Page 12 of Go Alone

“Anita’s looking into that as well,” Kate said. “Maybe he was. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what she comes up with.”

Marcus nodded. “Well, I’ll leave the coffee pot for you. I’m going to bed.”

“Want me to tuck you in?”

The words were out of Kate’s mouth before she could stop herself, not the first time that had happened to her today. She sipped her coffee, both to hide her chagrin and to maybe give her brain a bit of a smack in the ass so she could stop talking like a moron.

Fortunately, Marcus took it as a joke. Without turning to her, he climbed onto his bed and said, “Only if you use yourself as a blanket.”

He pulled the actual blanket over his body, leaving only his head exposed. Within a minute, he was snoring softly, blissfully unaware that lying atop him was exactly the thought running through Kate’s mind when she blurted that sentence out.

She picked up her coffee mug and cell phone, slipped her feet into a pair of wool slippers her mother had given her for her birthday the year before, back when they were happy with each other, and Catherine wasn’t angry with her for asking why Elijah Cox called her father a false witness. Then she headed outside.

That was the part of the cipher Marcus didn’t ask about. He didn’t ask about it because Kate had written that portion of the cipher on a separate page and slid it under the rest.

Now his way has reached its end.

Just like the way of the slain false witness who stole a legacy that belonged to another.

Their room was situated in a long hallway, one of three in the single-story U-shaped motel. At the end of that hallway was a glass door that swung out onto a square of sidewalk populated by two vending machines, one offering a modest array of chips and candy bars and the other an even more modest array of Coca-Cola products.

One day, if history were preserved well enough, academics would declare the single-story, U-shaped motel and its attendant vending machines the defining structure of Middle America.

Kate wondered how many lives had passed through this motel: couples enjoying a single bed, traveling salespeople watching grainy reruns and infomercials, drifters handing over crumpled bills in exchange for a night away from the elements, dreamers with their eyes focused on the lights of New York or the stars of Los Angeles. Maybe even frustrated FBI agents leaving the man they were one good day away from falling in love with in bed while they contemplated their slain father's past and possible connection to the serial murderer obsessed with murdering the daughter, as they had possibly murdered the father.

Kate had looked everywhere for evidence of her father’s false witness, everywhere for evidence of his theft of someone else’s ideas. She’d found nothing. No connection to Elijah Cox either. Poppy, a better researcher in a coma than Kate would be on Adderall, hadn’t found anything either.

But Catherine knew. Her mother knew. She wouldn’t admit it, but she knew.

Kate, who hadn’t smoked once in her life, sipped her coffee and wished it was a cigarette.

She set the cup on the ground behind the snack machine and pulled her cell phone from her pocket, just before nine. Gabe would still be awake.

She got his voicemail. That wasn’t common, but it wasn’t unheard of. He might be entertaining guests or grading papers. Hell, he might be at the peak of a marijuana edible trip with Sandy, his possibly sister, possibly lover, possibly invisible elf imaginary friend who he had referenced precisely once in the years she’d known him.

She left him a voicemail letting him know she was going to email him the cipher. She would leave it at that for now. She’d bothered him about Cox’s allusion to her father before. Like everyone else who knew about it, he told her that Cox was a liar and anything he said about her father was a lie too.

She only wished she could believe him.

CHAPTER FIVE

If one day some enterprising individual elected to write a treatise on the Midwest and sought for that treatise a subtitle that accurately described the feel of that expansive region, the subtitle Anita Purcell would suggest to that individual was Land of Ten Thousand Sayings. Midwesterners considered themselves straightforward people, and in their own way, they were. They just spoke a dialect of English that consisted almost entirely of idioms and pithy sayings.

Anita had grown up with many of those sayings, offered from the mouth of a stern, aloof mother who loved her children fiercely and believed the way to show that love was to offer not a comforting shoulder but a stern reproof, couched in the guise of one of Middle America’s many proverbs.

Never go raspberry pickin’ in shorts. Never run through a cow pasture barefoot. Some thoughts are meant to stay behind buttoned lips. Never beat around the bush. Never buy a pig in a poke.

Most of those sayings didn’t lend themselves to easy interpretation, even in context, but nearly all of them had to do with not doing something she had caught Anita doing. The pig in a poke one came after Anita bought her first car, a 1973 Dodge pickup that ran for one hundred thirty miles before shooting a rod through the cylinder head and halfway out the hood.

One saying, though, was both not unique to the Midwest and not prohibitive so much as observational. That saying was the one that ran through Anita’s mind as she stared at the information she’d collected on one Howard Alton Greer over the past eight hours.

You never really know somebody.

Howard, like Anita herself, was an Outsider. In the verbiage of Millbrook, the population was never less than eighty and never more than one hundred twenty in the entirety of its existence, one was either a Local, From Town (meaning Wooster), or an Outsider.

It didn’t matter that Anita was from a town just as small and just as stagnant as Millbrook. It didn’t matter that she’d spent almost half her life married to a descendant of the oldest family still remaining, not only in Millbrook but in all of Wayne County. She grew up elsewhere, so she was an Outsider.

Howard was from Columbus, the state capital an hour and a half southwest of Millbrook. Columbus was one of three true Big Cities in Ohio, the others being Cleveland and Cincinnati. He’d moved to Millbrook eleven years ago while still working for the Columbus city planning office. Anita hadn’t known him especially well, but it was impossible not to know someone at least a little bit in a town as small as Millbrook.