The Homewreckers(41)

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to the husband yet,” Mak said. “We’ll see.”

“Any chance she might still be alive?” asked Molly.

“You say you’ve been following this story for years. Tell me what you think.”

“Definitely dead,” Molly said. “I’ve talked to some of her former students at St. Mary’s, a couple teachers who worked with her at the school, even her college roommate at Ole Miss. Everyone agreed, even if the marriage was in trouble, she never would have walked off and left her little kid like that.”

“Was the marriage in trouble? Lanier’s mother said in the statement I read that Frank spent too much time with his team and drank too much, but had never gotten violent.”

“I don’t think it was perfect. Frank was this macho, alpha male type. Lanier, from what I hear, was sort of a dreamer, loved books. They were an unlikely couple, and she was barely twenty-two when they got married.” She started to say something else, but stopped.

Mak pounced on it. “What?”

“The last time I wrote a story, I think it was on the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, I got a phone call at the office. This was before our phones had caller ID. It was a woman, she wouldn’t tell me her name. She said she was sick of hearing everyone talk about Saint Lanier. That’s what she called her. She hinted that Lanier was running around on Frank. I asked her flat out—who was she running around with? And she laughed and said I wouldn’t believe it, but it was her boyfriend. Her high school boyfriend.”

“Lanier’s high school boyfriend?” Mak asked, confused.

“No. This anonymous woman’s boyfriend. Who was in high school at the time, and played football for Frank Ragan.”

“And you never passed that along to the Savannah cops? Or wrote about it?”

“You might find this hard to believe, but I don’t write stories based on rumors or anonymous tips,” Molly said. “I asked around, couldn’t verify it.”

“Do you think it could have been true, even considering the source?”

“I didn’t think that much about it at the time, but you know? Back in the spring I did a story about a production of Little Women that was put on by a local theater group. I was chatting with the director, a woman named Deborah Logenbuhl, who used to be the drama teacher at St. Mary’s. As soon as she told me that, my ears perked up. I asked her if she knew Lanier, and she looked like she might cry. Turns out she and Lanier were best friends.”

“And?”

“She was pretty cagey when I asked her if the rumor about Lanier could be true. She said Lanier changed in the last few months before she disappeared. She was moody, secretive even.”

Molly leaned forward. “They used to have a standing Saturday morning coffee date. But she said Lanier no-showed a couple times that fall.”

“There’s nothing like that in the Savannah PD files,” Makarowicz said. “Why didn’t she tell that to the cops working the case?”

“She was on maternity leave at the time, her baby was very preemie, spent six weeks in the ICU, and nobody ever contacted her to ask her about Lanier.”

“Some investigation,” Makarowicz said, shaking his head. He tapped his pen on his notepad. “Do you have contact information for this drama lady?”

“Deborah Logenbuhl,” Molly repeated, taking out her phone again. “I’ll text you her contact info.”

“Good,” Mak said. “That’s a pretty decent start for me. You got what you need?”

“Are you kidding? Lanier Ragan’s billfold turns up in an old beach house on Tybee, seventeen years after her disappearance? Yeah, that’s front-page stuff. Guess I better get back to the office and start working the phones.”

She put a five-dollar bill on the table and stood to leave. “Hey, uh, Mak? Thanks.”

“No problem. You’ll call me if you get any more of those anonymous tips, right?”

“As long as it’s a two-way street, yeah.”





20

Breaking News




It was still dark when Hattie left her cottage in Thunderbolt, but the first streaks of pinkish purple lit up the sky as she drove east toward Tybee Island.

Her mind was on the day’s task—rebuilding the staircase at the Creedmore house. The original was impossibly narrow and steep and awkwardly placed just a few steps inside the front door.

It had been Trae’s idea to relocate the stairway to the hallway outside the downstairs bedroom and to add a small powder bath in the space beneath. The move would open up the living room, give better access to the second floor, and add a second bath downstairs. She’d been forced to (secretly) admit Trae was right.

As she crossed the Lazaretto Creek bridge she felt the familiar twinge, a sense memory, of Hank, on his Kawasaki, riding away from their cottage that night, with only a fleeting, backward glance in her direction. She blinked back the inevitable tears, forcing herself to consider the challenge at hand.

The network had given them only five more weeks to finish work on the house. It seemed impossible. She and Cass and her framing crew had worked on the house until 11 P.M. the night before, punching a hole in the hallway ceiling so that work could begin this morning to erect the new stairs. Her painters were working from sunup to sundown, scraping, priming, and patching the old clapboard siding, and sometime this week, the plumbers would begin replacing all the old ductile iron piping.