Authors: Eric Rickstad
The Silent Girls (21 page)
A
FTER THE OTH
ERS
were gone, Grout sat in his office, the door closed, his head bowed, remembering. Karly Martin. Fall of junior year. He’d been sixteen, and he’d loved her. He must have. Because when he’d gotten her pregnant, he hadn’t been scared or angry or ashamed. He’d been proud. Happy. If there was a person he’d wanted to know more than he’d wanted to know Karly, it had been that baby. His baby.
When he’d told Karly, her laughter had scalded him. Was he
crazy
? They were
sixteen.
He’d argued that if she’d just wait until she felt it kick inside her, she’d love it. “No
,
” she’d said. “I’d hate it. I have things I want to do
.
Important things. Besides, my old man will kill me. Kill
you.
” It had been a dramatic thing to say, but her father probably would have hit her and definitely would have poleaxed Grout. Grout hadn’t cared. He’d told her all she had to do was have the baby, and he’d take care of it. He wanted it. She couldn’t do this. The baby was his as much as hers.”
She’d howled. “There’s no friggin’ way I’m packing on fifty pounds and getting cottage-cheese thighs to have a brat for you.”
Grout leaned back in his chair and stared at a water stain on the ceiling.
In the end, all he’d been able to do was convince her to let him be there during it. He’d thought he was being noble, as if he were at a vet’s office witnessing an old dog being put down quietly. It had been nothing like that.
He’d never seen Karly again—she’d left town.
He would have been a good father. “I
am
a good father,” he whispered. He’d been young. But he’d known how to love. “That’s one thing I know,” he whispered.
“What?” a voice said.
Grout looked up to see Larkin at the door. “You need something?” Larkin said.
Grout stared at the young cop for a long time.
“Resolution,” he said.
R
ACHEL S
COURED HER
flesh in Felix’s shower. She felt dirty and cheap. “I’m disgusting,” she said.
A shadow fell across the shower curtain.
She tore back the curtain to find Felix seated on the toilet’s lid. She yanked the curtain closed, cranked up the hot water, and pressed her forehead against the tile until she was poached.
In the kitchen, Felix had prepared oolong tea in chipped china cups they’d picked up at a tag sale. They liked rummaging about tag sales. They liked being uncool.
Felix handed her a cup of tea, and she nibbled at the cup’s edge and pressed in against his chest. He enfolded her in wiry arms so long it seemed he could wrap them around her twice. She sighed. Waited for him to ask about the night. Angle for details. But she didn’t want to talk. And he didn’t ask. She treasured that. Other guys would have poked her with questions to get her to open up, let them carry part of the burden. Solve it. Play Good Listener when what they really wanted was to soften her, get the dramatics behind them, so they could get to the sex.
Not Felix. He remained quiet. The cold of the linoleum floor seeped through Rachel’s thin socks, so she stood on the tops of Felix’s giant’s feet. Felix drew her tighter to his chest, and now she wished he
would
say something. She was fond of quiet people. Quiet men. Like her father. A man whose voice wasn’t music to his own ears. Her dad fell into deep silences sometimes, looking at her as if he was about to confess some horrible deed. Some wicked truth he’d kept from her. But then he’d always say something innocuous, like, “Should we go for pizza tonight?”
“Well,” Felix said, clearly sensing her discomfort, “how’d undercover go?”
She looked up into his face and felt a spark of confidence in her bones. “I did good. I think. But.
God.
Nerve-wracking. I didn’t see Mandy. I met some other quack. I have to go to other meetings in other locations, see if Mandy shows.” She took her iPhone from her pocket. “I snapped the list, just in case, to check for comparisons.”
“You’re a regular Laura Croft.”
“That anorexic skank.” She shivered. As hot as her flesh was from the shower and the terry-cloth robe, her core was a block of ice. The tea helped. She sipped it. Felt it easing down her throat and melting her from the inside out.
She slipped from Felix and paced, recounting the meeting, the ugliness of the reality and the buzz of playing her role. Told him all about Purple Hair.
“It’s weird,” she said. “She was insinuating herself into the group, like she was a spy trying to convert me. And I’m in there, a spy myself.”
“You need to watch it. There are crazies out there. We should call your dad.”
“Not until I can help; he’ll be pissed I did this on my own no matter what.”
She sat on Felix’s lap, slinging an arm around his neck and cupping his rough, unshaven cheek with her palm. “The upcoming meeting. Hopefully, I’ll spot Mandy unless this is all just a dead end.”
“Why would your old man follow a dead end?”
“It’s not like there’s a road sign that tells you:
DEAD END
. Besides you always learn something.” She pinched his cheek.
He blushed. “I’m bush-league.”
“You’ll learn, Watson.” She kissed his forehead. “Pizza?”
G
ROUT PULLED HIS
cruiser up to the Pratt estate’s admission gate and waited as the attendant spoke to the driver of a silver Volvo on the other side. The Pratt estate was legally deemed a non-profit agricultural center that admitted guests and school filed trips to observe cheese making and cow milking.
What a ruse
, Grout thought. The driver of the Volvo, who sported aviator shades and a
Magnum P.I.
mustache, was yapping at the guard, giving him grief. Finally, the driver shook his head with a scowl, and the Volvo shot off in a spit of gravel.
The attendant wheeled over on his chair to address Grout. He was surprisingly young. A kid. Maybe seventeen years old. The skin of his narrow face was pink and raw from Retin-A.
“One ticket?” the
guard
said, glancing in Grout’s car’s backseat. The whites of the kid’s eyes spiderwebbed pink with burst capillaries.
Grout showed him his badge. “I’m here to see Mr. Pratt.”
“Which?”
“Boyd,” Grout said.
“Which?”
“
The third.
”
The kid looked at a clipboard. Then nodded to Grout, and said, “I guess you don’t need a ticket.” He pressed a button, and the gate’s arm rose.
The road wound tranquilly through undulating hills of impressive oak stands, dipped between vast, sprawling fields. Grout had read on the Web site that in the 1920s, the family had hired so-called geniuses to create carriage trails of crushed pink marble, doze earth to mold the rolling hills, and strategically plant thousands of red oaks to replicate some sort of Victorian
pastoral aesthetic.
These hills had been designed and sculpted by a supposedly famous
landscape engineer
named Frederick Law Olmsted Senior. The original land had been flat as a beaver tail, scraped smooth by glaciers. The hills and oaks had all been purchased, were a manufactured deception.
Cars of foreign make with out-of-state plates passed Grout going the other way, kicking up powdered marble that settled as fine as ocean silt on the hood of the cruiser Grout drove to impress upon Pratt the official capacity of his visit.
Grout drove up the swell of a hill and into the shadows of mature oak trees. Squirrels scampered in the road, performing their neurotic jig of indecision. Grout tapped his brakes warily, so he wouldn’t crush one with a tire. He hated that sickening
thwump.
He came out of the trees and to a vista of the estate. The imposing enormity of the inn and mansion and dairy barn left Grout feeling exposed and dwarfed, as perhaps the buildings were meant to do to folks who did not belong among the privileged class. To those who did belong, the buildings likely inflated their dreamy sense of entitlement.
Grout pulled into the lot opposite the carriage house, which, relative to the other buildings, seemed modest, though it was three times that of Grout’s cape. He got out, and a gust of wind off Lake Champlain knocked him so full on he had to put his arms out for balance. The day was bright and cold. Out on the choppy lake, a skein of Canadian geese flew low over the water, making slow progress.
Grout crossed the road to stand in front of the old carriage house. He peered up at the widow’s watch. The curtains were drawn over the windows. The carriage house still had the classic double doors that had once allowed access for actual carriages but now likely garaged Pratt’s Land Rovers and Bentleys. The doors were windowless and not intended for a guest’s foot passage.
Grout went to the side of the place and found a door. It had a window, the pane of glass thin and warped. Old.
Antique
would be the word preferred by the Pratts. The glazing was crumbling. A shade was down inside. Grout was about to rap on the door when a shadow fell across him. As he turned, his hand instinctively went inside his jacket to the butt of his 9mm in his side holster.
The man who’d come up behind him stood a head taller than Grout, his fine blond hair whipped across his forehead by a blast of wind. “I doubt you’ll need that,” Boyd Pratt said, nodding at Grout’s hand inside his jacket. Pratt smiled, or attempted a smile, one corner of his mouth pulled tightly upward anyway, like that of a hooked fish.
He was dressed in a checked olive-and-tan shirt that sported a finely corduroyed shoulder shooting patch, over which was a vest of dense, heavily brushed moleskin in the same drab olive color as his moleskin trousers. It was the kind of blueblood ensemble an Orvis catalog would twaddle on about being
distinctive and refined, made of the finest materials for the sporting gentleman afield or about the town.
In a word: ghastly.
Pratt didn’t wear the $600 Le Chameau boots you’d expect with such garb, however. Instead, he wore ratty sneakers.
“You’re either the cop who called, or I should call the cops,” Boyd said without a hint of humor.
Grout retrieved his hand from his jacket and held it out, and said, “I’m the cop.”
Boyd didn’t acknowledge Grout’s hand. “Follow me,” he said, and walked off, shouting over his shoulder in the screaming wind, “I’m on my morning stroll before I brunch with my wife at the inn.”
Boyd brought Grout to a teakwood bench perched atop a shale cliff that dropped twenty feet to the lake below. He sat with his knees wide apart, plucked dead grass at his sneakers, tossed the grass in the air, and watched it flutter away, like a golfer testing the wind before a long approach shot, except in this case it seemed to have no purpose whatsoever.
Grout sat beside him, which felt odd, not being able to look him square in the eye. But it would have felt stranger to stand in front of him, looking down on him, Boyd’s face about zipper high on Grout.
“Hurry up with whatever you want to say, I’m quite pressed.” Boyd stared out at a lake the color of lead, spotted by frothy whitecaps. The string of Canadian geese had made no ground, and though the lake was some twenty feet down the bank from them, the crashing waves and the fierce blow misted water against Grout’s face as if he were oceanside. He licked his lips and was half surprised not to taste salt.
“Well, what is it?” Pratt said, squeezing his own kneecaps.
Prig,
Grout thought.
Genuine prig.
“I’ll come right out with it,” Grout said.
“Do.”
“Why were you at the Double Black Diamond when I saw you on the twenty-third?”
Pratt rotated his head on his neck much like an owl and peered at Grout. “I thought you looked familiar.” He turned back to the lake.
“Why were you there?” Grout asked. He stood and looked down on Pratt, blocking Pratt’s view.
Fuck it.
“I don’t believe that’s your business,” Pratt said, staring ahead as if Grout weren’t there.
“I’ll decide that,” Grout said.
“No,” Pratt said flatly. “I don’t believe you will.”
“I’ll subpoena you. How’d that be?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t tell you. I said it was none of your business. Meaning it won’t help you with anything, whatever it is you are up to.”
“I am
up to
the investigation of a missing girl and a murdered girl.”
Pratt lifted his eyes slowly to meet Grout’s. They were the palest of green, nearly transparent, nearly as white as the whites of his eye.
“So?” Grout said.
“I was there to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“A woman.”
Who’d have thought this pasty weed of a man could attract a lover? Grout guessed money compensated for a lot, with certain women anyway.
“Who?” Grout said.
“That
will
require you get me under oath. What
is
all this fuss about?” He patted his knees.
Grout showed him Mandy’s photo. “Have you ever seen this girl?” he said.
Pratt took the photo and looked at it, handed it back. “No.”
“It wasn’t her you
visited
at the resort that day, or any other day?”
“She’s twenty-five years younger than I. At least. She could be my child.” He pulled a tuft of grass from the ground and tossed it in the air, watching it. He was nervous. He was hiding something. Lying.
“Money makes up for a lot,” Grout said.
“You’re saying this girl was a prostitute?”
Maybe Mandy had been
working
at the resort. Is that how she got pregnant? A john? It would explain no apparent boyfriend but the use of birth control.
“You’d testify to never seeing her?” Grout said.
“If made to.”
“But you were there to see . . . a woman.”
Pratt wedged a blade of grass between his thumb and index finger and blew a high, sharp note, as if a child. “It’s a private matter. My wife and I— well, marriage isn’t easy.”
No,
Grout thought,
it isn’t.
“Though I do all I can to make her happy,” Pratt added.
“I’m sure. You’re hosting an upcoming fund-raiser for Senator Renstrom. Yes?”
Pratt leaned back and spread his arms over the back of the bench, trying to strike a confident, casual air but trying too hard. Covering.
“So?” Pratt said.
“He’s quite the lightning rod.”
“A person who has unwavering beliefs contrary to the masses often is.”
“You support him, personally?”
“I believe in much of what he represents. Solid American principles. Tradition. Family.”
“Do you know Betty Malroy personally?” Grout asked, dropping her name without warning to watch Pratt’s reaction.
Pratt’s eyes glided toward the lake. “I’ve never met the woman.”
“Do you know her?”
“No.”
“Are you involved with The Better Society in any way beyond this fund-raiser?”
“Hardly.” Grout was cold, freezing, out there in the fucking wind but dared not show it. His nose was leaking. His toes ice. Pratt seemed unfazed, sitting out there in his dandy duds. “I’m no good at being involved,” Pratt said. “I’m good at giving money away. That’s about all I’m good for.”
Ah, poor lad,
Grout thought.
Douche.
A gust blew a fine spray from the lake, ice crystals now, that stung his face.
“What does this have to do with the girl?” Pratt raised his voice over the wind so it squealed.
Grout shrugged. His feet ached. He blew in his cupped hands. “There are some loose ends. It’s my job to tie them all up.”
“Have you?” Pratt said.
“Time will tell.” Grout held out his cold hand in departure, but Pratt ignored it.
“We’ll be in touch,” Grout said.