Hiding Place (9781101606759) (5 page)

Her mom took her to the crime scene once and once only. Ashleigh was nine and had been bugging her mother to take her there. Her mother always refused. She didn’t give Ashleigh good reasons for not doing it—she just flat out refused. But one day Ashleigh asked, and her mother—somewhat reluctantly—agreed.

“I’ll show it to you,” she said. “But then that’s it. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

Ashleigh knew—even as a child—that she had probably just worn her mother down. Ashleigh possessed a rare persistence, a determination that she sometimes believed could chip away at glaciers if she set her mind to it.

But, looking back, Ashleigh wondered if her mom wanted to tell Ashleigh something by taking her to that place. Did she want—symbolically or psychologically or emotionally—to pass a torch to her daughter, even though she was only nine years old?

Whether her mother intended it or not, Ashleigh felt that is what had happened that day. Her mom rarely spoke of her uncle’s murder, but Ashleigh became fascinated by it. She went to that place in the woods as much as she could—sometimes once or twice a week. Ashleigh couldn’t say for sure why she went. She liked the isolation, the quiet, and the mystery. It was her place, a hiding place. And being there didn’t creep her out or scare her. What was scary about it after all? The body was long gone, and
except for the occasional drug arrest or fight between teenagers on the basketball court, nothing dangerous ever happened in the park.

Ashleigh walked past the playground where she’d started her day. More kids were playing there than early in the morning. The swings were filled, the chorus of kids’ voices and screaming rose like a million crickets. It almost hurt her ears. Parents watched from the side, chatting with each other or else talking on cell phones. If they noticed Ashleigh at all—any of them—they likely dismissed her as a typical moody teen, sulking along the edges of the park in her dark T-shirt and dirty jeans. Ashleigh knew appearing disaffected had its advantages—people tended to leave you alone.

She easily found the path through the trees and started toward the place where her uncle had died. The growth was thick from summer, the trees a vibrant green, the mosquitoes and gnats swarming around her face and hands. She thought about Kevin’s words on the bus. She’d been pissed at him before, usually over some minor slight that only Ashleigh understood. She knew she had a tendency to lash out at people—especially those closest to her—and then later regret it. She never really
apologized
to Kevin. She never actually said the words “I’m sorry” to him. She didn’t need to. She’d go to him after one of her blowups and say, “Kevin, about that thing earlier…I mean…I didn’t mean…I wasn’t exactly…” And then he’d laugh at her and she’d know she was forgiven.

He was usually right about most things. So she wondered,
Is he right about this? Did I blow it by not getting the cops involved?

Could this weird guy from the porch really be dangerous? Could he hurt someone—even Mom?

She reached her destination. She knew it because first she
passed a tiny pond, one that the police had searched right away looking for her uncle’s body, and then the path opened up just a little, spreading out for about ten yards and becoming a small clearing. She knew Uncle Justin’s remains had been found just to the west of that open clearing, several yards into the woods where the undergrowth grew thick in the summer heat. The place looked like—nothing. She wondered every time she came how many other people trudged through here—bird-watchers, hikers, teenagers looking for somewhere to smoke or drink or fuck—without even knowing that someone’s life, a child’s life, had ended on that very ground. It seemed like something should mark the locale—a plaque or a marker or something. But the only plaque to her uncle was in the cemetery—a small, simple one. She never went there. If the soul was separate from the body, then what was the point of going to where the body was buried? More than likely, he was there in the woods—or his spirit was—if spirits or even God existed the way everyone seemed to believe.

Ashleigh sat on a stone at the edge of the clearing. It had a smooth top, perfect for sitting. The day her mom brought her here they didn’t do or say anything. Ashleigh expected her mom to want to pray or at least make some sort of statement about what happened, but she had kept her mouth shut. She stared at the ground, her lips pressed into an odd shape, and after about ten minutes said to Ashleigh, “Come on, let’s go home.”

As far as Ashleigh knew, her mother had never gone back to the woods. And as Ashleigh sat there in the clearing, listening to the chirps of the birds or the occasional distant shout from the playground, she knew she saw that as a weakness in her mother, this refusal to take things head-on and really deal with them. And Ashleigh believed her mom had done nothing to find out
more about the man who’d shown up on the porch that night. She hadn’t pursued him or investigated him in any way, leaving the burden to fall to Ashleigh. And Ashleigh couldn’t help but judge her mother even as she tried to help her.

She clenched her fists, squeezed them as tight as she could until her fingernails dug into the skin of her palms. She believed the man who came to the door that night really knew something, and being so close to finding the key, so close to bringing home the answers her mother needed almost hurt—

She would do it her way. She’d find the answers everyone needed.

Ashleigh loosened her grip. When she was a kid and she felt this way—scared, nervous, alone—her mother told her to pray. It worked back then. She slept with a rosary under her pillow—one that had belonged to her grandmother—and fingered the beads when she heard noises in the house and couldn’t sleep. But that hadn’t worked for years, not since long before that man showed up in the night promising to return. Ashleigh still went to church. Her mom dragged her early every Sunday morning and every holy day, and they sat on the side near the front. Ashleigh went through the motions of the Mass, repeating the words and standing up and kneeling without even thinking about it. She suspected most people in the church were doing the same.

She believed her mom’s conviction, though. Her mom went through Mass with her eyes closed and her head down, and after Mass they never failed to go to the front and light a candle, slipping a dollar through the slot as a donation. When she was little, Ashleigh used to ask whom they were lighting a candle for, and her mom always gave the same response: “My brother.”

Ashleigh shut her eyes in the clearing. She heard the distant
hum of a leaf blower, the rustle of the tall trees as the breeze picked up. But she kept her eyelids closed. She watched the weird starburst patterns that exploded on her retinas, shifting swirls of green and red. She mouthed one word:

“God.”

She felt nothing. She felt alone. She didn’t even feel connected to the trees and the grass. Did praying even matter? Did all the time she and her mom spent in church really amount to anything? It all seemed like a fantasy. And Ashleigh wondered if there had really been a man on the porch that night speaking to her mother. Had she dreamed it? A child’s dream? She’d never spoken to her mother about it, so how did she know it really happened?

“God?”

Nothing.

She opened her eyes, and it took a moment for them to adjust to the bright sun. Impulsively, she raised her right hand to her mouth, kissed it, and then cast the “kiss” toward the ground where her uncle’s body was discovered, a gesture that felt a little childish and immature. She’d never done anything like it before, but something about the gesture just felt right, almost required.

Ashleigh pushed herself to her feet. She knew she had to get home. She knew the reporter was coming by their house, and her mother had begged her to be there for the interview. “It sends the message that we’re all united in this,” she had said.

But Ashleigh couldn’t convince herself to believe that either. It too felt like a fairy tale, a child’s myth. Her grandfather never spoke about his dead child or dead wife, and the man barely gave the time of day to Ashleigh or her mother. Ashleigh couldn’t say why, but she even felt a distance between herself and her mother. She thought about it often, searching for the source, and
could only conclude that it had to do with the sadness of her mother’s life, the black cloud that seemed to hang over everything the woman did. Ashleigh knew a better daughter would have reached out to her mother, talked to her about it, and tried to be the support system she so clearly lacked. But Ashleigh couldn’t bring herself to do that. She feared the wellspring of emotion that might pour out if the two of them even tried to talk about something real. Instead, Ashleigh decided to take the indirect approach. She’d find the man from the porch, and in the process, she’d find the truth about her uncle’s death. That would help her mother. That would put everything back on track.

When she first heard the twig snap, she assumed she had made the noise. Ashleigh looked down and saw that she was standing on dirt with no twigs nearby.

The noise came again, and when Ashleigh looked up, toward the same path to the clearing she had just come down, she saw the man looking at her, his body frozen in place next to the pond. A green scum was growing across the surface of the still water.

She recognized him. Didn’t she?

He was black. His eyes were large, the lids heavy and droopy. The man looked tired. Not like someone who hadn’t slept well, but rather like someone who had been knocked around, someone whose life had encountered a series of wrong turns and dead ends. The man’s eyes widened when he saw Ashleigh. He looked guilty, as though he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t be doing. Ashleigh didn’t think—didn’t know if—the man would even recognize her.

But she knew him. She had seen his picture in the paper that very morning.

“Hey,” she said. Her voice sounded low, tentative. She felt as if she were in a dream, the kind in which she would try to cry
out but her voice wouldn’t make a sound. To prove this wasn’t a dream, she spoke again, her voice finding itself and rising louder beneath the trees. “Hey.”

The man started backing away. He held up one hand, the palm toward Ashleigh. She thought he wanted to say something but could manage only the gesture. And what did that gesture say to her?

Stay away from me.

No, that wasn’t it, Ashleigh decided. It was something else, something more benevolent.

I’m sorry
. Is that what it said?
I’m sorry.

The man turned away and started jogging. He didn’t move fast. Ashleigh took several steps after him but then just as quickly stopped. Why would she run after him? What would she do if she caught him?

What could she have to say to Dante Rogers, the man who’d killed her uncle?

Detective Frank Stynes brought his car to a stop, then checked his face in the rearview mirror.
Sick
, he thought.
I look sick
. The air-conditioning in his city-owned sedan was on the fritz, so he drove to the Mannings’ house with the windows down, the hot summer air swirling through the car, rearranging his remaining strands of hair into a comical mess on his head. Without fail, his allergies kicked in with the arrival of the first official day of summer. The whites of his eyes were more pink than anything else, and the tip of his nose was red from repeated blowings. A good day to meet the press and pose for photos, he thought as he climbed out.

Stynes couldn’t remember the last time he had been to the Manning place. Five years, maybe seven. Whenever Dante Rogers had been up for parole the last time, and Stynes had gone over to brief them all on what to say before the board. Whatever he told them or whatever they said worked—for a time. But after twenty-two years of being a model prisoner and repeated claims of being a born-again Christian, Dante was released back into the community. And so Stynes came to the Manning house one more time—probably the last—to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder of a four-year-old.

Stynes’s right hip creaked as he climbed out of the car. He needed to have it replaced—so his doctor told him—and he
planned to have it done as soon as he retired. He’d do that in two years, when he turned fifty-seven. He’d opted to stay in for the full thirty. He told himself because he wanted the full pension and then some, but he knew the truth. Some people looked forward to traveling after retirement. Others to gardening or time with the wife and kids. Stynes had been a widower for four years, no kids. He hated to travel and paid a neighborhood teenager to cut his grass and pull weeds out of the cracks in the sidewalk. As far as he could tell, all he had to look forward to in retirement was a new hip.

The Mannings lived in a decent middle-class neighborhood in Dove Point, one planned and built in the sixties that had always housed schoolteachers and bank managers and salespeople. Kids ran or rode their bikes through the streets, and everyone spent their weekends grilling burgers or washing their cars. Janet Manning told Stynes she had moved back in because her father was contemplating early retirement. Stynes read between the lines of what she said, and he understood. Her dad—a guy a few years older than Stynes—had been laid off and didn’t think he could find another gig.
At least you have that going for you, Stynes,
he said to himself.
Bad hip or not, no one is forcing you out.

Stynes climbed the steps to the porch, and just a few seconds after he’d hit the bell, Janet Manning opened the door.

“Hello, Detective,” she said, stepping back so he could enter. The living room caught a lot of light through the open curtains, and the place looked clean and orderly. Stynes assumed the woman’s touch—either Janet or her daughter or a combination of both—kept the house looking in good shape, but then stopped himself for being sexist. Maybe her dad liked to keep a neat house? Maybe he spent his enforced retirement vacuuming and
dusting? The thought depressed Stynes more than he could have anticipated. He caught a quick flash of himself tending to his own little house—cooking meals on one burner, washing one dish and one cup in the sink…