named an exact time. Moonrise could be checked. “And you saw no one?”
“Guess we wouldn’t.” He toed his workboot over a knot in a board. “You’re not allowed to camp on the beach. But we were here in the time long ago. It’s really all ours.” That he stopped without making derogatory remarks about whites spoke for his self-control, but perhaps he didn’t want to antagonize the police.
“I don’t disagree.” She looked at her watch as if she were growing short of time and wanted to wrap up the interview. “That was a pretty cool shelter you made on the big fir root. Gotta hand it to you.”
He seemed flattered, rubbing a hand through his thick hair. “I’m pretty good at it. Get the pieces to fit just right. Don’t need no nails at all. Nice and tight. The wind gets up at night.”
She excused him. So there was a discrepancy in their description of where they had camped and the time they went to bed. But both denied seeing anyone on the beach.
Before leaving, she dropped one more penny onto the table as Billy rejoined them. “I need your fingerprints.”
They both tensed and looked at each other for a brief moment. Beads of moisture freckled Mike’s forehead. Billy cleared his throat. “We didn’t touch anything....not that there was anything to touch. Are you gonna check the driftwood?”
He gave a childish laugh, then coughed into his hand.
For once, a lie came in handy. On a beach, with winds and tide, not many pieces of forensics would remain, and not for long. “Of course not. But a car was broken into in the parking lot that week. A couple of prints showed up. This will eliminate you.”
Was that a visible relaxation in their muscular shoulders?
“Sure, why not?” Billy said.
Normally the print kit wasn’t carried in cars, but with distances making time a premium, Holly had changed the protocol. She took them to the Impala, opened the trunk and set up the equipment on a picnic table, offering them a wet towelette at the end of the process. Her real intention was to check against the prints on the condom package. Teenaged boys sure as hell didn’t use them in a same-sex encounter. But as ubiquitous as condoms were, often given out free, one might have lingered in their wallets or backpacks. And if so, that might break their story. Had one of them, or both, had sex with Angie?
Holly pulled in to the detachment as Ann was closing up. “How did it go?” the woman asked.
“They seem like good boys, but something is going on,” she said, explaining her procedures.
Ann gave a sign of approval at the fingerprint idea. “Why not? It’s not impossible that they were involved with those thefts. Clearly, it’s a local.”
Ann’s old Taurus chugged out in a cloud of blue smoke. With a sigh, Holly went inside to type her report. Then she set out the package of prints for the courier the next day.
By nine, her father had already gone to bed, but he’d left her a plate of meatloaf, garlic mashies and carrot coins in the fridge. She heated the tasty meal in the microwave, then sat in his recliner in the solarium. The wind had been up all day, the tides at a horrific 9.5, and from the beaches surf pounded the rocks like incoming mortars. As she finished the last juicy bite and stretched back in the fullness of comfort, she saw in a seat fold the newspaper he had been reading, a tell-tale piece of white sticking out. Inside was an envelope type-addressed to him with no stamp or postmark. Her hand hovered over it as she weighed the ethics. A plain piece of cheap copier paper lay inside. With hesitation, she read it. “I hope you’re still losing sleep. You won’t get away with it, you know. The mill of God grinds slow but exceedingly fine.” Her heart chilled like a cold marble slab. No wonder he hadn’t been himself. And the wording. “The mill of God.” Hardly garden-variety prose. Who was harassing him, and for how long? Was he being blackmailed? She got up, her knees wobbly and her strategy uncertain. Secrets buried in more than one heart never kept their own counsel.
She climbed the circular stairs slowly, thinking at each step.
Then she looked at his door, closed against the unwelcome night heat rising from the woodstove in the foyer. A slit of light appeared under it. “Knock knock,” she said.
An umhmmm followed, so she opened the door of the smaller corner bedroom. Only a highboy dresser and bed table served for furniture, and piles of books and magazines leaned in pillars. Wearing striped pajamas and a silk paisley dressing gown, Norman was propped up by pillows in a monkish single bed. A patchwork quilt covered one end, his mother’s work. Shogun lay on a soft foam pallet on the floor, his head sprawling, and his legs splayed, exposing his pink belly in a position of complete trust. A rope tug toy lay beside him. He was snoring. Another reason not to sleep with dogs.
The sight amused her, but she hadn’t come for this. She sat at the end of the bed, focusing on her father’s eyes, sad as an old bloodhound’s. When the woodstove started burning in the fall, he developed allergies, a vicissitude of age, he claimed. “I have to confess something, Dad,” she said.
“Oh my,” he said. “Your old man’s not a priest, though sometimes I live like one.” He put down his book. Peyton Place. “Bestseller in 1956. We kids used to find the paperback copies in the drug store and read the forbidden pages.”
Wasn’t he a wizard at sidetracking, or was he covering embarrassment for the personal approach? “You’re joking. Show me one.”
A slight smirk on his lips, he leafed on, then passed her the book. Something about getting it up good and hard, Rodney.
“That’s it? Pretty tame for these days.”
He was chuckling when she touched his shoulder, a rare gesture, brought his sea-blue eyes to hers, fawn like her mother’s but with emerald flecks. They saw the world so differently, he in his historical tower, she on the drawbridge tossing criminals into the moat. “This is serious. I found that note. Didn’t mean to... No, of course I did. I was wondering why you were a bit thoughtful lately.”
He said nothing, but reached for a glass of water by the bed. Then he took off his black horn-rimmed Mr. Peepers glasses. “Don’t worry about...those letters. They mean nothing.”
“Now letters? How long has this been going on? And no Judy Garland imitations, please.” She tortured herself about the unspoken fact that her father had been a suspect, had no alibi other than being in his office late that night marking papers. An old maintenance worker had claimed to have glimpsed a figure in his office, but the man had serious cataracts, a less than ideal witness. With no sign of her mother or the Bronco and no other forensic trails, the police had been forced to declare the case cold.
“A poison little note comes every year around the anniversary of your mother’s disappearance.” In clear sorrow, he rubbed the bridge of his hawk-like nose where the glasses had left a mark like a bruise. “Anniversary. What an ironic word.”
“Who’s doing this? Where are the rest? You know, we could have dusted them for prints. Was the stationery always just copier paper?” She gave a laugh. “My god, we could have taken DNA from under the flap.”
“Same paper and the same message, with minor variations. And the envelope’s never sealed.”
“Cleverer than I thought. How do these messages get to you?”
“They’re
