Once You Go This Far Page 3

  * * *

  Most of the leaves were off the trees by now. The golden glow of that morning had been replaced by ashy twilight, and the crisp chill in the air was just damp and cold. “I think it was here,” I said, pausing in the middle of the gravel trail. “I saw some lines in the dirt, here. And a divot, like from a rock or a shoe. Then I looked down and saw her.”

  Tom followed my hand as I swept it across the path in front of me. “What kind of marks?”

  “I don’t know. What kind of marks does a person make when they trip?”

  “I think it depends on the person—no need to investigate that one empirically though.”

  I felt myself smile. “No pratfalls in the name of science? It’s like you know me or something.”

  “I am vaguely familiar.”

  I stepped aside to let a jogger pass, and Tom brushed a hand against the small of my back. There was nothing sexy about standing here talking forensics, but I was a little turned on. I said, “Do you see the tree right there, the bendy white one? How far down do you think that is?”

  “The bendy white one—the birch tree?”

  “Obviously I don’t know what it’s called, Cub Scout. How far?”

  “Twenty feet, I think.”

  I took a few steps closer to the edge of the trail and Tom’s arm went rigid. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you afraid of heights?” I said.

  “What? No. Not afraid, per se.” His hand found my wrist and gently tugged me away from the overlook. “I just would prefer not to be right on the edge of a cliff.”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t know this about you.”

  “My last remaining secret.”

  I backed off the edge and spun around and he kissed me, long and slow and deep. I always had an impulse to pull away and tell him that this was going nowhere, that I was going nowhere, that if he wanted to go somewhere with someone he should get the hell away from me and do that before the world ended. But such warnings hadn’t fazed him yet and really, I was enjoying myself. Another jogger huffed past us and we both cracked up. “So how, exactly, does someone fall there,” I said, pointing to where I’d seen the marks in the path, “but end up over here, facedown, with injuries only to the right side of her body? Did she roll across the path?”

  “What are the famous Weary instincts telling you?”

  “That if she was walking down the hill and fell here, she would have ended up on the other side of the path. The non-ravine side.” The other side of the trail was lined with soft-looking bushy things, with no incline whatsoever. A fall there would have wounded Rebecca’s pride but little else. “Or, she was walking up the hill. Which would be strange because she had literally just started the trail.”

  “Maybe she was going back for something she left in her vehicle. Or because she wasn’t feeling well,” Tom said. “Maybe she passed out. A stroke.”

  “That would have been in the autopsy.”

  “True.”

  I thought back to my client’s worries, to the smug face of Keir Metcalf. So proud of himself for naming his business AA Security because it would show up first in the Yellow Pages that way. Did the Yellow Pages even exist anymore? If not, the joke was seriously on him. “Maybe she turned around because she encountered someone or something she didn’t want to mess with.”

  “Something?”

  “A bobcat? A snake? The ghost of her own failed ambition?”

  “Show me the wrist thing again.”

  I held up my arm and flexed my palm toward my body, having watched a YouTube video in order to determine that this position equaled flexion.

  Tom took my elbow and guided it out and down. “What if she fell backwards?”

  He turned me around so that my back was to the ravine Rebecca had fallen into. “If she was standing like this, and she fell backwards, that could break a wrist. It’s a sort of submissive posture, don’t you think? As opposed to defensive.” He let go of my arm and held up his own hands, palms out, in a don’t shoot gesture. “I could see an animal, maybe. Though I don’t think there are bobcats out here. And you didn’t see one, either.”

  That was the problem with any theory that involved Rebecca encountering someone or something on the trail—neither Stacy nor I had seen it.

  “But doesn’t it seem like there are more questions than answers here? Isn’t that what undetermined is meant for?”

  “It seems,” Tom said, “that your client wants there to be a big bad. It’s so much easier to blame a villain than it is to blame bad luck and gravity.”

  He wasn’t wrong. “That could be said about a lot of my clients. Most. Maybe all. I think that makes me want to help them more, not less.”

  The sun had dipped farther below the trees, and it was getting hard to see the edges of the trail. “I guess we can go. I’m not going to figure it out standing here.”

  We hiked in silence for a while. Tom was thinking about my father. I could tell because I was, too.

  * * *

  Later, in my bed, I thumbed my phone through a list of animals common to Ohio on the Department of Natural Resources website. “There are too bobcats around here,” I said. “And coyotes, black bears … it could have been anything.”

  “Don’t bobcats lie in wait for their prey?”

  I glanced over my shoulder at him. We were halfway spooning, me on my side, Tom on his back, a hand resting on my hip. “You’re the one who said there weren’t any bobcats in Ohio. But now you’re suddenly an expert?”

  “I didn’t say there weren’t any bobcats in Ohio. I said I didn’t think there were any in Highbanks.”

  “Maybe a least weasel, then.”

  He rolled over so that his mouth was right at my ear. “Let me see this list.”

  I held up my phone.

  “Least weasel,” he read. “As opposed to the short-tailed weasel and the long-tailed weasel.”

  “The woods contain multitudes.”

  “Least shrew.”

  “That’s me.”

  He laughed, the kind of laugh that seemed to take him by surprise. I loved the timbre of that one. “Do you think you’ll have to go to Toledo?”

  I sighed. “I don’t think I’m going to get an answer for Maggie with a list of small woodland mammals. So probably. Maybe tomorrow or the next day.”

  “We’ve fallen into a nice little rhythm here.”

  I scrolled back up through the list. “Indeed. But you can feel free to see your other girlfriends while I’m gone. I’m sure they miss you terribly.”

  “Roxane.”

  “That’s my name.”

  “You say stuff like that and I don’t know what to think.”

  “Think whatever you want. Do whatever you want.”

  Tom took my phone and put it on the nightstand, screen-down, and the room plunged into darkness except for the glowing stars on my ceiling. “I’m just the worst, for being so transparently available, is that it?”

  I tipped my mouth up to his for a kiss. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Kez brought crullers and information, two of the better things a person can offer at a morning meeting. “I think he’s a real asshole, Mr. AA Security,” she said. “His company has a LinkedIn profile that posts nothing but Bible stuff and Constance Archer-Nash hate memes.” She spun the laptop around to show me the screen—earlier that morning, Keir Metcalf had felt the urge to share with the world a picture of the candidate superimposed with text that said: “Life’s a bitch—don’t elect one.”

  “I think he may misunderstand what LinkedIn is for,” I said. “And also the Bible.”

  “Well, he also got canned from the Toledo Police for repeatedly handing out Jesus pamphlets at traffic stops.”

  I laughed around a mouthful of doughnut. “What?”

  Kez clicked around on the computer and then cleared her throat. “This is from 2010, the Toledo Blade. ‘A Toledo police officer has been fired after m
ultiple drivers complained that he issued more than tickets after pulling them over—he also shared a little religion on the roadside, in one case asking a woman if she had accepted Jesus Christ as her savior.

  “‘The department’s spokesperson said on Friday that the officer, Keiran Metcalf, a twelve-year veteran, was let go on Thursday for repeatedly proselytizing and for handing out religious materials to speeders.

  “‘The authorities said his termination was based on a complaint in January that said he had questioned a driver’s religious affiliations after pulling over the vehicle—the second time in the past year that the department was aware he had done so. After a similar episode in 2009, officials said, Officer Metcalf was formally told not to question drivers about their religious beliefs or try to convert them.’” She looked up from the screen. “Can you imagine?”

  “Did he issue tickets after all that?”

  “It doesn’t say.”

  “I’d be pissed if I got an inappropriate question about religion and a ticket.”

  “Fortunately, the dude has moved on to subtler forms of persuasion.” She opened a new link, this one an article entitled “Harry Potter: Harmless Christian Novel or Doorway to the Occult?”

  “So I think it’s at least safe to say he’s a crank. But in my experience, religious types generally frown upon throwing ex-wives off ravines.”

  “Also divorce, for that matter.”

  “Touché.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “Well, prior to joining the Toledo PD in 1998, he was a deputy with Delaware County.”

  “Really,” I said. That meant the jurisdiction that oversaw Highbanks was his former employer. I remembered what Maggie had said about Metcalf being connected. “What was his story there?”

  “He was put on leave for misconduct, along with three other guys, after the mishandling of a domestic-violence issue. Seemed pretty clear-cut, but I can go on if you want.”

  A twenty-year-old resignation seemed unlikely to matter here, so I just asked Kez to save the paper trail in Maggie’s Dropbox in case we wanted to refer to it later.

  “Now do I get paid extra?”

  “No. But good work.”

  She took her boots down off my desk and picked up her bag, a canvas messenger festooned with enamel pins that said things like MISANDRIST and DON’T FUCKING TALK TO ME. I admired the direct approach. “I have to go. TBH, this office makes me sad. Maybe you could hang that up or something?”

  I looked at the frame propped against the wall. “I need something to put in it first.”

  She squinted at it. “Fuck me, I thought this was some sad, artsy picture of a beach that you took on vacation. Here,” she said, scribbling something on an orange Post-it. She placed the square of paper over the bar code on the frame and walked out.

  I had to laugh when I saw what she’d written: Cheer up, beach.

  * * *

  I met Deputy Montoya at Coffeeology, where I bought a muffin and a mint tea for myself and a white chocolate mocha for him. “Black coffee hurts my stomach,” he said, as if his beverage choice required an explanation.

  “No judgment,” I said, although the image of the burly, armed cop stirring an additional packet of sugar into his whipped-creamy drink was a bit amusing.

  We were sitting at the barstools in the window facing Sandusky Street, which was caught in midday bustle. The Delaware County courthouse—a new, generally empty and silent fortress—loomed one block over.

  “Look,” Montoya said. “I do feel bad for Maggie Holmer. What an awful position to be in, about to have a baby and her mother has this accident. But whatever she told you about it not being an accident? She didn’t say a word until well after the fact.”

  “I think it was a slow-burn kind of conclusion.”

  “Conclusion.” Montoya wiped foam off his upper lip. “My sister-in-law,” he said, “when she was on maternity leave with her second kid. She started losing her shit, thinking the traffic signs were a code telling her that her baby had been switched at birth. She was diagnosed with, what do you call it. Postpartum. Postpartum psychosis. She had to spend three weeks on a psych ward. Hormones, you know?”

  “So Maggie’s making all of this up because hormones?”

  “You’re one of those feminist types, I take it.”

  We glared at each other.

  “I’m just saying. It is not unheard of for these … things to happen. To a woman right after she has a baby. If she truly thought that something suspicious had happened, why did she wait so long to say anything?”

  “Perhaps because she was shocked, and distracted, and once she actually had a chance to think about it, she realized it didn’t actually make any sense.”

  Montoya made a face like his stomach hurt anyway. I figured that was my fault and I wasn’t sorry. “Accidents are called accidents for a reason. You can’t say there’s no chance someone accidentally fell. The word means it was unintentional, out of anyone’s control. And besides, the coroner’s findings were consistent with an accidental fall.”

  I found myself flexing my wrist, still wondering exactly how Rebecca’s Smith’s fracture had happened. But instead of asking the deputy about it, I said, “So what’s your explanation of the Toledo Police showing up at the victim’s house the very day of the accident?”

  Now Montoya just seemed annoyed. “Rebecca’s neighbor, have you talked to her yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, she’s about a thousand years old and she has no idea what she’s talking about. Toledo PD don’t have a record of going there.”

  “An official record.”

  “Who’s paranoid now?”

  “You do realize that you’re quick to dismiss anything a woman says as unreliable.”

  “No—”

  “And for someone in the business of finding out the truth, that’s pretty messed up.”

  A blotchy red bloomed across his cheeks. “I have three daughters. I do not dismiss anything that a female says.”

  “But when was the last time you actually gave a damn about a woman’s opinion?”

  “Would you talk to your dad that way?”

  He hadn’t mentioned that he knew Frank until now. Sometimes I wondered if half the folks who claimed to remember him really did, or if he was just a part of the collective unconscious now. Maybe a vague knowledge of Frank Weary came with every badge in the state. I said, “Probably, or worse. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I would’ve thought a cop’s kid would have more respect, is all.”

  “Think again.”

  “I need to get back to the courthouse.”

  “One more thing. Keir Metcalf.”

  “What about him?”

  “You know him?”

  “Not personally.”

  “Would you just take his word for it, whatever he said? Because he used to wear that same star?” I nodded at his chest.

  “I told you, I don’t know him. But he had an alibi, with twenty-some witnesses. He was at a church breakfast that morning anyway.” Montoya stood up.

  I said, “Listen to your daughters now. If you don’t, they’ll never trust you.”

  That took some of the wind out of his sails. He politely shook my hand before he walked out.

  CHAPTER 5

  I needed to talk to Rebecca’s neighbor. Montoya obviously hadn’t liked me much, but I doubted he would lie about there being a police visit to the house on the day she fell. There were other explanations: maybe the neighbor had been wrong about the day, maybe the visit had been from some other law enforcement agency, or maybe from an off-duty cop.

  Maggie and her husband lived in Powell, a few blocks to the north of a small downtown area that called to mind the setting of an Andie MacDowell rom-com. The Holmers’ house was big and old and white, featuring a wraparound porch and an expansive yard. Maggie answered the door with a sleeping baby Bea in her arms. “Come in,” she whispered, and shut the door gently
behind me.

  I kept my voice low too. “I was hoping to take a look at your mom’s things that she left here. And hopefully get a house key. I’m going to head up to Toledo.”

  A sad sort of relief—or relieved sadness, if there was a difference—slid over Maggie’s face. “So you don’t think I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy, and I do think there are still some questions. Like I said the other day, I can’t promise you results, but I can promise you my time.”

  “That’s all I ask. Well, and preferably for you to be out of here before my husband gets home—I just don’t want to get into all of it with him again.”

  “Understood.”

  Maggie gave me her mother’s keys—recovered from her jacket pocket—and showed me up the steps to the guest room. “I’ve been driving her car—it’s so much easier than mine, with the baby. Feel free to look at that too if you want, as long as you don’t judge me for all the Starbucks cups.”

  It said something about the world, that people were afraid of being judged about something as insignificant as their caffeine habits.

  The guest room where Rebecca had been staying was about ten by ten, with creaky wooden floors and old, plaid wallpaper, the kind that had gone out of fashion so long ago that it was back on trend again. One wall featured a framed picture from the young couple’s wedding and another sported James’s diploma from the University of Michigan, chemical engineering. The double bed was pushed against the sloping attic ceiling on one side, with an abutting nightstand on the other.

  “I haven’t touched anything in here,” Maggie said. “I actually haven’t really come in here more than a couple times since, since it happened.” She looked down at her sleeping daughter. “I’ll be downstairs.”

  “Thanks, Maggie.”

  I closed the door and leaned against it. The attic was slightly stuffy from the warm sun streaming in through the skylight in the slanted ceiling, particles of dust seemingly caught in a midair snow globe. The white chenille bedspread was smoothed out on the bed and expertly folded under and over the pillows. The nightstand offered a lamp and a digital clock, which was flashing 3:02 in red numerals. I opened the nightstand drawer—a Bible and an extra set of sheets. I opened the closet—women’s clothes, summer, presumably Maggie’s prepregnancy wardrobe. A rolling suitcase was on its side on the floor of the closet, unzipped.