She's Not There (13 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Amelia awoke to a screech of air brakes and nearly fell from the bunk. The truck came to stop, and she could hear Dolly muttering to herself. Amelia rustled her hair, slathered her mouth with a fingertip of toothpaste from her duffel, and climbed back to the cab.

There was a cottony gray light coming through the windshield, and the cold air, slithering in from Dolly’s cracked window, had a sharp smell, like copper kettles and wet wool. Winter . . . it was the smell of almost-winter, Amelia realized. She looked out the side window at the bare black trees and the rolling hills covered with frosted grass. A roadside sign told her they were in a place called Jasper, slowed by a traffic jam.

“How long did I sleep?” Amelia asked.

“Over six hours,” Dolly said. “We’re coming to Tupelo soon. From there, we head to Memphis to pick up I-40 West then it’s balls to the wall until we hit Kingman, Arizona.”

Arizona. No, she couldn’t go there. It didn’t feel right. She didn’t know where she wanted to go but she knew she didn’t belong there. She needed to go . . . where? She needed . . .
what?

She shut her eyes, struggling to summon up something of comfort from her past, but all she could muster was that strange sensation she had felt the day she had awoken in the hospital, that feeling of floating inside a blue-green bubble.

They crept along, Dolly cursing and shifting the rig through its gears. Then suddenly, the pulsating lights of a police car came into view ahead. Amelia’s heart kicked up and didn’t slow until they had passed the trooper standing on the side of the road, directing traffic around a car that had gone into the ditch. Dolly was quick to get the truck back to cruising speed.

“I got you a coffee when I stopped a few miles back,” Dolly said, nodding to a Styrofoam cup in the holder. “And there’s an Egg McMuffin for you in that bag there.”

Amelia picked up the cup and lifted off the top. The coffee was lukewarm but good and strong. As she reached into the greasy bag, again she heard the Russian man’s voice:
I want to see bones
.

Screw you, whoever you are. I want to eat.

A few minutes later, her stomach had stopped rumbling and the coffee was gone. Dolly had turned up her iPod and it was blasting out a song Amelia didn’t recognize. But that was the norm now, hearing songs that sounded familiar but whose titles were lost to her.

Amelia’s eyes drifted down to the photo on the dashboard. “May I?” she asked, pointing at the photo.

“Sure.”

Amelia picked up the photo. It was a woman in baggy pants and a tank top, her sinewy arms cradling a rifle.

“Your sister?” Amelia asked.

“My hersband, Nikki,” Dolly said.

The word didn’t register, and Dolly laughed. “Partner, you know. My significant other. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

Amelia smiled. “No, I don’t.” She slipped the photograph back into its place on the dash.

“Is Nikki in the army?” she asked.

Dolly smiled. “Hell, no. She’s First Battalion Eighth Marines, Regimental Combat Team II. She’s in Musa Qala, Afghanistan.” Her smile faded. “She’s as tough as woodpecker lips and I love her.”

Amelia was still looking at the photograph when the images came, flooding her with such power she felt her body go slack.

Two skyscrapers crumbling to dust. Tanks rolling over sand. Men in camouflage but tan not green.
Then she could hear a man’s voice, the same voice that had told her about hitching with truckers.

It’s my duty, Mellie. I want to defend my country.

The face formed slowly in her head, like someone moving toward her out of a fog—brown eyes, hay-colored hair an inch or two too long, a spray of freckles across his nose.

I’ll come home safe. I promise.

The face stayed with her, moving through her head and settling deep in her heart. And finally, after a long moment, came a name.

Ben.

Amelia looked to Dolly, unable to stop herself from blurting out this new memory. “I have a brother,” she said.

Dolly glanced at her as if to say “so?”

“He’s a soldier, too.”

“Still serving over there?”

Amelia had no idea, but she didn’t want Dolly to know about her amnesia. She didn’t want to have to explain anything, so she lied.

“No, he’s home now.”

But maybe it wasn’t a lie. Ben—Benjamin Ross Bloodworth—was there in her head, as real as Dolly sitting next to her, and it brought her a comfort she hadn’t felt in days. She had someone. She had family. But where were they?

The song changed from something high-pitched and girly to the steady strumming of a guitar followed by a man’s voice that sounded as it were filtered through a shredder, imploring someone named Maggie to wake up.

Elton John? Billy Joel? Where were these names coming from? “Who’s singing that?” Amelia asked.

Dolly smiled. “It’s my man, Rod Stewart.”

The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age.

Amelia’s heart jumped. Why? It was the words, the words to the song.

“Can you play that back?” Amelia asked.

“What?”

“Those last couple of lines. Please, can you stop it and start it over?”

Dolly hit a button and the song started over. Amelia leaned closer to the speaker.

The morning sun when it’s in your face . . .

The morning sun.

She turned and crawled back to the bed, grabbing her iPad from her duffel. It booted right up and found a signal, just as the Apple clerk had said it would. In seconds, she had the search window up. She typed in the words “Morning Sun.” Up came links for a newspaper in Michigan, some publication about China, and a small book publisher.

She added the word “Town.”

Her first link was “Morning Sun, Iowa, Chamber of Commerce.”

She clicked on “Images,” and there it was. Narrow asphalt streets, white frame houses with wraparound porches, a tiny grocery, a tavern called The Sunspot, and trees, lots and lots of green trees.

And every bit of it felt real.

This was her home. This was where Ben was. Maybe where her family was.

She was so excited she could barely type, so excited that she knew Dolly was talking to her, but she couldn’t listen. She quickly brought up a map and punched in directions from Tupelo to Morning Sun. Morning Sun was on the east side of Iowa, over five hundred miles north from where Dolly would have to break due west, at the Mississippi River.

“I need you to let me off when we get past Memphis,” Amelia said. “Somewhere I can catch a bus north.”

“Where are you going?”

Amelia looked down at the map, her eyes fixed on the small yellow dot of Morning Sun.

“I’m going home,” she said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Was there anything more pathetic than staring at yourself in a bar mirror? But maybe that’s what he needed right now, a good long hard look at himself. Confront the man in the mirror, stare deep into his soul. Find a bright shining moment of moral clarity.

Buchanan picked up his glass. What was that Michael Jackson song? “The Man in the Mirror”? How did it go? Something about making a change?

He finished his second scotch and set the empty glass down in the trough of the bar. On the plane ride back from Georgia, he hadn’t had anything to drink. He had needed his head clear to think. Think about what might happen if he had to stand trial for Rayna’s murder. Think about the deal he had struck. Think about what he could do with two million dollars. Think about what he was going to have to do to get it.

Owen McCall’s face came back to him in that moment, how it had looked in the car, stone cold gray in the slant of the streetlight, how there was nothing coming from those hard blue eyes, like all the man’s energy was directed inward. Maybe that’s what it took. Maybe you had to filter everything and everyone out and laser-focus everything you had back into yourself to become a man like that—a man who was successful enough to buy anything on earth. Including a woman’s life.

Could he do that? Could he be the kind of man who would do whatever it took to get what he wanted?

But what do you want, Bucky?

Buchanan shut his eyes.

Tell me, Bucky. What do you want?

“I just want you to be quiet,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

Buchanan opened his eyes to see the bartender staring at him. He blinked her into focus.

“All I asked you was if you wanted a refill,” she said. “If you’re gonna get ugly, there’s the door.”

He held up his hands. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Yeah, bring me another, please.”

The bartender moved away, and he looked back across the bottles of booze at his reflection, thinking again about McCall. Had he intended from the start to kill Amelia Tobias? Had McCall known that when he had hired him? Was this all some elaborate setup? McCall’s last words to him in Georgia, just before he got out of the car, came back to him.

This is how it will work. When you get back to Fort Lauderdale, there will be a package waiting for you at the hotel. In it will be five thousand dollars, a cell phone, and a key. The five grand is for your expenses. The cell is how I will stay in contact with you. The key is to a locker where I will put two million in cash. When you finish the job to my satisfaction, you get the location of the locker. This is the last time we will see each other, do you understand?

Buchanan pulled out the cell phone. It was a cheap disposable Samsung with a prepaid plan that couldn’t be traced. It was called a burner, used by drug dealers mostly. Buchanan had used more than his share in his line of work.

He focused now on the key. It was small, brass, with the number 328 etched on it. It could fit anything from a bus locker at Port Authority to a safe deposit box in Sao Paulo. Buchanan pulled out his wallet, stuck the key behind the photograph of his daughter, and put the wallet away.

The bartender brought his fresh scotch. Buchanan took a drink and then finally, sick of staring at his reflection, he swung the stool around and looked around the bar. He had found Kim’s Alley by accident. After cabbing in from the airport, he had gone up to his room and started sorting through the box of mementoes from Amelia’s closet, looking for something that would lead him to Carol Fairfield or Amelia’s nameless lover. But after an hour of looking at faded snapshots and reading a couple letters Amelia’s brother had written from Afghanistan, Buchanan gave up. He knew he needed to keep digging into Amelia Tobias’s life, but since accepting McCall’s deal, it was almost like he didn’t want to know anything more about the woman. If she remained just a face in a magazine or a line in a dance review, he didn’t have to think about her as a real person.

Finally, he had thrown everything back into the cardboard box and retreated to the hotel bar, expecting a quiet dark corner where he could think. But after fifteen minutes sitting on a gold silk banquette listening to bad jazz, he left. He wandered down A1A, his head hunched into the turned-up collar of his sport coat. The beach was deserted, the afternoon sky and the ocean below it roiling and gray. He walked far, turning away from the beach and finally into a strip mall. That’s where he had found this place.

Kim’s Alley was dark, smelled like beer and body odor, and except for the soft
thick-thock
of Ping-Pong balls, it was blissfully quiet.

He watched two guys finish their Ping-Pong game. The roar in his head had quieted. Even her voice was gone, for the moment at least. He knew this was dangerous, letting his mind go empty, because that’s when the memories slid in. And they were coming now, not like they usually did, like he was seeing them through a soapy shower curtain, but with a sharp, stabbing, awful clarity.

It had been hot that September day, with tornado warnings crawling across the bottom of the TV screen as he watched the Titans game. The baby was crying in the kitchen, making that awful wheezing sound he made when his asthma was bad, and Gillian had made a mess on the rug with her Shrinky Dinks. Rayna had come into the living room and grabbed the remote, muting the TV.

Bucky, didn’t you hear the phone?

No. Did it ring?

He hadn’t even looked at her. The AC was on the fritz, he was hot and miserable, thinking that this was his first day off in two weeks and all he wanted was to be out in the woods with his binoculars and birds. He was thinking about the late mortgage payment and the baby’s unpaid medical bills, thinking about his peckerwood boss and how much he hated working as an insurance fraud investigator. Thinking that if Rayna hadn’t gotten pregnant again, the money they had saved might have been enough for him to go back to night school and finish his psychology degree.

When he finally looked up at his wife, he saw something there in her clear blue eyes he didn’t want to see—himself, made small and mean, because this was never what he had envisioned for himself, and it was too late to go back and fix it.

Rayna, you and the kids are the only good things in my life, and I love you, but whatever is choking me from inside won’t let the words come out.

That’s what he wanted to say.

Instead . . .

You still going to your mom’s?

Yeah, I have to get going. I’ll take the baby so he won’t bother you. Keep an eye on Gillie-Girl there.

When you coming back?

Around eight maybe.

It’s going to rain. The tires are bad on your car. You should take my truck.

I’ll be fine. I’ll be back before you can miss me, Bucky.

And then she was gone.

He watched the rest of the game, helped Gillian clean up her sticky things, and even got the six-year-old to take her bath, eat some SpaghettiOs, and get into her Garanimals. His daughter was fast asleep in her room and the Sunday night game was half over when he saw the car headlights sweep across the curtains.

The murmur of police radios out on the porch and then a sharp knocking. He opened the door to see two Nashville cops standing there, heavy and pulled in, like birds get when they sense a storm coming and the air is too thick to fly, and he knew, he knew, he just knew . . .

We found your wife’s car, Mr. Buchanan, in a wooded area north of town.

The driver’s door was open, and there was blood on the seat.

There was a baby seat in the back. It was empty. Do you have a child, sir? I mean, besides the little girl over there?

Gillian had come out of her room and was standing there staring at the cops, twirling a strand of her blonde hair. After that, the cops followed him next door while he got Mrs. Prescott to watch Gillian. He was allowed to drive his own truck down to the station and they took him into a small hot room.

Were you at home all evening, Mr. Buchanan?

Can anyone verify that?

How was your marriage?

Are you having an affair?

Are you in any financial trouble?

How much insurance do you have on your wife?

As the questions went on and on, he got the feeling they were never going to let him leave. But they did, finally. Maybe it would have been easier if they had just kept him there, locked him up. Because in the days that followed, the house, emptied of Rayna and baby Corey, felt too huge and too filled with a deafening quiet.

In the first week, the TV trucks camped at his curb, and every time he answered the phone it was another reporter. The cops kept coming back with
just one more question, Mr. Buchanan
. Everyone wanted a piece of him; everyone wanted his confession on tape, because it was easier to believe “that nice man next door” could kill his wife and baby than it was to imagine a faceless monster out in the dark, and that it was just random good luck that the monster hadn’t picked them instead.

In the second week, when Gillian left, wheeling her pink suitcase out behind Rayna’s parents to their car, his last barrier to oblivion was gone. For a while, he hid the empty scotch bottles in the garage, not wanting the neighbors to see them in the trash by the curb. But finally he just didn’t care.

Two months after Rayna and Corey disappeared, his boss called him in. He had been expecting it because how often could you drag in at noon smelling of booze before you were told that maybe you needed some time off to think? When he was fired, it was almost a relief.

Not long after that, the notice came in the mail. His in-laws were contesting custody of Gillian. He hired a lawyer and sat in the stuffy courtroom, watching the sleet pelt the windows, listening as they called him unfit to take care of himself, let alone a six-year-old girl, and all he could think was that it was true. Then his mother-in-law got up there and said he’d told Rayna that he had never wanted another kid.

Guilty, guilty as charged
.
Until I held my son for the first time.

After he lost Gillian, after his bank account was drained, he sold the house in Berry Hill, taking a loss in the lousy market. He found a furnished apartment in downtown Nashville and enough construction work to keep going. He was down to his last fifty bucks when his lawyer called him—out of pity, Buchanan guessed—saying he needed to track down a missing witness and was Buchanan interested in some freelance investigative work?

That was how it started. One desperate gig where he went looking for a loser and ended up finding himself.

He didn’t even know then that it was called skip tracing. He just did the job and did it so well that within six months he had had enough money to buy a good camera and some business cards. He loved the work because it was nothing like the drudgery of insurance fraud. It let him move in shadows and silence, watching people the way he watched birds. It let him crawl inside other people’s minds and emotions, mining their mysteries without giving back anything of himself.

He loved the fact he was finally able to send some money to help Gillian. He loved that it kept the memories of Rayna and Corey at bay. Or at least it had until now.

The district attorney in Nashville is preparing an indictment against you.

It had been five years, but he knew that charges could come anytime, even a decade after a murder, even with minimal evidence, even without a body. But he had hoped the truth would somehow keep him out of a courtroom again.

He had to know if what McCall had told him was true.

He pulled out his cell and scrolled to the Nashville name listed in his contacts—Gary Pitts. He had retained Pitts in the custody battle for Gillian, but he hadn’t talked to him in years. Buchanan wondered if the lawyer would even take his call.

He did.

“You’re lucky I’m talking to you,” Pitts said. “You still owe me five grand, Clay.”

“I know, and you’ll be getting it soon,” Buchanan said. “But right now I need something important.”

Pitts was silent.

“I heard a rumor the prosecutor was taking the case to a grand jury, looking for an indictment,” Buchanan said. “Is it true?”

He heard Pitts let out a slow breath. “I was going to call you once the grand jury went into session, but yeah, it’s true.”

Buchanan lowered his head, speaking softly so the bartender wouldn’t hear him.

“What do they have now that they didn’t have five years ago?”

“Your daughter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t have the statement in front of me yet but I heard Gillian’s psychiatrist—she’s been seeing one, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Well, I heard that the psychiatrist is claiming she’s recovered repressed memories of the night Rayna disappeared. She’s saying she heard her mother come home, heard an argument between the two of you, then heard a door slam.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Maybe, but it’s the meat of their argument.”

“My in-laws have brainwashed her.”

“Maybe that’s true, too, but the grand jury will believe her, Clay,” Pitts said. “She’s a sweet, credible witness and juries, by their nature, look for someone to blame so they can feel like they did their job. I think you’re in trouble.”

Buchanan took a slow drink and then stared into the empty glass. “How much will it cost me to retain you for the trial?”

“I’m not a criminal lawyer.”

“I want you,” Buchanan said.

“No, you don’t. I’d be in over my head. I’ll come up with a few referrals for you, but I can’t promise anything.”

McCall’s voice was in his ears again.
I can promise you won’t see one day in prison.

“I’ll get back to you, Gary,” Buchanan said. He hung up and dropped his phone to the bar. His eyes drifted back to the man in the mirror.

What is it you want, Bucky?