Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(58)

“What I mean—”

“The Blue Umbrella was make-believe.” From beneath the white brows, her eyes are calling him a perfect idiot. “It was a thing in her computer. Frankie was her computer pen-pal.”

He always feels a kind of electric shock in his midsection when fresh info drops. Frankie. Surely not the guy’s real name, but names have power and aliases often have meaning. Frankie.

“He told her to stop taking her medicine?”

“Yes, he said it was hooking her. Where’s Janey? I want my pills.”

“She’ll be back any minute, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Wharton broods into her lap for a moment. “Frankie said he took all the same medicines, and that’s why he did . . . what he did. He said he felt better after he stopped taking them. He said that after he stopped, he knew what he did was wrong. But it made him sad because he couldn’t take it back. That’s what he said. And that life wasn’t worth living. I told Livvy she should stop talking to him. I said he was bad. That he was poison. And she said . . .”

The tears are coming again.

“She said she had to save him.”

This time when Janey comes into the doorway, Hodges nods to her. Janey puts a pair of blue pills into her mother’s pursed and seeking mouth, then gives her a drink of juice.

“Thank you, Livvy.”

Hodges sees Janey wince, then smile. “You’re welcome, dear.” She turns to Hodges. “I think we should go, Bill. She’s very tired.”

He can see that, but is still reluctant to leave. There’s a feeling you get when the interview isn’t done. When there’s at least one more apple hanging on the tree. “Mrs. Wharton, did Olivia say anything else about Frankie? Because you’re right. He is bad. I’d like to find him so he can’t hurt anyone else.”

“Livvy never would have left her key in her car. Never.” Elizabeth Wharton sits hunched in her bar of sun, a human parenthesis in a fuzzy blue robe, unaware that she’s topped with a gauze of silver light. The finger comes up again—admonitory. She says, “That dog we had never threw up on the rug again. Just that once.”

Janey takes Hodges’s hand and mouths, Let’s go.

Habits die hard, and Hodges speaks the old formula as Janey bends down and kisses first her mother’s cheek and then the corner of her dry mouth. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Wharton. You’ve been very helpful.”

As they reach the door, Mrs. Wharton speaks clearly. “She still wouldn’t have committed suicide if not for the ghosts.”

Hodges turns back. Beside him, Janey Patterson is wide-eyed.

“What ghosts, Mrs. Wharton?”

“One was the baby,” she says. “The poor thing who was killed with all those others. Livvy heard that baby in the night, crying and crying. She said the baby’s name was Patricia.”

“In her house? Olivia heard this in her house?”

Elizabeth Wharton manages the smallest of nods, a mere dip of the chin. “And sometimes the mother. She said the mother would accuse her.”

She looks up at them from her wheelchair hunch.

“She would scream, ‘Why did you let him murder my baby?’ That’s why Livvy killed herself.”

8

It’s Friday afternoon and the suburban streets are feverish with kids released from school. There aren’t many on Harper Road, but there are still some, and this gives Brady a perfect reason to cruise slowly past number sixty-three and peek in the window. Except he can’t, because the drapes are drawn. And the overhang to the left of the house is empty except for the lawnmower. Instead of sitting in his house and watching TV, where he belongs, the Det-Ret is sporting about in his crappy old Toyota.

Sporting about where? It probably doesn’t matter, but Hodges’s absence makes Brady vaguely uneasy.

Two little girls trot to the curb with money clutched in their hands. They have undoubtedly been taught, both at home and at school, to never approach strangers, especially strange men, but who could be less strange than good old Mr. Tastey?

He sells them a cone each, one chocolate and one vanilla. He joshes with them, asks how they got so pretty. They giggle. The truth is one’s ugly and the other’s worse. As he serves them and makes change, he thinks about the missing Corolla, wondering if this break in Hodges’s afternoon routine has anything to do with him. Another message from Hodges on the Blue Umbrella might cast some light, give an idea of where the ex-cop’s head is at.

Even if it doesn’t, Brady wants to hear from him.

“You don’t dare ignore me,” he says as the bells tinkle and chime over his head.

He crosses Hanover Street, parks in the strip mall, kills the engine (the annoying chimes fall blessedly silent), and hauls his laptop out from under the seat. He keeps it in an insulated case because the truck is always so f**king cold. He boots it up and goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella courtesy of the nearby coffee shop’s Wi-Fi.

Nothing.

“You f**ker,” Brady whispers. “You don’t dare ignore me, you f**ker.”

As he zips the laptop back into its case, he sees a couple of boys standing outside the comic book shop, talking and looking at him and grinning. Given his five years of experience, Brady estimates that they’re sixth- or seventh-graders with a combined IQ of one-twenty and a long future of collecting unemployment checks. Or a short one in some desert country.