She leaned into him, her chest a fraction of an inch from his, her chin outthrust, her finger pointing. Pale pink nail polish, Orson saw, that matched her lipstick.
“If you think you’re gonna wake my daughter, you have another think coming. My girl is asleep, after crying her eyes out. You can just wait. You hear me?”
“I wouldn’t think about—I just need to ask—”
“You need to ask nothin’. I know how you cops work.” She put her hands on her hips. Orson saw his dad looking at her mouth. “You start out all sweet and nice and asking simple questions and then you lower the boom with some other awful question that says you think somebody’s guilty of something. It’s a sneak attack, is what it is. Jist like that sneaky way you questioned me about it all without telling me you was a cop. And my Nell is too broke up over Joe to be hurt like that.”
“Miz Bartwell, I—”
“I know you got a job to do. I know somebody’s gotta ask the hard questions and look for guilt. I know somebody’s gotta interrogate, and investigate, and stick his nose into other people’s business. Like assuming my girl is guilty of killing her husband and hiding the body. Right?” she demanded. She shoved her chin closer, nearly touching the old man’s chest. “Right? That’s what you gotta ask?”
Orson was pretty sure his dad had started to sweat. He nodded like he couldn’t help himself. He’d probably have agreed that the sky was green if she told him to. Twenty-five years as an investigator questioning the biggest and baddest the streets had to offer, and this little bitty woman…Orson laughed silently. She scared the hell outta him.
“I understand that,” she said. “But you gotta understand that I gotta job to do too. And my job is to protect my baby. And if you try to hurt her, if you try asking mean questions jist to see her cry, if you try to make her feel worse than she does now for gettin’ hurt and makin’ her husband go down a dangerous river alone to get her help, and then not come back from it, I’ll scratch out your blasted eyes. I’ll cut out your innards and leave your bloody, dead body where only the maggots can find it. And then I’ll pray over your dead, bleeding body that the Lord will somehow save your immortal soul, if you really have one. Are we clear?”
“Pretty clear, ma’am.”
“Come back later.” Claire stomped back up the steps and closed the door in his face.
“Did that little woman just threaten you with blinding, death and maggots?” Orson asked from the shadows. “Isn’t it against the law to threaten an officer of the court?”
Nolan looked over at Orson, leaning a shoulder against the side of the RV, arms crossed over his wet suit, ankles crossed. Amused as hell and not hiding it. Nolan shook his head. “Yeah. I think I’m in love.”
Orson snorted. “She’d eat you up and spit you out, old man.”
“Like I said. I think I’m in love.”
“One ’a these days your love of bitchy women is going to get you killed.”
“Feisty. Not bitchy.”
“You say potato, I say bitchy. But I did notice that she didn’t use a single cussword in all that tirade.”
“And she did offer to pray for me.” Nolan laughed and nodded his head at the river; the two men walked toward the slow-moving water. “You ready to go undercover?”
“I’m ready. But you know for a fact that the more experienced men will say I got this job on your coattails.”
“I asked who had river experience. You were the only one, Junior. Get in there and make nice with the kayak search crew. And don’t screw up, son.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said wryly.
“You want a pat on the butt, play football.” Nolan Lennox turned and walked back to his unmarked car, leaving Orson to join the search team and find out who knew what about Joe Stevens. As lead investigator on the Joseph Stevens case, his dad had bigger fish to fry.
As the shadows lengthened along the Leatherwood Ford Bridge, in the extended dusk that steep valleys and rivers always experience, Nell stood on the shore, hiding beneath a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, waiting. Her mother was at her side, with one arm around her waist, body heat a comfort at her back. She wanted to be there when the boaters brought Joe’s boat in.
There were four news vans behind them, all with cameras trained on her, one van for each of the competing networks working out of Knoxville, the closest city big enough to have its own TV stations. NBC, CBS, ABC and the local cable van were all present. Nell had seen her own interview on the air before shutting the TV off. She knew how unlikely it was for reporters to get the details right this early in the search, before they found someone—an unnamed source—to give them the skinny. She wasn’t interested in hearing their on-air misconceptions and mistakes or their take on the search.
Joe’s disappearance had made state news, and some pundits were implying that she had done away with Joe, an implication that should have made Nell furious, but only left her exhausted and more determined than ever not to grant interviews to predatory reporters. After hearing the insinuations on local talk radio, Claire had agreed that they were vultures. She had stepped in to protect her daughter’s privacy, telling reporters to stay back or she would shoot them herself, not that Claire owned a gun. Nell leaned in to her mother’s body as she stared at the empty water, the current only a ripple.
Near 4:00 p.m., the first kayak came into view, followed by the rest of the small craft and then by the Maravia Ranger raft, Mike sitting up high on the stern of the boat. Nell saw them all, but her eyes were on the red playboat being towed by the kayaker in the middle of the pack. It moved in erratic patterns behind the towboat, the lack of weight making it skitter across the surface of the quiet pool like a water spider.
Playboats were used by extreme kayakers who wanted to take class V rapids, and then do tricks and stunts in them. The responsive little boats required the weight and experience of a skillful paddler inside to track smoothly. Empty, Joe’s boat had no grace or style or spirit. Nell had an instant of memory—Joe in the boat, practicing a backflip, his body and boat in the air, upside down, churning water below him, his paddle spinning, a wide grin on his face.
She quivered with reaction. Her husband wasn’t dead. He was alive. He had to be. He was too vital, too vibrant to be…to be dead. Tears started to fall again.
Wavering in her tears, the boats scraped onto the shore, hulls rubbing on sand and rounded river rocks. Nell blinked hard and focused solely on her husband’s boat. She moved into the shallow water and knelt, one hand out to pull the forty-pound boat close to her. It ground across the surface of the shore, the empty hull hollow-sounding, magnifying the noise like a drum. She ran her hand across the boat.
It was battered, with long scratches along the sides, new gouges where it had impacted rock. Some parts of the top-of-the-line outfitting—the hip pads, and knee braces that Joe had duct taped in for a permanent fit—were missing, leaving only the seat, structured metal bracing and hard plastic.
Nell had seen a lot of boats in her time, many that had taken rapids without a boater. A lot of them had looked like this, the insides partially missing. Wherever Joe had come out, it hadn’t been just before the location where she found the small
