Down the Darkest Road

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I’ll see if we can get prints off the photograph,” he said. “I’ll canvass your neighbors and see if anyone saw anything. Beyond that, there’s nothing to do. I don’t know where Mr. Ballencoa might be. If I can’t find him, I can’t question him. And if we don’t have prints or the prints don’t come back to him, I won’t have call to do anything more than ask him where he was tonight. But we have to find him first.”

She nodded and took another sip of her drink, staring down at the tabletop.

“Was this the kind of thing he did in Santa Barbara?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he ever try to physically harm you?”

“No.”

“But he called you on the phone? That kind of thing?”

“Yes, but always from a pay phone so it couldn’t be traced back to him.”

“Did he ever try to gain entrance to your home?”

She took a while to answer. Another yes or no that had a long story attached.

“Yes,” she said at last.

“He broke in?”

“No. He got in,” she specified. “I don’t know how. I wasn’t there. But when I got home I knew he’d been there.”

“Had he left something? Taken something?”

She shook her head. “No, but things had been moved, touched. He had been there. He drank a glass of wine, washed the glass, and left it where I would see it. He had used the bathroom and put the hand towel in the wash. He had done a load of laundry.”

“Excuse me?”

“I had left a basket of dirty laundry on the washing machine. Underwear. It—and the hand towel—were wet in the washing machine when I got home.”

Mendez leaned his elbows on the table and looked at her, puzzled, thinking of the B&Es they’d had in town recently. Nothing had been taken, but someone had broken in. He’d thought maybe it was a kid’s prank. Maybe not.

“Did anyone see him coming or going?” he asked.

“No.”

“How do you know it was him?”

“It was him.”

“Was he questioned?”

She laughed without humor. “For what? For being a ghost? I couldn’t prove anyone had been there at all. The police weren’t interested. Nothing had been taken. And it turns out it isn’t against the law to do someone’s laundry without asking. That was when I got the lecture for wasting the department’s time, manpower, and resources.”

“They didn’t even talk to him?”

“No. By then he had already threatened to sue for harassment—the police department and me personally. How’s that for nerve? He was stalking me and threatening to sue me for trying to do something about it.”

The injustice of that made him angry. Like Mavis Whitaker had said, sometimes it felt as if the bad guys had more rights than the people they preyed upon.

“Do you have a friend you can call to come and stay the rest of the night with you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I have a Walther PPK.”

Cold comfort, that, Mendez thought. And dangerous.

“Guns and alcohol aren’t a good combination,” he cautioned. “I would hate to see you hurt yourself.”

She laughed at that. “Clearly you haven’t known me long enough. Before you know it, you’ll be wishing I would put that gun in my mouth and pull the trigger.”

“I doubt that, ma’am.”

She bobbed her eyebrows as if to say We’ll see, and took another long drink of her vodka.

20

Lauren waited for a long time after Mendez left. She sat at the table in the great room, drinking and looking at her photograph of Leslie the night before she was taken.

She was a beautiful girl. Leah was pretty. Leslie was beautiful. There was such a fire in her, and it glowed out of her blue eyes and shone in her long dark hair. That spirit had been a force of energy everyone in the room would feel when she turned it on as part and parcel of a strong emotion.

Leslie would have done something extraordinary with her life.

Sometimes Lauren wished she could feel that energy when she thought of her daughter or when she looked at her photograph. Sometimes she thought that would be a sign to her that Leslie was still alive somewhere. Sometimes she feared it would mean she was gone and her spirit was visiting in an attempt to offer her mother some kind of comfort. It was a torment either way.

God, why can’t this ever be over? she wondered for the millionth time.

And for the millionth time she thought Because there is no God to end it.

There had been a time when that thought would have left her feeling upset and adrift. The belief system that had been the platform of her life had suddenly dropped out from under her. Now she just felt sad. Life had been so much easier when she was naive to the cruel realities of the world. With experience came wisdom—also known as disillusionment.

At least she had had nearly forty years of blissful ignorance. Leah hadn’t managed to even get out of childhood before the truth stripped the joy from her. Lauren wished she could have somehow spared her youngest from the experience. If she somehow could have put Leah into suspended animation that day before they realized Leslie was missing . . . Or if she could have erased any memory of her sister and the hell they had all been put through . . .

But Leah was a victim as much as Lauren was a victim because Leslie had been victimized.

She was so tired of it. Victim was not a word that she would ever have used to describe who she was. She would have said that she didn’t have it in her to be a victim, and yet she was—a truth made all the more bitter considering her reasons for coming to Oak Knoll.

How had he found her? How had he known to come to this house?

How dare he?

The anger that rose up through her was enough to choke on.

It was five after four in the morning. The world was still and dark. The wind had died. The universe seemed to be holding its breath so as not to wake the sleeping inhabitants of Earth.

The shock and fear that had grabbed hold of her earlier in the night had faded as well. A strange calm fell through Lauren now.

She sat quietly, sipping at her drink, thinking nothing would come of Detective Mendez’s good intentions. This was just another verse in a poem of futility, like a nightmare that returned again and again but with different players.

Mendez would try to be helpful, but nothing would come of it. She would become angry and frustrated. Her fury would scorch the earth of Oak Knoll like Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea.

Perhaps this was purgatory, or a living model of Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.

Perhaps the time had finally come to take a different path.

Lauren took her wallet from her purse and dug a business card from a zippered compartment. GREGORY HEWITT, LICENSED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. She turned the card over and stared for a long time at what was written on the back. She should have given it to Mendez, but she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She shouldn’t have