Skeletons in the Mist (The McCall Twins) Read online

  “I realize that,” she snapped, tired of people telling her she was delusional. If anyone knew what it was like to be a hurt and confused teenager, swallowed up by grief, she did.

  “So I’m going to get you a room at the motel tonight. And before you argue, I can expense it.” He glanced at her evenly. “You’ll be closer to town that way too. I can pick you up in the morning and we’ll come here together.”

  “I can walk,” she said, silently relieved that she wouldn’t be spending another night in his bed, so to speak.

  “Suit yourself,” he said absently, and started the truck again. “You have my number if you change your mind and want a ride.”

  Sensing his entire persona had changed, she ignored him. Clearly he was worried about what his brother had said to him that morning on the phone. And she couldn’t really say she blamed him. The fact that she’d stayed in his parents’ home the night before had been somewhat personal, even if they did hardly know each other.

  “Eventually we’ll free up your aunt’s house and you can stay there,” he said, as they pulled to a stop in front of the Shady Lane Motel, at the end of the street. “Right now, it’s still part of the ongoing investigation.”

  She didn’t argue with him. She was in no hurry to face the montage of memories that were likely to hit her the moment she entered Aunt Myra’s house. The motel would do for now.

  The Shady Lane Motel was newly remodeled. It housed twenty units—ten on the top floor and ten on the bottom. She stood by while Chas filled out some paperwork, then handed the desk clerk his credit card. Before long, she had a key in her hand shaped like a tree, with the number 17 on it.

  “You need anything else?” he asked as he walked her toward the steps that led to the units upstairs.

  “I can handle things from here. I’ll meet you in the morning.” She turned to walk away from him, but he followed her up the stairs.

  “For what it’s worth, you’re doing the right thing.”

  They reached her room and she turned to face him. “I’m not good at that, Detective—doing the right thing, I mean. I’ve made a mess of things pretty much my whole life.”

  He folded his arms over his chest as he stared at her. “You’re stepping up to the plate now. That’s just about all you can do. The boys will either come around, or make the choice not to. Either way, you’ll have done your part.”

  “They’ve been failed before,” was all she said.

  “I’ve worked with troubled teenage kids for a lot of years, Roxy. They can tell when you really care about them. It’s obvious that you do. Give yourself a chance to make this right before you count yourself out.”

  She wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, but Chas McCall didn’t seem the type to lie.

  “Keep your door locked. Even in a small town, there are a lot of Woody McCleans around.”

  Thinking of the sulky teenager made her skin crawl. She walked inside the room and watched through the window as he waited for her to shut the door and lock it. Then he turned and walked away and she was left alone.

  The room smelled like a mix between cleaning solution and cigarettes. Not the most pleasant smell, but better than the gutter.

  As her cell phone rang, she grabbed it and answered the call.

  “Hi, Myles.”

  “Are you okay? I called a few times earlier and you didn’t answer.”

  Roxy knew Myles well enough to know he got worked up over things fairly easily. “I’m fine. I have some family business to take care of, that’s all. I’m going to be awhile though. Can you manage to store my stuff for me until I get a more permanent situation?”

  “I can store your things,” Myles said, though his voice was lower now. “You are coming back, aren’t you?”

  “I’m planning to come back,” she said, with less conviction than she felt. “At least to get my things.”

  “And then what?” he demanded. “Run some more? I thought you were done with that.”

  “I can’t do this right now, Myles.” She reached over and pulled the curtains shut over the wide front window that looked out into the parking lot. “I know I’ve never talked about my family much but I have brothers. Two of them. And they’re in trouble. I have to help them.”

  “I didn’t realize you had any living relatives. Is there something I can do to help?”

  “No, but thanks for asking. If you can just keep my things for me, I’d appreciate it. I will keep in touch.”

  “I consider you a very good friend, Roxy. You know that, don’t you?”

  She considered him her only friend, but she didn’t tell him that. “I know that, Myles. Thank you.”

  “Call me as soon as you can. And don’t worry about your stuff. I’ve got it covered.”

  She hung up a moment later, a pang of nostalgia in her chest. She missed her friend. Over the last six months, they’d been like girlfriends, sharing their thoughts over a bottle of wine more than once. But really, he knew nothing about her past. Only that she moved around a lot, and had come from a dysfunctional background. Even though she’d learned to trust Myles, she hadn’t let him in on her childhood. It wasn’t something she talked about with anyone.

  Setting her cell phone on a small, wooden table, she dug through her bag for some clothes. She wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and climb into bed.

  Hours later, as she rested between the sheets, her dreams came on full force.

  The room was dark. Roxy clutched Maisy, her doll, tightly as she hid in a corner of the closet. She felt the warm, sticky liquid on Maisy and knew it was blood. Her blood. Rachel’s blood and Momma’s blood too.

  Roxy had lain on the floor of the bedroom, playing dead, for what seemed like hours, until he had left. Then she’d crawled across the floor and into safety, all the way in the back of the closet—back where she’d been terrified to go by herself before, because she’d always feared a monster lived in there. But the monster hadn’t lived in the closet at all. It had lived out in the open, where she’d thought she was safe.

  She cringed as the blasts from his gun still echoed in her ears. The smell of blood was alive in her nose. She felt weak and panicked at the same time. The pain in her side was worsening. She knew he had shot her. She’d felt the bullet go into her side. She’d heard her mother scream. She’d heard Rachel scream, over and over and over, until more gun blasts had sounded. She wanted them to stop. She wanted the pain to stop.

  “Rose?” she heard a voice call. It seemed so far away. She felt herself leaning toward the closet door. Was it Daddy? The sound of boots on the floor grew nearer and nearer. And then the closet door opened up.

  “Rose…I knew you’d come back.”

  Roxy’s eyes snapped open abruptly, her breathing ragged. It took her a moment to get a grip on reality and realize she wasn’t back in time twenty years, but in the motel room Chas had gotten her earlier. It was dark and she froze. She distinctly remembered leaving the bathroom light on earlier. She never slept in complete darkness.

  Fear, with its old, familiar, ugly head, reared up as she straightened slowly and peered around the room. It was pitch black, with only the slight outline of the front window visibly illuminated by the moon outside.

  She slid out of bed and made her way toward the bathroom, desperate for the light that would lay her fears of what lurked in the darkness to rest. Maybe the bulb had burned out during the night.

  When she flipped the switch, the bright light nearly blinded her. Before she could even react, a hand came around her from behind and clamped down over her mouth tightly. She immediately went limp with fear, her six-year-old self, helpless and terrified, tossing her back into time.

  It took her a moment, but eventually the instinctual urge to defend herself surfaced through her fear and she struggled against what seemed like a rock wall. Her purse was near the door. She had a can of mace in there that Myles had given her a few weeks earlier. If only she could reach it…

  “Why do yo
u fight me? It won’t do you any good.”

  His voice was scratchy and eerily familiar. She struggled to turn her head but he was too strong. Keeping his hand over her mouth, he wrenched her arms down to her sides and forced her toward the bed, shoving her down violently, face first. She tried to crawl away but he had her feet within seconds, yanking her back and pressing her face into the mattress. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She tried to scream. His fist connected with the side of her head, stunning her momentarily. Her last conscious thought was that this time she wasn’t going to get away alive.

  TEN

  Chas listened to Loretta Kennings she as rattled off another sentence in his ear. She’d been on the phone for twenty minutes now, insisting something was wrong with her daughter. Tabitha hadn’t come home that night.

  Knowing that life in the Kennings household was anything but stable, Chas had no problem figuring out why Tabitha rarely chose to go home.

  Loretta Kennings meant well for the most part. She and Chas and Trace had graduated from high school the same year. They’d been friends even. That is until she’d hooked up with some loser from the city and gotten pregnant. Instead of going to prom, she’d been dealing with morning sickness and impending motherhood. From that point on, her life had taken a turn for the worse. Her prospective husband had taken off and she’d just seemed to make one bad decision after the next.

  Tabitha wasn’t a stupid kid. While she obviously loved her mother, she realized Loretta’s inability to be alone was dragging them down into the gutter. Chas could see that clearly every time he talked to the kid. It was likely that the teenager was shacked up with her so called friends for the night. When he told Loretta so, she cursed.

  “I told Tabby that she had to come home tonight. You hear me? I ordered her home. She knows better than to mess with me when I give her an order. She knows the rules.”

  He couldn’t help but wonder why Loretta only seemed to have rules one or two nights a week. Instead of saying so aloud, he tried another tactic. “I saw her earlier at the junkyard. She did mention coming home. She walked off with some other kids. She was fine. She probably decided to hang out with her friends again tonight. You said yourself she does that a lot.”

  Loretta was quiet a moment. “Damn kids are so disrespectful. You know she told Abel that she wished him dead the other day? All he asked her to do was mow the lawn—earn a little keep around here.”

  Abel Flannigan was a dick as far as Chas was concerned. From what he could tell, the guy did nothing but sit on his ass and drink beer while Loretta Kennings worked her tail off to pay the mortgage. But Chas figured telling her that wasn’t the best course of action. “If you haven’t talked to her by morning, call us back and we’ll take a ride over to the junkyard and have a look around. Or you can do it now yourself if you want to.”

  “It’s eleven-thirty at night. I work at five AM. I don’t have time to traipse over there right now.” She paused for a moment. “I s’pose I could have Abel swing in there and take a look on his way home. He’s probably at the saloon right now, drinking his life away. That’s his usual behavior this time of night.” She cursed again. “One bad apple after another.”

  “Probably the best idea.” Chas hung up the phone a moment later.

  “Who was that?” Trace wanted to know, as he looked up from a pile of papers he’d been going through.

  “Loretta Kennings. Tabitha was a no-show tonight.”

  “There’s a shocker.”

  “Yeah,” Chas mused absently. “Some people in this world really shouldn’t become parents.”

  “Those kind of people are usually the ones who do become parents. It’s sadly the way things work a lot of the time.”

  “No kidding. You find anything in any of the statements you’re going through?”

  Trace shook his head. “All the neighbors said the same thing. They heard Dylan screaming sometime after four PM. The police were called. By the time most of them reached the street, we were already there. Dylan was outside on the curb, hysterical. Devon was in the house, the aunt at his feet, so to speak. He had the bloody gun in his hand—which, by the way, we got a registered owner on. Hank Tavish.”

  Chas grimaced. This made things look even worse for the boys. “You think Devon really did it?”

  Trace was thoughtful. “I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense that he did. But I don’t get why Dylan said Devon did it at first and then even when he changed his story later on, he didn’t say that Devon didn’t do it. He just said he doesn’t know what happened. Why isn’t he trying to clear his brother?”

  “Maybe he really doesn’t know what happened. Or maybe he shot her himself,” Chas said thoughtfully. “The bottom line is that both boys would have had access to that gun. It was probably with Hank’s stuff, which Myra Tavish would have most likely kept in her house.”

  “Really, anyone could have had access to the gun, depending on where Myra kept it. We need to find Dylan,” Trace said, sitting back in his chair. “And we need to get him to talk.”

  Chas knew Trace was right. Devon and Dylan were the only two people alive who knew what had happened the night of Myra Tavish’s murder. Them and whoever killed her, provided the killer wasn’t one of them. Clearly Roxy felt her brothers were innocent. Frowning, he let out a sigh.

  “I can tell she’s getting under your skin. That was quick.”

  Chas met his brother’s gaze, scowling.

  Trace backed off. “Just be careful here. She doesn’t seem like your type.”

  Chas didn’t know whether to be relieved by this assumption or insulted. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, she doesn’t impress me as the kind of girl who likes to have a great time and then walk away.” Trace gave his brother a knowing look. “And she’s a big part of this case.”

  “I’ve known her for two days.” Chas rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

  “I can see that look in your eyes the first minute you meet a chick if you’re in to her.”

  “You’re being dramatic. I don’t have any look. She’s just a girl who happens to be involved in this investigation. End of story.”

  “You let her stay at Mom’s and Pop’s with Luci.”

  He cringed, figuring that probably hadn’t been the best idea. “We know the family. She’s not a complete stranger.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Drop it,” Chas finally growled, annoyed. “I’m not interested in getting into her pants, so you can back off.”

  “If you say so,” Trace said, as the phone on Chas’s desk rang.

  Irritated, Chas answered. “McCall.”

  “Chas? This is Manny at The Shady Lane. We’ve got a bit of a problem over here.”

  Chas could hear screaming in the background. A woman’s screaming.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “That’s your lady friend. The one you dropped off earlier. You’d better get over here right away.”

  It took Chas only a minute or two to make his way up the street to the motel, Trace at his heels. He could see there was a huge commotion going on up on the second floor. And, it was centered around the room he’d checked Roxy into earlier. His heart began to pound erratically as he took the stairs two at a time. He pushed his way through what appeared to be a crowd of onlookers. There was no screaming anymore. He didn’t know if he should be relieved or terrified.

  The door to Roxy’s room was wide open. Manny, the motel’s night manager, and a good friend of Chas’s, stood just inside the doorway, his hands up as if in surrender.

  “What’s going on?” Chas demanded, pushing Manny aside so he could see into the room. He heard Trace curse from behind him, but he was already moving across the floor.

  Roxy had done her best to stuff herself into a small coat closet in a corner of the room. Her face was a mess of blood and tears, her eyes wide as saucers as she struggled to keep screaming. Her voice had finally given out and
was nothing more than a scratchy moaning sound.

  “She won’t let you near her. I already tried,” Manny said, stepping back so Trace could enter the room.

  “What happened, Roxy?” Chas watched her flinch as he stepped closer. Crouching down where he was, his eyes met hers. He heard Trace call for back up from outside the door.

  The closer he got, the more anxiety he felt. From what he could tell, she didn’t have anything but a long t-shirt on. There were scrapes on her legs that indicated some kind of a struggle. He’d seen situations like this before. None of them indicated a small crime. The majority of them had been rape situations.

  His heart broke for her and he felt sick to his stomach.

  “Chas?”

  Hearing a raspy whisper, he looked at her face again. “Yeah, Roxy, it’s me. You’re safe now.” He indicated Manny. “She’s in shock. Get me a blanket and call an ambulance.”

  “Already done,” Trace said quietly from behind him. He tossed a fleece blanket to Chas.

  “Get them out of here,” he said, tossing a look toward the door, where the crowd had thickened, with observation peaked.

  “Don’t leave me here,” Roxy suddenly begged in a shaky whisper, climbing out of the closet and crawling toward Chas.

  He met her halfway, wrapping her in the blanket quickly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She burrowed into him snugly, her body shaking something fierce.

  By the time the paramedics arrived, they were no closer to figuring out what had happened. From Manny’s account, he’d been working the front desk when he’d heard earsplitting shrieking.

  “I mean I ain’t never heard screaming like that. It was almost like…like an animal being gutted or something.” Manny let out an inhaled breath, clearly shaken up.

  “So what did you do?” Chas asked, keeping an eye on the paramedics who were working Roxy over, not ten feet away from them. She’d refused to get into the ambulance and go to the hospital. Trina Miller, a female officer on the force, had taken over questioning her.