I nodded and then shrugged. Grace Sisson jerked open the front door between my first and second knock.
“Come in,” she said, and held the door at the ready, the way a person does when a rambunctious mud-covered pet is about to barge in on the heels of polite company.
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Sisson?” I asked.
She shut the door solidly behind me, then stood with her arms crossed, regarding me. “Do you have any idea why I asked that you come over here?”
“None whatsoever,” I said. “All I’m told is that you wanted to talk to me and that you didn’t want to speak with one of the deputies or with the undersheriff.” I shrugged. “So…here I am.”
“My daughter is gone,” she said abruptly.
Fatigue and an almost endless list of other excuses had deadened my brain, and it took a few seconds for that to sink in.
“Did you hear me?” Grace snapped.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.”
“Well?”
“What time did she leave?”
With a grimace of impatience, Grace Sisson rolled her eyes. “Who’s got cops crawling all over my property all day long, watching every minute? Ask one of them.”
“That’s helpful, Mrs. Sisson.” I stepped toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
I stopped and turned slowly. “I tell you what. When you’re ready to be civil and tell us what we need to know, then give me a buzz. If your daughter’s missing, I’m sorry. If you want to report her as a missing person after she’s been gone twenty-four hours, feel free. You’re the parent here. We’re just the cops. You might check with her friends. That would be my suggestion. If we find her on the street after ten p.m., we’ll bring her home. No charge.”
I reached for the doorknob, and Grace Sisson held out a hand. “No, wait.”
That’s as far as she got, since she had enough brains to know that if she fired any more shells at me, I’d be out the door. But anything less was difficult for her.
“Ma’am, I know you don’t want to talk to us. I know you’ve got a world of problems right now. But if you’ve got something to say to me, just take the easy road. Spit it out and get it over with so I can get to work.”
She took a deep breath and said, “Jennifer wanted something from the place across the street. I told her I didn’t know if we could do that or not.”
“You mean because of the deputies?” She nodded. “Mrs. Sisson, this property is under surveillance. So are you. The reason for that is that you’ve decided we aren’t worth talking to, and so we have to dig for the answers to all our questions without your help. But you’re not under house arrest. You can go anywhere you like. Any time you like. And we’ll follow along.”
Grace accepted that without a snide retort, and I chalked it up to slow progress. “So did she go over there? Across the street?”
“Yes.”
“What time?”
She turned and glanced at a small wall clock in the kitchen. “About twenty minutes ago.”
“About five-thirty or so, then. Give or take.”
“Yes. And she didn’t come back.”
I raised an eyebrow at Grace. “So let me ask a foolish question. Did you walk over there? It’s maybe a hundred yards, at most. Or call?”
“I called. She isn’t there. They told me that she had been there for a while but left.”
“And you have no idea where she might have gone?”
Grace shook her head. “I’m just afraid…”
“Of what?”
By this time, I could see the misting in the woman’s eyes and realized that Grace Sisson was wrestling with a fair-sized dragon. “Grace,” I said quietly, “it’s just you and me. If there’s something I need to know, then now’s the time.”
She turned and walked into the living room, plopping down on the burgundy corduroy sofa. She clasped her hands between her knees and nodded at the overstuffed chair opposite. From the faint, cloying smell of oil mixed with cigarette smoke, I knew it was Jim’s television chair. I sat down, rested my forearms on my knees, clasped my hands together, and regarded Grace with sympathy. The broken mirror still hung on the wall behind her chair.
“So tell me,” I said.
“We’ve been arguing all day,” she said. “Jennifer and I. All day long, back and forth. If she doesn’t keep that baby, it’s going to kill her grandparents. First Jim dying, and now this. It’ll be something she’ll regret until the day she dies.”
I frowned. “Was Jennifer raped, Mrs. Sisson?”
She looked as if I’d slapped her.
“No, she wasn’t raped,” she snapped. “My God, what do you think? If she was raped, then you’d have heard from me long before this.”
“Then I’m not sure any of this is our concern.”
“It is if he takes her somewhere for an illegal abortion. She’s only fifteen years old, Sheriff. Do you understand that? Fifteen years old.”
“I understand that perfectly well, Mrs. Sisson. And you think that’s what she’s doing? Looking for a quick way out?”
Grace Sisson nodded. “Of course that’s what she’s doing. That’s what we argued about all day.” She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her pocket and held it out to me. It was just a piece of school kids’ notebook paper, with large loopy handwriting at the top. “Mom,” I read. “I need some time to think. I’ll be OK. Jennifer.”
I looked up at Grace. “She left this when she was supposedly going across to the burger place?” Grace nodded, and I added, “Maybe she means what she wrote.”
“Jennifer doesn’t think about anything, Sheriff. That’s why she got pregnant in the first place. She’s not into introspection.”
“Who’s the father?”
“I assume that it’s Kenny Carter.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“No, I’m not sure.”
“Do you have any ideas who else it might be?”
She was too long answering. “No.”
“Was Kenny over here Tuesday night?”
This time, she looked at me steadily, with no petulance, no evasion, no rudeness. When she spoke, it was as if each word were timed with a metronome. “I…really…don’t…know.” She took a breath and added, “I really don’t know who killed Jim.”
Every instinct told me that she was telling the truth. I said, “We’ll find out who killed your husband, Mrs. Sisson. And we’ll find your daughter for you.”
Undersheriff Robert Torrez was waiting by 310 when I came out of the house. “You survived Grace,” he said.
“Two wackos in one day, Roberto. It’s got to be something in the village water.”
He laughed. “No more prints, by the way,” he added.
“I didn’t think we’d be that lucky.”
“So what now?”
I straightened up, stretching my shoulders, the early-evening sun feeling good after the refrigerated air in the Sissons’ house. “I guess I’ll get me a burger. Want to come?”
He glanced across at the Burger Heaven and made a face. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Gayle’s got something. Why don’t you come over? She’d like that.”
I reached out and patted him on the arm. “Some other time. I appreciate the offer and I know what I’m missing, but I need to check out one little thing. And you might stay close to the radio. I’ve got a feeling that it’s going to be a busy night.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Benny Fernandez had opened Burger Heaven seventeen years before, and for a few years the business had blossomed into one of the most successful teen hangouts in Posadas. Benny had understood some basics about a kid business: give ’em lots of food for not very much money and free refills on the watery fountain drinks, and don’t harass ’em when they get so noisy that they drive out the adults. That was his policy.
When Benny died in 1991, his wife had tried to carry on, but she had mistakenly believed that high school kids could be prim and proper, quiet, and well behaved. She’d raised prices and improved food quality, cleaned the place up, and restored order-and lost business. Five years later, she’d sold the place to Nick Chavez’s nephew.