My most vivid memory of Martin’s Point was taking Anna Helvik there on a Sunday afternoon five years earlier. That was when Karl and Trina were away in Chicago for her cancer surgery. Anna was five years old then but already smart for her age. She knew something was wrong with her mother. I took this beautiful blond child to the lake, where we cruised on my father’s boat under the bright sunshine. We fished, and Anna caught a crappie. She struggled to hold the slippery, squirming fish in her small hands and giggled the whole time, until it stopped struggling as it died. I watched Anna shake the fish, as if to wake it up. When it didn’t, she bawled, and it took me most of an hour to get her to stop. When she was finally calm again, she wiped her face and asked me, “Is that what’s going to happen to my mom?”
That was when I started crying, too.
That night, when we were back at her house, I stood outside her bedroom and listened to her pray before she went to sleep. Over and over, she said, “God, I’m sorry for killing the fishy, I’m sorry for killing the fishy, I’m sorry for killing the fishy.”
I remember thinking: I would take a bullet for that little girl.
Anyway, Agent Reed and I arrived in Martin’s Point, and I parked the cruiser near an ice cream parlor on the far end of the main street. The shop owner was also the owner of the F-150 that had been stolen the previous day. Unfortunately, we were one block from the town’s sandy beach, where dozens of tourists tanned on any given summer day. The bus stop from the town of Stanton was immediately across the street. The large town parking lot was behind us, and anyone walking from their car toward the water would have passed where the truck had been stolen. So this location had hundreds of suspects and not a security camera anywhere in sight.
The store owner’s name was Bonnie Butterfield, which I thought was a great name for someone with an ice cream shop. She gave us free ice cream when we introduced ourselves. I’m not too proud to turn down things like that. I picked a flavor called Ursulina Poop, which was chocolate-hazelnut ice cream swirled with fudge and studded with nuts and malted milk balls. It was terrific. Agent Reed got vanilla, and I rolled my eyes at him.
Bonnie took us outside and showed us where her truck had been parked half a block from the store itself. It was out of view from inside the parlor. She’d discovered it was missing when her husband arrived at one o’clock and mentioned that the truck wasn’t in its usual spot. She’d seen it there about eleven o’clock when she went outside to meet the mailman, so the theft had occurred sometime in the two hours or so in between.
She also told us with some embarrassment that she’d left her truck unlocked with the keys in the cup holder. She’d been doing that for years without any problems. I wasn’t surprised, because half the families in this area couldn’t even find their house keys if you asked, but this time, it was Agent Reed who did the eye rolling.
After our conversation with Bonnie, we stopped in at every store along the main street to see if anyone had witnessed the theft, but no one had seen a thing. We located the mailman, too, who was no help. There wasn’t anything else for us to do. Half an hour later, we were in my cruiser on the way back to Everywhere.
“What did you take away from all that?” Reed asked me, as if I were a trainee at Quantico.
I thought about it as I drove. Then I said, “The time.”
“That’s right. What about it?”
“The truck was stolen sometime between eleven and one. The Gruders passed the truck on the national forest road around one fifteen or so. And we’re at least a ninety-minute drive from where we found Jeremiah’s bicycle. So if this was our guy, he didn’t waste any time. He must have driven straight there.”
“Exactly,” Reed said. “Whoever took the truck knew where he was going. He had plans.”
Chapter Eighteen
That night in Everywhere, the rain came.
After I took Agent Reed back to the command post, he set me free until morning. I drove to the Nowhere Café and parked on the main street, where rivers ran through the gutters and the downpour drenched me immediately. It was ten o’clock. All the shops were closed, and the only light I could see was from the window of the diner. Even so, the street was still crowded with cars bearing out-of-state plates. The café was open late to accommodate a full house of strangers. Print and TV reporters. Volunteers and curiosity-seekers, all sharing posts on Instagram and Facebook. Our little town was suddenly the epicenter of the daily news.
Inside, I squeezed to the end of the lunch counter and found an open stool next to Adam. He’d switched out of his uniform into casual clothes. He wore a tight-fitting white T-shirt, ratty blue jeans, and a baseball cap backward on his head. His brown curls poked out from under the rim. He had a bottle of Bud in front of him and two other empty bottles on the counter. He glanced at me with a resentful stare as I sat down.
“Busy day, Shelby?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“Well, it must be nice to be in the middle of all the action.”
“Come on, Adam. I didn’t ask for this.”
“Yeah, but you got it, didn’t you? Maybe if I had perky little tits, Agent Reed would have picked me.”
He was trying to get a rise out of me, but I kept my mouth shut rather than fire back at him. I knew he was drunk and didn’t know what he was saying.
“So did you find Jeremiah?” Adam asked.
“You know we didn’t.”
“Did you find anything?”
“We’re still looking for the missing truck.”
“You mean all those Feds crawling over town and they still don’t have a damn clue what happened? What a shock. It’s almost like they don’t know this area from the holes in their asses.”
“Adam,” I murmured sharply. “Keep your voice down. You want these reporters to know you’re a cop and you’re drunk? If Agent Reed hears about it, you’re going to be in big trouble.”
“Oh, what’s he going to do? Give me a crap assignment? You know what I spent my day doing, Shelby, while you were hanging out with the feebs? I was visiting camp sites on my motorcycle. Talking to Bubba and Dixie in their RV about whether they’d seen anything strange. Sticking my head inside every outhouse to make sure nobody was hiding there. Reed was very insistent about that. Check every toilet, he said. Supposedly they found a kid gagged and bound inside a porta-potty on one case, but if you ask me, he was making that up. You got a body, you bury it.”
“Adam,” I hissed at him again. “Don’t talk like that.”
He went back to his beer. “Whatever.”
Breezy arrived to rescue me with a glazed donut, which she knew was my favorite. She’d already put in a fifteen-hour day but looked none the worse for wear. She was whistling, and I suspected that the pockets of her apron were stuffed with tips. She’d borrowed new clothes, too. Somewhere during the day, she’d traded her red mock turtleneck for a button-down white blouse sheer enough to give the world a look at the skimpy purple bra she was wearing underneath. Enough buttons were undone that the girls practically spilled out when she leaned over.
“Is he still being Mr. Grumples?” Breezy asked, eyeing Adam next to me.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Poor baby,” she said, sticking out her tongue at him. “The FBI won’t let you play with them?”
“Shut up, Breezy,” Adam retorted.
She reached out and patted his hand, and she tugged on her blouse to make sure he had a good view. “Sorry, sweets. I don’t mean to poke the bear. Drink up, the next one’s on the house. When I’m in a good mood, I figure the world should be, too.”