Fortunes of the Dead (24 page)

Janis takes off the ball cap and rolls the window down an inch. The cold air keeps her awake. She glances once into the rearview mirror, and sees the same dark brown Toyota that she saw just as she was leaving the meet. She has not seen it in the twenty minutes she has been driving since. There are no other cars and the road is long and flat, and yet for the last twenty minutes this car has stayed out of sight.

She decreases her speed to twenty miles an hour. The Toyota is there, edging closer. Janis chews her bottom lip, thinking that someone from the group is following. Which is not in the rules. It will be that new guy, the talker. And it is as if he wants her to see him, so she pulls the truck to the side of the road and waits. Whoever he is, he'll be sorry. She brings the cattle prod out from under the seat.

The Toyota approaches slowly, as if the driver is making up his mind. She could be wrong, Janis thinks, and whoever it is may pass her by.

The Toyota comes close enough for Janis to see the driver, a young woman, with curly brown hair. The Toyota pulls right in front of her truck, and the woman gets out of the car, slams the car door very hard, and faces her, hands on her hips, feet spread. Janis does not know this woman, who acts as if they have unfinished business of some kind. She gets out of the truck and leans against the grille of the pickup.

“So what's up?” Janis asks. She is almost amused, as well as annoyed.

“Who are you?” the girl says.

Janis does not reply.

“You might as well tell me. I saw you go into the woods. I saw him go into the woods. I know the two of you had some kind of assignation, and I want to know what about.”

“Who are
you?
” Janis asks.

“Me? I'm Miranda. Cory's girlfriend. The woman he will marry as soon as the divorce goes through with the wife. And if he's been seeing you, I want to know it. And I want you to know exactly what you are up against here.”

“Seeing him? As in … fucking him?”

Miranda's face goes dusky red. “So it's true.”

“That I'm fucking him? No, it's not.”

“You're lying. And why bother? Why else would he meet you like that at the crack of dawn?”

“If I told you, I'd have to kill you.”

“Very funny. But don't give me that cop crap. This isn't his jurisdiction.”

Janis drums a finger on the hood of the truck. So the son of a bitch really is a cop. She is turned sideways, looking at Miranda. A stupid cop, with a stupid jealous girlfriend.

“How long have you been seeing him?”

“This is the first time,” Janis says.

“Did you sleep with him?”

“No.”

“But you wanted to.”

“No. But he definitely wanted to sleep with me.”

Miranda is quick and she uses her nails. Janis feels the skin of her cheeks sting and bleed, and she sweeps her foot between Miranda's legs and drops the girl.

Janis is quick now, and strong, and she grabs Miranda by the skirt and drags her to the back of the truck. The girl is screaming, but it is rage and not fear, and she kicks like a calf being roped, connecting more often than not. Janis pulls the girl up by the collar of her shirt, and grabs both arms behind her back, making sure to cause a good amount of pain.

“Bitch.”

“Tell me something I don't know,” Janis says. She is out of breath. “Now be still, if you want to know who I am.”

Miranda kicks again, and it connects, but then she stops.

“He's a cop, your boyfriend?”

“Yes, damn you.” Miranda's chest is heaving and her face is red and swollen with tears.

“Federal?”

“Not yet, but he will be. He's working with the ATF. Why, what did he tell you? That he was already hired? He will be, don't worry. He's one of the best, believe me. And he's working on something that will put him at the top of the heap.”

Janis nods, more to herself than to Miranda. Always trust that first instinct, she thinks. She'd known he was a cop on some subconscious level.

“I have some good news for you, Miranda.”

“And what could that possibly be?”

Janis takes the cattle prod out of her belt. Miranda is listening now, and it is easy to hold her with one hand. “I'm not sleeping with your boyfriend, honey, and I reckon anything between us is strictly business. Unfortunately, Miranda, the business happens to be the big case he's been working on.”

A singe and electric crack, and Miranda drops like a brick. The cattle prod has been enhanced, and it delivers one hundred thousand volts. Miranda will not be able to move for a while. Janis moves the girl's hair off her face. Her eyes are shut; she's out. Janis looks up and down the road, considering. There is plenty of wire in the kit, but by the side of the road is a bad idea no matter what time of the day. And the farther away the body is from the girl's car, the longer it will take for the cops to make an ID, and pick up a trail. But she will use the wire. So they'll know who it is. So the cop will know, if he lives that long. Janis chews her bottom lip. All she has to do is let the group know about the infiltration. They'll take care of him themselves.

Miranda isn't moving. Janis picks the girl up like a feed sack and loads her into the bed of the pickup. She brushes dirt off the hem of her Wranglers, and climbs back into the truck. Somewhere between here and there, she'll find a place.

Thirty minutes later, Janis takes a side road that leads to a patch of woods and a creek. Janis is tired. She drives off the little road through the field to the edge of the woods. The truck will leave tracks, the ground is damp; but she is too tired to carry Miranda across that field, and she'll be ditching the truck soon anyway.

Janis slings the double strap of a navy blue polyester satchel over her shoulder. Her kit. She closes the truck door gently, and walks around to the back.

No Miranda.

Janis frowns, circles the truck all the way around, and looks again. The back divider has been unlatched and let down. This kid has recovered from the stun in bizarrely quick time, and jumped out somewhere along the way. She is a mental, Janis thinks. Only a really crazy person could recover from a stun like that, and then have the guts to jump out of a moving truck. Janis looks back over her shoulder. She would like to go back after this girl. Likely she will find her, hurt or walking by the side of the road.

But it is getting late, and the owner of the truck will be waking up soon. The last thing Janis needs is for the truck to be reported stolen, especially since the man spent yesterday at the rodeo, and part of last night in a bar with her.

Miranda
, she thinks.
I'll catch up with you later. You and the cop
.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

It is at worst a three-hour drive from Lexington to Clinton/Norris where Kate Edgers lived. It didn't seem kind to call her with a
hey, you don't know me but
sort of pitch that slammed her with the news that her so-called husband actually wasn't. Kate Edgers didn't know me; she wouldn't believe me. She might check my story out, and find I was right, but that wouldn't get me time and conversation.

It seemed reasonable at three this afternoon when I took the Raccoon Valley Road exit off I-75 to find her house and talk to her face-to-face. It was now past seven, pitch-dark and windy, and I was on some road called Kent's Ferry, which was patchy with ice, and clearly a death trap for possums, whose remains appeared regularly on the side of the road. I had no idea how to get back to the interstate, much less to the Edgers's house. On my right was a mobile home, with three cars in pieces to one side, and at least twelve dogs in and around the property. All of them were barking. I had just passed a sizable two-story house, newly built, with a circular driveway and a Ford Explorer out front. Before that was some kind of a chicken farm. Although I had lived in the South all my life, I had never been this far out of the real world. It was dark this far out from the city (
any
city) and patches of fog floated across the road. I felt sure I was going in circles, but nothing looked familiar, and there were no recognizable landmarks that meant I had been this way before.

I pulled off the side of the road and flipped the cell phone open. There was service. This was still Earth.

I dialed information and found that Bell South was alive and well. “Edgers, please. On Kent's Ferry Road.”

Information gave me the number, then dialed it for me, and a woman answered on the second ring.

“My name is Lena Padget, and I'd like to talk to Kate Edgers, please.”

“I'm Kate Edgers. I'm afraid I don't know you.”

“
Please
don't hang up. I'm really lost out here.” I didn't fake the panic in my voice. “I got off on Raccoon Valley Road at three o'clock this afternoon and I have been wandering around this mountain ever since.”

“Where are you trying to go?”

“I'm a detective. I've been trying to find your house, to talk to you about the Cheryl Dunkirk case.”

“I've already talked to all of you people.”

“I'm private. Hired by the family to find Cheryl.”

“I can't help you.”

“If you don't want to talk to me about Cheryl Dunkirk, that's fine, but would you please God tell me how to get out of here? Right now, all I want to do is go home. There's a man down the road by a church, and he is standing out there singing about what the dead men say, and I don't want to go back in that direction if I don't have to because honestly, this guy freaks me out.”

Kate Edgers laughed. “He's harmless. Your name is familiar. Lena Padget. Do I know you?”

“No.”

“Then why is your name so … wait a minute, I read about you a couple of times in the papers. Aren't you the one that helps women and had the sister that died?”

“That's me.”

“Did you come by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of car are you driving?”

“A Miata.”

“And you're not a reporter and you're not a cop?”

“A private detective, only concerned with Cheryl's family. And I'll go away if you'll just tell me how to get the hell off this mountain.”

“My son and I were just sitting down to a pot roast dinner. If you'd like to join us, you're only about five minutes away.”

Pot roast and people, bathrooms, telephones. “That would be wonderful.”

“First let me explain my driveway,” Kate Edgers says. “And be really careful on the way up.”

I passed the driveway three times before I finally found the double mailboxes, one with reflective numbers down the post. The driveway was on the other side of the road, a short sweet break in the trees. “Driveway” was a kind word for a wide dirt track that had a smattering of gravel mixed in with mud and potholes big enough to give pause to an SUV. The Miata was small enough for me to go around most of them.

The track wound gently at a steep angle, but it was nothing I couldn't handle. The road leveled off and the trees gave way to a small clearing. There was a basketball goal on my right, and the glint of moonlight on water on my left. I put my foot on the brake and took a look. The pond was huge, I could see that even in the dark, and I thought I could make out the dark shape of a small dock. Beautiful in daylight, no doubt.

I put my foot on the accelerator. The tires spun, then achieved traction and I turned a corner and braked.

Kate Edgers hadn't exaggerated.

The road headed up at a ninety-degree angle, snaked sharply to the left and disappeared in the dark. Built on a clearing at the top, the house was a monster, brown brick and oddly shaped, some kind of homemade amateur architecture. There were security lights blazing on every end of the house, and lights in the windows, but darkness pushed from every side, and the woods were thick and close.

You think a lot about gravity when you drive up a road that is more like a ski lift, and you tell yourself that your car will not fall over backward and to think it might is foolish. The final curve had a sheer drop on the right and a deep rut on the far left, which is where I would have preferred to position my car.

Once the curve was negotiated, the track straightened out to level ground and the house. The front porch light was on. I got out of the car and looked back down the mountain, thinking that if down was worse than up I might never make it out.

A voice came out of the darkness. “The first time I came up that driveway, I cried. Of course, I knew I was going to have to live here.”

A porch light went on, and I headed to it like an insect on a summer breeze. Kate Edgers stood on the porch—a tall woman, with dark blond hair pinned on top of her head, a genuine lopsided smile, and a firm, calloused handshake. She smiled at me and shook my hand. I did not know how she felt about me, but I was very glad to see her.

“Come on in. The roast has been cooking all day in the Crock-Pot, so it ought to be good and ready.”

A dog stood by her side, black, with a large head and wise eyes. He looked at me and wagged his tail. He looked wolfish and had the presence of a rottweiler.

Kate reached down and scratched the dog's head. “Don't worry about him. He looks scary but he's a baby doll, aren't you, Georgie Boy?”

I put a hand out and George sniffed it delicately, standing politely while I stroked his neck. He stood on the porch until both Kate and I were inside, and I felt like part of his herd.

It was a strange house. A stairwell on the right, with open back steps, led up to bedrooms and down to a basement. The foyer passed through French doors to a great room, where a wood-burning stove sat on a hearth at the right corner. The outer wall was all windows and French doors that led to a deck that circled the house. The view out over the mountain would likely be amazing when it wasn't pitch-black dark. A boy of about four or five was on his knees in the middle of the floor, snapping pieces of wooden railroad track together.