“Of course,” Reed replied with a roll of his eyes.
“This will sound strange, but do you still have it?”
He gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I’m sure we have it archived somewhere. Trust me, the FBI saves everything. It would take me a few minutes to find on our server, though. Why? What is this about?”
“I need to listen to it again.”
Reed read the expression on my face. He was wide awake now. “Okay. Let me see what I can do.”
He retrieved his laptop from the bed and relocated it to a circular table near the window. He sat down and began tapping the keys. I closed the motel-room door behind me, shutting out the winter air. Reed gave me a sideways glance as he typed. “So are you going to tell me what this is about?”
“Drunk driving. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is about.”
His fingers stopped over the keys. “What?”
“No kidnapping. No abuse. Just drunk driving.”
Reed didn’t push me to explain. He turned his eyes down to the keyboard and focused on his laptop again. It took him only a few minutes to find the archived recording of Adam’s voicemail. The time stamp was just before one a.m. on that early Sunday morning ten years ago. He called me over to listen, and then he played it for me. I’d heard the message once before, but I barely remembered what Adam had said. I only knew it had been bad, and it was.
“Special Agent Reed, this is Deputy Adam Twilley. Just thought I’d check in with you after a really productive day checking the toilets of campgrounds around here. Yeah, thanks a lot for the vote of confidence. I bet you thought that was funny. I bet you guys had a good laugh about that. Man, you feebs really think you’re rock stars, huh? You think you’re so much better than a bunch of rubes like us in the sticks. Well, you know what? You’re all just a—”
I held up my hand to make Reed stop the playback. There was no need to go on. I confess, I cleaned up what Adam had said. It was much, much worse, filled with insults and F-bombs. The fact is, I wasn’t really listening to Adam’s slurred, drunken voice.
I was listening to the background.
“Did you hear it?”
Reed looked at me. “Hear what?”
“The music.”
He played it again, and this time he heard it, too. It was music from a car radio. Close by, so close that Adam had to be practically on top of it, Mick Jagger was croaking out “Under My Thumb.”
“The music is coming from the F-150,” I said. “Adam was there. He was at the resort.”
Chapter Forty-Five
At daybreak, I asked Adam to meet me.
The morning was cold and clear at the old Mittel Pines Resort. With barely a murmur of wind, every branch in the trees was still. The winter gray had vanished and left the clearing under blue skies, making the bed of snow sparkle like a field of diamonds. I hiked through calf-deep powder into the middle of the meadow and found a fallen tree trunk. I brushed off the snow and sat down. I waited.
Adam arrived ten minutes later.
I watched him come. He wore his uniform and his hat like shields that he could hide behind. He was the sheriff, but to me, he looked like a boy again, impulsive and reckless. I could see now what the years and the guilt had done to him. I tried to imagine what it was like to keep a terrible secret for so long and to see it reflected in your own eyes whenever you looked in a mirror.
As he came close to me, I watched him try to decode my own face. Did I know?
He stood over me and squinted into the sun. His shadow stretched behind him. “Shelby.”
“Hello, Adam.”
“What’s up? Why the early meeting?”
“I have a question.”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“I want to know if it was an accident.”
He tried to keep his cool, but his whole body stiffened. “What are you talking about?”
“Not Jeremiah. I know he was an accident. I’m talking about Breezy. Did you mean to do it? Was it deliberate? Or did you simply get angry and push her and she fell?”
“Is this a joke?”
“Oh, no. No joke. What was the problem, did she want you to pay her to keep quiet? Violet says Breezy wasn’t above a little blackmail. She needed money, and you’ve got a lot of it.”
Adam shook his head, but he was a terrible actor. He was trembling down to his boots. “I think you’ve had a stroke, Shelby. We should get you some help.”
I stood up from the fallen tree, and we were eye to eye.
“When I asked Breezy who went home with her on that Saturday night ten years ago, she was about to say it was you. Right? You took her home on your motorcycle. But she stopped and didn’t say anything when she saw you flinch. Did she realize that you didn’t want her to tell me? She must have wondered why. When you came back later, had she already figured it out? Did she threaten to expose you? So the two of you argued. You grabbed her by the shoulders, you shoved her, and she fell and hit her head. I really hope it was an accident. Breezy was my friend. I don’t want to think you went over there to kill her.”
“We’re done here, Shelby. I’m leaving.”
“No, you’re not going anywhere, Sheriff. I need to tell you a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“I’m going to tell you what happened to Jeremiah. Agent Reed and I spent most of the night working out the details. Yes, he knows all about it, too. We must be pretty close to the truth, but you can stop me if I get anything wrong. Okay?”
Adam stared at me with hollow, empty eyes and said nothing.
“We know about Paul Nadler taking the F-150 and meeting up with Jeremiah. I bet they liked each other immediately. The old man, the young boy. Nadler probably asked him if he knew where this old resort was, and Jeremiah said, sure, I know that place. And off they went. They drove here. Right here. It must have been an adventure for Jeremiah. Hunting for rocks. Playing with his badminton racket. Putting Legos together. Playing the radio on the pickup truck. I’m sure he was thinking he’d have a great story to tell when he got home.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the cabin where the two of them had stayed. It was winter now. It was summer then. But Anna was right. Suddenly, I could feel Jeremiah all over this place.
“Friday was fun, but I bet Saturday was when the fun started to wear off. Jeremiah started getting lonely. Hungry, too. I don’t imagine he had much to eat in his backpack. His phone was dead. He was missing his family and wondering what to do. I don’t know exactly when Paul Nadler had his heart attack, but at some point, Jeremiah must have realized that this sweet old man was gone. Just like his own grandfather. All of a sudden, the adventure began to get scary. And when it got dark on Saturday? And a thunderstorm came roaring in? That poor kid. He must have been terrified. Probably the only thing that helped was listening to the radio on the truck, but he’d had the engine running for hours. It must have been getting pretty low on gas. I feel bad, thinking about him all alone, hiding in the cabin, wondering if anyone would ever find him.”
I stared into Adam’s eyes.
“But someone did. You found him.”
Out of the stillness, a single gust of wind whipped across the meadow and took Adam’s hat off his head. It rolled away on top of the snow like an old tire. Adam made no attempt to retrieve it.
“Saturday was a rotten day for you,” I went on. “I get that. You were doing grunt work for the FBI. You were tired. You were pissed off. You smelled like campground toilets. So you spent the evening drinking at the Nowhere Café and pouring out your problems to Breezy. And when the diner finally closed, you took her home. She rode on the back of your bike in the pouring rain. Not smart, Adam. You were already pretty drunk. You could have both been killed. But you made it to her trailer. What did you do when you got there? Did you drink more? Or did Breezy share any of her other stash with you? Meth? Cocaine? Heroin? Did you sleep with her, or were you too drunk and riled to make it to bed? That probably made you feel worse. Now you were really angry. So when the rain stopped, you told Breezy you were heading home. She came outside with you, and she heard the music. Rock and roll radio blaring over the trees for hours. Just like the previous night. She was sure it was the Gruders. She asked you to go over there and tell them to knock it off, and that’s what you did. You drove your motorcycle down the dirt road, but pretty soon you realized it couldn’t be the Gruders. The music was coming from the other direction. And that’s when you headed to the old resort.”