One Good Deed(99)

He climbed free of the car and shut the door.

He looked at the Nash’s tires and lower half of the car and saw they were mud splattered. He felt the engine. It was cold. And the car couldn’t have been driven during this latest rain because it had just started not five minutes ago. He peered under the car and saw the hardened and now dried mud caked there, too. That meant the Nash had been driven during the big storm, on the very night that Lucas Tuttle had been killed. He wondered where it had been driven to, and who had been driving it.

As far as I know, only one person has the keys. Jackie Tuttle.

But she hadn’t mentioned going anywhere that night. She was at her house waiting for her father. Ernestine had gone home at eleven, and Jackie had gone to bed. Or so she had said.

She had asked him to leave the keys in the glove box when he returned the car that day, and he had done so. Now, there was no law against driving your own car whenever you wanted, but still. Yet with the keys in the glove box, anyone could have driven the car.

Including Ernestine Crabtree.

He could fathom no connection between the parole officer and Lucas Tuttle. But there had seemed to be no connection between Ernestine and Jackie, either. And now that he knew there was, that meant the connection between Ernestine and Lucas Tuttle would probably run through Jackie.

He walked around the car and stopped at the passenger side. He opened the door and sat in the seat. He rummaged in the glove box but found nothing useful. When he closed it back up, he looked directly down and saw it near his shoe.

It was a bit of a yellow flower bud on the floorboard. He picked it up and looked at it more closely. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but it looked an awful lot like it could be from the flower beds at Marjorie Pittleman’s place. That would make sense because Jackie knew her and had visited the place.

But why is the flower fragment in the passenger seat? Was it from my shoe when I was over there with her?

But if that were the case, the bud wouldn’t have looked as fresh, he figured.

He drew a long breath and then stopped before he let it out. Then he drew two more breaths. He wasn’t doing his combat ritual exercise. He was taking in a scent.

Ever since his time as a scout in the war, Archer’s senses, particularly hearing and smelling, had been heightened. The bolt of a rifle sliding back or the collective breaths of a hundred men about to attack. Or the smell of cordite flung into the air from a brigade in arms marching. Or simply the scent of fear that oozed from anxious men at every deadly encounter.

He recognized the scent he was now inhaling. And it was not Jackie Tuttle’s.

It was the same one Ernestine had been wearing when he had gone to his first parole meeting.

He climbed out of the Nash and shut the door.

He couldn’t be certain that Ernestine had been in the car. She couldn’t be the only woman in town to wear that perfume. But if it had been her, what was she doing in the Nash? Then again, he had just found out that the two were great friends. So maybe they had made a trip in this car to the home of Lucas Tuttle on the night he was murdered.

Archer left the garage and set off for Eldorado Street. He viewed Jackie’s house from a distance, looking for any sign of her being there before heading up to the front door. He knocked and knocked and then called out. He went over to the window that she had been at before and rapped on the glass there. He peered inside a crack in the drapes.

He couldn’t see or hear anything.

Archer looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He went around back and used his knife to unlock the woman’s rear door. He called out when he got inside but heard nothing. He looked quickly through the house and found nothing. A search of Jackie’s closet showed that her clothes, or at least a great many of them, were still there. But he didn’t see a suitcase. Only he had never been in her closet before, and thus didn’t know if she even had one.

He glanced at the bed where they had lain together.

Shaw’s words—or warning, rather—came to his mind.

Women can have their way with you.

He did find the Nash’s car keys hanging on a peg next to the back door.

That was convenient, because he couldn’t exactly walk every place he needed to go.

As he was leaving by the back door, he pulled out his pack of cigarettes but saw that it was empty. He spotted the garbage can and lifted the lid. It was half full of rubbish. He tossed the empty pack in there and was about to put the lid back on when he saw the wadded-up paper next to an apple core.

He pulled the paper out and straightened it. On it were written a series of letters and numbers. He studied the paper a moment longer and put it in his pocket.

Next, he went to the houses on either side of Jackie’s and knocked at the doors. No one was home at either place. Archer wanted to determine if anyone had seen Lucas Tuttle drive up to Jackie’s house at nine that night. Well, he wouldn’t get an answer to that right now. He wasn’t sure anyone even lived in them.

Archer jogged back over to the garage on Fulsome, beating another furious bout of rain by about a minute, and then drove the car out onto the street. He had two places he could go and chose one by taking a quarter from his pocket and performing a coin flip. He punched the gas and the Nash leapt forward, its windshield wipers busily swishing the rain off the glass.

He hoped the clarity of his vision would be able to match that of the cleared glass. But right now that seemed like a stretch.