Hiding Place (9781101606759) (4 page)

Nothing. One more floor to try.

The stairs squeaked and rattled beneath their feet. With every step, Ashleigh gripped the railing tighter, a layer of sweat between her skin and the cold metal. She reached the top and saw the door of the first apartment on the right stood open. She stopped. She felt Kevin behind her, his feet still on the stairs. A plunger, a bucket, and a wrench sat in the hallway just outside the door. Even though she doubted Kevin would speak, she still held her finger in the air, asking for silence.

She wanted to leave. She wanted to back down the stairs, pushing Kevin ahead of her, and go. But she couldn’t. Instead, Ashleigh willed herself forward and peered into the apartment. It looked cluttered and dirty, the floor covered with papers, the furniture rickety and worn. She knocked on the open door, and a pudgy middle-aged man came out of the kitchen. His thinning hair hung in limpid strings, and his thick glasses clung to the tip of his nose so precariously Ashleigh wanted to reach out and push them back up where they belonged.

“Help you?” he said. His face brightened a little, and he brushed some of the strands of hair into a semblance of order. Then his eyes moved over Ashleigh’s head. He saw Kevin, and his face fell a little. “You have to be eighteen to rent,” he said. “And married. I don’t rent to couples who aren’t married.”

“I’m not looking to rent.”
God, I hope I never have to live in a place like this.
“I’m looking for someone. A guy named Steven.”

The man’s face pinched up like he had finally caught a whiff
of the smells that permeated the building. “Steven Kollman?” he asked.

She nodded. She didn’t know if she could speak.

“He’s not home,” the man said. He reached up and used the back of his hand to wipe sweat off his forehead. “I’m the building manager. Just fixing a leak in the kitchen, although why I’m fixing it for him I’ll never know.”

Ashleigh took a step back. “I guess I’ll come another time.”

“Are you a relative or something?” the man asked.

Ashleigh looked back at Kevin. She shrugged. “Kind of.”

“He’s two months late on his rent, so if you see him before I do, you should tell him to get his act together.” The man looked pleased with his tough talk. “Hey, if you’re a relative, maybe you know someone else who can pay the rent for him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anybody can pay it, you know.”

“Sure,” Ashleigh said, backing down the stairs.

The man’s brow furrowed and he scratched at his head. Then his face brightened. “Maybe that guy who came to see him the other night,” the manager said. “Do you know him?”

“A guy?” Ashleigh said. “What guy?”

“I figured maybe he’s a cousin or a brother or something. He seemed to have a little more class than Steven.” The man wiped his nose with his hand. “Sounded like they were arguing.”

“I don’t think I know him,” Ashleigh said.

“Maybe Steven owes him money too.”

“I guess I don’t know about that,” Ashleigh said, and she and Kevin left the building.

“Michael?” Janet said, moving closer. “Is that—Michael?”

When she said his name, he pushed himself up off the car. He didn’t smile, but his eyes brightened. “Hey.”

“It’s you,” Janet said. “It’s really you.”

They came within arm’s length of each other, and the awkward moment descended in which she didn’t know if they were going to hug or if he even wanted to hug her. But he held out his arms, so she went for it, felt herself folded up against his body, triggering, as if by raw instinct, a flash of heat on the back of her neck and a tingling of desire in the pit of her stomach. She inhaled his rugged scent—a touch of sweat and a tangy cologne or deodorant.

When the hug broke off, she examined him up close in the sunlight. It had been how long? Five years? More? He looked thinner, older, the lines at the corners of his eyes and on his forehead more pronounced and deeper. But he finally smiled, and the old Michael was there, the one from childhood and high school. The Michael she really knew. And that familiar desire was there—desire for him—as strong as it had been in the past.

“I didn’t know you were back,” Janet said.

“I wanted to see my mom,” he said.

“Did you just get back?”

“It’s been a little while.” He seemed evasive, which told Janet that he’d been back longer than he wanted to let on. “A few weeks or so.”

“What have you been doing? Where were you living? We heard you might have been in Chicago for a while.”

“I don’t want to keep you from work,” he said.

Janet made a dismissive wave toward the office. “They don’t need me now,” she said, feeling awkward, like a teenager again. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she crossed her arms, then uncrossed them. She did this twice. “Why don’t you come in and we can talk somewhere?”

“I won’t keep you,” he said.

“Okay. But you were in Chicago?”

“That was a couple of years ago,” he said. “I was on the West Coast for a while, then Columbus.”

“You were in Columbus?” Janet said. “Just an hour away?”

“The last year or so,” he said. “I was working for this guy, but—the economy, you know?” He looked around the lot, not letting his eyes rest on Janet.

“But you’re here now,” she said. “For a while?” She heard the hopeful, almost pleading tone in her voice and didn’t like it. But she couldn’t help it. She’d be lying to herself and anyone else if she said she wasn’t thrilled to see him, if she said she didn’t think, from time to time, about the possibility of Michael Bower coming back to Dove Point for good.

“There’s another reason I’m back,” Michael said. He turned to face her. “Do you know what it is?”

“Your dad?”

Michael frowned. “No, not him.” He shook his head.
“Twenty-five years, Janet. I know the date. I saw the paper today. Twenty-five years.”

“I didn’t know if you’d remember,” she said.

“Of course. I was there.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s just—we’ve never really talked about it, you and I. But there’s a reporter coming over to interview me after work today. They’re doing another story.”

“How are you doing with all of this, Janet?” he asked. “I thought you might need the support. You shouldn’t have to go through it alone, you know.”

“You should come to the house today,” Janet said. “The reporter asked me if I was in touch with you. We can do the interview together.”

Michael looked away again, but this time he glanced behind her. She turned to follow his gaze and saw Madeline coming out of the back of the building, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun.

“There you are,” Madeline said. “I thought you’d run off. The provost’s office is on the phone. They need you.”

“Okay. Just a minute.”

“I think they have a question about the budget.”

Before Madeline went back in, she cast a last, long look at Michael, and Janet knew she’d have more questions to answer about the man in the parking lot.

“I have to go,” Janet said. “But come to the interview. Really. You must be thinking about this a lot. We can talk about it.”

“You must think about it a lot, too,” Michael said. He stared at her, studying her face. “What do you remember from that day, Janet?”

For a long moment, Janet stared at him. Her mouth was dry, and the sounds of the passing cars amplified, like rushing wind.
Before she could say anything else, Madeline stuck her head out the door and called her name again.

“You’ll come today, right?” Janet asked. “Two o’clock.”

“We’ll talk,” Michael said.

Janet looked back once before she entered the building, but he was already gone.

As the nearly empty bus brought the two of them back near their homes, Ashleigh thought about the size of Dove Point, Ohio. Not really big enough to be called a city, and yet not really small enough to be called a town. According to her ninth-grade civics class, about fifty thousand people lived there. Most of them worked at the university or the medical center complex or the handful of factories that dotted the perimeter of Dove Point like beads on a bracelet.

Had she really come that close to the guy from the porch? Had she almost found the needle in the haystack?

Kevin stretched across from her. His long legs spilled off the end of the seat, partially blocking the aisle, and she could tell by the way he chewed his thumbnail that he was anxious.

“They won’t fire you for being late once,” she said.

“I know. I really wasn’t thinking about that.” He straightened up and scooted over to the seat on the aisle, making sure he wouldn’t have to raise his voice to be heard. One old woman rode at the front, her little rolling grocery cart close by her side as if it contained gold. “What are you going to do now?” he asked. “I mean, you didn’t really prove that’s the dude who came to your house in the middle of the night.”

She didn’t hesitate. “It’s him,” she said.

“Really?”

“Really. It’s him.”

They stopped at a light, the engine rumbling in idle. The air-conditioning worked hard to keep them cool, and Ashleigh pinched the fabric of her T-shirt between two fingers and tugged it back and forth, adding to the breeze.

“Do you think this guy might be getting ready to leave town? Not paying rent, not hanging around. Do you think he heard someone was asking about him?” Kevin asked, his voice low. “Maybe the people you asked at his old job told him.”

“What was I supposed to do? Ignore it?”

“No, no.” He held out his hands. He was placating her, which always made her even more angry. “I’m just saying, this guy—if he really knows something—doesn’t want to spill it yet.”

“He showed up at our door.”

Kevin raised an index finger. “In the middle of the night.”

“He said he’d come back.”

“But he hasn’t yet. He could be in trouble with the police. He could be scared. Think about how you would feel if someone came around asking questions about you. You’d freak out. He doesn’t know who you are, does he? Or what you want.”

“Fuck you.”

“Ash, come on—”

“You heard me. Fuck you.”

The old woman at the front of the bus turned, her lips pursed. Ashleigh swallowed hard, felt her anger rise.

“Don’t be like that,” Kevin said. “But if we’d told the police or an adult, maybe they could have…I don’t know…handled it better.”

Ashleigh pulled the bell. “This is your stop,” she said.

The motion of the bus stopping rocked Ashleigh in her seat. She heard Kevin stand up and take two steps up the aisle.

“Hey,” he said. “You coming?”

“You know where I’m going,” she said.

“You want me to come with you?” he asked.

She didn’t respond. Kevin was keeping the bus waiting, but he said one more thing.

“I’m just worried that this guy might be trouble. What if he’s dangerous? What if he wants to hurt you or your mom for some reason?”

Ashleigh heard him. His words registered within her, but she didn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing any response. She stared straight ahead and froze him out until he turned and pushed through the side door of the bus, leaving her alone.

Ashleigh knew where her uncle had died. She’d been there many times. The Norbert Rovin Memorial Park sat two blocks north of their house, the house Ashleigh shared with her mother and grandfather, the house her mother had grown up in. Adjacent to the park stood a thick cluster of trees—several acres’ worth. The land for the park had been set aside not long after the town’s founding, and over the years houses and neighborhoods sprung up around its border. Kevin lived with his family on the opposite side of the park from Ashleigh, which made it a convenient meeting place.

Ashleigh walked the two blocks from the bus stop to the park. She knew—seemingly since her birth—that her uncle had been murdered in the woods near their house. Over the years, a process of eavesdropping on adult conversations combined with her own investigations at the local library had allowed Ashleigh to know the facts of her uncle’s death as well as anybody else. Her uncle Justin had gone to the park with her mom on
a hot summer day. Eyewitnesses—both adults and children—remembered seeing a young black man in the park talking to some of the children, including Justin. When her uncle disappeared, the police made a sketch of the man and searched for him. Volunteers and professionals combed the woods near the park, then expanded their search to remote areas around town—ponds and culverts and abandoned houses. While the search for the boy—or his body—went on, police began to learn more about the man in the sketch. A woman came forward four weeks after the disappearance and told police her nephew—seventeen-year-old Dante Rogers—liked to go to the park Justin had disappeared from. She also said he had been acting strangely since the boy’s disappearance, and had even started collecting newspaper articles about the case. When the police investigated Rogers further, they found he had once been arrested—as a juvenile—for improper contact with a child. They took him into custody, where he denied his guilt.

That summer had remained hot. For the six weeks after her uncle’s disappearance, the Midwest baked under record heat. The search parties tailed off. Then the weather broke. The temperatures cooled and the area was soaked with several days of heavy rain. Hoping the weather change might aid the search, the volunteers looked again, starting in the woods near the park. Apparently, the recent rain had disturbed the earth enough to reveal the skeletal remains of her uncle, who had been buried in a shallow grave in the woods near the park, not far from a walking path. Police charged Dante Rogers with the second-degree murder of Justin Manning.

As long as Ashleigh could remember, she had asked her mother to show her the place where the crime had occurred. As a child, Ashleigh couldn’t articulate why she wanted to see that
spot. She just knew she felt curiosity about it. Only as she grew older did she feel she fully understood the fascination that place held for her.

It was simple, really: everything for her family had changed that day in the park. If her uncle hadn’t been killed, if her mother hadn’t been there…who knows how things would be different? Would her grandfather be less distant and cold? Would her mother be stronger and have a more fulfilling life?