“Lights?”
“He put all these lights in the trees and everywhere. It makes it harder for me to sleep, and then Mom gets mad. ”
“Was it your father who told you about the place at the lake?” Wren shook his head.
“Then who did?” I asked.
“Creed.”
“Creed?”
“He’s one of the janitors at school. He makes toothpicks, and we buy them for a dollar. Ten for a dollar. He soaks them in peppermint and cinnamon.
I like the cinnamon best’cause they’re real hot like Fireballs. Sometimes I trade him candy when I run out of lunch money. But you can’t tell anybody. ” He looked worried.
“What does Creed look like?” I asked as a quiet alarm began to sound in the back of my brain.
“I don’t know,” Wren said.
“He’s a greaser’cause he’s always wearing white socks with boots. I guess he’s pretty old.” He sighed.
“Do you know his last name?” Wren shook his head.
“Has he always worked at your school?” He shook his head again.
“He took Albert’s place. Albert got sick from smoking, and they had to cut his lung out.”
“Wren,” I asked, “did Creed and Emily know each other?” He was talking faster and faster.
“We used to make her mad by saying Creed was her boyfriend’cause one time he gave her some flowers he picked. And he would give her candy’cause she didn’t like toothpicks. You know, a lot of girls would rather have candy than toothpicks.”
“Yes,” I answered with a grim smile, “I suspect a lot of girls would.”
The last thing I asked Wren was if he had visited the place at the lake where Emily’s body had been found. He claimed he had not.
“I believe him,” I said to Marino as we drove away from the Maxwells’ well-lit house.
“Not me. I think he’s lying his little ass off so his old man don’t whip the shit out of him.” He turned down the heat.
“This ride heats up better than any one I’ve ever had. All it’s missing is heaters in the seats like you got in your Benz.”
“The way he described the scene at the lake,” I went on, “tells me he’s never been there. I don’t think he left the candy there, Marino.”
“Then who did?”
“What do you know about a custodian named Creed?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“Well,” I said, “I think you’d better find him. And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t think Emily took the shortcut around the lake on her way home from the church.”
“Shit,” he complained.
“I hate it when you get like this. Just when pieces start to fall in place you shake the hell out of them like a damn puzzle in a box.”
“Marino, I took the path around the lake myself. There’s no way an eleven-year-old girl–or anybody else, for that matter–would do that when it’s getting dark. And it would have been almost completely dark by six p.m.” which was the time Emily headed home. ”
“Then she lied to her mother,” Marino said.
“It would appear so. But why?”
“Maybe because Emily was up to something.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. You got any Scotch in the room? I mean, there’s no point in asking if you got bourbon.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“I don’t have bourbon.”
I found five messages awaiting me when I returned to the Travel-Eze. Three were from Benton Wesley. The Bureau was sending the helicopter to pick me up at dawn. When I got hold of Wesley he cryptically said, “Among other things, we’ve got rather a crisis situation with your niece. We’re bringing you straight back to Quantico.”
“What’s happened?” I asked as my stomach closed like a fist.
“Is Lucy all right?”
“Kay, this is not a secured line.”
“But is she all right?”
“Physically,” he said, “she’s fine.”
10
The next morning I woke up to mist and could not see the mountains. My return north was postponed until afternoon, and I went out for a run in the brisk, moist air.
I wended my way through neighborhoods of cozy homes and modest cars, smiling as a miniature collie behind a chain link fence raced from one border of the yard to another, barking frantically at falling leaves.