Monday went by slowly. Stella roamed the shop floor restlessly, her head throbbing and her mouth cottony. She ordered a pizza for lunch and, after promising herself she’d eat only half and take the rest home for leftovers, nibbled it down to a few crusts over the course of the afternoon.
Hardesty Sewing Machine Sales & Repair did the same languid business it always had. There had been a steady trickle of customers when Ollie ran the place, and there was a steady trickle now. The only difference was that Ollie used to fix the machines himself; now, a man came in and picked them up once a week and returned them a few days later, running better than Ollie had ever managed.
Stella made small talk while she handled the day’s few sales, and tried to keep herself awake by dusting and polishing and straightening the stock, until it was finally time to close up and go home. After a dinner of an apple and half a bag of carrots—penance for the pizza—Stella fell asleep watching CNN, woke up after eight dreamless hours, and switched to Good Morning America. For a while she was content to watch Diane Sawyer sideways, checking the tourists holding signs, as she always did, for anyone from Missouri. On the rare occasion when one of her fellow Missourians made it all the way to Rockefeller Center, Stella felt both proud and wistful; the farthest east she’d ever been was a high school trip to Philadelphia, back when they still had the Liberty Bell out where you could see it close-up.
Diane had on a fungus green jacket today, and a section of her hair, the part that was supposed to fall coquettishly above one eye, was doing something a little strange, winging out at an angle. “Not your best look,” Stella murmured at the television. But kindly: she could relate.
Stella decided it would be a day of hard work. She had a banana for breakfast and got to work in earnest. She put the laundry in the dryer and collected all the dirty sheets and towels and the remaining dirty clothes and sorted them. The sight of the color-coded piles made her feel pleasantly efficient.
She’d been a competent homemaker. As a young mother, she’d kept a spotless house, dressed her daughter Noelle in clean, pressed little outfits, with her hair in ribbons to match. She’d baked elaborate cakes for church fund-raisers, slipcovered all the furniture herself, vacuumed the drapes regularly, and dusted twice a week.
Now, with two businesses to run, she’d let the place slide. Usually it didn’t bother her. In fact, it still felt decadent and rebellious. Occasionally, though, Stella spent a whole day cleaning the place from top to bottom.
Today would have been such a day. Except that around ten thirty, the doorbell rang. Stella peeled off her yellow rubber gloves and set down the bucket of soapy water and the brush she’d been using to scrub the kitchen floor, and answered the door.
Chrissy Shaw stood on her front porch wearing a strappy purple top that showed off her pillowy breasts as well as the fading bruises along her shoulders and upper arms. She crossed her arms over her chest and shifted from one high platform sandal to the other, her face swollen from crying.
Stella’s heart sank. She hadn’t expected to see the girl for a while. Usually, her clients stayed away after a job. She didn’t take it personally—they usually just needed to distance themselves. Not everyone was as comfortable dishing out Stella’s brand of justice as she was. No matter how relieved they were with the results, it could be a messy business.
When a client came back this quick it usually meant something had gone wrong.
“Is Roy Dean bothering you?” Stella demanded, holding the door wide for Chrissy to enter.
“No’m,” Chrissy mumbled. She had on tight denim shorts that barely covered her jiggly rear, and she tugged at the fringed hems as she clopped past Stella. She trailed some kind of perfume that smelled like it came out of one of those peel-and-rub ads in Cosmopolitan magazine—a little musky, a little papery. Could be the girl had just spritzed on a little over-much to cover up skipping today’s shower; Stella employed that technique herself from time to time.
Chrissy walked into Stella’s living room and lost her momentum. She turned to the couch, the love seat, Ollie’s old La-Z-Boy and considered each one, but couldn’t seem to make up her mind. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and managed a pathetic little whimper. Chrissy was in her middle twenties, but if you didn’t know better you might guess she was eighteen.
“Hell, sugar, don’t matter where you plant your butt, we’ll still be having the same conversation,” Stella said. “Tell you what, while you’re deciding, why don’t I get us some iced tea.”
When she came back with the tray a few minutes later, Chrissy had slumped low in the love seat and was leaking tears down her plump cheeks, pale blond hair sticking to her sweat-damp skin. Her wide blue eyes were ringed with smudgy mascara.
“Oh, dear,” Stella said. “I know it seems bad now, but whatever Roy Dean’s done, it’s nowhere near the worst problem someone’s come here to talk about. Nothing I can’t help you fix, anyway.”
Chrissy wiped her nose along her knuckles and sniffled. “Yeah? Well, guess what, I think this time I might a brung you a problem you ain’t had before.”
Stella sat down on the couch and picked up a long silver spoon off the tray and gave her glass of tea a swirl. Oh, these girls. Every one of them sure they had a new story to tell. Honestly, it tried her patience sometimes, until she remembered what it felt like to be in their shoes. When you were the one getting smacked around, trash-talked, cheated on, and generally treated worse than any man would treat a tick-infested hound dog, then yeah, your story seemed like the most singular piece of news on earth.
“Is that right, dolly.” Stella screwed down the lid on her impatience and settled in to hear the whole story. “Well, you tell me all about it, and then we’ll figure out what to do. But here, wet your whistle before you get rolling.”
Chrissy accepted a glass of tea but set it down on the table without sipping. “Roy Dean’s gone and run off.”
“Now honey, he isn’t gone, he’s just been staying out at a trailer down close to Shooter’s Cove,” Stella said, wondering if the girl had been foolish enough to go looking for him. Sometimes, even after suffering all manner of abuse, her clients had second thoughts. “But there’s no need to go stirring things up.”
“Ain’t Roy Dean I care about, Stella—only just he’s taken Tucker. Came and took him yesterday morning. Told me he wanted his hibachi back and when I went around back to get it, I guess that’s when he got Tucker ’cause when I came back inside they was both gone.” Chrissy snuffled and dabbed at her eyes, smearing her makeup further.
“Oh no,” Stella said, setting her own glass down and jerking to attention. “That does change things. Shit!”
“Yeah,” Chrissy said, and her glum expression slipped further and a shadow of terrible worry flashed across her doughy features. “That’s about the size of it.”
Stella excused herself, making sure that the plate of Oreos was in Chrissy’s easy reach, and called Sheriff Goat Jones from the kitchen. She was one of only a handful of people with direct access to the sheriff’s mobile number, and that was a result of her only case that had gone terribly wrong, a failure from which Stella would never entirely recover.
Two years back, Lorelle Cavenaugh went missing less than a week after she came to Stella for help. Stella spent forty straight hours searching for Lorelle on her own before calling the sheriff. She invented a story about them being third cousins and Lorelle leaving a terrified message on her machine, which she had just happened to erase, and which oddly didn’t show up in the phone company records.
By the time they found Lorelle, stuffed head-down into a rain barrel at Jack Cavenaugh’s fishing cabin, Stella had promised herself that she’d never again let anything get in the way of a woman’s safety. Not even if it meant danger to herself, or exposure, or bringing in the entire sheriff’s department.
Goat Jones told her she had more stick than a cocklebur after she hounded him to widen the search and ignored every order he gave her to stay away from him and his men while they scoured the county. He called her a few other things, too—the words bulldog and no-sense and damn stubborn fool came to mind.
Goat said he’d be right over, grousing only a little that she wouldn’t give him any details on the phone. Stella peeked in at Chrissy, who was nibbling morosely at a cookie, and hightailed it to her bathroom, where she got out the modest arsenal of beauty products that she kept in an empty Jif peanut butter jar, and went to work.
It wasn’t that she was fixing up for the sheriff, exactly. Because that would be ridiculous. For one thing, their work generally put them on opposite sides of the law. That alone made the man, if not exactly an enemy, certainly not a person she should be fraternizing with.
And anyway they didn’t run in the same social circles. Goat was a regular at the Friday night poker game at the firehouse—the same game Ollie had played in for years, the game all of Ollie’s old friends still belonged to. Not that it was fair to paint them with the same brush as her dead husband, but they had become a little standoffish since she nearly stood trial for killing Ollie.
Goat got himself invited to the game as a sort of law enforcement courtesy. His deputies, Ian Sloat and Mike Kutzler, had been playing for years, and it wouldn’t have looked right to exclude Goat, even though he was still a newcomer to the area. He had lived in Prosper for only a couple of years, having been hired in to replace old Sheriff Burt Knoll after he died of a heart attack while cheering on his grandson at a go-kart race.
Most of the poker players had lived in Prosper for decades, if not their entire lives. They were courteous to Goat, but maybe “friend” was too strong a word; outside the poker game, she knew they didn’t barbecue together or bowl in the same league or even jaw too long if they ran into each other at the Home Depot. Still, at the rate of four hours a week for two years, that was… oh, hell, a few hundred hours anyway that Goat and her late husband’s drinking buddies shared each other’s company, and in Stella’s book that made Goat guilty of poor taste in the company he kept, if nothing else.
Stella splashed cold water on her face and slapped her cheeks a few times in an effort to get a little color into them. She leaned in close to the mirror and didn’t like what she saw: it had been a while since she’d taken a pair of tweezers to her eyebrows, and they seemed to have made expansion plans on their own. The battle she was waging on her wrinkles, armed with the jumbo tub of Avon Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate that her sister had sent her last Christmas, didn’t seem like it was trending in her favor. The wrinkles were still there, and if she wasn’t mistaken, the ones around her eyes had hatched a plan to reach down and shake hands with her laugh lines.
Stella scrambled through the Jif jar, tossing aside shampoo sample packets and emery boards and a dozen lipsticks in unflattering shades—she was a sucker for those Clinique gift-with-purchase deals—until she found the tube of Avon Radiant Lifting Foundation. Another gift from Gracellen. Praying it hadn’t passed its sell-by date, she squeezed a little onto her finger and dabbed at the worst spots on her face.
Her hair had escaped its barrette and sprang out in an unruly mass. That was entirely Stella’s fault. For most of her life she’d been vain about her thick, wavy light brown hair, keeping it trimmed and conditioned and blown dry. She’d just gotten in a few bad habits in the last couple of years, that’s all. Missing yesterday’s appointment with Jane over at Hair Lines hadn’t helped any.
She grabbed her hairbrush and yanked it forcibly through, ignoring the pain. Unfortunately, taking out the tangles also served to play up the line of demarcation between her gray roots and the shade that Jane had mixed up at her last visit.
Stella was overdue for a goodly amount of maintenance work.
She gave up and put down the brush. She made a face at the mirror, figuring she’d done all she could on short notice.
At the door to her bedroom, she had a thought, and dashed back to the bathroom. She dumped the Jif jar out in the sink and found what she was looking for at the bottom of the pile: a small bottle of White Diamonds. She sprayed behind her ears and on her wrists, sniffed deeply, and added one last spritz down her bra.
In the living room Chrissy had made a sizable dent in the Oreos. “Good girl,” Stella murmured, helping herself to one. “Got to keep your strength up.”
Naturally, Goat knocked on the door just as soon as she had the whole cookie in her mouth. Stella backhanded the crumbs off her lips and swallowed hard as she went to open the door, managing to get the thing stuck in her throat. She had to cough out a greeting.
“Goat,” she gasped, holding the door wide and gesturing him in. “Good of you to come.” A bit of cookie lodged stubbornly and she hacked some more.
“You okay there, Dusty?” Goat asked, but damn the man, he didn’t look so much concerned as amused. Light streaming through the picture window bounced off his shiny bald head and sparkled up his bluer-than-blue eyes, and he gave her one of his sideways grins. “Want me to whack you on the back a time or two?”
“Don’t you dare,” Stella said with as much dignity as she could manage. “Please sit.”
She reclaimed her own spot on the couch and sipped primly at her tea. Once she’d cleared her air passage so that she could talk without spraying crumbs, she gestured at Chrissy, who had managed to get herself more or less into a sit-up-straight position in the chair to greet the sheriff.
“Chrissy, you know Sheriff Jones, don’t you, dear? And Sheriff, this is Chrissy Shaw. She’s one of the Lardner girls. Out Road Twelve, the soybean Lardners.”
There were two strains of Lardners in town. The soybean Lardners were the wrong ones to hail from, if you had any choice in the matter. Ralph Lardner was a lazy mountain of flesh who did more sitting on his ass and ordering his boys around the farm than he did actual labor, and the family skill set lent itself more to quick-and-dirty methods rather than true craftsmanship, so the Lardner sons were constantly patching the siding on the barns and resetting leaning fence posts and attacking late-season weeds with industrial-strength fungicide in watering cans, killing off their mother’s flower garden at least once a year.
The other Lardner in town was named Gray. Ralph and Gray were distant cousins, but it would take degrees in both history and math to trace out the exact nature of their blood relationship. The lineage had split long enough back that Gray’s side had managed to build a modest fortune buying up rich land along Sugar Creek on the south end of town. While Ralph’s crew mined stony, hard-packed dirt for a bedraggled crop every year, Gray had to just look at his land sideways and it seemed happy to send up burgeoning fields of corn, alfalfa, prizewinning squash—whatever he had a mind to grow.
Ralph’s boys seemed bent on following in their father’s sorry footsteps. His girls, on the other hand, tended to marry the first boy who asked, just to get off that unlucky land.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” the sheriff said, shaking Chrissy’s limp hand with exaggerated care before settling his lanky frame into Ollie’s old La-Z-Boy.
Damn, but the man was tall, Stella couldn’t help thinking for the thousandth time. Had to be six foot four, with acres of muscle running along his broad shoulders visible even under that homely tan uniform shirt. In his spare time, Goat had what was generally viewed as a strange hobby: he liked to lash his kayak to the top of his pickup truck and drive to any of the hundreds of put-in spots along the northern shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, as close as twenty miles away as the crow flies. Then he’d spend the day paddling around the inlets and channels and bights along the jagged shore.
All that paddling clearly built up a man’s physique.
“Nice to meet you, Sheriff… sir,” Chrissy said, a rosy blush stealing across her pale, full cheeks, and she looked at the carpet rather than at Goat. Stella might have thought the girl was shy, but she knew better: stammering uncertainty was the blood-dictated response that all the Ralph Lardner kin had to the law. She guessed that the idea was that if your pa or brothers weren’t guilty of something at this particular juncture, odds were good that they had just come from or were plotting to soon commit some sort of law-skirting activity.
“Chrissy’s a good girl,” Stella said, hoping to head off any conclusions Goat might be tempted to draw.
“Oh, I’m sure she is. I’m sure you are,” he repeated, giving Chrissy a reassuring smile.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you over,” Stella said.
“Well yes, Dusty, I am, but I’m also wondering if you’re planning to offer me a glass of that tea.”
“Oh!” Stella felt the blood flow to her cheeks as she hauled herself up out of the couch. “I meant to, I’m sorry, I just, ah…”
She retreated to the kitchen to fetch another glass, cursing under her breath. Damn, damn, damn. She had the hardest time keeping her wits about her when Goat was around, and that annoyed her plenty. She possessed, after all, a slick and hardened criminal mind; she’d committed any number of misdemeanors and felonies. She generally stayed icy cool in sticky situations, so why was she such a stuttering mess around the man?
It wasn’t like she was afraid old Goat was going to put two and two together anytime soon. Those who knew her business weren’t talking. Those who suspected… well, they weren’t talking much either, and Stella figured they all had their reasons: some didn’t want to end up on her bad side; others figured the world was a sight better place if she was left in peace to do her job.
Of course, there was the small and niggling problem that Goat, she suspected, was far smarter than he let on. And eventually, someone was going to break the time-honored rule of small-town living and engage in a little conjecturing with him—outsider or not. When that day came, it would be the sort of reckoning that would make all of her previous brushes with the law look like playground entertainment.
Yet another reason to spend as little time with the man as possible.
“Here,” she said accusingly, thrusting the glass at him.
“Well, I suppose I’ll just pour myself,” Goat said, accepting the glass. He reached for the pitcher, raising his pinkie in an exaggerated fancy-schmancy pose. “Don’t you exert yourself none, Dusty. Am I allowed to have a cookie, or are those just for the ladies?”
Stella picked up the plate and smacked it down in front of him. There were only three or four cookies left. Poor Chrissy had eaten most of them—who could blame her? “And stop calling me Dusty.”
“Why’s he call you that, anyway?” Chrissy stage-whispered in a perfectly audible voice, still keeping her eyes cast down.
“ ’Cause he hasn’t got any manners, I guess,” Stella said.
Goat laughed. “That’s not right. It’s just ’cause she’s a bad old Hardesty. Get it—‘desty,’ ‘dusty.’ She’s not like a regular gal, Miss. Why, she frequents disreputable taverns, cusses a blue streak, probably chews tobacco when nobody’s looking. Can’t exactly call her ‘Rosebud’ so—”
“That’s enough,” Stella said sharply, and she must of put a little extra mean-it in her voice because suddenly everyone was very quiet and Goat slowly lowered his iced tea glass to the coffee table and gave her a long, studied look.
“What I mean to say is, I think I’m a little old for some juvenile nickname, so if you don’t mind, you can just start calling me Stella, like every other person in this town. Goat.” Maybe it wasn’t necessary to add that last bit, but Stella was steamed enough to go for it.
“Well, why d’you call him that?” Chrissy asked the carpet. Clearly, she was no student of conversational subtext.
Stella sighed. “Now, hon, why don’t we just lay this whole names business to rest. We got plenty else to talk about here.”
“No, Miss, I don’t mind answering,” Goat said, but he kept his gaze trained steady on Stella, and by the wicked sparkle in his eyes Stella could tell she’d managed to get his ire up. Smart, she chided herself, way to provoke the law when she needed him most. “See, when I got divorced, my first wife saw fit to tell everyone that the problem was that I’m as randy as a—”
“Stop right there,” Stella snapped. Chrissy might be one of the dimmer bulbs in a family that wasn’t lit up bright with smarts to start with, but Stella didn’t think it was right to take advantage of her gullible nature with any sort of teasing. Not to mention the terrible day the poor girl was having. “It’s just that the sheriff has been stubborn from the day he was born. It was his own mama who gave him that nickname.”
“What kind of stubborn?” Chrissy asked, darting shy little glances in the man’s direction. Her mama had obviously not gotten around to teaching her that it wasn’t polite to talk about people right in front of them as though they weren’t there.
“Well, the wrong kind, of course. Like a goat. You ever try to lead one around? Wherever you try to drag it, the goat figures it wants to be headed the other way.”
“Oh. I see.” Chrissy nodded. “Well, Sheriff, I imagine I’ll just call you ‘Sheriff Jones,’ if it’s all the same to you.”
“That’d be just fine, Miss.”
After that there was a brief silence while Stella’s two guests stole polite glances at each other.
“Chrissy’s husband, Roy Dean, has run off,” Stella said. Time to get down to business. “He’s been gone since yesterday morning. And he took little Tucker with him.”
“Who’s Tucker?” Goat asked.
At that, Chrissy’s features, which had been schooled into her best approximation of mindful interest, melted into a blubbery puddle. Stella handed her the box of Kleenex she kept at the ready on the side table next to the couch; smacked-around wives often found it came in handy. “Tucker’s my little baby boy,” she wailed. “He’s not even two years old yet.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s only been one day—”
“And Tucker ain’t even his!” Chrissy continued to sniffle. “Roy Dean never paid that child any mind before. I don’t know why he’d want to go and run off with him!”
Goat looked at Stella, eyebrows raised.
“Chrissy was married before,” she explained. “To Pitt Akers, from the Akers over up south of Sedalia.”
“But he wasn’t the father either,” Chrissy cut in, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. She was getting herself under control a little.
“No?” Goat asked politely. “I think I might ought to start noting some of this down.” He pulled out a little notebook and flipped to a fresh page. “Now, whose boy is your Tucker?”
“Well, I’m not entirely sure, see, because that was right about when I broke up with the fella I’d been seeing after Pitt and I split up, and there was this one night out at my cousin’s—”
Goat held up a palm to stop her. “I guess I don’t need to know that,” he said.
“What Tucker is, is a child from a previous relationship,” Stella clarified, hoping to save Chrissy a little embarrassment.
“That’s right,” Chrissy said, nodding. “That’s exactly what he is.”
“Now, had your husband been talking about taking any trips, going to visit kin, anything like that?”
“Oh, no sir, Roy Dean’s not one for a lot of visiting. And his folks are all around here.”
That was an understatement; Shaws were firmly rooted in Prosper. Some of them probably hadn’t left Sawyer County in years. Roy Dean’s daddy had a painting business he’d got from his own daddy, and now Roy Dean and his brother Arthur were on the books. Tucker, if Roy Dean’d taken more of a shine to the boy, could have looked forward to a painting career himself.
“Was there anybody he had a beef with?”
Chrissy shot Stella a wide-eyed glance, no doubt wondering if she herself counted. Stella gave her a tiny little shake of the head, hoping the girl would have the sense not to talk about the problems between her and Roy Dean. Assuming Roy Dean turned up, and Chrissy had the need to take care of him in some manner or other down the road, it wouldn’t do for the sheriff to know too much about their relationship.
“Um, no,” Chrissy said. “I mean, yes, he got into a fight now and then. He’s kind of quick-tempered, I guess you’d say.”
“Who’s he fight with?”
“Well, just whoever’s there when the mood comes on, I guess. I mean it’s usually somebody says something Roy Dean don’t like, when he’s been drinkin’ too much. Ain’t that usually how it goes?”
“Can you give me a for-instance?” Goat sat with his pen poised and ready to go, but he hadn’t written much yet. So far this wasn’t a terribly unique tale that Chrissy was telling.
Despite its name, Prosper was not a place where people lived extravagant lives. Times had gotten hard in the eighties, and not improved much since. Besides farming, there was the pork-processing plant, and a sad little office park that had never been fully occupied. The businesses ran along the shabby side of legitimate. There was a used-office-furniture dealer, the headquarters of a regional fried-chicken chain, an outfit that installed prefab sheds in people’s backyards, so they had somewhere to put all the junk that didn’t fit in the garage.
Prosper had developed an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, of cynicism, that Stella didn’t remember from her own childhood there. Fifty years ago, when she was born, rural Missouri still strove to live up to the wholesome ideals generated by the postwar era. Men like her father worked hard to buy a house, to get ahead. The American Legion hall and a few of the local churches had been built by volunteers during that era of civic responsibility. As Stella and her sister attended Prosper Elementary and played in the streets and parks and back yards of town, the world seemed like a safe and orderly place. Sure, Prosper had its town drunk, its ne’er-do-wells, its hard cases, but they routinely got their clocks fixed by Sheriff Knoll: after a lecture and a couple nights in the lockup, sheepish spells of better behavior nearly always followed.
Nowadays the distinction between the good guys and the bad guys was a lot blurrier, and it wasn’t clear to Stella who was winning. She was almost tempted to feel sorry for Goat and his crew; she knew that they spent most of their time on patrol and traffic stops and trying to keep a lid on all the problems at the high school, a job that Stella figured parents ought to be helping out with. Sawyer County didn’t extend down to the lake, so they were spared the job of patrolling the shore, but they got the traffic heading home, often drunk, frequently rowdy, and sometimes belligerent.
And with the mountains of procedural requirements in place these days, Goat and Ian and Mike didn’t have the freedom to police the town the way they saw fit, as Burt Knoll had once done. Hell, they probably spent half their time doing paperwork.
It was a wonder Goat had never been tempted to go freelance himself, like she had.
“Well, Roy Dean likes go to BJ’s after work some days,” Chrissy said. “Him and Arthur and them all. Sometimes things get a little out of hand.”
Goat wrote a few words down. “Bar fights, then,” he said. “Anything lately?”
Chrissy shifted uncomfortably in her chair. A pale band of flesh muffined up over her shorts, her lively top not quite up to the task of covering it, and Chrissy tugged at the fabric ineffectively. “Well, maybe,” she said. “A couple weeks ago he came home scraped up some.”
“How so?”
“Well, a little worse’n some, not as bad as other times.”
“I mean, what was the nature of Roy Dean’s injuries?”
“Oh. One of his eyes was swoll up so he could hardly see out of it, and he got hit in the other one too, but not as bad—it didn’t bruise up until the next day. He did something to his arm where he couldn’t lift it up past his shoulder for a while. He was favoring it, said it hurt to lift anything. Oh, and he thought he was gonna lose one of his teeth. It went kind of loose on him, but you know, that seemed to take care of itself. And of course he was cut up here and there, not bad enough for stitches or anything.”
“So a pretty good dustup, then,” the sheriff said.
“Well, not the worst ever, but bad enough, I guess.”
“And you don’t have any idea who it was he got into it with?”
“No sir. Roy Dean don’t like to talk about that kind of thing much. He just makes light of it. I put Bactine on ’im, gauze and bandages. Put some steak on his eyes, raw, you know, have him lay down and that helps.”
What a fool waste of meat, Stella thought. But at least Chrissy was answering the sheriff’s questions without mumbling too much—and without giving too much away about her marital problems. But if Goat had any sense, he’d be on his way to figuring out that part.
“You know men,” she interjected, joining the conversation in an effort to distract him. “They don’t have much to say when they’re on the receiving end of a beating.”
Oops.
Stella clamped her mouth shut, but the unfortunate remark had slipped out. Goat turned to her and gave her a long, searching look. She had to work hard not to fidget. It was like those blue eyes sent out some sort of low-level laser beam that burned right through her skin.
“Is that right,” he said mildly.
Stella had a thought that she’d had before, and not a very comfortable one. At times it seemed as if Goat suspected a little too much about her sideline business. The sewing machine shop provided as much cover as she ought to need: Stella was there every Monday and Wednesday through Saturday, nine to six; Sunday and Tuesday were her days off, and then she made sure that folks saw her doing errands around town.
Her other business was the sort of thing that could be conducted in the evenings. Late evenings, if need be, which was often the case. Besides, it was word of mouth only—and her clients were very, very discreet. They passed her name along only to their most trusted—and desperate—friends. After all, they had as much reason to keep things quiet as she did. More, most of them.
“So I hear,” she said, cool as she could. She felt little prickles of sweat pop along her hairline but resisted the urge to wipe them away. Fussing like that was a good way to signal you were thinking something you didn’t want to let on—Stella had learned that from the online course.
“What about when men are the ones dishing it out?” Goat asked. Same steady gaze.
Stella shrugged. “Wouldn’t know.”
She looked straight at him and carefully blinked twice while she told this whopper of a lie. That same criminology course had advised that people who didn’t blink at all might be lying, concentrating a little too hard at looking you in the face.
Although this might be a pointless lie. It wasn’t exactly an iron-clad secret that Ollie had taken out his frustrations on her for the better part of her marriage. Neighbors heard sounds coming from the house, friends noticed the bruises, and even the most taciturn talked eventually.
Of course, lots of folks had talked when Stella went up in front of the judge, back when Goat was still just a deputy sheriff all the way over in Sedalia, and it was Burt Knoll who had answered a call from the neighbors and found Stella sitting in this very living room next to the body of her husband, wrench still in her hand.
Every person in town knew that Ollie was a wife beater, and plenty of them were prepared to say that he’d always been a cowardly bully, as well. The judge finally had to turn away the flood of would-be character witnesses who’d swear they’d seen Ollie kick a dog or backhand Stella in the car as they pulled out of the church lot after Sunday services. The judge did allow several to testify they’d clearly heard Ollie threaten to kill his wife.
But Stella was willing to bet that Goat didn’t know everything. One of the holy commandments of small-town living was that newcomers weren’t privy to local gossip, even if it was acknowledged truth. So he probably had to do a little guesswork to fill in the gaps. For all Stella knew, he was still wondering why old Judge Ligett had dismissed the case and sent her home in time for Jeopardy.
“All right then.” Goat turned back to Chrissy. “Can you give me the exact date of this fight?”
Chrissy thought about it for a few moments. “No, I can’t,” she said apologetically. “It was probably a Friday, ’cause Roy Dean does his more serious drinking on Fridays, and I guess it was probably in April, but I don’t know beyond that.”
“Well now, Easter was, let’s see, I believe it was on April twelfth. Was it before Easter or after? You remember that?”
Chrissy put on a look of tremendous concentration, pinching her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger. “Well… we went to Easter dinner at Roy Dean’s folks’ place and I don’t remember him being busted up in the face then, so I guess it must have been after.”
“So that leaves, uh, Friday the twenty-fourth, and then you’re into May. May first’s a Friday. You think it was the twenty-fourth?”
More thinking. Chrissy’s brow wrinkled with intense concentration. “Oh, Sheriff, I just don’t know. I’m sorry, sir.”
Goat reached over and patted her knee awkwardly. “That’s all right, hon,” he said gently.
Stella noticed the gesture with surprise. Goat was hardly a warm and fuzzy creature. She had never heard him use any form of endearment before, but maybe Chrissy’s pathetic expression had swayed the stubborn man. A point for their team.
“And you’re sure you don’t know who he might have seen that night?”
“No.”
“Do you think his brother Arthur would have been there?”
“Well, maybe. Sometimes they’d go together, sometimes not. You know how brothers are. Sometimes Roy Dean’d get mad at him for some silly little thing and not talk to him for a day or two.”
Goat scribbled in his pad a little more. “How about since then? Any more fights? Did you overhear any arguments, maybe on the phone?”
“No, nothing like that,” Chrissy said, a little too quickly.
Stella guessed she knew what that meant. Usually women came to her when there had been an uptick in the abuse heaped on them by their men. Sometimes there was a huge confrontation, but more often it was just that the abuse became more and more frequent until the women never had time to recover in between, to convince themselves that it was worth sticking around, that they’d imagined how bad it was, that things would change. In the end, one last straw, usually not so different from those that came before, would be the one that broke the camel’s back and sent them to Stella’s doorstep.
She peeked at Goat and saw he’d knit his eyebrows together in a look of consternation; Chrissy’s quick denial hadn’t got past the man.
Stella also noticed, before she had a chance to stop herself, that Goat had some fine-looking eyebrows: for a man who was out of the hair business on the top of his head, he’d got him some nice thick all-business brows with a rakish slant to them that made him look like the close cousin of a handsome devil.
Goat caught her looking. Winked at her.
Winked! Just when Stella figured she had a handle on the man, he’d go and do something like that, shake her foundations. Maybe that was his goal, to get her flummoxed enough that she’d let her guard down. As Stella blushed, he turned back to Chrissy.
“Any change in his work habits?”
“Well… I don’t think so. I mean him and Arthur Junior been helping their dad on a job at Parkade Elementary School over in Colfax. It’s a big job, so he’s been gone regular, and he doesn’t call me during he day less he needs something.”
“Arthur Junior still on that job?”
“I guess.”
“You haven’t talked to him since Roy Dean left?”
“No… me and Arthur Junior, we don’t get along so good. I can’t ever think what to say around him. I don’t guess he much likes me.”
Stella narrowed her eyes. That was news to her, news she would have preferred Chrissy save for later. She coughed lightly, trying to signal to Chrissy to put a sock in it.
Goat didn’t seem to notice. “I’ll talk to him. What about their folks? Mr. and Mrs. Shaw. Have you talked to them?”
“No sir. I just usually wait until I see them. We go over for Sunday dinner once a month or so, and his mom and I catch up then. Roy Dean sees his dad on the job most days.”
“But didn’t his dad call around looking for Roy Dean yesterday when he didn’t show up for work?”
“Well…” This time Chrissy glanced at Stella before answering. “See, it’s not all that unusual… if Roy Dean or Arthur Junior take a day off here and there.… They cover for each other, you know? If one of them is feeling poorly or something like that?”
Stella couldn’t help it—she rolled her eyes heavenward. Feeling poorly—yeah, she could guess what that was about. She had plenty of her own mornings when she was feeling that brand of poorly. She, however, went and opened up the shop, hangover or no. She didn’t give herself a day off as a reward for misbehaving the night before.
Goat evidently got the drift. He gave those eyebrows a bit of a workout and cleared his throat.
“I see. Okay, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your boy. Tucker, was it?”
“Oh, yes. Here, I got pictures.” Chrissy sat up straight in her chair and grabbed her purse off the table. She dug in it and found a cheap little plastic flip book and handed it to Goat.
He paged through the book, taking a few moments over each photo. “Well, if he isn’t a little dickens,” Goat said, smiling, and Chrissy brightened.
He handed the book to Stella. Tucker was adorable, a big, chubby-handed baby who was laughing in nearly every picture. He had his mother’s wide blue eyes and silky pale hair.
Stella glanced over at the fireplace mantel, where she still kept one of Noelle’s baby pictures; her daughter had been a big, happy baby too, a good sleeper and nearly always contented.
Funny how they turned out.
Stella turned back to the conversation and noticed that Goat was watching her. “That your daughter in that picture?” he asked.
Stella nodded. She didn’t plan to say anything more on the subject, but to her surprise she suddenly couldn’t say any more, because her throat closed up and her eyes stung. Well, it was no wonder, was it, what with all this talk about missing kids.
Of course, Noelle was twenty-eight now, and she wasn’t exactly missing; she just wasn’t speaking to her mother.
“Tucker’s eighteen months and thirteen days old,” Chrissy said. “I got his fingerprints done at the Home Depot on Safe Kids Day. You want me to go home and get the card?”
Goat snapped his notebook shut and slid his pen into the ring binding. “Well, I don’t see any need for that just now, Chrissy. I don’t want you to worry too much about Roy Dean and Tucker just yet. There’s all kinds of reasons why he might be gone, hear, and you’ve given me lots of ideas for where to look for him.”
“You’re going to start right now?” The longing in Chrissy’s voice tugged at Stella’s heart; the girl was desperate enough to get her baby back that she was eager to launch a hunt for her no-good husband.
“Might as well. I’ll be in touch soon’s I find out anything. You think of something, or hear from him, you call me.” He stood, unfolding his lanky legs like a carpenter’s rule, and took a card from his pocket and laid it on the coffee table in front of Chrissy. After a moment’s hesitation, he laid a second one in front of Stella. “I suppose you might as well have one too.”
He gave her that same long, studied, know-too-much look before he threw in a grin, nodded to Chrissy, and made his way to the door. Stella stood and watched him warily. “Thanks for coming so quick,” she said.
“Anytime.” He shut the front door with care, holding the handle so it wouldn’t slam. Through the screen Stella and Chrissy listened to him start up his department-issue Charger and drive off.
“Well,” Stella said uncertainly. “I guess that went about as well as it could have.”
“He sure is tall,” Chrissy said, “for a sheriff.”
“Why, you known any short ones?”
“Short what?”
“Sheriffs, hon.” Stella’s opinion of Chrissy was taking a turn for the dumber, and she was sorry to see it. Dumb wasn’t going to help find Roy Dean any quicker. Still, it could just be the stress of the situation. Poor girl had a lot on her mind, and besides, talking to Goat did weird things to Stella’s own brain, so she supposed she shouldn’t judge Chrissy too harshly.
“Oh! No. Well, there was Sheriff Knoll, of course, and he was about medium, I guess.”
“Chrissy.” Stella sat back down, scooted a little closer to Chrissy, and leaned in close. “This is important. What you told the sheriff, was that all true?”
Chrissy nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
“Did you leave anything out?”
“You mean, like what he done to me lately? Yes, I guess I did.” Chrissy lifted up her shirt, showed the shadow of a wide black-and-blue bruise that stretched across her rib cage. “He’s got more careful about hitting me on the arms, ’cause sometimes it showed. Done this one with his fist though. And got me right above the butt, too, here.”
“All since that fight in the bar?”
Chrissy sighed. “Yes, these ones… they’re taking their time fading. I never do heal up very quick. But before that it kind of seemed like things might be looking up a bit, you know?”
Stella didn’t say it, but she remembered well. How you’d go a week or two, a month, sometimes maybe three with nothing. Start thinking things had changed, that your man wasn’t really so different from other guys, that he’d just come through a bad patch, that was all. That if you were just a little extra careful, a little more attentive, it would be different this time.
Until one day he saw fit to remind you.
“Okay. Well now, look. I want you to go on home and try not to worry, just like the sheriff says. If he calls you, you tell him whatever he wants to know. But then you call me up and tell me about it, hear?”
Chrissy nodded, only a little wobbly. “I just want Tucker back. I’ll do anything to get Tucker.”
“Me too, sweetheart. And I’m going to work hard to make that happen. We’ll get your boy. But if Roy Dean comes back too, then we’re going to be right back where we started. And we need to make sure that you’re still ready to do what needs done. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re gonna whup Roy Dean’s ass.”
For the first time that day, Stella managed a smile. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s the spirit.”