Never Look Away (18 page)

Dwayne's eyes were boring into Kate.

"I said forget it," she said.

"You think I'm a faggot?" he asked.

"No," she said.

"'Cause a person might do things and still not be a faggot," he said.

No more wondering now
, she thought.

"You want to go places you shouldn't?" he asked. "I can do that, too,
Kate."

"Dwayne."

"How's it feel, putting your friend in the ground?"

"She wasn't my friend," she said.

"You worked in the same office together."

"She wasn't my friend. And I get it. We're even. I'm sorry."

"He did it first!" one of the boys whimpered.

Dwayne closed his eyes. Through gritted teeth, he said, "Fucking kids."

"It's not their fault," she said, relieved to be able to channel Dwayne's thoughts to the kids, and away from her comment. "They have to be taught how to behave in a restaurant. Their dad should have brought something for them to do, a coloring book, a video game, something. That's what you do."

Dwayne took a few deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling through his nose.

The waitress served the father and twins, and a moment later, brought plates for Kate and Dwayne. He was on it like a bear on a bag of trash.

"Eat your breakfast," the father said behind Dwayne.

"I don't
want
to," said one twin.

The other one suddenly showed up at the end of Kate and Dwayne's table. He inspected their breakfast until Dwayne said, "Piss off."

Then the boy began strolling up to the cash register. The father twisted around in his booth and said, "Alton, come here!"

Dwayne looked at Kate and mouthed,
"Alton?"

She poured some syrup on her pancakes, cut out a triangle from one and speared it with her fork. There'd been plenty of things to lose her appetite over in the last twenty-four hours, but she was hungry just the same. Had been since the middle of the night, when she'd stood at the window looking at the McDonald's sign. And she had a feeling that she needed to eat fast, that they might not be staying here much longer.

Dwayne shoveled more food into his mouth, put the mug to his lips, mixed everything together. His mouth still full, he said, "What were the odds, huh?"

She couldn't guess where his mind was. Was he talking about the odds that they would be here, today, getting ready to do the thing they'd been waiting so long to do?

When she didn't answer, he said, "That we'd run into her? That she'd see us?"

"Alton, come back here right now!"

"But I gotta say," Dwayne continued, "I think we turned a bad situation into a positive."

"Whatever."

"Alton, I'm warning you, you better get back here!"

"My eggs are icky!" said the twin still at the table.

Dwayne spun around, put one hand on the father's throat, drove him down sideways and slammed his head onto the bench. The man's arm swept across the table, knocking coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon all over himself and the floor. His eyes were wide with fear as he struggled for breath. He batted pitifully at Dwayne's arm, roped with muscle, pinning the man like a steel beam. The boy at the table watched, speechless and horrified.

Dwayne said, "I was going to have a word with your boys, but my girl here says it's your fault they act like a couple of fucking wild animals. You need to teach them how to behave when they're out."

She was on her feet. "We need to go," she said.

TWENTY-TWO

"When was this again?" Barry Duckworth asked.

Gina tried to think. "Around the beginning of last week? Maybe Monday or Tuesday? Wait, not this past week, but the week before."

"I'm not saying you have to do this now," the detective said, getting a whiff of pizza dough baking in the oven, "but if I needed you to find the receipt for that night, do you think you could?"

"Probably," she said. "Mr. Harwood usually pays with a credit card."

"Okay, that's good. Because at some point I may need to know exactly when this happened." Duckworth was already thinking about Gina on a witness stand, how a defense attorney would slice her up like--well, that pizza he thought he could smell cooking--if she couldn't remember when the incident took place.

"So Mr. and Mrs. Harwood are pretty regular customers at your restaurant here?"

Gina hesitated. "Regular? Maybe every three weeks or so. Once a month? I really wonder if I've done the right thing."

"About what?"

"About calling the police. I think maybe I shouldn't have done this."

Duckworth reached across the restaurant table, covered with a white cloth, and patted her hand. "You did the right thing."

"I didn't even see it on the news at first, but my son, who works here in the kitchen, he saw it, and he said, 'Hey, isn't that those people who come in here once in a while?' So he showed me the story on the TV station's website, and I saw that it was Mrs. Harwood, and that's when I remembered what had happened here that night. But now that I've called the police, I think I may have done a terrible thing."

"That's not true," the detective said.

"I don't want to get Mr. Harwood in trouble. I'm sure he'd never do anything to hurt his wife. He's a very nice man."

"I'm sure he is."

"And he always leaves a fair tip. Not, you know, huge, but just about right. I hope you're not going to tell him that I spoke to you."

"We always do our best to be discreet," Duckworth said, promising nothing.

"But my son, he said I should call you. So that's what I did."

"Tell me what the Harwoods are usually like when they're here."

"Usually, they're very happy," she said. "I try not to listen in on my customers. People want to have their private conversations. But you can tell when a couple are having a bad evening, even if you can't hear exactly what they are saying. It's how they lean back in their chairs, or they don't look at each other."

"Body language," Duckworth said.

Gina nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, that's it. But the last time they were here, forget about the body language. I could hear what they were saying. Well, at least what she was saying."

"And what was that?"

"They'd been talking about something that couldn't have been good, because they both looked very upset. And I was coming over to the table, and that was when she said to him something like 'You'd be happy if something happened to me.'"

"Those were her words?"

"It might have been different. Maybe she said he'd be happy if she was dead. Or he was rid of her. Something like that."

"Did you hear Mr. Harwood say anything like that to her?"

"Not really, but maybe that was what he said to her just before she got so upset. Maybe he told her he wished she was dead. That's what I was thinking."

"But you didn't actually hear him say that?" Duckworth asked, making notes.

Gina thought. "No, but she was very upset. She got up from the table and they left without having the rest of their dinner."

Duckworth sniffed the air. "I can't imagine leaving here without eating."

Gina smiled broadly. "Would you like a slice of my special pizza?"

Duckworth smiled back. "I guess it would be rude to say no, wouldn't it?"

When he got back into his car, after an astonishing slice of cheese-and-portobello-mushroom pizza, Duckworth made a couple of calls.

The first was to his wife. "Hey," he said. "Just called to see what was going on."

"Not much," Maureen said.

"No emails or anything?"

"He's five or six hours ahead, so he has to be up by now."

"Don't be too sure."

"Don't worry. Just do your thing. Did you eat the salad I packed you?"

"I won't lie. I'm still a little hungry."

"Tomorrow I'll put in a banana."

"Okay. I'll call you later."

The second call was to see whether Leanne Kowalski had come home. He didn't call her husband--he didn't want to get into a discussion with him right now--but he knew he'd be able to find out what he needed to know by calling headquarters.

She had not come home.

The detective felt it was time to step up efforts where she was concerned. Someone needed to be working exclusively on that while he worked the Harwood disappearance, and they'd need to compare notes several times through the day to see where the two cases intersected, assuming they did. He put in a call to the Promise Falls police headquarters to see what could be done on that front.

Duckworth was thinking he might need to take a drive up to Lake George before the day was over, but there was at least one other stop he wanted to make first.

Along the way, he thought about how this was coming together:

David Harwood called the police to tell them his wife had gone missing during a trip to Five Mountains. But there was no record of her entering the park. Tickets to get him and his son in were purchased online, but there was no ticket for his wife.

This is what trips them up. They try to save a few bucks and end up in jail for the rest of their lives
.

You think they're too smart to make a mistake that dumb. And then you think about that bozo who helped bomb the World Trade Center back in 1993, gets caught when he's trying to get his deposit back on the rental truck that carried the explosives
.

The surveillance cameras at the amusement park failed to turn up any images of Jan Harwood. Not conclusive, Duckworth thought, but not a very good sign for Mr. Harwood. They'd have to go over the images more thoroughly. They'd have to be sure.

David Harwood's story that his wife was suicidal wasn't passing the sniff test. No one he'd spoken to so far shared his assessment of Jan Harwood's mental state. Most damning of all--Harwood's tale that his wife had been to see her doctor about her depression, and Dr. Samuels's report that she'd never shown up.

Now, Gina's story about Jan Harwood telling her husband he'd be pleased if she weren't in the picture anymore--what the hell was that about?

And the Lake George trip. David Harwood hadn't mentioned anything about that. A witness had put Jan Harwood in Lake George the night before she disappeared. The store owner, Ted Brehl, reported that Jan had said she didn't know where she was headed, that her husband was planning some sort of surprise. And her boss, Ernie Bertram, had backed this up, saying that Jan was headed on some sort of "mysterious" trip with her husband Friday.

Was it possible Ted Brehl was the last person to see Jan Harwood? Not counting David Harwood, of course. Duckworth was becoming increasingly convinced that David Harwood was the last person to see his wife alive.

And he was getting a gut feeling no one else ever would.

Arlene Harwood tried to keep busy. Her husband, who could sometimes get underfoot and be--let's be honest here--a real pain in the ass when he started telling her how to do things, was entertaining Ethan. That was good. Don had gone into the garage and found an old croquet set, and with Ethan's help had set it up in the backyard. But Ethan quickly adopted a playing style that had little to do with hitting the wooden balls through the hoops. Just whacking the balls in any old direction kept him occupied, and Don quickly abandoned plans to teach his grandson the game's finer points.

Arlene, meanwhile, went from one activity to another. She did some dishes, she ironed, she paid some bills online, she tried to read the paper, she flipped through the TV channels. The one thing she did not do, at least not for more than a minute or so, was use the phone. She didn't want to tie up the line. David might call. Maybe the police.

Maybe Jan.

When she wasn't feeling desperately worried for her daughter-in-law, she was thinking about her son and grandson. What if something had happened to Jan? How would David deal with it? How would Ethan deal with losing a mother?

She didn't want to let her mind go there. She wanted to think positively, but she'd always been a realist. Might as well prepare yourself for the worst, and if things turned out better than you'd expected, well, that was a bonus.

She racked her brain trying to figure out where Jan might have gone, what might have happened to her. The thing was, she'd always had a feeling that she'd never shared with her son or her husband. She certainly couldn't tell Don--he'd never be able to keep his mouth shut about how she felt. But there was something about Jan that wasn't quite right.

Arlene Harwood couldn't say what it was. It might have had something to do with how Jan handled men, and didn't handle women. David had fallen for her hard soon after he met her while doing a story for the
Standard
on people looking for jobs at the city employment office. Jan was new to town, looking for work, and David tried to coax some quotes out of her. But Jan was reserved, didn't want her name in the paper or to be part of the piece.

Something about her touched David. She seemed, he once disclosed to his mother, "adrift."

Although she wouldn't be interviewed for the piece, she did disclose, after some persistent questioning from David, that she lived alone, didn't have anyone in her life, and had no family here.

David had once said if it hadn't been so corny, he would have asked her how a woman as beautiful as Jan could be so alone. Arlene Harwood had thought it a question worth asking.

When David finished interviewing other, more willing subjects at the employment office, he spotted Jan outside waiting for a bus. He offered her a lift, and after some hesitation, she accepted. She had rented a room over a pool hall.

"That's really--I mean, it's none of my business," David said, "but that's not really a good place for you to live."

"It's all I can afford at the moment," she said. "When I get a job, I'll find something better."

"What are you paying?" he asked.

Jan's eyes widened. "You're right, it's none of your business."

"Tell me," he said.

She did.

David went back to the paper to write his story. After he'd filed it, he made a call to a woman he knew in Classified. "You got any rentals going in tomorrow I can get a jump on? I know someone looking for a place. Let me give you the price range."

She emailed him copies of four listings. On the way home, he parked across from the pool hall, went upstairs and down a hallway, knocking on doors until he found Jan.

He handed her the list he'd printed out. "These won't be in the paper until tomorrow. At least three of these are in way better parts of town than this, and they're the same as what you're paying now." He tried to peer past her into her room. "Doesn't look like you'd have that much to pack."

"Who the hell are you?" Jan asked him.

That weekend, he helped her move.

Someone new to rescue, his mother thought, after Samantha Henry made it clear she could manage on her own, thank you very much.

It was a short courtship. (Arlene grimaced to herself; there was a word nobody used anymore. "Courtship." Just how old was she, anyway?) But damn it all, things did move fast.

They were married in a matter of months.

"Why wait?" David said to his mother. "If she's the right one, she's the right one. I've been spinning my wheels long enough. I've already got a house." It was true. He'd bought it a couple of years ago, having been persuaded by the business editor that only saps paid rent.

"Jan wants to rush into this, too?"

"And remind me how long you knew Dad before you got married?"

"Got you there," Don said, walking in on the conversation. They'd gone out for five months before eloping.

The thing was, Don had loved Jan from the first time David brought her home. Jan ingratiated herself effortlessly with David's father, but did she really make the same effort with his mother? Maybe Arlene was imagining it, but it struck her that Jan had a natural way with men. She got them to give her what she wanted without their even realizing it.

No great mystery there
, Arlene thought. Jan was unquestionably desirable. She had the whole package. Not a supermodel's face, maybe, but the full lips and eyes, the pert nose, went together well. Her long legs looked great in everything from a tight skirt to tattered jeans. And she had a way of communicating her sex appeal without it being tarty. No batting of the eyelashes, no baby girl voices. It was just something she gave off, like a scent.

When David first started bringing her around, Don made an absolute fool of himself, always offering to take her coat, freshen her drink, get her another sofa cushion. Arlene finally spoke to him. "For Christ's sake," she said one evening after David and Jan went home. "What's wrong with you? What's next? You gonna give her a back rub?"