Misery Loves Company (18 page)

“Ma’am, your conference call begins in five minutes,” the assistant said, slicing into the conversation as smoothly as a knife into butter.

Chris didn’t believe a word out of him, and he wasn’t selling it very convincingly. Leona stood, straightening the expensive material of her suit. They walked toward the front door, the only sound the clacking of her tall heels against the shiny marble floors.

“You know where this cabin is, don’t you?” Chris asked as the door was opened for him.

She followed him just to the threshold. “If I knew that,” she said with a wry smile, “I would be privy to one of the greatest literary secrets of our time, wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know about that,” Chris said, “but I sure would like to find this guy.” He handed her a card. “Please call me if you . . . stumble upon any information.”

She stepped back. “Best wishes, Officer Downey.” And the door shut.

Chris sighed and walked to his truck. Unsuccessful. Again. Another day gone, for nothing, except to affirm what he already knew: Patrick Reagan was a guy on the verge of . . . something.

Chris got in his truck and started the heater. He saw shadows passing in front of veiled windows. His body was chilled from the brief walk to his truck. Winter was coming
early and strong. The mountains already had snow. Even if he knew where the cabin was, could he get to it?

Didn’t matter. He was no closer to finding Patrick Reagan than when he began.

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket as it rang.

“Downey.”

“Chris, it’s Pearl.”

Pearl, as they called him due to an unfortunate food poisoning incident at an oyster bar, was the guy at the department who could find the needle in a haystack and keep quiet about it too. He was the one everyone went to when their daughters started dating boys.

“Hey, Pearl, what’s up?”

“Got some interesting information for you regarding a hunt for our boy Roy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Turns out there was a guy named Roy Fletcher incarcerated about a year and a half ago. And he was arrested for being involved in a boat theft ring.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah. He’s out at State in Warren.”

Chris checked his watch. If he drove fast, he could get there during visiting hours. “Pearl, this is great. Thanks.”

“One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“The captain came down this morning and asked me if you’d been asking for information regarding Jason’s death.”

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said we hadn’t talked about anything but hockey.”

Chris’s mind raced. “Um, thanks. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I figure if he was asking about it, there was a good reason you were doing it. The captain hasn’t been my favorite person in the world, as you know. He stuck me behind this desk and I’ll never forgive him for it.”

“So he doesn’t know anything about us finding this Roy Fletcher?”

“Nothing at all. Wiped my searches clean.”

“Okay. Thanks, Pearl. I guess I better go find out who Roy Fletcher is, shouldn’t I?”

“Yeah. And, Chris . . . watch your back.”

JULES LAY IN BED,
comfortably propped up by pillows, warmed by blankets and a delectable beef broth, watching the writer she’d admired most in her life pacing the floor while reading to her from his manuscript.

If her ankles didn’t hurt so badly, she might’ve just rested in this moment and enjoyed it for what it was
 
—whatever it was. She’d accepted some ibuprofen, and that had taken the edge off. But they throbbed nonstop.

“Wait,” she said, and Patrick turned. “I think you’re building the character up too quickly to be the hero. I think we should wonder if he is, wonder if he has what it takes.”

Patrick paused, scratching behind his ear, studying his
words. “Good point,” he finally said and scribbled a note before continuing.

He was reading a scene where a cop was working with a snitch, trying to find out who was stealing boats. The snitch was a guy who had his reasons for turning on his gang of bandits. Patrick just hadn’t found those reasons yet.

“Maybe,” Jules said, interrupting him again, “it’s because he really does believe in right and wrong. He really has that sense, even though he’s on the wrong side of it.”

“Too easy.”

Jules sighed. “I don’t know then. I can’t find his motivation.”

Patrick smiled. “But I like that you’re trying. You’re working hard at this.”

“Don’t have much of an option.”

“True.” Patrick sat down in the chair in the corner of the room, stretching his legs. “What if . . . ?”

“Yeah?” she said, feeling a little giddy at the idea that he was brainstorming with her.

“What if the bad guys were too bad for him?”

Jules slumped a little. “That sounds kind of cliché. What are they, psychopathic mass-murdering boat thieves?”

“What’s so bad that a thief would feel he’s better off going to the other side?”

“I don’t know . . . Thieves who steal from thieves.”

“A given. It’s part of their world. Something else.”

Jules sat up a bit, readjusting her weight. Her hips were starting to hurt. She stared into space, trying to find a good answer.

Patrick began to pace again. “Blake Timble, he would overdramatize them. Yes. He would create drama where there was none to be had.”

Jules pulled the covers closer to her. Was he going to start another Blake Timble rant? Her hands twisted the comforter back and forth as she watched him carefully.

“I believe he would give this about fifteen minutes of thought and throw something down on paper. He’d move on, figuring the reader is going to follow wherever he goes.” He waved a finger in the air. “But we are not Blake Timble, are we? No. We are not going to settle for the easy answer.”

Jules stared at him through the cold cabin air. “Maybe they weren’t easy answers for Blake Timble. Maybe they just weren’t
your
answers.” She resisted the urge to cover her mouth as regret filled her for speaking out, but she hated the way he looked down on every writer but himself.

He turned at her words, midsentence, and froze. She locked eyes with him for a long moment; then Patrick said, “Perhaps.”

Jules looked out the window. She hated feeling so vulnerable. She couldn’t run even if she had to.

He was jotting something down, pausing between words, absorbing something Jules couldn’t see.

“Look,” she said, “my dad’s a drunk, okay? Sometimes there are no easy answers in life. And sometimes what’s an answer for one person isn’t for another. It’s easy for you to look from the outside in and judge the motives. But there’s nothing easy about life. Any of it. And though many people
would have you believe they’ve got the answers and the rule book, they don’t. Not really.”

“What about Jason? Didn’t he have the answers?”

Jules thought for a moment. “I think Jason would’ve replied that he believed in the One who has the answer. He couldn’t explain much, but he put his trust in Someone who he felt was worthy of it and who understood all the questions and the answers.”

Patrick set his pages down and sat at the end of the bed, his eyes lit with curiosity. “What did Jason think of your father?”

“Jason always wanted to believe the best about him. But I’d lived with it, you know? I knew what my dad was capable of. More importantly, I knew what he wasn’t capable of.”

“But Jason, he never gave up on him?”

“He believed in prayer.” Jules’s throat tightened as she recalled a fight they’d had about her father, with Jules imploring Jason to stop praying for him, to stop believing things would change. She glanced at Patrick, hoping her eyes weren’t too shiny with tears. “Maybe if I’d believed in prayer more, Jason wouldn’t be dead.”

Patrick looked torn by her words. “You don’t believe that, do you? That you’re responsible for Jason’s death?”

“Jason was this guy that was filled with so much faith. It was like a gift that I wanted so badly but couldn’t begin to even unwrap. He just believed. Plain and simple. And he always asked me to . . .” Her voice broke. She tried to hold it steady. “To pray for him while he was at work. And I tried.
But I could never get myself to trust God with him. I trusted Jason’s ability to protect himself more than God’s ability to protect him.”

“Then I guess you were right.”

“Don’t say that!” Jules pounded the bed with her fist, barely noticing the pain in her frostbitten fingers. “Don’t say that! You dishonor Jason by saying that, by accusing God of that.”

Patrick didn’t seem deterred. “Isn’t he dead? Didn’t God fail?”

Jules looked away. “You just don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“Jason would never say that. Even lying on that pavement, bleeding out, murdered by men he didn’t know, Jason would never say that God failed him.”

“Why not?”

“Because he believed God always had a plan. . . .” Jules let the tears run freely down her cheeks. There was no use trying to stop them. “He thought that if you trusted God, there was a purpose, and that everything worked out for good. He thought that every tragedy was used to touch someone else’s life, to help someone else.”

They were silent for a moment.

Patrick stirred, waking her out of the fog of grief that had settled over her. “Is this good, Juliet?”

“What?”

“Your present circumstances.”

“Being held captive? My ankles rendered useless by
frostbite? My favorite author ridiculing me?” She sniffled her protest, casting him an angry look.

“Perhaps Jason’s God knew that there was no reason to offer these promises if there wasn’t the chance that our paths would cross with trouble. Evil, even.”

Jules forced herself to look at him. “Are you evil, Patrick?”

He seemed to seriously consider it. “I don’t believe so. But I’ve seen evil. Yes. I’ve seen it. Stared it down.”

“Sure. In the pages of your books.”

“No. Not there. Here. In this room.”

There was a haunting sorrow in his voice. Jules wanted to recoil from it, but she had nowhere to go. Even though he wasn’t moving, he seemed to be inching closer to her.

“What do you mean?” It came out of her in a whisper, though she intended it to sound much stronger.

“I saw evil here.”

“And what did it do?”

“Not it. She.”

“Evil is feminine?”

“Evil is wherever and whoever evil wants to be.” His demeanor changed as his eyes flickered with a desperate pain.

“Tell me.” Jules wasn’t sure she even said it out loud. But something in her wanted to know.

He looked as if he might not, but then he nodded slightly as though encouraging himself that it was possible to talk about.

“It was the cancer,” he said softly. “She succumbed to it quickly. I thought that might be a blessing, but it was not
quickly enough for her. This woman who would not hurt a fly was so . . . vicious. She cursed me. Over and over, she cursed me.”

“That was the cancer talking. You have to know that. Amelia loved you.”

“She was suffering so badly. She wouldn’t hear about going to the hospital. And the nurse that came and tended to her could only do so much.” His voice choked. “My sweet, sweet Amelia. It was as if we’d not shared thirty-five years together. It was as if she didn’t know my love for her.”

“She was very sick,” Jules said, sitting up even more. “That happens with cancer.”

“I think,” Patrick said, weariness in his eyes, “that if she had been able, she would’ve killed me.”

Jules chose her words carefully. “For not killing her?”

Patrick didn’t answer for a while and didn’t look at her. “You must know for your own sake, mustn’t you?”

Jules just stared at him.

“It is so clear-cut for you. You are so sure what the right thing to do was, and your trust in me relies on the notion that if I didn’t kill my wife, then I can be trusted.”

Jules didn’t nod, but she knew he spoke the truth.

Patrick stood. He tossed the rest of the pages on the bed and they slid into a messy pile. At the door, he turned, looking directly at her. “It’s that kind of thinking that got your husband killed.”

Jules gripped the sheets. “What does that mean?”

“I must go prepare our dinner.” He gestured to the pages.
“Read more. Read on. You’re moving too slowly, Juliet. You’re not getting this like I had hoped.”

“That’s because you’re speaking in a cryptic language nobody can understand.”

“I’m speaking in a language that your heart understands. Soon your head is going to catch up.” He smiled mildly. “That’s a quote from Blake Timble, who, despite making a mess of an otherwise-decent concept, had some worthy things to say.”

He shut the door, and Jules stared at the pages. She wanted to take her hand and swipe them all off the bed. But instead, she slowly scooped them toward herself. She was becoming aware that inside these pages was the key to her release. She could no longer run to escape. She couldn’t even fling herself off that balcony. She had to find this needle in a haystack. Somehow, it seemed, her life depended on it.

Roy Fletcher looked like a gecko. He had a gecko-like posture, with a long but thick neck and a mullet that barely reached his shoulders because of it. The back of his head was very flat, but his face held many angles: a pointed nose, slicing cheekbones, but thin, wavy lips, and an enlarged forehead with a scar at the top right that looked just like a bullet hole. His eyes were beady
 
—ink black and shiny like marbles
 
—and they weren’t to be trusted. He pulled on one of his bushy sideburns like one might finger a goatee.

He approached the table carefully, taking in every detail, and sat down, still fingering his chops. His entire right arm was covered in tattoos of snakes.

“What business you got with me, cop?” he said in a thick Southern accent made harder to understand by his missing front teeth.

“How do you know I’m a cop?” Chris asked.

“I can sniff me a cop. Believe you me, I can sniff me a cop.” Roy leaned back, pleased with himself. “The way you boys never sit with your back to the door. The way you always lookin’ around to see what everyone else up to.” He lifted his chin. “The way you look at me. I know me some cops all right.”

“I’m Sergeant Downey with the Wissberry PD.”

“You got a first name?”

“Chris.”

“I don’t like no formalities,” he said. “So why you here, Chris?”

Chris leaned forward, trying his best to size Roy up without Roy feeling sized up. “I need your help.”

Roy grinned. “A cop in need of my help. So greatly honored. Yes sirree.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear the sarcasm in your voice.”

“It was meant to stab you right through the heart,” Roy said, his tone turning cold and his beady eyes warming with anger.

Chris tried to stay neutral. This guy was obviously easily inflamed. “I believe you might have information about the murder of my partner, Jason Belleno, two years ago.”

Roy’s face flickered through expressions like a flame against a strong wind. “Don’t know no Jason . . . What’d ya say? Bell-something?”

“When my partner was killed near a boat two years ago, he had among his possessions a scrap of paper with the name Roy on it and a phone number. I believe you’re that Roy.”