No One Will Miss Her(76)

It was a cool April day in the city, blustery and half-gray. The afternoon sun peeked in and out from behind the clouds, lukewarm and colorless as weak tea. Bird turned his face to it all the same. The state of Maine was still thawing out after a long, bleak winter, but a couple hundred miles south, you could feel spring coming down the pike. Longer days, milder temperatures, the smell of damp earth in the air. The Sox were at Fenway, playing their home opener. Bird could stop for an early dinner, catch the end of the game, and still be home before dark.

He drove back out of the city, putting a little distance between himself and Boston’s rush-hour snarl. It was six months to the day from the last time he’d driven this route, leaving Adrienne Richards’s house and heading north, and leaving her to shoot Dwayne Cleaves in what Boston law enforcement immediately decided was an open-and-shut case of self-defense. Bird had been surprised at the time by how little attention it got, particularly in the press, particularly with an obnoxious, publicity-hungry, highly telegenic survivor like Adrienne Richards at the center of it all. You couldn’t deny, it was a juicy story. The residents of Copper Falls were inundated for days, slamming doors in the face of every reporter who made the trip north in hopes of getting a comment from Lizzie’s friends and family. Nobody talked, of course. Eventually, the reporters left. But Adrienne—you’d think she would milk her fifteen minutes of fame for all it was worth. Instead, she’d declined all interview requests and virtually vanished from the public eye. The tabloids screamed for a while to know where and what she was hiding, but eventually, they got bored and found another story to chase. The screaming stopped. Life went on. Except for Ethan Richards, of course, but nobody even pretended to be too broken up about that.

Not that Bird had been keeping close tabs. He’d had more than enough to occupy him in the intervening months after closing Lizzie Ouellette’s case, months spent following up on the leads from his conversation with George Pullen. The centenarian Pullen couldn’t tell you what he’d had for breakfast that morning, but he still remembered the early 1980s and Laurie Richter with razor-sharp clarity. Most of all, he remembered that a buddy of his had been acting odd that summer, and got odder after the girl went missing. Staring into space, staying up all night, disappearing for days at a time. Pullen didn’t know what to make of it, he said; he wasn’t even sure the friend knew Laurie, who was much younger than either of them and kept mostly to herself. But it was weird enough that he asked where the buddy was always running off to, and when he did, the man had gotten wild around the eyes—“Like a spooked racehorse” were Pullen’s exact words—and said he’d been fishing at a quarry out near the Forks. He described the place in painstaking, almost reverent detail. The clarity of the water, the mottled colors of the rock, the way you could perch on an outcrop and look straight down into the depths. It was peaceful, he said. So peaceful. When Pullen asked about the fish, the buddy gave him a funny look and said he didn’t know—he’d never caught one.

Thanks to that conversation, Bird had pinpointed four slate quarries in the area that he thought were worth a look.

They found Laurie Richter’s car sunk in the third place on the list. Her body, what was left of it, was locked in the trunk.

There were still months of work ahead before Bird caught another break, complicated by the fact that George Pullen’s buddy, unlike George himself, was no longer alive to spill his guts. But the discovery of the car ignited renewed interest in the case, and in the end, George Pullen lived long enough to find out that his buddy wasn’t guilty of anything but not wanting to break his kid sister’s heart.

The buddy’s nephew, on the other hand—the kid sister’s kid—was a goddamn murdering bastard.

Not much of a liar, though, Bird thought with a smirk. Once they’d gotten the guy in custody, he confessed within minutes. He was just tired, he told them. All those years, keeping that terrible secret, waiting and wondering if someone would figure it out. It was a relief, finally, to tell the truth.

Bird’s mind was still meandering through a half year’s worth of memories—Lizzie Ouellette, Dwayne Cleaves, Adrienne Richards, Laurie Richter—as he pulled off the highway and followed the signs for a chain restaurant, the most reliable bet for a decent burger and a seat with a view of the TV. If not for the fact that he’d just been thinking of her, he might have come and gone without ever recognizing the woman sitting at the bar. She was four seats down, beside the wall, her body angled slightly toward him, her face upturned. She was sipping a beer and gazing at the television, where the Sox were down by one run. Her hair was different now, cropped to her shoulders and colored a reddish brown, but there was no mistaking her face. Bird shook his head in amazement.

When Adrienne Richards had disappeared from the public eye, everyone assumed she was living a life of private luxury at some seaside retreat. But now here she was: in a suburban Chili’s, drinking Coors and watching baseball.

He almost turned around and left. It wasn’t just that he wanted to avoid the inevitable awkwardness once she spotted him, if she spotted him. It was the look on her face: not happy, exactly, but comfortable. At ease. At home. Crazy as it was, Bird felt like he’d be intruding.

Then she looked up, and her eyes went wide, and the sip of beer she’d been about to take tipped down the front of her shirt instead.

“Shit,” she hissed, slamming the bottle onto the bar and fumbling for a napkin. Bird crossed the distance between them, his hands raised apologetically.