What the River Knows (27 page)

Scott looked down at his tea and shrugged. “Food’s good.”

Al studied Scott for a long minute. “That it is.” He looked up at Debbie. “I’ll have the French dip, please, Debbie.”

“Coming right up, Al.”

“So, no new leads?” Al folded his napkin in half, then in half again.

“Nope.” Scott watched Al folding. “Everything has run into a dead end.”

“Now what?”

“Case gets shoved to the back burner, and no more active investigation unless something new turns up.”

“By ‘no more active investigation,’ I’m guessing you mean that you will continue to watch for clues?”

Scott nodded. “Can’t let this one just go.” He lined up his silverware. “I guess it’s the hometown connection, or because I’m the one who found her.” He sighed. “We got the second suspect in the Quick Shop murders, but neither will implicate the other one in pulling the trigger, so that case will drag on for a long time.” He spotted lunch coming their way. “So that means it’s back to hunting down stolen bric-a-brac on Craigslist.”

Al smiled as Debbie set a plate in front of him. “I take it you don’t like bric-a-brac hunting.”

“I don’t even like bric-a-brac.” Scott took his first bite. “But I do like this.” He tried to remember if he had eaten dinner last night, but failed. All he remembered was falling asleep in his chair when he got home from work, waking up to go for a run, then falling asleep in front of late night talk-show hosts when he returned. Dinner wasn’t part of that memory.

Al, too, stayed silent as they ate the first few bites. “So,” he said finally. “What really brings you to Homedale on your day off with no new leads to pursue?”

Scott stopped eating for a moment. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe I think being here will bring back something I need to know.”

Al dipped his sandwich. “About the case or about yourself?”

With three-fourths of his meal gone, Scott lost his appetite. He reached for his tea. “The case.” He drank the tea and looked down at his hands. “Maybe both.”

“And why do you have today off?”

Scott looked out the window at the cars parked here and there along Main Street. Two more cars pulled up in front of the Diner and one parked at the antique store across the street, which was only open from eleven to two on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “I got suspended for the rest of the week.”

Al continued to eat his dinner. His silence pushed Scott into going on. “It’s department policy to let your supervisors know as soon as there is a major change in the household.” He looked down at his plate. “Like your wife moving out.”

“And you hadn’t mentioned that to your supervisor?”

Scott shook his head. “I kept thinking she’d change her mind. She’s pretty volatile sometimes.”

“Then how did they find out?”

“I got served divorce papers at work.”

“Oh.”

“And then I have to see a shrink before I can come back to work.”

Al finished his sandwich. “And you don’t want to see a shrink?”

“None of the guys ever do.” Scott shook his head. “It’s against ‘the code.’”

Al crumpled his napkin onto his plate. “Yet you have a degree in psychology.”

“That’s just so I can understand the bad guys.” Scott smiled. Even though he had already told Al more than he had planned to tell him, it seemed right to do so.

“I see.” Al leaned back in the booth, as Debbie swooped in to refill his coffee and take away the plates. “Nothing about understanding some things about yourself that may have been puzzling you?”

Scott focused. “Like what?”

“Like why you can’t focus on doing chores around the house, but neither can you pull yourself out of focusing on every aspect of any case you are on.” Al took a sip of coffee. “Any case that doesn’t involve bric-a-brac, that is.”

“Well, you know, that doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

“It does if you know how your brain is wired.”

“Backwards?”

Al leaned forward. “Our youngest son was the same way. Couldn’t remember where his shoes were or whether he did his homework. Took him forever to clean his room, because we’d come in to find that he was rearranging his bookshelf instead of just putting things away to vacuum. When we finally started seeing doctors, they told us he experienced attention deficit disorder.”

Scott nodded. The story sounded like his autobiography.

“They wanted to medicate him, but Sarah resisted. She knew how intelligent and creative he was. So she did a lot of research into behavior modification and learned that we could teach him to live
with
the disorder instead of constantly fighting against it. We helped him set up routines and schedules to keep him on track.”

“Did it work?”

“He’ll get his M.D. in two more years. On the Honor Roll, involved in half the clubs on campus.” Al met Scott’s eyes. “I see a lot of Sam in you, Scott.”

Scott sat silent. Al had hit the nail squarely on the head. But what to do about it?

“So what are you so scared of seeing the therapist about, Scott? They don’t make you feel like a horrible person, in fact, most of what they do is to help you feel better about yourself.”

“I don’t know.” Scott looked down at his hands. “Maybe there’s some things about myself I just don’t want to face.”

“Scott.” Al’s voice made him look up. “Fears are like noises in a closet on a dark night. In the dark, it sounds like there’s a bear in the closet. But if you get up, decide to face your fear, and turn a light on it, it’s nothing more than a mouse, if it’s that big. And it’s easy to defeat then.” The skin around Al’s eyes began to crinkle. “Unless you have a phobia about mice.”

Scott chuckled, something he hadn’t done much lately. “Not mice. Spiders.”

“So ‘Itsy, Bitsy Spider’ wasn’t your favorite nursery rhyme as a child?”

Scott shook his head. “Not so much.”

Al laughed. “You know, I have it on good authority that they got in some fresh-baked pies this morning. How does coconut cream sound?”

Scott turned over his coffee cup. “Lemon meringue sounds better.”

Chapter 58

Scott took his time on the drive back from Homedale. Overhead the brassy blue sky contrasted sharply with the molten gold of the cottonwoods lining the riverbank. Most people liked the bright reds of fall maple leaves, but Scott preferred the twinkling yellow of the cottonwoods, the plains version of the aspen. As the shorter days and cooling temperatures caused the chlorophyll to draw out of the leaves into the branches, all that was left was the color of the sunlight the leaves had captured over the summer.

The couple of rains they’d had since Labor Day had been the slow, soaking kind. And now, thanks to that rain, the winter wheat carpeted most of the fields he passed with bright green. He paused at the bridge over the river. The rain had rescued it as well, though there was still more sand than water between the banks. He pulled his truck to a stop and parked. Walking down to the riverbed, he pulled off his shoes and socks and let his feet sink a half inch into the sun-warmed sand. A gnarled bit of gray tree trunk presented itself a yard away, so he sat down with his back against it and watched brown and yellow leaves float slowly past him. “What do you know, river?” He tossed a twig into a channel where it joined the leaves. “What secrets are you hiding from me?” He continued to sit and watch as he waited for the answer. The quiet lulled him to sleep, until a grain truck thundered over the bridge and startled him. He blinked a few times and checked his watch. He’d slept nearly a half hour. Time to get moving again. He stood and stretched.

By the time he got back to his apartment, he’d be ready for a run. And he just might call that shrink before he left the house.

Chapter 59

Scott strolled into his office five minutes before eight on Monday morning. Bates looked up from his desk. “I take this to mean you saw the shrink.”

Scott plopped into his chair, then rolled it toward Bates. “Yeah, I saw her and she saw me.”

“And?” Bates took a sip of his coffee, then dumped it in the plant on the windowsill.

“She wants to see me every other Friday for a while.”

“That’s not so bad.” Bates poured another cup of coffee, then set it on his desk to cool.

Scott shrugged. “I guess it could be worse.”

“Yeah.” Bates tried his coffee, still too hot to drink. “She could have made you turn in your gun and pull desk duty till after the divorce hearing.”

“Glad she didn’t do that, but I still don’t like it.”

“Just go until she gets tired of you and then you’re free.” Bates turned back to his computer. “Who knows, you might get something good out of it.”

Scott rolled back to his own desk. “Yeah, callouses on my ass from sitting in her chair.”

“What?” Firearms training had done Del’s hearing no good.

“Nothing, I just agreed with you.”

The phone on Del’s desk jangled. “Bates.”

He followed his terse answer with three “uh-huhs” and a “yeah” before he hung up. “Let’s go, rookie.”

“Oh, yeah?” Scott rose and slipped into the jacket he had just shed. “Where?”

Bates pitched his coffee cup in the trash. “Ten miles west of town.” He reached the door to their office.

“Isn’t that a little out of our jurisdiction?” Scott continued to sip from his McDonald’s coffee.

Bates grinned as he headed down the stairs to the garage. “Yeah, but SO just got called to a burglary that is the same MO as our unsolved ones.” He paused a moment at the door to the garage to catch his breath. “They thought we might stand a better chance of catching them if we worked together and compared notes.”

“Imagine that.”
More bric-a-brac theft.
“You know, maybe the thieves are doing the homeowners a favor.”

“How so?” Bates pressed the clicker on the key fob in his hand, and the Crown Vic they usually used gave them a friendly wave with its headlights from the other end of the garage.

“Well, if thieves stole all the bric-a-brac there is, worldwide, think how much less dusting would have to be done.”

Bates opened the driver’s door; keyholder had the call to drive or ride. “I see your point, rookie, but what would that do to the furniture industry?” He slipped behind the wheel. “What about all those poor workers overseas who build the china cabinets they put this stuff in?” He looked at Scott as he slid into the passenger seat. “What about their families?”

“As usual, oh wise one, you are right.” He set his coffee cup in the holder. “If we can solve this crime and continue the collection of bric-a-brac, we can save families, whole villages even, from losing their way of life.”

“Amen.” Bates started the car and pulled from the garage. “Truth, justice, and the American way.”

Scott nodded. “We are making the world safe for capitalism, so that Americans can collect more stuff for others to covet.” He picked up his coffee again. “God, it really is Monday, isn’t it.”

Bates sighed. “Yup. I’d much rather wrestle a sweaty drunk to the ground than investigate something like these have been.”

“Yeah, it’s like these thieves are in there as much to destroy someone’s memories as they are to find anything to sell.”

“It would sure break my mom’s heart if anyone stole the stuff I used to hate to help her clean.”

“My mom, too.” Scott closed his eyes, realizing how much of his mother’s bric-a-brac had been boxed up and placed in storage near his brother’s house, while the influence she had wielded over the style and substance of an entire farmstead was now reduced to one small bedroom and a chair in the family room. Never again would he grumble as he washed china lambs and shepherdesses while she told him the history of how each one had come into the family and then into her hands. To be fair, she should have had one daughter who could have appreciated the stories wrapped up in each figurine or knick-knack, instead of boys who simply wanted to be done with them and run outside. Of her daughters-in-law, only Rica, with her solid sense of family heritage, could have appreciated the sacrifices made to build lives on the prairie each piece represented. But he had never taken the time to help Rica get to know his mother. Not until his mother lay recuperating from a broken hip, and Rica made it a point to stop in to visit her at the end of her shift every day, had the two women begun to bond, and then his mother moved to a rehabilitation hospital near his brother, and from there into his home, and Scott lost one more opportunity to build family that he would never regain. He really needed to go visit his mom.

They turned off the highway and followed a sand road between irrigated cornfields, now dry and brown awaiting troops of upland bird hunters in another two months. Bates slowed as the car wallowed in the sand.

Two more miles, and he turned back east a half mile to a farmhouse that had once been surrounded by a windbreak of mixed evergreens and deciduous trees with barns and granaries. Now, leaves blown south by the wind, the trees that had escaped tornadoes and ice storms stood as a battle-scarred army around the house. One of the barns was settling back into the ground, like a mortally wounded elephant sinking slowly to its knees and then leaning over on its side. Inch by inch and year by year, the barn yielded to time. Near the barn, a combine that had been state of the art right after World War II sat rusting, a redbud tree growing through its header. Another barn had been converted to a shop and then the effort abandoned. A door swung in the wind. The house itself needed paint and the yard some tender care, though scattered and bent rose bushes and beds of dried flowers provided evidence that the yard had once been loved.

Bates pulled into the circular driveway behind the Sheriff’s Office Blazer. Deputy Lyle Nash stepped out of the Blazer. “Mornin’ Del, Scott,” he said as he strolled to their car.

“Hey, Lyle.” Scott hopped out of the car, camera in hand. “How bad is it?”

“I think it’s worse than the ones you had in town.”

“Wow.” Bates stood beside Nash while Scott snapped pictures of the house. The back door stood ajar, framed photographs littering the steps and keeping the door from closing. Items of clothing, left as if the thieves had no concern about what they dropped, trailed to a spot where a large vehicle had been parked near the door. The thieves had driven over and shattered a crystal plate in their haste to leave.