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Island of Bones(37)

By:P. J. Parrish


Louis stood there, hands on his hips. Then he walked slowly up the stairs, grabbed the paper and went back down the stairs.





CHAPTER 18




The next morning, he was up early. He got a coffee from the 7-Eleven and steered the Mustang onto I-75 South. The police report on Emma Fielding was lying on the passenger seat but he had read it all last night.

According to the 1953 report, Emma had run away from home when she was sixteen. Her stepfather, Cliff Parker, had reported her missing to the police, saying Emma might have run off to live with her older brother, Neil. But when police questioned Neil, a construction worker living in a trailer park in East Naples, he said he hadn’t seen his sister in six months.

A year later, a drunken Cliff Parker drove his pickup into a canal along Alligator Alley, drowning himself and his wife. Emma was never heard from again and police shuffled her disappearance to the cold case files.

When Louis exited the freeway onto Golden Gate Parkway, he stopped at a light and rechecked the address he had for Neil Fielding.

It hadn’t been hard finding the brother. He was still living in the same trailer, now surviving on disability after a work accident.

The Lazy Lakes Mobile Home Park looked like it might have seen better days, but there were still signs that not everyone had given up —- a garden gnome here, a plastic picket fence there.

At lot number 35, Louis parked and looked up at the trailer. He wondered what he was going to get from this. How much could a brother tell about a sister who had gone missing more than thirty years ago? Especially since the two apparently weren’t exactly close to begin with.

Louis went up the Astroturf-covered ramp and knocked. The sound of the television, tuned to a game show, came through the door. Louis banged again on the metal door.

It jerked open. A man in a wheelchair squinted out at Louis. His eyes narrowed in fear —- at the sight of a young strange black man, Louis presumed.

“Mr. Fielding? I’m here on behalf of Fort Myers police.”

“What about?”

“Your sister, Emma.”

Neil Fielding’s pasty face screwed into a frown. “Em? Fuck, she’s been dead for thirty-four years, man.”

“Missing,” Louis said.

Neil shrugged. “Missing, dead. What’s the difference?”

“I need to talk to you, Mr. Fielding. Can I come in?”

“Sure, why not? I’m not doing anything.”

Neil wheeled away and Louis opened the door to the trailer. It was dark inside, the sun kept out by dust-coated old plastic blinds. A wall unit wheezed away over the worn plaid sofa, keeping the place plenty cold but doing nothing to disperse the smell of dirty clothes and cigarette smoke. There was an under note of another odor that Louis couldn’t place, something fusty and metallic.

“Sit down,” Neil said backing his chair in front of the television. He picked up the remote off the TV tray and turned down the sound on the game show. “Why are cops coming round asking about Em after all this time?”

“We might have connected her disappearance to the recent death of another young woman,” Louis said.

“That so?” Neil’s eyes had drifted to the TV. He was a big man, or had been at some point. He still had a barrel chest beneath the stained T-shirt and his arms looked like he might still lift weights. But his legs were withered like an old woman’s. Louis’s eyes went to his right foot. It was heavily bandaged, red, and swollen. Louis suddenly recognized the smell -— decay.

Neil saw him looking at the foot. “Diabetes,” he said. “Probably gonna lose it.”

Louis pulled a photograph from the file. It was a close-up of the coral ring they had found on Shelly Umber. “Did your sister have a ring like this, Mr. Fielding?”

Neil took the photo, shook his head, and handed it back. “Em liked gold. Was all she ever wore.”

“Were you and your sister close?”

Neil shrugged. “I was four years older. You know how that goes.”

Neil’s eyes drifted to the TV where Bob Barker was shoving a microphone into the face of a woman in a purple tube-top.

“She disappeared when she was sixteen. Your stepfather told the police back in 1953 that she just ran away one night”

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

Neil looked at Louis. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why would your sister just leave?”

“Kids run away all the time, don’t they?”

“Did you?”

Neil stared hard at Louis but finally he just shrugged and looked away. “I left, yeah.”

Louis looked at Neil’s 1953 police interview. “You were seventeen when you left home, right?”