Chapter 9
Tat Face or Face Tat?
Detective Levi Madison tugged at the tight tie at his throat on Maria's porch the next morning. Maria shouted through the wall that she'd be out in a moment while frantically shooing her mother out of the foyer.
"Mama, please —"
Rosa put her hands on her hips, refusing to budge. "Invite the man in, mija . It's not polite."
"It's also not polite to eavesdrop, and yet, you and I both know, you'll listen to anything we say from the other room," Maria hissed. "Where in the world did I put my coat?"
"I can't help it, you have a loud voice. It's like a boom," Rosa said, flashing her fingers out wide in imitation of a bomb. But she turned and slowly sauntered out of the room, heels clicking all the way to the back of the house.
Maria found a semi-clean sweater on the couch and threw it over her head. She walked out the door, still trying to disentangle her curls from the tag and smiled wide.
"Chief Madison! H-how are you?" Maria's head was still cocked sideways while her fingers searched for the snag.
He stood still, likely waiting for her to stop being a spaz, before shaking his head. He walked across the porch and disentangled the god-awful tag from her hair without a word. He didn't let go of the curl though right away, and Maria held her breath at his sudden proximity.
Up close she could see the slight salt and pepper stubble against his skin. It angled across his sharp cheekbones and Maria itched to trace that line with her fingers. He shifted her curls, like he was setting them to rights, and Maria’s face heated. He finally made eye contact and dropped his hand.
His slight step back felt like a welcome gust of cool air, but he said, "Please, it's just Levi."
She nodded, and somehow found her voice over her pounding heart. "Then I'm just Maria."
He smiled, and she basked in that rare show of emotion.
"What?" He asked.
Maria bit her lip, attempting to not look like a grinning idiot. "Sorry. I'm just not sure I've ever seen you smile." She stopped him before he could go back to scowling, "It's a good one. You should do it more often."
He ran a hand over the back of his close cropped hair and she thought for a moment that he blushed as well. But when he looked up he was back to the stone faced detective she knew. "Maria, I got a call from Shane Bolles. Why didn't you call me when you thought you were being followed?"
Maria didn't know why, but it didn’t occur to her in her panic to call Levi last night. She only thought of Shane. "I don't know, to be honest. I didn’t think I was being followed until last night when I was getting in my car. And besides, you were dealing with the Town Hall meeting."
He huffed out a laugh. "That was miserable. I would have skipped out of the building mid speech had you given me a reason. But in all—" he paused mid-sentence, looking over Maria's shoulder.
She glanced back to see two sets of eyes disappearing behind the curtain. "My mother is staying with us," she said by way of explanation. She glared at the curtains still swaying. "Want to take a walk?"
He held his arm out for her to walk first, and Maria thought back to all the times Dave walked five steps ahead of her. He constantly complained about how slow she and Isa walked. Stop thinking about Dave, she thought. She focused instead on the sidewalk ahead of them and the soft warmth of the autumn sun on the bright and cloudless morning. They ambled along, and she opted for the route that would wind them around the homes with the best gardens.
It was early enough that most people were still in their homes. Puffs of white smoke snaked out of stone chimneys, and the steady raking of leaves from a few yards over calmed her. It was hard to believe that bad things ever happened in this town at all. And yet, you committed murder. You started this mess.
They walked in amiable silence for almost a block before Maria realized she wasn't rushing to fill the void. She had never spent much time with Levi before. He'd gruffly said hellos and things of that nature around town, but even when he'd taken her information and alibi after Dave's body was found, they'd been surrounded by other people. She didn't know anything about him. Other than that he never wore a wedding ring and he didn't have kids at Isa's school.
"Maria, I've been looking further into Dave's death ever since the toxicology report came out."
And just like that, the easy contentment Maria felt walking by Levi's side whooshed out of her. Panic hunkered down in its place instead.
He continued: "Specifically, into who he was associated with prior to his death." He motioned for her to sit on the bench in the pocket park tucked in between two of Hinnewatcha's oldest homes, which suited her just fine. She was already nauseated from the highs and lows of this conversation.
"Do you know what Dave was doing for his brother before he died?" He asked.
Maria shook her head, "No. He would go up to Greg's house a few nights a week and come home drunk or loaded, but he never told me what they did." Nor did I ever ask because it meant he left me alone for a while.
"Have you ever found more pills than he would take himself in your home?"
"You think he was selling?" If she could kill Dave again, she would.
"I'm wondering if that was the intent. There's a rumor that one of the bigger drug runners in New England had a shipment stolen. It started a turf war that's made its way to Vermont. And according to the police in Albany, one of their insiders thinks some small-time dealers in our state are responsible."
Maria's head reeled from the implications. "So, are you saying that someone could have killed Dave because he stole this kingpin's drugs? Is that why the trucker was killed?"
"I don't have enough to link the two. The two murders, if we're working on the assumption that Dave was murdered and didn't overdose, are completely different in nature. And I don't have any proof that the Fever brothers are the ones who stole the pills to begin with."
"Have you looked at Greg's place?"
He shook his head. "I’d need a warrant for that, and I don't have enough evidence for a judge to grant me one, at least not yet. That's why I need to start with Dave. Did he have any storage units or safes? Is there anywhere you can think of that he could have hidden a stockpile of drugs?"
She held her hands up, "I would never allow a stash of drugs like that in our home. Dave kept pills, but I never saw more than a bottle or so at a time, and he usually kept them on himself. I've got Isa, and I don't want anything threatening her. The syringe found next to him was the first I’d heard of him injecting anything.”
He put his hand on her knee. It was for half a moment but it was soothing enough to calm her frantic heart at the implication. "I don't think you would. The Fever brothers have enough possession charges in their history that would make them suspects, but as far as I know, you have nothing in your history, correct?"
"Right. I’ve never even vaped. Drugs scared me, even as a kid running around LA with a bunch of other kids that had zero hesitations when it came to drugs."
"As they should."
"It wasn't really the drugs. It was Rosa Cruz. I can't imagine what my mother would have done had I even been caught smoking a cigarette, and even though we weren’t always close, just the thought of her reaction kept me away."
He laughed and leaned back against the bench. They watched a toddler scoot merrily past them on a small bike, his mother running after him. Levi sighed once and then said, "I've probably said more than I should. But I wanted to give you a heads up so you're not caught off guard. And I don't think this needs to be said, but stay away from Greg Fever. Even if he's not involved, he's no good."
"I'm aware. And I'm trying." Maria and Levi stood up and began walking back in the direction of her home. "Levi, I saw Greg talking with the guy with the face tattoos outside while everyone was in the Town Hall. Afterwards, Greg cornered me and told me about something that happened to Dave's body. What happened?"
"Officially? I'm not allowed to say anything. But unofficially, we have no idea who or why someone would do that to his body. It doesn't add up. The only thing I can think of is that it's some sort of Halloween prank or séance. We get enough crazy people visiting this town during this time of year because of Burial Rock."
Hamby told Maria not long after she moved to town about the Abenaki burial site. The mountains and rivers around Hinnewatcha were once home to the Western Abenaki tribe. Archeologists speculated that a group of rocks in the woods behind Dan's Diesel could have been an old burial ground for the tribe, but they couldn’t prove it because locals had raided the place around the turn of the century. Ever since, a rumor persisted that on fall nights the ghost of an Abenaki woman stood over one of the rocks. She was called The Protector. A few B-list documentaries were made about it, but for the most part, it only became popular around Halloween when teens dared each other to camp out near the rocks.
Still, Maria thought, taking a body out of a morgue is a ways away from camping near a haunted rock. She packed away that thought to focus on something tangible.
" Greg thought I might have done it as a Mexican burial tradition."
"Greg is an idiot," Levi responded immediately.
She laughed at that and its simplicity. "Agreed. But when I brought up the fact that I saw him and the face tattoo guy talking, he got really defensive. Told me to forget I saw them together."
Levi didn't say anything right away. He processed it silently, as he seemed to do with most conversations. A few moments later he said, "Thank you for telling me that. After I got Shane's call this morning, I put one of my deputies on the newcomer's tail to keep tabs on him."
"Thank you," Maria said.
"Shane seemed worried about you," Levi said, looking down at his shoes once before turning back to her. "Did you know him before Dave's death?"
It felt like a probing question, but then again, he was a detective. "No, I just met him when he got to town. He seems like a nice man, despite all the cameras."
Levi nodded. "He's actually not as bad as I thought, but his crew is rather aggressive."
"How so?" Maria asked as they reached her front gate. She was surprised her mother wasn't waiting on the front porch.
He waved it off, "It's nothing, I shouldn't have said anything." He put a hand on her forearm before she opened the picket fence. "Maria, I'd like to put an officer on night watch outside your home for a few days until we figure out who this newcomer is."
"That's really not necessary," she said, though part of her was relieved that someone else would have eyes on her home while her mother and Isa were there.
"Humor me. I'll sleep better knowing you're safe."
She smiled at that. "Thank you. And Levi?"
He turned around, hands in his pockets. "Yea?"
"If I find anything like we discussed, I'll call you first."
He smiled, a true second smile at that. "Thank you."
Maria turned, wondering how fast she could get her mother and Isa out of the house so she could dig up every inch of her home. If Dave hid a stash drugs in there, she'd find them.
***
Two hours later, sweaty and out of cuss words, Maria put down the hammer. She stopped short of ripping up floorboards. She scoured every inch of her home looking for a hidey hole Dave might have found and came up empty. She didn't find any notes or receipts indicating he had a storage space elsewhere, there were no obvious dug up places in the yard, and nothing abnormal about her potting shed.
She cursed him for the hundredth time and knelt down in her flower bed to work out her frustrations on the remaining chamomile flowers. Usually the act of harvesting the flowers would calm her, but even after small buds piled around her like confetti, she couldn't sit still. Her thoughts kept drifting back to how she got to this place in life.
Somehow the defiant, angry girl she’d been in New York had given way to a woman she was only just now getting to know. She’d let each disappointing relationship chip away at her on the other side of the country. Dave had taken advantage of her vulnerability by the time she came back to the East Coast, but she was the one that let him whittle away at her until only a hollow shell of herself remained. The girl her mother and aunts raised would never have let a man control her. Let alone hit her.
She attacked the flower bed, muttering to herself all the things Dave preached.
“Women should respect the man of the house.”
“Women should know their place.”
“Isa has a mouth on her. She’ll learn.”
She let the hot tears wash over her face, and welcomed the cramp in her hand from gripping the clippers.
“Divorce isn’t a word in this house.”
“No one will believe you.”
“You’ll leave over my dead body.”
There are sentences that change lives forever. Small moments that to anyone else would be inconsequential but to someone listening, to someone paying attention, those moments would be earth shattering. That sentence came when she brought home an almond croissant from Mama Cate’s for Dave one day.
“What kind of wife doesn’t know her husband is allergic to almonds? Even just smelling those will send me to the hospital. Are you trying to kill me?”
She stood in the kitchen, rooted to the spot, when he stormed off indignant and raging. That tiny pastry cracked open her hollow shell, allowing the powerful force she once was to trickle out. She didn’t decide to kill him then, that didn’t happen until after the incident with Isa, but she began a mental list of things she might need if he ever had to go as she clutched that croissant. The list gave way to measurable steps to take her life back, and now she refused to go back to the woman that felt helpless.
With each snip of the flowerheads she listed and discarded any place she knew of that Dave could have hidden a cache of pills. She was left with only one conclusion: Anything Dave hid had to be at his brother’s place in the woods. By the time she loaded the flower heads onto a drying rack, she had made her decision. She’d find whatever evidence she could so no one would ever realize that she was the murderer. Maria grabbed the jar of lavender and chamomile tea leaves she'd made the week before and hopped in her car.
***
"We gotta talk about the bigger problem," Brandon said as he snapped the lid of the dry erase marker back on.
Shane, Emily, and Brandon Bolles sat in front of the large whiteboard on wheels that Shane's dad purchased the day before. Notes and pictures of everything they could pull on the murdered trucker and their list of suspects were taped to the board, and the opposite side held ideas on how to cover Maria's tracks.
Shane looked over at his daughter on the couch, who at some point shoved a pen behind her ear, identical to how he stashed his pen. She threw her hands up, almost toppling her laptop out of her lap. "What have we not gone over? We've been at this for hours."
His dad replied, "We can't keep talking about the guy as "the guy with the face tattoos," or "tattoos on his face." It's too clunky. How do you not have a real name yet?" Brandon leveled the last question at Emily as if she was holding something back. She replied instantly, "I love how you just learned about the internet two days ago and suddenly have an issue with how fast I can find information on it."
Shane ignored their banter. It at least lacked the heat it did when they first arrived, which was a good sign. "I personally prefer Tat Face," he said, hand raised.
"You would," the other two replied simultaneously. Brandon wrote Face Tat instead above the suspect's photo.
Brandon, suddenly better suited as a general than a farmer, paced in front of the whiteboard. "Let’s recap. We know the trucker, Nathan Dass, racked up significant gambling debt according to Shane's new buddy."
"I like Shirley," Shane mused. The old deputy loved a good gossip and had zero issues recapping everything Levi Madison's team was looking into.
"We also know that Face Tat had some sort of heated discussion with Greg Fever, which likely means they met prior to last night’s Town Hall."
"I still think we need the mayor on here," Emily said as she tapped her pencil against her laptop. "She's way too peppy for a murder to have just taken place in her town. I saw her waving a pack of TikTokers into her AirBnBs like she was a tour guide."
Brandon scoffed, "I'm pretty sure they're called Tikkers."
She looked at Shane, "I can't tell if he's serious."
"I think you need to get off the sleuth pages for a bit, kiddo. The conspiracy theories are going to your head," Shane replied.
"Hear me out," Emily said, taking the dry erase marker from Brandon. "First, she put an offer on all the land surrounding Dan's Diesel one month prior to the murder. The LLC she owns applied for a multi-family permit to build 250 townhomes on that land. And, ScoobyRoo sent,—"
Shane raised his hand again, "I'm sorry, what?"
"Right? 250 townhomes! And that's not—"
He shook his head. "No, no Buttercup. You're getting your facts from someone named ScoobyRoo?"
"He called the Mailman Murder before you did, and you had to Raise the mailman from the dead to get that confirmation. Even Frankie said the sleuth had talent," She replied, arms crossed.
"Frankie gets on those accounts just to stir up controversy so younger people will watch the show."
"And Frankie is a scoundrel," Brandon chimed in.
"Are we suddenly interviewing for the Renaissance Festival? Who says 'scoundrel'?" Emily said, relinquishing the dry erase marker back to Brandon. “We need to go back to the voice.”
Shane shuddered and glanced over at his dad’s hopeful face. “Dad, I know you want it to be mom, but there was nothing warm about the voice that spoke through Dave Fever.” He pushed through the lump in his throat that always formed when he thought of his mom. “I think she is watching us and rooting for us, but whoever, or whatever, spoke wasn’t Mom.”
“I heard some kids in town talking about the Abenaki ghost in the woods behind Dan’s Diesel,” Emily said, chewing on the end of her pen. “They call her The Protector, and said she stayed behind even after her tribe moved away. Maybe she’s protecting this place.”
A knock at the front door interrupted their discussion, and Shane mulled over Emily’s words while his dad got the door. A few moments later, Brandon said in a loud, dramatic voice, "Oh hello, Maria Fever! Please, come in!"
Shit. Emily and Shane sprang into action and gathered up every photo and note they had on the table. Emily pushed the whiteboard into Brandon's room just as Maria walked in the living room.
"Hi, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt," she said, holding a jar of something in her hands.
She looked disheveled, and Shane was pretty sure there was a dead flower trapped in her wild curls. Suddenly he realized why she might be here. I should have asked her first.
"Uh Dad, Emily, can you give us a few?"
His dad beamed. He'd met Maria briefly when she dropped Shane off the night before and she was now his new favorite Hinnewatchan. Brandon motioned for Emily. "Come on, hippie, I bet you'll like the Farmer's Market and it's still open for another hour. Let's let them have the house to themselves for a bit."
"Way to make it weird, Pops. Thanks." Shane said, avoiding Maria's face. When he got the nerve to glance over she was silently laughing behind her hands. He waited until he heard the front door shut and said, "I'm really sorry. He's lived alone for too long apparently."
"It's fine. He’s great," she replied.
They spoke at the same time, "I'm sorry for not calling first—"
"I told Chief Madison what you said."
She laughed, and the nerves Shane was juggling lessened. He motioned for her to sit and said, "You go first."
"Thank you,” she said, nestling back into the old leather couch. “It's fine. I would have told Levi at some point. I'm not sure why I felt like I should talk to you about it first."
"I'm glad you did, but I don't know how to protect you. I knew Madison could.” Shane scooped up a note Emily scrawled about the Abenaki ghost on the coffee table and shoved it into his back pocket. “So, is that why you came by?"
"Not quite,” Maria said, biting the corner of her lower lip. “ I need a favor, but it's something I'm afraid you'll say no to."
"I doubt I could tell you no," he said before he could stop himself. She was fiddling with the ring on her right hand so he knew it must be bad, but he didn't care. He was running headfirst into the fact that making this woman happy made him happy. Bad idea. You're not staying. And if she knew you were a fraud, she wouldn't give you the time of day.
She clapped her hands once and the words rushed out. "OK. I need you to go with me to Greg Fever's property so we can look for a pile of drugs I think he and Dave stole."
"Wasn’t expecting that," Shane deadpanned.
She stood up, pacing, and walked him through the conversation she had with Levi Madison earlier that morning. Ten minutes later, she'd convinced him despite every warning bell in his head.
He pointed her to the only bathroom on this floor when she asked, and he texted Frankie back while waiting on her. The run through with his cameraman yesterday wasn't his best, and Frankie was quick to tell him as much. He didn't care. He had yet to tell him that this would be his last show. Ever since Frankie became the main producer for Dead Don't Lie he'd become far more opinionated on everything Shane did on the show. As if that man needed more opinions.
He heard Maria wash her hands and looked up when she paused at the doorway. It was only then that he realized she was in his dad's room. With the whiteboard. He froze. It might be on the trucker side.
" Why do you have my picture taped up here?"
Not on the trucker side. He rushed in to get her away from reading the rest, but it was too late. She stepped back when he tried to touch her shoulder.
"You guys think I killed Dave?"
He probably should lie. But he needed her to know that he was trying to protect her, that she could trust him. "No. I know you killed Dave."
It was the wrong thing to say.