Page 41 of Water's Edge

I want to see if it was the same one that Truitt gave us. And I want to find Joe Bobbsey and squeeze the truth out of him. But I’m tired. I know Ronnie is tired. I need a drink. I surprise myself by telling her it can wait until morning.

“Do you want to get a drink?” I ask.

Ronnie brightens. “Absolutely. Where are we going?”

“I’m buying, so don’t ask.”

We get to The Tides and I’m hoping Mindy will be there; if she’s anywhere, it’s at The Tides. I spot her white van at the corner. She is sitting in a booth by the windows.

“I saw you pull up. I was hoping you’d stop by.”

“How did you know I would come here? More importantly, if you saw me pull up, why isn’t my drink on the table?”

She laughs. “Because I saw Deputy Marsh with you. I don’t know what she drinks. I knew if you stopped anywhere, it would be here.”

We sit in the booth. I order Scotch, neat, doubles, all around. The waiter asks if I prefer a particular brand. I tell him anything named Glen will do. Mindy starts to object but sees my mood. Mindy is a white wine drinker. I want to expand her horizons. And I don’t want to be seen drinking hard liquor alone. I have a reputation to uphold.

“What did Leann’s father tell you?” Mindy asks.

I shake my head. “He’s part of a New Age movement. His spirit guide told him to abandon his daughter and pay the father of her baby to convince her to give it away.”

She doesn’t act surprised. “That explains why there were no baby things in the cabin. But I did find a partial bottle of multivitamins in the medicine cabinet. So who is the baby’s father?”

“Steve Bohleber,” I tell her. “He of Bobbsey Twin fame.”

Mindy looks confused, so I explain about the twins and the locals giving them the nickname. I now know why Steve wasn’t anywhere to be found. I hope he was paid well for betraying his baby mama and child. I wonder if he knew his brother, Joe, was still shaking Truitt down. Truitt isn’t the sort of man to part with money easy. He’s saving it for his next life. And Joe is a mercenary type. He wouldn’t let a rich guy like Truitt off the hook easily. Hence the call to Truitt to warn him I was coming. The offer to destroy the rental agreement. He’ll regret that the next time I see him.

“I went over every inch of that cabin,” Mindy says. “She wasn’t killed there. There would have been some sign from all the cuts and injuries on the body. Plus there weren’t any rub marks or scrapes on any surface where she could have been chained. No chain. No rope. No broken furniture. The only thing I found interesting was the clothing on the bed. Ronnie probably told you.”

Our drinks come and Ronnie downs half of hers without making a face. She’s tougher than she looks. She’s beginning to grow on me and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

“Tell me about the clothes again,” I ask, although I really don’t need to know. I just want to drink my Scotch and not talk.

“There were three sets of clothes laid out on the mattress,” Mindy goes on. “I couldn’t tell if anything was missing from the closet. It looked to me like she had a date, left, and didn’t come back. That’s another reason I don’t think she was killed in her cabin.”

“Do you remember the locket, Mindy?” Ronnie asks.

Mindy sets down her glass and nods. “Vintage. Solid gold. Heart-shaped. The latch was broken.”

“Tell her about the pictures inside the locket,” Ronnie puts in.

Mindy takes a sip of the Scotch and mulls it over. “Black-and-white photo of a white male, a full-face shot. Late thirties. And a color picture of a baby. Newborn. No way to tell the gender.”

Ronnie goes back to the screen on her phone. She’s found something. She uses her fingers to widen the screen and turns it for me to see.

“This is the picture of the man in the locket.”

It’s a black-and-white photo but the hair is some dark color, not black. It’s worn down on the shoulders. The man does appear to be in his late thirties. His jaw is angular, the cheekbones sharp. The lips are full, almost puffy. The mouth is set in a scowl.

“That’s Jim Truitt,” I say.

Ronnie nods. “Now look at the baby,” she says. The lips are full, like inner tubes. The ears stick out, and the too-wide nose… “Is it possible…?”

Ronnie then replaces the baby’s photo with one of Jim Truitt that she found on the Internet. Then one of Joe Bohleber. The baby looks nothing like a Bohleber.

It looks like a Truitt.

I don’t need a photo to remember Leann’s face. Her nose was petite. She got her looks from her mother, perhaps, like I did. The baby resembles Jim Truitt’s line.

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