What She Saw - 14

Sloane

Smiling, I walked up to the senior center’s reception desk. I hoped the news of my arrival had not reached the center yet. “Hey, I’m here to see Monica Carr. She’s been so amazing with my mother, and I want to thank her.”

The mid-forties receptionist had black hair tied back into a ponytail. She wore aqua glasses attached to a silver chain around her neck. “You missed her.”

I set a gift bag on the counter. “Darn, I had a present for her.”

“You can leave it with me.”

“It’s cake. It should be refrigerated.”

“Oh, well, she’ll be back in a few days.”

I shoved out a sigh, trying to strike a balance between sadness and frustration. “I can run it by her house. She’s on the way toward Mom’s house.”

“I’m sure she’d be fine with that.”

I opened my phone. “She’s on Craig Road, right?”

“No, Jones Road.”

I searched the street. It looked rural. “That’s right. End of the road on the right?”

“Left.”

“Okay.”

“Number 2020.”

“Perfect. Thank you,” I said.

As I walked back to my car, I caught my reflection in the window of a storefront. Dark hair draped down my Rolling Stones T-shirt. Worn jeans skimmed my long legs. I slid into the car and tossed the bag in the back seat.

I plugged Jones Road into my phone and drove east. It took me a good thirty minutes before I made the left down a small gravel road.

I’d made a career interviewing victims. Sure, some of them didn’t always get the story right. But most had a handle on the offender, even if they didn’t remember all the details. There was something about being face-to-face with a killer or rapist that imprinted impressions on a body that even a mind didn’t recall.

I’d spent countless hours reading Taggart’s police records. But there was no replacing interviews with the victims and their families. Most victims of crime weren’t wealthy. And cops and reporters tended to discount them if their home situation was dysfunctional.

I couldn’t write a book on parenting or family bonding, but I understood even the most messed up of us had something to offer.

My GPS led me off another secondary highway onto the graveled and tarred Jones Road. The trees on either side were thick, and long branches draped over the road. Several scraped against the side of my car as I searched for a house at the end of the road on the left.

I spotted a rusted mailbox that rested cockeyed on a leaning post. The name “Carr” was visible, but the two R ’s looked more like I ’s. I turned down a narrow, rutted driveway that arched in front of a brick rancher. The grass around the house looked freshly cut. But the edges of the yard were ragged, as if weed eating were a bridge too far. I got it. Homes, as a rule, were a pain in the ass. I was happy living on the road and operating off my laptop and a post office box in Charlottesville.

I pulled around the arch and nosed my car toward the end of the driveway. I’d not called ahead, which was a huge risk. Even when I notified a contact I was coming, I was cautious. I was a stranger, and my interviews stirred up bad old memories for people that could go sideways.

That had been the case last year when I’d interviewed the father of a murdered girl. The victim had been one of six girls killed by a man who’d lived five houses down from the family. It was a lower-middle-income neighborhood outside of Baltimore. The slain girl’s father was devastated. He’d tried to start a nonprofit for missing kids, but it had never gained enough traction. He’d lost his job, and his wife left him.

As I’d pulled into his driveway, the father had staggered outside. He’d been drunk and brandishing a .45 caliber handgun. He’d fired two bullets at my Jeep. I’d shoved the car’s gear into reverse and hit the accelerator. I took out two clay planters as I raced out of the driveway. I’d not pressed charges, but I also hadn’t approached him again. After that day, I parked on the street.

I walked along the cracked cement sidewalk and, seeing no doorbell, knocked hard. A glance at the untrimmed shrubs brought to mind an old cop’s joke about 1970s porn snatch.

The door opened to a woman who was a few inches shorter than me. Her thinning gray hair was scraped back into a ponytail, and her face was lined. Her T-shirt and jeans were clean but old and threadbare.

“I’m Sloane Grayson. I’m writing an article about the Mountain Music Festival.”

“I heard there was a reporter in town.” She studied me.

“Already? News travels fast.”

“Edna at the grocery store and I are friends, and she knows Bailey. Why are you here? Why care about a case that’s thirty-one years old?”

“I don’t want people to forget about those women.” I avoided the word victim . The term dehumanized the women and made them faceless.

“You’ll make a small splash, but no one will care for long.”

“I don’t make small splashes. Mine are big and messy.”

That prompted a small smile.

“I’d like to think my articles matter.”

She sighed and stared at me a long moment before unlatching the hook on the screened door. “Come on in.”

I followed her into the dimly lit house. It had low ceilings and white walls that needed a fresh coat of paint about a decade ago. On those walls were dozens of pictures of a young blond girl. In all the photos, she was holding a guitar and smiling.

“That kid came out of the womb singing. And she was playing her daddy’s guitar by the time she was four. Such talent. She was convinced she’d be a big success.”

The girl was Laurie Carr, later known as Blue Guitar Girl. From what I’d learned about Laurie, she’d been nineteen when she vanished. She’d made several demo tapes and wanted to sing in Nashville. She’d thought the festival would be her big break. She’d sung a duet onstage with the lead singer of the Terrible Tuesdays, a five-man rock band. The band had done well on festival circuits for about five years but disbanded by 2000. A local news station had been filming, and they’d captured Laurie and Joe Keller’s set. Laurie had been good and maybe could have gotten a contract. Maybe.

I followed Ms. Carr. The sofa was threadbare, the coffee table covered in old magazines, the carpet shag. The avocado-green kitchen dated back to the 1980s.

“I made lemonade this morning,” Ms. Carr said. “Care for a glass?”

“Sounds great.”

She pulled out two mason jars from a dark-grain wooden cabinet and a pitcher of lemonade. The bright yellow wasn’t found in nature, but I wasn’t going to argue.

She set two glasses on a round kitchen table and motioned for me to sit. I lowered to the chair, letting my backpack drop to the ground. The lemonade was tart and made my lips pucker.

“It’ll put hair on your chest,” she said.

“Like the Depot coffee?”

“Better. Vodka adds a bite to the sweetness, if you need a little.”

“No, this is fine.” I set the glass down. “Again, thank you for seeing me.”

She rattled the ice in her glass. “Nobody ever asks me about Laurie anymore.”

“I’ve seen a video of her singing at the festival. As rough as the tape is, you can’t miss she was great.”

“She was special.”

“What prompted her to go to the Mountain Music Festival?”

“It was a chance to sing. My brother, her father, didn’t have money for fancy lessons, but that never stopped her. Then she saw the poster for the festival in the Waynesboro shop where she worked. The day of the festival, her car was in the shop, so she took the bus to Dawson and then started walking toward the site. Finally, one of the band guys picked her up.”

“Joe Keller.”

“Joe told me he’d warned my girl to be careful, but she was so sure that she had life figured out.”

“She couldn’t have known.”

“She would’ve loved playing for a big crowd. I can’t imagine how good that must have felt for her.” She rose and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the freezer. Unscrewing the top, she offered me a sip, but I declined. She put a healthy dose in her lemonade.

“I understand you helped raise Laurie.”

“Her mama ran off when she was five, so I stepped in to help.”

The similarities among Laurie, Patty, and me weren’t hard to miss. “You reported Laurie missing, right?”

“I called the station on Saturday afternoon. Not enough time had passed for the police to take a report. But Laurie had promised she’d check in by Saturday afternoon. And she was always good to her word. When she didn’t call, I called the sheriff’s office. The dispatcher told me to give it time. When she didn’t come on Sunday, I called first thing on Monday. The lady on the phone said the sheriff was investigating other complaints about the concert.”

Given the numbers, I suspected so many crimes hadn’t been reported. “What did he say when you told him your niece was missing?”

“He reminded me she was over eighteen, and that young girls sometimes took off longer than they said.”

“And?”

“And that pissed me off. I knew my girl. I knew she wouldn’t run off and not call home. That wasn’t Laurie. I told him.” She took a long pull on her lemonade. “He called me back that afternoon and asked me to come to the station. I thought they’d found her body. When I got there, there was another woman. She said her daughter was missing.”

“Do you remember the missing woman’s name?”

“Patty. The woman was her mother, Sara.” She shook her head. “All these years and I can’t forget the names.”

“You remember Patty after all this time?”

“Patty’s mother and I sat together in the waiting room for several hours. Didn’t take long to realize why we were both there.”

“That’s not standard police procedure.”

“I didn’t know what was proper or what wasn’t. By the time I left, I was worried. My Laurie was missing and so was Patty. Both were young and pretty.”

“Witnesses later said that Laurie worked the hamburger stand with Patty.”

“Made sense to me. Laurie always found a way to make a few bucks. My girl was resourceful. She had the talent and the work ethic for going the distance in Nashville.”

Who knew if Laurie would have been a star. Death had a way of whitewashing away faults and highlighting strengths. Either way, she’d deserved to live her life. “Did you keep up with Sara?”

“You know a lot about this case.”

“I do.”

“Sara and I talked on the phone. We were frustrated that the cops couldn’t find their bodies.”

“When did you learn there were two other missing girls?”

“A week after the concert. The sheriff had a third missing person report but didn’t announce it until his press conference.”

“Debra Jackson.”

“That’s right.” She sipped her lemonade. “After the press conference, another family called in a report.”

“Tristan Fletcher’s family.”

“The dancer.”

“And after that the story went national.”

She sipped her lemonade. “Reporters showed up at my door. They didn’t call ahead.”

“Neither did I.”

“But you’re polite. Most of them weren’t. One pounded on my door at midnight. I damn near shot him.”

“Joe was questioned.”

“He’d done time in jail when he was younger. Assault. And they held it against him at first.”

“He acknowledged his record in his interviews.”

“We all make mistakes. He’d gotten on with his life. And he was nice to me. Didn’t look down on me like some of those reporters looking for a reason to discredit me. I wasn’t Laurie’s mama, and I’d had a child that had died. Some tried to link all that to Laurie’s death.” She shook her head. “I can’t even say if my girl is dead or not. Without a body to bury, I can’t even grieve for her.”

I understood the irritation of unanswered questions. When I was a kid, I’d pretended that my mother wasn’t dead. She was traveling. She was making movies in Hollywood. Those lies came back to bite me, so I fabricated better ones. Yes, I’d admit, my mother was dead, but it had been a terrible car accident when I was a baby. She was buried in a distant city. By the time I was fifteen, I didn’t mix with my peers very much, which meant fewer questions to deal with. I’d also stopped wondering if she’d show up at the mall, school, or my doorstep. I knew she was dead. But my grandmother never gave up hope. Until the day Sara died, whenever she drank too much, which was often, she insisted that my mother was alive. I found it annoying. We’d argue. She died two days after my eighteenth birthday. My first thought was that she was with Patty. Sara was at peace. And so was I. For a little while.

“Did you go to the trial?” I asked.

“I couldn’t afford the time off from work, and I didn’t want to see Rafe Colton. I worried that I’d shoot him where he sat.”

Courtroom sketches portrayed a smiling, relaxed defendant sitting next to his attorneys. “Was Laurie dating anyone?”

“She had a few guys that followed her like puppy dogs but nothing serious.”

“You have any names?”

“David Green was the most attached to her. He still lives near Dawson. He’s married and has three grown kids.” She shook her head. “He’s been married longer than Laurie was alive. Hell, she’d be fifty now.”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you doing all this? And don’t tell me because you want people to remember.” She shook her head. “People have the memory spans of gnats.”

A quiet rage rubbed against the underside of my chest. “My mother was Patty Reed. I want to know where he put them in the ground.”

Monica studied me. “You think you can find them? The police had no luck.”

“Time can loosen up facts once held close. And cops follow the rules. I don’t.”

A slight smile tipped the old woman’s lips. “Do me a favor and break every fucking rule. Smash them all to bits.”

“That’s what I do best.”