In the Dark (18 page)

 

“Where the hell are you? This is so damn unfair, Donna.”

 

Words spilled out of her mouth. She couldn’t slow them down. “Clark, get down here, get down here now!”

 

“What’s going on? Is it Mary?”

 

“Just come now, I’m on the highway south of town. Come right now!”

 

God bless him, he didn’t ask any more questions. The phone was dead. He was already gone and on his way. When you needed him, Clark always came through. That was why she had loved him for so long.

 

All she had to do was wait. Wait for the sirens. Wait for Clark.

 

Donna turned over. Crouching on the ground, she couldn’t see the bench by the river where Mary was sitting. She didn’t want to call Mary’s
name and risk her wandering into the road. She laid Charlie’s hand on the pavement. “I’m still here,” she told him.

 

Donna stood up.

 

“Oh, my God!” she screamed.

 

The wooden bench was empty in the shadows. She didn’t see Mary anywhere. Donna tore at her hair. Blood smeared on her face. She looked everywhere, at her car, at the trees, at the path that disappeared up the river bank. “Mary! Mary!”

 

She screamed over and over, but she didn’t see her beautiful girl.

 

“Oh, God, someone help me! Help! Mary!”

 

 

 

 

A baby rabbit no bigger than Mary’s fist poked its nose out of the goldenrod and hopped into the middle of the dirt trail. Mary wanted to hold it so she could feel better. She had held a rabbit before, and its fur was soft on her fingers and its warm little body made her happy. She got up and crept toward the path, laying each foot down softly and quietly. The rabbit watched her come. Its big dark eyes blinked at her. Its nose smelled her. The animal took two more hops, turning its white puffball tail toward Mary. They began a little dance, Mary taking a step, the rabbit taking a hop, as if they were playing with each other.

 

“Bunny,” Mary cooed. “Here, bunny.”

 

She followed it up the trail. She looked down at her feet, not at the trees or the river, and not at the highway, which soon disappeared from view behind her. She didn’t notice it was getting dark. The bunny led her away, a hop at a time, and when it finally shot north on the trail and disappeared, Mary ran, trying to catch it. She called out for the bunny in a murmur and hunted in the brush. It was gone, but when she jumped into a patch of wildflowers, she flushed another butterfly, which floated just out of her reach. She forgot about the rabbit and followed the butterfly instead.

 

She forgot about Charlie, too. And Mama. She didn’t think about being alone, because the butterfly was with her. It wasn’t until the butterfly soared off into the treetops that Mary stopped and looked around her and realized that no one was close to her anymore. It was nearly dark inside the trees. She could see the river down the bank below her, but the dancing dots of sunlight were gone, and the water looked black. Mary stood in the
middle of the trail, not knowing what to do. She bit her lip and blinked. Tears dripped down her cheeks.

 

“Mama?”

 

She didn’t dare speak loudly. She didn’t know who would hear her. She wished the bunny would come back. Somewhere below her, awfully far away, she thought she heard Mama’s voice. Mary didn’t know how to find her, and she was afraid that Mama would be angry at her for running away. She had done that before, and Mama always got upset, although she hugged her hard.

 

Mary wanted a hug right now.

 

She heard noises in the woods. Her eyes grew wide. She hoped it would be Mama, or Charlie, or Daddy, and that they had come to get her and take her home. She took a step backward and laced her fingers together over her stomach. It was hard to see anything at all now, just shadows that were like the night outside her bedroom window. She looked up, wanting to see the sky, but the branches drooped like arms over her head, and she didn’t like it at all. The noises got louder. She cried harder and whimpered.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

The trees moved. They were alive. Mary saw a man climb out of the trees, not even ten feet away from her. He reached out his hands toward her the way a monster would, but it wasn’t Charlie, or Daddy; he was a stranger, and she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t scream, because she wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. Not at all. Not ever.

 

She didn’t want to look at him. She thought if she closed her eyes, he would go away, like a bad dream. But when she did, and she opened them to slits, he was still there, and he was coming closer. When he was close enough that she could see his face, her mouth fell open in a terrible O, because this man was worse than a stranger.

 

He was the man outside her window.

 

The man who scared her.

 

“Him him him him him him him!”

 

He said something to her. He moved toward her, his grasping arms outstretched.

 

“No no no no no!”

 

Mary ran, falling as she did, then getting up and crying. She didn’t look
behind her. She never wanted to see the man again, never wanted to see his face, never wanted to feel him watching her, never wanted to find him outside her window. She wanted Mama and Daddy to make him go away. She wanted to wake up and be in her bed.

 

She couldn’t see anything in front of her as she ran. She didn’t know where she was. She knew only that the world was going down, that the branches and brush grabbed at her like the hands of monsters, that she heard animals breathing and snorting.

 

The ground under her feet became a dark pool of quicksand.

 

Water.

 

She was in water. She was in the river.

 

Then there was no ground under her feet at all, and she was sinking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16
___________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stride slid open a small cubbyhole inside the cabinet of his desk. The drawer was empty except for a photograph, which Stride removed and held at the corner between his thumb and forefinger. The picture was more than ten years old. It showed two men, dressed in suits, standing in front of a brick fireplace at the Kitch, which was the private club where the movers and shakers of Duluth sipped martinis, ate red meat, and decided the city’s future. Stride was the man on the left. Next to him was Ray Wallace, with an arm around Stride’s shoulder and a smile as big as the lake. It was the night Stride had been named to lead the city’s Detective Bureau. Ray was the police chief.

 

He could see paternal pride in Ray’s eyes. There was nothing fake about that glow. Ray had guided every step of his career from his earliest days on the police force. That night at the Kitch, Ray told him that the only thing that would ever make him happier was the day he could hand the keys to the chief’s office to Stride as he retired.

 

Two years later, Ray drilled a bullet through Stride’s shoulder.

 

He used the same long-barreled revolver he had kept in pristine condition since his own days as a detective, the same gun he had used to hunt
Dada. While Stride watched, bleeding, from the floor of Ray’s cabin, Ray took that revolver, put the barrel in his mouth under his droopy red mustache, and blew out most of his brain through the back of his skull.

 

Looking back, Stride knew he should have seen the signs. He could see them in the photograph as he stared at it. Ray was heavy. His cheeks were florid from the four scotches he drank at dinner. Age wore on him. He had trappings of wealth he never should have had, like the watch on his hand, the bottle of champagne at dinner, the spring vacation to Aruba, and the pearls around his young wife’s neck. Back then, Stride had never
wanted
to see the signs. He had refused to allow them into his mind, until a whistle-blower from Stanhope Industries laid out all the papers for him at a Twin Cities hotel, and Stride could see twenty years of bribery and corruption with only one name to explain it all away. Ray.

 

Stride hired a forensic accountant who followed the paper trail to Ray and to a handful of senior executives at Stanhope. The mayor and county attorney would have been content to let Ray resign and slip away quietly, but the media got their teeth in the story, and Ray was staring not only at disgrace and bankruptcy but at jail time, too. When Ray’s wife called Stride from their cabin near Ely, Ray was threatening to kill all of them. His wife. Their two kids. Stride went up there alone, wanting to talk Ray out of it, man to man, detective to chief. He thought he had a chance of making it all end peacefully when Ray let his wife and kids walk safely out the door. He only realized later that this was between himself and Ray, that Stride’s betrayal was like a son taking down a father. Ray wanted Stride to be there when he killed himself.

 

“You don’t still blame yourself, do you?”

 

Stride saw Maggie in the doorway of his office. The rest of the Detective Bureau was dark behind her; it was after midnight. She strolled inside and sat down sideways in the upholstered chair he kept in the corner. Her short legs dangled off the ground. She had a can of Diet Coke in one hand.

 

“I’ve been down that road too many times,” Stride said. “There’s nothing I would have done differently.”

 

Maggie and Cindy had been the two people in his life who helped him climb out of a well of depression after Ray died. Without Maggie, he doubted that he would have gone back on the job after his shoulder healed.
He had been ready to quit, but Maggie had nagged him about open cases until he realized that he still loved being a cop, with or without Ray.

 

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Stride said.

 

“What’s that?”

 

“I still wonder why Ray never tried to corrupt me. He was on the take all those years, but he never once asked me to cut a corner for him. He never asked for my help.”

 

“He knew you’d say no,” Maggie said.

 

“Do you think so? If Ray came to me when I was a young cop and asked me to look the other way on something, do you think I wouldn’t have done it? No way I would have said no to him.”

 

“Maybe that’s the point, boss.”

 

“What?”

 

“You were the one thing Ray was really proud of,” Maggie told him. “He wasn’t going to mess you up the way he was messed up. He didn’t want you to wind up like him.”

 

Stride laid the photo down on his desk. “Maybe you’re right.” He looked up at her and added, “Why are you here so late?”

 

“I saw your light.”

 

“Any more news on the adoption front?”

 

“Not yet. I still can’t make up my mind.”

 

“You know what I think. You’re a natural.”

 

Maggie shrugged and didn’t say anything more.

 

“Were you on the scene in Fond du Lac?” he asked.

 

Maggie took a long swallow from her can of soda. She draped her head back and stared at the ceiling. “Yeah.”

 

“Did the girl make it?”

 

“No. She was dead when they pulled her out of the water.”

 

“How about the boy? The one on the bicycle?”

 

“Lucky. His vitals are good. The docs think he’ll pull through.”

 

“How are the girl’s parents?”

 

Maggie shook her head. “They’re both wrecks. Mary was everything to them. Taking care of her destroyed their marriage, but they lived and breathed for that girl.”

 

“I hope the mother doesn’t blame herself for leaving the girl alone,” Stride said. “It was a terrible accident. There was nothing she could have done.”

 

“I’m not so sure it was an accident.”

 

Stride balanced his elbows on his desk. “What do you mean?”

 

“Donna Biggs thinks the peeper was there. She thinks that’s what spooked Mary and made her run. When she went into the water, he took off.”

 

“Is there anything to back it up?”

 

“Donna swears she saw a car parked just up the hill from where she was. She says it was a silver RAV4, which tracks with the reports of a mini-SUV near several of the peeping scenes. No one got plates, of course.”

 

“That’s not much.”

 

“Donna also saw a man get into the RAV when she was running up the trail after she heard Mary scream.”

 

“Can she recognize him?”

 

“No.”

 

“Is there any physical evidence?”

 

“We’ll be searching the woods between the trail and the spot where the car was parked.”

 

“I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but even if you find this guy, it’s going to be a tough road to prove he was responsible for Mary’s death.”

 

“If he tried to grab her, and she wound up dead as a result of his actions, we can make a manslaughter case out of that.”

 

“I know, but with what evidence?” Stride asked.

 

“The peeping history with the girl. The car. Any physical evidence we can find. Mary’s scream. Hell, who knows what souvenirs this guy kept? Maybe when we find him, he’ll have pictures. If I can put a few of the pieces together, Pat Burns can make a jury see the light.”

 

“You sound like this case is personal,” Stride said.

 

Maggie nodded. “I saw the girl when she was sleeping at her house. She was sweet. I told her father he didn’t have anything to worry about, and now the girl winds up dead. We were staking out Clark’s house and Donna’s apartment, but it looks like he outsmarted us. Donna says she stopped at this park every Friday night before she dropped Mary off at her ex-husband’s place. He must have been following them.”

 

“Or the mother is wrong.”

 

“I don’t think she is.”

 

Stride trusted Maggie’s instincts. “Go with your gut,” he said.

 

He picked up the photograph from his desk and studied it again. He was having a hard time shrugging off the past. “You know, I’ve always believed that Ray’s death was one more ripple effect from Laura’s murder,” he said.