Two words: truly lame.
Hobert said, “What’s her name?”
“Barbara Cromwell.”
The officer blinked. “This a joke?”
“No.”
“One of your athletes is interested in dating Barbara Cromwell?”
Myron tried a little backpedal. “I might have gotten the name wrong,” he said.
“I think maybe you have.”
“Why’s that?”
“You mentioned Ron Lemmon before. The old sheriff.”
“Right.”
“Barbara Cromwell is his daughter.”
For a moment Myron just stood there. A fan whirred. A phone rang. Hobert said, “Excuse me a second,” and picked it up. Myron heard none of it. Someone had frozen the moment. Someone had suspended him above a dark hole, giving Myron plenty of time to stare down at the nothingness, until suddenly the same someone let go. Myron plunged down into the black, his hands wheeling, his body turning, waiting, almost hoping, to smash against the bottom.
Chapter 36
Myron stumbled back outside. He walked the town square. He grabbed something to eat at a Mexican place, wolfing it down without even tasting the food. Win called.
“We were correct,” Win said. “Hester Crimstein was trying to divert our attention.”
“She admitted it?”
“No. She offers no explanation. She claims that she will speak with you and only you and only in person. She then pushed me for details on your whereabouts.”
No surprise.
“Would you like me to”—Win paused—“interrogate her?”
“Please no,” Myron said. “Ethics aside, I don’t think there’s much need anymore.”
“Oh?”
“Sawyer Wells said he was a drug counselor at Rockwell.”
“I remember.”
“Billy Lee Palms was treated at Rockwell. His mother mentioned it when I visited her house.
“Hmm,” Win said. “Wonderful coincidence.”
“Not a coincidence,” Myron said. “It explains everything.”
When he finished talking to Win, he strolled the main street of Wilston seven or eight times over. The shopkeepers, light on business, smiled at him. He smiled back. He nodded hello to the large assortment of people passing by. The town was so stuck in the sixties, the kind of place where people still wore unkempt beards and black caps and looked like Seals and Crofts at an outdoor concert. He liked it here. He liked it a lot.
He thought about his mother and his father. He thought about them getting old and wondered why he could not accept it. He thought about how his father’s “chest pains” were partially his fault, how the strain of his running away had at least tangentially contributed to what happened. He thought about what it would have been like for his parents if they had suffered the same fate as Sophie and Gary Mayor, if he had disappeared at seventeen without a trace and were never found. He thought about Jessica and how she claimed she would fight for him. He thought about Brenda and what he had done. He thought about Terese and last night and what, if anything, it meant. He thought about Win and Esperanza and the sacrifices that friends make.
For a long time he did not think about Clu’s murder or Billy Lee’s death. He did not think about Lucy Mayor and her disappearance and his connection to it. But that lasted only so long. Eventually he made a few phone calls, did some digging, confirmed what he already suspected.
The answers never come with cries of “Eureka!” You stumble toward them, often in total darkness. You stagger through an unlit room at night, tripping over the unseen, lumbering forward, bruising your shins, toppling over and righting yourself, feeling your way across the walls and hoping your hand happens upon the light switch. And then—to keep within this piss-poor but sadly accurate analogy—when you find the switch, when you flick it on and bathe the room in light, sometimes the room is just as you pictured it. And then sometimes, like now, you wonder if you’d have been better off staying forever stumbling in the dark.
Win of course would say that Myron was limiting the analogy. He would point out that there were other options. You could simply leave the room. You could let your eyes get accustomed to the dark, and while you would never see everything clearly, that was okay. You could even flick the switch back off once you turned it on. In the case of Horace and Brenda Slaughter, Win would be right. In the case of Clu Haid, Myron was not so sure.
He had found the light switch. He had flicked it on. But the analogy did not hold—and not just because it was a dumb one from the start. Everything in the room was still murky, as though he were looking through a shower curtain. He could see lights and shadows. He could make out shapes. But to know exactly what had happened, he would have to push aside the curtain.
He could still back off, let the curtain rest or even flick the light back off. But that was the problem with darkness and Win’s options. In the dark you cannot see the rot fester. The rot is free to continue to eat away, undisturbed, until it consumes everything, even the man huddled in the corner, trying like hell to stay away from that damned light switch.
So Myron got in his car. He drove back out to the farmhouse on Claremont Road. He knocked on the door, and again Barbara Cromwell told him to go away. “I know why Clu Haid came here,” he told her. He kept talking. And eventually she let him in.
When he left, Myron called Win again. They talked a long time. First about Clu Haid’s murder. Then about Myron’s dad. It helped. But not a lot. He called Terese and told her what he knew. She said that she’d tried to check some of the facts with her sources.
“So Win was right,” Terese said. “You are personally connected.”
“Yes.”
“I blame myself every day,” Terese said. “You get used to it.”
Again he wanted to ask more. Again he knew that it wasn’t time.
Myron made two more calls on the cell phone. The first was to the law office of Hester Crimstein.
“Where are you?” Hester snapped.
“I assume you’re in contact with Bonnie Haid,” he said.
Pause. Then: “Oh Christ, Myron, what did you do?”
“They aren’t telling you everything, Hester. In fact, I bet Esperanza barely told you anything.”
“Where are you, dammit?”
“I’ll be in your office in three hours. Have Bonnie there.”
His final call was to Sophie Mayor. When she answered, he said three words: “I found Lucy.”