Coop had taken ten photos, each one an interior shot of the house Melissa French had rented, each taken between 10 and 11 a.m. on the day after he had called her from the payphone in Fort Jefferson.
The first photo had been taken from the front doorway: a panoramic shot of the downstairs, which had an open-concept floor plan. Square-shaped foyer in front of carpeted steps leading upstairs and, to the right, a closet door. To the left of the stairs, a living room with a wood stove mounted inside a stone fireplace, a sectional couch facing it and a TV. A circular maple table with four matching chairs, and behind it an island counter made of a dark granite or laminate. She pinched her fingers to enlarge sections of the picture, searching for … what? What was she looking for? Noel said he didn’t know because Coop hadn’t told him – didn’t have time to tell him.
And what was the reason behind his sudden change of heart back at the accident site, asking her to go to the house and look around, when up until that moment he had done everything to keep her in the dark?
Back to the photographs.
The remaining nine shots were all interiors taken mostly from doorways of bathrooms and bedrooms. Everything was neat and orderly: beds made, no mess on any of the counters. The kind of pictures a real-estate agent would load on to the company website to give a potential buyer a feel of the place. Staged photographs. This wasn’t a lived-in space. Either Melissa had cleaned and arranged everything before she left town or someone else had done this. Darby made a mental note to check with the realtor, see if they’d hired a local cleaning company or asked a couple of employees to come in and tidy everything up.
See what you can find, Noel had told her.
But there wasn’t anything to find, at least not in these ten pictures. Nothing jumped out and screamed Look! Over here! Coop had taken pictures of the living room and kitchen and the downstairs bathroom and the upstairs bathroom, with its old-fashioned claw-foot bath, and the two bedrooms, one of which was a child’s room, with a pair of bunk beds and Disney princess decals and posters on the wall. If a crime had taken place inside that house, there was no evidence of it in these photos. And if a crime had taken place inside the house and been cleaned up by the perpetrator, how was she going to find and collect any evidence when she didn’t have use of her forensics kit?
The phone’s screen dimmed from inactivity. Darby looked out the window, thinking about why Coop had taken these pictures.
‘We’ll be at the house in about five minutes,’ her driver said. His name was Michael and, in addition to his black Stetson and long, scraggly beard, he wore a long Texas-Ranger-style black duster. Slap a six-shooter into his hand and the guy could have easily played some cocksure gunslinger in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western.
The SUV’s high beams sliced the darkness, lighting up the road. Both sides were lined with tall trees, not a single streetlight or house anywhere in sight – no, wait, there was a house. It was set far back from the road, its single, dimly lit window nearly swallowed up by the forest.
‘Where you from?’ he asked.
‘Boston, originally.’
He made a fist and tapped it against the top of the steering wheel. ‘I knew it,’ he said, smiling from beneath his beard. ‘You’ve got the accent – not as bad as you hear in the movies, but I was sure I caught a hint of it.’ He smiled brightly, pleased with himself. ‘Who you know in Fort Jefferson?’
Darby didn’t see the harm in telling him. ‘Woman named Melissa French.’
His brow furrowed in thought. ‘Can’t say I know her – and I know a good number of people here. Fort Jefferson’s real small now, about, oh, 300 people, I’d say. Could be less.’
‘You live in Fort Jefferson?’
‘Not any more. Well, not full time, anyway. I was born and raised here, and my parents still live on Hanover Avenue, right behind Goodies department store. I try to get down every weekend, or at least every other weekend, to check in on ’em. They’re getting on in years, scared to death of pretty much everything – politicians, getting their guns taken away just as World War III is about to break out – and I hate to say it, it is going to happen in our lifetime, don’t you think?’
‘You never know.’
‘How long’s your friend Melissa been here?’
‘Only a few months. She’s new to the area. Works at the C & J Diner.’
‘They make the world’s best blueberry-and-cinnamon pancakes, no lie.’
Having spent a good amount of her adulthood travelling through what political pundits consistently referred to as ‘Middle America’, that magical stretch of heartland separating the two coasts, it always amazed her how friendly and chatty people were, how they liked to strike up random conversations with random people. She had grown up in provincial Boston, with Irish Catholic parents who kept to themselves, like everyone else in the neighbourhood. You talked to tourists only when they asked for directions (usually to the Bull & Finch Restaurant that was used in the TV show Cheers), and you never struck up a conversation with someone you didn’t know while waiting in a line or sharing a taxi – and God help the outsider who decided to move into the neighbourhood. Friends were hard to make, unless you survived the gradual thawing that could last months if not years, to see if you and your family were trustworthy. Not a good way to go through life, but it was the life she had been given. She and Coop.
Coop.
A tide of anger and loss, hot and nearly boiling, rose within her, wanting to scald her. She turned her back to it, but she could feel the tide rising behind her, as tall as a mountain. She swallowed, sucking in deep breaths through her nose, holding them as she forced her attention outside the window.
The forest of trees had disappeared maybe a mile or so back. Now they were travelling through a wide street in the downtown area; she saw there was a pharmacy, bakery and grocery store, with ample parking for all the businesses. Straight ahead she saw an ornate wooden sign peeking out from a mound of snow, welcoming them to downtown Fort Jefferson. The limbs of the bare trees and the pavilion’s railings and pillars were strung with tiny white Christmas lights that glowed like distant stars.
‘Place where I picked you up,’ her driver said, taking a right at a corner belonging to Buzzy’s Beer. A big neon sign of a happy, smiling bee holding a beer can was mounted on the bricks above the front door. ‘What happened there? Some sort of car accident?’
Darby nodded absently, thinking of Coop’s wet jacket, torn and stained with dried blood.
‘They call that place Dead Man’s Curve – I know, not original, but the name fits. Number of people who got in car accidents there and died?’ He whistled. ‘You look okay, praise be. Must have a guardian angel watching out for you.’
Now they were driving past flat and empty land, as though the downtown area was the remnant of a ghost town. He saw her looking around and, either wanting to fill the silence or just be friendly and chatty, said, ‘We’ve got ourselves a great town here, and even greater people. But, as you’ve probably guessed by now, there’s not a lot going on in terms of career prospects – unless you see dishwashing or lawn and road maintenance in your future. Which is why I had to leave.’
Darby spotted signs of life ahead: clusters of homes together on both sides of the street – and actual road signs. Some windows burned with light, and, although the homes were reasonably close together to form actual neighbourhoods, the area still struck her as lonely and desolate, probably because she was used to living in cities.
‘Went to the University of Montana for hospitality management but never finished, ’cause I decided to go to Big Sky and spend a semester skiing. But it all worked out. Got a sweet gig at the hotel that includes free skiing and free housing. Got to share the bathroom with the other guys on my floor, but hey, it’s all good.’
She suspected Michael the Driver was in his late twenties or early thirties and, to use one of Coop’s phrases, ‘into hippy-dippy bullshit’. They hung around ski lodges and campsites, these guys who had no career ambitions beyond earning enough money to support their passions, which were skiing and drinking beer and hiking and camping and drinking beer and hunting with big coolers full of beer. They didn’t live to work but worked to live, and there was a part of her that secretly envied their devil-may-care attitude to life.
The dashboard GPS spoke, announcing that their destination was a mile away.
‘What time do you have to be back at the hotel?’ Darby asked, digging a hand into her back pocket.
‘My shift ended an hour ago. Why?’
‘I’ve got some things I need to do inside the house.’
‘Anything I can help you with?’
‘No, but I may be a while. Will two hundred cover it?’
‘Ma’am, for two hundred dollars, I’ll roll around the snow in my skivvies and howl at the moon. Take all the time you need.’