the guest room, Stella could sense the prickles of a second wind starting along her spine.
Part of it was the whole bar thing, of course. Stella couldn’t help it: she loved bars, loved the way folks came in and shed the first three-quarters of their day and settled into the final stretch, some of them weary, some of them desperate, some on the make, some—occasionally—even happy. Stella loved to sit on the sidelines and watch the squabbling and the mating rituals and the jealousy and the preening, the lively bubbling of humanity’s stew.
She’d missed so much; Ollie never wanted her to go out at night. With his crazy jealous streak he didn’t even like to let her wait on the very occasional male customer who came into the sewing machine shop. Since he died, Stella had decided she had some catching up to do, and she took herself out a couple times a month.
Tonight was a work outing, of course, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little fun. She’d told Chrissy she was going to stop by Lovie Lee’s divorce party, just to be polite. Lovie wasn’t a client; she and Larry Lee had just grown tired of each other. Larry’d been living in the garage, which he’d fixed up with a waterbed and a couple of weight machines, for a few years. They were only making it official because Lovie had got tired of parking on the driveway. She wanted her garage back.
The party probably would have been fun, but duty came first.
Chrissy hadn’t questioned Stella’s lie—which Stella had told only because she didn’t want to have to explain why her hunt for Tucker was starting out in a bar. She was afraid Chrissy might bring up the search party idea again. But deep in her melancholy funk, the girl just nodded and said she’d be fine, that Stella should go ahead and have a nice time.
Stella pushed the hangers back and forth in her closet, finally settling on a jazzy little teal number, a tank top with straps wide enough to cover her bra, which was a serious piece of equipment with a big job to do. The top had beads sewn along the neckline, a little sparkle to set off her earrings, which were a dangly crystal pair she’d got out of the Avon catalog Gracellen sent her.
She squeezed into her favorite jeans, which had a squiggly row of stitching on the butt pockets and molded everything into a tight-looking, if generous, package. She added slip-on black sandals with just a bit of a heel, sprayed herself with White Diamonds, and she was ready to go.
Stella peeked in on Chrissy, who was reading a copy of
“You gonna be all right, sugar?”
“Yeah, I guess. But every time I think about Tucker…” Chrissy’s lips wobbled, and Stella was afraid she was going to bust out crying again. Earlier, it had taken half an hour to get her calmed down, and Stella needed to get on the road.
“Look here, honey,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and patting Chrissy’s arm. “I’m doing everything I know to figure out where they’ve got to. And even if Roy Dean’s a son of a bitch, you know he won’t do nothing bad to Tucker.”
Chrissy nodded, and Stella prayed hard she had just spoken the truth.
“Sheriff Jones is good at his job,” she continued. “He’ll be looking in the places I can’t. And tomorrow, we’re going to keep you busy at the shop, so now you’ve just got to put it out of your mind, and get some rest, right?”
Putting Chrissy to work had been one of Stella’s better ideas: not only would it give the girl something to do, but it would free Stella up to work on tracking down Roy Dean and Pitt Akers. She didn’t want to admit it, even to herself, but as the hours ticked by she was getting more and more worried about Tucker. Get a bunch of stupid assholes together and the first things they were liable to let slide was the women and children. At least women had a fighting chance.
“Thank you,” Chrissy snuffled. “I just couldn’t go back home.”
Stella understood; having to go back to the empty house, with all of Tucker’s toys on the floor, his crib, would just make her crazy. Chrissy worked part-time at an in-home day care in her neighborhood, and she didn’t want to go to work either, and Stella guessed she could understand that too. She wouldn’t be much good to the other kids, frantic with worry. A quick call to Chrissy’s employer had straightened that out.
Stella headed first for the apartments across the street from the Prosper Industrial Park, a sad L-shaped complex of prefab buildings that had never been fully occupied in its ten-year history. The apartments had been there even before the industrial park was built, and hence had time to accumulate a nearly full complement of divorcees and down-on-their-luck entrepreneurial types and drifters and general underachievers—anyone who found the idea of a cheap, boxlike one-bedroom apartment with drafty aluminum windows appealing.
She found Pitt’s place easily enough in the last of the evening twilight. He had a ground-floor apartment on the back side, which enjoyed a fair amount of privacy on account of a bank of Dumpsters. After knocking and trying the door, Stella set down the Tupperware spaghetti tote she used to store her lock tools and shone her mini Maglite in the crack between the door and the frame, where indifferent construction had left a hair’s-breadth gap.
“Oh, didn’t your mama teach you nothing,” she breathed—Pitt hadn’t used the deadbolt. Stella was a little disappointed at the lack of a challenge; she’d spent a few recent slow afternoons at the shop making herself a set of shims using tin snips and some rinsed-out Bud cans, and she was eager to try them out.
Still, there were advantages to keeping it simple. Stella slipped her old Macy’s card—long since canceled but kept for occasions like this one—into the door jamb. Then she slid a pair of quart-size Ziplocs over her hands and let herself in.
She stood for a moment in the living room, listening for sounds and glancing around. The door to the bedroom was open, and the cramped kitchen was visible through a pass-through. A shape darted past her, nearly giving her a heart attack, but as it bolted under the couch Stella realized it was just a cat.
She snapped on the lights. Illumination did little to improve the surroundings—scuffed white walls, dingy gray carpet, tired plaid sofas—but at least Pitt kept the place clean. There was no cat smell; Stella even detected a faint scent of Clorox. “Might oughtta have kept this one, Chrissy,” Stella murmured as she started looking around. “Knows how to clean.”
If she’d planned on any serious digging, she would have splurged and used a pair of disposable latex gloves from the box she kept under her bathroom sink, but they were so danged expensive compared to the Ziplocs. Worrying about fingerprints was probably ridiculous anyway; Stella highly doubted whether the crime scene techs would be coming down from the county seat in Fayette anytime soon to go looking for Tucker. Still, anything worth doing, as her dad used to say, was worth doing right.
There was little to see. Pitt, it appeared, had been leading a monklike existence since divorcing Chrissy, aside from his Polaroid collection, which Stella found in an envelope on his bureau. One glimpse convinced her she didn’t need to see any more of that, but she slipped the packet into her pocket anyway—one less thing for Chrissy to worry about.
Other than the racy photos, scouring Pitt’s place was about as exciting as watching paint dry. A couple of Costco uniform shirts hung in the closet. Tightie whities and V-neck T-shirts and over-the-calf athletic socks were neatly folded in the drawers. Pitt owned an impressive collection of household cleaners—409
As she turned to leave, the cat appeared, one cautious paw at a time, from under the living room sofa, and stalked imperiously into the kitchen, where it lapped at a full water bowl. Watching the cat, Stella noticed something she’d missed earlier; there was not one but two very full bowls of cat food set out on a vinyl place mat on the floor. One had a small dent, a few of the little orange triangular nuggets having spilled to the floor, but the other was mounded high and undisturbed.
“Looks like your master wanted to make sure you had plenty to eat,” Stella said, “while he was away. Where’d he go, anyway?”
No response. Typical. Stella left without saying good-bye, having confirmed that she was still a dog person; she wanted a pet that
So it looked like Pitt had left town for a while. Interesting.
Stella returned her spaghetti box to the back of the Jeep and hit the road, thinking that in the morning she’d have to try to find out where Pitt had gone. She made the drive to BJ’s Bar with the window rolled down, despite the damage it did to her well-sprayed hairdo. Sometimes you just had to feel the wind on your face.
On her way from the parking lot to the front door, she patted her hair back into place and hitched up her bra
