Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(25)

“Maybe your stepdaughter Stephanie.”

Stephanie Johnson was Jessie’s daughter from a first marriage.

“We had a conversation and we got into it,” Nancy continued. “Steph was upset that you went to California and didn’t tell anybody about it.”

This argument made Nancy think that Steph was the one who broke into the house because she was the only one who knew what time Nancy would be gone and how long she’d be gone.

“I’ll take care of it when I get home,” Carol answered, clearly exasperated and not a little worried that her home, and that of her children, had some sort of security breach. “I’ll find out who did it when I get home,” she promised.

Carol hung up and told Tim what Nancy had said about the break-in. Tim got visibly quiet and withdrawn. He didn’t want to talk to her. She hated when there was so much silence and distance between them.

“What’s the matter Tim?” Carol finally asked.

“I think Nancy did it. Why would Steph steal the stuff? Because whatever Steph had wanted, after Jessie died, you gave it to her.”

And why would she come into the house and just steal the jewelry and not the fifty-five-inch TV and VCR in the bedroom? Tim wondered. He figured the answer was whoever burglarized the place took stuff that could be sold fast on the street for drugs. Or money to buy drugs.

Nancy had a coke habit she needed to support; Steph didn’t. Nancy couldn’t support her habit just by waitressing, Tim figured. She owed Carol for drugs she’d given her before they left, and Nancy had had to pay off the debt by babysitting the kids while they were gone.

Tim was convinced Nancy took the stuff and faked the burglary. She took it to sell fast and to buy drugs.

“We gotta get her,” Tim said.

Carol, though, wasn’t so sure it was Nancy. How could they know for sure who had done it—the house being back in Michigan and them being here in California? They didn’t talk about it anymore that night. But the next morning, they were both aggravated enough about their privacy being invaded by person or persons unknown that they decided to return to Michigan.

They had driven west in Carol’s truck. As they climbed the Rockies, they discovered it had bad brakes. They didn’t want to take the time to nurse it cross-country or spend the money on a brake job. Carol called Greyhound and got the schedule and location of the bus station. On Sunday night, they abandoned the truck and picked up the bus home.

While they sprawled in adjoining seats, the bus made its way through Green River, Utah, in country that had once belonged to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Some legends said that Cassidy had made it back from Bolivia and was buried somewhere nearby in a secret grave.

The bus passed through Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where Doc Holliday was buried in a cemetery up on a hill, his gravestone marked with a poker hand of aces and eights, the dead man’s hand. The town was now a preferred retirement site for senior citizens from the east.

They traveled out on the Kansas prairie that Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson had once roamed. Like zombies moving through the pale yellow light of the bus stations, Carol and Tim sleepily switched buses a few times along the route. It was always night, it seemed, and the cafeterias served the same tasteless food. Except for the chili, which was always good.

Mile after mile, they chattered on about this or that, but they never talked about the break-in, Carol recalled. To her, anyway, it was no big deal. After all, only material things had been taken. Who cared about those?

They had told no one they were coming home and so it was a surprised Nancy Billiter who looked up on the cold afternoon of November 12 to see the key turning in the door and her friend Carol and Carol’s boyfriend, Tim, come marching in with their suitcases.

Nancy, still surprised, asked how the trip was. Carol said it was fine.

“Why are you back so soon?” Nancy asked suspiciously.

Carol and Tim ignored that question. Nancy must have been thinking it had something to do with the burglary, but she didn’t let on.

Carol made a careful walk through the house to see if anything else had been stolen. She walked upstairs with her bags and looked in the closet and saw that the safe was gone, as were the VCR and the TV. There was something else in the closet that was missing, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was.

It had been a long bus ride. Tim went into the bathroom to relieve himself. Through the closed door, Carol told him that something in the closet was missing, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Nancy was suddenly by her side.

“Come talk to me,” said the older woman.

The two friends went down to the living room and sat on the sofa, where Nancy peppered her with questions about the trip. Where did they go? What did they see? They blathered on for a while and then when Tim came out of the bathroom, he and Carol went out to the garage to get the gold Caddy. Carol went to put something in the trunk—she couldn’t remember what—and that’s when she saw it.

“It’s the kid’s piggy bank!”

Now, Carol knew for sure that Nancy was the burglar and not someone else, because she didn’t tell her that the piggy bank was stolen and yet she found it in the very car Nancy had been using to drive to work while they were gone. Tim and Carol theorized that Nancy had stolen the goods, pawned them for drugs, and then made it look like someone else had broken into the house.