough for the cook to hear. He gave another nod from the back. I headed for the door.

  “Excuse me there, little lady.” I stopped and turned. Gene came around the counter. “Rob Raymond was a bully growing up too. Most people around here are scared of him. For good reason, I reckon. I wouldn’t get on his bad side.”

  “Too late.” I smiled, thanked him, and pushed through the glass door.

  10

  The Whispering Pines Inn was part motor lodge, part fake southern mansion. My room was upstairs. I didn’t mind the climb. I’d packed light—something I’d gotten good at all those years with the Bureau when I had to be ready to jump on a helicopter or a plane anytime the phone rang.

  I set my bag on a chair and pulled the bedspread and mattress pad up at the bottom corners, inspected all the crevasses and seams in the mattress. I put the bottom corners back on, took the pillows off, and repeated this process at the top. Hey, don’t judge. The whole bedbug thing is terrifying. The little fuckers are indestructible. If they get in your bags and go home with you, you might as well douse everything you own in gasoline and set fire to it.

  I showered and slipped into one of Rauser’s T-shirts I’d stuffed in my suitcase on the way out that morning. I’d found it in a pile on the bed he’d left unmade. It was his favorite shirt, navy blue with ATLANTA POLICE DEPARTMENT embroidered in gold on the edge of the left sleeve. He’d worn it around the house for a couple of days and it smelled like him—shaving cream and aftershave around the collar, his natural scent everywhere else. I pulled it up to my face and closed my eyes. It was the kind of smell that makes you think cognac, something warm and woody and musky. And then I thought about the blouse that had washed up with Melinda Cochran’s skin cells trapped in the collar. And Josey Davidson’s regrets. And the dead bugs. And Raymond standing too close to me as I looked down into the disposal site, the old server’s warnings after dinner. And all my warm fuzzies evaporated.