A Spark of Light(42)

“I met him a little over fifteen years ago,” Pastor Mike said. “He showed up one night in the church, carrying his baby. She was sick, feverish. His wife was gone.”

“Dead?”

“No. She left him, but he never would say why.”

Hugh’s mind began to turn, mixing possibilities. Had she run because her husband was violent? Had he stolen the baby and left her? Was she still alive somewhere?

“Do you know her name?” Hugh said, pulling the cap of a pen off with his teeth.

“No,” the pastor said. “He wouldn’t even speak of her. It was always just George and Lil.”

“Lil?”

“His daughter. Good girl. Used to sing in the church choir.”

All Hugh had known about George’s daughter was that she had come here for an abortion. But now, he also knew her name. Hugh held his hand over the speaker of the phone. “Lil Goddard,” he barked at the young detective. “Find her.”

—


HUGH KNEW ALL THE WAYS to find someone who didn’t want to be found. You looked at bank records and credit card receipts and phone records. You followed aliases and money trails. The primary advantage a detective had was that he was pursuing a truth, while the person hiding was living a lie. Truth tends to gleam, like the glint of a penny. Lies, on the other hand, are a series of loops—eventually they will trip you up.

It had been the car radio that tipped him off. He had taken Annabelle’s minivan to get the registration renewed and on the way punched at the five preprogrammed radio buttons to find NPR. There was an oldies station, an acoustic station that always made him feel like he’d nod off at the wheel, a classical music channel, and one that played nonstop Disney tunes for Wren. The NPR station, however, had been reprogrammed to a country station.

Hugh had punched through the buttons again. True, he was rarely in this car, but Annabelle hated country music.

He could still remember her lying with her head in his lap when they were dating, telling him that what she hated most about the Deep South was the constant barrage of songs about men with trucks, men with cheating wives, men with cheating wives in trucks.

Hugh had reset the radio channel to NPR, got his wife’s car registration, had the oil changed, and even went through the car wash. He didn’t think about it again for a week, until he came home early from work. He knew Wren would still be at school, and when he heard the shower running, he grinned and stripped off his clothes, planning to join Annabelle. It wasn’t until he reached the bedroom that he heard her belting out “Before He Cheats.”

He was still standing at the threshold of the bathroom when the water turned off and Annabelle opened the door, wearing a towel. “Hugh!” she shrieked. “You scared me to death! What are you doing here?”

“Playing hooky,” he said.

Annabelle laughed. “Naked?”

“That was a happy accident,” he replied.

He put his arms around her and started to kiss her. He tried not to wonder about her sudden interest in country music or whether it was his imagination that she had stiffened at his touch.

When Annabelle left to pick up Wren at school, Hugh pulled on a pair of shorts and sat down at the computer. He logged in to their AT&T account, the family plan that included his phone and Annabelle’s. Her call history was password-protected, but he knew her password—Pepper, her childhood dog’s name. As the list of numbers scrolled onto the screen, he looked past her mother’s number and his work number and others he recognized. His eyes rested on the repeat calls to Branson, Missouri. The calls were lengthy—an hour at times. There were texts to that number, too.

Hugh wrote it down, put on a T-shirt and sneakers, and jogged five miles back to the police station. His secretary, Paula, glanced at him as he walked into his office, streaming with sweat. “Didn’t you just sneak out of here?”

“Can’t stay away from you,” he joked.

In criminal cases, Hugh could subpoena the phone company to release the name of a cellphone subscriber. He wrestled with the morality of using his power to check up on his wife, and lost. A day later he had a name: Cliff Wargeddon. He ran a DMV check and got the license plate number of a white Ford pickup truck and an address.

He arrived at nine P.M. The house was a small ranch on a cul-de-sac, with carefully tended gardens and little gnome statues and colorful pinwheels catching the wind. The white pickup was in the driveway. There was a doormat that said, THE PEOPLE INSIDE THIS HOME ARE BLESSED. On the stoop, two potted plants dripped with begonias.

When a woman in her seventies opened the front door and came out with a small dog on a leash, Hugh began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. She walked the dog around the block and then went back inside. Hugh was about to abandon his post when the door opened again and a young man walked out, shouting something into the house before he walked to the white pickup truck and got inside.

He was younger than Hugh. Maybe by ten years. Hell, he still lived with his mother. Hugh followed him to a bakery in Jackson. The man went through an employee entrance in the back. He didn’t emerge for another six hours, just as dawn was breaking, his arms and pants dusty with flour.

It took two more days of trailing him before Wargeddon parked his white pickup truck down the street from Hugh’s house, in the middle of the day, when Wren was at school and Hugh was at work.