Текст книги "Unhallowed Ground"

Автор книги: Heather Graham

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 18 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 8 страниц]

“Wow. He laid a lot on you,” Caleb said.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, or that a house can be evil,” she told him.

“I don’t believe it, either. But I believe that human beings are capable of some pretty hideous things, and that madmen can walk around looking like saints. And if there’s a legend that goes with the house, some bastard may find it useful in carrying out his own crimes.” He lifted her chin, looking into her eyes. “Look, Sarah, you don’t have to believe in ghosts to have been subconsciously influenced by what Mr. Griffin said. You had a dream, and I was the last person you saw before you went to sleep, so…”

“So…” she repeated softly, staring at him. “So where did the mud come from?”

“We tracked it in somehow.”

She stood. “I’ve got to call the museum and leave a message. Caroline’s parents suggested that I take a few days off, and I’m going to. I want to look at the historical records and whatever newspaper files I can find. I want to see what went on in the house over the years. So you can go on to the police station without me.”

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Caleb asked her.

“I’ll be fine. So go do whatever you have to do,” Sarah said.

“I’m going to help hunt for Winona Hart,” he said.

“What about Jennie Lawson?” she asked.

“Jennie was here. I found someone who saw her. She wanted to go on the spookiest ghost tours she could find.” He hesitated. “When I showed her picture around yesterday, a lot of people thought I was showing them a picture of Winona Hart, so logic says that the same person snatched both girls. If we can find Winona, I’ll find out the truth about Jennie.”

“Do you think Winona might still be alive?” Sarah asked. “She hasn’t been missing that long.”

“We can hope. But I want to get moving quickly. That means a trip to the station to tell Tim Jamison what I learned yesterday and find out everything the police have on Winona, and then I need to follow up on every last person who was near her and every possible clue.”

“I hope you can find them both. Alive.”

He nodded. “I hope so, too.”

“You don’t think it’s possible, though, do you?”

He shrugged. “I saw Jennie’s mother. She said she knows that her daughter is gone. And Jennie was a good kid. She wouldn’t have just disappeared. She wouldn’t have run away with a man. So…quite frankly, it doesn’t look good. But people need closure. They need to bury their dead, and they need to grieve.” He stepped toward the door. “Maybe I should walk you wherever you’re going.”

She smiled. “Thanks. But it’s broad daylight now. Someone will be by to get into the house soon—Floby left me a note that they still had some things to do. And I can walk to the library on my own when it opens. It’s a whole three blocks away—maybe.”

He paused at the door, looking back at her. “You believe me, don’t you?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Yes, it’s just that…it was so real.” It took her a minute but she finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly. “I’m sorry about your room and your stuff. I can go clean up if you want, since you’ll be busy.”

He shook his head. “No, that’s all right. I can manage. But, by the way…”

“By the way…what?”

He grinned. “If you ever show up at my room again, it had better be for sex.”

She flushed, and her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.

He let himself out.

Sarah knew that legal documents would only back up what she already knew.

What she needed were newspaper articles, diaries and letters from the period. Such things existed, she was sure. St. Augustine had been occupied by Union forces long before the war’s end, and it had never been burned to the ground. Many of the old houses had attics, and those attics often yielded treasures offering insights into the past. Even now, despite the intervening years, people often found old trunks in crawl spaces, or stashes of Confederate bills stuffed into cubbyholes or under old floorboards. Even Spanish coins still surfaced now and then.

It wasn’t a hopeless case.

Vicky Hind, one of the librarians, was happy to assist Sarah.

“Those old bones got you thinking, huh?” she asked sympathetically. “Well, legend and history are often one and the same, you know. Here’s a memoir written in 1908 by a woman whose father came down after the Union established command of the city. She was born in 1860 and came here with her mother when she was just two years old. She self-published her journal in 1908, when she was nearly fifty. She died a few years later, so we’re lucky she got it out there. Anyway, take this and have a seat in the General’s Room, and I’ll see what else I can find for you.”

Sarah thanked her and took a seat in the room that had gotten its name because a Confederate general had been born there. He hadn’t surrendered when Lee had. Instead, he’d gone to Texas, hoping to lead his unit into Mexico to establish a new order. His mother had remained in the house until her death, a feisty old woman who reveled in causing trouble for the “damn Yankee invaders,” as she called them.

Sarah started reading and found a charming personality developing as she turned the pages. She found herself fascinated by the writing alone. The author, Sadie Hanrahan, didn’t remember much about the war, but she did recall the days after. There had been a great deal of bitterness in the city, despite the fact that it had been in Federal hands for years, and that many of the citizens had never wanted Florida to secede—they had always needed their Yankee tourist dollars. It had been a difficult time. President Lincoln had been assassinated. John Wilkes Booth had been hunted down and shot, and his co-conspirators hanged, but many blamed all Southerners for the death of the president. And so many in the South had been stripped of their homes, their heritage and more.

Sadie’s first pages were filled with tales of growing up and vivid descriptions of buildings that hadn’t changed to this day. There were also some very funny anecdotes about learning to deal with the cumbersome clothing women had to wear, even in the summer heat. And then Sarah hit the jackpot.

It was on a Saturday late in 1865 that I walked by the old Grant place with Scotty Kehoe. It was near dusk, and in front of the building, in the drive, we saw the mortuary’s glass-encased hearse with a coffin inside. At first I was enthralled by the two horses that were to draw the funerary wagon; they were glorious big black beasts, wearing black-feathered headdresses. But Scotty was drawn by the coffin within the hearse. “Come on!” he said to me. “What are you doing?” I protested. Then he called me a chicken. Well, I couldn’t have that. He’d cluck at me every single day at school. So I crept with him through the brush that was kept neatly trimmed around the entrances to the main mansion and the carriage house and then we crawled up on the conveyance to look in. I’d never been to a funeral. I was shocked by the coffin. It was beautifully carved, but there was a glass window above the face. I saw the girl in the coffin. She was young, with beautiful wheat-colored hair, and she had pale skin, like all her blood was gone, but her lips were a bright red. She looked as if she was sleeping. “Look, she’s opening her eyes!” Scotty teased, and I nearly screamed. I did slide from my perch. That was when the elder Mr. Brennan came out on the porch. I had always hated him. We weren’t bad people, not most of us—even if they did call us carpetbaggers. But Mr. Brennan had rather taken over the place before he had bought it. We’d heard tales that the previous owner’s father, Mr. MacTavish, had been a kind man, forced to turn his home into a funeral parlor to survive once his plantations had failed and his son was gone to war. MacTavish had died, and his son had returned from the war only to have his heart broken when he found his father dead and his fiancée gone, so I’d been told. Some people remembered the son kindly, too. He had been dashing, and a valiant soldier. Always charming and kind and caring, especially to children and the elderly. But other people whispered about him, saying that he was really the devil incarnate and a murderer. But at least some people had liked him, and no one liked old man Brennan. I especially didn’t like Mr. Brennan after that day. He was furious; he yelled at us and promised that kids or no kids, next time, he’d have his shotgun out, that we were defiling the dead. We ran. I thought he would tell our parents about the incident, but he never did.

I found out who the girl in the coffin was that night, when my father’s housekeeper was talking to him about it.

“A carriage accident, my foot. That young’un disappeared more’n three weeks ago. It’s something afoot, just like that Madison girl who disappeared in ’sixty-two. She died in a carriage accident, too—so they said. I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. Not Miss Della Bentley. It’s them carpetbaggers that run this place that say what isn’t is, and ignore what’s going on. They say one girl rode off with her Rebel lover, and another girl ran off to meet her Yankee lover, and it just ain’t so. They’re just saying it was a carriage accident ’cause poor Mr. Cato MacTavish isn’t around for them to be blaming this on! Why, they’ve even tried to start the rumor that Cato is out hiding in the woods—that he comes back to stalk and hunt women—just in case someone realizes there weren’t any carriage accidents.”

My father was a good man. He tried to soothe her. He said it was a tragedy about the poor girl, but we couldn’t go believing in wild fantasies made up by folks who were bitter about the war and had little else to do.

Our housekeeper walked away, muttering.

My father kept a sharp eye on me after that, though. I wasn’t allowed to walk around town anymore with the other children. But by then, we weren’t really allowed to be children at all anyway. Maybe it had to do with it being the aftermath of the war. I was a child at the time. My father trusted the authorities. I trusted my father.

After that day, whenever I saw Mr. Brennan on the streets, I ran. One day, when I was much older, I asked my father about Brennan and the house on St. George. He was silent for a long time. “There was a lot of tragedy there,” he told me at last. I asked him why the young Mr. MacTavish had left. I understood a broken heart—half the women not too many years older than I was had broken hearts, on account of their fellows had died in the war. But he had abandoned such a beautiful house.

“The disappearances,” my father said. “Or the murders,” he added after a moment of reflection. “I didn’t believe it at the time.” He rattled off a list of names. Women’s names. “They all disappeared, starting right when Cato MacTavish came home. We assumed then that they had run off—it was a war, conditions were miserable. Only two of the girls were ever found—and the doctor on call said that both had died in the streets. Carriage accidents. But…they didn’t look right.” He stopped. He wasn’t going to tell me any details of the corpses that had been found. “Cato’s fiancée had disappeared right after he left to fight, and since he wasn’t here, he was a good scapegoat. When he returned from the war, people said he’d killed her because she was pregnant or he was just tired of her. He tried to fight the accusations—they weren’t official, there was no evidence—but bear this in mind, child. Words can be as cruel as any weapon; they give rise to battles and wars, and in the end, he was a soldier who could not win the battle of words, I’m sad to say. Thing is, soon after he left, the housekeeper disappeared, too. She wasn’t actually his housekeeper, she had come with Brennan. But the whole city was terrified of her.” “Why?” I asked. “Black magic.” “You don’t believe in black magic,” I told him. He shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe. They said that she mixed voodoo with Indian lore, black magic and more. Some thought it was her spells that made the girls disappear. Or made them run away. Or perhaps she was the one who killed them. The truth, Brennan was allied with the powers that controlled the city at the time. Cato MacTavish was not. And MacTavish was a man who could bear no more. Perhaps he changed his name when he went north—or south. All anyone knows for sure is that he rode out of town one day on his father’s big bay, crying out his innocence and cursing the city, never to be seen again. Brennan, now, Brennan is a dangerous man. He conned Cato into teaching him the business, and he managed to make MacTavish leave and get hold of the place for himself. It’s always dark, that house, always covered in a pall of black and mourning. I told you once, years ago, to stay away. And I want you to do so now and forever, even if you’re growing into a woman.”

And so I did. But as the years went by, I found myself walking past the house, time and time again. It was on St. George, just a block from my home, so it was easy to take that route. The house remained sheathed in black, black veils, black drapes, black wreaths. And the death carriages came and went, and I still wondered why old man Brennan had never told my father about my crawling up on his hearse and looking into the coffin of the beautiful young woman.

Sarah just finished the entry when her cell phone rang, nearly sending her flying from the chair as it broke into her intense concentration.

“Hello?” she said a bit breathlessly.

“Sarah?” It was Caroline.

“Yes, hi.”

“Are you all right?”

Sarah laughed. “Yes. The sound of my phone just startled me, that’s all.”

“I know you’re taking the day off, but can you stop by the museum for a minute? Come in the back. No one will even know you’re here.”

“Okay. But are you all right? You sound…disturbed.”

“There’s something I need to show you,” Caroline said.

“What?”

“Just get over here. You really need to see it for yourself.”

Sarah frowned and glanced at her watch. “Okay. Should I head over now?”

“Please. I’ll meet you at the back door.”

Sarah returned the book to Vicky Hind, aware that it was valuable and should be put away carefully, so she was surprised when Vicky told her that she was welcome to take it home to read.

“I know you, Sarah. You’ll treat it like gold. Here—let me put one of these dust jackets over it, and then you won’t have to worry about a thing.”

Once the book was duly encased, Sarah put it in her shoulder bag and left, thanking Vicky for her help. Vicky assured her that she would dig around for more references to the house.

Sarah hurriedly walked the few blocks to the museum and headed around to the back.

Caroline was already standing there with the rear door open, dressed in homespun antebellum attire. Her face was knitted in a frown, and she was anxious.

“Get in, get in!” she urged, as if they were on a secret spy mission.

Sarah stepped through the back door into the employees’ break room, nicely set up with a slightly worn but comfortable sofa, a refrigerator, microwave, television and coffeemaker. A door on a side wall led to the hall, and the restrooms and lockers.

They were alone in the room, but even so, Caroline looked around worriedly, as if the walls themselves might be watching surreptitiously.

“Caroline, what the hell is going on?” Sarah demanded.

“He’s so striking—Caleb Anderson, I mean. And I admit I’ve been trying to throw you at him. It’s time for you to start dating. I mean, your fiancé’s been gone for longer than you knew him….”

“Caroline! What are you trying to tell me?”

“All right. Remember how I told you I was sure I’d seen Caleb Anderson before, and you thought he looked familiar, too?”

“Yes,” Sarah said warily.

Caroline looked around again, then reached into the pocket of her homespun cotton skirt and produced an old photograph.

It had been framed and placed under glass to preserve it—the museum was careful with all its artifacts. It was dusty, probably from being in the storeroom, since they rotated exhibits.

“Okay, it’s a photograph. An old photograph,” Sarah said, taking a quick glance, then looking back at Caroline. “I think it’s a Brady, and since it’s in good condition, probably very valuable.”

“Look at it,” Caroline insisted.

Sarah did—and nearly dropped it.

It was the same man she’d seen standing at the foot of her bed.

It was Caleb.

In nineteenth-century garb, complete with one of the sweeping plumed hats that had been in vogue at the time.

“The name is on the back,” Caroline said. “It’s Cato MacTavish. MacTavish. This guy owned your house, Sarah, and Caleb Anderson is his spitting image!”

7

“I’ve had my men cruising every street, we’ve searched in the water, and we’ve questioned every kid that was at the beach party before Winona Hart disappeared,” Tim Jamison told Caleb. “We’ve checked out the parents—because when a kid disappears, right or wrong, we look at the parents first. We’ve interviewed every ex-boyfriend and all her girlfriends—we never kid ourselves. Girls can be jealous and vicious.” He was sitting behind his desk at the station, and now he leaned back, looking weary. “We were on this faster than a brushfire. If she was there to be found, we would have found her. Here’s what’s really sad,” he admitted, leaning forward and folding his hands on his desk. “Last year, when we started the search for Jennie Lawson, it was impersonal—we just didn’t believe that it had anything to do with us. Unlike you, we couldn’t find anyone who saw her after she picked up her car in Jacksonville, so we assumed she never got here, that she went somewhere else or was taken before she got this far. As time went by, we assumed it was a random crime, tragic, but a one-off. You and I both know that the percentage of violent crimes that go unsolved is staggering. Old cases get shoved to the back burner when new crimes are committed. But now…now we’ve got two women who’ve as good as vanished—into thin air.”

There was a tap on the door. A young officer came in at Jamison’s bidding, handing him a file, which he in turn handed to Caleb. “Take it with my blessing. Anything you can find, we’ll be grateful to hear about.”

Caleb nodded. “Thanks. I’m really hoping I can find something here, because I think we’re looking for someone who’s going after a certain physical type, and that the two cases are related.”

Jamison shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve only taken a few classes in behavioral crime, but you’d think this guy would escalate, not snatch one girl a year.”

“Maybe he was somewhere else in between, or maybe there’s a method to his madness,” Caleb suggested.

“No one sees anything, and we’ve got nothing at all to go on,” Jamison said glumly. “They say there’s no perfect crime, but this guy seems to be getting away with what he’s doing pretty fucking well. No bodies, no blood, no signs of a fight or fingerprints, footprints, no witnesses—nada.”

“Criminals are often strangely brilliant,” Caleb reminded him. “This guy may study people. Follow them, watch them, looking for the perfect victim, making the perfect plan to get her. But sooner or later—and I hope like hell it’s sooner—he’ll make a mistake. I’m going to start by talking to the kids from the beach. You never know what will jar a memory, or what little overlooked piece of information might come out.”

“Like I said, you have my blessing,” Jamison told him. It looked to Caleb as if Jamison hadn’t been sleeping. As if there were more on his mind than just the missing girl.

Caleb stood and thanked him. For a moment he toyed with the idea of mentioning that someone might have broken in to Sarah’s carriage house, but he refrained, seeing as she still seemed to half believe that that someone had been him.

He left the police station, leafing through the file he had been given. He was completely convinced that the parents had nothing to do with Winona Hart’s disappearance. He was working on the theory that the same person or persons had abducted both girls.

He had a list of the kids who had been at the party. A well-organized list, with notes by each name, and the names weren’t in alphabetical order, but in an order based on who among those who had seen her last had the closest relationships with Winona.

One of the boys she knew well worked at an open-fronted ice-cream shop along the pedestrian mall. Nigel Mason. According to the notes, he should be working now, and that meant he had a place to start.

Feeling newly invigorated, Caleb headed down the street.

“That’s…amazing,” Sarah said to Caroline.

“Amazing? It’s uncanny,” Caroline countered.

Sarah felt as if the air had been knocked out of her.

The picture depicted the man she had seen at the foot of her bed—exactly.

Chills raced through her. Her throat was dry. She didn’t want to show Caroline just how much the photograph disturbed her, but her knees were buckling. She pretended to be studying the old photograph with keen interest as she headed for a chair and sat.

For some reason—maybe to preserve her own reputation for sanity—Sarah didn’t want Caroline to know anything about the night’s strange events, at least not yet.

Events—or nightmare?

“Now I understand why Caleb looked so familiar when we first saw him,” Caroline said, following her and perching on the sofa by the chair. “We both saw this photograph before when it was part of that display on how the city was divided during the Civil War. You and I took down that exhibit when we replaced it with the one on Henry Flagler’s wives.”

Sarah let out a long breath and almost laughed aloud as she handed the photo back to Caroline. Of course. That was it. She had seen the photograph before, and that was why she had thought Caleb looked familiar. She just hadn’t put the two together. And of course this was why she’d been so sure Caleb himself had been in her room. Now, with a fair amount of time having passed between the morning and this revelation, it all made sense. In a way, at least. She’d had the photograph catalogued neatly somewhere in memory. She’d met Caleb. Mr. Griffin had come into her house and given her quite a jolt with his crazy fantasies. And then she had dreamed, and in her dream, she had dredged up her memory of the photograph and put the Caleb she knew into the body of a man who had lived long ago.

“Caroline, I could kiss you!” she said.

Caroline stared at her as if she’d gone nuts. “What?”

She decided she still didn’t feel ready to share what was proving to be only a nightmare, however terrifying, with anyone else. She’d already made a fool of herself in front of Caleb.

“This photograph. It explains everything,” Sarah said. Caroline was still looking at her blankly, so Sarah smiled and went on. “Don’t you see—I’ve been wary of him because somewhere in my subconscious I remembered this photo. Now I understand why he seemed so familiar, so…” She faltered, at a loss for a way to pull things together. “Now it all just makes so much sense,” she finished lamely.

“That’s all you can think of to say? You’ve got to be kidding,” Caroline said.

“No, I’m not kidding. Why?”

“Didn’t you hear me? This is uncanny.”

“I admit, the resemblance is startling.”

“It’s more than a resemblance. There’s got to be a genetic connection. I mean, how else could Caleb possibly look so much like Cato? His great, great, great…whatever grandfather must have been Cato MacTavish, who used to own your house. Maybe it’s destiny that Caleb’s here now. We have to show him the picture. We have to tell him about it,” Caroline said excitedly, and then her smile faded. “Although I have to admit, when I came across the picture today, my…mind went a little crazy. For a minute there I actually thought maybe Cato was back from the dead to take vengeance on the people who drove him away.”

“Oh, Caroline…”

“Well…you have to admit it’s pretty weird. I mean, Cato’s double shows up in the city when all this…stuff is happening.”

“Caroline, Caleb is here searching for a girl who disappeared a year ago, and then he plunged right into the efforts to look for the girl who only just disappeared, but be reasonable. He wasn’t here when either one of them disappeared,” Sarah said, then looked away for a moment. She’d been scared for a minute herself when she first saw the photograph, yet here she was, completely prepared to defend Caleb Anderson with all the passion she had.

And it wasn’t because he was good-looking and articulate, not to mention capable, charming and charismatic.

He worked for Adam Harrison, and that meant he was the one thing that really mattered: a good man.

“I know. I realized right away that I was being ridiculous. I can’t wait to show the picture to him, though. There’s obviously some connection here. He has to be related somehow to Cato MacTavish. I know—when Cato MacTavish left St. Augustine, he changed his name to Anderson.”

Sarah shook her head, smiling. “Even if he is somehow related—and I admit it looks likely—the connection might have come down through the maternal line.”

“Maybe. But I’ll have to research it later. Right now I have to get back out there and talk about Henry Flagler,” Caroline said, glancing at her watch. “What’s up at your house today, by the way?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been at the library, but I think I’ll head back home now. And, Caroline, I don’t think you should look into Caleb’s connection to Cato here at the museum.”

“Why not?”

“Because…Caleb is here on business. I don’t think he’d want to become a sideshow oddity.”

“You’re right.” Caroline studied the photograph for a long moment, then offered it to Sarah. “You hold on to it.”

“Thank you, Caroline.”

Caroline looked at her and smirked. “You’re really going to go back to the library to try to trace Caleb Anderson’s background, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Caroline studied her. “You like him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, then hesitated for a moment. She felt silly for keeping secrets and decided to confide in her. “Caroline, here’s what’s so strange. I must have remembered this photograph in the back in my mind somewhere, because last night I had a nightmare about this man, dressed just this way, standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that he was innocent.”

“Innocent?”

“I didn’t know what it could have meant then, but now that I know this is Cato, I think he meant he was innocent of kidnapping and killing those girls.”

“How bizarre.” Caroline grinned suddenly. “Did you think you were dreaming about Caleb all dressed up or something?”

Sarah grimaced and said, “Actually, I thought it was really him and he’d broken into the carriage house. I went over to Bertie’s and burst in on him, and accused him of trying to scare me half to death.”

Caroline gasped, then laughed. “You didn’t! What on earth did he say? No, wait. More importantly, does he sleep in the buff?”

“No.” Sarah said. She hesitated. “He was wearing boxers.”

“Still…oh, Sarah!” Caroline started to laugh.

“Stop it.”

“Sorry. So—does he think you’re crazy? Too crazy to maybe go out with? Wait—how did he look?”

Sarah paused, then admitted, “He looked damned good. Now let me out the back,” Sarah said. “I don’t want to run in to anyone right now. Be sure to lock the door behind me.”

“Okay, okay, come on.”

Sarah had just stepped outside when Caroline stopped her. “Sarah?”

“What?” Sarah asked, turning back.

Caroline was grinning. “Go for it. If he looks good in boxers, chances are he looks equally good out of them.”

Sarah groaned and made her escape.

Nigel Mason looked like a typical high school kid, hovering between adolescence and adulthood. He was tall, and extremely lean and lanky, with long hair that he had tied back and covered with a bandana as he served ice cream. Caleb recognized him instantly from his picture in the file Tim Jamison had given him.

He observed the boy before approaching the window. He saw Nigel perk up when a trio of young women came to the stand, and after they had paid and departed, he leaned an elbow on the counter and looked glum.

Caleb approached him. “Nigel?”

Nigel looked up and straightened, a wary look coming into his eyes.

“Yes?”

Caleb offered him a handshake. “Hi. My name is Caleb Anderson.”

“You another cop?” Nigel asked.

“Private investigator.”

A flash of pain crossed Nigel’s features, making him young and vulnerable all of a sudden. He looked around for a moment, as if praying for someone to come over to buy ice cream. “You’re here about Winona, aren’t you?” he asked Caleb.

“Yes.”

“I wish I knew something,” Nigel said.

“Can you just tell me about the night she was last seen? I’m coming in fresh, and something might hit me that the cops missed, or maybe you’ll remember something new.”

Nigel looked around again, still hopeful that a customer would appear from nowhere. “I wish I knew something,” he repeated.

“Anything that you know will help me. Where were you? Who was there? What was the night like? Like I said, I’m not a cop. I’m not going to turn anyone in, or tell anyone’s folks they were drinking or smoking pot or anything else,” Caleb assured him.

Nigel inhaled deeply, then exhaled loudly, as if he’d made a decision. “Okay, so we had this party at the beach—out on Anastasia Island, not far over the bridge. There’s a place that’s kind of off the beaten track. We had a bonfire going, and…and yeah, there was booze and grass.” He went quiet, remembering.

“You dated Winona for a while, right?” Caleb asked, prodding him.

“Yeah, kind of. Last year. But it felt too weird. We’d gone to grade school together, you know?”

“There were no hard feelings when you split up?”

“Hell, no.” He stared at Caleb suddenly. “You think I could have done something to her?” he asked incredulously.

“No,” Caleb assured him. His gut told him that this kid couldn’t have carried off a white lie, much less an abduction. “I’m just wondering if she would have confided in you. If she would have told you that she was going to run away, for instance. Or if she was meeting someone.”

“She wasn’t running away. And she wasn’t meeting anyone.” He was quiet for a minute, then looked at Caleb as if sizing him up. “She was pretty wasted, though. Just on beer—she didn’t smoke weed. But she had a lot of beer. She was dancing around the fire and pretending it was some kind of an old Maypole or something.”