Chapter 12
The Lake
Deborah Cleaves had a honey-blond bob and the studied manners of a preacher’s wife who’d been by her husband’s side through twenty-nine years of sermons, social calls, and church dinners—manners that persisted even though the preacher had passed away two years back. She offered Bird his pick of coffee or whiskey, and served the former on a tray accompanied by an antique sugar bowl and a little matching pitcher of cream.
“I’m sorry I don’t have decaf,” she said. “I keep the regular on hand for guests, but I don’t drink it myself.”
“Regular is fine,” Bird said. “I’ll be up awhile yet.”
“Will you be staying here in town?”
“For the moment.”
She nodded. “Of course. I’m sorry to be meeting you so late. I drove out this morning to visit my sister and wasn’t checking my messages. If I’d known . . .” Her voice began to tremble, and she trailed off, shaking her head, and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “And you don’t have any idea where he is? Dwayne?”
“We were hoping you might,” Bird said, and Deborah Cleaves shook her head harder. She twisted the tissue between her hands.
“No, no, no. I couldn’t imagine, I can’t imagine. That w . . .” she started to say, and snapped her mouth shut, coughing to cover the faux pas, but Bird caught it. That woman, or maybe, that wife of his. Either way, he was guessing that Deborah’s tearful concern was reserved largely for her son, with very little love lost for her now-deceased daughter-in-law. He also guessed that she would be very careful not to slip up like that again.
“Excuse me,” Deborah said, recovering. “It’s just, I haven’t seen much of my son lately. He’s always so busy—he owns his own business, you know—and then there was quite a lot to do at the lake this summer, as I understand it. Of course I wished he would stop by more often, but once they’re grown, you know, it’s hard—it’s hard . . .” She broke off again, pressing her lips together, gathering herself. “But something must have happened. Dwayne wouldn’t just disappear. Can’t you do DNA? Or fingerprints, or something? Whoever did . . . that . . . to Elizabeth Ouellette, that person could have kidnapped him, or—”
The idea of Dwayne being kidnapped was absurd, but Bird nodded and broke in gently. “Did Dwayne have enemies? Someone who would want to hurt him?”
The tissue had started to disintegrate. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Could he have been in trouble? Money? Or drugs?”
Deborah Cleaves stiffened, her hands clenched into fists.
“My son doesn’t do drugs.” She glared at him. Her voice grew shrill. “Have you asked Earl Ouellette if his daughter did drugs?”
“We spoke to Earl,” Bird said mildly. He allowed the silence to stretch for another few beats, while Deborah fidgeted. There was no obvious reason to think that the murder was drug-related, but the vehemence of her reaction gave him pause. If nothing else, addiction could put a lot of stress on a marriage. If Lizzie had been using, and if her husband had been unhappy about it . . .
“Detective? I’m sorry, I want to help. I just don’t know what I can do. I don’t know where my son is,” Deborah said, breaking the silence.
“You can help by telling us right away if he calls you,” said Bird.
“Of course, but—”
Bird smiled. “We want him found just as much as you do.”
His conversation with Deborah Cleaves concluded, Bird drove back through town and turned right on the county road, crossing over the Copper Falls town line and into a no-man’s-land of loosely developed plots. There was an auto-body shop that seemed to double as a repository for broken-down farm equipment; the grocery store with its windows brightly lit, the evening’s last few shoppers pushing carts across the lot to their waiting cars; a gas station with a flagpole mounted on the roof, the Stars and Stripes hanging limply in the windless night, faintly lit by the streetlights below. Then, nothing. The lights faded behind him as the dark closed in and thick stands of pine trees rose up on either side of the road. A few minutes later, the bar called Strangler’s loomed ahead, the last stop before the county road widened from two lanes to four and the posted speed limit jumped from forty to fifty-five miles per hour. Bird spotted it at a distance, set back a hundred feet from the road. The building was lit by floodlights and advertised by a dingy fluorescent sign that looked like it was floating, unanchored in the dark: one word, bar, in red letters against a white background.