Raveled (3 page)

I wasn’t sure how I’d answer the disgusting thing. I’d grown accustomed to life in denial
and ignorance.

“It’s like trying to do a Rubik’s Cube blind,” Kevin said. “You gotta be my eyes, Alley Cat. I can’t take it
anymore. The nightmares. The guilt. The flashbacks that always come up empty. Can’t you at least try? I have money stashed away. I can cover you for—”

“It’s not the money, Kevin!” The guard shot me a reproving glance. What? There’s no shouting in rehab prison?

“What is it, then?” he said.

The good girl inside me lowered my voice to a whisper in obeisance to the guard. “I got my own shit, you know. And when I do something, I really do it. I dive into this cesspool, I might drown.”

“In said shit.” Kevin winked. He had long ago adopted
shit
as his favorite curse word. He’d once expounded, in a semi-inebriated state, how shit could be used as all forms of grammar. Noun, verb, exclamation, adjective, adverb, you name it. We’d tried to make an entire sentence out of it.
Joe, that shitty shit, shat on the shitter and screamed, ‘Shit! What the shit? Are you shitting me? Somebody shit the shit shittily
.’ Later that night, we’d discovered a full and interesting six-word sentence using only the word
buffalo.
Wasn’t nearly as much fun.

“You know me,” I said. “Writing ten-page essays when the teacher asked for three paragraphs. Working five hours overtime when the boss ask
s for two. And besides, it’d be me against Lavitte.”

“When’d you ever let that stop you?”

He knew exactly what to say. We were cut from the same frayed cloth, after all.

His face hardened, making his eyes glaze over. For a moment, he looked like my mother
in one of her less aware states. “I don’t want to end up like Dad, you know?”

I knew.

Chapter 4

Allison… present

Gosh, I couldn’t wait. The arrival of a Fennimore at the Lavitte Police Station was always cause for celebration. I anticipated a warm greeting and perhaps an offer of Delorma’s Caramel Peach Pie. Delorma had been the police department secretary since the dinosaur age, and in keeping with her current reputation, had probably bedded a triceratops her first week on the job. I was pretty sure no law enforcement professional, man nor beast, had escaped Delorma’s forced affections over the years. Three cops had even made the mistake of marrying her without conducting thorough background checks. Goes to show, treat everyone like a suspect.

I
again drove when I should have walked, but it was an unusually humid 89 degrees outside and who knew if I’d need to make a quick exit? I pulled up to the two-story, white-brick building and found a parking spot right up front. How very Mayberry. The heavy door squeaked when I pulled it open and I made a mental note to buy some hinge oil before I realized I didn’t give a shit if that squeak drove them all to madness.

Delorma sat
at her computer, pecking at the keyboard like a delinquent teenage boy killing ants with his fingertips, one by one. Seriously? Eight billion years on the job and she still couldn’t type? It would help if she could see the keyboard over her bulbous boobs, but they spilled so far out of her cheap, wallpaper-print blouse that she was typing blind. Those poor ants.

She glanced up
when the door reached its lowest pitch, the solid wood closing me in with a slow, firm click. “Oh,” she said, filling the single syllable with the disgust normally reserved for puppy-kickers. “Detective Barkley said you might be stopping by.”

One would think from Delorma’s tone that I’d mercilessly teased Detective Barkley and left him in a tizzy of wonder as to whether I might show.
Whatever. Delorma’s slights were just that—slight. Always had been.

“
And here I am,” I said, adding a bright smile. “Imagine that.”

She stood up, showing off the twenty pounds she’d put on since I saw her
six years ago. Kevin and I had both returned home for my mom’s gall bladder operation and, of course, my brother had managed to get himself cited for public drunkenness. At least he’d been walking. Unfortunately, it had been through the fountain outside City Hall.

With a s
cowl that shrunk her green-shadowed eyes to invisibility, Delorma indicated a metal detector to my right. “You gotta walk through this now, you know.” She said it with a sense of superiority, as if Lavitte was proud to be counted among the towns where a disgruntled postal employee might randomly enter the police department and start a shoot-‘em-up. She made no mention of the big, open area behind her, where half a dozen bored cops sat, unprotected by bullet-proof glass. But hey, if it floated Lavitte’s boat to go all Homeland Security on everybody’s ass, I’d swim along. Couldn’t be worse than Drywaters.

I walked through
the detector, no doubt disappointing dumpy Delorma when it didn’t beep. But she wasn’t done yet. She cascaded the fingers of her right hand towards me, so slowly that I had time to notice a distinct decal on each of her painted fingertips. A star, a happy face, a clown, a giraffe, and a gun. Only one bothered me. I mean, really, did anyone like clowns?

“I need to search your bag,” she said.

I thought about protesting that my bag hadn’t triggered the metal detector, but a Fennimore protesting anything in a police department was too cliché for me today. I handed over the bag I’d bought on 6
th
and Broadway from an Indian guy who convinced me I was getting a deal when I knew I was getting a fake. As Delorma lowered her claw, I looked forward to her pulling out my birth control pills. That’s right, dinosaur-lover, even the daughter of a murderer can have a better sex life than you.

She felt around in there, hopefully sticking her finger in the gum I’d sp
at in a tissue. When she got to the pills, she pulled them out, glared at me like they were a lie, then thrust the purse in my direction. Her scent wafted in my direction, an odor of old sex and mint. Who knew in which cop’s pants her fingers had been lately? I glanced at the selection of candidates milling about and hoped, for their sakes, that it was none of them.

“Third door on the right
,” she said. “Of course, you should know your way around pretty well.”

My smile and wave of thanks
may well have ruined her day. That was the problem with having feelings. Things tended to bother you.

I entered the conference room
which doubled as an interrogation room and, judging from the sandwich wrappers in the trash, tripled as a break room. Detective Barkley was already standing at full alert in anticipation of my entrance. Perhaps he’d watched me via a monitor, his excitement bubbling over at the idea of meeting an infamous Fennimore.

When I
’d made the appointment over the phone, his voice had projected an image quite different from reality. While his deep baritone had suggested a hulking bear of a man, he was a fit and trim six-footer with what seemed to be a perfectly balanced body. In great shape without the overbearing, check-me-out muscles. Like an athlete. Probably strong as a horse but kept it in check. I had no idea what would constitute
not keeping it in check—
maybe launching into handstand push-ups as I entered—but he managed to avoid that weird impulse. Either way, he flowed when he approached, like a river in control of every drop. He looked younger than his voice, too. Couldn’t have been older than me. Most disappointing of all, his neck held a human head, not the long-nosed, floppy-eared hound I’d envisioned. He was more purebred. Clean-cut, good lines, from a PETA-approved kennel.

“
Allison Fennimore,” he said, extending a hand. “A pleasure. I’m Detective Blake Barkley. I have to apologize. It didn’t occur to me that this might be an awkward place to meet.”

“No problem.
Just a conference room.”

Perhaps he didn’t realize that a
nywhere in Lavitte would have meant the same accusatory looks, the customary aversion of the eyes, as if I had personally pulled the trigger on Bobby, or discarded Shelby’s body in the No Corpse zone. At his invitation, I took a seat at the square table that contained a large box and a stack of files. He sat to my right, leaning forward on his arms like an attentive student.

“
I gotta confess,” he said, “nobody likes going to the archive room. No air conditioning, crummy lighting, and mutant spiders crawling out from under the cabinets. Ugh.” He fake-shivered, but somewhere along the way, it turned real and went on a smidge too long. “Sorry. Anyway, when your brother’s request came in for the files, I drew the short straw. But once I dusted off the cobwebs, I started reading and wow, really interesting case to read as an adult.”

His enthusiasm was oddly contagious, until I remembered what we were talking about.
“One way to put it, I guess.”

“I was there, you know
, at the trial. When I was a kid. For one day. Sat in the balcony.”

Glad we
Fennimores could provide him such a cherished childhood memory. “Only time the balcony was ever used, as far as I know,” I said. “So you’re a local?”

“One year behind you at school, Miss Number One in her
ninth grade class.”

Okay, that was disturbing, but I sometimes forg
ot my family’s notoriety. Still, I didn’t like him having the upper hand. I squinted into his burnished blue eyes in an attempt to regress him to a pimply fourteen-year-old. Couldn’t get there. He looked like he’d been born as a handsome adult, fully suited and tied and ready to charm the world.

“Not polite to stare,” he said
, although he looked perfectly comfortable with it. Despite a slow lean back into a more casual posture, he maintained his squirrel-like alertness and wily smirk. “Guess I didn’t leave much of an impression back then.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I tended to be in classes with the older kids.”

“I gave you a penny one day,” he said cautiously. “Outside the courtroom.”

“A penny?”

“Found it on the sidewalk. Heads up. That’s how it’s supposed to be for the old saying to work. Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

“No offense, but are you sure it was heads up?”

A faraway, regretful look sailed across his face. “Maybe it didn’t work because I was the one who found it, not you.”

Seemed that a random penny handoff, so out of context at a murder trial, would stick in a young girl’s mind. Especially one who thought she remembered everything from that day, from the overhead lights reflecting in muted tones against the hardwood floors to the echo of the judge’s voice that seemed to start and stop directly above
her head, in the peak of the alcove. But no, I couldn’t remember Blake Barkley’s moment in the sun when he touched the hand of the killer’s daughter and tried to pass her a bit of luck.

“Why did you want
to wish me good luck anyway?” I asked. “Most people were rooting against the Fennimore family those days.”

“When I finally saw your dad brought out, I was so disappointed.”

“Wasn’t real ecstatic myself,” I said.

“No,” he said, “
what I mean is, he didn’t look like a criminal. He didn’t even look like a guilty guy trying to look innocent. For my money, he was an innocent guy putting on a show of indifference.”

“Quite the observation for a
middle-schooler.”

“Wanted to
be a detective since my first Sherlock Holmes novel. I have great instincts about these things, and your dad looked like an innocent guy who’d given up and wanted to get it over with.”

“He definitely did that,” I mumbled. “Maybe the day you saw him, he was being realistic. The town had pretty much decided his fate long before the jury.”

“I don’t know. The Bobby Kettrick case was pretty circumstantial.”

“My dad had the trifecta: motive, means and opportunity. Revenge, a gun and a dark night in an empty garage. Might have been circumstantial, but the circumstances were just right.”

“The case hung on some flimsy threads. You know, they didn’t completely rule out Kevin or Enzo as suspects right away. But gradually, they packaged everything to point to your dad. As I’m sure you recall, Mayor Kettrick had—still has—some serious connections around here, not all of them on the up and up. Either that case was going to be wrapped up quick, or it was going to be wrapped up the mayor’s way.”

“What
’s with that, exactly? Do we have Mafia here in Lavitte? Why is Mayor Kettrick the be-all and end-all?”

Detective Barkley lowered his voice confidentially
, talking more out of the right side of his mouth. “It’s never been proved, but the mayor was linked to a lot of activity in New Jersey. Had a cousin up there on his mother’s side. Low-level thug, trafficked in stolen merchandise, that sort of thing.” He stole a furtive glance through the windows on the wall opposite me, perhaps suspicious of a clever co-worker reading his lips. “The story goes that Mayor Kettrick worked his own deal with the cousin’s handlers and managed a ring down here.”

“Jesus
Christ on a sandwich,” I said. “My dad couldn’t hit the twenty-pound rats running around the back of his garage. When he finally gets off one good shot, he manages to take out Mayor Mafioso’s kid.”

“Twenty pounds?”
was Blake’s only reaction. Rats must have rated right up there with spiders for him.

“
You never heard of Garbage Hill?” I said.

He shook his head.

“There’s a big hill behind my dad’s garage. Unofficial dumping ground in the forties. Plants and weeds managed to grow from it so you can’t really tell that it’s nothing but trash and chemicals. It was declared toxic a year before my dad bought it. That’s how he got the building so cheap. Converted it to Artie’s Autos. Anyway, the rats gorged themselves on the hill, grew to the size of footballs, and dug tunnels right to the back door.”

“If you discard it, they will come.”

I knew a rehearsed line when I heard one. Hell, the pickup lines that guys used in New York were so worn they had zero tread and less traction. “Been waiting a while to use that one, Detective?”

“Not my first time to the rat rodeo.”

We both smiled in hesitant crescent moons, a small drop of glue trying to wedge itself between us.

“
The Shelby Anderson case was never officially closed, you know,” he said.

“I didn’t know, but that makes sense
. Closed in most people’s minds though, wouldn’t you say?”

“
What are your theories?” he asked.

I shook my head like a girl declining an offer to play Spin the Bottle. No thanks, Detective
. No desire to get dragged into a dark closet with you. At least not for purposes of exploring my dad’s case. “Theories spin out of control when they have no foundation,” I said. “Eventually, their creators swirl themselves into a big hole in the ground with nothing to show for it. Like riding an augur drill to Hell.”