BEFORE SHE FIGURED out her next move, she had to ensure her son’s safety.
Julia debated long and hard about how to approach Calvin’s teacher before coming up with a story she deemed both vague and suitable enough.
“I’ve been getting some threats,” she said when she dropped him off the next morning. “It happens occasionally in my line of work, and it’s probably nothing. But could you please make sure the playground monitors keep an extra eye on Calvin when he’s outside? And of course, the school is not to release him to anyone but me or his grandmother.”
She thought she’d soft-pedaled it enough, hit the sweet spot between too scary and too casual. Apparently not.
The teacher’s pursed lips conveyed both concern and disapproval. “If one of our students is in danger, that means the other children could be. Or our teachers. We can’t have that.”
“Oh, no.” Julia hastened to undercut her own words. “If it was that serious, there’d be a restraining order. I’m probably being overly cautious. You know how it is.”
The woman had two decades on Julia and was exactly the kind of person she’d have imagined as a kindergarten teacher, plump and grandmotherly, a warm smile her default expression. Now the smile was nowhere to be seen and Julia glimpsed another side of her, the one that daily rode herd over a dozen five-year-olds with little or no impulse control and somehow managed to keep the days from devolving into chaos.
“I suggest you try and see it from my point of view.” Her tone made it clear it was a command, not a suggestion.
Try seeing it from mine. “Of course. I understand completely. Gosh. Look at the time. I’m going to be late for work.”
Julia, ready to confront a rogue sheriff’s deputy with metaphorical guns blazing, turned coward when faced with a teacher’s disapproval. Scattering demurrals, she fled.
She was late. But she couldn’t walk into the office in this agitated state. So she took the long way, heading for the creek trail, hoping despite recent experience that its distractions would this time soothe her into the readjustment necessary for radiating an attitude of being firmly In Charge.
For a few moments, it worked. A great blue heron caught her attention, standing statuelike on a single leg on a log jutting into the creek, its yellow eye fixed on the water rushing past. A couple of mallards paddled in a placid backwater, gabbling to one another, seemingly oblivious to the chaos just a few feet away.
The creek snatched at things as it passed, tearing shallow-rooted trees free and sending them downstream like so many ungainly vessels. Sometimes a trailing root would snag on a rock, pulling the log low in the water, where it would bob nearly undetectable until it grabbed an overeager boater who’d launched too early in the year, the centrifugal force of the rushing waters dragging the craft under with a savage and lethal swiftness.
Julia looked past the logs and focused on the egrets, the ducks, an osprey hovering high overhead, vying with the heron for the trout newly freed from their winter somnolence.
Spring, a teasing flirt in their part of the world, today bestowed upon Duck Creek an abundance of sunshine, the temperature climbing by the moment, the kind of morning that invoked thoughts of daffodils and budding fruit trees, of hats and mittens tossed aside, of the reappearance of sidewalk buskers and patio tables—all the things to make one think that life this close to the Canadian border made sense after all.
Julia unfastened her coat. Slowed her pace. Turned her face to the sun. And nearly walked into Angie.
“Watch where you’re going, lawyer lady.”
Julia stumbled and refocused, blinking her eyes, trying to chase away sun-blindness.
“Sorry. Guess I was daydreaming.”
“Sun-drunk,” Angie said knowingly. “Happens to everyone at this time of year. Better than the real thing, if you ask me.”
Indeed, she was clear-eyed, unburdened by the pained expression, the pretzeled posture, the shaking hands of so many of Julia’s clients when they showed up for court appearances scheduled the morning after the night before.
Julia studied her. She wasn’t like the others who huddled in downtown doorways, hands hopefully extended for spare change; others who wandered the streets, muttering and gesticulating, lost in their own private world of misfired synapses. Clean up Angie Barrett, supply her with some teeth, put her in one of the ramshackle apartment buildings on Duck Creek’s outskirts, out on a postage-stamp balcony watering plants in an old coffee can, and she’d have fit right in.
“Angie, do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.” She shielded her eyes against the sun’s glare.
Julia struggled for tactful phrasing and ended up going with direct. “How’d you end up out here?”
She favored Julia with a sly smile. “Heading downtown just like you are.”
“I don’t mean today. What I mean is—”
“Oh, I know what you mean. You want to know why I don’t live the way you do. Or all these people.” She swung her arm wide, the gesture incorporating the whole town.
“I guess.”
“Guess, nothing. That’s exactly what you mean.” Angie’s grin was gone, replaced with the implacable expression of someone calling bullshit.
Busted. “So why do you?”
They stepped aside to allow a runner to pass, along with a bicyclist pedaling so fast they felt the breeze. Julia wondered at these people who had time for such workaday jaunts. Neither runner nor cyclist looked anywhere near retirement age.
Angie pointed to their retreating forms. “Same reason they’re out here. Only difference is, I don’t go to a house at night. Or”—she shuddered—“an office. I tried. I really did. Worked a few jobs, nothing special, fast food or stocking shelves in a supermarket, stuff like that. I still take a little job now and then, but it doesn’t last long. I always either get fired or quit. Don’t like people telling me what to do.” The sly smile reappeared.
“But isn’t it dangerous out here?” Julia kept the obvious—given that you’re a woman alone—to herself.
Angie bent and slid a hand into her beat-up boot. Something flashed silvery in the sun, then disappeared back into the boot.
“Was that a switchblade? Aren’t they illegal?”
Angie ran her tongue over her gums. “Yeah. So’s what some people want to do to me. And if they do it, they end up with somebody like you defending them in court, telling them I asked for it. Let’s just say my friend”—she nodded toward the boot—“is way more reliable than any judge and jury. Miss Mae told me years ago to always have one on me, and it’s the best advice I ever got.
“Besides.” Her expression softened. “Ray was usually out here with me. Anybody hassled me, they’d have to deal with Ray, and if he wasn’t around, one of the rest of us. Now half of us are dead or in jail. It’s just me and Johnny out here on our own. Everyone leaves us alone now after what happened to Billy and Miss Mae and Craig, either out of respect or more likely they think we’re bad luck. Wonder how long that’ll last, what with Ray in jail now.”
Ray. Julia had been so caught up in her own worries that she’d nearly forgotten about him.
“I’m trying my best with Ray. Or at least, I was. Do you have any idea why he decided to plead guilty? He won’t talk to me at all.”
The wind went out of Angie, so defiant just a moment before.
“Because he doesn’t have a choice.”
“He does! He could have let me defend him. I’d have worked my ass off for him. I’m worried about him, Angie. Last time I saw him, he’d been beaten up.”
Angie moved close and lowered her voice. “Beaten is bad. But killed is worse.”
Julia tried to sound casual. “What do you mean?”
She looked around. “Nothing. I don’t mean nothing.”
Julia grabbed her wrist. “What are you saying? Angie, if you know something, you have to tell me. You have no idea how important this is.”
Angie didn’t pull away. Just looked at Julia’s hand and laughed, a grim, rusty sound.
“I have no idea? Billy, Miss Mae, and Craig are all dead and Ray’s in jail. Don’t talk to me about important. I have a better idea than you ever will.”
Julia went out on a limb. “I know Cheryl Hayes is mixed up in this, but I don’t know how. If you tell me, I can do something about it. And I promise I’ll keep you out of it. Keep you safe.”
Angie shook her wrist free. Contempt chased the despair from her face.
“You couldn’t even keep your own kid safe, letting him run loose down here in the dark. What are you going to do for me?”
Julia gaped. “How do you know about that?”
Angie ignored her. “Only person you ought to be worried about keeping safe is yourself.”
She reached into the shrubbery, retrieved a day pack and slung it over her shoulder. “And leave Deputy Hayes out of this. She’s about the only friend we’ve got out here.”
“Like hell I’ll leave Deputy Hayes out of this,” Julia muttered. Hayes’s shtick might have worked on Angie’s alcohol-soaked brain, but Julia had finally come to her senses.
Hayes’s lunch break was at twelve thirty. Julia was at the tea shop by noon.
This time she ordered Earl Grey, which came in a pint-size teapot decorated with—what else—tea roses. Julia, no fan of cuteness, turned it sideways so as to avoid the showiest of the painted flowers.
“I never took you for the tea-and-crumpets type,” Coates had said. He was right. But the shop offered crumpets, and out of curiosity, she ordered one. It turned out to be something like a spongy English muffin, browned on one side, pale on the other. Butter vastly improved it, marmalade further still.
She nibbled at it, licking a bit of sticky marmalade from her fingers, and sipped her tea and tried not to think how much she missed the instant caffeine kick of coffee. She’d stop at Colombia on the way back to the office.
The bell on the door tinkled, and she hastily turned her chair away. She’d left her wool cap on, tucking her too-recognizable coppery curls beneath it, a subterfuge that apparently worked because the voice responding to a cheerful “Your usual?” was that of Cheryl Hayes.
Julia became very, very interested in the remnants of her crumpet, bending over her tiny plate—with its own rim of painted roses—until she heard a chair scrape at a nearby table and the rustle of Hayes removing her coat.
She waited for the first faint slurp and made her move.
Two long strides brought her to Hayes’s table. She grabbed one of the adorable wrought-iron chairs, spun it around, and sat facing Hayes, who froze with her teacup halfway to her lips.
“What’s the deal with you and Mack Coates?”
Give the woman credit. When Julia had first confronted her in the tea shop, she’d been shaken. Now Hayes lifted her cup, drank, and set back in its saucer (this one rimmed with violets) with a rock-steady hand.
She glanced at her book—still working her way through Crime and Punishment, Julia noted—gave the corner of her open page the tiniest crimp, and closed it with possibly more force than necessary. Julia braced herself to be clocked upside the head with nearly five hundred pages of Dostoyevsky.
But Hayes merely folded her hands before her and waited. An old trick, one Julia had used herself.
Hayes was better at it.
“You were with him the other night down by the river, weren’t you?” Julia said finally. “After he took my little boy.”
“You mean the night I found your little boy wandering alone.”
“After Mack had lured our dog away.”
Hayes lifted a brown-clad shoulder and held her gaze. “So you let both your child and your dog wander off. At night. Near the river. I could have ticketed you.”
Two could play this game. Julia rested her arms across the back of the chair. “But you didn’t. Why?”
Hayes’s eyes crinkled at the corners, signaling a smile that never made it to her lips.
“I’ll let you figure that out.”
She rose, slipped into her coat, tucked Dostoyevsky under one arm, and headed for the door in a Fuck you saunter, maneuvering around tables and shelves laden with fragile, pretty things as nimbly—despite her heavy coat and clumsy work boots—as she’d dodged Julia’s questions about Mack Coates.