Roadside Crosses

follow up on one thing.”
    “You need help?”
    She said she didn’t, though the truth was she sure as hell didn’t want to do this one solo.

Chapter 37
    SITTING IN HER car, parked in the driveway, Dance gazed at the Brighams’ small house: the sad lean of the gutters and curl of the shingles, the dismembered toys and tools in the front and side yards. The garage so filled with discards that you couldn’t get more than half a car hood under its roof.
    Dance was sitting in the driver’s seat of her Crown Vic, the door shut. Listening to a CD she and Martine had been sent from a group in Los Angeles. The musicians were Costa Rican. She found the music both cheerful and mysterious, and wanted to know more about them. She’d hoped that when she and Michael were in L.A. on the J. Doe murder case she’d have a chance to meet with them and do some more recordings.
    But she couldn’t think about that now.
    She heard the rumble of rubber on gravel and looked into the rearview mirror to see Sonia Brigham’s car pause as it turned past the hedge of boxwood.
    The woman was alone in the front seat. Sammy sat in the back.
    The car didn’t move for a long moment and Dance could see the woman staring desperately at the policecruiser. Finally Sonia teased her battered car forward again and drove past Dance to the front of the house, braked and shut the engine off.
    With a fast look Dance’s way, the woman climbed out and strode to the back of the car and lifted out the laundry baskets, and a large bottle of Tide.
    His families so poor that they can’t even afford a washer and drier. . . . Who goes to laundromats? Lusers that’s who. . . .
    The blog post that told Schaeffer where to find a sweatshirt to steal to help him frame Travis.
    Dance climbed out of her own vehicle.
    Sammy looked at her with a probing expression. The curiosity of their first meeting was gone; now he was uneasy. His eyes were eerily adult.
    “You know something about Travis?” he asked, and didn’t sound as odd as he had earlier.
    But before Dance could say anything, his mother shooed him off to play in the backyard.
    He hesitated, still staring at Dance, then wandered off, uncomfortable, fishing in his pockets.
    “Don’t go far, Sammy.”
    Dance took the bottle of detergent from under Sonja’s pale arm and followed her toward the house. Sonia’s jaw was firm, eyes straight forward.
    “Mrs.—”
    “I have to put this away,” Sonia Brigham said in a clipped tone.
    Dance opened the unlocked door for her. She followed Sonia inside. The woman moved straight into the kitchen and separated the baskets. “If you let them sit . . . the wrinkles, you know what it’s like.” She smoothed a T-shirt.
    Woman to woman.
    “I washed it thinking I could give it to him.”
    “Mrs. Brigham, there are some things you should know. Travis wasn’t driving the car on June 9. He took the blame.”
    “What?” She stopped fussing with her laundry.
    “He had a crush on the girl who was driving. She’d been drinking. He tried to get her to pull over and let him drive. She crashed before that happened.”
    “Oh, heavens!” Sonia lifted the shirt to her face, as if it could ward off the impending tears.
    “And he wasn’t the killer, leaving the crosses. Someone set it up to make it seem like he’d left them and caused those deaths. A man with a grudge against James Chilton. We stopped him.”
    “And Travis?” Sonia asked desperately, fingers white as they gripped the shirt.
    “We don’t know where he is. We’re looking everywhere, but we haven’t found any leads yet.” Dance explained briefly about Greg Schaeffer and his plan for revenge.
    Sonia wiped her round cheeks. There was prettiness still in her face, though obscured. The remnants of the prettiness evident in the picture of her in the state fair stall taken years earlier. Sonia whispered, “I knew Travis wouldn’t hurt those people. I told you that.”
    Yes, you did, Dance thought. And your body language told me that you were telling the truth. I didn’t listen to you. I listened to logic when I should have listened to intuition. Long ago Dance had done a Myers-Briggs analysis of herself. She got into trouble when she strayed too far from her nature.
    She replaced the shirt, smoothed the cotton again. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “We have no evidence he is. Absolutely none.”
    “But you think so.”
    “It’d be logical for Schaeffer to keep him alive. I’m doing