ERICA DRIVES NORTH OUT OF Bismarck on Route 32 for six miles before turning into a small subdivision of prefab homes. She’s expecting neglect spiced with squalor but instead finds a tidy little neighborhood with flower boxes, garden gnomes, and ornate mailboxes. Apparently when your economy is as hot as North Dakota’s, some of it trickles all the way down to the prefab crowd. That sure didn’t happen in Maine.
Erica parks in front of #45, gets out, and knocks on the door. A young woman she recognizes as Marcus’s daughter opens it. She’s wearing a loose dress that looks like it just came out of the wash. She doesn’t seem particularly comfortable in it. She doesn’t seem comfortable, period. She seems dazed and scared.
“Cathy Allen?”
“That’s me. And you’re Erica Sparks. In my doorway.” She laughs nervously. Erica hates it when she intimidates people; it can throw up roadblocks to the truth.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
Cathy sticks her head out the door and scans the street. “Come in, sit down.”
The house is neatly furnished, heavy on the plaid furniture, with bookshelves filled with science fiction and fantasy, a lava lamp, magazines and catalogues in perfect symmetry on the coffee table. There’s also a loaf of sweet bread and a pot of coffee on a trivet.
Erica sits in a plaid recliner, Cathy on the sofa. She looks at Erica and smiles wanly.
“How about a cup of coffee? I made a banana bread.”
“Coffee sounds great. And so does a slice of the banana bread.” Erica hates banana bread.
Cathy’s hand shakes slightly as she pours the coffee and cuts the loaf, and she laughs to cover the shaking. “I’m sorry, I don’t like being here alone. My husband’s at the hospital, he’s a nurse. I’m a para, a teacher’s assistant at Guthrie Elementary. You know, it’s funny, you wanting to talk to me. My mom watched your show every night. She said you kicked butt. Do you think they’ll find her killer?”
She hands Erica the coffee and cake. Erica takes a bite. “This is delicious.” It isn’t.
“I add a little cinnamon and yogurt. My mom taught me to jazz up recipes.”
“Is there anything else you want to tell me about your mom?”
“You may have heard that she had a drinking problem. Well, I mean, she did, but she didn’t always. She was a wonderful mother when I was little, when I was big too, it’s only been the last year or so that she started drinking like that. I didn’t know what to do, she’d promise to stop but something was wrong in her life and she drank . . .” Cathy’s eyes well with tears and she looks like she’s an inch away from hysteria. She gulps air and says, “I’m sorry, pay me no mind.”
“Cathy, you just lost your mother.” This interview feels so intrusive, Erica has half a mind to cut it short—make that a quarter of a mind. She’s a journalist with a job to do. She can’t solve this murder if she walks away now. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple more questions?”
Cathy shakes her head.
“Was there some incident in her life that coincided with the start of the heavy drinking?”
Cathy blows her nose. “It was her work. Her job. Oh, she was making some serious money. But she paid a price for those dollars.”
“You mean with Oil Field Solutions?”
Cathy nods. “She wanted to cash in on the boom, like everyone else. They were paying her forty-five dollars an hour. Before that she was working in an insurance agency in Jamestown for fifteen.”
“What exactly was she doing for Oil Field Solutions?”
“She did bookkeeping and operations. She kept track of expenditures, expenses. Capital spending. And shipments. She tracked shipments. Mom was smart and organized. She knew how to put two and two together.”
“What do you think it was about the job that made her drink?”
Cathy stands up and goes to a window and looks out. Then she sits back down. “At first she liked it, although she told me she was seeing some ugly things. And the hours were brutal, they worked her like a mule, twenty hours straight sometimes. They were on three shifts a day, place never stopped. So she was exhausted. Then there was the mess.”
“The mess?”
“Oh yeah. The wastewater was being drained into streams, all these fracking chemicals treated haphazardly, spilling all the time, people were coming down sick, it was nasty.”
“Why didn’t she leave?”
“She earned six figures.”
“Was your mother going to expose the pollution?”
“She talked about it. But decided not to.”
“Then why do you think someone would want to kill her?”
“It wasn’t only the chemicals and stuff. They had her doing bookkeeping and shipment tracking for other companies they owned, and some they didn’t even own. Canadian companies. The Bellamys are tight with some billionaire up there. It’s shady. She saw something she shouldn’t have. It scared her.”
“Do you have any idea what it was?”
Cathy stands up and goes to the window again, scanning the street. “We’re moving to Florida. We’re putting this place on the market this week. It’s gotten all weird up here. There’s too much money coming in too fast. Money makes people do crazy things. We’re getting out.”
“Cathy?”
She turns from the window, but she can’t look Erica in the eye. She starts to walk around the room straightening things that are already straight. “That’s why it’s so neat in here. I’m trying to sort of stage the place. There’s going to be an open house. Frank has a job lined up down in Jacksonville. You can buy a pretty decent house down there for 150,000. And no snow. Imagine that?”
When she finally turns to Erica, her eyes are full of fear and her words come in a rush. “Why did they have to slit her throat like that? I had to go down and identify her body. They tried to cover up her neck, but I could see it. She looked like a carved-up animal. She was a good mom. She always told me I was smart and pretty and could do anything and now . . .” She takes a throw off the back of the sofa and wraps it around herself. Then she walks back to the window.
“Cathy, what did your mother find out that made them kill her?”
Cathy whirls around. “I don’t know! I swear I don’t know! She didn’t tell me!” Cathy looks shocked by her own outburst. Her shoulders slump and she sits on the sofa, legs curled under her, and pulls the throw tight around her. When she speaks her voice is soft and flat. “All she told me was that it was big. Real big.”