Chapter 12 #2
Patrice’s face shifted, the warmth pulling back just enough to make room for something more careful.
“Matter of fact, I did. It came down Catherine of Aragon, driving slow. Not lost slow, more like looking-for-something slow. Passed right by my windows.” She pointed toward the plate glass.
“Only reason I noticed was because he turned left onto Anne Boleyn, and then sure enough, a couple of minutes later he came driving by again and pulled into your driveway. I figured it was a delivery service or something. Usually when you’ve got big flower arrangements they come in a van like that. ”
“Did you happen to get a look at the driver?”
“White guy,” she said. “Had a beard. Not old, but not young either.”
“And after?” Jack asked. “Did you see which way the van went when it left?”
“Went out the same way it came in, back down Catherine of Aragon away from the Towne Square, like it was headed toward Nottingham.” She looked between us, her expression serious, and the neighborhood gossip was replaced by something sharper. “What happened over there today?”
“The van left a dead body on the lawn,” I said.
She looked at me with eyes wide. “Normally I’d make some kind of comment about it being a funeral home, but I can see you’re serious as a heart attack. You think they’re coming back?”
“I’d just say to keep your eyes open, and to call if you see anything suspicious,” Jack told her. “Let us know if you think of anything else.”
She picked up a towel and folded it with slow deliberation. “You know I will. Stay safe.”
We worked our way down the strip mall. The kid working the register at Crate and Go had been on his phone all morning and hadn’t seen anything, which he reported with the cheerful lack of shame that only a teenager could manage.
The CrossFit gym gave us nothing—the owner said a class had been going on during the time the van dumped the body, and the front windows were too fogged to see through anyway.
When we got to the deli, it was closed, with sign on the door that said BACK AT TWO. Obviously their appointment ran over because it was after three and the door was still locked.
“Maybe they saw all the cops and decided it was best to stay out of the way,” I said. “You know how cops make people nervous.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I love that part of the job.”
We walked down Catherine of Aragon toward Anne Boleyn.
The houses on Anne Boleyn sat on large lots with deep setbacks and mature trees that said old money or at least old roots.
American flags hung from porch brackets.
Flower beds were tended with the seriousness of competitive sport.
It was a street where people mowed their lawns on Saturday mornings and waved at every car that passed.
The people who lived in these houses knew everything that happened on the street.
They usually knew what bodies were coming into the funeral home before they were delivered.
Harold and Ruthann Pruitt lived in the yellow Cape Cod on the corner, the property closest to the funeral home.
A wooden flagpole stood at the edge of the front walk with an American flag that Harold raised every morning at six and took down every evening at sunset, rain or shine, because some habits outlasted the uniform that created them.
The flower beds along the front were Ruthann’s domain—roses and hydrangeas and black-eyed Susans in tidy rows that looked like they’d been planted with a level and a tape measure.
Ruthann answered the door before we knocked, which meant she’d been watching us come up the walk, which meant the neighborhood grapevine was already fully operational.
She was a small, round woman with a cloud of white hair she kept pinned back with tortoiseshell clips, pink cheeks that always looked like she’d just come in from a walk, and bright hazel eyes that missed absolutely nothing.
She was wearing a floral apron over a denim shirt, and her hands were dusted with flour.
“We were hoping you’d stop by,” she said with more excitement than was probably appropriate. “I’ve made some sweet tea. Come on in and make yourselves at home. Harold moves to the sunroom after lunch to avoid the sun.”
She ushered us through the front hall and into a kitchen that smelled like lemon and butter and looked like it hadn’t been updated since the nineties.
There was rooster wallpaper border along the soffit.
A collection of ceramic salt and pepper shakers sat on a shelf above the stove that spanned at least three decades of vacation souvenirs, and more roosters along the tops of the cabinet and hidden among appliances on the countertops. It was a lot of roosters.
“Harold,” she called toward the back of the house. “Sheriff’s here. Put on your shoes and come be useful.”
Harold appeared in the doorway, and even at seventy-one he still carried himself with the straight-backed economy of movement that the army put into a man and never fully took out.
He was lean and weathered, with a face like a walnut—deeply lined and harder than it looked.
What was left of his hair was cropped close and silver, and his eyes were the pale, steady blue of a man who’d spent twenty-five years making assessments that other people’s lives depended on.
He wore khaki shorts and a faded VFW T-shirt, and his binoculars hung around his neck as though they were part of the dress code.
“I was wondering when you’d get around to me,” he said to Jack. “Took you long enough, son.”
“Mr. Pruitt,” Jack said.
Ruthann set glasses of sweet tea in front of us without asking and then inspected the butterfly bandage on my cheek with a critical eye.
“You need to change out that bandage,” she said, looking at my cheek.
“I’ll take care of it once we get back,” I told her.
“Uh-huh.” She was already rummaging in a drawer near the stove. “I’ve got a fresh bandage and Neosporin right here.”
I sighed. There would be no getting around this, so I sat quietly and let her play nurse.
“Mr. Pruitt, we’re canvassing the neighborhood about some activity at the funeral home this morning,” Jack said. “From your porch on the corner, you’ve got a good angle of the driveway. Did you see a van pull into the property around ten thirty, quarter to eleven?”
“I saw it before it pulled in,” Harold said.
He lowered himself into a kitchen chair with deliberate precision.
“I was on the porch with my crossword and binoculars, watching a pair of goldfinches on the power line, when a navy blue van came down Catherine of Aragon and did a couple turns around the block.
Caught my attention right away. Then they turned into the driveway.
Ford Transit, 2019 or thereabouts based on the body style.
“The plates caught my eye first,” Harold continued. “I zoomed in on the Virginia tags, but was something over the numbers. Looked like tape.”
He reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a small spiral notebook, the kind you could buy for a dollar at any convenience store. He flipped it open to a page with neat, angular handwriting that looked like it had been trained on army field reports.
“I took the liberty of making notes. My memory isn’t what it used to be. Let’s see. The van pulled up the driveway at 10:47 a.m.”
Jack leaned forward. “What did you see?”
“The tall one got out first. He was the one closest to me, so I got a decent look. Maybe six-foot, slim build, clean shaven. Light skinned but not white, if you know what I mean. Maybe Italian or Middle Eastern. Mid-thirties, maybe younger. Strong jaw, straight nose, dark hair under the ball cap.”
Harold’s eyes were steady and precise, delivering the information the way he’d been trained to deliver a field report. “He had a tattoo on the side of his neck, below the ear. Looked pretty intricate.”
“What about when the door opened? Could you see inside the van?”
“Some. The angle was right for it and I still had the binoculars up.” Harold turned a page in his notebook.
“There was a work shirt folded on the console, dark blue, like a uniform or a mechanic’s shirt.
It had yellow lettering over the pocket.
” He looked down at his notebook and read directly from it. “Tidewater Logistics.”
“That’s great info,” Jack said. “What about the second guy?”
“Couldn’t see him as well, but he was short and stocky.
Had a stocking cap pulled over his head, and he had a scar along his jaw that was a real doozy.
Then he and the guy in the passenger seat went to the back of the van,” Harold said.
“They opened the rear doors, and they pulled something out and carried it around the side of the building toward the front.”
“Did you see what they were carrying?” Jack asked.
“I assumed it was a delivery. You’re a funeral home.
” Harold looked at me without apology. “People carry things in and out of your building all day long. But I couldn’t see what they were carrying from the porch.
The van doors blocked my visual. It looked heavy though.
Nothing about it seemed unusual except the covered plates.
But I saw on the news it was a body. I should’ve checked it out. ”
“You had no way of knowing,” I assured him.
“Mmhm.” Harold didn’t look like he entirely believed that, but he let it go.
The kitchen was quiet for a moment. Ruthann set a plate of lemon squares on the table and put her hand on Harold’s shoulder, and I watched something pass between them that didn’t need words—the understanding of two people who’d spent a lifetime together and could communicate whole conversations in the pressure of a palm.
“Those men will come back,” Harold said. He took a lemon square from the plate and bit into it. “Men who plan routes and cover plates and move that clean don’t do one job and disappear. They’re on somebody’s payroll, and they’ll do whatever that somebody tells them to do next.”