“You think they were related?” Dana asked in a lowered voice that only barely suggested the question mark at the end.
“They might’ve been.” I drummed the plastic brown coffee stirrer against the table. “You know how people always make jokes about Southerners being related?”
“Are you about to tell me they’re not just jokes? Because in North Carolina, they’re just jokes.”
I drummed the stick harder, against my cup, against the table, against a napkin. “Kind of. But I think what it really is, is that we admit to more relations than people do in other parts of the world. People talk about their ‘cousins,’ and they might mean their aunt’s kids, or they may mean some far-distant relation three or four times removed.”
“So what are you getting at?”
The last was dead, and I gave my word.
The phrase haunted me again, and I remembered the source perfectly. I remembered his reflecting eyes and his long, flowing hair. “Is that what he meant?” I asked myself, but I said it loud enough that Dana heard me.
“Who? What?”
“Old Green Eyes. One of the things he said before he disappeared was that the ‘last’ was dead. I didn’t know what he meant, and I still don’t know for sure…but what if this is who he means? Ooh, it’s a long shot.”
“No kidding, sweetheart.”
“Well I’m not pretending it’s a high probability; I’m just saying that it’s possible the two are connected. It’s perfect, or it might be.” I chewed at my battered stirring straw.
We sat quiet, staring at everything around us except each other.
She caved first. “How would we find out?”
“I don’t know. There might not be any good way. But let’s pretend we know, for a minute,” I begged her. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this Ryan kid was the last living relative of the old general who helped found the park.”
“Okay, so what if we do?”
“So if we do, then we may as well—for the sake of argument—agree that Green Eyes was talking about Ryan when he said that the last one was dead.”
Dana looked skeptical.
“Hang on.” I cut myself off and hopped free from my seat. Out in the main lobby area there were always abandoned newspapers to be found, and I spied one in a flash. No one protested when I snatched it, so I rolled it up and brought it back to the table I shared with Dana. Within a few page flips, I’d located an update on the missing Boynton boy. I rotated the paper and pushed it up under her view.
“‘No leads in the case of missing McCallie football star Ryan Boynton,’” she read.
“But if you look, if you keep going…Listen—he disappeared about a week before Decoration Day. That’s right around the time the ghost sightings began in earnest; and, if we care to extrapolate, it’s roughly the same time that Green Eyes left. The two could easily be related. Don’t you think it’s an incredible coincidence?”
“It’s a coincidence,” she agreed with a tepid shrug. “But I wouldn’t say it’s an incredible one.”
I struggled to read the upside-down text on the sheet in front of her and defend my bright idea at the same time. “Yeah, but this kid could be the great-great-grand-something-or-another of the park’s founder. He’s murdered, and weird shit goes down at the battlefield.”
She pushed the paper away, nearly tipping my empty cup. “But you’re creating this coincidence—you’re making a whole series of assumptions that are absolutely unverifiable.”
“Like what?”
“Like, first and most obviously, we have no earthly idea if this Ryan kid is any relation to the dead soldier who helped establish the park. You said yourself—matching last names mean squat.”
“Yes, but—”
“And second, we don’t even know that he’s dead—much less that he was murdered.”
I shoved the Times Free Press back beneath her nose. “His truck was found filled with blood, broken glass, and bullet casings. If it wasn’t him, then somebody probably died in that pickup cab. You don’t find skull fragments of people who are still out walking around, and if he’d shot himself, then he’d’ve still been there when they found the truck.”
“Probably,” she conceded. “But not necessarily. There’s always the possibility that Ryan did the shooting, and he has both disposed of the body and headed for the hills. You see what I’m saying?”
“I’m not asking you to embrace my theory without reservation; I’m asking you to think about it with an open mind. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do for a living?”
She corrected me quickly. “Actually, it’s always been my job to raise the sorts of questions and probabilities that escaped my husband. Eden, I’d think you know better than anyone how people who want to believe do so without a lot of critical evaluation. Don’t fall into that trap.”
“Why not?” I demanded. “I can afford to, so why shouldn’t I? I realize that you’ve spent your career trying to validate your work, but you need to understand: I’m not working here. I don’t do this for a living, and I don’t do it for press, and I don’t do it for journalistic integrity.”
I paused, and sucked in a deep breath. I let it out and gathered another one before I’d gained the steam to keep going. “Having said that, I’m not entirely sure why I’m doing it at all, except that I’m not very good at anything else, and when it came down to it, I simply wanted to know. I wanted to go and find out what was happening because I could, and because of that, it felt like I should. But remember this—I don’t have anything to prove to anyone except myself.”
“That must be nice,” she said with a lifted nostril.
I ignored her sarcasm. “It is nice, thanks. I don’t have to document my sources, I don’t have to catalog my findings, and I sure as hell don’t have to justify my hunches.”
“Is that what this is? A hunch?”
“Sure, it’s a hunch. It might even be the world’s most farfetched hunch, but I plan to follow it anyway. And why won’t you play along?” Before she could answer, I continued. “Do you want to legitimize your next television special, or do you want to know why your husband’s dead? Because I can’t help you with the one, but you’ve got nothing to lose by running with me on the other.”
That stopped her, and I thought she might take a swing at me, but she didn’t. “It’ll be a waste of time,” she murmured, after giving it a few seconds of thought.
“Well, what are you doing this afternoon? Say, right now?” I asked.
She caved, though not all the way and not without some petulance. “Fine. But even if you’re right, what do you propose to do about it? Should we play cop and try to find the Boynton kid?”
She had me, there. I didn’t have a plan; I just had a goofy theory that no one in her right mind would chase. “We need to…”
“Yes?”
Right about then Karl left the bathroom, tailed by the sound of flushing and his trusty sidekick. They scooted out and into the hallway, the man in the chair making friendly excuses and bidding us good afternoon. We smiled him off and returned to our discussion.
“Well, Ms. Spade, what are we going to do now?” She goaded me on, knowing I hadn’t thought of anything stunning in the intervening minute and a half.
“Several things. Or there are several things we need to do, anyway, if I’m right.”
“Go on.”
I froze, thawed, and stuttered. “We’ve got to find out what happened to Ryan Boynton. If I’m right and he’s been murdered, then we keep going. If I’m wrong, and he’s huddled up in an outhouse with a shotgun, then we’re completely off track and there’s no sense in listening to another word that comes out of my mouth. But I bet if we found out where he was, and why he’s gone, then we’ll have a much better idea of why Green Eyes left his charges.”
“And I guess we’ll just leap ahead of the cops on the Boynton case, solve it, and be on our merry way before sunset?”
“Yes,” I declared with perfect confidence, which was perfectly counter to what I actually felt. And then I heard Benny placing an order up at the counter.
“I’ll have a latte in a large to-go cup, please. And have you seen Eden hanging around here?”
Karl answered him, from the table by the storefront window. “She’s in the back with Mrs. Marshall. In the hall.”
“Thanks.”
Benny gave me the idea I’d been so fruitlessly clamoring for. “Yes,” I repeated to Dana. “Yes, because we have access to resources that the cops don’t.”
Back at Benny’s place, Dana, Jamie, and I gathered around FrankenHal and watched the lurching lines of the audio track as our EVP collection played. Dana frowned and listened hard. Jamie looked bored as he stroked Tiggy, who sat on his chest and purred.
Benny did his best not to appear nervous in the woman’s presence, but he misclicked a couple of times and blamed it on his head injury. “There—that again. That part, there. What does that sound like to you? Doesn’t it sound like ‘Boynton’?”
“It definitely sounds like you saying ‘you’re all awake,’” Dana said, reaching around Benny’s hand and taking the mouse away from him enough to play the clip again. “The rest, it could be ‘Boynton,’ I suppose.”
“And the next part, the one I thought sounded like ‘fender,’ but with an extra syllable. I think it’s Van Derveer. I think they’re trying to say ‘Boynton’ and ‘Van Derveer.’”
“That’s not so far out,” Jamie said. He’d already heard it once and didn’t feel the need to impress Dana or prove anything, so he stayed on the fringes of the circle with the kitten.