“What do you think she meant by that? Do you think she could kill anybody?”

  A somber look came over Earlene’s face. “There was a part of Eve that really kind of frightened me. She had a horrible dark side—these unbelievable rages, and dark, dark depressions. But when she was at a party, she was the life of the party. She’d dance on the tables; she could outdrink every man at the place. She had no inhibitions whatsoever and always wanted to push the limits. My first husband used to call her Zelda, after some writer’s crazy wife, I don’t know who. As for killing somebody, I...” Earlene stopped.

  Silence hung in the air between us.

  “You believe she could, don’t you?”

  “The Saturday night we went out, Eve got really drunk. She had been caring for her mother for several years by then and it was a horrible stress on her. Betty has dementia so bad. Eve spends half her money keeping up that house and the other half paying for her mother’s care. We went out to dinner that night, and then to this bar. I wanted to stay and have a few drinks, but Eve was acting all paranoid, said she was being followed, so we went to the liquor store, picked up a bottle of vodka and we went back to my condo.”

  “Paranoid? About what?”

  “She always got this paranoid streak when she came home.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  Earlene shrugged. “Who knows? She made so many people angry over the years.”

  “But you said she lived in Texas. The people she dealt with professionally wouldn’t have followed her back to Jubilant Falls, would they?” I thought about Betty’s reaction to the photo of the young man found in the creek.

  Earlene shrugged. “She wasn’t talking about her job. In her line of work, she eliminated the chaff and the dead weight after a company bought another company out.”

  “So she came in after corporate raiders bought a company and gutted its staff.” I made a note to check in with Leland Huffinger for the details on her professional life.

  “Whatever you want to call it, there was a lot of weight on her shoulders from a lot of different sources. When we got to my condo, we had more than a couple drinks and that’s where she went off the deep end.”

  “About what?”

  “I mentioned that we’d done a fortieth anniversary issue on the tornado and she just went crazy. ‘I don’t want to talk about that stupid tornado! I don’t want to remember that day!’ she said. I told you that Monday, remember? She just kept doing shots, one right after the other.”

  “The tornado destroyed a lot of people’s lives,” I said, trying to hide the fact I hadn’t listened to too much of anything she’d said Monday afternoon. “What else did Eve say?”

  “That’s just it. That night was the second time I ever heard her talk about Jimmy Lyle.”

  My stomach tightened in fear. I swallowed hard and looked her in the eye.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She said there weren’t thirty-five people killed in the tornado. There were only thirty-four.”

  “Did she mention Jimmy Lyle specifically?” My pulse quickened.

  Earlene nodded. “I asked her, ‘Eve, who are you talking about?’ She just kept saying ‘Jimmy was going to ruin my life. He was going to ruin my life and he got what he deserved.’ I asked her if she knew how he really died and that’s when she turned on me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she knew what really happened, but if I ever mentioned this conversation to anybody about Jimmy Lyle, she would destroy me. I tried to convince her to tell somebody, but she wouldn’t hear of it. We argued and she left. Then Monday the police find her dead in the park and I’m looking at a murder charge!”

  I leaned back in my Morris chair as Earlene checked herself in the make-up mirror.

  “Tell me something, Earlene. Did you ever go to her house?”

  Earlene leaned to the side the mirror and gave me an odd look. “Of course not!”

  “Really? Why not? I mean if you two were such good friends…”

  “With her home situation, Eve didn’t want me to come over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You never knew? The abuse she suffered at that house was horrible. She’s an angel for taking care of Betty, after all that happened at that house.”

  Chapter 21 Charisma

  I handed the letter back to Gary.

  “She’s accused him of GSI—gross sexual imposition. That’s pretty damned serious,” I said. “Did you know that was in there?”

  Gary flipped through a few more pages of Martz’ personnel file before answering me.

  “If I did, it wouldn’t have mattered before Eve Dahlgren was killed. But look at this.” McGinnis handed me another piece of paper. “The post did an investigation, as she asked. The commander took the whole thing very seriously—put Martz on desk duty and everything—but it didn’t last too long. Apparently, what Miss Dahlgren didn’t realize was that warnings—written or verbal—are recorded in the dispatch log. It’s a little different than what we do here at the PD. We actually keep all written warnings on file for a period of time. When investigators checked the log for the nights Eve claimed Martz stopped her, they found no mention of a warning or even a traffic stop. They couldn’t even find a record of her calling in to complain—and if someone called in to accuse a trooper of a sex crime, there’d sure as hell be a record of it and there would sure as hell be a swift response. Because of that, the post commander said there was no basis for her accusations and dismissed the whole thing. She apparently wasn’t happy.”

  “According to one of Addison’s sources, the woman who was the cheerleader with Eve, she had a tendency to fabricate stories to get back at people,” I said.

  “Looks like that’s what happened here,” Gary said, flipping through the file. “She wanted to stick to her guns, though. Her lawyer threatened a lawsuit, screamed cover up, but backed down when faced with the truth.”

  “But why would she target a trooper?”

  “I don’t know,” McGinnis said. “According to the investigation report, this whole thing was ‘the result of some unknown personal vendetta.’ Bob Martz may have flirted with the women in the office, but he was a professional with the general public, from what I heard while I was there. Eve may have come on to him somewhere or somehow. When he refused her advances, it pissed her off and she wrote this letter. Who knows at this point?”

  “Could it have gotten him killed though? Could Eve Dahlgren have shot him?”

  Gary shot a sideways look at me. “You’re listening to your boss too much. She wants to pin an awful lot on our victim. Eve may have been a badge bunny—”

  “A what?”

  “A badge bunny—a woman who wants to have sex with cops, especially if they’re in uniform. Eve may have been a badge bunny, but we don’t think she’s a killer.”

  A shadow darkened the door and we looked up as a heavy, almost obese police officer stepped into the room. The epaulets on his white starched shirt had four stars and he carried his hat in his hand. It had the same four stars across the front.

  “Hey Marvin,” Gary said, nodding. “Charisma Lemarnier, this is my brother Marvin. He’s the chief.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Chief,” I said shaking his hand. “I had hopes of interviewing you for the story about the body in the creek, but we never seemed to make connections.”

  Marvin McGinnis’s bear-paw hand covered my hand. “Yes, my schedule can get pretty full. Still, I’m pleased to meet you. It’s not often we have a reporter with your qualifications come to Jubilant Falls,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, my throat tightening.

  “Most reporters who’ve covered Baghdad probably find Jubilant Falls a very dull place.”

  I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw. What I’d feared for so long, what I’d tried to hide was somehow known to the world. Who would have done this to me? Why? My hand, still clutched in the chief’s heavy grasp, began to shake. I pulled it free.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Please don’t say anything… I can’t let anybody find me. I’m not ready.”

  The chief didn’t hear me. “You don’t look like I remember you from television, though. Wasn’t your hair blonde back then? You’re face is a little different, too, but then with the injuries you sustained… I probably shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I just remember sitting in front of the television watching that one series you did on girls’ schools in Afghanistan. Man, that was powerful stuff, powerful stuff. Then when that bomb went off—”

  Gary’s eyes widened as he too realized my identity.

  “You’re Charisma Prentiss!” he gasped. “Oh my God!”

  “Stop it! Shut up!” I screamed. Dropping the papers from Bob Martz’s file onto the floor, I ran from the room, out the door of the basement department and up the stairs into the street.

  Chapter 22 Leland

  I ordered lunch at the hotel restaurant and carried it up to my room, where I would continue my research.

  Thanks to the clip files, I had a list of firms Eve Dahlgren was employed by, either full-time or as a consultant, up until the mid-1990s. Hopefully, I could get folks to talk to me and let me know what she was like, where she went after that and why. A couple phone calls shouldn’t take long; although not the most ethical thing to do, being a fake PI was a good cover. There would be plenty of time this afternoon to run that stuff down.

  My mind was on Charisma.

  As I ate, I thought about everything I’d seen in the Journal-Gazette newsroom this morning. They were a hard-working bunch, comfortable working with each other. Although Charisma also gave her job all she had, I noticed she kept herself apart from most interaction with the other staff members. One young man spoke incessantly about his infant daughter; an older male reporter, looking to be in his early fifties, spoke about covering city hall to Addison. From his conversation, he sounded like the most senior reporter there. A photographer was on staff, but he was apparently out on a vacation day. Dennis, the only person whose name I caught, was the assistant editor and functioned often as the one who kept everything running smoothly.

  The chatter was typical of most newsrooms I’d been in—loud, profane and politically incorrect—but Charisma didn’t take part in any of it. She kept her head down and worked as everything circled around her. It might have been part of her efforts to stay unrecognized; it might have been her single-minded focus, I wasn’t sure. As a result, she wasn’t really an integral part of the team. The others knew she could be counted on, that she would fulfill her responsibilities, but I sensed that they hadn’t bonded with her. She wasn’t one of them and until she opened up and put down roots here, she wouldn’t be.

  I’d seen that in other small newspapers, ones dominated with staff members whose families had been in the community for generations. New employees who were not related to someone in the community were welcomed and accepted, but it was expected at some point they would move on—and they generally did. Was that what was happening here? If so, that couldn’t necessarily be blamed on Charisma.

  Why had she chosen this particular little Ohio town? Was it the slower pace? Was it the off-the-beaten-path aspect of Jubilant Falls? Maybe she figured both would be make it easier for her to recover. And why choose to hide in plain sight as she had? Why continue to work in an industry like the news that made someone’s identity so public, day after day?

  When Noah died and my marriage collapsed, I couldn’t face the public scrutiny and chose to hide in academia. While I wasn’t charged with my son’s death, I still had to live with the story on the front page, followed less than six months later by another headline, Reporter Charged In Assault, after I punched Bitch Goddess’s lover in the face. Philly newspapers, as well as every other East Coast paper had a field day with it, with headlines filled with leering, juvenile double meanings that nearly destroyed Bitch Goddess’s career. That was followed a few months later by a brief page 3B story that began: An Inquirer reporter charged with assaulting a Channel 3 news anchor received probation and will enter alcohol rehabilitation as part of his sentence.

  The story ended with the publisher’s statement, “Mr. Huffinger has been a great part of the team here at the Philadelphia Inquirer for a number of years and we wish him well on his efforts to regain his health.”

  The story didn’t include a picture of me being escorted out of the building by security, a box of personal belongings in my arms. Management wouldn’t fire me until I’d been proven guilty, after all.

  No one ever came looking for me and I did everything to keep the story of my own personal and professional implosion to myself. Outside of my AA meetings, I never told anyone the truth about myself.

  Like Charisma, I’d found a place to hide, an insular little world of my own.

  She said I’d been the first to come looking for her. It hadn’t been too difficult. Did the general public really have that short of an attention span? Was that what she was counting on?

  Maybe tonight she’d be willing to open up to me about her PTSD. Maybe I could find out more of what was behind her choices.

  I swallowed my last bite of lunch, stacked my dirty dishes on the tray, and opened the door to set them in the hall for pick up. A young woman from housekeeping walked by, carrying a stack of towels in her arms. A lavender fragrance, similar to Charisma’s, followed in her wake.

  I sat the tray on the carpeted hall floor and leaned against my doorframe, struck by the nearly physical reaction I had to the scent.

  I had more than veered off the path I intended to follow when I came to Jubilant Falls. I wasn’t anywhere near close to looking at this whole situation from an academic or objective viewpoint. Why even pretend I was here to research anything? After all, it’s not like the department chair knew what I was doing, or that I’d received any kind of a grant or stipend to fund this wild goose chase. My meals, my hotel bill and my airline ticket all came out of my own pocket.

  Don’t lie to yourself, old man, I thought.

  I came in search of the world’s most sought-after reporter, and suddenly didn’t want to expose her secrets. I’d seen her at her best, making sure she got the information she needed the night the inn burned. I’d seen her at her worst, fighting through the after-effects of the trauma she’d endured. Who was I to rip open her wounds again, this time for the public to see?

  Charisma held me at arms length for that very reason. I saw that now.

  I stepped back into my hotel room and closed the door.

  If I was going to gain her trust, I had to keep up my end of the bargain and see what I could dig up about Eve Dahlgren.

  Chapter 23 Addison

  “Betty Dahlgren abused Eve?” I stared at Earlene, who was back to gazing at herself in the make up mirror, adjusting each one of her false lashes, like Gloria Swanson in ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ready for her close up.

  An abusive background would make sense of the bullying Angela Perry suffered through, I thought to myself.

  Somehow, I couldn’t put the image of a raging, abusive parent together with the well coiffed little old lady sitting on the front porch of that old elegant farmhouse, but god knows what secrets lurk inside someone’s door. Maybe Eve’s father was the abuser. He might not have abused Eve—he might have abused and controlled Betty and Eve was simply a witness. In either case, it would color her relationship with men. It might also explain what happened at the bar near OSU—and even her overreaction to me tutoring Jimmy Lyle.

  “I don’t know what the exact details were,” Earlene said. “She wouldn’t talk about it—never, ever—except in these cryptic one-sentence declarations when she’d had too much to drink.”

  “Like what?”

  Earlene shrugged. “One thing she would say, particularly when she had been drinking, was ‘You don’t know what’s behind those awful doors.’”

  How could a house with such local historic significance have such dark secrets? Suddenly, I thought about the stocky woman in the pink baseball cap, the one I’d seen at Betty’s house.

  “Did Eve have a sister or a cousin? Somebody that lives at the house with her?”

  Earlene grimaced. “Not that she mentioned. Why?”

  “I saw this person the other day when I was out at the Dahlgren house to talk to Betty. This woman is short, stocky, maybe a couple years younger than us. She has bad hair, short and dirty blonde. She had a ball cap that said ‘Barn Diva’ across the front.”

  Earlene shook her head. “No idea. They’ve had horses for some time. I’ll bet she works with them.”

  “You and Eve went to college together, too, didn’t you?” I vaguely remembered her rattling on and on about tailgating at college football games.

  “Yes, Texas A&M. We applied at the same time and everything.”

  “Didn’t you guys room together?”

  “Not the first term. Eve didn’t show up until January, when winter term began.”

  “Why not?”

  “She said her parents decided to take her to Europe at the last minute, as a graduation gift.”

  “Did that seem strange to you? You would think that your best friend from high school would want to pick up where you left off, party-wise.”

  Earlene shrugged. “If my Daddy wanted to take me to Europe at the last minute, I’d sure let him. Anyway, Eve was bright. She made up all the classes she missed during summer term. We had an off-campus apartment together that summer—while I was working retail at the mall, she was studying.”

  I made a few more notes. Earlene stood up and smoothed her tight skirt.

  “You’re going to do a story on this, right?”

  “What does your lawyer say?”

  “Oh, who cares what he says? He did his job.”