eventually destroyed her. Tragic, but I used her as an example with my kids and now with my grandkids. Straying from the path of the Lord leaves us stumbling in darkness.” She turned away from the screen door then to check on the welfare of the three children sitting in a row on the couch, eyes all glued in the same direction. The sound of cartoons could be heard.
“Do you remember what she did after her business burned down? How’d she make a living?”
The woman patted her graying bun and gave a slight sniff. “Not sure the bar was ever her business to begin with. I think that man she took up with gave her the cash for it. Had her put it in her name, and I told her at the time, there’s no good reason a man does that, unless he’s trying to hide something. Did she listen?”
Obviously the question was meant to be rhetorical. Carly didn’t wait for an answer. “He was bad news from the start, and I told her that, too. He’d been in prison and he didn’t make his living any way that I could see, so where’d that money come from? She was doomed to come to a bad end from the day she met him. And she should have known better, with a kid to take care of and all.”
“So the boy didn’t belong to Fredericks?”
The woman shook her head hard enough that it should have set her hairdo to unraveling. Not a strand moved. Risa was beginning to believe it was shellacked in place. “Can’t tell you where the kid came from, but he appeared long before she took up with that Fredericks. I will say,” and the words were uttered so grudgingly they appeared painful for her, “he was good enough to the boy. Sammy idolized him. Was real broken up when he died. I always figured it was drugs brought Fredericks and Tory together. She’d had her own problems with that stuff before, but after his death, she just spiraled further and further downward.” For the first time a hint of true emotion flickered over her face. “Maybe I didn’t try hard enough with her. Might have been a bit too strong in my opinions back then. But she sort of pulled away. When I heard she’d overdosed, I hadn’t seen her in almost a year.”
“What happened to her son?”
A pious expression crossed the woman’s face. “Well, it was my Christian duty to raise my sister’s boy, so I did my best. No matter that we didn’t get a dime to take him in, either. Tory certainly didn’t leave anything behind when she died. But things didn’t work out. My husband hurt his back and was on disability. He and Sammy never did get on together. And he was just all the time causing problems with my own two kids. Things got tight and we had to give him over to Social Services. They treated him right,” she hastened to say. “They got families who take kids like that, with nowhere else to go.”
It was impossible not to feel a tug of sympathy for a long ago young boy who lost everything in a few short years. The man who’d taken an interest in him. His mother. And the only other living relatives he had.
“Do you have an address for Sammy now? Know where we can find him?”
“He’s in Bethany Alliance Cemetery, buried right next to his mother. We didn’t have the money for a proper stone, but there’s a marker on his grave. We did right by the boy in death, even though he never had much use for us after he was grown.”
Risa’s heart dropped to the vicinity of her stomach. “Sammy Baltes is dead?”
The woman nodded, and if she felt a shred of sorrow over the thought, it didn’t show in her expression. “Car crash three years ago. And I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but that boy was headed for a bad end, in any case. There was a slyness about that one. You ask me, he didn’t care a bit about anyone but himself.”
“So you identified the body?” Nate asked.
She lifted one bony shoulder. “I identified the car. It was registered to him. Wasn’t much I could do with the body. The car rolled several times before bursting into flames. What was left of Sammy was burnt to a crisp.”
Johnny waited for Hans to speak. And the longer the silence stretched,