Leather Maiden Read online

  I got out of the van and Belinda got out of the car and we moved through the summer heat like we were moving through gelatin; the heat rose up from the cement in wavy lines that made you feel dizzy.

  I shook hands with Cripson. He didn’t offer to shake hands with Belinda, but he gave her an up-and-down look that no one could really blame him for. She was wearing blue jeans today and a simple top, but those jeans fit her as close as baby oil.

  “Here’s the key,” Cripson said. “You unlock it. This emphysema wears me out if I so much as vigorously wipe my ass.”

  I unlocked the storage shed and peeked inside. There were all manner of dusty boxes. The air was still and heavy and stunk of mildew and something spoiled. It was hot.

  “What’s that smell?” I said.

  “Now and again, animals crawl up under the back, get in there and are too stupid to get out,” Cripson said. “Possums, armadillos, rats. They die. Ain’t nothing stinks worse than a dead rat.”

  “I can vouch for that,” I said.

  “Hence, the saying: I smell a rat,” Belinda said.

  “What’s that?” Cripson said.

  “Nothing,” Belinda said. “I was entertaining myself.”

  “Well,” Cripson said, “whatever. It’s all yours. Dig in. Get it all. That’s our deal. And when you leave, push the padlock in place. Give me the key now.”

  A moment later Cripson wheezed back into his SUV and was gone in a puff of dust, leaving Belinda and me inside the storage shed looking around.

  “It’s so hot I feel as if I’m going to swoon,” Belinda said.

  I felt the same way, so we went at it easy, a little at a time, took a break and hung the padlock in place without locking it, went back to Belinda’s house to eat a sandwich, then returned to work before we got so comfortable we couldn’t force ourselves back.

  It took most of the morning and into the early afternoon, and the stink got worse as we went along. It was coming from somewhere amidst the garbage. We didn’t find out what the stink was right then, but got everything loaded and over to Belinda’s place, where we put it in her garage.

  When we were finished, Belinda said, “I can tell you this much, Cason. Ronnie didn’t just decide to skip out on her rent. She left in a real hurry, because she left her jewelry and her makeup, some awfully nice dresses and slacks, and a lot of shoes. I don’t think she’d do that. I wouldn’t do that, not unless I had to. Not unless I had to run quick.”

  “Maybe Ronnie knew more about Caroline than overdue library fines.”

  “And all those boxes,” she said, “I don’t know what’s in them, but that’s where the stink is coming from. My guess is Cripson hired someone to move all this stuff, and they unloaded her refrigerator and stuck the stuff in boxes and put it in the shed. The bottom is about to come out of a couple of them. Would she have gone off and left a whole refrigerator full of food?”

  “Sometimes people do that.”

  “Okay. But what’s her rush? And again, there’s the makeup, jewelry and clothes.”

  “It’s a little curious,” I said.

  We looked in the boxes, and sure enough, it was old rotten food that seemed to have mutated and become one with the boxes it was in. You couldn’t tell what kind of food it had been, but it was certainly a lively creation. We bagged all of that up in plastic bags and stuffed it in trash cans.

  We poked around in the other boxes, looking for what we in the newspaper business like to call a big ole goddamn clue. I was prowling through a box of books, mostly cookbooks, and one book on sexuality that had some nice pictures, which I examined closely, just in case it might contain information we might need. Like certain sexual positions that required peanut butter and jelly. I was looking this over when Belinda said, “Put that down, Cason.”

  I did.

  “I got some letters here,” she said. “They are kind of curious.”

  I went over and looked at them with her. They were letters from a Mrs. Soledad who lived in Cleveland, Texas.

  “I don’t know they mean anything,” she said, “but it might not be a bad idea to look through them. It might give us some home information about Ronnie, where to find her. You can find anyone on the Internet these days.”

  “We can try that. Anything else curious?”

  Belinda shook her head. “Not really, and that’s pretty much all of it. We been through everything. Of course, if you need to examine that book a little more closely….”

  “Nope,” I said. “Got it memorized.”

  “Perhaps you could show me some of the points of interest later.”

  “I can almost guarantee that,” I said.

  We bundled the letters together, and I drove the moving van back to the rental company, Belinda following in my car, then we went back to her place. We had the letters with us the whole trip, and as I drove us back, Belinda looked through them. When she was finished, she bundled them together again and we carried them into her place.

  It was really cool inside, especially after we’d been out in the heat all day, and we put the letters on the coffee table and got something to drink. We sat and drank and didn’t look at the letters. We soon found ourselves in the shower, where it was necessary to use the soap bar on each other so we could get to all those hard-to-reach spots. The water was warm but it wasn’t warm like the outside air. It was pleasant and we spent a long time in there, then rinsed in cold water until we shook.

  We toweled off and lay in the bed under the covers. I told Belinda some things about that sex book I had been looking at in the garage, but neither of us was particularly inspired; the heat had sapped us. Without meaning to, we fell asleep.

  When I awoke the room was dark. Night had fallen. I got out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Belinda. Still nude, I padded into the living room and sat down on the couch and took the bundle of letters off the coffee table.

  I looked through them. Caroline was mentioned in them. A lot. The letters were obviously Mrs. Soledad’s response to letters written by Ronnie. Just being on the receiving end, not having Ronnie’s letters, I wasn’t exactly sure what some of it meant. But I could tell this: Ronnie was worried about Caroline and so was Mrs. Soledad, up to a point. I got the feeling maybe Mrs. Soledad didn’t miss Caroline as much as Ronnie did.

  I read through the letters a couple of times. A lot of them weren’t about Caroline and were just hometown things. From the letters I understood that Soledad lived outside of Cleveland, Texas. That was about two hours from where we were.

  I turned on Belinda’s computer and looked up Cleveland, and I looked up Mrs. Soledad’s address. It was there, easy as could be to find. There was even an aerial view of her house.

  I was looking at the aerial view and thinking about some of the things in the letters when a hand clapped down on my shoulder and I jumped.

  Belinda said, “Looking up porn sites.”

  I turned. She hadn’t bothered with clothes either. I said, “Hey, I’m living one. Why look it up?”

  She smiled at me. “What you got there?” she said.

  “An address. Now all I need is a phone number.”

  33

  It didn’t take much research to find Mrs. Soledad’s phone number. Next morning, I called her and told her I wanted to talk to her about Ronnie, asked if she knew where Ronnie was these days.

  “No,” she said. “But I don’t talk about things like that over the telephone.”

  I gave her my background, told her I was running down a story about missing women, meaning Ronnie and Caroline, and from some letters I had come across, I knew she knew them well.

  Mrs. Soledad was silent for a moment.

  “Letters?” she asked.

  I explained.

  “Those were private,” she said.

  “Came across them by accident, and we’re doing an investigation.”

  “We?”

  “My assistant and I.”

  “I don’t know I like you going through letters I’v
e written.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Soledad. We just sort of came across them.”

  “Did you have permission? Isn’t there a law about that?”

  “They had been confiscated by the landlord for back rent. He gave us permission to look through what was left.”

  No word from the other end.

  “You know that Caroline went missing?” I said.

  “Of course. Ronnie told me. We exchanged letters and phone calls. Mostly letters. I don’t do that new thing everyone does.”

  “New thing?”

  “Mailing off the computer.”

  “Oh. E-mail.”

  “That’s right. We did it the old-fashioned way. Envelopes and stamps. But, yes, I knew Caroline. I knew her well.”

  “Can you tell me about her and Ronnie?”

  “You come see me. I see you face-to-face, then maybe I’ll want to talk.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You get here, I’ll be the one with a .357 in my lap.”

  “Oh.”

  “No. I mean it. Come on, but you better have good intentions.”

  “I use my powers only for good.”

  “Yeah, well, you better.”

  She gave me the directions I already had from the Internet. Belinda and I drove over to Cleveland in my junker. When we left, a dark cloud came in from the west and brought thunder and lightning with it. The noonday sky was dark as midnight. We drove with the headlights on. We saw a strand of lightning hit the ground out in a pasture, and when it hit, the world lit up brighter than a floor show in Las Vegas, made my vision go white for an instant. When we were a half hour out from Cleveland, the bottom of the cloud collapsed and down came rain. We had to turn the windshield wipers on high. One of my wiper blades was a wounded soldier. Part of it came loose, slapped frantically at the windshield.

  It was still raining when we got into Cleveland. Mrs. Soledad lived in a little white house just off the highway with a covered porch with a swing on it and a couple of cloth foldout chairs. As we drove up in the yard, the wind picked up the chairs and slapped them across the porch and hung them up in the swing.

  Belinda and I sat in the car for a moment. The driveway ended some twenty feet from the porch steps, in front of a closed-up garage. I said, “I’m thinking about the .357 she mentioned.”

  “She shoots you,” Belinda said, “I’ll go for help.”

  “Comforting.”

  About that time, a woman, who I surmised was Mrs. Soledad, came out on the porch. I didn’t see the .357 in her hand. She waved us in.

  “Here we go,” I said, and I opened my door and slid out, and Belinda slid out behind me. We fought our way through the rain, and the moment we stepped up on the porch steps, the wind picked up again, jerked one of the cloth chairs out of its tangle against the swing, carried it away in a swirl, just missing us. I watched it fly off the porch, hit the yard twice, like a skipping rock, then go sailing into a stand of trees where it got hung up.

  I gave a hand to Belinda and helped her onto the porch. I turned and looked at Mrs. Soledad. She was about five feet tall with black hair streaked with gray, and she had a little body and a pleasant face. She looked elderly, but spry, like an android version of a grandma. In spite of this, I kept the .357 she had mentioned in mind.

  “Sorry about your chair,” I said. “Rain slacks, I’ll get it for you.”

  “Don’t worry about the chairs,” she said. She pushed the screen door wider. “Come on in. It’s gotten chilly out here. Not to mention wet.”

  The other chair gave way then, came up and over the swing, banged against one of the chains that supported the swing, then darted off the open end of the porch and sailed out to join its cousin.

  Inside it was a little cool, but nothing like outside. The place was dark and smelled of Lysol. After a moment my eyes adjusted, and I could see the place looked like the classic grandma home, with knickknacks here and there, and a big comfy couch with a Chihuahua lying on it like something stuffed. There was a small blackened fireplace and some really thick, comfy chairs nearby. Out a back window I could see a big fenced-in yard being rained on.

  We stood there as she went away, and came back with towels.

  “Dry off,” she said, and we did. She took the towels, folded them up and placed them on an arm of the couch.

  “Sit down,” Mrs. Soledad said. “I’ll make us some tea.”

  “Thanks,” Belinda said. She and I chose the comfy chairs by the dead fireplace. Mrs. Soledad disappeared into the kitchen. A light came on in there and some of it fled into the room where we sat. I could hear pans clanging around in there.

  About five minutes passed, Belinda and I not saying anything, just glancing at each other from time to time. Occasionally checking out the Chihuahua, who had almost raised its head once, but had decided on a shrug and a soft sigh.

  I looked around for the .357, but didn’t see it.

  Mrs. Soledad came out of the kitchen, came over and stood between us in our chairs. “Take about fifteen minutes for the water to be ready,” she said. “I’ll start us up a fire. Can you believe this?” she said, stopping to snap up some wood in a little metal bucket, and put it in the fireplace. “This time of year it ought to be hot. I had to turn off the air conditioner.”

  “Weird times,” I said.

  “Global warming,” she said. “It makes the seasons all screwed up.”

  She built a fire in the fireplace, and I stood up and got some larger wood out of a bin on the other side of the mantel and gave it to her and she put it in the way she wanted. Pretty soon the fire was jumping and crackling and throwing shadows over the room.

  Outside the rain came down hard on the roof. Mrs. Soledad sat on the couch beside the motionless Chihuahua.

  “They usually yap, Chihuahuas,” I said.

  “He’s too old for that,” Ms. Soledad said. “He barks too hard, he might throw up a lung. He’s twenty-one years old. I kid you not.”

  “Wow,” Belinda said.

  “About Ronnie,” she said. “Do you know where she is?”

  “We were hoping you might,” I said. “She knew Caroline, and Caroline is also missing…possibly murdered, and it ties in with another investigation our paper is doing.”

  Ms. Soledad shook her head. “No. I was hoping you knew where she is. I’ve tried shaking every tree you can imagine. I reported her missing, but nothing really came of it. They said she checked out of the university and left, just no one knows where.”

  “Wouldn’t she just go home?” Belinda asked.

  “This is home,” Ms. Soledad said. “Home of a sorts. The one she knew best. I did home care. A foster parent.”

  “Ronnie was one of your foster kids?” I asked.

  Ms. Soledad nodded. “And so was Caroline, for a while.”

  “Can you tell us about it?” I asked.

  “Caroline and Ronnie came to me when they were preteens. They had been with an adoption agency, but no one adopted them. Ronnie would have been adopted, I suppose, but when she came to stay with me, she just never left. I pretty much became her mother, and she my daughter. I love her dearly, and I’m very concerned about her.”

  “Why didn’t the police follow up?” I asked.

  “I think they did. But there was nothing to follow. She checked out of school, left her apartment and just went away. There was no evidence of foul play, they said.”

  “Except she left everything she had in the apartment…” I said. “Oh, I didn’t mean to worry you, Mrs. Soledad. It’s just that I’m not that impressed with our police force in Camp Rapture, previous or present.”

  “Nor I,” she said. “Fact is, I’m quite sure something has happened to Ronnie. She wouldn’t have quit writing. She would have called me on Mother’s Day. She always did, you know. I was worried because she was so close to Caroline, and that was like having a rattlesnake for a friend. In the end, it just doesn’t work out.”

  “Can you tell us about Ronnie and C
aroline?” Belinda asked. “Maybe we can help find them, if we knew more about them.”

  “Truth is, I hated Caroline,” she said. “Isn’t that an absolutely awful thing to say? I raised her to some degree, but, as they say in East Texas, that girl just wasn’t right.”

  Belinda looked at me out of the corner of her eye, then back at Mrs. Soledad. “When she was a kid did you hate her?” Belinda asked.

  Ms. Soledad nodded. “I never said such a thing to her. I tried in every way to like her and to get along with her, but she was…wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think she was born wrong. Having helped raise many foster kids, I’m convinced that we humans make our own monsters. But sometimes, the monster gets made very early, and there’s no rescue. The deed is done.”

  The teapot whistled and Mrs. Soledad walked into the kitchen and came back with a tray and three cups of tea. She gave one to Belinda, one to me. She sat down on the floor and fixed her tea, then got up without effort and went to the couch.

  “Notice how I get around,” she said, and it was easy to see she was proud of her agility.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yoga. I swear by it.”

  I nodded. “I may have to take it up.”

  “Good for the back.”

  “I’m sure it is. You were saying about Caroline.”

  Mrs. Soledad sipped her tea. “Yes. She was a pathetic thing. Her parents, they had done a number on her. Her mother was thirteen when she had Caroline. Can you believe that, thirteen? I didn’t even know about sex until I was fifteen or sixteen. Christ, are hormones really working at that age? I guess so, but it seems so amazing.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Anyway, her mother had her at thirteen, and the old boy who was the father ran off and didn’t come back, and when Caroline was two or so, her mother…what was her name…Jennifer something…Well, Jennifer took up with an older man. Some fellow twenty-five, worked as a pulpwood driver. This guy drank when he worked and drank when he was home, and he took to beating Jennifer like she was a dusty rug, and he didn’t have a lot of patience with a baby either. I don’t know what went on there exactly, but it wasn’t good. I’m sure little Caroline took a few whippings herself. If not worse.