TEST PARKED HER Peugeot in front of what she thought of as Location A; the Village Fare restaurant. Puddles of slush sloshed beneath her boots on the sidewalk. She knocked on the building’s front glass door. The place was closed, but the proprietor was expecting her.
The door opened and Test was greeted by a woman dressed in chef whites, flour dappling the very tip of her sharp, severe nose. Test recognized the woman’s face from ads that ran in the local weekly. But the face was somehow off in real life. What, in the ad, seemed a classic face of elegant bone structure was, in reality, bony, with a chin that jutted just enough to be of proportion to the rest of the face, and one eye slightly smaller than the other. And this woman was pushing her mid-sixties. The photo in the ad must have been a good decade old.
“Please,” the woman said, beckoning with long fingers graced with the same white powder as was her nose, “come in.”
Test stepped inside, blinking back the darkness that temporarily blinded her after being outside. The woman locked the door behind them and walked to a table graced with a fine white linen tablecloth, again gesturing with wriggling fingers for Test to have a seat across from her. The place was impressive, refined. Too refined for Test’s taste. Not that she would mind the food. She’d likely love it. Just not the prices or the atmosphere. She preferred a homey, family setting where duct tape served to repair a punctured booth cushion, and crayons and coloring books were brought out first thing, rather than a setting of white linens and candles afloat in scented water where the first thing ushered out to you was a choice between two ten-dollar bottles of sparkling or natural water.
She’d always favored casual restaurants; perhaps because her father had dragged her to Gene and Georgetti’s steakhouse since she could walk. A place where she was told to sit up, sit straight, keep her napkin tucked, and forced to breathe cigar and cigarette smoke.
“Can I get you a bottled water? We have sparkling or natural,” the woman asked as she picked at some invisible thread on the tablecloth.
“I’m fine,” Test said, swallowing a laugh. “I have a few questions.”
The woman smoothed her hand over a wrinkle in the white linen tablecloth. “I’ll do my best to answer.”
“They’re easy. One. Are your bathrooms unisex?”
She seemed perplexed. “We have a gents’ and a ladies’.”
“Do they accommodate more than one person at a time?”
“No.” The woman now seemed genuinely amused.
“The CCTV you have, does it cover the back of the restaurant, the hallway to the restrooms?”
“Some. Not much past the back door by the dish room.”
The answers the owner gave both muddled and partly clarified the case for Test, as Test began to understand it in a new way. Her blood fizzed with the urgency of culminating facts; she felt like she was George, shimmying and pushing a sled to the edge of a hill. And once she got the momentum and gravity got hold of it, the case would accelerate rapidly, beyond her own ability to stop it, even if she wanted to.
“May I see what we spoke of on the phone?” Test asked.
The woman handed Test a DVD of the CCTV footage taken the night of the murder.
“It’s all there, the time span you asked for.”
“And the restrooms, in an establishment like this, they must be seen to regularly.”
“Oh yes, hourly.”
“On the hour?”
“Not quite.”
“May I speak to the person who cleans them?”
“Drew. He’s not in yet. Give it a half hour.”
“May I take a look at the restrooms?” Test asked.
The woman smiled. “Be my guest.”
TEST WALKED DOWN the hallway off that ran from the bar at the rear right side of the restaurant. She eyed the CCTV camera in one corner of the hallway ceiling as she walked to the men’s restroom.
The restroom told her nothing. It was clean and appointed with high-end fixtures, a marble floor. Candles. But it was, after all, just a bathroom.
Standing outside the bathroom she saw the hall went past the dish room to a door that must have opened to the back. She did not know if the door was set to trigger the alarm system so went back out to the front door.
Outside, Test walked around to the back of the place, startled by a crow that burst into flight from the Dumpster.
She stared at the back of the building. It was plain enough. Brick with one door that led to the Dumpster, and a single window farther down.
She looked into the woods behind the place. From the Google Earth imagery she’d studied earlier, it had appeared that if she cut through the woods to the other side, and skirted along the edge of the school park and ball fields, she’d end up on Lincoln Street in minutes.
There was only one way to find out.
THE WOODS WERE not vast by any means, but they were thick with understory and gnarled masses of blowdowns and vines that slowed her progress significantly. One aspect Google Earth did not show well on such a small scale was the few deep and soggy gullies to navigate.
After bushwhacking for several minutes, Test came out at the edge of the school fields and looked at her watch. Five minutes. OK. She edged along the ball fields and the playground and came out toward the end of Lincoln Street. From there, if she were to walk between two houses and cross the street, she’d be at Location B; The Merryfields’ house.
Another two minutes. Tops.
It was possible.
Physically.
In the daylight.
But in the dark?
A flashlight would have been risky, and a light in such a dark place did not help you find your way, it only lit up the confusion of branches right in front of you. But without any light, the trek would be impossible in the time span needed.
Perhaps there was a path she’d missed, one the local kids used as a shortcut.
No. On the way back she found no such path.
She’d have to come back in the dark, with a headlamp.
When she did, she would ask the staff a couple questions too.
Even with the lowered odds, her new premise pestered at her. There was something here. If the DVD revealed what she hoped, the rest might be moot.
The sun came out as she stepped from the woods to the back of the building. The crow took flight from the Dumpster, and Test caught a whiff of that sour cabbage-y odor Dumpsters gave off. It made her stomach roil.
She looked at the woods, her eyes scouring for the sign of the most scant trail. There was none.
As she turned to go, something caught her eye. Then it was gone. She stepped closer to the woods, but did not see it again. A glint. A tiny flash.
She walked back a few feet and looked. There it was again. Then gone.
But her eyes were locked on its location now.
She walked up to a tree at the edge. Looked back at the sun in the sky.
She searched the tree, an old cragged maple tree. She almost missed what she was looking for though she was nearly staring right at it from a few feet away. A thumbtack.
Except, she saw, not just a thumbtack. It surface was coated with a sparkly dust. A reflector. It would be almost impossible to find more of them in the daytime. She decided she would return that night with a flashlight to see if there were more of them, strung together, to make a lighted path someone could see easily at night.
Had Jon Merryfield left out the back way when he’d said he’d been in the bathroom? Was it possible he had sneaked out and slipped through the woods to return to his own house and murder Jessica?
Yes, logistically, if there were reflectors to light the way, it might be possible.
But even if so, the question remained: Why?