The Prettiest One: A Thriller (20 page)

“What the hell is this, Katie?” the man said. “You stop showing up for work and don’t answer calls, that’s quitting. So I can’t imagine what the hell you’re doin’ here now.” He pointed at Bix with a finger that looked like a fat cigar and said, “This is what I get for helping out your friend and paying this one under the table.”

Bix shrugged. “Hey, he’s my friend but he’s your cousin.”

The man looked back at Caitlin. “You can’t be here for money, because I paid you the last night you worked, like I did every night. So why are you here?”

Caitlin had no idea what to say. Fortunately, Josh did. “Look, I’m sorry if Caitlin . . . uh, if Katie’s absence caused you any problems. The fact is, she had an accident. She sustained a head injury and now she’s having problems with her memory.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “This is a joke, right?”

“It’s not,” Josh replied.

“She looks fine.”

“Well, she’s not, not really. She has big gaps in her memory, and we’re really hoping someone here can help her fill them in.”

The man used his tongue to move the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. Finally, he said, “We’re trying to get ready for lunch. Sorry.”

“Oh, just let ’em in,” Martha said as she appeared behind the man. “It’s not like she’s asking for her job back. Are you?” she asked, frowning.

“No,” Caitlin said.

“So let ’em in, Joe.”

Joe was quiet a moment, then said softly, “We don’t need trouble, Martha.”

“It can’t be her,” Martha replied just as softly. “Maybe it looks like her, but we know her, and it can’t be her. So let ’em ask their questions or whatever. If it will help her, great. If not, it’s not our problem.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t try to help,” Joe said. “Maybe that makes it our problem.”

“Oh, just let ’em in, will you?”

Caitlin had no idea what they were talking about. Finally, Joe grunted and stepped back so the three of them could enter the pub. Confused, Caitlin looked around the place, at the bar, the tables, the odds and ends affixed to the walls for decoration—an old wooden sled, an old catcher’s mitt, an old wooden oar—but nothing looked familiar to her. She was getting used to that.

“I have to turn on the fryer,” Joe said. “You deal with this, Martha. And don’t be long.”

With that, Joe disappeared through a door in the back wall. Martha walked over to the dark wood bar and stepped behind it. She picked up a towel and started drying wet glasses that were lined up on a towel spread out on the bar. Caitlin took a seat on a stool, and Josh and Bix did the same on either side of her.

“You heard the man,” Martha said as she rubbed at a particularly troublesome smudge on a glass. “I need to be quick here.” She looked up at Caitlin again, and her face softened for the briefest of moments. “Sorry about your head.” Then her features hardened into what were apparently their natural states.

Caitlin began. “Uh, what was that you and . . . and Joe were saying? About trouble?”

“Nothing,” Martha said in a tone that completely closed off that avenue of discussion. “Now ask your questions and get on out of here, okay? What do you need to know?”

Caitlin knew she should have had questions ready, seeing as their answers were the reason they had gone there, but she didn’t. She thought for a moment. What did she need to know?

“I stopped coming to work two weeks ago?” she finally asked.

“I think we went over that,” Martha said.

“Any idea why?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Well, when I was last here, did I give any indication that I wouldn’t be coming back to work?”

“Not to me,” Martha said. She squinted her eyes at Caitlin. “You really hurt your head?”

Ignoring that, Caitlin said, “Had I started acting differently? You know, before I stopped coming to work. Did you notice anything like that?”

“I have nine servers working for me . . . well, eight since you flaked on me . . . plus four bartenders and two guys who rotate doing the cooking with Joe,” Martha said. “I don’t really pay attention to everybody’s moods.”

“Do you remember anyone telling you that I was acting differently or anything like that?”

Martha did something weird with her lips—pursed them, maybe—while she thought. “Look,” she finally said, “I never heard anyone complain about you. They all liked you. Your coworkers, the customers. No one had anything bad to say about you. And no one ever said you were acting funny or anything. Okay?”

Caitlin nodded. What else could she ask? She had hoped that someone here would have some idea of what she had been doing lately, some sort of clue as to how she had ended up with a gun and fake hands and covered in blood. Why she would have been in that warehouse two nights ago. But seeing as Caitlin hadn’t even been to work in weeks, she didn’t see how anyone could give them insight into her recent behavior.

Rather than learning any answers here, all Caitlin had found were more questions.

“Listen,” Martha said, “I really do have things to do before we open. Like I told you, Katie, you seemed fine, everyone seemed fine with you, so I don’t know what else I can tell you. Did you talk to Janie? I asked her where you were, but she said she didn’t know, which I had trouble believing.”

“Janie?” Caitlin asked, looking over at Bix.

He nodded. “You two are friends.”

Caitlin turned back to Martha, who was openly staring at her.

“It’s true, huh?” Martha said. “You really don’t remember much, do you?”

Caitlin shook her head. She looked at Bix again. “Do you think we have Janie’s phone number?”

“It’s probably in your phone,” Bix said, “but you lost that, right?”

She nodded and turned to Martha. Martha sighed and shook her head resignedly, then reached under the bar and came back up with a spiral notebook. She opened it, flipped past a few pages, then turned the book around so Caitlin could read the number to which she was pointing. Caitlin leaned forward and felt the men beside her do the same. She looked at the page. At the top, the word
Employees
was written in blue ink. It was underlined. Below that were more than a dozen names and phone numbers. One name had a line through it. It was Caitlin’s . . . or, rather, Katie’s. Martha was pointing to a phone number beside the name Jane Stillwood. It didn’t ring even the tiniest bell for Caitlin.

“Do you have a pen and a piece of paper so I can write this down?” Caitlin asked.

“No need,” Josh said quickly. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, touched the screen, then snapped a flash photo of the page. He took a quick look at the screen to confirm that he had captured a good image, then smiled and said, “Who needs to write things down these days?”

Caitlin quickly scanned the other names on the list with the faint hope that one of them would sound familiar. Her eyes fell again on her own crossed-out name . . . that is, Katie’s name. And that’s when she realized why Josh had taken the snapshot.

“Well, that’s all I can tell you,” Martha said. She looked at Caitlin and her face showed a glimpse of her softer features again. “Like I said, sorry about your head. Hope you get it all figured out.”

“Thank you,” Caitlin said. “I appreciate that. And I’m really sorry about . . . well, about not showing up at work and everything.”

She stood, squeezed out between Josh and Bix, and started for the door. Josh followed. At the door, she turned and saw Bix still seated at the bar.

“Bix?” she said.

“In a minute,” he called over his shoulder.

Caitlin walked back to him.

“You need me to show you to the door?” Martha asked.

Bix reached for a bowl of mixed nuts on the bar and pulled it toward him. As Caitlin watched him dig a small handful of nuts from the bowl and toss them into his mouth one by one, she couldn’t help but wonder whether they were fresh from a can this morning or left over from last night. “Just wondering, Martha,” Bix said, “what was that you and Cookie were saying before about not wanting trouble?”

“You mean Joe?” Martha asked.

“Sure.”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit,” Bix said. “What were you talking about?”

“It’s nothing,” Martha repeated. “I’m telling you.”

“Well, it seemed like you were worried about trouble, and you thought Katie being here could cause it. So how about we just sit here until you open up? In fact, as your customers start filing in, Katie will be sure to greet them one by one, reminding them how fantastically helpful you’ve been to her today, letting us hang out here, giving us phone numbers, stuff like that.”

Martha glared at Bix.

“Or is there some reason you’d rather people not know she was here today? That you gave us a hand?”

“You sonofabitch,” Martha said. “We opened our door to you . . . to her . . . tried to help her a bit . . . and this is how you thank us?”

She’s right
, Caitlin thought. They did open their door to her. They did try to help out. She didn’t like the way this was going all of a sudden.

“Bix . . .” she said.

He ignored her and watched Martha. Martha scowled back. Caitlin couldn’t remember Martha from before this morning, but she’d have been willing to bet that plenty of people withered under that scowl. But Bix stared back impassively as he munched another mouthful of nuts. Finally, Martha said, “Hell, I don’t know why it matters. Take it and go,” she said as she grabbed a newspaper from beside the cash register and shoved it across the bar at Bix.

Instead of leaving, Bix opened the paper, turning pages until he found it. Caitlin leaned over his shoulder and looked. A headline on page six—
Woman Sought in Warehouse Slaying
. Beside the article were two police sketches, one of a man and the other of a woman. Caitlin’s eyes focused for a moment on the sketch of the woman, which wasn’t terribly detailed, but which nonetheless looked—Caitlin had to admit—remarkably like her. After looking briefly at what could only be a sketch of her own face, she slid her eyes over to the image of the man, which was far more detailed than the sketch of her. She sucked in a sharp breath.

“Caitlin?” Josh said.

She recognized him. He had been in her dream last night. She couldn’t remember seeing him before in her life—that is, her real life—but he had been there in her nightmare. For what felt like the millionth time, she’d been running from the Bogeyman last night. This time, though, she’d had a gun in her hand. She’d turned and fired and hit the Bogeyman dead center, yet when he fell to the floor, he was . . . well, somehow he was the man in the sketch. Caitlin studied the drawing. No doubt about it. Add a bullet hole to the left cheek and he was a dead ringer—pun accidental but far too apt—for the man in her nightmare. The man Caitlin had shot. She hadn’t meant to. She had meant to shoot the Bogeyman. In fact, that’s exactly what she’d done. She remembered that part of the dream clearly. The Bogeyman had been rushing at her, loping with his long legs, and she’d fired the gun. She thought she’d hit him in the stomach, but when she had stood over the body and looked down, she saw the man from the police sketch lying on his back, a hole in his cheek, his eyes dead and staring. It was him. Caitlin knew it for certain. Which meant that . . .

“I killed that man,” she said softly.

“Jesus, Caitlin,” Josh said.

“Whoa, Katie, let’s watch what we say,” Bix said quickly.

Martha watched them and said nothing.

“I . . . I don’t remember doing it,” Caitlin said. “Not really. But I dreamed that I did it.”

“Honey,” Josh said in a calm, reassuring tone, “just because you dreamed it doesn’t mean you did it.”

“How else would I know that face?” Caitlin asked, looking first from Josh, then to Bix, then to Josh again. “I don’t remember ever seeing it before, yet I remember seeing it in my dream, first without the bullet hole, then I shot him . . . well, I shot the Bogeyman, but then the Bogeyman was him. He was dead and I shot him.”

Martha was clearly listening to every word they said. Her eyebrows were high on her blotchy forehead.

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Josh said to Martha. “I mean, you hear her, right? Bogeyman? Dreams? This is obviously a result of her head injury.”

Martha nodded but Caitlin knew she wasn’t convinced. But Caitlin was. Whoever that guy in the picture was, whatever her reason could have been, Caitlin had shot him in the warehouse the other night. She didn’t remember it, but her subconscious mind did, and it had replayed the scene for her last night while she slept. Sure, it twisted the facts a little, as nightmares are known to do, but the important facts were there and in plain sight.

“I killed him,” she said.

“Katie,” Bix said, “I think you should probably stop saying that.”

“Let’s go, hon,” Josh said, tugging her elbow gently as he turned toward the door. “Can we keep this?” Josh said as he grabbed the newspaper.

“Be my guest,” Martha said.

Halfway to the door, Bix stopped and turned. “Any chance you aren’t going to call the cops the second we walk out the door?”

“You think I need that kind of publicity?” Martha said.

“Some people say there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“Not sure I agree. I wouldn’t brag about it if Osama bin Laden tended bar here before he took down the towers.”

Bix nodded. “Yeah, but Katie’s not bin Laden.”

“No, she’s not,” Martha said. “I’m not good at showing it, but I always liked you, Katie. So if that’s you in the paper, if you had anything to do with that business in the warehouse . . . well, I figure you probably had your reasons, even if you can’t remember ’em any longer. So I’ll keep my mouth shut. Joe will, too. I can’t speak for anyone else around here. Maybe one of your coworkers will recognize you in that drawing, or one of the customers will, but as far as Joe and me, we won’t say anything.”

Caitlin managed a smile, which she achieved only through an act of sheer willpower, then she walked out of the pub with Josh and Bix behind her. They got back into Bix’s Explorer and no one spoke for a moment. Then Caitlin said, “I think it’s time to go to the cops.”

“The hell it is,” Bix said. “I already told you, you can’t trust them. As soon as they have you in custody, they’ll stop looking for the real killer.”