Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels (12 page)

I pictured Shayna’s face when she first saw the body and then when the police found the drugs under the seat of her car. She had been genuinely shocked in both instances. Something told me the Lord had put me there at those moments so I would see for myself, so I would believe in her innocence, so I would feel the urge to help this girl.

For now, I was eager to get over to the police station and talk to Shayna face-to-face. If I was going to try and help her, I had some questions that definitely needed some answers.

Fourteen

Shayna looked terrible. Of course, I hadn’t exactly expected her to be chipper, but truly the kid looked as though she had been raked over the coals. When the policeman let me into the interrogation room, I found Shayna with her head down on the table, softly crying. She looked up when I entered, confusion blurring her features.

“Callie? What are you doing here?”

“Hey, Shayna,” I said. “How are you holding up?”

The door was shut and locked behind me with a click.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, eyes wide. “Did they arrest you, too?”

I shook my head, allowing myself a small smile.

“No. I’m here to see you.”

She sat up, smoothing her new hairdo back from her face. Even with bloodshot eyes and splotchy cheeks, the flattering effect of the hairstyle was remarkable. I could detect a tremble in her fingers, and I asked if she needed water or coffee or anything.

“They’ve been real nice with all that,” she said. “I’m fine.”

There was a chair across from her at the table, so I sat, looking around at the small room. It was a standard interrogation room: one table, a couple of chairs, and blank walls except for a large one-way mirrored window. There was a box of Kleenex on the table, and I pushed it toward her. She took one and tended to her face before rolling it into a ball and clutching it nervously in her hand.

“So they’ve been asking you a lot of questions, huh?” I asked.

She nodded her head vigorously.

“Oh my gosh, Callie, the stupidest stuff. What did I have for breakfast yesterday. What time did I go to the bathroom. Where do I keep my car keys.”

“Where
do
you keep your car keys?”

“In the car! I keep telling them,
everybody
in Kawshek does that. We either leave them in the ignition or under the floor mat. It’s not like car theft is exactly a problem out there. Especially with a piece of junk like mine. Who’d want it?”

“Did Eddie Ray ever borrow your car?”

“Yeah, sometimes. He didn’t have a car of his own.”

“Have you had any flat tires lately?”

“A couple of weeks ago. I drove over a piece of wire. It looked like maybe it had broken off from an old crab trap.”

“Did you change the tire yourself?”

“Yeah. I was out on the highway. There wasn’t anybody else around.”

“You used the tire iron?”

“Of course I did. You think I’ve got Triple A? It was just a flat tire!”

“I see.”

“You see what? You sound just like the cops, asking me all these stupid questions. I don’t understand what’s going on, Callie.”

“They’re giving you a lot of rope in the hope that eventually you’ll hang yourself with it.”

“What?”

“They want to catch you in a lie, Shayna.”

She shook her head vigorously.

“But I haven’t lied, not once. I swear I don’t know where the pot came from. You believe me, don’t you? I’ve been clean since last fall!”

I nodded.

“Now I’ve got this new job starting,” she continued, “and I’ll just die if I have to postpone that because of some lousy drug charge. It would be so embarrassing!”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at her, thinking that losing a job was the least of her problems right now.

“Shayna, don’t you get it?” I said. “They’re not interested in the marijuana. They want you for Eddie Ray’s murder.”

She looked at me for a moment as that sunk in. She seemed to be reviewing things in her mind, and then finally she looked down and blinked out more tears.

“I’m so stupid,” she whispered. “I guess I should’ve figured that out.”

“Did you kill him?” I asked.

“No!”

“Do you know who did?”

“No!”

“Then let’s work on getting you out of here. I mean, if you want my help, that is.”

Shayna looked up, shock written in her wide-open eyes.

“Oh, Callie,” she said, those eyes filling with tears. “I think I need your help right now more than I’ve ever needed anything in my whole life.”

Fifteen

For the next 15 minutes, I listened to a detailed history of Shayna’s relationship with Eddie Ray Higgins. Some of the facts I already knew, and some were new to me.

They first met in a truck stop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she was a waitress, and he was working as a “mule,” smuggling heroin across the Mexican border. Shayna was an addict then, and Eddie Ray was a ready source—not to mention a sweet-talking charmer. After a few weeks of on-again, off-again romance, Eddie Ray learned that his mother had died and left him a small sum of money along with a house in Kawshek. He decided to get out of drug-running and move back home to make his fortune legitimately. He brought Shayna with him.

Once they moved here Eddie Ray had tried all manner of ways to make money, but he seemed to fail at everything he did. Shayna described some of his schemes, from starting a fishing lure mail-order business to opening a fancy restaurant in Easton. Eddie always gravitated to “big” plans—things that were destined to fail simply because of his grandiose nature. He went through his inheritance fairly quickly, and then he took out a mortgage on the house and went through that, too. In the end, he had enough left to make a down payment on a deluxe boat for a water-taxi service, but no money to promote the service or even pay for the upkeep of the boat.

“After the water-taxi business failed, he left me for good,” Shayna said. “Like I told you, he just up and left. Then two days later, some men from the bank showed up to foreclose on his mother’s house.”

“Wow.”

“I didn’t even know they were coming.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I left! I walked out of that house, went over to the bar, and got high. I woke up two days later in a ditch out along the highway, and that’s when I realized life just couldn’t get any worse.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

Shayna went on to describe how the first thing she saw as she walked back to town was a big white tent outside of the community church. There was something going on there, but what drew her were the free donuts and coffee set up on a table nearby. She took as many donuts as her hands could hold and then sat in a metal folding chair, intending to eat and be on her way. Instead, she started listening to the words and the music down front, and soon she was swept into the revival. Before the night was over, she had accepted Christ and decided to turn her life around.

“The people in that church could not have helped me more,” she said. “They prayed with me and supported me, but they also showed me how I couldn’t keep on with the way things were. They talked me into going to drug rehab so I could dry out, and then I was assigned a social worker and got job training. When I finally got out of rehab, the whole church was so proud of me. One of the deacons let me live rent free in that apartment until I could find a job, and the ladies’ group gave me an old car so I could get to interviews. They even gave me spending money in exchange for cleaning the sanctuary every Monday morning.”

Tears started to roll down Shayna’s cheeks as she talked.

“Oh, Callie, they all believed in me so much. Things were going so well. If even one of them thinks I did this—the drugs or the murder—it will just break my heart. I can’t face them!”

I sat back, waiting as Shayna pulled out more tissues and blew her nose. I thought about the crowd that had been watching the police activity near her apartment the night before. Indeed, the way they talked, they all seemed to believe she had killed Eddie Ray—but even so, they had sounded sympathetic to
her,
not to him.

“If things were going so well for you,” I asked, “why did you let Eddie Ray back into your life?”

She shook her head.

“He took me by surprise, I guess,” she replied. “He said he missed me and he loved me—and I was feeling kind of lonely and scared. I hadn’t been with anybody in so long. Not that we did anything this time, you know. I let him move in, but I made him sleep on the couch. Part of me wanted him to leave. But part of me just wanted a man around again. Somebody to hold my hand. Somebody to say nice things to me.”

I wondered about those nice things he had said to her. Had he really loved her, or was there some other motive? Perhaps he was just in need of a free place to crash. According to Shayna, he had five dollars in his pocket the day he showed up this time. Maybe she was simply his last resort.

“Yesterday,” I said, “at Advancing Attire, you were telling me about some new big plan Eddie Ray had. You said he told you that soon he would have enough money so that neither one of you would ever have to work again.”

Shayna rolled her eyes.

“I don’t even know what this one was about. He got all excited one day about two weeks ago. He said he’d finally hit the jackpot.”

“Another water-taxi service?”

“No, this was different. This time he wouldn’t tell me what it was exactly. He just said that as soon as he made his first big
chunk of change we would get married, and then I would never have to worry about money again.”

“Was he involved with someone locally? Like, in a business deal or something?”

“I don’t know. He spent a lot of time at the bar with Russell and the other guys, shooting pool, but that was nothing new.”

“Russell?”

“Russell Lynch. One of his old friends.”

“Did he have many friends in the area?”

“A few. There’s not much to do in Kawshek. ’Round five o’clock every afternoon, folks start coming in from the water. Most of them hang out in either the bar or the store. In a way, everybody is friends with everybody else.”

“I understand.”

Shayna let out a deep breath, pushing her new bangs from her forehead. She looked exhausted.

“What about Hank?” I asked.

“Hank?”

“The guy you had been dating before Eddie Ray came back to town.”

“How’d you know about him?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Gossip. Weren’t you dating him previously?”

“We went out a few times,” she said, “but I kind of broke it off.”

“Why?”

This time she shrugged.

“Hank’s a fisherman. Ready to live his life out in Kawshek in a little one-room apartment. I don’t want that life. I want out of here. So I stopped things before they ever really got started.”

“Do you think he could’ve killed Eddie Ray? Out of jealousy?”

Shayna actually laughed out loud.

“Hank Hawkins? He wouldn’t kill a fly with a flyswatter. No, there’s no way. He may look tough, but he’s really very sweet, like
a giant teddy bear. We broke up a couple days before Eddie Ray came back. There were no hard feelings.”

I nodded, doubt still lingering in my mind. I tried to picture Hank as I had seen him last night, ruddy and huge, with that nasty scar across his chin.

In any event, I knew our time here was just about out, so I approached things from a different tack, concentrating back on Eddie Ray’s latest plan for making big bucks.

“Shayna, do you think it’s possible Eddie Ray was working as a mule again?”

I thought that if he had been a drug runner before, there was a chance he was involved with something like that again. In an area like the Chesapeake, where hundreds of ships from all over the world passed by on the waterways every day, smuggling had to be rampant. The kind of people involved with drug smuggling probably wouldn’t think twice about committing murder—or stuffing a dead body into the nearest trunk.

“I doubt it,” she replied. “He hated smuggling before. Besides, he never made much money from it anyway.”

I asked her other questions about Eddie Ray’s moneymaking plan, insisting he had to have let something about it slip, even if he’d primarily kept her in the dark. She thought for a while before finally looking up at me in surprise, her eyes wide.