Gone (15 page)

After about three hours of driving, Jake pulled out his cell phone and made a call.

“Steve, we’re about thirty minutes out. Beth Ryder’s sister is with me.” Jake fell silent while he listened to the man on the other end of the line. “Okay. See you there.”

Clare didn’t ask for a summary of his conversation. It wasn’t hard to put together that Jake had made arrangements to view the body with the cop who’d alerted him earlier.

All too soon, yet not soon enough, he pulled into the Kenton County Morgue parking lot.

The morgue was in the basement of a small hospital. Steve Sumner, a lanky man with a receding hairline and a full red beard, met them in the short corridor. Jake made quick introductions. Clare supposed she muttered an adequate response, though she couldn’t remember what it was she’d said.

“We don’t have a camera to view the body,” Sumner said. “Not in the budget at this time. Clare, you’re going to have to take a look at it up close.” Sumner tugged at his tie. “The body was found in a dumpster. It’s pretty banged up, including the face.”

“I’m making the ID,” Jake said.

Since Jake had never met Beth, he couldn’t legally identify a body as hers. Neither could Clare for that matter; the last time she’d seen her sister, Beth had been an infant. If the body was believed to be Beth from photographs they’d both seen of her, Dean Ryder would be notified for an official identification. The legalities sprang to Clare’s mind and then faded away like bubbles. At the moment, legalities meant nothing to her.

Neither did Jake’s insistence that he view the body himself.

Voice tight, Clare addressed Sumner. “I want to see the woman.”

Sumner nodded, then opened the door to the morgue and led them inside.

The morgue was like the thousand others Clare had been in, crypt cold and wreaking of disinfectant. Unlike the others, however, she’d never gone into one fearing the body she’d view was her sister’s. Her stomach clenched tight as a fist and goosebumps pebbled her skin.

A male attendant nodded to Sumner and went to one of the drawers.

Clare’s heart thumped. Jake’s hand settled on her shoulder, big and heavy, while his other arm wrapped around her.

Clare held her breath.

The attendant slid the drawer open. A wave of cold air rose. He drew the sheet down to the body’s neck.

Clare stared at the face. Bruises discolored the left side. A cut sliced across the jawline. Despite the damage to the features, Clare could see that this woman wasn’t Beth.

Clare shook her head.

* * * * *

Back at his vehicle, Jake stood at the driver’s door, facing the opposite side of the street. It was twilight now. Neon lights lit up a small white-washed structure with a marquee that proclaimed the place
Mack’s Bar.

Jake regarded the marquee. “We could use a drink.”

“I’d rather we went back to Farley.” She did not want to linger here. She tried for a firm tone. Instead, her voice came out thin.

Jake eyed her and his jaw tensed. “Got a hot date?”

Before she could summon a response, he crossed to the passenger side where she stood and seized her hand. He waited out two cars driving through the intersection then towed her across the street.

The onset of evening hadn’t dispelled the heat, but for the first time since she’d come to the south, Clare didn’t mind the temperature. She was bundled in Jake’s jacket. He’d put it on her in the hallway of the morgue when she began to shiver. The jacket was still warm from his body and she huddled into it.

There were few people inside the bar. A couple sat together on the same side of a booth. Two men racked up balls at one of the pool tables. A film of cigarette smoke circulated in the conditioned air. A big screen TV mounted high on one wall was tuned to a sports channel.

The bar stools were unoccupied. Jake steered her to one of them, then took the seat beside hers.

He ordered a beer and a gin from a bartender with the build of a Sumo wrestler, and when the drinks arrived, set the gin in front of her with a curt, “Drink.”

Clare would have objected to his high-handed tone, but just then her stomach did a flip-flop and she gagged. She slid off the stool onto legs that felt as sturdy as wet noodles.

“Clare—”

She clutched her stomach. “If you don’t want me to be sick on you, stay out of my way.” She spotted the restrooms and rushed by him.

When she returned to her seat moments later, Jake stood leaning against the brass railing of the bar, facing the door she’d gone into. His eyes narrowed as she approached. She caught her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. She had less color in her face than the poor woman she and Jake had just viewed.

When she picked up her drink, to her dismay, her hand shook. Jake wrapped his fingers around hers, steadying her grip. Together, they lifted the glass to her lips and she took a gulp. A fire ignited in her throat and stomach from the alcohol, but she welcomed the burn.

Once they lowered her glass, Jake released her. He raised a bottle of beer to his own lips and drank deeply, as he downed half the liquid.

She took another large swallow of the gin, then a third, finishing the drink. Jake signaled to the bartender for another, but she shook her head. The gin had already achieved the desired effect of warming her, and that was all she wanted from the alcohol at the moment. She wanted to remain clear-headed, though why she would want that, given that the gruesome image of the woman she’d just seen hadn’t dispelled, she couldn’t imagine.

Someone fed the jukebox and Willie Nelson crooned about all the girls he’d loved before.

Clare set the glass on the bar. “I’m okay now. When you’re done, I’m ready to go.”

Jake’s jaw tightened. He didn’t answer, but continued to nurse what had to be the last remaining swallow or two of beer in the bottle. She found his unwillingness to abandon the last drops unusual. He’d never been particularly fond of beer.

Some time passed; he didn’t respond to her statement or finish his drink.

“Jake, if you’re done, I’m ready to go,” she said.

He turned to face her then. “Are you? You should take a look at yourself.” He pointed with the neck of the beer bottle to the mirror behind the bar. “See what I’m seeing.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” It occurred to her that he was angry with her. “Are you mad at me?” Her tone held outrage, but due to her recent bout of nausea lacked the usual punch.

He raised the bottle once again, this time in a toast. “You got it in one. Give the lady a prize.”

She turned her head to face him fully, and caught her reflection. Indignation had put two spots of red on her cheeks now. It wasn’t a flattering addition. The red looked ghastly, garish against her still chalk-white face.

“Jake, what is your prob—”

He thumped the beer bottle on the wooden bar top. “You could have waited in the hallway of the morgue. Not only was there a possibility that the woman was Beth, but Sumner warned you that the woman had died hard. It was going to be ugly. Your first glimpse of your sister in twenty-five years would have been of her bruised and beaten and laying on a cement slab. You didn’t need to put yourself through that. You didn’t need to, but you did anyway.”

“I needed to see for myself that the woman wasn’t my sister.”

“Was that it, Clare? Really? Or, was it you just didn’t want to be weak—let yourself for once in your life give in to a moment of weakness?” The anger in his eyes was now joined by frustration. “When there’s a way to achieve a result that will save pain, most people take that way. Not you. You have this need to test yourself—to push yourself to impossible levels of endurance. If there’s a way for you to punish yourself, you’re first in line to do that. Just what the hell are you punishing yourself for?”

Clare straightened her shoulders. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, I do. I know you, remember? At least as much as you’d let anyone know you. I’d venture to say that I know you better than
anyone
. Delude yourself if you want, but don’t try to delude me.” He touched his index finger to her temple. “You’ve got a need in there to keep yourself from being happy. I wish to God I knew what to do about that.”

Clare drew back, so he was no longer touching her. Body tense and shaking from heat now, rather than cold, she eyed him. “Are you finished? I must have missed the Bureau’s class on Psych 101. As to your claim that I keep myself from being happy, where does that come from? Where do you get off? I was happy three years ago, remember, you were there. I did not keep myself from being happy. If you want to lay blame, then it’s all yours. You walked away from what we had. I didn’t.”

“What we had?” He grunted. “What we had was great sex. That’s all we had.” His brows drew together. His tone lowered and the anger left his voice. “That’s all you’d let us have. It was never anymore than that.”

Chapter Nine
 

Clare pulled into the driveway of Connie’s Place. An elderly man and woman sat on the verandah facing one another across from a checkerboard. They glanced up from their game as Clare climbed the creaking porch steps.

“Good afternoon,” Clare said as she walked by them into the house.

Clare had just come from her sister’s residence after spending the last hour with Beth’s neighbors. The women on the short street were stay-at-home moms, and when Clare had given them the date of Beth’s last known day in town and asked if they recalled being at home on that day, they’d given responses like, “I’m home every day!”

The women hadn’t been cordial. Clearly, their sympathies lay with Dean Ryder but Clare could tell they’d been curious about her. They hadn’t wanted to turn down a chance to learn something new about the Ryder scandal.

She’d asked each woman in turn if she’d seen Beth on that afternoon. None had.

She needed to retrace her sister’s steps on her last day in Farley. So far, all she knew was that Beth had been in the grocery store at ten-thirty on that Friday morning, arranging with Gil Hoag to leave town. Hoag said that Beth intended to complete her workday at the inn. Clare would confirm the time Beth left the inn of course, but more, she hoped someone here could tell her where Beth had gone next.

Inside the inn, a door at the end of the hall was open, revealing the kitchen. The blades of ceiling fans whirled, carrying the scent of something sweet baking. A kitchen door, open to the glass, showed Connie in the yard hanging sheets on a clothesline.