Page 18 of Heartbreak Bay

I don’t want to lie to her, but I also don’t want her to know Melvin Royal still haunts me. I don’t want anyone to know that. “No. Not really.”

She probably doesn’t believe that, but she lets it go. “Thanks for making the trip. I know this is twice in just a few hours. And I ruined a good night’s sleep.”

“Oh, my daughter ruined it before you did.” I explain about Lanny’s late-night club date. She just smiles.

“That sounds like her,” she says. “Hope you’re not going to be too tough on her. She’s growing up fast.”

“Too fast,” I sigh. “Anyway. Did you talk to your chief? Let him know you were going to keep working the case?”

“He’s fine with me working it until the TBI says we can’t. Then I may have to have another conversation.”

“Maybe the TBI will want to work with you on it.”

“I get the feeling they think us rural folk don’t have the skills.”

“Well, that’s a dumb mistake.”

She quirks a smile, barely. “Not necessarily. You met Deputy Dawg this morning; beyond pissing in the accidentally right place, there’s not much he actually did right. Maybe they’ll see past that and look into my record. I don’t think they’ll bother.”

Or they’ll look into her record and worry she might turn out to be all too effective. She might take the shine right off them if she solves it. The TBI is a bureaucracy, like anything bigger than three or four people; there’s a chain of command, there are clearly defined roles, and there are always politics in play. In her present frame of mind, my friend doesn’t care about any of that, and while I’m with her, I wonder if she’s thought through the consequences.

I open my mouth to ask, then shut it without uttering a word. She has. And she’s made her decision regardless.

“What were the autopsy results?” I finally ask her. Her eyes lose focus, and there’s a significant chill that settles through me even before she answers.

“What we expected,” she says. “Death by drowning. Marks on both bodies show they struggled.”

It conjures up a nightmare, which I imagine she’s seeing in terrible detail. I can feel the cool breath of it on the back of my neck, but she’s faced these ghosts directly. I don’t reply. I can’t think of anything comforting to say.

“I went to her house,” she continues after a moment. “Sheryl Lansdowne’s house. It doesn’t look to me like she was planning a trip, and there weren’t any suitcases in the car, just her purse. You ever drive your kids around in the middle of the night?”

“Sure, when they were little,” I say. My mouth has gone dry, and I take a restoring sip of water. “Mostly Connor. There were more than a few nights I couldn’t get him settled, and I didn’t want to wake up ...” My voice fades out to a thin thread that breaks on the last word. I’m Gina again, frustrated and exhausted, afraid the baby will wake Melvin. I leave my daughter asleep in her bed and I put my son in the baby seat in the back. I drive him around the dark neighborhood, singing nonsense songs, until he finally is limp and peacefully dreaming.

I left my daughterwith Melvin.

I haven’t thought of that horribly vulnerable moment until now, and it chills me deep. She was just a little thing, and I’d checked on her when I put my son back in his crib. She’d seemed peaceful and undisturbed, but I hadn’t thoughtonceabout the risk to her. I’d had no reason to then. But I hadn’t even thought of it later, when I found out what Melvin was, what he did.

Oh, I’d had generic, unfocused terror over what hecouldhave done, but for some reason this one memory of her lying so defenseless in her bed, face round and innocent, little hands clutching the Care Bearsblanket she loved so much ... it breaks something in me with an audible, ringing snap.

I didn’t protect her then. And in a very real sense, I’m horribly aware that I can’t protect her now. Not from this carnivorous world.

Kez has seen it.

“You’re thinking about being with Melvin, aren’t you?” She’s too perceptive. I swallow and nod. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge all that up again.”

“He’s like a zombie,” I tell her. “Keeps coming back no matter how many times I put him down. It’s okay.” I don’t think the smile I deploy is especially convincing. “Anyway, the answer is yes. I did drive my baby around in the middle of the night sometimes. And I remember how exhausted I was, and how surreal everything seemed. When you’re a new mother, you’re just in a fog of hormones and exhaustion most of the time.”

“Yeah, already feeling some of that,” she sighs. “So that’s likely what she was doing out there in the middle of nowhere. Getting the kids to sleep?”

“Or she was meeting somebody.”

“I thought about a drug deal, but honestly, nothing about that car or her house screams junkie to me. House needed some outside work but seemed pretty orderly inside.”

“We both know of high-functioning addicts, especially opioid addicts,” I say, and she nods. “But you’re right—that seems an especially lonely place to go for a drug exchange. Pretty strange when truck stops and convenience stores exist.”

“Could have been some kind of romantic rendezvous,” Kezia adds. “Though I can’t imagine that as a make-out spot even on a damn sunny day.”

I have to agree with her. If ever a place had a bad spirit, it’s that one. And now it has claimed two lives ... or two more. You’d have to be exceptionally high or drunk to have some kind of consensualencounter out there. “So, if not a drug deal gone bad, we’re looking at a straight-up abduction of the mother that he covered up by pushing her car into the pond?”

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