Skeleton Key (16 page)

“
Do you think you would have been proud of a decision to make all your team—or all your teammates, like in my case—be able to play with one hundred percent focus?”

“
I have to admit, you’re a little more reckless in the use of your powers than I tend to be, but that doesn’t mean you’re any more selfish or any more inappropriate. The way I saw it—and Zander and his wife agreed—you helped your teammates deal with a very difficult situation, and they came out of it as a better team. Maybe it
was
the wrong thing to do, but we as individuals are forced to make tough decisions and moral decisions over and over again. We learn from the wrong ones and try to do better the next time. I don’t know if what you did was wrong or not, and I’m not sure if I would have done what you just did, but I’m proud of you for caring about whether you were right or not.”

Tanner had listened intently and seemed to be thinking deeply about what his father had said. He leaned over and gave his dad another hug. “Thanks, Dad…Let’s go get something to eat. I’m starving.”

Clay simply laughed. Tanner bounced back from everything in what seemed to be a blink of the eye. “Sounds good.”

“
I’m gonna have a hard time gettin’ that broken ankle out of my head. You wanna get in my head and make me forget it?”

“
Nope. It’ll help you remember what happened tonight.”

Tanner laughed too. “By the way. I have another picture in my head that I can’t seem to shake. It’s a gray, metal cabinet, about the size of a two-drawer file cabinet. It looks like it has a drawer and a door. There’s a metal handle that you’d probably turn down and then pull out to open the door. It looks like there’s a keypad, but it’s kind of semi-dangling loose from the door. The vision’s been in my head all day. I was hoping you’d know what it was.”

“
I don’t have any idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something to do with the mystery we’re working on. I’ll keep my eyes open for something that looks like that. Maybe it’ll be important.”

Logan Payne didn’t go to school again on Monday. His woodshop teacher, Mr. Jorgenson, called to see if everything was all right, and his basketball coach called to give his condolences. Logan had spent the entire morning working on a wood project that he planned to give to Anna Gomez. He took a one-inch by one-inch by four-inch piece of soft balsa wood. He drew a circle at the center of each of the four sides and then drew two rectangles on each side of the block—one to the right and one to the left of each circle. He took a chisel and chipped away each of the eight rectangles until the piece of wood looked like a cage for the remaining portion of wood in the center. He then took out his jackknife and began to whittle away at the piece of wood remaining in the center, rounding it into the shape of a ball that was too big to slide through its cage. When he was done, he had created a toy for Anna. She would be amazed at how he got the ball inside the cage since it was obviously too big to be taken out.

Erika marveled at his talent and was grateful that he was using it to be kind to someone else. Her phone rang for the third time that morning. It was Clay and Luke Hopper, wondering if they could stop by again to talk to Logan. Erika told them that he wasn’t in school, so they could visit any time.

The men left right away. Clay was excited to see Erika again, so when Hopper’s car pulled to a stop at a railroad crossing, he was more than a little disturbed. Lights were flashing and the crossing arm was lowered, but there was no train. Clay leaned forward in his seat and looked to his left and right to locate the train, but he didn’t see anything. “You’re a cop. How ’bout you drive around that arm so we can get going?”

“
I’m an officer of the law, Clay. That would be illegal.”

“
But there’s no train, Luke.”

“
It does appear that way. Maybe some tests are being done. Happens all the time around here.”

“
And you don’t just drive around? You sit here until the arm goes back up?”

“
I usually just listen to one of my books or listen to sports talk. Sometimes I finish my coffee and read the paper. Today I’m blessed to have
you
and your stimulating conversation to keep me entertained. There’s usually not much reason to hurry around here. Relax, Clay. Enjoy the sights.”

“
What sights? I see some overgrown bushes, a dilapidated storage shed, and some telephone poles. Is that the best you have to offer?”

“
Sometimes, if you’re patient, you might see some wildlife cross the road,” Hopper joked. “By the way, we checked out Erika the best we could so far. She made a phone call to Mortonson’s home on the morning of the train crash, and he made a call from East Lansing back to Erika’s house before the train left the station. There are no records of any purchases through her credit card, which would be strange if she drove to Indiana and back.”

“
The calls make sense, you know,” Clay responded. “He was watching her son. And maybe she didn’t drive. She was with other people. Have you checked with any of them? Maybe she paid cash. I can’t believe you think she’s a suspect.”

“
I wouldn’t be doing my job if I ruled her out before I was sure. It’s called police work.” The lights stopped flashing and the crossing arm raised. “See there? Patience is a virtue, you know. You could use some patience as we muddle our way through this
case
too.”

Clay just rolled his eyes and started thinking about Erika again.

***

Erika had to get Logan back out of bed when Clay and Chief Hopper arrived. One side of his hair was flattened to his head; the other side was sticking straight out. His bangs were still covering his eyes. Erika explained to him that the men were there to ask questions about the day his dad disappeared.

After Logan plopped down on the couch and grabbed a pillow to hug, Chief Hopper asked his first question. “What do you remember about that day, Logan?”

“
Nothin’ really.”

“
You were in a train wreck and your dad disappeared, and you don’t remember
anything
?”

“
Logan, be cooperative,” his mother ordered.

There was a long pause, and finally Logan said, “I remember my loser dad being a jerk.”

Hopper was practicing amazing interview skills. He continued to remain silent. There was another long pause. “He didn’t want me to go. I remember that. So Mom had to send Morty to baby sit. I wanted to ride on the train. I wanted to be in the engine with my dad and have him pay attention to me. Maybe let me drive the train. But like
always
, he didn’t want to be with me.”

That was a lot of words for Logan. Erika was amazed. She looked at Clay and pointed at her eyes, then his, hoping that he’d understand what she was suggesting, but Clay shook his head. He hadn’t controlled Logan at all.

“
Tell me what you remember about the train ride home,” Hopper suggested.

“
I was waiting with Morty to get on the train, but I was looking for my dad. I didn’t see him anywhere—didn’t see
anyone
I knew, except Morty, who was with me, and I think I saw Robbie. He was carrying a chain and a toolbox away from the train. Finally, my dad showed up and stepped up into the engine car. When we got on, we went to the back of the train and sat.”

“
Mr. Mortonson said you got up after about a half hour and went to look for your dad.”

Clay had been struggling to get a look at Logan’s eyes, but they were mostly covered by his bangs, and he rarely looked up. It appeared that he wasn’t going to learn anything by reading the boy’s mind. But miraculously, he actually looked up and they made eye contact. “
Don’t look away
,” Clay ordered him.

“
I wanted to ride in the engine with him.”

“
Did you see him?” asked Hopper.

“
Yes
,” thought Logan. There was a pause. He didn’t answer.

Clay had eye contact, so he asked, “Was he lying on the floor of the train?”

“
No,” Logan answered quietly.

“
What happened, Logan?” Clay responded just as softly.

“
We argued and he hit me in the face
,” Logan thought. “Nothing” is what he said.

When Clay heard what Logan was thinking, he lost eye contact in order to look at Erika. When he looked back, Logan was looking down again.

Hopper rejoined the interview. “Nothing happened? You didn’t see him?”

“
No.” Logan was back to his usual one-word answers.

Hopper paused again and seemed to sense that he was fortunate to get Logan to say as much as he did, so he thanked Logan and allowed him to go back to his room.

As soon as Clay heard the boy’s door close, he looked at Erika and quietly said, “He saw your husband on the train.”

“
Are you just saying that because it’s what you believe or do you know something that I don’t?”

“
I read his mind. He saw Adrian, and Adrian hit him in the face.”

“
What?” Erika was clearly shocked.

“
Had Adrian ever hit him before?” Luke asked.

“
No. Not that I ever knew of…How can you be sure that’s what he was thinking?”

“
I’m sure, Erika. But the only things that I read from him were that he saw your husband, and that your husband struck him in the face.”

“
Ex-husband. And if he was alive now, I think I’d kill him.”

***

Luke Hopper was being very contemplative in the car on the way back to the station. When the first of two trains zoomed by—actually at a reasonable speed—Luke turned his CD player on and listened to Harlan Coben’s
Tell No One
. “You ever read this book, Clay?”

“
No, actually, I haven’t. Isn’t Coben the guy with the Myron Bolitar character?”

“
Yeah, but not in this book.” He stopped the CD. “This one is about a guy whose wife was taken and killed. Eight years later, he gets a message that he’s convinced only his wife could have sent, but he gets warned to ‘tell no one.’ Well, the guy isn’t about to sit still. He needs answers—closure. He wants to know what happened to his wife. Erika, in my opinion, doesn’t seem quite as concerned about finding out what happened to her husband. I don’t want to believe that she’s somehow involved in this, but she had two pretty good motives to kill the guy. And she also quite likely had the opportunity. She as much as admitted that she could kill him.”

“
Well, you keep following your little rabbit trail if you want to, Luke, but she’s innocent of any wrongdoing, and I intend to prove it. In the meantime, maybe we’ll find what really happened that day.”

“
What’s especially troubling,” said Luke, “is that the medical examiner said that Adrian died from the accident, and Adrian’s ghost said he died of a heart attack. But the body was definitely buried after the fact, and people are lying about it. And we just started asking around. And one more thing. Logan said he thought he saw Robbie at the train in East Lansing. I have the passenger lists. Robbie wasn’t a passenger. What was he doing there?”

Clay got in his car and considered driving back home. He was feeling a bit helpless, not knowing what to do next, so he did what he
wanted
to do. He called Erika. She asked him to meet her at Durand High School, where she was dropping her son off at basketball practice. He’d agreed to go even though he’d missed school and wouldn’t be able to participate. His first game was only one day away.

At the high school, Erika got out of her car and got in Clay’s. She affectionately squeezed his hand. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go give my friend, Dan Duncan, a visit. He’s at home after emergency surgery on his big toe. We can ask him what
he
remembers about that night.”

On the way, Clay was driving behind the one lone car on the road, a car that was slowing down as they were approaching a railroad crossing. The crossing was in a wide-open space where both directions of track could be easily seen and where there was no crossing arm. As they cautiously—for no apparent reason that Clay could perceive— approached the tracks, the crossing lights began to flash and the driver slammed on his brakes and came to a screeching halt. Clay slammed on his brakes too and managed to skid to about an inch of the car in front of him. After breathing a sigh of relief, he craned his neck in both directions, looking for the train. Ten to fifteen seconds later, he caught sight of the engine about a quarter-mile away. There was still plenty of time to cross the tracks, but the car in front of Clay never budged. As Clay impatiently started to back up, another car came to a stop behind him, blocking any hope of maneuvering around the waiting car. He was stuck. There was no end to the adventures of train crossings in Durand. When the train
finally
arrived, it was at least a mile long and took a good five minutes to pass.