I wanted to ask her: What happened last night?
What did you see?
What did you hear?
Who was with you?
But I couldn’t.
And the fact is, I knew the answers to all of those questions, and they didn’t help me. What happened? Nothing. What did she see? Nothing. What did she hear? Music, just music, blowing in with the wind.
Who was with her? Dennis Sloan.
A cheating husband with a missing son. But Dennis wasn’t the man I wanted. I simply didn’t believe it.
No, the man I wanted was Will Gruder. I had this insane notion that the medal of St. Benedict around Will’s neck really did belong to Keith Whalen. That Will and Vince had been the ones to murder Colleen. That Keith was innocent, just like he said, and that somehow the Gruders had discovered that Jeremiah had seen it all happen. Which gave them a reason to make sure he disappeared. They’d heard the Rolling Stones booming from the pickup truck’s radio that night. They’d gone out to the resort and found Jeremiah, and they’d seized the opportunity to make the one witness to their crime go away for good.
That’s what I wanted the last word in the crossword puzzle to be. Four letters.
Will.
But the letters simply didn’t fit the clue. Breezy didn’t know anything about Will or Keith or Colleen or even Jeremiah back then. And Will didn’t kill Breezy. I knew that, too. He’d been in the hospital in Stanton on Monday night. So if Will didn’t kill Breezy, then I simply wasn’t looking at the clue the right way.
So I did the only thing you can do when you can’t solve a puzzle.
I switched puzzles.
“I enjoyed talking to you last night, Dad.”
His face grew quizzical. “Last night?”
“At the lake.”
“Oh. Well. I enjoyed it, too.” He smiled, but I knew he didn’t remember. Our time at the shore of Shelby Lake was already filed away in a part of his brain that he couldn’t locate.
“You told me about the day your mother died,” I prompted him. “You took a trip. You met a woman who rescued you in a campground.”
He looked lost at what I was saying. He blinked rapidly, and his smile faltered. His expression told me that all I was doing was upsetting him. I wasn’t sure he even remembered his mother at that moment. And certainly not a policewoman he’d encountered somewhere in a long-ago winter. They may as well have been ghosts who’d never existed.
“It’s okay, Dad. It doesn’t matter.”
He looked grateful that I dropped it. That’s what always hurt more than anything, that momentary look of panic in his eyes. I could see his mind saying: These are things I should know. Why don’t I know them? Fortunately, it never lasted long, and then the curtain came down again to protect him.
Dad shouldered his way to the side of the booth and got out, looking tall and fit. The disease could be a terrible mirage. “Nature calls,” he said.
I watched him make his way to the restroom, and I kept a close watch on the hallway, because the rear door of the diner was back there. I didn’t want him wandering out into the snow.
Monica inched closer to me and spoke in a low voice. “What was that about Tom’s mother?”
“He told me that he took a long drive after she died, and he got lost somewhere. Did he ever tell you about that?”
If anyone would know, it was Monica, but she shook her head. “I vaguely remember him taking a couple of days off, but he never spoke about what he did. Why?”
“It’s nothing.”
For now, this was my secret. My mystery.
I saw the restroom door open again, and my father came back to the booth. Patty came over with the final dregs of the coffee. “One last warmer-upper before you go, Tom?”
“Oh, no, thank you, Breezy. I’m likely to float away.”
Patty looked uncomfortable at being called by the name of a dead woman. She looked at me with a silent question as to whether she should correct him or not. I gently shook my head.
“So you’ve got Dudley running again, do you?” Dad went on. “Yesterday you said he was on life support. You weren’t sure you were going to get him started again. Good thing you made it to work with all of these out-of-towners around. Big tips, am I right?”
I didn’t know exactly where he was at that moment, but what he was saying made me hold my breath. Maybe somewhere in Dad’s head, he knew what I needed, and he was trying to find it for me. Maybe, for him, it was that Sunday morning ten years ago after Jeremiah disappeared.
Maybe he knew something that I’d forgotten long ago.
“Dudley?” Patty asked him. “Who’s Dudley?”
I cringed, because I was afraid that she would jar him out of his memories when I needed him to be back in the past. But Dad simply gave one of his Santa laughs.
“Your car, Breezy, your car! Yesterday you had to rely on Monica’s taxi service to make it to the diner, don’t you remember? But here you are today, bright and early. So I assume Dudley is back in the land of the living.”
I mouthed to her: Yes.
“Uh, yeah, yeah, sure he is, Tom,” Patty murmured.
“Good, very good. How did you get home last night anyway? You were working pretty late. Did you find a knight in shining armor to take you out to Witch Tree?”
Patty looked completely at sea, but I felt a chill running up and down the length of my body.
“Last night?” Patty said, not understanding the game. “My husband picked me up, like he always does. We only have the one car. I’m sorry, Tom, did you want more coffee?”
“Oh, well, sure, just a little more for the road. Thank you, young lady.”
I knew that Dad was gone again. Patty was “young lady,” not Breezy. He was back in the shadows, among strangers he didn’t know. The visits never lasted long.
But this time, he’d given me the clue I needed to solve the puzzle.
“You picked up Breezy in Witch Tree on that Saturday morning,” I said to Monica. “You brought her to the diner that day, right?”
Monica knitted her eyebrows in confusion and stroked Moody’s urn. “I’m sorry, dear, what?”
“Saturday. The day after Jeremiah went missing. You picked up Breezy.”
“Did I? Oh yes, you’re right, I did. She couldn’t get Dudley started, and she called to see if I would stop at her place on my way into town. I’d forgotten all about it. But why is that important?”
I shook my head. “It’s not. It doesn’t matter how she got to the diner. What’s important is how she got from the diner to her place in Witch Tree that night. She didn’t have her car with her. She was stranded here. So who took her home?”
Monica looked at me for the answer. “Do you know?”
In that first moment, I didn’t.
And in the next moment, in a rush, I did. Yes, I did. The snow melted around me, and I knew everything. I knew who took Breezy home. I knew who killed her. I knew how Jeremiah died, I knew how Paul Nadler’s body made its way to the river in Stanton, I knew how that white F-150 had been abandoned at Shelby Lake without anyone coming to pick up the driver.
There was just one man behind all of it.
One man with a motorcycle.
“Shelby?” Monica asked me. “Who took Breezy home that night?”
“A well-meaning traveler,” I replied.
I woke up Agent Reed at the motel.
It had been the Avery Weir Inn since Rose sold it, but we all still called it the Rest in Peace. I saw a laptop open on the bed in Reed’s room, but his eyes were heavy, as if he’d fallen asleep while working.
“Shelby,” he said in surprise, with a glance at his watch. “Is everything okay?”
“No. No, I don’t think so. I have a question for you. Do you remember that voicemail that Adam left for you when you came to town the first time? The one that almost got him fired?”