The Nobody Girls (Kendra Dillon Cold Case Thriller Book 3), Rebecca Rane [best book club books of all time txt] 📗

It took a moment for Chuck to answer the door.

“Oh, the podcaster lady! Come in, come in.” Fairly opened the screen and gave Kendra a smile. “My wife is due back from the grocery store in a half hour or so, which then means we won’t have quiet, but for now, we do.”

Somehow, it made Kendra feel relieved to know his wife was on the way home. She had been uneasy since the incident at the Easy On Truck Stop, though it was ridiculous. She was the one who set this up. It wasn’t some trap.

“I’ll try to be quick,” Kendra said.

Fairly wore a Cincinnati baseball hat and a plain red t-shirt over baggy jeans. He had significant jowls and shiny cheeks.

“I work in the garage. My stuff’s there. I have a room air conditioner in there, but it’s so hot today the thing naturally quit on me. The kitchen is a little less like Satan’s back porch.”

“This is good, truly.”

Kendra and Fairly sat at a farmhouse table. She put the mic on his t-shirt. It was moist with perspiration.

“As I explained, I am just trying to piece together several deaths, murders, from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and you’re one of the only people listed that’s, uh….”

“Still alive? Yeah, that was a long time ago now. I’m pushing sixty. Where does the time go, right? Any way I can help though, fire away.”

“Can you tell me what happened that day?”

“I can. I wish I could get it out of my head, but, you know, I still get flashes of it. When I blink or turn out a light.”

Kendra did know what it was like to see flashes of things you didn’t want to see. It had gotten better. These days, she wasn’t ripped from one place to another, from one time to a worse time, because of sound or a smell.

But she knew.

Chuck Fairly was there now, in his mind, the time and place he’d found Jane Doe Two.

“I’ll never forget it. I mean, I saw some weird things at my post over those years, but that day was nuts.”

“What was going on? How did you find it?”

“You know, I’d seen something from my car. The weigh station I worked at was a state-run one back then, so it looks like a highway exit. You’ve seen that kind, right?”

Kendra nodded.

“It caught my eye, this mound, in the distance, off the road. But I had a busy shift, a lot of trucks through that day. Thursday is always busy because they’re trying to get home before the weekend.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw a dark spot where there shouldn’t be one. But then I forgot about it. I did my day’s work and was walking back to my car. The station was shut down. I normally would just drive home.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I had a handle on my door, and maybe I should have opened it and driven home. Ha, now I know I shoulda. But it felt like something was calling me out there. That I had to quiet something down. Almost like, I don’t know, haunted.”

“Like a ghost?”

“Not so much a ghost but a sound or a feeling. I knew there was something about that dark lump that was unresolved. That I had better just deal with it so I could have some peace.”

“Peace?”

“Well, peace of mind, maybe that’s a better way to say it.”

“I see.” Kendra wasn’t sure if she did. Was Fairly nuts? She let him continue.

“So, I walked out there, it took longer than I thought, and it was a bitch, walking over rows of corn stalk nubs, you ever try it?”

“Yes.”

“I got about ten feet from it, and that’s when I knew. I still hadn’t seen the worse, but I knew, I felt the worse, I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

“That there was a dead girl in there. That a body was wrapped in that garbage bag. And I knew that something had killed it. It wasn’t an animal or something like that. Or a suicide. Violence has an energy, and I felt that energy all around.”

Charlie Fairly had a flair for the dramatic, Kendra decided. She didn’t want to think about the dark energy that might swirl and linger in the wake of a violent act. Did it hover around her? Would it always? The idea raised goose flesh on her arm, even in the humid Kentucky kitchen.

“What did you do?”

“I walked closer. I got to about an arm’s length. Then a piece of the garbage bag separated, and the ripping sound scared the hell out of me, and then it floated in the air around me. It was like a little bag demon.”

Kendra felt unsettled. She clearly remembered the garbage back that loosely wrapped the remains at the High Timbers site.

Fairly continued to remember the awful moment. “Other garbage floated out as that bag flapped loose, snack wrappers and stuff. It was like if the bottom ripped out of the bag on the way to the curb. The body was just one of the things that were thrown out. That freaked me out too.”

“And then?”

“I jumped back and decided it was best to stay an arm’s length away, in case, I don’t know. Just in case.”

“Did you think she was going to grab you?”

“I don’t know. But the wind was howling, and the sky was getting darker. There weren’t cell phones then. People forget that too. No cell phone, no car phone, no pay phone out there on the highway. The walk from my car to that spot was farther than I thought it was, and running back, if something happened, well, it was a long run. Then some of the garbage blew into my face. I mean, I was totally spooked by an empty bag of Doritos or whatever. It grazed my cheek. The idea that it was touching that dead body, and then me, well, dead skin, then my skin. I’m not going to lie. That was extra freak