“At the office, I chatted with a couple of my guys and then Barbie, my secretary. Before seven-thirty, a woman pulled into the parking lot. It was Petra Collins.”
Bryant paused and studied Jake. “How do you know Petra Collins?”
Jake swallowed, palms beginning to sweat beneath him. He extracted his hands and clasped them in his lap. He wasn’t guilty, not in the slightest, but something about the small room and the detective’s steady gaze made him uneasy. “I don’t. I’d never seen her before she walked into my office this morning.”
“Was she inquiring about excavating services?”
Jake shook his head and wiped his hands on his jeans. “She said we knew each other when we were kids. She’d tracked me down and wanted to know if I remembered her.”
Bryant clicked his pen and made a note on the notepad. “Let me get this straight. You’d never met Petra Collins before she appeared at your place of business this morning claiming that you knew each other as children?”
“Yeah, exactly,” Jake told him.
“Did she offer any reason for looking you up now? For showing up at your office so early in the morning?”
“No, not really.” Jake thought about Petra’s comments about the asylum and stuffed the words down. He could only imagine this man’s expression if he thought Jake had once been institutionalized, and he hadn’t! But once the thought was in the man’s mind, well, there was no taking it back.
“What exactly did she say to you, Mr. Edwards? Or Jake. Can I call you Jake?”
“Yeah, sure. Umm… she said my eyes looked the same.”
“Your eyes?”
Jake chuckled and shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. Honestly, I didn’t take her seriously because I thought my girlfriend Allison was playing some kind of prank. I’d forgotten our one-year anniversary…” He trailed off. The excuse sounded flimsy.
“What kind of prank? I mean, it’s not exactly funny. Or cruel. Sending someone in to claim they knew you as a child?”
Jake placed his hands palm up on the desk. “Yeah, it doesn’t make much sense, but my head had already kicked into work mode and I wasn’t paying her much mind. I brushed her off and left for the job. When I got back to my office around five, I saw she’d left her card on my desk. I called her.”
“What time was that?”
“Right around five, but that was the first call.”
“You called twice?”
“Yeah. The first time, someone answered but didn’t say anything. I just heard breath.” Jake recalled the memory of the child’s voice, far off, strange. He had to have imagined it.
“So you called, and a person answered and simply breathed into the phone?”
“Yeah. I decided to head home. Packed up for the day and got in my truck and then… I went back in and called a second time. I’m not sure why. It was about fifteen minutes between the two calls. When I called the second time, Norm answered. He was screaming about blood. I told him to hang up and stay near the phone. I called the police.”
“And then you drove to Petra’s home? If you’d never met the woman, how could you have known her address?”
“I got it from Norm so I could call the police. I didn’t know his name was Norm then. I just knew he’d walked in and saw blood and he seemed to be in shock. I didn’t think he could make the call himself. He was hysterical.”
“I see.” Bryant wrote a few lines and then flipped the page in his notebook as if he didn’t want Jake to see what he’d scribbled. “Tell me about your call with Norm. What did he say?”
Jake closed his eyes and tried to remember. “He… umm… he kept saying ‘Oh, God’ and ‘There’s blood.’ Maybe he said ‘There’s blood everywhere.’ I thought it was a joke. Kind of like I had with Petra that morning. I realized pretty quick it wasn’t a joke. Norm sounded really upset. I told him to call for help, but he didn’t seem to get what I was saying, so I told him to hang up and I’d call them. I asked for Petra’s address and he told me. Then I hung up and called 911.”
Bryant nodded and clasped his hands on the desk. “Had you ever spoken with Norm before?”
“No.”
“And what is your impression of his tone? Did he sound angry?”
“No,” Jake said. “He sounded scared and upset.”
“Did it sound like he was moving around at all? Cleaning things? Moving things?”
Jake shook his head. “I couldn’t hear it if he was.”
Bryant didn’t speak for several seconds.
“Do you think it was Norm? That Norm did something to Petra?” Jake asked.
Bryant focused on Jake. “Do you?”
“Shit, I don’t know. I don’t know Norm or Petra from Adam. I only met them both today. I just… I mean, did you find her? Or…”
“We did not find her, no. As for whether Norm had something to do with her disappearance, it’s too early to know.”
“This is nuts.” Jake leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees, pushing his hands into his mess of hair. He sat up and looked the detective in the eye. “What now?”
Bryant gazed at Jake for several long seconds and then flipped the page in his notebook and slid the blank page toward him. “Write down your full name, phone number and home address. If we have more questions, we’ll be in touch.”
The house was dark when Jake returned. Allison’s silver Probe was not parked in the driveway. She had stayed at her own apartment or, equally likely, gone to her parents, where she and her mother would have drunk coffee late into the night and trash-talked Jake. He deserved it.
The house was quiet except for the tick-tock of the kitchen clock. Quiet and dark and a little eerie.
Shuddering, he flipped on the entryway lights and continued lighting his way as he walked down the hall and into the living room.
He rarely watched television before bed, but he turned it on and punched seven for the news. A commercial displayed a game of beach volleyball with a bucket of icy-cold beer in the foreground.
Instead of sitting, he returned to the refrigerator for a beer, smiling at the thought of Lennon, who would have said, “See? Advertising. They got ya again.”
He returned to the couch, sipped his beer, and watched another commercial. This one displayed a woman rushing down a flight of stairs, across a park and into a busy courthouse, all without getting a run in ultra-sheer pantyhose.
The news came on. A weather man, in a brown suit, and gestured at the days ahead, mostly sunny skies, maybe a chance of rain on Tuesday.
If the weather was on, the major news had come and gone. He’d missed whatever had been covered about Petra. And something had been covered because when he’d left for the police station, several news vans had crowded the street.
He sighed, left his three-quarters-full can of beer on the coffee table and walked up to bed.
5
Charlie parked on the curb in front of her new house, giddy to the point of shaking.
A Queen Anne Victorian, the listing had read. Welcome to Wilder’s Grove in the heart of picturesque Frankenunmuth, Michigan. A home with historical charm, a huge wraparound front porch and ornate front entry doors. Host parties in the grand formal living room. Prepare meals in the remodeled rustic farmhouse kitchen. You’ll love the floor-to-ceiling built-ins, original hardwood floors, vintage fireplace mantels, stained-glass windows and wrought-iron banisters and railings. Charlie had read the listing half a dozen times before she even saw the house.