“Only thing I’m curious about is why you brought me along.”

“A lawyer always brings an investigator when he questions witnesses.”

“That he does. But my guess, Vic, is you don’t want me nowhere near that courtroom.”

He was right, I didn’t. As far as I knew, only Skink could connect me to Hailey Prouix, and that I couldn’t allow. “Maybe not. Maybe I just like your company.”

“I am charming, I am. But if I was a hundred and fifty dollars a day charming, I’d be in another line of work. You don’t know what the hell you’re getting into, do you?”

“Nope.”

“And you wanted to bring some muscle.”

“Something like that.”

“All right, then.”

“Don’t you want to know my plan?”

“Nah,” he said, turning from the edge and heading back for the path up the hill. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re chasing here after your own tail. I don’t need no plan. I’ll just sit back and watch the show.”

31

“COURSE I remember,” said Chief Edmonds as he wrapped his meaty hands around a coffee cup. “How could I forget? A sight like that’s not something slips away so easy. When they pulled him out of the water, he was bloated and white like a German Wasserwurst and the back of his head was cracked open like a walnut.”

I tried to ignore the unpleasant food imagery as I finished my breakfast.

We were in Kim’s Luncheonette on Main Street, a large, barren café that, with its high ceiling and uncomfortable spaciousness, seemed to have taken over for a failed hardware store in one of the city’s squat brick buildings. The plain Formica tables were sparsely filled with grizzled patrons, who slumped over their meals and drank their coffees in silence.

“How was everything, Harvey?” said the woman behind the counter when a man stepped over to pay for his eggs.

“Just fine.”

“That’ll be a dollar eighty-six.”

“Uh-oh, I ain’t got it.”

“Then it will be four-fifty.”

They both shared a laugh as he handed over his money. Behind the counter at Kim’s was a large stainless steel milk refrigerator with one serving spigot, the red sign above the spigot holding a single word: WHOLE.

Edmonds and I finished up our breakfasts: eggs, ham, grits, and biscuits with white milk gravy. Skink pawed with his spoon at his milkless oatmeal. The dress code required blue jeans and baseball caps advertising various farm implements, and so Skink and I stood out more than a bit, Skink in his brown suit, me in my shirtsleeves. The chief sat stolidly in his flannel shirt and green John Deere baseball cap. Edmonds’s name had been in Jesse’s letters to Hailey. It hadn’t taken much to look him up in the Pierce telephone directory, and it hadn’t taken much more to get him out to Kim’s. Edmonds, now retired, seemed to welcome the company and was willing enough to talk about Hailey. Trying to get people to speak to me was pretty much the extent of the wondrous plan I had wrought: I would take my cue from the letters, talk to the principals involved, try to shake something loose.

I said I had a plan; I didn’t say it was brilliant.

In the middle of breakfast I had dropped the picture of the boy in his baseball uniform onto the center of our table. I figured that might start things shaking, and maybe it did. When Edmonds saw it, he closed his eyes for a moment and exhaled the name. “Jesse Sterrett.”

“What happened?” I asked after he had described the corpse.

“Who the hell knows?” said Edmonds. “That damn quarry. In Jesse’s time they necked and did their drugs there. In my time we necked and drank our beer there. Now they neck and do who knows what there. We’ve got a fence all around and signs warning everyone to stay away, warning that the rock faces have grown unsteady over time, but I suppose there never was a danger sign that teenagers didn’t ignore. We were forever patrolling, shining in our spotlights, but it didn’t do any good. It was only a matter of time before something happened. Best as we could tell, he fell down, cracked his head, and then tumbled into the water.”

“An accident?” said Skink.

“Yep.”

“Everyone thought so?” I pressed.

“All that mattered, me and the coroner.”

“Doc Robinson.”

“That’s right.”

“How about the boy’s father?”

“You know parents. If a kid crashes the car, it must be a dangerous turn that should have been fixed years ago. If the kid busts a knee in football, it’s the coach’s fault. Always looking for someone to blame. How else could you lawyers stay in business? Jesse’s dad didn’t want to believe that his son was out at the quarry smoking that marihuana and just got careless.”

“Jesse Sterrett didn’t smoke marihuana,” I said.

Edmonds was taken up short. “How do you know that?”

“And didn’t you find it peculiar that a week after Jesse is in a brutal fight that puts a boy in the hospital, he’s found dead?”

Chief Edmonds squinted his hard blue eyes at me. “Come again with what you’re doing here?”

“We’re just trying to understand what happened to Hailey. We have the idea…” I glanced at Skink. “I have the idea that there might be some connection between what happened to Hailey and what happened to Jesse Sterrett.”

“I’m sorry as hell about Hailey. I knew her father, played cards with her uncle, and what’s happened with her sister is just plain sad. I’m sorry as hell, but I’m not surprised. She had a wild streak no one could tame.”

“What is it that happened with her sister?”

Edmonds looked at me and pursed his lips. “I’m willing to tell you what I know about Hailey, but that’s as far as I go. Though I’ll tell you this for free: There’s nothing between what happened to her and what happened to that boy.”

“Weren’t Hailey and Jesse going together when he died?”

“Not as I recall. I seem to recall that Jesse had other interests.”

“Like baseball.”

“Just other interests. And as I remember it, Hailey was seeing someone else at the time. That fight, it was just something between two boys. It’s not unusual ’round here. This one just got a little out of hand. From what I learned, they had been at each other’s throats for years.”

“Jesse and Grady,” I said.

“That’s right. Grady Pritchett. He was like a spur in Jesse’s side, never gave it a moment’s rest. Two guys hate each other like that, you don’t need a reason to fight. From what I could tell, the fight was Grady’s doing. That’s why we let Jesse go back to school and play ball after just a few days.”

“And you never thought there might be a link between the fight and the death?”

“Like I said, it looked like an accident to us. But we did our jobs. Police work’s the same out here as anywhere else. We brought in Grady for questioning. Said he knew nothing about it, said it convincingly, too. He’d been in trouble before, and he had lied to us before, and this time looked to me he wasn’t lying. But still we checked him out. Oh, we did ourselves a full investigation. Doc Robinson insisted, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. On the night of the accident Grady said he was with someone at the time. We went out and proved up his alibi. Witness we talked to was as definite as could be. So that was that.”

I leaned forward. “Who was the witness?”

Edmonds took a sip of his coffee. “Hailey,” he said. “And she didn’t have no doubt about it.”