She hung up and moved her notebook aside to make room for her food.
CHAPTER 28
Mind and emotions spinning, Angie closed her laptop as Babs set her food down. The server’s gaze ticked immediately to the row of photographs on the table. “You want any ketchup or vinegar or hot sauce with that?”
“No, thanks, but a coffee refill would be great.”
“You betcha.” She hesitated, then said, “So you’re that PI, eh? I hear you’re looking into that woman’s drowning from twenty-four years ago, the one found in the shallow grave.”
This was what Angie had been angling for—to get Babs talking of her own accord.
“Who told you I was a private investigator?”
She wiped her hands on her apron. “Oh, everyone knows. Right from when you checked into the motel. Town like this? Osmosis, I tell ya. That’s how information gets around.” She nodded at the photos. “What do those guys have to do with it?”
“You know them?”
A snort. “Who doesn’t? Those Carmanagh and Tollet males have been tight for generations. Half of ’em grown up in the woods along the river. Fishers, hunters, loggers. They know the land, those boys. Right there in that picture, you got the troublemakers. Those twins and Wallace. Feed off one another. You don’t mess with that gang.”
“Capable of doing someone harm, you think?”
She pulled a face and shrugged. “I dunno. Wouldn’t put it past them. There’s some whacked-out rumor that one of that bunch, or all of them, killed a kid back in high school. Now there’s no proof, mind.”
Angie’s pulse spiked. “Serious?” she whispered. “Theykilledsomeone?” She glanced around as if to feign concern over who was listening, then leaned forward and said, “Who? What happened?”
“Babs!” It was the guy who’d been reading the paper at the counter. “Can I get a check over here?”
“One sec,” she said to Angie and scuttled off.
Angie took several hungry bites of her sandwich and stuffed hot fries into her mouth as she watched Babs working the till. She was famished.
The two old gents near the door packed up their chess set and went to the cash register as well. They paid for their coffees and waved goodbye to Babs as they exited.
With the diner empty, Babs scuttled back.
“Take a quick seat,” Angie said. “Tell me what happened to that schoolkid.”
“His name was Porter Bates,” she said, sliding into the booth across from Angie. “He was a right bully. Hated gays, lesbians, blacks, the First Nations kids. Always picking on the underdog, always in trouble. He had it in for one of the Tollet boys.”
“Which Tollet?”
“Axel. He’s the Tollet twins’ younger brother. He was a slow learner. He’d been held back several grades, had some writing disability. Like dyslexia but to do with the actual holding of a pen and writing.”
“Dysgraphia?”
“It had some name like that. Porter used to call him a fag. Poor Axel. He just used to hang his head down and take it like a giant kicked puppy.”
“Is this Axel behind the bar here?” Angie slid one of the screenshots over to Babs.
“Yeah, that’s him. Driver for Sea-Tech Freight now. Wallace and Jessie are real good to him. Axel is how it all happened, or so the story goes.” Babs cast an eye over her shoulder to be sure they were alone. She leaned forward. “Porter Bates and his two lackeys apparently lured Axel out to this quarry north of town. It’s a real dark and spooky place. Dangerous with deep black water. Some of the older guys used to go out there to shoot targets and drink and mess about. When the Tollet kid got there, Porter and his mates jumped him and gangbanged him.”
“What?”
“Sodomized him.”
A chill rippled over Angie’s skin as the horror of it sliced through her.
“Axel had just turned thirteen, and whatever happened out there, he didn’t come back to school for the rest of that year. The story goes that Wallace Carmanagh got wind of what Porter did. So Wallace and the Tollet twins, and maybe Garrison, jumped him on a trail in the woods one day. They trussed him up like a rodeo calf and took him out to the quarry. He was never seen again. Just vanished. I used to know Porter’s sister at school, Fallon Bates—she’s Fallon Rickley now. We were in the same class. She told me Wallace and the Tollet guys drowned her brother.”
