“Twenty. Please, I’d like to go home now. I feel dizzy.”
“Soon,” the man told her. “Just a few more questions. You visited a young man, Spencer, at his home in Leelanau. What did you find?”
The tooth rose in Orla’s mind, and she knew she couldn’t speak of it. If she revealed her vision, she’d be dead.
“A tooth,” her mouth said anyway.
“A tooth?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows.
“Susan’s tooth,” she added. She clenched her eyes shut and ground her teeth together.
“How do you know it was Susan’s tooth?”
Orla wiggled her gloved fingers.
“I see things with my hands. It’s a gift.” She laughed, and tears slipped over her cheeks.
“You see things? Explain that.”
“It’s like the residue of an experience, energy, I guess. Sometimes when I touch things, I catch images, experience feelings, receive information.”
“And you found a tooth at Spencer’s house. The tooth of a woman named Susan?”
“Someone murdered her.” Orla gasped as the words slipped out. She had revealed everything, and she couldn’t take it back.
“How did she die?” he asked, calm, voice unmoved.
Orla squinted. She glimpsed the image again, the brief flash of something striking Susan in the face.
“A rock, I don’t know. Someone hit her with a rock.”
“And did you see who killed her?”
Orla shook her head no.
“What happened after the rock hit her?”
“I don’t know,” Orla whispered, and she didn’t.
Her face ached from the effort of not speaking, but she had spoken.
The man watched her with a troubled, and intrigued, expression.
“We have work to do, Orla. You and I.”
Chapter 14
Abe
Abe pulled into the small parking lot at Birch Park’s trailhead.
Another car, invisible from the road, was parked half in the overgrowth. Abe studied the gold sports car, surprised the owner would leave it where pine sap might fall onto the hood. It appeared as if the driver wanted to conceal the car from the road.
Abe peered at the photo of Orla he’d taped to his dashboard. She sat cross-legged in the grass with a pile of kittens crawling in her lap. She gazed down, and grinned at the kittens, her black hair falling over one shoulder. Hazel had loaned him the photo. It made Orla real. A breathtaking young woman with a smile and a heart and a life.
Abe stepped from his car, jotted down the license plate of the gold sports car, and walked closer. He peered in windows at the clean leather interior. Shiny clean, as if the owner had detailed the car that morning. Abe searched for personal items and spotted none. Not a pair of sunglasses or a discarded candy wrapper lay in sight.
“Can I help you?”
The voice startled him, but Abe didn’t react.
He lifted his gaze, offered a smile, and nodded at the car.
“She yours?”
The man was around his height, six foot, with sandy hair, tanned skin, and bright blue eyes. He was handsome, clean-cut, a college boy. Abe had been a college boy too, but he had never owned tennis shorts in his life.
The man hooked one thumb in his pocket and nodded.
“Yeah.” He smiled, losing the hardness of his jawline for a more relaxed expression. “Got her last year. My baby.” He stepped to the car, patted the hood, and pulled keys from his pocket.
“Hiking?” Abe asked, gesturing at the trees.
“Actually,” the man gave him a sly smile. “I was taking a piss.”
He got into his car, offered a salute, and started the engine.
Abe walked backwards.
His own car, a Rambler bought cheap the year after he graduated from college, made a sad comparison to the Corvette. He watched the car drive from the lot. The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror for half a second before he pulled onto the road and was gone.
Abe glanced at his notebook where he’d written the license plate number.
“It doesn’t take that long to piss,” he murmured, looking toward the trailhead where the man had emerged. And why walk into the trail at all? He’d parked right next to a grove of dense trees. He could have stood next to his car and remained unnoticed.
Walking the trail, Abe searched for the man’s footprints but quickly lost them in the trampled grass left by the search party. It was unlikely there was anything left to find.
A half-mile in, a shadow passed over Abe and he gazed toward the sky to see an eagle, its white head at the tip of huge, dark wings, soaring into a tree.
Abe cut through the trees, leaving the path to get closer to where he thought the eagle had landed. He found it. A huge nest sat high in a tree. He heard the eagle, but the leafy branches blocked the bird from view.
Scanning the ground beneath the tree, Abe saw nothing, but continued his search squatting low, brushing the ground with fingertips, and then moving on.
After fifteen minutes, he stood and walked back to the base of the tree. He inspected the bark, the low branches.
He almost missed it. As he ducked beneath a branch, something wispy caught in his beard. A spiderweb, he assumed, and started to bat it away and then paused, his eye catching on the color. It was black. He reached up, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger.
He stared at a long strand of black hair.
Hazel
Hazel saw Abe’s car pull into her driveway, and she scrawled a quick note to her roommates before hurrying out.
She climbed into his passenger seat, stepping on several Styrofoam coffee cups.
“Sorry,” he told her, leaning over to gather them up and toss them into the backseat. “I like to call her my mobile think-tank.” He patted the dashboard.
“I can imagine the inside of a brain looks something like this,” she admitted, glancing into the disarray of his backseat.
“Do you know anyone who drives a gold sports car?” Abe asked, backing down the driveway and turning onto the road.
Hazel shook her head.
“Why?”
“I went to Birch Park this morning and met a man who drove a distinctive gold car. I thought he might be one of Orla’s friends.”
Hazel tried to remember the few men Orla had gone on dates with, but didn’t land on anyone with a sports car, especially a gold one.
“No, nothing. Did you find anything else?”
Abe gestured to his glove box.
Hazel popped it open, but the door stuck. Papers stuffed into the small space blocked the hinge. She reached in and pulled out a paperback.
“It’s in the book,” he said.
She flipped open the cover and stared at a clear plastic bag. Inside, she saw a long, black hair.
“Is there any way to know if it’s hers?”
“Microscopic hair analysis could get pretty close to a verification, but right now, there’s no detective willing to consider it.”
Hazel looked out the window. Sun-baked beaches speckled with bright towels and umbrellas stretched along the bay. Beyond them, Lake Michigan seemed to doze beneath the hot midday sun.
The summer temperatures peaked in July and August. Hazel looked forward to the evenings when the sun’s intensity subsided. Still, she woke many nights sweaty, summoning a breeze that rarely arrived.
“Do you mind?” she asked, touching the dial on the air conditioner.
“Not at all. Crank it. The heat today is already unbearable, and it’s not even noon.”