Blind Spot (12 page)

“It went fine,” Alexa said in her mother-you-are-just-too-trying voice, as if Suki were inquiring about an ordinary day.

“What exactly went fine?” Suki persisted. “Did anyone bother you? Say anything to you? Kids? Teachers?”

“I told you already.” Alexa’s voice was tight and thin. “There’s nothing to get all bent out of shape over.”

Under normal circumstances Suki would have let it go, but these circumstances were anything but normal. “Honey,” she said gently, “there aren’t too many people on your team at the moment, I wouldn’t alienate one of the few you still have.”

Alexa sighed through the phone’s static. “Kendra got Robin and Steph to walk me to every class.”

“And that worked out okay?”

“I guess.” Alexa’s shrug was almost audible over the phone.

“But?”

“But she didn’t need to.”

“Why not?” Suki pressed.

“Because no one bothered me,” Alexa said in a small voice. “No one would even look at me.”

Suki’s heart ached. “Well, it’s great that you’ve got your good friends to stand by you,” she said. “That means a lot.”

“I guess.”

“Have you got much homework?” Suki asked, hoping that by acting normal she would make them both feel normal.

“Calculus, history, English. The usual.”

“Well, why don’t you get to it? I should be home around five-thirty. Maybe I’ll pick up some McDonald’s for dinner.”

“Can I go now?” Alexa asked.

“Screen the calls through the machine before you answer the phone,” Suki added. “And tell Kyle to do his homework, too.”

“Later,” Alexa said and hung up.

Suki pressed the
END
button on the phone, but she pushed too hard and the receiver fell from its housing onto the floor in front of the passenger seat. The phone stared up at her, its blank screen beseeching her to take action. Suki gripped the steering wheel and focused on the road.

The Pepperell Coffee Shoppe was just as she had imagined it, down to the frosted glass windows and plump, floury woman behind the counter. It was steamy and warm and homey. It smelled like raisins.

Kenneth’s tall frame was folded into a booth toward the back. He waved her over. “Hi,” he said with an awkward smile.

“Hi,” she answered, sitting across from him. He continued to smile at her, and Suki realized he was far younger than she had thought upon first meeting him. His beard conferred the initial impression of age, but his brown eyes, a surprising color given his red hair, were only lightly webbed. The beard also hid the height of his cheekbones and the keen nobility of his lean, craggy face. “Off for the day?” she asked.

His smile disappeared. “Am I?”

“You tell me.” After the woman had taken their order, Suki told him what had happened with Abe Fleming in the rec center parking lot.

Kenneth was silent as she added sweetener and a touch of cream to her coffee. He was silent as she bit into her cranberry muffin, which was as good as he had promised. He was silent for so long that Suki began to shift in her seat. She picked lint from her navy blue skirt.

Finally, he cleared his throat. “I didn’t hear that story from you.”

She watched him over the rim of her mug.

“I heard it somewhere else. A rumor. Tales of the street.”

“Tales of the streets of Witton?” she asked, forcing a smile.

“If this whole thing doesn’t show you that Witton has no protective magic, I don’t know what will.”

Suki blinked and sipped her coffee.

Kenneth reached out and touched her arm lightly. “I’ll do what I can, Suki, but I doubt it’ll come to much. These types of situations are tough—and I’m kind of odd-man-out down at the station.”

Suki guessed that meant Kenneth didn’t play poker with Charlie and Ellery on Friday nights.

“I left the NYPD because of this kind of thing,” he continued. “Politics and self-interest.” He stared out the steamy window into the past; through his thick beard, Suki could see his facial muscles tensing. “Not to mention drugs and a lot of bad blood …”

Suki was curious about the story Kenneth wasn’t telling, but she knew not to ask. Everyone had their secrets. “How long ago did you leave New York?”

“Two years in June.” He gestured to the lime green buds outside the window, the tree branches rocking in the wind. “I moved out here to get some fresh air—both literally and figuratively.”

“Guess it doesn’t smell too great anywhere.”

“Small towns have an odor all their own.” He rubbed his beard with a gesture that, although she had only met him once before, Suki recognized as habitual.

“I’m going to go back to the rec center and make Ellery talk to me,” she told him. “Finlay Thompson, too. But this time I’ll take my father’s car.”

“We got the report on your car.”

“And?” Suki asked, not encouraged by the expression on Kenneth’s face.

“Mostly what you’d expect.” He shrugged with exaggerated nonchalance. “Tread marks match the ones on River Road. Powder residue inside and out …”

“And the fingerprints?”

“Alexa’s are all over the place. Yours, too,” Kenneth said to his coffee cup. “Steering wheel, passenger window, back seat. Lots of others, but they’re partials. Smudges.”

“What about the boys?”

He raised his eyes and met hers. “No clear prints on any of them.”

“None?” Suki was horrified. “But how can that be? They’ve all been in the car at one time or another. I’ve driven them myself.”

“I’m sure you have,” Kenneth said. “Good prints aren’t as easy to get in the real world as they are in the movies. This happens more often than you’d think.” He cleared his throat. “So, although this doesn’t prove that the boys
weren’t
in the car, it doesn’t prove that they were, or when they were—and that’s what Alexa needs right now.”

Suki stared at her hands. They looked like her mother’s hands, not hers. The veins were blue and raised, the skin looser than she remembered it. When had her hands gotten so old?

“I worked with a real psychic in New York,” Kenneth said.

“What?” Suki raised her head, not sure she had heard correctly.

“On a bunch of different cases. Very impressive.” He grinned. “Believe it or not, she’s a Jewish grandmother from Great Neck.”

“Is this a joke?”

Kenneth sobered. “No,” he said. “I’m serious. Her name’s Doris Sheketoff and we’ve become good friends. As a matter of fact, I was supposed to go to the seder at her house last Friday night.”

“You’re Jewish?” Suki asked, more willing to focus on the unlikelihood of a redheaded man named Pendergast being Jewish, than on last Friday night.

Kenneth reached into his shirt and pulled out a gold chain with the Hebrew word
chai
hanging from it;
chai
was the symbol for life. “A convert,” he said.

Suki nodded. People were full of surprises. “Tell me about this woman.”

“She found a kidnapper when no one else could. A lost child, too.”

“And you think she did these things with psychic powers?”

“You tell me.” Kenneth leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “There was a kid missing on the east side. Nice neighborhood. Nice little girl. Nice parents. And no trace of Heather. No ransom note, no nothing. The media’s going nuts, and we’ve got almost the entire detective force working on the case. Time goes by and still nothing. Then I get a call from Doris. She tells me Heather’s underwater.”

“Did the little girl drown?”

Kenneth shook his head. “Doris said she had the sense Heather was still alive. So naturally, I had the sense the lady was loony tunes—we got lots of those in the city—and hung up. But she kept calling. And then she got the parents involved.”

“So what happened?”

“To make a long story short, Doris ultimately led us to an underground bunker where this maniac was keeping the kid.”

“She was all right?”

“As all right as a little girl can be who’s been buried alive for a month.”

“But what about the underwater part?”

Kenneth grinned. “The bunker was directly under a billboard advertising suntan lotion: it was a picture of a woman floating on a raft in a big swimming pool.”

Suki stared at him incredulously. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying—anymore than I know how Doris can do what she does. It’s just that I’ve learned things aren’t always the way they seem to be.” He leaned over the table. “Just because we can’t explain it, does that mean it didn’t happen?”

“Are you telling me you believe Alexa’s psychic?”

“I’m only raising possibilities. But the truth is, if Alexa isn’t psychic—or if no one believes that she possibly could be—then all the evidence is pointing in only one direction.”

Suki played with the ceramic sugar bowl in front of her. She took the top off. She put it back on. She took it off again.

“The thing you need to—”

“Does anyone else on the Witton force know Doris?” Suki interrupted. “Does anyone else beside you believe psychics are possible?”

Kenneth shook his head. “My hands are pretty much tied. I probably shouldn’t even be here, but this whole thing has gotten under my skin. There was a great show on ghosts on PBS the other night—full of facts and research, really credible stuff that was hard to dispute. And it all makes me wonder. About what’s true and what isn’t true, and about how someone like Alexa can get caught in it all.”

“Can’t you talk to Charlie? Tell him what you’ve just told me?”

“I doubt it would make much difference,” Kenneth said. “Look, you seem like a nice woman, like a nice family, so when you called, when you sounded so upset, I figured, well, I just figured I should at least talk to you.” He played with the crumbs of his muffin. “But I don’t know what else I can do.”

Suki exhaled slowly. Kenneth was a gift, a gift that could be yanked from her at any moment. She would take everything he had to give her while she had the opportunity. “Talk is good,” she said with a small smile. “Talk to me about what’s happening.”

Kenneth gave her a look that clearly said: You don’t want to know, but when Suki nodded, he began, “I can’t go into the specifics, but let’s just say that Charlie’s getting a lot of pressure to make an arrest—pressure from pretty high up. And you can be sure the people turning the screws on him don’t believe in psychics. The way the evidence is falling, the easiest thing for them is to pin it on Alexa. There’s no point in looking for evidence, or bringing in the paranormal, when you’ve got such a strong suspect.”

“But Alexa’s
not
that strong a suspect,” Suki argued. “The whole thing makes no sense. How could she drive the car and shoot Jonah at the same time? Where’d she get a gun? When did she learn to use it, and most importantly, why would she
want
to kill him?” Suki’s voice rose with the last question and a man sitting at the counter turned to look at them. “There’s opportunity and no motive,” Suki added more softly. “How can she be a strong suspect when there’s no reason why she would kill him?”

“They determined the car was stationary when the shot was fired. Alexa and Jonah were lov—boyfriend and girlfriend.” Kenneth put his large hand over hers for a second. “It all depends on your vantage point,” he said, quickly drawing his hand and eyes from hers. “It all depends on your agenda.”

Kenneth had the kindness not to list all the evidence against Alexa, but Suki mentally ticked off each item as if he had: Alexa’s prediction, Alexa’s admission to being at the scene, tread marks that placed the car at the scene, the boys’ alibi, the report of Alexa saying she wished Jonah were dead, Alexa’s fingerprints in the car, none of the boys’ fingerprints in the car.… “I’m going to break that damn alibi,” Suki said. “This time, when I go to the rec center, I’ll talk to Finlay first. Get him to admit Devin wasn’t there that night. Then I can prove the boys are lying. Prove that Devin fired the gun.”

“The divers have never found the gun in the river, you know.”

“But the alibi’s the key,” Suki argued.

“Find the gun and you’ll have the evidence you need to break the alibi.” Kenneth leaned back in the booth and watched her carefully.

“You think maybe the gun isn’t in the river?” Suki grabbed onto her coffee cup as hope surged through her.

“If it isn’t, maybe Alexa knows where they stashed it.”

The Community Boathouse is at the end of a long rutted road. Suki hadn’t been out there since Stan had left, and as she drove up to the building, memories emerged from the shadows: Stan and her walking hand and hand in the early morning fog, a tangle of legs and tanned skin as they made love in the hull of Stan’s boat, picnic baskets and pickles and the sweet sound of Alexa’s little-girl giggle. Suki pulled to a stop in front of the tall, silent structure and wondered when she would finally be done with the pain.

“Do you think anyone’s here?” Alexa asked.

There were no cars in sight. “It’s a bit early in the season,” Suki assured her. “And the weather’s rotten.” Which it was. Yesterday’s warm promise of spring was obliterated by today’s cold rain. It was the kind of damp that crawled into the bone marrow, chilling from the inside out.

Alexa pulled her sweater more tightly around her, but she didn’t make any motion to leave the car. “It’s not going to be there.”

“We don’t have the luxury of pessimism, Alexa,” Suki reminded her.

“Sorry,” Alexa said, looking down at her lap.

Suki leaned over and raised her chin. “We’re going to beat this thing,” she said. “We will. You and I.”

Alexa nodded slightly and tried to smile; the corner of her mouth wobbled. “Sure, Mom,” she said, clearly attempting to convince them both. “Sure we will.”

“Then let’s go do it.” Suki slapped the steering wheel and jumped out of the car. Alexa followed more slowly.

Suki braced herself before entering the boat-house, knowing the familiar mingled odor of sawdust and gasoline and life vests would bring back the memories. She pulled the hood of her poncho further down on her head, breathing in the cotton-rubber smell of the fabric. Then she pushed the tall door open. It squeaked under her hand.

The boathouse is always open because it isn’t really a boathouse, not the kind where boats are stored; it’s a place where people who owned boats keep their gear. The boats are either tied to the docks or launched from the ramp on the left side of the building.