Deceit

Interesting. He’d be thirteen years older than my Melissa, but these days that meant little. Could they be living together?

I copied Tony’s information into my file. Printed out the color picture from his website.

Although I continued searching, I found nothing to definitively tie Tony to the Melissa Harkoff I sought. No blog or pages on his website with personal photos. Neither did I find anything to detract from that possibility, such as a newspaper article about his marriage to someone else.

Turning aside from Willmott and Tony, I ran the older San Jose addresses attached to a Melissa Harkoff through phone-number searches. Each came up with a listed number in someone else’s name. If my Melissa had once lived at those addresses, she didn’t anymore.

Willmott remained.

Using the Gilroy addresses I repeated the process. The older ones yielded numbers under different names. The most recent came up with a phone number for a Melissa Harkoff. My gal or the florist?

I’d bet on the florist. She had to have a home number somewhere. Likely it was in the same town as her flower shop. But hunches could be wrong. A phone call in the morning should tell me what I needed to know.

Morning. I blinked at the computer clock. Four-fifty. In a few hours it would be light.

I pushed back from the computer, walked through the darkened hallway and into the bathroom. Exiting there a minute later, I found myself skulking through the house, checking locks again, peeking through a curtain to look outside. The rain had stopped. The world, what I could see of it, lay sullen and spent. Small branches and leaves littered Dineen’s front lawn and her neighbor’s yard across the street.

Where was Hooded Man now?

Who was Hooded Man?

I returned to Dineen’s computer, wishing it were my own. I needed to search my photos for a picture of Melissa. I knew I had at least one of her and Linda together. I could picture them now on my back deck, Melissa looking proud and lovely in the new clothes Linda had bought her. She’d been living with the Jacksons less than a week, and I had just met her at church the previous Sunday. Melissa would speak little of her childhood, saying only that she was glad the horrible days following her mother’s death were behind her. She seemed so grateful to be living at the Jacksons’ home. To her it was a mansion, a new life.

The Cafe Latte Jelly Bellies were gone. I ate what remained of the Chocolate Puddings. Rot my teeth with sugar, yeah right, Dineen. It would never happen. She was just jealous of my hard choppers.

I drank the last of my water and looked over the information in the computer file. Somewhere along the way I’d eased up on my handwritten notes. Not good. Even though I’d ask Dineen for a flash drive to copy the file and take it back to my computer, I still wanted the written backup, just in case.

I stopped to write the notes on the yellow pad.

Finished with that, I sat back, data chugging through my tired brain. I would run other searches while waiting for dawn. Meanwhile the Willmott address held real promise.

A page I had seen on Tony Whistman’s website suddenly registered. I blinked. Returned to the site. I found the page…and in my soggy head a plan began to form.

SIXTEEN

JUNE 2004

The sounds wafted into Melissa’s subconscious, chilling hands pulling her from another terrible dream of her mother dead on the kitchen floor.

Melissa’s eyes blinked open to focus blearily on the open door of her walk-in closet. She was in the Jacksons’ house, not her old trailer. Her new bright and shiny life.

Relief washed through Melissa, aching and cold. She shifted in her grand bed. Cracks of light shone through her closed curtains, promising another sunny day.

In her mind’s eye she could still see the broken linoleum of the trailer kitchen. Her mom’s bare feet, her body spread on the floor. The whiskey bottle and the blood—

The sounds came again—whatever had awakened Melissa. Now they clarified. Muffled voices in argument. A man’s rapid words, pulsing with anger. A woman’s retort.

Baxter and Linda.

Melissa raised up on one elbow, head tilted, listening. The voices sounded like they were coming from somewhere on the right side of her bedroom.

How could that be?

She threw back her covers and slipped from bed. Stood still, barely breathing, eyes roaming the room as if ghosts of the Jacksons morphed along the walls.

Maybe she’d imagined the sounds. The Jacksons didn’t argue.

“Stop it, Baxter!”

Linda’s words filtered sort of thick and tinny, as if from some distance. Melissa’s focus jerked toward the ceiling across her room.

The heating vent.

She trotted over to her desk, picked up the chair in front of it, and set it down beneath the vent. Then climbed up on the chair, cocking her ear toward the ceiling.

“How dare you talk to me like that in my own home?” Baxter’s voice was rough, seething.

“It’s my home too.” Linda’s words caught, as if she was about to cry.

“I had this home before you came here, and if you took off tomorrow, I’d still have it. You just happen to live in it.”

“I take care of it. I take care of you.”

Hard footsteps thumped. “I take care of me. Not to mention the entire town.”

Melissa’s muscles tensed. She drew her arms around herself.

“Now you listen to me, Linda. You’re going to have that dinner party this Saturday. I don’t care what else you were planning. You’ll invite who I tell you to invite, and they’ll sit where I want them to sit. And before you start whining, remember you live in this house because I pay for it.”

“This isn’t about being thankful! I just wanted to do it next weekend so I could take Mel—”

Melissa heard a muffled smack. “My clients are more important than that girl.”

Melissa’s fingers curled into her pajama top. No way. He’d hit her.

That girl.

Silence.

“I’m sorry.” Linda’s voice shook.

“Go make me breakfast. You’re making me late for work.”

The voices stopped. Melissa craned her neck to one side, concentrating on hearing more.

Nothing.

Shaking, she climbed down from the chair. She slumped into it and leaned forward, staring at her bare feet digging into thick carpet. Wishing like anything she could erase the last sixty seconds.

Baxter had slapped Linda. As much as Melissa didn’t want to believe that, she knew the sound. She’d heard it enough against her own cheek.

Maybe it was just a one-time thing. After all, she’d never heard their voices through the vent before. Besides, nice church-going men like Baxter didn’t hit their wives. Trailer trash did that, like the kind who’d lived near her and her mom. Melissa could count off ten neighbor men in a heartbeat who’d shoved their wives around.

Yeah, and men who hit their wives didn’t do it just once. They lived it.

Melissa raised her head and focused across the room, feeling sick. She’d had such plans for living here. Suddenly they were crumbling. What kind of home had she gotten herself into?

People were no good. No matter where you went, they were all just liars.