The Sixes

30

PHOEBE HAD BRACED herself for the fact that Duncan had lied to her about knowing Lily, but the actual words still rocked her.

“Did you have an affair with her?” Phoebe said.

“No, of course not.”

“Really?”

“You honestly think I had an affair with a student here?” Duncan said indignantly.

“Lily told at least one person that she was in love with a man she was on a committee with last spring.”

Duncan pressed his lips together, as if holding the words back.

“Okay, something did happen,” he said after a moment.

Phoebe’s heart seemed to stop. She glanced over his shoulder again. The boys who’d been tossing the Frisbee had given up and drifted off.

“You slept with her?” Phoebe said.

“No, I told you I didn’t,” Duncan said. His anger was rising, and he swept a hand roughly through his hair. “But she seemed to have a crush on me, and it might have been partially my fault. I’d become friendly with her when we were on a committee in part because I knew she was a wreck about her boyfriend disappearing, but also because I liked that she was so passionate about animal rights. She came by my office a couple of times this term to continue the discussion. Then one day she called and asked me to grab a beer after class. I thought she was including other kids from the committee, but she was alone and I started to pick up this flirtatious undercurrent. So I backed off completely. Even if I’d been interested—and I wasn’t—I would have never jeopardized my career here.”

“And that’s it?” Phoebe demanded.

He didn’t say anything for a second, and she saw him take a breath.

“No,” he said, “there’s a bit more than that. About two weeks ago, I bumped into her at a farmer’s market a few miles from here. It seemed odd to find her there, and later I realized she might have overheard me tell someone I was headed there on the weekend, and showed up on purpose. She asked if I wanted to have a cup of coffee with her. There were a few plastic tables set up. I felt backed into a corner, so I said yes. And as we were sitting there, she leaned over and kissed me—totally out of the blue.”

He shook his head as if the memory still bugged him. Was it all an act? Phoebe wondered.

“I told her I was flattered,” Duncan said, “but that I didn’t believe in dating students. She apologized and said she was just confused about a bunch of things. I felt sorry for her—I could tell she was still troubled about the boyfriend and trying to sort things out. That was the last contact I had with her this semester—though I saw her a couple of times coming out of the science center. If I’m the man she told people about, I had no clue her feelings ran that deep.”

“But why would you lie to me? Why tell me you didn’t know her?”

“A student drowns in the river? A student I rebuffed romantically? That’s not information I intended to broadcast on campus. I hadn’t even told Miles.”

He’d misled her so successfully before, she didn’t know how to read whether this was the truth or not.

“Look, Phoebe,” he said when she’d didn’t reply. “That’s why I acted like such a prick this morning when you mentioned her having an affair. Once you and I had become intimate, I was having second thoughts about withholding this information from you. I don’t make a habit of lying.”

“Is that right?” she said. “But you told me a lie just the other day. You said Miles had had an angina attack, but when I talked to Jan today, she claimed he doesn’t have angina.”

“Wait, you spoke to Jan?”

“I asked her if Miles was okay.”

Duncan threw up his hands. “I should have told you. He hasn’t admitted to Jan that he has it. He doesn’t want to alarm her. If you don’t believe me, call him.”

He seemed frustrated with her. But that was what liars often did, she knew. They flipped things, becoming indignant with you.

“Then why tell me it was Bruce you were going to see?” she said.

“What?”

“You told me at first you were going upstairs to see Bruce.”

“I misspoke, for God’s sake. I work with both of them every day. Where are you going with this, Phoebe, anyway?”

“Well, there are these inconsistencies, but then I’m supposed to believe you when you say that there was really nothing between you and Lily. And then she ends up dead. And so does Hutch.”

“Are you suggesting that I did something to her—that I killed her?”

Stop right there, Phoebe commanded herself. Don’t go any further. But she couldn’t contain herself.

“Did you?” she asked, her voice suddenly hoarse.

Duncan let his arms drop by his side and shook his head in dismay, his mouth pinched together.

“I don’t believe you’re doing this, Phoebe,” he said. “I thought we had something together—something good.”

He turned abruptly and traipsed off along the woods.

I guess that’s it for us, Phoebe thought, regardless of what the truth is. I just ended everything.

She felt overwhelmed—by sadness and grief but also by anger that Duncan had lied to her, and by fear that everything he’d said just now had been lies as well. She wanted to believe him, but she was still nagged by doubt.

She waited a minute until Duncan was out of sight and then made her own way across campus. By the time she reached the gate, her head was pounding and her elbow ached unbearably.

She had just turned onto Hunter Street when her phone rang. Wesley, finally.

“What’s going on?” he said, sounding agitated. “I got all these calls from you.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Phoebe said, sliding into the front seat. “I was just anxious to catch up with you.”

“Is something the matter?”

“No, no. I just need your help. I want to get a bit more info from you about the man at the jukebox in Cat Tails.”

“The man? Why does that matter anymore? They’ve arrested the girls who did it.”

“Uh, maybe not. I’m having doubts that Blair and her friend are the killers.”

“Whoa, really? And you think it was this man I talked to?”

“I don’t know, but I just keep coming back to him. Is there any way you can meet me tonight? I can explain when I see you.”

“Lemme think for a second,” he said. “I’m still at work, and then I’m going out from here—but in the opposite direction from Lyle.” There were a few seconds of silence. “Is there any way you could meet me here? It’s about twenty, twenty-five minutes west of Lyle.”

She didn’t like the idea of driving all that way, especially because it would be completely dark soon, but she was desperate to meet with Wesley. In person she could take notes, prod him better. And even show him a picture.

“Okay,” she said. “How late will you be there?”

“I was planning to leave in half an hour because I need to be at this other place. But if you hurry, I’ll wait.”

Phoebe was worried about how she would pull it off, but she didn’t want to pass up the chance to see him. She scribbled down the address and signed off. Now she needed to hurry home, check on Ginger, and pick up her car. She also had to download a photo.

The little dog seemed overjoyed to see her and nearly leaped in her arms when she walked into the house. Phoebe took a few seconds to pet her and toss her one of the tiny treats from the package Dan had left. Next, with the clock ticking in her head, Phoebe pulled up the college Web site and downloaded the photo of Stockton. There was a remote chance, she thought, that once Lily had been spurned by Duncan—if that were really the case—she had moved on to Stockton, and the story had then morphed slightly in the telling.

Phoebe was in the car in less than ten minutes, but she was now behind schedule. She programmed the address into her GPS and pulled out of the driveway. Fortunately most of the trip turned out to be on backcountry roads, and there was little traffic to contend with. As she drove, the misery she was feeling seemed to balloon with each mile. Her boots were soaked through from walking over soggy ground earlier, her elbow still ached, and her emotions were a battered mess. She had had something good with Duncan. And now it was over.

Wesley’s feed company was at the edge of a small town called Springville, and Phoebe reached it fifteen minutes later than she’d promised. She prayed that Wesley was still waiting. As she pulled off the road into the parking lot, she saw a sign out front that read, “Closed,” but there was one car still in the parking lot.

She stepped from her car into the cold. She was at the far right end of the large brick building, and peering through the twilight, she saw a stream running near the back. It was the one Wesley had mentioned, she realized, the one that once moved the paddle wheel that then turned the grist stones. In the air was the smell of something sweet but unidentifiable.

As she hurried toward the main door, she saw that she was actually looking at two buildings—the big old gristmill with a drive-through on one end—probably for trucks and vans making pickups—and a newer, less impressive structure on the far side that appeared to be devoted to the lawn care business. There was a light on just inside the main building, so she tried that door first. Entering, she spotted Wesley standing behind a counter in the two-story-high space, dressed in his standard-issue khaki pants, button-down shirt, and pullover. The smell she’d picked up outside was even stronger in here.

“Thanks so much for waiting,” Phoebe told him. The front of the large room, she saw, had been set up as a store, with shelves of feed and supplies. It opened at the back onto an area with industrial-looking equipment and huge container bags. That was clearly where the feed was ground and bagged.

“Not a problem,” Wesley said. “What’d you do to your arm?”

“Broke my elbow—but just a minor fracture.”

He smoothed an eyebrow with his hand, a gesture she interpreted as impatience. He was being polite, but he was clearly eager to leave.

“This should only take a second,” Phoebe said. “What’s that smell, by the way?”

“Oh, that’s probably the molasses you’re smelling. We sweeten the animal feed with it. We have vats of it in the basement, and it’s piped up to the back room.”

As she drew a notebook from her purse, the store phone rang.

“Lemme just grab this, okay?” he said. “It’s a guy calling back about a lawn issue.”

Wesley answered, “Springville Feed Company,” and ended up in a conversation about crabgrass. As he talked, Phoebe’s eyes wandered over the space. In the middle of the first floor was an open area protected by a waist-high wooden fence; beyond it was the top of a large, weathered paddle wheel, at least twelve feet in diameter. She moved closer and stared down into a pit large enough to hold the wheel and several wooden gears. At one point the stream had run through there, she realized, making the wheel turn, but now it was totally dry.

Across the room she heard Wesley say good-bye, and she returned to where she’d been standing.

“Pretty interesting, isn’t it?” he said, coming from behind the counter. “The water churned the paddle wheel around, and that moved the gears that in turn activated the grist stones.” He pointed to an area to her left, and she swiveled her head in that direction. There was a large circular stone resting on the floor.

“Yes, fascinating,” she said, though she hadn’t a lick of interest at the moment. “Anyway, as I said on the phone, I’d love a better description of the man at the jukebox. You said he was in his late thirties, perhaps early forties, not dressed as a townie. Anything else you recall?”

Wesley slowly shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “I mean, he seemed sure of himself, confident. That much I remember.”

Phoebe pulled the photo of Stockton out of her purse. It was a long shot, but it was all she had.

“This wasn’t the guy by any chance, was it?”

“He looks vaguely familiar, but no,” Wesley said. “The guy I talked to was darker. Dark hair, dark eyes.”

Phoebe stuffed the photo back in her purse and, after hesitating for a second, pulled out her phone. I can’t believe I’m doing this, she thought.

“What about him?” she asked. She opened up the photo she had taken of Duncan in his kitchen last Friday.

“Oh, wow,” Wesley said after a couple of seconds.

Phoebe caught her breath. “What?” she asked. It came out as barely a whisper.

“This is a professor from Lyle. I’ve seen him.”

“What do you mean? He’s the man you saw that night?”

“No, no, definitely not,” Wesley said. He narrowed his gray eyes. “I just recognized him from school.”

Thank God for small favors, Phoebe thought.

“So now you’re thinking a guy did it, huh?” Wesley said as Phoebe dropped the phone back in her purse.

“Yes. Someone familiar with the area who knew about the Sixes and figured it would be easy to frame them. And very possibly someone connected to Lyle College. It might be the man you talked to that night, but maybe not. Can I ask you one more favor?”

“Is it going to take long?” Wesley asked. He sounded a little testy, as if he were starting to run out of patience.

“No, just a few minutes, I swear.” She reached into her purse again and pulled out a copy of Hutch’s notes.

“These are the notes Ed Hutchinson took after talking to you last fall. He told me that when he’d reread them, he’d found something significant in them, but he never had a chance to tell me what it was. Can you look and see if anything jumps out for you?”

Wesley shrugged his shoulders before he’d even looked but then glanced down and moved his eyes along the page.

“Sorry, nope,” he said after not more than a cursory glance. “I mean, it’s all just the stuff I told him.”

“There must be something significant in the underlined parts,” Phoebe said. “Mr. Hutchinson looked over a set of notes I took after my first meeting with you, and he highlighted the exact same things. It’s uncanny, but the two sets of notes are almost identical. All the details are the same—nearly word for word. It’s, well—”

And then, as she said the words, the truth seemed to charge into her brain, like someone flinging open a door and bursting into a room. The same. The two sets of notes were exactly the same. Every single detail given to Hutch had been repeated to her—an entire year later. Glenda’s words from the other day echoed in her head: “A liar’s story is often just a little too pat.”

Phoebe now knew what Hutch had discovered through the notes. Wesley had made up the story. Because, she thought, without understanding the reason, Wesley was the killer.

She forced a smile, but she could feel how lopsided it was on her face. Can he tell? she wondered as terror mounted inside her. Can he tell I just figured it out?

“Well,” she said feebly, “if nothing occurs to you, I’d better scoot and let you close up.” She looked down, hoping he couldn’t see her fear, and tucked the notes back into her purse. She saw that her fingers were trembling.

“Where’re you headed?” he asked. When she forced herself to look back up at him, she saw that he’d slapped a smile on his own face, but it was ugly and mean.

“I thought I’d just stay in with a book tonight,” she said. Fear had turned her voice into only a whisper. “Well, good night.”

“You really think I’m going to let you leave now?”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

“You know why I’m saying that, right?” he said. “I just saw you figure it out in your head. Or kind of, right?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

She started to turn around and aimed for the door, but he took a giant step with her and blocked her way.

“Don’t make me fly into a rage, okay?” he said. His voice was different now, surly and low. “That’s what Gramps did.”

“I won’t make you mad,” she whispered. “I promise.”

“That Gramps,” he said, shaking his head back and forth as if someone had turned up the speed on him. “He thought he was so damn smart. Didn’t that irritate the hell out of you?”

Humor him, she told herself. Until you can figure out what to do. “Did—did Hutch call you about the notes?”

“Well, I told you he called me—so I could make it seem like I’d shared the stuff about Blair. But he’s too much of a busybody to just call.” Wesley snickered. “He dropped by here last Saturday afternoon. I was outside the lawn care barn, and he pulled up in his truck. Took me a second to recognize him. Said he was sorry about not taking my case seriously before, and he was finally trying to follow up with me. He showed me the notes he’d taken, and then he whips out the notes from you. And all of a sudden he starts to go all Lenny Briscoe on me. He asks in this mocking way if I don’t find it funny that every detail is the same. And then he says that when someone’s telling the truth, they tend to forget certain details or recall them a bit differently. But liars often repeat it word for word because they’ve rehearsed it. The whole time he’s not accusing me, just insinuating in this sly way, like he’s the hotshot cop and I’m just some idiot.

“Then he tells me he’s used the computer to check me out at school, and he’s figured out that I was in a bunch of classes with Lily Mack.”

“A bunch?” Phoebe recalled that Wesley had told her he was in one.

“I took three classes with that bitch. I was freaking in love with Lily. We were in a class together last fall, and we started sharing notes and having coffee together, that sort of thing. We had a connection, you know. But then she totally messes it up—she starts dating that flaming asshole, Trevor. I tried to make her see what a jerk he was, but she just didn’t get it. So I made sure he was out of the picture and bided my time.”

Even in her panic, Phoebe could see the pieces beginning to fit in her own mind.

“But before you killed Trevor, you decided to throw yourself into the river—so that his drowning would seem like part of a pattern?”

“Why not, right? I mean, there’d already been one drowning, and I’d read about these other cases on the Internet.”

“How did you kill him?”

“It was so easy, it was kind of sick. I knew he hung out downtown, and one night at Cat Tails after I’d bided my time for a few months, I stood near him at the bar and put GHB in his drink. And then, after a while, I asked him if he wanted some weed. He was the kind of guy who called me Fathead behind my back, but he wouldn’t turn down that kind of offer—plus he was pretty out of it by then. I told him to meet me in the parking lot by the river so no one would see us, and then I drove him up the road.”

“Across from the Big Red Barn?”

“Yup. It was a piece of cake to just push him in.”

“But then his body was never found.”

“Yeah, I know. Can you believe that freaking luck? But it worked out in the end. Everybody thought he just took off. Which made him look like an even bigger asshole.”

“But Lily still didn’t want to date you.”

“At first she was just too upset to do anything. I figured I’d just wait till she came back after the summer. But then we get together one day, and I finally tell her how I feel, and she says she never wants to be anything other than my fucking friend.”

He twisted his mouth as he said the word friend, as if it filled him with disgust. Phoebe could barely look at him, but she knew she had to, had to keep him talking and calm.

“And then you killed Lily, too—because she didn’t love you?”

“No,” he snapped. “The problem was, she started to figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“That I killed Trevor,” he said, even fiercer now. “What the fuck else do you think?”

“Okay, I got it,” Phoebe said. She commanded herself to breathe slowly, to fight her fear.

“I was still keeping tabs on her sometimes. I thought she might finally see what I could offer her, you know. I was watching her that night she went down to Cat Tails. I parked my car and went inside a few minutes later, like it was just a coincidence. I grabbed a beer and was hanging out near her, but trying not to crowd her. And then these guys came in who knew Trevor, who were around the night he disappeared, I guess, and she got upset once she started talking to them. She asked them about that night and if he gave any reason for wanting to just bail. And then out of the blue one of them looks over at me and goes, ‘You talked to him a little bit that night, didn’t you, Hines? Did he say anything to you?’

“Well, I guess that freaked her out. She finished her beer real quick and left. I drove up the street looking for her and convinced her to hop in my car so we could just talk. Of course, she wanted to know why I’d never told her about talking to Trevor, and I said it was because I hadn’t wanted to upset her about what he’d confessed. I said he’d told me he didn’t want to hurt her but he didn’t love her and he just wanted to make a break for it.”

Wesley was growing more and more agitated as he spoke, twisting his neck as if the shirt were choking him.

“I could see that she was becoming suspicious, that she knew a guy like Trevor wouldn’t be confiding shit to me. I figured that she might go to the cops and they’d check my car and find that asshole’s DNA in it or something. You know what’s funny? There was a minute when I thought she was going to just bolt from the car and there was nothing I could do. But she was trying to figure out the truth—be the little investigator like you—and she kept talking to me. I had some coffee in a thermos, and I offered it to her while we were talking. I dropped the drug in the coffee and gave her a drink. She was totally passed out by the time I dumped her in the river.”

Phoebe felt sick, seeing the image in her mind. At least Lily hadn’t had to fight for her life in the dark, muddy water.

“And Hutch?” Phoebe asked. “He had to die, too?”

Wesley shook his head hard.

“I didn’t know what to do about Gramps,” he said. “After he left here, I was crazy. I knew he was going to probably go to the cops, and I needed to act fast. That stuff you told me about that stupid girl group was a total godsend. I planted all the stuff at the diner with you about Blair, and then I figured how I could set them up. And then I went to pay Gramps a visit. I wasn’t sure I was going to kill him, but he didn’t give me a choice.”

He shook his head again.

“You want to do the right thing,” he said. “But people just don’t let you. Like Lily. She just wouldn’t give me a chance.”

He stared right at Phoebe. “And like you,” he said.

“Bu—”

“You wouldn’t back off. You kept snooping around. I tried to scare you by killing the lights in the science building that night. But even when they caught the girls, you wouldn’t let it go.”

He glanced off, as if in dismay. Now! Phoebe screamed to herself. She spun around and bolted toward the door. She’d only gone two steps before Wesley grabbed her fiercely by the hair and yanked her back. She yelped in pain.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Wesley yelled. He was still behind her, and he coiled her hair roughly in his fist.

“Wesley, don’t do this, please,” she said. “You—you have a chance to stop it all now.”

“And get caught?” He snickered. “Why would I want to do that?”

“They’ll find out. I—I’ve told people. The man I’m seeing knows.”

“I doubt it. I know who you’ve been seeing—the guy on your phone. Ten fucking minutes ago you thought he was the killer.”

She started to struggle, trying to free herself from his grasp, but he yanked her hair even tighter. Then he drew his other hand back and punched her hard in the face. Her head snapped back. He let go of her hair, and she went crashing to the ground, landing on her broken elbow. It felt like someone had just lit a fire to her arm.

And then he had her by the hair again and was dragging her across the dusty floorboards.

“You’re going to have to excuse me,” Wesley said, panting. “But it’s going to seem weird if I don’t meet these people tonight. I’ll have to deal with you later.”

Finally he dropped her. She saw that she was against the wooden barrier that surrounded the pit. Was he going to tie her up and come back afterward? she wondered desperately. If he tied her up, she might have a chance to free herself.

But then he was hoisting her up, his thick arms under hers.

“No, Wesley, please,” she pleaded. “Please, no.”

She kicked at the barrier with both feet, but it was useless.

With one easy movement he raised her even higher. And then she was sailing through the air.