“You’re going to stay?”
“We’ll see,” Monica said. “Silver Falls seems like it could use a renovation as much as my lodge can. It was always a little hard on its luck, but these days it seems downright festering.”
“Have you seen the pit?” Stella asked her, thinking of her run-in with Steel earlier.
“Not an improvement over the old colliery,” Monica said dispiritedly. “I guess I’m lucky all those kids aren’t hanging out at my place, though. Good thing the lodge is just far enough away from the heart of town it’s not attractive to them.” She peered into Stella’s face. “Everything all right with you?”
Stella thought about lying but found herself saying, “Someone I know is mixed up with the people who hang out at the pit. I just saw him there. Couldn’t believe it, although I’ve heard the rumors.”
“We like to think people will stay the way we think they should be,” Monica said. “Doesn’t always work out that way, though. Sometimes people show you their true colors and you have to let them go.”
“I suppose.” Stella sighed. “What about those boys of yours? They ever coming home?”
“Yes, they are,” Monica said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
The following morning Steel figured things had to go better than they’d gone the previous day. He went through his usual routine of sit-ups, push-ups, dips on the pull-up bar he’d installed in the doorway between his trailer’s small living room and hallway and the rest of the workout he’d performed every day since he was fifteen. He poured himself a bowl of cereal, splashed some milk on it and dug in while he scanned his phone for the latest local news. Nothing much had happened overnight.
Which suited him just fine.
He was heading out to his truck through a fine misting of rain when a woman’s voice cut through the quiet morning. Steel sighed. He’d hoped to avoid this, but by now he ought to know there was no getting past Marion Wheeler’s eagle eyes.
Marion had been a fixture in the trailer park for as long as there’d been a trailer park. Longer, maybe. It was rumored she’d settled her single wide on a vacant lot in the seventies and the park had grown up organically around her. It was only recently that Silver Falls had any kind of bylaws. For most of its existence it had been the wild west—people doing what they wanted, when and where they wanted, and damn the consequences.
The consequences of Marion’s presence at the Mountain Rise park was that no one could come or go without her noticing and commenting.
“Out causing trouble early today, huh, Cooper?” she called out. She was sitting on a tiny porch that jutted out from her trailer. At one time the trailer’s siding must have been powder blue, but it had faded mostly to a silvery gray. The porch had been cobbled together from scrap wood. Steel wondered how it held together, but Marion was a bony, hawk-nosed woman who looked like a puff of wind might blow her away. Only her voice was heavy—grating, even. It followed him as he unlocked his truck. “Someone oughtta call the law on you. Heard you were hitting on minors at the pit yesterday. Shame on you.”
He held his tongue through sheer force of will, every inch of him wanting to turn around and tell her he was the law, not that it was any of her damn business. How did she know what he’d been up to yesterday, anyway? It wasn’t like she ever left that damn porch.
“You should go back to Chance Creek, where riffraff like you belong,” she was calling after him when he drove away.
That was rich. Steel doubted anyone in Chance Creek thought of their town as a step down from Silver Falls. Chance Creek had its struggles, but Silver Falls was barely holding on these days.
As he drove through the winding streets that led to the town center, he considered her words. Maybe Marion was right—maybe he was from the wrong side of the tracks, if there could be such a designation in a town without a railway running through it—but the kids who frequented the pit these days weren’t. Something was wrong with this situation, and while he’d already fingered a dealer or two, allowing Bolton and his deputies to catch them in the act, the girls like Lara and her friends needed help he couldn’t give.
He took a right turn, away from the center of Silver Falls, drove about ten miles and turned into a short dirt driveway that led into the woods. When he was sure he was out of view of the road, he gave Bolton a call and waited. He’d already stopped at the station once this week. It wasn’t good practice for that to happen very often.
Twenty minutes later the sheriff parked his cruiser behind him, got out and slid into the passenger seat of Steel’s truck. “What’s up?”
“We need counselors. For those girls hanging out at the pit. Some kind of female liaison officer who can get out there and talk to them in a way I can’t.”
“You’re supposed to be our eyes and ears on the ground.” Bolton’s tone made it clear he didn’t appreciate being dragged from the office for this kind of thing.
“I get close to them, and they think I’m hitting on them.” It didn’t feel good to him, either. Steel had to do a lot of things during his undercover work he didn’t like but nothing that had made him feel so uneasy.
Bolton considered this. “Yeah, that’s a problem.”
“The problem is that nice young women are ending up dead,” Steel pointed out. He couldn’t get his mind off Rena. If he’d been doing his job more effectively, maybe she’d still be alive. During the last couple of months, he’d been more concerned about a pair of sisters—runaways
