Chapter 16
NOELLE
Even with the break she’d taken with McCrae at the beginning of the week, her work on the photo of Anthony Coolidge hadn’t made any more progress.
She’d worked on an assignment from a museum hoping to give faces to the children who’d been sent to church schools far away from their tribes.
That work was what she needed to feed her soul.
As much as she hated admitting she couldn’t complete a project, when it came to getting a workable ‘face’ for Anthony Coolidge, she was stumped.
It had been a bit of a stretch in the first place.
She normally worked from the inside out.
Taking an old photo and going under the skin and then attempting to picture a man as he might look currently?
Her skills didn’t extend to that scenario.
“Noelle?”
She startled when someone put a hand on her shoulder.
She’d been too deep in her thoughts to realize she wasn’t alone anymore.
That hand on her shoulder slid around to be a one-armed hug from Tracy Cooper.
“You’ve been looking at the same tray of lavender for almost twenty minutes.”
Lavender?
Noelle looked down at the tray in front of her. The tall stems tipped with purple blossoms were indeed lavender.
She nodded. “Sorry, I was... thinking...”
“You don’t have to apologize. You’re not on a timetable here.”
Noelle looked up at the rest of the garden center and smiled.
“I’m just happy we got you out of the house to come out and spend some time with us.”
Turning to look at Tracy, Noelle reached out a hand to brush it over the silk-like hair of Tracy’s daughter. The day had started with her mother shaking her awake to get showered and changed.
Once she was knee-deep in a project, she could go for days with just a handful of hours of sleep and questionable shower time.
While she’d been planning to forge on ahead in the Indian School project, the idea of going out and seeing the other women connected to the S.W.A.T. team was a welcome change of pace.
Now, besides Tracy and her baby, her own mother, Ciela, Katie and Finola were moving around the garden center picking out plants for their own yards. Jack wasn’t there as she was on shift with the team.
“What do you think of Duval’s yard?”
Noelle shook herself and looked at Tracy, wondering why she was asking.
Tracy smiled. “It’s just a question.”
The coquettish fluttering of her eyelashes was enough to make Noelle chuckle a little.
“It’s just a question? More like a fishing expedition. Right?”
Tracy gestured to a tray of marigolds beside the lavender pots. “These are great for color.”
Noelle picked up the little plastic tag that was stuck into the medium surrounding the plant. “If I was putting something into Duval’s yard, I’d go with something that doesn’t need a lot of care-”
Her eyes moved over the instructions and general plant information.
“These bloom once and then they have to be planted again. I don’t know if McCrae has the time or the interest in replanting over and over again.”
Noelle moved to the next tray and picked up a card to read, deciding almost immediately that the paper-thin petals of the flowers wouldn’t survive him handling them very much.
“Then again,” Tracy leaned in, bouncing her baby slightly in her carrier, “I have a feeling that he might be moving soon.”
Noelle frowned at her words, lifting her eyes from the plant tag in her hands. “Moving?”
Tracy’s smile was more of a mischievous twist of her lips. “In with you, sweetheart. You know that’s where y’all are headed, right?”
She was right.
At least in Noelle’s heart, McCrae was already there.
And her mother already had her eye on a prefab ‘granny cabin’ to put in the backyard.
Noelle smiled at the idea.
“Pretty sure the team is already betting on a move in date.”
Noelle lowered her voice. “Are law enforcement personnel allowed to bet on things like this?”
Tracy bit her lips and her daughter reached her hands up to touch her mother’s face. “Unofficially.”
Noelle smiled at that. “Unofficially.”
The loud noise of a heavy cart reached her ears a moment before a loud crash.
“Damn it!”
Noelle looked up and she could see that Tracy did the same, turning her head to look over the thigh-high table in front of them.
A large, wheeled cart laden with potted starter plants had collided with a standing display of seeds and gardening gloves.
The manager, who’d greeted all of them with bright smiles and a cheerful greeting stormed across the room. “Damn it, Andy. Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”
The man he was hissing at, kept his chin down and his eyes were glued to the ground.
Noelle felt for the man.
No one liked making mistakes.
And no one liked being yelled at in public.
It would be bad enough to have the garden center’s management breathing down your neck, but in public?
That made everything worse.
“You just love to piss me off, don’t you?”
The manager had hissed the words in a whisper like voice, but Noelle had excellent hearing.
A quick look to her side said that Tracy had heard it, too.
“We... We should move over by your mom.”
The suggestion was good.
And Noelle made a move to follow Tracy, but she stopped short when the man whose eyes had been glued to the ground looked up and met her gaze.
Andy.
That was the name that the manager had used, but Noelle knew, deep down in her bones, that the man’s name wasn’t Andy.
At least it hadn’t been about twenty years before.
The man on the other side of the thigh-high table of starter plants was Anthony ‘Tony’ Coolidge.
The bone structure that had been hidden by the grainy photo she’d been shone was clear as day now.
The man had aged in the twenty years since the photo had been taken at the market. His face had thinned. His whole body had lost a good deal of weight, making his bone structure so much more visible than the photo she’d been studying for hours and hours.
There it was.
The man she’d been asked to draw.
The man that McCrae’s team was searching for.
The man who’d killed Aracely Santos.
Noelle tore her gaze away from his, hoping that he wouldn’t see that she’d recognized him.
Hoping that she could get to Tracy and the others so that they could leave the garden center and alert the team.
Hoping, but things didn’t always work the way she wanted it to.
Noelle took a step to the side, meant to catch up to Tracy, but she stopped short when a woman and her two children pushed a cart down the center of the available aisle.
Noelle bit into her lip and moved closer. “Miss?”
“Miss?” the woman shot back, gesturing at the two children beside her and the one standing in the basket before her. “Does it look like I’m a ‘Miss’?”
Trust herself to pick the exact wrong word to use.
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to say-”
“Look,” the woman before her looked and sounded harried, “I’m just here to pick up stuff to put in the garden that I don’t have to grow from a seed, okay?”
“Sure... of course.” Noelle bit her lip, trying to hide the building fear inside of her. “Please, can I just get past-”
“Well,” the other woman huffed and lifted her nose in the air, “aren’t you special?”
“Please, ma’am-”
“Look, children,” the other woman leaned over and pointed at Noelle, “she’s special. We need to get out of her way because she owns this store, apparently.”
She must have been having a horrible day, or maybe she was just a horrible person.
Noelle looked over her shoulder and the man... Tony, was staring at her. His hands which were down at his sides were balled up into fists.
The stories in the news, the videos with Aracely’s image, the search for her identity, the search for her murderer?
They’d all been on TV. On the internet.
A local station had leaked that the Coolidges had been interviewed.
Like the men themselves, eager to get ahead of any suspicion that they were the ones that had killed her.
All of that had been out in the public.
Noelle had no idea that she’d walk into the workplace of the killer, or that he might recognize her from the news features.
How had a man like Ranger Douglas been the one to possibly put her in danger?
She hoped she’d have time later to give him a slap across his face, but first?
She needed to get her family out of that store.
Yes, her family.
All of them.
The woman blocking the way in front of her wasn’t going to let her by.
Noelle looked behind her and saw that the only way to get out in that direction was to go around the tables and walk right past Tony.
Noelle reached into her pocket for her phone and as soon as she took it out and lifted it to unlock it with facial recognition, the woman jumped to a crazy conclusion.
“Oh my god! Are you going to video me?”
Ignoring her for the moment, Noelle opened her phone app and hit speed dial 1.
MOM
The phone rang and then rang a second time.
Noelle’s heart was pounding in her chest and the woman in front of her who probably hadn’t heard the phone in Noelle’s hand ringing over her own piercingly loud voice, was still complaining.
“If you put my children online, I’m suing you!”
Noelle looked up, hoping to catch her mother’s eye, but she couldn’t see her mother anywhere in the store.
Good.
Hopefully.
“Are you listening to me?”
Noelle heard the screech of shopping cart wheels a second before her phone was snatched from her hand and thrown down to the ground.
As soon as the phone bounced from the first impact, it flipped and landed on its back.
Noelle could see a pronounced spider web across the dark screen.
“You... you people,” the woman spat, “always on your damn phones!”
“Ma’am, please.”
Noelle turned to look at Tony, but he wasn’t standing there anymore.
Panic.
Her whole body froze in panic.
Where did he go?
Noelle turned around, looking behind her.
The aisle was empty.
She let out a breath.
Okay.
The double swinging doors behind his cart, likely where he’d come from, were still.
He probably hadn’t gone back through the doors.
That left...
Someone grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked at her.
Noelle spun around and came face to air with the woman who hadn’t let her past. The woman was smaller than she’d expected without a cart between them.
“You don’t own this place.”