Orchids and Stone (18 page)

“You know, Joe-
and
-Jane, instead of Joe-
or
-Jane. When a title shows a person
or
another person, then either one can sell it, but when it shows one person
and
another person, then both people have to sign to sell it.”

“Oh.” She looked across the cars toward Vic, on his phone.

“Yeah. Dude’s calling here, telling me it wasn’t the money—guess he’d figured he was going to get some inheritance, his mother had a nice place and funds stashed away—he was just so surprised. Dude’s mother was something like ninety years old and never said anything about this charity before. And to top it off, the dude can’t get in touch with these nonprofit folks, like it’s already belly-up or something.”

“Meaning, if his name wasn’t on the title, the charity would have gotten the car, too?” she asked.

The lot man nodded. “Stinking charity cleaned out the guy’s mother and she dies and then her car’s stolen. What luck. I guess the Seattle Police contacted him about the car. He was calling here before it even made it to the yard. Told me the whole story.”

Minerva Watts’s voice pierced Daphne’s memory.

They’re trying to steal my house and all my money. And my car.

She pictured the lavender pantsuit and tan raincoat, heard the pleas for help in the Peace Park. And then Daphne thought of them putting the lady into a car—Mrs. Watts’s own car, probably—and imagined the couple taking her to a Ford dealership, quick-selling the car below wholesale price. She stared across the row of cars at Vic. He was too far away for her to read his expression, but she watched him fold his arms across his chest.

When she waved him over, Vic looked over then back at his car.

“Sad story,” the lot boss said. “I’ve heard this kind of thing—folks preying on old folks, wrangling what they can out of them, selling them some song and dance.”

Daphne gulped and felt herself go cold. “Vic!” She turned toward the Honda again, but Vic was just a few strides away.

“I think the insurance company will require me to get several estimates,” he said. “I hope they don’t total it. It’s an old car and they might not find it worth fixing. But it starts. The damage might be all cosmetic.”

She stared into the Lincoln and pictured the car evading her, making it through the traffic light, Minerva Watts worried in the backseat, boxes of her things—including her grandmother Miller’s brooch—in the trunk.

“What is it, Daph?”

Pointing to the Lincoln, she explained how it was identical to the car those people had used to take Minerva Watts and her things away from her house. It probably
was
the Lincoln she’d chased. She told him it was owned by a recently deceased old woman in California who signed over her bank accounts and house to a charity that then went defunct. And the car was stolen.

He raked a hand through his hair and twisted to look back at his Honda.

“Couldn’t . . . I mean. Just suppose . . .” Daphne snapped her mouth shut. No. No way. Not possible, and not her business anyway. Had she been overreacting all this time, about everything regarding Mrs. Watts. But . . . what if?

“Couldn’t . . . ,” she tried again, but faltered as her thoughts ran wild.

“Couldn’t?” Vic half-encouraged, half-teased.

“Couldn’t there be a connection?”

“Between what and what?” he asked.

“Whatever’s going on with Minerva Watts and whatever happened in California.”

Vic pursed his lips. “It seems far-fetched. But . . . possible. Worst-case scenario.”

Daphne nodded, insistent. “The wrong license plate was on it. The plate was stolen off a similar car. This car was stolen in California,” she said, pointing to papers in the lot boss’s hand.

“Where was it impounded from?” Vic asked.

The lot manager looked at his paperwork and gave them an intersection.

Crunched outside, airbags blown, the Honda was ugly but still drivable. Daphne pressured Vic for all she was worth, pushing until he agreed to drop the car off at the best body shop he knew of, right away. When he protested about insurance and getting estimates, she brushed his arguments away.

“My accident, my fault. I’m paying for it.”

When they pulled into the body shop parking lot, he hesitated again. “You shouldn’t pay for it out of your pocket. This is what insurance is for. We should just go through the procedure, see what the insurance company wants to do.”

“I’ll get your car fixed. I want it fixed. I don’t want this to drag out. Please. I don’t want problems dragging on and on. I want to get clear.”

The body shop attendant waited with paperwork on a clipboard. Vic nodded at the man, then pulled his phone from his belt clip and handed it to Daphne.

“What?”

“Don’t you want to call Thea?”

“Oh.” She flipped his phone on, wishing it were a smartphone so she could Google. Rolling her lips in, closing her eyes, she walked away from Vic as he signed papers. Back in her truck, Daphne dialed, trying to summon what to say when Thea answered.

“Hello?” Thea’s voice held the reserve expected for a call from Vic’s phone.

“It’s Daphne. I—”

“Hey, you! I wanted to tell you I’m sorry for bitching you out earlier, I—”

“Oh, stop,” Daphne said. “I’m sorry for being everything you said I was being. I felt pushed and pulled and I think of things being fine and things being catastrophic and I don’t know what’s what, so . . . wait, I think I’m not apologizing very well. But, Thea, I’m so sor—”

“Done,” Thea said. “And I have a possible address on Lindsay Wallach for you.”

“Wallach.” Daphne sucked in her breath and closed her eyes. The last name sounded distantly familiar now that she heard it again. “Now I’m going to find Ross Bouchard. You could do it faster. I won’t have computer access until I get home. Would you find him for me?”

“Oh, fuck it, Daphne.”

“Well . . . I might as well finish, right?”

“I found this Lindsay woman. I found the Watts woman. You get one person a day out of me.”

Daphne drummed her fingers on the phone and slumped in her pickup’s seat. “But you could find him?”

“Now you’re wanting me to show off,” Thea said, her voice demure.

“You’re always showing off.” Daphne felt a weight drop, just a small one, but the load was lightened as she scribbled down an address for Lindsay Wallach, thanked Thea, and hung up.

Vic slid onto the passenger’s seat, studying paperwork from the body shop.

“I’m going to find Ross Bouchard,” she told him. “I’m going to talk to that boy myself.”

“Ross Bouchard,” he said. “The guy some people thought killed your sister.”

She nodded.

“Then I’m going with you. No argument this time.”

Daphne smiled and let him take her palm in his. “I don’t have a way to contact him yet.”

“Yet?”

“But I will.” She offered her most satisfied smile.

Vic guessed. “Thea?”

She nodded. “And she gave me an address on Lindsay Wallach. There’s enough time to go right now.”

Baskets of bleeding hearts and other flowers lined the porch of the tiny trailer house. There was no answer to Vic’s knock or to Daphne pushing the bell button. She tried to not feel pressured by his glancing at his watch, knowing she’d pressured him to make this quick trip to Lindsay Wallach’s house right away. He had to collect his kids for the weekend.

Daphne looked at her truck and wondered about leaving a note. She knocked on the thin aluminum door again. Vic tapped his watch with one finger. A melodic voice rose with the rushing-air sound of wind in the evergreens.

“There’s someone out back,” Daphne said, stepping off the porch and striding for the corner before he could protest.

She didn’t see the woman, not right away. She saw the weathered slab of plywood hanging on the trailer at the edge of the back deck. On the railing beneath the board, spent candlewicks jutted from puddles of cold, long-melted wax. Numerous faded items curled to the pins tacking them to the plywood—a rustic version of a bulletin board. In one corner dangled a faded purple and gold high school graduation tassel. Old photographs—of a beautiful young woman with feathers in her hair, wearing secondhand clothes—bubbled and delaminated the wood. Notes and cards, close to illegible with age, were tucked above spent candles.

“Can I help you?” the singsong voice called out from behind apple trees. The woman kinked a hose and the sound of water gushing stopped. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

“Lindsay Wallach?” Daphne’s voice shook and she stared at the board instead of the woman she was addressing, too stricken to say anything more.

The plywood hung under the trailer’s eave but showed years and years of weathering. The keepsakes had faded with their secret message, but the ghostly photographs of her sister’s likeness in the few years after high school graduation were already etched in Daphne’s memories. She didn’t know why the board was here, but she knew what she was looking at.

The board was a shrine to her dead sister.

CHAPTER 17

Staring hard at the tattered notes to and about Suzanne, Daphne knew Vic stared hard at her, knew he could see her pure trepidation and shaking hands. When she stayed voiceless, he told Lindsay Wallach who they were and accepted two glasses of water, served on the back deck because they were not invited inside.

“What happened at the funeral?” Vic asked.

Lindsay Wallach shot him a shocked look. “What?”

Daphne looked toward the board.
The board, Vic.
But she understood him. He’d always raised his eyebrows over what he termed the bad scene of Ross Bouchard being hauled out of Suzanne’s funeral after making a spectacle.

Vic shifted uncomfortably and said to Lindsay, “You were there, weren’t you?”

“At . . .
Suzanne’s
funeral? What, twenty years ago?”

Vic nodded and Daphne stayed mute, thinking about the retired homicide detective and his little nudge in this direction.
She’s the one who first realized your sister was missing.

“At the funeral,” Vic asked again, “what really happened?”

When Lindsay threw Daphne a puzzled look, as though to point out that Daphne had, after all, been there for the entire service, Vic said, “She was just a kid at the time. I’ve heard a bit about it. What’s the deal? Ross Bouchard was escorted out. What happened?”

Lindsay winced at the Bouchard name. Daphne gazed at Lindsay’s face, watched her eyes close to avoid the stare.

“Ross sang,” Lindsay said, her gaze shifting from Vic to Daphne and back again.

Vic eyed Daphne. She’d told him many times about the singing, about the congregation’s gasps over the weird words the boy had wailed at the altar.

“It was just a tribute to Suzanne. An old Cohen song that just fit her. And him. And it was, the whole thing, a boy with a guitar, him singing about loving her . . . well, it was too hippie for that stuffed-shirt church. And Ross was broken up, half-crying so he was kind of talking the lyrics, and he came off pretty weird.” Lindsay looked at the shrine and back again. “Why? Why are you asking now? What in the world brings you out here today? After all these years?”

Mute, Daphne looked again at the board and its faded mementos of Suzanne. She felt Lindsay’s gaze follow hers, heard Vic clear his throat.

“Saturday,” he said, “tomorrow, is the anniversary of Daphne’s father’s suicide.”

“Oh, I-I didn’t know,” Lindsay said, her voice a soft, pained gasp. “You, your dad, your poor family. Some people get more than their share. That’s terrible. When did he . . . ?”

Daphne still couldn’t speak. Vic looked at her, nodded, and told Lindsay, “It’s been a while.”

“Well,” she said. “I’m sorry he died. Sorry he did that. Old news, apparently, but I didn’t know. The poor guy. You poor girl, Daphne.”

Daphne remembered sparing the retired detective this detail, wondering about her own character that she’d liked it a second ago when Vic dropped it on Lindsay, foisted bad news on Suzanne’s old friend.

“Tomorrow, huh?” Lindsay asked.

“Yes, tomorrow.” Daphne’s voice was measured, careful. But she couldn’t last, her voice breaking as she asked, “Do you know what day Sunday is?”

Lindsay glanced at Vic who watched Daphne then folded his arms across his chest and told Lindsay, “It’s Suzanne’s birthday.”

“Oh . . .” Lindsay exhaled. “I always think of the anniversary of, I mean, I remember Suzanne more in December . . .”

“When she died,” Daphne sniffed.

“Yes.” Lindsay faltered, seeming lost in thought.

“Why do you have that board over there?” Daphne asked at last, pointing to it now without looking at it. Satisfying Vic’s curiosity was not the same as satisfying her own. What he had wanted to know all along, and what she wanted to know since they’d arrived, were in different directions, past and present.

Lindsay opened her mouth, hesitated, then said, “I don’t. I mean, I just didn’t ever take it down. It’s been there a long, long time.”

Daphne felt herself soften and she wished the sun would stay on them, but the sky clouded. She wanted, needed, warmth.

Twenty years ago, she was my sister’s best friend.

“Can I use your bathroom?” Daphne asked, her voice hoarse.

Lindsay waved toward the door. “On your right as you go inside.” Daphne stepped inside but heard Lindsay say to Vic, “So . . . her father’s death still affects her.”

His soft response was immediate, clear to Daphne because she’d
heard him say the same words only yesterday. “Her sister’s death more.”

She found the bathroom, a tiny thing with a triangular shower crammed next to a toilet and a small corner sink. Washing her hands in the minimal flow of cold water, Daphne looked at herself, at her palms, and turned her wrists over. The unsettling specter of Lindsay, out here in the woods in an ancient, crummy trailer, tending a little orchard, felt somehow morally suspect.

Because she survived? Because this is her version of survival? Daphne shook her head.
Don’t go there,
she warned herself.
You might not stack up so well yourself.

Uncomfortable answers arose to other uncomfortable questions.

When she and Vic began as a couple, he told her about his divorce and talked of how he strove to improve his children’s lives by not engaging Cassandra’s bile. Passivity helped, he told her. Things had been worse before he figured out how to avoid Cassandra’s wrath. Vic had shrugged when Daphne suggested taking the fight to Cassandra and told Daphne he was a work in progress.

And now she decided, she was a work not-in-progress. Recognizing this made her wonder how long she’d been suspended, and whether it was an inherited condition.

Had Lindsay inherited this trailer house? Daphne tried to picture her perhaps coming here as a college girl, coming with Suzanne, with Ross. She thought of best-case and worst-case possibilities, tried to delineate the givens.

A man like Vic, a person like him, Daphne decided, would take a heavy breath and find it all an opportunity to be more thoughtful. He’d said this sort of thing before, to his son and daughter, and to Daphne. Never quite a lecture, just a considered nod and a hug and the comment that whatever upsetting thing had just transpired could be an opportunity for him and whoever else to work harder, to practice more patience, more kindness. Daphne wasn’t sure she wanted to work harder.

Cold. It was cold in the trailer, stagnant. Daphne thought of what it might have been like twenty years ago. What Suzanne might have seen. It was December then. It would have been even colder.

And that December Suzanne was attacked by someone. Just someone. Not knowing more was still as random and strange as it had always been.

Longing for the air on the deck, Daphne allowed herself a tour of the little house. The narrow hallway led to one small bedroom with veneer buckling on the walls.

It was just a thin home. There were no other secret shrines. Nothing untoward raised her hackles. Daphne wanted back outside, to escape from the cool, dark interior of Lindsay Wallach’s home.

“What did her dad do for a living?” Lindsay was asking Vic.

“He sold insurance.” Vic’s tone was cool enough to demonstrate this was not going to be an engaging conversation, but he was willing to tell what he knew. He was part of the Mayfield family, in the way that people close to one family member adopt. Lindsay Wallach had long ago filtered out and away from the Mayfields.

Daphne stepped back onto the deck and slid the door shut, reassured that Vic and Lindsay had not relaxed into friendship, but awaited her return.

“It’s a special kind of grief to lose someone unexpectedly,” Lindsay said, her acknowledgment spoken with the care of somber pronouncement one might make to the close relative of a dead friend. “With someone still young, with such promise, it’s even worse.”

Pointing again to the board beyond the deck railing, Daphne asked, “Did you make that?”

Lindsay cleared her throat. “Do you know about the, um, the gift of bones? The idea that a person might need a place to go . . . to grieve?”

Daphne felt her jaw tighten. Her mother had talked about the gift of bones after Suzanne’s body was found. Her mom was a grave visitor. The habit of mourning was a large part of Daphne’s dread for this weekend and its anniversaries. Daphne found no solace at the cemetery. “I know about it,” Daphne said. “We had the gift of bones two weeks after Suzanne disappeared. And then we had the funeral.”

“She had . . .” Lindsay began and stumbled, “a horrible death. I’m so sorry about that. Sorry for you.”

Am I supposed to say thank you?
Daphne wondered.

“But,” Lindsay continued, “a great life. Suzanne had a great life. Don’t you think? Do you remember her well?”

Vic eyed Lindsay. “When her sister was murdered, I think Daph’s memories got all the stronger. She wasn’t going to get any more of them.”

“Are you looking for something else here?” Lindsay asked. “Are you searching? Ross said all of us are searchers until we’re freed.”

“You stayed in touch with him,” Daphne said.

Lindsay hesitated before nodding. Daphne took a deep breath, saw Vic do the same, and gestured for him to say nothing. It was time. After all these years, she’d find Ross Bouchard and confront the man so many thought was the killer who got away with her sister’s murder.

Daphne stared at the plywood board of old photos, the fluttered, faded colors of the high school graduation tassel above the old candles. “He made that board, didn’t he?”

“Before she was found,” Lindsay said, nodding as her voice caught and she was unable to speak.

Daphne set her jaw. Someone else crying, even threatening to cry over Suzanne, would make her crash. Don’t do it, she willed Lindsay.
Don’t you dare do it.
“He made it right after she went missing?”

“The second week. Then he added to it afterward, for a long time. Years. He used to live here, but often he went off to his father’s place down in Oregon.” Lindsay squeezed her eyes shut. “Ross said a girl like Suzanne comes along once. Like once in a generation or in a lifetime.”

“He was right about that,” Daphne said.

Lindsay cocked her head as if struck by some personal thought. “I know how much Ross cared about Suzanne.”

Talking right on top of her, Vic said, “I know he failed every lie detector test he ever took about her.”

Lindsay’s eyebrows perked up an inch.

“You didn’t know that?” he asked her, his voice harsh now, even cruel.

Hallelujah,
Daphne thought.

“He failed the polygraphs when he was questioned about Suzanne’s death,” Vic said, a judgment sealed.

A long exhale escaped Lindsay’s pursed lips. “Well, he must have felt guilty.”

“Why?” Vic and Daphne said as one. Daphne continued, “Why did he feel guilty?”

Lindsay’s voice grew small and strained. “He was with me. That night. The night before, you know. The night when Suzanne took off, went off wherever she went, did whatever she did. Something reckless, I’m sure. She’d found us here, together, said she was going to find some action—”

“But you . . .” Daphne felt tears sting her eyes on her sister’s behalf. She thought again about Lindsay filtering out of the Mayfields’ lives. Suzanne had known this would happen before anyone else. She’d known it fresh and painful in the last hours of her life. “You were her best friend.”

“Yes. And I was twenty-one. So was he. I’m sorry I went after my best friend’s boyfriend.”

“She told me you guys didn’t even like each other! Her best friend and her boyfriend don’t like each other. I mean, they didn’t like each other.”

Lindsay and Vic gaped at her.

“And Ross Bouchard—” Daphne began.

“Was sorry, too. Sorrier. I mean . . .” Lindsay hesitated, her gaze casting about and hands fluttering. “We liked each other, Daphne. We tried not to. I was, and am, as sorry as I can be, but I forgave myself. And Ross, well Ross never got over it.”

Feeling Vic’s gaze shift to her, Daphne met his glance but couldn’t hold it. There was too much in his face. Sympathy and questions, his and hers.

And then Lindsay told them, “He’s dead, you know.”

Vic closed the distance and put an arm around Daphne, who managed no words from her open mouth.

Lindsay cleared her throat, and when she spoke again, her voice held the raspy catch of grief. “It was a couple years ago, March. He’d been a drinker, tried to dry up and relapsed lots of times. A few months before, he’d been back in central Oregon, out on the rimrocks. A favorite spot of his. I’d been there with him. The ground just falls away. His body was found below. At the top of the ledge were a lot of empty beers. At the bottom . . .”

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Daphne’s mind created an image of Ross Bouchard—not a man approaching forty but a boy dating her sister—in a suspended free fall from one of Oregon’s high desert mesas. She shook her head and inclined her chin at Vic, glancing away to indicate readiness to leave.

She needed air, wanted to drive too fast, to leave this place. They said stiff good-byes and slipped around the trailer to her truck.

Before Vic entered the passenger side, Daphne said, “When I went away to college, I felt out of place. After the first summer, I had a hard time going back. After the second summer, it was worse. My mother promised the angels would come, but the next year my father killed himself.”

“I know, honey.” Vic pressed his lips to her hair as soon as they got in the truck’s cab.

She fired up the engine and shoved the transmission stick. “The angels never came.”

He held her hand, kissed her hair again. “There are different kinds of angels.”

Lindsay ran at them, waving. Daphne braked and lowered her window.

“When he sang at her funeral,” Lindsay said, breathing hard, “you have to understand this, he sang with a whole heart.”