“You’ve got it all wrong, Senator,” he said, keeping his voice down despite the fact that he’d heard her close the door behind her. “I’m not here to change your mind. I’m here to make sure you don’t.”
CHAPTER NINE
LUCY THORNE
Friday, 1:00 p.m.
There was a perfectly serviceable hotel situated just outside town limits, but Lucy chose to stay at the Butterfly Bed & Breakfast cozied up with a few other houses at the end of one of Knox Hollow’s side streets. It was a quirk of hers, to stay in B and Bs or inns during out-of-town investigations. Usually there was no better source of gossip than their owners.
Annie Tate was no exception. She was inching toward her forties—maybe five or six years older than Lucy’s thirty-three—had a plain, round face and a hair color that fell into that indistinct category between blonde and brunette. The thinning strands were pulled back in a neat chignon, complementing the staid-cardigan-and-button-up-shirt combo Annie was wearing.
“Leave your bags here, I’ll show you around,” Annie said, stepping out from behind the imposing desk that took up three-quarters of the entryway.
As Annie led Lucy into the main sitting room, she chattered about the weather, the children’s school play, the businessman who had stayed there last week after getting lost on his way to Las Vegas. “Can you imagine being that turned around?”
The story stretched credulity, but Lucy smiled and shook her head to get Annie to continue. Lucy never understood agents who cut themselves off from the locals, as though nothing could be gleaned from the ebb and flow of the town’s daily life. There had been plenty of cases that had been solved off information that had been dropped in casual small talk, and Lucy soaked it up. The nonsense, the inanities, the foibles of the locals, they painted a picture, each tidbit adding a new layer of color.
The sitting room was a testament to the Butterfly B & B’s name, the walls papered floor to ceiling in a busy spectacle of a summer garden. Little porcelain cat figurines perched on the corners of most available surfaces, ready to pounce into the bowls of potpourri placed liberally enough that the too-sweet perfume had Lucy longing for the coroner’s mint gel.
Annie continued the steady stream of conversation, and Lucy made note of some of the families’ names, the mention of children who might be Eliza’s age, who might be Noah’s.
Josiah Cook came up often. Eliza’s uncle, though Lucy wasn’t sure if it was by marriage or blood.
His name was peppered liberally into Annie’s stories. He’d led a charity drive for the coffee shop after its kitchen had sustained damage from a fire. He’d given Liam Dawson work when Old Man Porter’s general store had been bought out by a big chain from Boise. He petitioned for the state to fix the bridge that was all but falling apart out near the highway.
A local hero, Josiah Cook. A shining example of everything a pastor should be, according to Annie, at least.
Considering the sway he seemed to have, it would have made sense for Eliza to stay in Knox Hollow when she’d confessed. If she cared about what kind of treatment she’d be receiving after she was taken into custody, that was.
Maybe she hadn’t considered the possibility that Josiah’s influence could affect the outcome of her case. Or maybe she had and decided against taking advantage of it.
She asked for me? That little tidbit niggled at the edges of Lucy’s mind once more. She’d mostly written it off before, distracted by more important things. But maybe . . . Why would Eliza have traveled the five hours? Had it been because of Lucy?
As they swung back through the lobby, Lucy grabbed her bag and followed Annie up the narrow, creaky staircase.
“Have to get Frank Thomas out here to fix that,” Annie said, her lips pinched in irritation, staring at the offending step that had wobbled beneath her foot. “Though he has enough on his plate right now, dear heart.”
Lucy skipped the weak board. “Oh yeah, why’s that?”
Annie turned back to Lucy, blinking too fast, a hand resting at the base of her throat.
“His daughter, she ran away,” Annie said without any hesitation, as if it wasn’t inappropriate to give such personal information to a stranger who didn’t even know who Frank Thomas was. God, Lucy loved small towns.
“Ran away?”
“Molly.” Annie said the name as if it told a story all by itself. Maybe in Knox Hollow it did. “She was a troubled girl. But that doesn’t make it any easier for those poor parents.”
“When was this?” Lucy asked as they continued down the hallway, only to stop in front of a door numbered—for no particular reason that Lucy could see—thirty-four. “That she ran away.”
“Oh, let me see now.” Annie pulled the thick, heavy key ring from where she wore it on her belt, like an old-fashioned housekeeper. “About . . . three weeks ago.”
So fairly recent. “How old was she?”
“Just turned sixteen a few days before she left,” Annie said on a sigh. “Teenagers.”
Lucy hummed a little agreeable sound, though her experiences with teenagers were usually as victims of a brutal crime, so she didn’t quite share the irritation—tinged with affection, though it was.
The age range put Molly Thomas close to Eliza, so that made her interesting. But the fact that the girl had run away close to her birthday was a good indicator that she’d just jumped on a bus, probably headed to LA or somewhere equally glamorous-sounding to a kid from Nowhere, Idaho. It was a common-enough pattern. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to run a search on her, see if anything pinged in the databases.
“Well, breakfast is at six a.m. sharp, and my sister and I take our tea at seven p.m. if you would ever like to join us in the sitting room,” Annie said, interrupting Lucy’s thoughts.
“Thanks.” Lucy smiled, but it was a dismissal. It was already Friday afternoon, and she still had the Cooks and the Dawsons to talk to yet.
Annie glanced around, her fingers fiddling with her belt, looking like she wanted to linger, but she finally let herself be nudged out the door with just a little more prodding. Once it was closed, Lucy stripped out of her rainwater-stiff jeans. She pulled on a different pair, calculating that the people around these parts would probably be more willing to talk to her if she were wearing denim instead of the dress trousers she’d also packed.
As she shoved her hair back into a remade ponytail, she tried to better order her thoughts. There were oddities here, ones that continued to undermine the idea that this was the open-and-shut case that it looked like.
She wished she had a whiteboard to write on so she could see the information in a single glance. That always made it easier to figure out where the holes were.
Instead she called Vaughn, putting the woman on speakerphone as soon as she picked up.
“Eliza say anything?” Lucy asked first.
“Nothing.” Vaughn confirmed what Lucy had already guessed. “And what have you found?”
A frustrated sound caught in Lucy’s throat. “More questions.”
“Isn’t that how it always is?” Vaughn said, laughter instead of censure in her voice.
“Noah was killed on Monday night, Tuesday morning at the latest.” The silence on the other end of the line seemed to confirm that Vaughn had been just as guilty as Lucy in making assumptions.