Stranded by Alice Sharpe Page A

you?”
    “Mama told me you got back,” he said with a sideways glance at Alex and away. He wasn’t the brightest guy in town, but he was always friendly and pretty reliable. There was no doubt he had his share of burdens to deal with. Besides his own learning impairments, his mother was a difficult woman who had once been a great beauty. She’d married an out-of-work mill worker right out of high school but the guy died a few weeks after Billy was born. After his death, rumors circulated she slept around, but slowly those gossipy whispers were replaced by ones concerning her descent into some kind of undefined mental issues that now kept her more or less trapped in the double-wide she shared with her only son. Billy took care of her as well as doing odd jobs at the airport. Money had to be tight.
    “She must have read it in the newspaper,” Alex said.
    “She likes to collect newspapers,” Billy said, his gaze lifting to meet the intense interest of the other officers, then sliding away. When Smyth cleared his throat, Billy jumped a few inches.
    Smyth was fiftysomething, with a shaved head and a hooked, prominent nose with a tight, strong body thanks to weekend trail biking. His unblinking gaze sometimes reminded Alex of a hawk. Given the cornered look on Billy’s face, he agreed with that assessment.
    Billy swallowed and tried talking a couple of times, but the sentences ended in stuttering and were difficult to understand. Alex tried to get him to sit down, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t, nor did he recover his ability to speak coherently. He paced a little, stared at Dylan, paced some more, stared at Herrera, paced some more, darted a quick glance at Chief Smyth.
    During this uncomfortable interlude, Alex had a sudden memory of the day his plane lifted off the Blunt Falls runway, something he had completely put out of his mind until that moment of watching Billy aimlessly move around the porch while darting looks this way and that. Add the vision he’d created earlier when he walked through the fog and it suddenly gelled. “You were at the airfield,” he said to Billy.
    Billy stopped pacing so abruptly he almost tripped on his own feet. “What?” he said.
    “Yeah, you were there,” Alex said. “In fact, when I came out of the office after taking Kit’s call, you were on the field. You’d been deicing someone’s windshield, remember? You were carrying the equipment and you were walking toward me during a light snow flurry. In fact, you’re the last person I saw that day.”
    The kid’s Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat as he swallowed.
    “You don’t remember seeing Alex?” Dylan asked, hands planted on his knees.
    “I forget,” the boy said, swallowing yet again. Little beads of perspiration sprang out across his forehead and the redness in his cheeks paled.
    “Sounds to me like you’re hiding something,” the chief said.
    “No, no, nothing,” Billy sputtered.
    “Then why did you come here tonight?”
    “I’ve been helping...helping...you know...Mrs. Foster...with yard work.”
    “At eleven o’clock at night?”
    “No. No. Mama told me Mr. Foster came home. I wanted to see if he was okay, that’s all.”
    “You said you wanted to tell him something,” Herrera said.
    “I don’t remember,” Billy said quickly, his voice high and anxious.
    The porch door opened and Jessica appeared carrying a tray laden with tall cups of what smelled like coffee, probably in deference to those who still had hours of work ahead of them. Her warm smile faded a bit as her gaze settled on the obvious distress of Billy’s expression. Cups slid as the tray dipped. Alex grabbed it from her just in time.
    “What’s going on?” she asked as he settled the tray on a table.
    “Billy came to talk to me,” he said.
    She looked at the formidable group facing the young man and stepped forward. “Did you ride your bike into town this late at night and in the fog?” she asked Billy, casting him a