Page 125 of Moonshine Kiss
The quarter panel on the passenger side was missing. The rear bumper had fallen off on one side but was still attached on the other. The rear fender was scraped up. There was rust on every single surface, but the interior was remarkably intact aside from a decade of leaves and dirt and nature’s debris. After snapping a few pictures of the exterior with my phone, I pulled the latex gloves out of my coat pocket and put them on. I ducked down and climbed into the back seat.
“Cassidy,” Bowie warned.
“It’s fine. I’ll be a second,” I said. My throat tightened when I saw the rusty brown stains on the driver seat. Old blood. So much blood.
I thought of my father being called to the scene and seeing Connie’s lifeless body limp behind the wheel.
I thought of him keeping his concerns to himself to protect the family.
I’d known Connie. About as well as a teenager could know her best friend’s mom. Suicide didn’t make sense. She was stubborn, like Scarlett. I could see her deciding to live to ninety just to displease her husband. But accidents happened every damn day, stealing people away from their loved ones.
“Move over,” Bowie said gruffly.
“Bow, you don’t have to—”
But he was sliding in next to me.
“We used to fight over who got to ride up front,” he said, patting the disintegrating blue cloth that sagged from the roof of the car. “Gibs was the tallest and needed the most leg room. But I had an inch on Jameson. Of course, then Scarlett started pretending to get carsick and got the front seat all the time.”
“Diabolical, that sister of yours,” I said.
Bowie gave a non-committal grunt. I patted his knee. “There’s no need for you to be in here. I shouldn’t have dragged you out here. It’s gotta be hard for you.”
He reached into the seat back pocket with more bravery than me. Who knew what kind of tarantulas or fanged, poisonous wildlife had taken up residence.
“Here.” I shifted and pulled out a second pair of gloves.
Wordlessly, he snapped them on and dug back in. Not finding what he was looking for, he felt around with his feet on the floor.
“Still here,” he said, reaching down into a pile of leaves and twigs and pulling out a pink-and-purple striped umbrella.
It sparked a few dozen memories. Grumpy Gibson carting groceries to the car, Connie holding the umbrella over him. Me and Scarlett trying to use it as a lightsaber while Connie drove us to a junior high dance. Jameson taking a whack at the Canadian goose that tried to take a bite out of Bowie’s arm when Connie had dragged us out of the house for a rainy day walk.
“What’s that still doing in here?” I asked softly.
“Dad was supposed to come clean the car out after…after she died. Looks like he never did.”
There was a paper coffee cup still tucked in the cupholder. One of Scarlett’s flip-flops was in the door pocket.
“She used to have a whatchamacallit…a dreamcatcher,” Bowie said.
“On the rearview mirror.” I remembered it.
I peered between the seats. The windshield was cracked in a few thousand spidery veins. The driver’s seatbelt was still clipped, but the belt itself had been cut. The gas station coffee cup had brown spattered stains, and I wasn’t sure if it was spilled coffee or long dried blood.
Something glimmered through the dried, frozen muck on the passenger side floorboard, and I reached down.
“Anything up there?” Bowie asked. He sounded numb, and I was reminded that I was a gigantic ass for bringing him here.
I pawed carefully through the dead leaves and mud coating what had once been a Tasmanian devil floor mat. “Aha!” I plucked it out of the debris. The synthetic feathers were long gone, but the silver hoop and wire were mostly intact.
I handed it over my shoulder to Bowie. It wasn’t evidence. He could have this piece of his mother.
There were other things in the dirt. Bits and pieces of a life. A grocery receipt. A crushed soda bottle. I found one of Scarlett’s old Bonne Bell lip glosses and a guitar pick that could have been Gibson’s or Jonah’s. There were no folded maps with a convenient X marking the spot where Jonah had gone after the disappearance, nothing that said Callie Kendall was here.
I peered over at the driver side. Glass glittered amongst the leaves on the floor. The seat’s fabric had rotted through, and god knows what might be living in the sodden mess.
I tried the trunk release, but it didn’t work. As I was pulling my hand back, a yellow piece of paper caught my eye. It was wedged in a crack in the dashboard between two molded pieces of plastic.
