Chapter Twelve
Saturday evening, Shayla let Mira into her small rental home on the other side of town from Mira’s apartment.
A small white dog barked at her from the sofa and two cats wound around her feet as she greeted her friend.
Shayla rubbed at the streaks of mascara beneath her bloodshot eyes.
“I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” she said. “I can’t stop crying. ”
“Don’t apologize,” Mira said. “You have every reason to be upset.”
She followed Shayla to the sofa, where two more cats had settled in beside the dog. Shayla sank down next to them, while Mira took the adjacent armchair. A black cat—one that had greeted her at the door—immediately joined her. “I can’t believe Mitch had anything to do with this,” Shayla said.
Mira stroked the cat, who began to purr, and tried to think of something comforting to say.
She had been in Shayla’s shoes, not believing a man she loved had been capable of such evil.
In her case, police had shown her undeniable evidence of his guilt.
And even George hadn’t denied his guilt.
He had only asked her to understand that he couldn’t help himself and he had never really hurt anyone—a rationalization that had sickened her further.
But what proof did they have of Mitch’s guilt? “Carter and I went to the sheriff’s office,” she said.
Shayla looked more alert. “Did you find out anything? Did you see Mitch? Is he okay?”
“We didn’t see Mitch and the sheriff wouldn’t tell us anything about the case. But I told him about seeing Mitch here at school during pickup at the end of the day, and again about an hour and a half later when he came to tell the two of us about Bryce’s kidnapping.”
“I don’t see how he could have snatched Bryce, driven him up to Galloway Basin and gotten back to school in that time, do you?” Shayla asked.
Mira thought it might just be possible, though it didn’t seem probable. “The sheriff will interview other people at the school,” she said. “I’m sure someone will have seen him. Wouldn’t he have track practice after school?”
“Not on Thursday,” Shayla said. “That’s the day junior varsity competes, but they had a bye week, so he was free that afternoon.” She hugged a pillow to her stomach. “My mom called.”
“She was probably worried about you. What did she say?”
“That she hoped I would stay far away from a man like Mitch.”
“Oh, Shayla.”
“I told her I knew he was innocent and she had no right to judge him.” She rocked back and forth. “But what if I’m wrong? What if he really did do it?” She burst into sobs.
Mira moved over to the sofa, displacing one of the cats, and rubbed Shayla’s back, knowing there was no comfort she could offer but her presence. And maybe the benefit of her own experience. “What are you doing tomorrow?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably what I’m doing right now. Sitting at home. Crying.”
“Come hiking with me. You’ll feel better if you do something active, outdoors.” After George’s arrest, she had walked miles and miles in the mountains around Santa Fe. It was the only thing that kept her from completely falling apart.
“I don’t know,” Shayla said. “I’d be terrible company.”
“No you won’t. And it will make you feel better. I promise.”
“All right. I’ll come with you. Where do you want to go?”
“I’ll think of a good trail by tomorrow. Be ready about ten?”
“Sounds good.” She wiped her eyes, then squeezed Mira’s hand. “Thanks. You’re a good friend.”
“So are you.” She would do her best to distract Shayla from her worst thoughts. And if those thoughts turned out to be true, she would give her a shoulder to lean on. She was someone who had been through a similar situation and come out the other side, wounded, but still standing.
Saturday night, Carter stopped himself three times from calling Mira. If she wanted to hear from him, she would contact him. She had asked him to be patient, so he had to do that—no matter how impatient the idea made him.
Dalton looked up from his computer. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You’re like a hyperactive puppy that can’t sit still for two seconds. You’re making me nervous.”
“I’m just restless.” He stopped to look over Dalton’s shoulder at his computer screen. But the strings of numbers there made no sense to him.
“Then go for a run. Or to the bar. Just get out of here.”
“Good idea.” He grabbed his keys and headed out the door. Not for a run, but to Mo’s Pub. The server at the door greeted him. “You’re with search and rescue, right?” she asked. “Those guys are at the big table in the back.”
“Is this a meeting no one told me about?” he asked as he approached the table. Ryan, Vince, Eldon, and Tony, their girlfriends, and several climbers Carter recognized but didn’t know well were crowded around the table, with pitchers of beer and platters of pizza between them.
“Carter! Come join us.” Vince scooted over to make room and Carter pulled a chair from another table. “You know Tammy.” Vince introduced the curly-haired blonde with him. “She writes for the paper.”
“Hi, Tammy,” Carter said. Several other people introduced themselves. Someone handed him a beer and someone else passed over a platter of pizza. He helped himself. “So what’s going on?” he asked.
“We just all ended up here,” Ryan said.
“Some of us were climbing over in Caspar Canyon and came here because we were hungry and thirsty,” Eldon said. “The others just showed up, like you.”
“Everyone ends up at Mo’s sooner or later,” Tony said.
“Hey, anybody know what’s up with Mitch Anders?” one of the climbers at the other end of the table asked. “I heard he was arrested.”
“Mitch?” Ryan’s girlfriend, Deni, asked. “What for?”
“Apparently, they think he’s the guy who tried to kidnap that kid. The one we searched for and found up above Galloway Basin,” Tony said.
“No way,” the climber said. “Mitch?”
“I heard he has an alibi,” Carter said. “He was at school that afternoon. I know a couple of people who saw him.”
“Who?” Ryan asked.
“Mira Veronica and another teacher. She said Mitch was at school all afternoon.”
“Then why arrest him?” Tony asked. “They must have some evidence.”
“I don’t know,” Carter admitted.
“Your brother is a cop, isn’t he?” Vince asked. “What does he say?”
“Aaron doesn’t talk about stuff like that.” He took a bite of pizza, an excuse to stop talking.
“Mitch always struck me as a good guy,” Ryan said. “It just goes to show you never really know about people. They must have had some good evidence to arrest him.”
“Maybe the kid identified him,” Eldon’s girlfriend, May, said.
“Maybe they got DNA or something,” someone else suggested.
“Hey, I ran into some guy today who was telling me that he took up climbing because he had this DNA profile done that said he would be good at it,” one of the climbers said. “I think he got taken because the guy was seriously awful.”
The conversation turned to climbing and Carter excused himself to go to the bathroom.
On his way back to the table, he passed the bar.
Raised voices stopped him and he turned to see the bartender, a blonde named Cherise, arguing with a customer.
Carter moved closer. “I can’t pour you another one, Ed,” she said.
“You’ve already had too many. You need to go home. Let me call you a ride.”
“I want another drink!” the older man shouted. He was about five foot seven, thin and bent, with scraggly long gray hair and stubble, a red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt open over a gray T-shirt and baggy jeans.
“You need help, Cherise?” Carter asked.
“I’m just trying to find Ed here a ride home,” she said. “He’s in no shape to get behind the wheel.”
“I don’t want to go home!” Ed bellowed. “I want another drink.”
“Who is he?” Carter asked.
Cherise turned away from Ed and lowered her voice. “He’s Mitch Anders’s father. You heard what happened with Mitch.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s awful. I get that Ed is upset, but he’s had way too much to drink. I’m afraid he’s going to pass out and fall and hurt himself. He can hardly get around as it is. I can’t believe he drove over here.”
“Let me see if I can talk to him,” Carter said.
The barstools on either side of Ed were vacant. Carter slid onto one of them. “Hey, Ed,” he said. “I’m Carter.”
“Will you buy me a drink?” Ed asked.
“How about a Coke?” Carter asked. “Or a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t want any coffee!” He slammed a fist on the bar, making his empty pint glass jump.
“Guess you had a rough day,” Carter said.
“My son was arrested,” Ed said. “They had no right. He’s innocent.”
“I want to hear about your son,” Carter said. He took out his keys. “Let me take you home.”
Ed looked at him with watery blue eyes. “Do you know Mitch?”
“Sure,” Carter lied. “He’s a coach at the high school. A great guy.” He stood. “Come on. I’ll take you home and you can tell me more about Mitch.”
Ed hesitated, and Carter braced for another argument, but then the older man dragged over a metal walker Carter hadn’t noticed. Ed struggled to his feet, then pushing the walker in front of him, started for the door.
Carter hurried to open it for him, then led the way to his Jeep. The old man refused any help getting into the vehicle and despite his bent frame and shuffling gait had a muscular upper body. “That’s my car over there,” he said, pointing to a faded red Jeep.
“It will be safe here overnight,” Carter said. “I’ll play chauffeur for now. What’s your address?”
“Five twenty-eight Moose Way.” Ed closed his eyes and leaned back in the seat. Before they were even out of the parking lot, he was snoring. He woke with a jerk when Carter pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. “What? Where are we?”
“We’re at your house.” Carter got out of the Jeep and walked around to open the passenger door. Ed shook off his hand, slid to the ground, grabbed the walker and hurried up the walk to the front door. Carter hastened to catch up with him.
Ed shoved open the door and left it open behind him as he shuffled into the living room.
The house was small and dark—dark wood floors and paneled walls, heavy drapes over the windows. Ed switched on a lamp on a table by the sofa and flopped down onto the cushions. “There’s beer in the refrigerator,” he said. “Get us both one.”
Carter wasn’t sure the old man should be drinking, but he fetched two cans of a cheap domestic beer from the refrigerator and handed one to the old man. He opened his can but didn’t drink it.
Ed drained half his can in one long slug, then looked at Carter from beneath bushy eyebrows.
“Mitch is a good son,” he said, his words only slightly slurred.
“Don’t tell anybody, but me and Mitch’s mom never married.
Not because I didn’t ask her, mind you. But I wasn’t good enough for her family.
They didn’t want me around and pretty soon she didn’t, either.
I wasn’t in his life much but I tried to make up for it later.
When I needed a place to live he took me in.
He’s a good son. He doesn’t deserve this. ”
Carter tried to think of something to say, but Ed drained the rest of his beer, not seeming to expect an answer. Carter looked around the room, which was decorated in southwestern art—paintings of desert scenes in pastel colors.
Ed slammed his empty beer can down on the coffee table. “Mitch’s mother was an artist. That’s all her work. He keeps it up there because of her.”
“Nice,” Carter said. His gaze shifted to a framed photo on the table beside them, a color image of a man and a boy standing together on a dock with fishing poles and a large fish. “That’s me and Mitch,” Ed said. “He was eight.”
The man in the photo had the build of a rodeo bull rider—stocky and muscular, and slightly bowlegged. He squinted at the camera from beneath a shock of thick brown hair, one hand on the shoulder of the grinning boy.
“That was a great day,” Ed said. “I didn’t see him again for almost twenty years.” There was no regret in his words. He sounded almost detached.
“Why didn’t you see him?” Carter asked.
“Things happen. Time gets away from you.”
Carter looked at the photo again. Was Ed the one who had kept it all these years, or Mitch? When Mitch looked at his father now, did he see the man he had been that day, or the one who had been absent twenty years?
He turned to look at Ed again, but the old man’s chin was down on his chest and he was snoring.
Moving carefully, Carter stood and crept to the door. He left the can of beer on a table by the entrance and hurried to his Jeep and drove away.
He debated going back to the bar, but decided to go home.
His mind was too full of his encounter with Ed.
Ed was lucky to have a son like Mitch, but was Mitch lucky to have a father like Ed?
Carter hadn’t seen the man at his best, but he doubted a sober Ed would be a big improvement.
He had admitted he had neglected his son, and turned to him only when he had nowhere else to go.
Had that lack of a father in his life led Mitch to commit the crime of which he was accused?
Or were his friends right and Mitch was blameless?
Smarter people than Carter would try to figure that out.
All he knew for sure was that he was glad he had been born into the family he had.
For all he sometimes felt smothered or overlooked by his parents and siblings, they had always been there for him, and never asked much of him.
Did that make him weaker than someone like Mitch?
Or stronger in ways he hadn’t yet figured out?