They left her stewing in the interrogation room for most of an hour. Deanne amused herself trying to rub off the ink from being fingerprinted, with little success. They were trying to make her nervous, of course, and while it wasn't working quite the way they hoped she was a little worried about Sammy; four years as a solid citizen had probably dulled some of the run-from-the-cops reflexes.
At last the sheriff himself came in, carrying a cardboard box. He was older than the other cops, complete with graying mustache and a little bit of paunch, but Deanne was pretty sure he knew what he was doing. Not that he scared her either; she was just going to have to be a little careful.
The sheriff, whose nametag said "Pierce", set the box down on the table with a thud and went to sit across from her. He put his hands on the table and fixed her with what was probably meant to be an intimidating stare. "So, you want to give us your real name?" he asked after a moment.
Deanne smiled at him and said, "I told you, it's Jett. Joan Jett."
Pierce made a face like she'd disappointed him. Probably would have worked on Sam, too. "I'm not sure you realize just how much trouble you're in here, young lady," he said.
"Are we talking misdemeanor trouble, or 'squeal like a pig' trouble?" Deanne asked innocently.
"You've got the faces of ten missing persons taped to your wall," he said. Deanne thought about pointing out that it wasn't actually her wall, but he looked like he was on a roll so she didn't. "Along with a whole lot of Satanic mumbo-jumbo. You are officially a suspect."
She didn't bother hiding her contempt for that one. "That makes sense. Because when the first guy went missing in '82, I was three," she said.
"I know you have partners," Pierce said heavily. "One of 'em's older. Maybe she started this thing. So tell me—Deanne." She tried to cover her shock, but she got the feeling he'd caught it; small town cops weren't necessarily idiots, that was just the way to bet. He pulled a book out of the box and tossed it onto the table, and Deanne's eyes widened. It was Mom's journal, the one she kept records of her hunts in. Pierce flipped it open and started paging through it. "This hers?"
Deanne stared at the journal, a twist of worry starting in her gut. Mom kept that book like a family Bible; it wasn't like her to leave it behind for anything short of a life-threatening situation. Pierce was still watching her closely. "I thought that might be your name," he said. "See, I leafed through this. What little I could make out—I mean, it's nine kinds of crazy." Deanne leaned forward, trying to put on curiosity. "I found this too," the sheriff continued, and flipped to one of the blank pages in the back. In the center, circled, was Deanne 35-111. Pierce leaned on the table, intruding almost into her personal space. "Now, you're stayin' right here till you tell me exactly what the hell that means," he said. Deanne met his eyes, but for once she didn't know what to say.
*.*
Sam stood on the tiny concrete porch and raised her hand to knock. It hadn't been hard to dig up an address for Joseph Welch, and fortunately he still lived in Jericho. Sam had given it a few minutes of thought before deciding to come out here, finally deciding that a few hours in the police station wasn't going to hurt Deanne, and that all this would probably be easier without both of them trying to dodge the cops.
Sam really wasn't eager to collect a police record, either. She knocked on the door firmly.
After a few seconds she heard movement and stood back so the door would open. The man who peered out was recognizable from his newspaper photograph, though he hadn't aged all that well. "Hi," Sam said. "Are you Joseph Welch?"
"Yeah," he replied, sounding a little wary. Sam smiled at him and hunched a little, trying to make it less obvious she was taller than him. A lot of men, especially older ones, really didn't like that.
"Mr. Welch, my name's Sam Vickers—" Deanne liked to use rock stars for her aliases; Sam usually went for gun-makers because, well, Winchester "—and I was wondering if I could ask you about a friend of mine."
"A friend," he said.
"Yes." She held out the picture from the motel room; it wasn't great, but the best she had, and Mom hadn't changed that much. "She's been out of touch for a few days and people are starting to get worried," she offered. Welch stepped out onto the porch and closed the door firmly behind him, but he extended a hand for the photo. Sam was surprised to feel a little pang at letting it go. They walked slowly down the driveway as Welch examined the picture.
"The woman?" he asked, and Sam nodded.
"She looks kinda like that lady that was here," Welch said, and stopped walking to look closer. "OK, yeah, she was older, but that's her."
Sam felt a surge of relief. So she and Mom had fought; that didn't mean she wanted her to be dead. Welch handed the photo back and Sam tucked it into her wallet.
Welch continued, "She came by three or four days ago. Said she was a reporter." He seemed dubious about that, but Sam was getting the feeling that dubious was just his natural state. She was just glad Mom had used a cover that was easy to work herself into.
"That's right," she said. "We're working on a story together, but she hasn't filed anything and our editor sent me out to ask around."
Welch nodded, but he didn't look happy. "Well, I don't know what the hell kinda story you're working on. The questions she asked me?"
Trying to sound sympathetic, Sam said, "About your wife Constance." Welch nodded.
"She wanted to know where she was buried."
"And where is that again?"
Welch looked disgusted and said, "What, I gotta go through this twice?"
"It's fact-checking," Sam said apologetically. "If you don't mind?"
Welch hesitated, sighed. "In a plot. Behind my old place over on Breckenridge."
Sam nodded attentively. "And why did you move?"
"I'm not gonna live in the house where my children died," Welch said indignantly. Sam paused and Welch stopped beside her. Something about the way he'd said that made her suspicious.
"Mr. Welch, did you ever marry again?" she asked, a shot in the dark.
"No way," Welch said. "Constance, she was the love of my life. Prettiest woman I ever known."
"So you had a happy marriage?" Sam asked, firmly squelching her opinion of defining love as having anything to do with physical appearance. Welch hesitated too long before replying, and Sam thought Bingo.
"Definitely," he said at last. Sam snapped her notebook closed and said, "Well, that should do it. Thank you for your time." She turned towards the car and waited till she heard him start to walk away, and then called after him, "Mr. Welch. Did you ever hear of a woman in white?"
He stopped and turned back. "A what?"
"A woman in white, or sometimes a weeping woman?" He didn't reply, so she went on. "It's a ghost story. Or more of a phenomenon, really." She walked towards him, straightening as she went. "They're spirits. They've been sighted for hundreds of years, in dozens of places: Hawaii, Mexico, lately Arizona, even Indiana. All these are different women." By now she was right in front of him, and he was having to crane back a bit to meet her eyes. "All different, but they all share the same story."
Welch looked a little nervous, and covered it with irritation. "I don't care much for nonsense, girl." He turned and stomped in the direction of his front door; Sam followed.
"See, when they were alive, their husbands were unfaithful to them." He stopped dead, but didn't turn to face her, and the feeling of Bingo got stronger. "So these women, basically suffering from temporary insanity—murdered their children." Now he did turn, and now he was angry. "Then once they realized what they had done, they took their own lives. So now their spirits are cursed, walking back roads, waterways. And if they find an unfaithful man, they kill him. And that man is never seen again."
"You bitch," he said, his voice shaking. "You think this…ghost story has something to do with Constance?"
"You tell me," Sam said, as neutrally as she could.
"I mean, maybe, maybe I…made some mistakes. But no matter what I did, Constance, she never would have killed her own children." He took a defensive step back, his face working in anger, or grief, or both. "Now, you get the hell out of here! And you don't come back!" He glared at her for a long moment, and then turned and hurried back to his house. Sam watched him go and sighed.
That was it, then. Constance had lost her kids all right. She'd killed them herself.
*.*
Deanne was getting really tired of Sheriff Pierce. He kept alternating between berating her and acting like an understanding uncle-slash-father trying to save her from herself. It was like he was trying to be the good cop and the bad cop, and Deanne could have told him either one would work better without the other. Right now they were in the middle of a berating phase. "I don't know how many times I have to tell you," she said. "It was my high school locker combo." It was weak and she knew it, but since her role here was pretty much to kill time she wasn't too worried.
"We gonna do this all night long?" the sheriff asked, sounding disgusted. He was drawing breath to speak again when the door to the interrogation room opened and a deputy leaned in, looking a little white around the eyes.
"We just got a 911, shots fired over at Whiteford Road," the deputy said. This was clearly not SOP for the Jericho police department. Pierce stood up, thinking visibly, and finally snapped at Deanne, "You have to go to the bathroom?"
"No," she said; in truth she wouldn't have minded, but the quicker he got out of here…
"Good," Pierce said, and pulled out his handcuffs. He cuffed her to the table and left the interrogation room at a half-run. Deanne gave him a moment to get safely away, then pulled the journal towards her. There was a paperclip holding some loose leaves to one of the pages, and she grinned as she pulled it out. Pierce really should have known better.
It was the work of moments to straighten out the wire; from there the cuffs took practically no time at all. The locks on handcuffs weren't complex, because they had to be reliable, and that fact made them simple to pick. She had her wrist loose before the sheriff and his deputy were even out of the squad room. There was one bad moment when the deputy approached the door, but Pierce called him before he could get a good look and he didn't see that she was free.
She debated for a moment, but the only thing they'd taken was her phone and she could kill that remotely. Deanne went out the window, Mom's journal tucked into her jacket.
*.*
Sam was driving when her phone rang, but she answered it anyway. "Fake 911 call? I dunno, Sammy, that's pretty illegal," her sister's voice said. Sam grinned in relief and said, "You're welcome."
"Listen, we gotta talk."
"Tell me about it," Sam said. "So, the husband was unfaithful. We are dealing with a woman in white. And she's buried behind her old house, so that should have been Mom's next stop."
Deanne said, "Sammy, shut up a second." Sam only half heard her, and continued, "I just can't figure out why Mom hasn't torched the corpse yet."
"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Deanne said. "She's gone. Mom has left Jericho."
"What?" Sam said, jolted out of her thoughts. "How do you know?"
"I've got her journal," Deanne said. Sam felt her eyes widen.
"She doesn't go anywhere without that thing."
"Yeah, well, he did this time," Deanne said, sounding a little unsettled.
Sam thought hard for a second, and asked, "Okay, what's it say?"
"Same old crap," Deanne said, and wasn't that interesting? Usually anything Mom did was the right thing. "She wanted to let us know where she was going."
Which meant…"Coordinates. Where to?"
"Not sure yet."
Sam stared at the empty road, trying to think. "I don't get this. What could be so important that Mom would just skip out, in the middle of a job. Dee, what the hell is going on?" There was a flash of white and the headlights caught a woman, just standing in the middle of the lane; Sam slammed on the breaks, just in time remembering to pump them, and dropped her phone. She couldn't stop in time, but there was no impact; the hood of the car just passed through the space where the woman stood and she flickered and vanished. Sam sat there panting for a second as Deanne's voice called her from the fallen phone.
A flicker of movement in the rear view caught her eye and she twisted in her seat. Constance Welch sat in the back, her hands folded primly in her lap. Her eyes were huge and mournful.
"Take me home," she said.