“I let ’em in the door, I can’t get rid of ’em.”
I rose, bent forward, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She didn’t smell like roses, but interrupting her train of thought seemed worth it.
Her head straightened and her eyes fully focused for the first time. “What was that? You want to get laid?”
I laughed. “No, but I carry a mental snapshot of you in my mind-since the first time we met.”
She frowned for a moment, thinking back, and then smiled. “I flash you?”
“You did. It was a sore temptation.”
“I remember. You brought me a coffeemaker after that asshole beat me up.” She paused. “I offered you a freebie… Boy Scout.”
She looked off into the distance for a while. I kept quiet, letting her memories fill her mind-I hoped for the better.
Finally, she brought her attention back to me, laying her hands flat against the front of her bathrobe. “Okay, send me your head shrinker. I’ll talk to her… She better be good, though.”
“Thanks.”
Without moving a muscle, she seemed to gather herself together then. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
I pulled out the photograph Wilma Davis had given me and showed it to her. “When you were at Clipper’s, you worked on this girl-orange and purple dye job, shaved one side, left the other side long.”
She studied the picture carefully. “Yeah-Shawna.”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “That was a long time ago.”
“She was special. I wouldn’t forget her. We talked. It was like seeing myself, a lot of years ago. The backgrounds weren’t exactly the same-but I knew where she was headed.” She waved the picture in her hand. “I guess I was right, huh?”
“’Fraid so.”
“Jesus. I didn’t even give her a decent cut. How’d she end up?”
I doubted Susan had seen a newspaper or listened to the news in months. “We’re not sure. We only found the remains. What made you think she was in trouble?”
She shook her head. “A lamb to slaughter. You know the type.”
“But nothing specific?”
A crease appeared between her eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Joe, what do I know? We talked. We never met again. End of story.”
“She didn’t mention anyone by name?” I persisted. “Where she was living? Who she was seeing?”
She surprised me again. “Mother Gert’s-at least we talked about it.”
Mother Gert’s was the street name given to the William Stanchion Home, a privately funded shelter for the temporarily homeless. “She was staying there?”
“Either staying there or planning to. I might’ve told her about it-I don’t remember. I cut her hair, said a few things, and she unloaded on me like I was a bartender. She talked about where she grew up, her mom, her friends. She was on her own, blowing her last bucks on me, changing her look. ’Course, even there, I screwed her up-not that she complained. She even tipped me.”
“But she didn’t refer to anyone local?”
She rolled her eyes. “No-nobody local-least nobody I remember. I think that’s why Gert’s came up.”
I stood up. “Okay, Susan. I appreciate it.”
I hesitated, about to give her shoulder a squeeze. From that angle, she looked diminished again, like someone dropped from an enormous height.
But she stopped me cold, reading me like an old pro. “Don’t push your luck. I’ll see whoever you send over, but it could be I’ll just throw her out. Make sure they know that.”
I nodded and crossed to the door. “I will. Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah.”
Gert was Gertrude Simmons, a lapsed Catholic nun who had owned and operated her oddly named shelter since the sixties. William Stanchion, she’d once told me, had been an early financial backer-one of the few people from her previous life that hadn’t scorned her after she’d left the Church. As far as she knew, he’d never been to New England, much less Brattleboro, but to this day, her feelings for him made her the only person never to refer to the William Stanchion Home as Mother Gert’s.
The building was a statuesque Greek Revival mansion on Western Avenue, the heavily traveled umbilical cord tying Brattleboro to West Brattleboro, but the house was set up and away from the road on a tree-lined embankment that offered a sense of privacy and retreat. Sammie and I drove directly there from Susan’s in silence-I lost in thought and Sammie having the sensitivity to leave me there.
The official entrance was to the back, where the original home had no doubt once received horse-drawn deliveries. The trade-off for the building’s survival beyond those days had been the carving up of its once splendid but impractical interior into a rabbit warren of offices, dorm rooms, and meeting areas-all of which had doomed the grandiose official entrance hall. It was a sacrifice part of me mourned every time I visited and saw, either hidden under the paintwork or almost covered by later remodeling, a glimpse of the original hardwood, high-ceilinged, stained-glass splendor.
It was not a subject I ever broached with Gert, however. A short, no-nonsense pragmatist, who nevertheless gave both of us the customary hug she offered all comers, Gertrude Simmons was not one to pine over past glories. If queried, I had no doubt she would have acerbically reminded me how the first owners of this house had probably treated those they’d deemed their social inferiors.
She led us into an office the size of a small bathroom and offered us the one guest chair, which I forced a reluctant Sammie to take. I closed the door behind us and leaned against its frame.
“Two of you,” Gert said, perching on an ancient tilt-back that caused her feet to swing free of the floor. “This must be big.”
“Actually,” I answered, “we’re not sure what we’re chasing.”
“Except that it led you here.”
“Maybe.” I pulled the picture from my pocket again and gave it to her. “Ring a bell?”
She looked at it and handed it back, poker-faced. “Why?”
The response was typical and expected. Maintaining the confidentiality of her many skittish guests had become one of the cornerstones of her success in this business-something they’d learned to believe in, and we’d learned to respect.
“No strings, Gert. You hear about the bits of skeleton we found? We think it’s her.”
Her expression saddened, and her response was disappointing. “I’m sorry, then. It doesn’t ring a bell. Do you have a name?”
“Shawna Davis,” Sammie said.
Gert climbed out of her chair and moved me over so she could get into a filing cabinet by the door. “Do you have any idea when she might have been here?”
Again, it was Sammie who answered. “April or May of last year, give or take.”
“Close enough,” Gert said, half to herself, and riffled through a tightly packed wad of files, eventually pulling one free from near the back. She brought it with her to her seat and opened it there, where I couldn’t see over her shoulder.
After a minute of silently reading, she looked up. “Shawna Davis. Stayed one night only-April twenty-third.”
So it looked like Susan Lucey had been the one who suggested Mother Gert’s. “Can you tell us anything about her?” I asked.
She closed the file. “What do you think happened?”
It wasn’t a question I normally answered from someone outside law enforcement-we, too, liked our secrets. With Gert, however, I didn’t hesitate. “She might’ve taken an overdose of sleeping medicine, but I’m starting to think she was murdered. I don’t have anything concrete to base that on, though.”
“Are you looking at anyone in particular?”
“We’re not looking at anyone period,” Sammie answered. “This thing’s heading nowhere unless you can give us something.”
Gert looked at her sympathetically and gestured with the folder in her hand. “This contains what we call an ‘entrance sheet,’ which everyone is asked to complete. It lists things like name, age, address, family, and all the rest, but it’s voluntary, and she only gave us the first two. It also has an evaluation form that one of our volunteer counselors fills out if he or she is allowed to by the client. Without actually showing you that form, I can tell you it also contains very little. Apparently, Shawna Davis wanted a place to spend the night, and nothing more.”