Deadline(125)

            “Well, the idea that Jen would take anything from the schools . . . that’s simply ridiculous. If you’re sniffing, you’re sniffing up the wrong tree.”

            Virgil left Serna sitting on a couch, and did a quick tour of the house, peering in closets, finding clothes, looking in drawers, finding socks and underwear, probing medicine cabinets, finding a high blood pressure prescription, partly used. A desk in the converted bedroom yielded a checkbook, showing a neatly entered balance of one thousand, six hundred and eighty-four dollars.

            The hall leading from the short flight of stairs across the upper floor to the office was decorated with two dozen family photos; most prominent was a fleshy man wearing large plastic-rimmed glasses, and, Virgil thought, a bad brown toupee. Vernon? He thought so.

            Back in the living room, Virgil asked Serna, “Was Miz Houser close to her children?”

            “Oh . . . I guess. They didn’t really . . . visit back and forth much. Why?”

            “I noticed that most of the family photos were older. Kids were small in all of the pictures.”

            “Yeah, she wasn’t much for photography, I guess. Not sentimental that way, except for that little picture of her with her mom, when she was a toddler.”

            “Where’s that?”

            “Right there in the hallway. It’s the little black-and-white one,” Serna said.

            “There aren’t any black-and-white ones,” Virgil said.

            “Yes, it’s right there in the center, down from that awful picture of Vernon.”

            “Show me,” Virgil said.

            —

            THERE WAS NO PHOTO of Jennifer Houser and her mother. Serna put her fingers to her mouth, puzzled: “Jeez. It’s always been right there. Forever. It was the centerpiece.”

            Virgil relaxed.

            There was no murder: Houser was running.

            And she’d had to take just one little memento.





                     23


            VIKE LAUGHTON CALLED for an emergency meeting of the Buchanan County school board in the back storage room of the newspaper. The remaining four members of the board arrived at intervals of a minute or two, slinking in the back door from the busy parking lot that served both Village Pizza and Quartermain’s Bar and BBQ.

            Laughton offered beer, but nobody took one, except him. “What happened?” Bob Owens demanded, as Laughton popped the top on a Coors Light. “Why are we here?”

            “What do you mean, why are we here?” Jennifer Gedney said. “Randy’s dead. Who knows what he left behind? Obviously, we’ve got to find out—”

            Laughton interrupted: “Jen Houser disappeared. The police found blood on her kitchen floor.”

            That stopped everybody short.

            Then, “She’s been killed?” Jennifer Gedney put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, what’s going on? I heard that Randy was murdered, too. Some people said it looked like suicide, but now everybody’s saying it was murder. They say the police know for sure—”

            “Where’re Henry and Del?” Larry Parsons asked.

            “That’s what I want to talk about,” Laughton said. He took one of the folding chairs he’d set out, flopped his hands in the air and flopped them back down on his thighs, sloshing a little beer on the floor without noticing. “The fact of the matter is, this Flowers guy is breaking things down. The biggest thing we always had going for us is that nobody worried about the school board. We’re all upstanding citizens, committed to educating the kids, keeping an eye on things. But once somebody starts looking hard, a police officer or an attorney or a CPA . . . things are going to come bubbling out.”