Circled Page 3

  Opening my eyes was like wrenching two glued boards apart, but my lids succumbed. Dangling above my nose, of all things, was a tiny spider working frantic legs—spinning silk and getting nowhere fast. Welcome to my life, little guy.

  No sooner had I thought it than I swatted angrily at the creature, missing by a mile while my head throbbed. Chad’s face suddenly appeared above me, his look of concern unable to mar his astounding good looks. I’d seen his face from this angle before, but only when he was panting and horny, not sympathetic and pitiful. I didn’t like this new expression at all.

  “No,” I said, trying but failing to sit up.

  Suddenly, the cold, hard sensation of Boyd’s cement floor rose through my back and thighs, and everything came rushing back. I was lying in the room where Boyd had cultivated a drug business to support his lame lifestyle as a chain-smoking loser who lived in a third-floor walk-up with stained sheets for curtains. And I was next to the room where he had—

  “Chloe,” Chad said gently. “You fainted in that room where the skull watch was. No biggie; the air in there was pretty stifling.”

  Ah, sweet, innocent Chad. Get a clue. “Whose blood was it?” I asked. “Who was the duct tape used on?”

  He grinned. “Kind of hard to tell in ninety seconds.”

  “Is that all I’ve been out? Feels like a lifetime.”

  “Sorry. Same old life. I carried you out here so you wouldn’t contaminate a crime scene.” He cringed slightly after he said it.

  Sherilyn, standing nearby, glanced over. “Welcome back, hon. Thank God you didn’t throw up in there. Feeling better?”

  I grabbed Chad’s arm and hoisted myself up.

  “You were mumbling swamp or circus when you passed out,” he said, the question implied.

  My heart became a clenched fist. “Was I?”

  “Sherilyn told me how you thought that strip of cloth might have belonged to a friend of yours. Hoop Whitaker?” My fisted heart wanted to punch him, but he placed a warm hand on my arm. “I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you’ve got to look at things objectively.”

  “Objectively?” I said. “This might be the first thing that makes sense in my life since I was fourteen.”

  For a flash, Chad looked hurt. He’d been a significant part of my adult life and, in his view, we’d made sense as a couple, at least for a while.

  “Okay,” he said, “but you’ve gotta take a step back.”

  “And how should I do that, Chad?”

  “Well, I’ve got the fashion sense of a slug, but seems to me every kid and his brother wore checkered flannels like that ten or fifteen years ago. Still popular today. That green and black material Sherilyn found could have come from anywhere.”

  “No. That was Hoop’s shirt, his second skin, and sometimes his pillow.” I stepped closer to Chad to make sure he got the message. “Hoop was wearing that shirt the last time I saw him—the last time anyone saw him.” I looked around. “I need to smell it.”

  Chad exchanged a concerned look with Sherilyn.

  “You never know,” I said defensively. “The sense of smell is the most evocative. It’s rooted in our brains.”

  “That might be true, Sweetie,” Sherilyn said, “but that piece of plaid is evidence now. Can’t have you snotting it up, if you know what I mean.” She gave me a supportive squeeze. “You hang tight, and no more jumping to conclusions, okay?” One of Sherilyn’s new techs called her over to look at something.

  I brushed myself off and caught a glimpse of the small room where I’d fainted. Emotion overwhelmed me, but I bucked up. “This is going to wreak havoc with my story.”

  “Your big piece?” Chad said. “I thought it was about the lottery.”

  “Not just the lottery. The article covers the whole week. That’s why I’m calling it The Week.”

  “Before my time, I guess. What else happened? Something to do with this kid, Hoop?”

  I swallowed away the lump in my throat and tried to keep emotion at bay. “It was seven days of dire contrasts,” I said. “Ultimate highs and lows. That’s how my editor pitched it, anyway.”

  “It wasn’t your idea?”

  “No. Someone called up and suggested it, complete with a monetary donation if the article got published right after the twelfth anniversary. I need to turn it in next week.” I refrained from mentioning how I’d lunged across the room to claim the article as my own the moment my editor had pitched it.

  “It was our own Wizard of Oz,” I continued. “Like Beulah got swept up in a horrible tornado and then plunked down in some strange land. First, Macy, a girl in my class, got hit and killed on her bike by Avis Whitaker, right here on Old Pleasant Road.”

  “Where it curves around near the swamp?” Chad said.

  “Yeah. She was only fourteen, and Avis Whitaker was the town’s loveable drunk. He’d gotten hooked on painkillers for a bad back and eventually turned to alcohol. After he hit Macy, he crashed into a big oak tree, went into a coma, and died five days later. Meanwhile, his son, Hoop—”

  “Wait a minute. Your friend, Hoop, was Avis Whitaker’s son?”

  I nodded, the small gesture more challenging than it seemed. “He disappeared without a trace the same day Macy died.” I swallowed back the growing lump, realizing that no time buffer would ever be enough. “Of course, none of us knew about”—I nodded toward Boyd’s basement cell—“whatever this room is. We were all just in shock that Hoop missed Macy’s funeral and never showed up to visit his dad in the hospital. Who could blame him, though? I mean, imagine the love of your life being catapulted from the world by the father you worshipped.”

  “Hold up. This is getting better, or worse, I guess. Hoop’s dad accidentally killed the girl he was sweet on?”

  I nodded. “We were all young, but Hoop made no secret of his feelings for Macy. They would have been an item soon enough. A lot of people thought he must have drowned in the swamp, or, you know . . . lots of ideas floated around. Your dad dredged what he could, set up search parties, but . . .” My shoulders shrugged of their own accord as my eyes stayed glued to the floor. It became a chore just to breathe as I realized how rarely I spoke of the events aloud. “They found his bike in the swamp a few weeks later but I’ve never believed that Black Swamp would take one of its own.”

  “What do you mean, one of its own?”

  “Hoop was a swamp rat. Always hunting snakes or befriending alligators or getting birds to land on his shoulder. Claimed he could tame the beavers if he wanted to.”

  “A Dr. Dolittle-Huck Finn combination?”

  “If you sprinkled in some crazy.”

  Chad took a moment to reflect. “Macy, Hoop, and Hoop’s dad,” he said. “The town lost three people in one week.”

  “And then we gained four winners.” I sounded far from celebratory. “Fate pulled off quite the balancing act because the day after Macy’s funeral, we had the biggest lottery win the state’s ever seen—shared by a foursome as unlikely as the ones who traipsed down the yellow brick road. The ticket was sold right here at Boyd’s.”

  Chad looked dubious as he glanced around. “Doesn’t sound like your article’s going to end with someone clicking their heels and saying, ‘There’s no place like home.’”

  “Definitely not. But maybe we’ll finally be able to pull back the curtain on some things.”

  “What in holy hell?” The voice was coarse and angry, and I realized how rarely I’d heard Boyd Junior speak. My adrenaline shot through the roof. I wanted to tackle him, throttle his skinny, greasy neck and kick his gaunt frame through the wall, but I remained in frozen shock. I grabbed the end of a table and held on. Chad’s strong hands gripped my arms, either to keep me from fainting or to prevent me from committing murder.

  The sheriff caught my reaction, too, so he grabbed Boyd—a claw gripping a straw—and dragged him up the stairs. Away from the evidence. Away from me.

  My rage multiplied. How dare the sheriff deny me the opportunity to se
e Boyd’s reaction as his secrets were splayed open? To savor the moment when Boyd spotted the open door leading to his personal torture chamber?

  I made for the stairs but Chad jerked me back. “Not a good idea, Chloe.”

  “This is none of your business, Chad, and I need to hear what that idiot has to say for himself.”

  “Let Strike handle it. Because right now, it’s none of your business.”

  I wheeled on him, hotly aware of the seconds ticking by as Boyd concocted some lame-ass story to feed the sheriff. “Really, Chad? How good of a job has old Strike been doing exactly? For years, he’s been up there buying bread and milk in the general store and—oh yeah—lottery tickets, while this drug operation thrived right under his nose. And people have always complained about the funky smells coming from this basement, but never once did your father investigate.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yeah? Well, don’t even get me started on other crimes occurring down here that went unaddressed by the sheriff.” I sliced my eyes toward the adjoining room.

  “Come on, Chloe, that’s not—”

  I didn’t hear the rest. I twisted my arm free, pain shooting from wrist to shoulder, and bounded up the stairs just in time to see Boyd being dragged toward the sheriff’s car, his wrists cuffed. The crowd had multiplied to include a news crew, ten cars’ worth of commuters, young moms with toddlers, and a group of skateboarders, all clustered in the parking lot to enjoy the excitement.

  I bolted out, my feet flying, my body cutting through the throng like a razor, but as I got within five feet of my mark, the sheriff spotted me. He spun Boyd around and shoved him into the back seat of his black-and-white cruiser. The sheriff might have been fast, but I was on fire. I got a hand on the car door and slipped my leg in its path before the sheriff could seal Boyd inside.

  “Chloe,” the sheriff said, his eyes slitted, his lips bunched in an angry circle, “this is a police matter. You got no right interfering with an arrest. Back away.”

  “I got no right? What about Hoop’s rights, Sheriff? What about him? No wonder you never found his body. No wonder he didn’t turn up anywhere in the last twelve years. Because he was being held prisoner by this sick excuse for a human being.” My voice began to crack. “He’s probably buried in the field out back.”

  Boyd, whose head was sagging crookedly inside the car, angled his chin out and lifted a lazy eye in my direction. A scar sliced his scraggly eyebrow, creating a vertical slash above his pupil. It made that particular brow look like a bat in flight. Everything about him was cockeyed, including the stupid scowl on his face. “Hoop?” he said. “Hoop Whitaker?” He sounded like a slow three-year-old trying out the name for the first time.

  I lunged at him for even daring to utter the name, not sure what I would do if I got hold of him but knowing it would hurt. The sheriff kept me from finding out as he planted his boulder of a body between us. I used my height advantage over the stocky lawman to poke my head around and address the mangy animal inside. “How dare you say his name! You shouldn’t even be allowed to breathe the same air as Hoop Whitaker. And let me tell you something, Boyd Sexton, no matter what you did in your sleazy little dungeon, you never held a candle to him. Because he shined! So don’t you sit there like some smug jerk when you’re nothing but a drug-dealing, dropout loser who couldn’t even hack high school.”

  Boyd moved his head around slowly as if awakening from a bad night’s sleep. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, but seems to me . . . Hoop Whitaker didn’t finish high school neither.”

  My adrenaline performed an encore. Straining against the sheriff and trying to deal with the shifting realities of the morning, my world spun out of control. Blood rushed through me in both directions. I didn’t know whether to kick the car, head-butt Boyd, or scream for justice.

  I settled for kicking the car—hard—and screaming. “He didn’t graduate because you killed him! You killed him, you bastard! Don’t deny it!”

  I kicked the car again, brutally enough to dent it.

  “Hey, hey, now.” It was Chad’s voice, insanely mellow in comparison to the situation. He’d come up behind me. I vaguely felt his hand on my upper back. No doubt he and the sheriff had been signaling to each other to extricate the crazy lady from the situation, but they also knew what I was capable of. They approached with caution.

  I couldn’t tear my eyes from the contemptible creature in the back seat. “Just give me five minutes with him, Sheriff.” My voice went eerily quiet. “I’ll just talk, I swear. I just want to talk.” Between the dirt on my clothes, the hot, raging redness of my skin, and the hair falling randomly in front of my face, a passing stranger might well mistake me for the one resisting arrest, but I didn’t care. This was my one chance for justice. The skanky, grotesque scarecrow in the back seat was my only chance to learn the truth.

  The sheriff shook his head. No.

  A skateboarder cruised by, laughing, holding his phone up as he videotaped the confrontation. Fine with me. Let the world bear witness to the moment when I finally closed the circle that had ripped open my heart twelve years ago.

  I breathed hard, surprised not to see fire erupting from my nostrils. “Dammit, Sheriff! Let me talk to him. He killed Hoop! Don’t you understand?”

  “Get her out of here, Sheriff,” came Boyd’s coarse voice. “She’s infringing on my rights or something.” He sneered at me, his dark eyes dancing. “Got nothing to say to her anyway. She’s crazy as a rabid dog.”

  I squirmed around the sheriff and got close to Boyd’s face, although Chad’s grip on my wrists cuffed me as surely as the suspect. “You think you’re the one giving the orders now, you pathetic worm? You’re going down for this. Murder one. You’re gonna fry.”

  Chad hauled me back, whispered in my ear. “This isn’t helping matters, Chloe. Anything he says now is inadmissible and we don’t want him getting it out of his system.”

  But the culmination of a dozen years of anger had taken the wheel. I kicked the air as Chad pulled me back. “You’ll pay, Boyd Sexton! Front page! Sick pedophile deviant gets the chair!”

  The sheriff finally got his chance to close the door, but Boyd thrust his foot out this time, wedging it open. “Last I checked,” he said, “a few pot plants don’t make the news, bitch.”

  “I saw you looking at him, Boyd! I saw you! You always wanted him.”

  The sheriff kicked Boyd’s leg so hard that a crack rang out, but Strike Ryker excelled at subtlety; no one saw any hint of police violence.

  Boyd let out a grunt of pain and drew his leg back. The Sheriff slammed the door, huffed around to the driver’s seat, and took off.

  “We’ve got him, Chloe,” Chad said. “He’s not going anywhere for a long time.”

  I heard the words but took no comfort. The sheriff’s car grew smaller as it drove away. A long time? A long time wasn’t an eternity. It wasn’t a lifetime lost.

  Chapter 6

  Five Days Before the Thump

  “And I’m supposed to go where with my little girl, Richie?” Melanie LeGrange said into the phone. “You want us on the street?”

  Macy LeGrange’s gaunt but beautiful mom, Melanie, probably thought she was shouting with vigor and standing taller than her five-and-a-half feet, but in reality, her words entered the phone like a drowsy sigh, surely stirring no empathy in Richie Quail, their landlord.

  The former high school cheerleader listened to Quail on the other end of the line, and then spoke in a murmur as she supported her head with her palm. “I know you need your money, Richie. Darrell’s check should definitely arrive tomorrow.”

  Even Macy had to scrunch her face at that whopper. No way Richie Quail was buying it—again. All parties involved knew that fifteen years ago, Melanie LeGrange had fallen for the wrong high school jock: Darrell LeGrange, narcissistic bully. At the time, Darrell must have looked like security and sexiness all rolled into one, but that image had proven as false as his wedding vows. A
ccording to the old stories, Macy’s touchdown-scoring, home run-hitting father would swagger out of the high school weight room, a sheen of sweat coating his oversized muscles and a dare-you-to grin aimed in Melanie’s direction. The mutual attraction had taken them down the aisle and to a subpar honeymoon in Atlantic City, where they conceived Macy. Melanie wised up after that and got on the pill, but over the course of the next decade, the disagreements escalated from mild to riotous, and the words from unkind to spiteful. Darrell’s career skipped from car salesman to construction worker, and ultimately, to bounty hunter, while his appearances at the dinner table grew almost nonexistent. The sheen of well-earned sweat had long since dulled, and finally, twenty-eight months ago, he’d swaggered out of Melanie and Macy’s lives for good, taking their savings and his female assistant with him.

  “Listen, Richie,” Melanie said before getting cut off. “Yes, I’ve considered that . . . Yes, I’ve got applications in now for two jobs.”

  Macy cringed inside. The last application her mother had filled out was for Macy’s reduced-price lunches, and even that had been denied due to Darrell’s court-ordered child support payments. But those checks had proven as elusive as the criminals he tried to hunt.

  Macy patted her mother on the back and indicated she’d be outside. She liked to give her mom privacy when Richie Quail delivered his lectures on personal responsibility. Supposedly, Quail had been so skinny in high school, he’d been nicknamed Quail the Rail, but Macy couldn’t conjure such an image. To her, and to all the tenants of his ratty duplex development, he’d never be anything but Quail the Whale, 300-plus pounds of not-so-lean mean.

  Macy stepped outside and the humidity almost flattened the waves in her hair. Even the weeds in the tiny front yard had wilted and matted themselves to the ground like pressed flowers in a frame of mud. But the oppressive heat seemed to lift when a familiar boy with shoulder-length blond hair, lean arms, and a crush as big as the moon, skidded up to Macy’s yard on his 3-speed Schwinn. That bike held itself together with string, wire, and hope, but for Hoop Whitaker, that was more than enough.