Blood Relations (19 page)

“Oh, right. If I don't say something, then tomorrow at school she'll ignore me.”

“So?”

“So, if she ignores me, then all the popular kids will ignore me.”

“Rachel, there're what—forty kids in your entire grade? How many popular and nonpopular kids can there be?”

“You just don't get it,” she said.

“Okay, then just go over and say hello. Then you've said hello and done your bit.”

“I can't do that.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because then it's like I've got nothing better to do than to say hello to her. You know, like I'm groveling. She'll probably ignore me.”

“You know, Rachel, you make my head hurt,” I said.

“Whatever.”

“Stay here and watch Matthew, then, okay? I need to speak to Meaghan and Justin's mother.”

“Oh, that's perfect,” she said, elated. “Then I can't go and speak to her because I'm baby-sitting. Mom, you're a genius.”

I didn't want to think about how she'd come to that conclusion. “I'll be right back” was all I said.

I walked down three lanes. June McKinney saw me coming before I got there and waved me on over. She was about forty, with blondish hair and sparkly green eyes. She wore khakis and a sweater with pinecones all over it. “Torie, how have you been?”

“Oh, pretty good.”

“I heard about your foot,” she said. “Does it hurt?”

“Not too much anymore. Is Mary bothering you?”

“Oh, not at all,” she replied.

Yeah, right. What a polite and sweet woman, I thought. “Hey, I wanted to ask you,” I said, leaning toward her. “Did you know Justin was out on his bike the Sunday before last in that snow? I wouldn't normally say anything, I figure that's the parents' business. But it was dark and icy, so I thought I should bring it to your attention, if you didn't already know.”

She wasn't the least bit shocked by what I'd said. “I know he was out. We grounded him for the week. I have told him time and again not to be out on the bike after dark, especially when the weather is bad. And here he was out after dark, in the snow, and on the very night somebody got his head bashed in!”

“Yes,” I said, pondering that a moment. “He was, wasn't he?”

“Sometimes I think the brain doesn't develop until you turn twenty-five,” she said.

I laughed at that, agreeing with her. “Well, has … has he been acting funny since then?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, you don't think he saw anything, do you? Pertaining to the murder?” I asked. “I tell you, he was flying by me on that bike.”

“Probably because he knew he was going to get in trouble for being out so late,” she said.

Or because he'd just seen a guy get his head bashed in and it had freaked him out a tad.

“Yeah, you're probably right,” I said. “Well, I have to get back to our game. I just wanted you to know he was out.”

“I appreciate that,” she said.

“Mary! Come on, we have to finish our game and get Matthew to bed,” I said.

She stomped her foot, clearly unhappy with being pulled away from Dreamboat Justin. Finally, she walked toward me, and Justin's eyes met mine. In that moment, I knew that he had seen something that night. A silent positive message was hidden there beneath those dreamy green eyes that Mary always talked about. And they were just begging for somebody to ask him about it. Some kids are like that. They want desperately to tell something to an adult, but only after you go through the motions of prying it from them.

“It's your turn to bowl,” I said to Mary as we walked away. I dropped her off at our lane and then went to the next lane to speak to Colin. As soon as I entered the Sacred Circle of Terrible Bowlers, Chuck held a hand up to me.

“We love you, Torie, but you're not allowed,” Chuck said.

“Oh, shut the hell up, Chuck. I need to speak to my stepdad, if you don't mind,” I said.

Colin leaned back in the chair and sort of looked at me upside down. “What do you want?”

I leaned down so that nobody else could hear what I had to say. “You need to interview Justin McKinney about whether he saw anything the night Professor Lahrs was murdered.”

I pulled away, and he raised his eyebrows in the form of a question.

“I forgot to tell you. He was out that night. He nearly ran over me and Collette, and he was riding his bicycle like a bat out of hell. As if he'd seen something he shouldn't have,” I said.

Instead of answering me, he yelled at Tony, who had just rolled the ball in the gutter. “Aw, what was that? You bowl any worse, I'm gonna have to arrest you!” he yelled.

“Colin,” I said. “Did you hear me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'll check into it.”

Twenty-three

On Thursday, I decided to go visit Danny Jones. He had appeared fairly levelheaded, and so I thought maybe he could give me some insight into the relationship between Jeremiah Ketchum and Jacob Lahrs. I was, of course, judging that solely on the fact that he hadn't tried to get liquor illegally that night at the Corner Bar. What can I say? It made a good impression on me.

He attended the Granite County junior college, which was about a half hour south of New Kassel. I did my morning tour at the Gaheimer House—yes, my foot was feeling much better—and told Sylvia I would be back for the one at two o'clock that afternoon.

It hadn't warmed up enough to melt all of the snow yet. But it was off the roads and the sky was a deep azure, in stark comparison with the snow white of the ground. The green of the conifers peeked out from under the heavy snow, reminding us all that eventually everything would return to green.

I enjoyed the ride down to Granite County Community College. I passed through several towns that were no more than a four-way intersection with maybe a gas station, a church, and a grocery store on the corner. All were little hamlets, whose names might appear on one of the more comprehensive gazetteers but not on an average map.

Just before arriving in the town of Rosefield, I spotted a dairy farm off to the right, dotting the landscape with its black-and-white cows. As I came around the bend, a valley sprang forth; in it lay Murphyville and Granite County CC. It was a perfect little dell, like something the Teletubbies would visit. I passed through three stoplights, made a left, and parked the car.

The secretary at the administration building wouldn't give me any information about what class Danny Jones was in, saying that was against the rules. But Colin had let it slip that on Thursdays Mr. Jones only put in a half day, so I was just going to find his car and wait by it. Not a difficult thing to do, since I had casually asked Colin what sort of car Danny Jones drove, and he'd told me he owned an old beat-up Chevette. They don't even make Chevettes anymore. It was probably his mother's old car, from when she was in college.

I drove up and down the lanes until I found a white Chevette, decorated with an unbelievable amount of both rust and bumper stickers. The stickers held eloquent phrases:
MEAN PEOPLE SUCK; MY OTHER CAR IS A BMW
; and, my favorite,
JESUS IS COMING. LOOK BUSY
. There were several other bumper stickers pertaining to bands that I had only a peripheral knowledge of. In other words, I knew they existed, but I wouldn't know their music if I heard it: Insane Clown Posse, Limp Bizkit, and Alien Ant Farm. Maybe he wasn't so levelheaded after all.

I got out of my car and circled his, peeking in the windows for no other reason than that I'm nosy. You find out a lot about a person by what the inside of his car looks like. With mine, you know I have kids, because of the car seat, the forty-odd Barbie shoes—none of which match, by the way—and the mess of school papers. One could tell I had a dog, too, by the nose smudges on the passenger-side window. I know, it's terrible, but I guess my car-cleaning fairies are always on strike.

What Danny Jones' car said to me was that he was young, single, and considered himself hip and cool—and that he used his car as a laundry basket. The guitar picks in the little coin holder told me he was a musician, and a serious one, too, judging by the
Rolling Stone
and
Guitar
magazines and the catalog for Danelectro that I found on his passenger seat. He preferred Taco Bell to McDonald's, but he had a definite thing for shakes from Steak-n-Shake. I learned all that just from peeking into his car windows.

Mardi Gras beads hung from the rearview mirror. Studying his dash, I saw old parking stubs for concert events, a melted, half-eaten Snickers bar, and lots of dust bunnies.

“It's not for sale,” a voice said.

I jumped and squealed.

When my heart had calmed down enough that I didn't feel as if it were going to run away, I managed a smile. “Mr. Jones, you scared the bejesus out of me.”

“I see that,” he said. “You down here just scoping out the shittiest cars in the parking lot, or did you want something with me in particular?”

I took a deep breath and swallowed. “I, uh … I came by to speak to you.”

“What about?”

“Mr. Ketchum said some fairly unusual things about Jacob Lahrs, and I just wanted a second opinion.”

“What do you care?”

“Uh … Collette. My friend Collette is doing a story, and I told her I'd help her out by doing some interviews. We just want to profile what type of person Jacob Lahrs was.” That sounded good, I thought.

“Professor Lahrs was great,” he said, setting his books on the hood of his car. “He was my favorite teacher.”

“Mr. Ketchum said something about Jacob having a substance-abuse problem.”

Danny smiled and fished around in his huge pockets, which were situated on the sides of pants that were two sizes too large. He found his keys and held them in his hand. “Professor Lahrs loved to party. He liked to drink. But I never saw him drunk in class or under the influence of anything harsher than alcohol.”

“Why do you think Mr. Ketchum would say otherwise?”

Danny looked around the parking lot, his dark eyes landing on nothing in particular. He shrugged then. “I think … I think Mr. Ketchum was jealous.”

“Of Jacob Lahrs?” I asked. “Why?”

“He's an old fart, you know. He is in his forties, and here Professor Lahrs had this really cool thing that was gonna get him out of the community college before he turned thirty, and Mr. Ketchum would still be here.”

“What's so bad about teaching at a junior college?” I asked, ignoring the “old fart” comment about a man in his forties. I mean, I'm not forty yet, but it isn't too far off.

“Nothing's wrong with it,” Danny said. “But if you want to be something else and this is what you're settling for, it can be a bitter pill.”

I said nothing, so he went on.

“Being president would suck if you wanted to be king,” he said.

“In other words, having to settle was the problem.”

“Exactly. From what I understand, they both had settled for something they didn't want. Only Jacob was getting ready to do something about it.”

“How much do you know about what they were working on?”

“All three of us were working on the same thing,” he said, correcting me. “I get the feeling you know what it was.”

“It wasn't how the wreck happened, was it? Were you guys going to blow the lid off of the Huntleigh mystery and retire on your laurels?”

Danny Jones looked at his feet. “Yeah, well. That's all over now,” he said, grabbing his books off the hood of the car.

“Why?”

“Because we still don't know where the diamonds are. Jacob had an idea of where they were, but evidently it was a semipublic place and he couldn't just go and get them without some hard evidence.”

He unlocked his car door then, but I stopped him. “Wait,” I said. My head was spinning. Jacob Lahrs didn't know where the diamonds were? What did he mean by that? That could only mean one thing. That William Wade had never retrieved the diamonds. They really had been missing all this time, and they still were.

“I have to get to work, Mrs. O'Shea,” he said.

“Of course, the letter mentioned about them not having to worry about the future. He was going back for the diamonds, but he died before he could.”

“Mrs. O'Shea?” Danny asked, a puzzled look crossing his face.

I hadn't realized I had been speaking out loud.

“Just one more question,” I asked, ignoring him. “What were you guys celebrating that night at the Corner Bar?”

He hesitated a moment. “On a dive, Jacob found the case the diamonds were supposed to have been in. The case was shut but not locked. They were all gone. Not one single diamond left in a closed case. It confirmed to Jacob that somebody had taken the diamonds off the boat before the wreck.”

I thought about that a moment as Danny Jones opened his car door. It was clear that he thought I knew more than I did, so I just played along.

“That's it? That's what the celebration was about?”

“More or less,” he said. “He'd also found a few personal items that had belonged to his great-grandparents.”

“Eli Thibeau and Jessica Huntleigh.”

An admiring smile crossed his face. “The rumors about you are true,” he said. “Jacob said more than once that if you weren't so anal, he'd bring you on board.”

“‘Anal'?” I asked. “I am not anal.”

“I have to go, Mrs. O'Shea.”

“Sure,” I said, thinking about what he'd said. “Hey, where do you work?”

“Camelot, the music store,” he said.

“Where's that?”

“Wisteria,” he replied.

“Have a good day,” I said.

He shut the door, started the car, and pulled out of the parking lot. I got in my car, fairly satisfied with the way the interview had gone. Well, except for when he'd called me anal.