The Silent Girls (6 page)

Chapter 12

G
ROUT BARGED PAST
the Double Black Diamond’s bellhop. One look at the kid’s flat, wide-faced bone structure, the pugged Frenchman’s nose, and the pinched eyes set too closely, the teeth that begged for braces they would never get, and you could see he was a local yokel from Morrisville or some other piss-poor town that bordered Stowe. And as soon as he shed his Double Black Diamond disguise, he’d be out tooling around on his ATV to sate that inflated insatiable macho urge found in rednecks everywhere to burn up gasoline. Grout despised ATVs and snow machines and the lazy asses who rode them for shits and grins. Same for the yahoos who churned the quiet of Lake Canaan into froth with their Jet Skis. Wherever they towed their Big Boy Toys, they left behind shattered beer bottles, spent condoms, and McDonald’s trash. A real nice sight for his two kids and wife when they were trying to enjoy a day outside.

The bellhop probably despised the folks who passed through these doors and gave him his livelihood, resentful of their money. Grout had no use for them either, but not because of their money. He’d have liked to have himself a piece of
this
pie. He’d even played with the idea of applying for a head security position at the resort. He’d heard they made good money. They worked more normal hours, too, and were less likely to get their ass shot while investigating a domestic. Jen had all but begged him to apply for an opening she’d seen in the paper. He’d driven up to get an application but had decided against it at the last minute and sat in the car for an hour listening to ESPN radio. After all, what kind of life was it for a man, a detective, being a rent-a-cop for the rich? Still, he had to admit, it was good money.

It was the privileged class’s ignorance, not their money that rankled Grout. They skied here and shot their wad when they saw a black bear scrounging from the Dumpster at their slope-side condo, oblivious to the fact that the ski area’s development was destroying bear habitat, putting the population on the edge of collapse, and forcing the bears to seek food at the Dumpster to begin with. They whined about how the old swimming hole they’d loved when they’d “summered” here as kids was now muck, blind to the ski area sucking water from the river for snowmaking. Not that Grout gave a shit about the environment. He was no tree hugger. He was one of a few locals who had approved of the Ravens Way estates on Canaan Ridge. It was stupidity Grout hated.

He elbowed past the moneyed guests on his way to the customer-service desk.

A young woman with a pixie haircut and the requisite black slacks and blouse of the Double Black Diamond looked up from a laptop.
FAWN
, her nametag announced. Was that her real name? If so, where could her next stop be except a Montreal strip joint?

“Can I help you?” Fawn said, arcing an eyebrow plucked in an already unnatural perpetual arc.

“I’m here to speak with Cynthia Mann,” Grout said, and flashed his badge. Fawn gaped at the badge.

“Cool,” she said, beaming. “I’ll grab her.” She turned toward a shut door behind her, then turned back to Grout, and whispered, “What did she do?”

“I can’t say,” Grout whispered.

“You never know.”

“You never do.” Fawn opened the door and slipped inside the back room.

Grout looked at his wristwatch. He could devote a half hour to Cynthia before he headed back north. It was his “official” day off, and he needed to get back for Liam’s basketball game and family-dinner night at the Pizza Palace, a place that fell pathetically short of its name. Still, Sunday was the only day he didn’t arrive late from work or have to head out for work; and aware as Jen was about his career demands, she was as impatient with its cutting into his supposed day off. Family Day. He saw her point. But what else could he do? Sniffing out scum was his innate talent. His job. What he wanted was to be Senior Detective, then interim chief when Barrons shoved off to live his Caribbean dream. Grout expected he’d advance when the new budget passed. Jen expected it, too. As she saw it, he should have been Senior Detective long ago, and she was beginning to hint that his lack of advancement had had less to do with a shit budget than it did with him. It pissed him off. Maybe if she wasn’t always after him to be home.

Fawn came out of the back room, trailing a woman with long silver hair strung in a ponytail so taut it seemed to pull back the skin of her face, as if she’d had work done by a plastic surgeon who received his certification online. Grout had an urge to rip out the barrette holding her ponytail in place to relax her face.

With a sideways glance, she sent Fawn off on some mission then said, “My office would serve us better. The lobby is chaos.”

Grout followed her into the office. She did not wear the resort’s black ensemble but a wool dress the rusty orange of an autumn leaf past its peak. “Have a seat.” When she sat behind her ornate white desk, he saw she was pregnant.

Grout eased into a chair as ornate as the desk.

“So?” Cynthia Mann clasped her hands atop her desk.

“A young girl up our way has disappeared. We found a notepad in her bedroom.” He pointed at a notepad on the desk. “Like that one. We need to follow up every possibility. She might have come by the notepad in any manner of ways, of course.”

“What was her full name?”

Grout told her.

Cynthia clicked keys on her laptop, sipped tea from a DBD mug. Waited.

“No one’s registered in that name the past three months.”

He asked if she could go back farther than that.

“These notepads didn’t exist before August,” she said. “We rebranded the entire resort when the new ownership took over and sank 20 million into remodeling.”

Grout whistled. One more dead end. He should have known not to waste time on such an improbable thread. But what other threads were there? If he could just find one and pull it, a thread of motive, opportunity, means, physical evidence that brought a pattern into clarity, even if, especially if, it proved Mandy was alive. But he needed the single thread to start. Right now, he had squat. At least he’d make Liam’s game.

“She likely stayed here with someone else,” he said. “She could hardly afford a room.”

“She and every other Vermonter. I can’t, even at my 40 percent off.”

“Do you recognize her?” he asked, and slid a photograph across the desk. It was a better photo than the one Rath had; Grout had stopped by to speak with Doris, and she’d given him the best one she could find.

Cynthia shook her head. “I’d remember her. She’s from where?”

“Canaan.”

“She’s darling. A real Boondocks Beauty. She could make it in New York or—” She snapped her fingers. “You
know.
We get modeling agencies here. Casting calls, too. Out of Boston mostly, they rent a conference room to skim the cream of local talent. We did more of them before the remodeling and the new water park.”

Another waste of water, Grout thought. Maybe he
was
a closet tree hugger.

“We had a casting call for extras in a Ben Affleck movie a year ago. I can look into the list of agencies who booked and get back?”

Grout told her to keep the photo, make copies and pass it around. He had more.

As he left, he thought perhaps something was gained. If Mandy had come to one of these modeling or talent-agency auditions, she might have met someone, some Hollywood dipshit, or someone more sinister. It was a long shot. But it was a shot.

In the parking lot, Grout backed out his Subaru and was nearly clipped by a Land Rover that swept into the space next to his.

Grout got out as the Rover’s driver, a tall man dressed in a waxed Barbour coat, wide-wale cords, and suede chukkas strode past.

“Hey,” Grout said.

The man didn’t break stride.

“Hey,” Grout said louder.

The man stopped, his wispy blond hair blowing in the breeze. He looked about to scold Grout, and Grout was about to launch into him when he recognized the man. Boyd Hale Pratt,
III
. The Pratts were as close to the Kennedys as Vermont had. Hailing from a lineage of railroad and steel barons, the clan lived on a sixty-thousand-acre estate perched on Lake Champlain and commanding dramatic views of the Adirondacks.

Grout had spoken with Pratt a year ago, at a fund-raising ceremony.

Pratt squinted and thumbed his round, tortoiseshell glasses higher on his nose.

“Detective Harland Grout,” Grout said.

“Right, of course,” Pratt said, feigning familiarity and clearly growing impatient with Grout, cop or no cop.

Grout considered telling Pratt how they knew each other but refrained. “Just slow it down,” Grout said.

“Right, sure,” Pratt said, and hurried away, to his spa treatment or tennis game, or whatever a man who’d never worked a day in his life did when slumming it at a five-star resort.

Chapter 13

M
ONDAY MORNING,
R
ATH
sat erect in a waiting-room chair of the Canaan County Medical Center, a single-story building that had once been the Canaan elementary school, before the school was absorbed into Connecticut Valley District. In 1990, the asbestos had been torn out, the building gutted, and the site remodeled to house general practitioners under one convenient roof. Rath flipped through a
Sports Illustrated
from April that contended the Red Sox were World Series favorites, no hint of their historic September collapse, spurred by fried chicken and beer.

Rath’s cell buzzed. Sonja Test. Rath answered. “Detective Test,” he said.

“Please. Sonja.” Her voice was low, as if someone might be eavesdropping. “I have something you’re going to want to hear. Meet me at the Wilderness Restaurant in Victory, say two o’clock.”

“Is this about your dead girl?”

“Can you make it?”

He could.

“See you then.” She ended the call.

Rath stared at his cell phone. A nurse poked her head in from the door to the back. “Mr. Rath?”

Rath got up gingerly and followed the nurse, in her mid-twenties, short, and wiry, with the requisite tattoo of her generation, an intricate blue vine snaking out from under the sleeve of her short-sleeved shirt. Rath knew of no image he’d want injected into his skin, and had no idea how tattoos were considered art by anybody; especially when every tattoo he’d ever seen looked like it was done with all the artistry of the high-school stoner drop out.

The nurse had Rath stand on the scale. Measured him. He glimpsed her underarm tuft, caught a whiff of patchouli oil as she raised the bar behind his head.

“Six feet,” she said.

“And a half.”

“No half.”

“There’s always been a half.”

“Not anymore.”

He followed the nurse into a cramped room, where he sat on the edge of an examining table covered with crackling waxed paper.

The nurse took his blood pressure. He felt his blood throb beneath the cuff. “One forty over ninety,” the nurse said.

“Is that bad?”

“You’ll live, tough guy like you. Dr. Snell will be right in.”

“Snell? Where’s Rankin?”

“In his bow stand, waiting for a big buck, so he says. He’s probably asleep on his couch, worn-out from watching game shows.”

She pointed at a Johnny. “Toss that on.”

Rath waited in his Johnny, his skin prickling in the cool room. Why were doctors’ offices always cold? Snell. He knew of him. Young. Early thirties. When Rath had been in his twenties, he’d not trusted anyone over forty and had disliked
old man
Rankin, who was resistant to technology, a dinosaur stuck in a tar pit. Now that Rath was north of forty, he didn’t trust a doctor younger than forty-five, kids who couldn’t relate to the tolling bell of mortality accompanying daily life.

Snell strolled in, whistling, his dark eyes working crisply over the screen of the iPad he had in hand. If he didn’t know what ailed Rath, perhaps Google would.

Snell’s skull was as smooth and bare as a marble pestle, with a squeezed bulge of flesh at the back of his neck. He wore a flannel shirt, Carhartt pants, and Merrell hiking boots. On his chin squatted a soulless soul patch. He sat on a stool and looked at Rath, clicking his teeth as if calling a squirrel from a park bench. “The X-rays were negative. I’m thinking we get you an MRI.”

“MRI?” Rath’s stomach fluttered.

“We tried six weeks of PT. We gave it a chance. It’s nothing skeletal, given the X-ray. If it were muscular, the PT should have worked.”

Rath knew his liver and pancreas were packed snug to the
erector spinae.
What if it was something internal? Five years earlier, a friend had experienced back pain throughout the fall. On Thanksgiving, when he’d been unable to get up from the couch for dinner, his wife had taken him to the emergency room. He’d died of lung cancer on Christmas.

Rath shifted. “Rankin said I had nothing to worry about.” His voice felt weak.

“We just need to make sure.”

Sure of what?

“Look,” Snell said, clapping a hand on Rath’s knee. Rath flinched. “We’ll get the MRI, so we can scratch any other concerns off the list. You’ve been doing the stretches?”

“Religiously,” Rath said, not a lie for a man who thought comedian Bill Maher was a zealot.

“And you’ve been practicing good body mechanics, not overdoing the bending, twisting, or pulling. Pulling’s the worst.”

Rath thought about the deer he’d dragged two miles through Dufrane’s Swamp and over Corser Brook ridge. He’d dragged bigger deer much farther, over worse terrain.

“Not overdoing it,” he said.

“I’ll set you up for an MRI. Lie down, I’ll take a look.”

Snell pressed cold fingers into Rath’s flesh. “What level of pain, zero to ten?”

Rath’s pain felt like a big fat eight, an infinite loop of pain, at least with Snell jabbing away. “Not bad, a six.”

“A six is
not
‘not bad’, four’s bad.”

“I’m out of Vicodin.”

“You
shouldn’t
be. I hope you’re not taking more than prescribed or selling them on the playground.”

“I knocked the open bottle into a sink of dishwater,” Rath lied.

“I’ll write another. This once. But don’t ever take more than prescribed. It can cloud judgment, impair motor skills.” Snell pressed the stethoscope to Rath’s chest. Cold. Always cold. He listened to Rath’s heart. “So, what’s cooking?”

Rath might have a tumor the size of an eggplant in his liver, and Snell wanted to know
what’s cooking
?

“I’m trying to find a missing girl,” Rath said.

Snell pressed the stethoscope to Rath’s back. “Breathe. Sounds ominous.”

Rath reached for his shirt and plucked Mandy’s photo from its pocket. “Seen her?”

Snell considered the photo, calling all squirrels with his clicking tongue. “Pretty.”

“Ever seen her?”

Snell shook his head as he clasped the end of his stethoscope. “I don’t think so.”

“You might have?” Rath sat up.

Snell squeezed the roll of fat at the base of his neck. “She sort of seems familiar. But. In that way that reminds you of someone from TV or a dream.” He handed the photo to Rath.

“Give me a call if anything comes to you,” Rath said.

“Get dressed. Don’t do anything stupid with that back. And don’t worry about the MRI. It’s probably nothing.”

Probably nothing.

One more euphemism by which to live.

Or die.