Chapter 26
Back to the Beginning
Three days after the hullabaloo that occurred outside of Bozeman, Sheriff David Reid was shuffling papers at his desk, muttering to himself as he thumbed through the pages. His faithful hound dog, Bandit, was curled up in his dog bed in the corner, enjoying the warm rectangle of sunlight that was coming in from the window. Every so often, the sheriff would turn around to scratch the top of Bandit’s head before returning to the stack of papers he was perusing. The tox report for Michaelangelo Z. Hastings had just arrived, which indicated acute amatoxin poisoning; Sheriff O’Toole’s team had determined that the tea he’d made for himself two days prior to passing – made from his own hand-picked, dehydrated mushroom stems – was the culprit. Of course, there was still the matter of the other two mugs of tea found at the scene, but if Harry didn’t feel the need to launch a full investigation, Reid certainly wasn’t going to stick his nose in another county’s business.
But something was tickling the back of Sheriff Reid’s mind – something from a long time ago. He couldn’t have known the man – certainly a name like Michaelangelo Z. Hastings would have rung a bell. But there was something about him that made the sheriff lean back in his chair with his hands folded behind his head and ponder for a good quarter of an hour. Hastings… Had he been involved in some sort of crime long ago? Did he file a police report at some point? Had his wife mentioned the name for some reason? The sheriff ground his teeth. He didn’t like to be stumped, especially when the answer was just on the tip of his tongue—
His secretary’s voice startled him out of his reverie.
“—Chief Quinn and his daughter.”
“Huh?” he barked, nearly toppling out of his chair.
Pamela was poking her head into his office. “Sir, I said Chief Quinn and his daughter, Lilah, are here to see you. They said it’s a matter of importance.”
“Give me five minutes and then send them in,” he said, rising from his chair. “I just remembered something important…”
As the door clicked shut behind her, Sheriff Reid strode over to the long wall of filing cabinets, yanked the top drawer of the second from the last one open, and began thumbing through the labels, still muttering under his breath.
“Here we go,” he said, pulling a dusty manila file from its folder. It was labeled “Lilah Quinn,” and had every piece of information he and Stanley had ever dug up about her – which boiled down to practically nothing. It was a worthless folder filled with empty leads and dead ends. But near the back of the folder was an intake report relating to the two Mayweather women who had disappeared the same night Lilah was dumped at Quinn’s station. One of the handful of people who had been called in for questioning was named Mike Hastings.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the sheriff muttered, scratching the thinning hair under his wide-brimmed hat.
He was still nose-deep in the file when Stanley and Lilah stepped into his office.
“Stan, come on in,” he said, setting the file aside to shake his hand. “Lilah, always nice to see you. What can I do for you both?”
The two of them exchanged pointed glances as they took their seats in front of the sheriff’s desk, as if they weren’t sure where to begin. After an uncomfortable minute, it was Stanley who eventually broke the silence.
“Well, uh, I don’t really know how to say this, Dave, but uh—”
“We’d like your help solving a murder,” Lilah cut in, earning a sharp look from her father.
“A murder?” Sheriff Reid leaned forward in his chair. “What’s this all about, Stan?”
Stanley puffed up his cheeks and blew out a long, protracted breath. Then he turned to Lilah and gave a resigned shrug. “You know what, Li? Go ahead. I don’t know any other way to explain it to him.”
Lilah rolled up her jacket sleeves and took a deep breath. “Sixteen years ago, the same night I was found at Dad’s fire station, two women went missing—”
“Willow and Celeste Mayweather,” Sheriff Reid interjected. “Right?”
“Er, yes.” Lilah blinked in surprise. “Well, as it turns out, they were my biological mother and grandmother, but you couldn’t have known that because they hid the fact that Willow had given birth to a baby. Anyway, on their way home from leaving me at the station, they pulled over to help a hitchhiker. A Hispanic woman in a red rain jacket and torn jeans.”
“Now wait just a minute. How could you possibly—”
Stanley held up a hand. “Just hang tight, Dave. We’ll get to all that.”
“When they stopped to talk to her,” Lilah continued, her rushed words stringing together like Christmas lights, “a man pulled Celeste out of the car. He had blond, short-cropped hair, a mustache, and was maybe forty years old. He had yellow paint on his coveralls and boots. Oh, and he had a bandage over his left eyebrow. Anyway, I think he killed them. Well, I know he killed Willow because her body is under a huckleberry bush about a hundred yards behind Mile Marker 147. I just need your help figuring out who the man was.”
Lilah said all of this in one long breath, and when she finished, she collapsed into her seat, wiping a bead of anxious sweat from her brow. The room had fallen completely silent, save for the muffled sounds of a jackhammer outside on the street. Hearing that, a thought suddenly occurred to her.
“Hey… Do you think the paint had to do with road work?”
“Road work?” Stanley asked, stroking his beard. “As in, the guy was a construction worker? It’s an interesting theory.”
Sheriff Reid’s jaw was hanging open as he gawked at the two of them. “What on God’s green earth are you two talking about?” he asked, confusion plastering his bushy eyebrows to his deeply furrowed forehead.
Stanley gave the sheriff a sheepish look. “Look, Dave, it’s hard to explain, and I know it all sounds crazy, but… is there anyone in your working memory who might fit that man’s description?”
“First things first – what’s this you’re telling me about a body?” Sheriff Reid leaned forward on his desk.
Stanley started to say something, stopped, started again, then finally tossed his hands in the air. “Kid, I think we better start at the beginning since I don’t know another way around this – what do you say?”
“He’ll think we’re crazy.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to show him, won’t we?”
As the two of them appeared to continue their conversation using only raised eyebrows and thinly-veiled shrugs, Sheriff Reid picked up his desk phone. “Pam – I need you to hold all my calls for the next hour… Nothing comes through, not even the mayor.”
After he set the phone back on its cradle, he leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands over his belt buckle, and clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Well, come on then… let’s hear it.”
With one final glance at her father, Lilah took a deep breath. “Well, you see… it all started with this cat.”
· · ·
It had been a full five minutes since Lilah had finished her story, and Sheriff Reid still hadn’t said anything. Every so often he would open his mouth and raise a finger as if to speak, but then he would lower it, drum his fingers on the desk, and clutch his mouth with his other hand, seemingly deep in thought. All the while, Stanley was twiddling his thumbs anxiously, while Lilah was staring at her hands, tightly clasped in her lap. She wished, more than anything, that Jace could have been there to hold her hand during all of this. But her father had forbidden it, and she begrudgingly found herself agreeing with him – they were, after all, talking about a murder. Two, depending on how you looked at Mike Hastings’ death. Lilah had very much wanted to confess that part to Sheriff Reid – leaving Jace’s role out of it entirely – but, after filling her in on the mushroom theory, Stanley made her swear up and down that she would hold off on mentioning the tree that temporarily grew out of Mike’s torso. They would first wait to hear the results of the toxicology report; if it showed no trace of amatoxins, then and only then would he let her confess to anything. And even then, Stanley was already trying to come up with a plausible story about how Mike Hastings’ death was his fault, not Lilah’s.