Flowering Judas(40)

“Already? Is he even here yet?”

“He got here first thing this morning,” Gwen said. “They say he got here and looked through some pictures and knew immediately that it wasn’t a suicide, it was a murder. So now there’s going to be a murder investigation. Can you believe that? They’re going to come over here and interview all the teachers. They figure whatever it is that got him murdered, it must have been something from back then. You know, whatever the something there that had made him disappear. It could have been anything, really. He could have been dealing drugs.”

“I don’t think so,” Penny said.

“Really? Do you think you’d know if your students were dealing drugs? I know they’re taking them, sometimes, you know, because they come to class high and it’s really impossible not to notice, but—”

“Chester Morton never came to class high as far as I remember,” Penny said.

“But there must have been something strange about him at the time, don’t you think? There must have been something off. I mean, if he’d been murdered back then, it could have been anything, really. It could just have been a mugging. But for him to disappear for twelve years, and nobody knowing where he was, and then to come back and be murdered after all this time. Well. There must have been something.”

“Maybe there was.”

“Maybe there was and you just don’t realize it,” Gwen said. She stood up again. “That’s what this consultant will be for. He’ll talk to all the witnesses and he’ll be able to pinpoint what’s important that they don’t know is important.”

“Witnesses to what?” Penny said.

“Well, you must be a witness to something,” Gwendolyn said, “or nobody would be interested in talking to you. I’ve got to go prep for a class. Check your e-mail, all right? We’ll get in touch as soon as we know when he wants to talk to you.”

“All right,” Penny said.

But there was no point. Gwendolyn was already off and away, stomping away in those skintight pants and those mile-high wedgies she always wore, her middle-aged ass bumping and grinding like a fully inflated beach ball being juggled on the top of two thin sticks.

Penny picked up her fork and started working her way through the waffles and sausage.

There was something, of course, from that term—there had been something that bothered her at the time, but nobody had been interested in listening to her.

It was too bad she didn’t have a place anymore to keep her records.

3

If there was one thing that bothered Kyle Holborn about his relationship with Darvelle Haymes, it was that they weren’t married yet, not even after all this time.

Except that that was not true, not exactly. It wasn’t that they weren’t married that bothered him, but the reason why they weren’t married. Kyle was, he thought, a very steady person. He liked things to be simple and straightforward and sure. That was why he had joined the police force. There were never a lot of layoffs in the police force. In bad economic times, there might even be increases in force. Bad economic times meant people without money, and people without money meant more police needed to find them when they robbed the local convenience store. Police work was good, and steady, and not anywhere near as dangerous as people thought. Most of the time, all you were dealing with were kids being stupid. Having been a stupid kid himself once, Kyle knew how to handle that.

Kyle liked everything in life steady and straightforward, not just his job. He wanted to buy a house someday, or to move in Darvelle’s, but it was a house like Darvelle’s he wanted, not one of those big new things in the subdivisions in Kiratonic and Lakewood and Shale. Darvelle wanted those, and Kyle sometimes thought she wanted even more than that. She was always talking to him about what a good “platform” police work was. If he got a few promotions, he could run for the state legislature, and after that, there was no telling where he could go.

The problem was, Kyle thought he could tell where he would go. He didn’t want to be in the state legislature. He didn’t want to run for something even bigger, where people from news stations would go chasing around to find out if he’d ever been caught smoking marijuana in high school. He just wanted a quiet life, with a house and a wife and a baby. He wanted to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. He wanted to shop at Walmart on the weekend. He wanted to go to the movies and see Bruce Willis kick ass.

He did not want to be here, at the central station, wondering what his partner was doing with a temporary partner. Kyle thought it was both understandable and a little ridiculous that he had been pulled off patrol just because of the backpack.