No One Will Miss Her(22)

It seemed so strange.

It doesn’t anymore.





Chapter 9

The Lake




The house in town where Lizzie and Dwayne had lived was a featureless little saltbox: gray vinyl siding on the outside, old green carpet and wood-paneled walls within. Bird, who was six foot three, ducked involuntarily as he passed through the front door. In the west, the sun was dipping lower, drenching the early evening in golden light as a faint chill crept into the air, but inside the house it seemed that night had already fallen. The ceilings were low, the rooms dark.

Bird wasn’t alone: Myles Johnson had met him out front, still looking as spooked as . . . well, as a man who’d started his day by pulling a severed nose out of a garbage disposal. Bird grimaced at the sight of Johnson’s hands, already red and chapped from repeated washings. They were going to bleed before the day was done.

“You been here before?” Bird asked.

Johnson peered around, scanning the room from left to right. Bird followed his gaze. The doorway opened into a den that contained a torn fake leather sofa, a plaid recliner, and a pair of mismatched end tables. It was hard to believe that the same woman who’d so painstakingly decorated the lake house had also lived here.

Johnson replied, “A few times. Deer season, usually. I’d pick Dwayne up and we’d go hunting. I never stayed long, though.”

“Anything look out of place?”

Johnson shook his head. “Not to me. But I can’t be sure.”

Bird moved toward the kitchen and Johnson followed, hunching as he passed through the doorway. The house was neat but claustrophobic. The rooms were airless and cramped, the furniture bulky and a little too big for the space. It wasn’t a crime scene, at least not as far as anyone knew—one of the techs had swept through briefly and found no traces of blood, nothing in disarray. The shotgun registered to Dwayne was the only thing apparently missing. Dwayne and Lizzie’s clothes still hung in the closets. The refrigerator was stocked. Someone’s dirty plate sat in the sink, with something yellow—egg yolk, maybe—dried to a hard crust on the rim. None of it looked like anything to Bird. Sometimes, with a case like this one, the victim’s home would have a haunted feeling, every scuff on the woodwork or stain on the carpet suddenly imbued with meaning, harbingers of eventual tragedy. Sadder still was when there were signs that she’d seen it coming: a suitcase packed and stashed in a closet, a wad of bills socked away in a drawer, the address of a shelter or a divorce attorney’s business card tucked between the pages of a book. In the life of a battered woman, there would never be a day more dangerous than the day she tried to leave. In one heartbreaking case, the suitcase had been by the door, the woman it belonged to lying facedown a few feet away. She’d dropped it when he shot her.

Lizzie Ouellette didn’t have a suitcase, or a secret cash stash, or a diary detailing her escape plan from years of abuse. Nor had Dwayne left behind a written confession, or a suicide note, or a telltale internet search for travel to Canada or Mexico. But Bird thought the house would be valuable all the same, if only for what it could tell him about the people who’d lived there, revealing things about Dwayne and Lizzie that the people of Copper Falls might prefer not to say. Jennifer Wellstood had been more forthcoming than most, but even she seemed to be part of an unspoken agreement among the locals to only reveal so much. This house, though, with the mismatched shitty furniture, the dingy carpet, the shelves that contained no books or mementos, the walls on which not a single photograph was hung—it all told a story. The two might have bedded down here together each night, but the shared space contained no sense of a shared life, no “us.” The fake leather couch had a long dent down the middle where Dwayne must have regularly sprawled out alone. A few empty beer cans sat on the table at the end where he would have put his head, the one with the better view of the television. Lizzie could have taken the chair, of course, but the chair looked comparatively unused, with a pair of battered work boots with one broken lace lying on the floor right in front of it. Even with what little Bird knew of her, he couldn’t picture Lizzie sitting there.

He left the kitchen and moved toward the back of the house, Johnson following at his heels. A doorway on the right opened into the bedroom: messy, with a sour aroma emanating from the piles of dirty laundry on the floor. Bird paused and glanced back at the deputy.

“How about this?” he asked. “Anything different?”

“I don’t know, man. I was only ever in and out; they weren’t inviting me into the bedroom,” Johnson said, giving Bird a bewildered look. “But it looks . . . normal? For Dwayne, anyway. He’s kind of a slob. You should see his car.”

“How about Lizzie? Would this have bothered her?” Bird asked.

Johnson shifted uncomfortably. “I see what you’re doing,” he said.

“What’s that?” said Bird.

“You want to know what it was like between them, were they fighting or whatever. I mean, I get it. But I just don’t know, you know? People like their privacy around here. My own folks used to go into the basement if they were gonna have it out, because it was the one place where they could scream at each other without the neighbors hearing. If Dwayne and Lizzie were having problems, I never saw it. Hell, I hardly saw her at all. She kept her distance from Dwayne’s friends and that was fine with us.”