Stranger in the Lake(60)
The two of us pick our way across the grass to the front door, where Chet knocks hard enough to crack the wood. Jamie Holmes is a little deaf.
A little lame, too. I can hear her limping on the other side of the wood, the whomp swish, whomp swish as she makes her way across the room. I hike my bag higher on my shoulder and give her all the time she needs.
“Well, well, well,” she says, and loud enough they can hear her in town. “If it ain’t Miss High and Mighty and her baby brother, Chet. How y’all doin’?”
She softens her words with a grin, and there’s a hole where a tooth used to be—the third that I can spot. I take in her rumpled clothes, her gray skin and uncombed hair, the clear tube hanging from her nose like a skinny mustache. It trails down her chin and snakes around her left side, disappearing into the oxygen tank she drags with her everywhere. Jamie is only fifty, but thanks to the bum knee and faulty heart valve, she looks twice her age.
“Hi, Miss Jamie,” I say. “You’re looking good.”
She laughs, a painful hacking sound. “Liar. Now get your skinny tails in here before you let in all the cold.”
I wait for her to step back, which takes a minute. Jamie’s tank is in the way, the wheels snagged in the shaggy carpet. Chet leans around her to turn the thing around, a sleek piece of metal and plastic on caster wheels. Once she and her tank are pointed in the right direction, I follow her in and shut the door.
Jamie limps into her living room, a cramped space on the front side of the house crammed full of durable, mismatched furniture. A gilded coffee table next to a modern wing chair, an LED floor lamp, a leather couch buried under discarded clothes and junk, newspapers and food cartons and crumpled lottery scratch-offs. I shove everything aside and sink onto a corner. Chet perches on the armrest.
“Can I get y’all some tea or lemonade or something?” She parks her tank next to a plaid La-Z-Boy.
“We’re fine, thanks. How are you feeling?”
“Oh, like crap.” She collapses into the chair and gives a hard yank on the handle. The footrest pops up like magic, revealing ankles swollen to twice their normal size, meaty white skin cinched by the elastic of her sweats. “I’m panting like a dog in heat, and I haven’t felt my toes in a decade. How do you think I feel?”
I’d ask what the doctors say, but Jamie doesn’t see a doctor. She doesn’t take medication, either, at least not regularly. Whatever money she has is not spent on medical care, and she probably shouldn’t be driving. If she can’t feel her toes, she sure as hell can’t feel the brake pedal.
And yet...my gaze lands on her oxygen tank, the latest, lightest model. Maybe Medicaid, but what about the yard and paint job outside? What about all this furniture? I glance around the room, taking it in, clocking the electronics—an iPad, a laptop, a sixty-inch flat screen on the wall, and that’s only the pieces I can see. Miss Jamie hasn’t worked in years. There’s no way she can afford all this.
Miss Jamie waves a hand through the air. “Are y’all gonna tell me what brought the two of you all the way over here, or are you gonna make me guess? Though I’ve been watching the news. I know it was you who fished that poor lady from under the dock, wasn’t it?”
“It was. And we’re here because there’s a rumor going around Lake Crosby that she was here because of Bobby.”
I say it slowly, gently, because I was standing on the shore the day they dredged Bobby from the depths of Pitts Cove. I saw the way she dropped to the dirt and worked herself into a coughing fit so violent that even the paramedics looked spooked. My gaze lands on an old picture of him, hanging from a nail rammed into the wall. The crooked teeth, close-set eyes, greasy dirt-blond hair I remember hanging out the window of a bright yellow Camaro. As tragic as his death was, his sister was the first thing I thought of when I saw his name on Sienna’s Twitter feed, what dredging him up all over again is going to do to Miss Jamie.
She shifts in her recliner, agitated. “God, the people in this town. You’d think gossip was an Olympic sport. Twenty years and they’re still making up tales about poor Bobby.”
“Actually, the rumors are coming from her,” Chet says. “The lady Charlie found under the dock. Sienna Sterling was her name.”
I lean forward on the couch. “She didn’t happen to stop by here, did she?”
Miss Jamie shakes her head, her gaze bouncing between us. “I don’t get many visitors these days, no. What would she want to talk to me for?”
“On Twitter, she was calling Bobby’s death a crime.”
“Well, of course it was a crime. It was a crime the cops took five whole days to file a missing persons report, and even then they didn’t spend more than ten minutes looking for him. They came back two days later with the nonsense that he ran off. Case closed. But I know my Bobby. He wouldn’t have just up and left. Not without telling me. Not without something real scary chasing him out of town.” She reaches down and twists a knob at the top of the tank, and air hisses through the tubes. “Or somebody.”
“Why do you think they waited so long?”
Jamie is quiet for a minute, all but a high-pitched wheezing coming from her lungs. “I know you know Bobby’s business.”
I nod. That’s one part all the gossips got right. Drugs. Bobby dealt all kinds of drugs.