Leaving Time: A Novel (13 page)

I thought we should arrest Thomas as a person of interest. Donny said that wasn’t possible, since we didn’t know if any crime had been
committed. He said that we’d have to wait for Alice to wake up and tell us herself what had happened, and if Thomas had anything to do with her head injury or the kid’s disappearance or Nevvie’s death.

We were still at the hospital waiting for her to regain consciousness when Gideon called, panicked. Twenty minutes later, we accompanied him to the sanctuary enclosure, shining flashlights into the dark, where Thomas Metcalf was standing in his bare feet and bathrobe, trying to secure chains around the front legs of an elephant. She kept trying to rip away from her restraints; a dog was barking and nipping at him, attempting to stop him. Metcalf kicked the dog in the ribs, and it whimpered away on its belly. “It’ll only take a few minutes to get the U0126 into her system—”

“I don’t know what the hell he’s doing,” Gideon said, “but we do
not
chain elephants here.”

The elephants were rumbling, an unholy earthquake that shuddered across the ground and up my legs.

“You’ve got to get him out of there,” Gideon muttered, “before the elephant gets hurt.”

Or vice versa
, I thought.

It took an hour to talk Thomas out of the enclosure. It took another thirty minutes for Gideon to get close enough to the terrified animal to remove the shackles. We handcuffed Metcalf, which seemed awfully fitting, and brought him to a psychiatric hospital sixty miles south of Boone. For a while, during the drive, we were out of the range of cell phone coverage, which is why it wasn’t until an hour later I got the message that Alice Metcalf was awake.

By then, we had been on the job for sixteen hours.

“Tomorrow,” Donny pronounced. “We’ll interview her first thing. Neither one of us is going to be any good right now.”

And so began the biggest mistake of my life.

Sometime between midnight and 6:00
A.M.
, Alice signed herself out of Mercy hospital and disappeared off the face of the earth.

•  •  •

“Mr. Stanhope,” she says. “
Virgil
Stanhope?”

When I open the door, the kid speaks the word like an accusation, as if being named Virgil is equivalent to having an STD. Immediately all my defenses kick in. I’m not Virgil and haven’t been for a long time. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to Alice Metcalf?”

I peer more closely at her face, which is still kind of blurry, thanks to the amount I’ve drunk. Then I squint. This must be another hallucination. “Go away,” I slur.

“Not until you admit that you’re the guy who dropped my mother off, unconscious, at a hospital ten years ago.”

Just like that, I’m stone-cold sober, and I know who this is standing before me. Not Alice, and not just a hallucination. “Jenna. You’re her daughter.”

The light that washes over that girl’s face looks like the kind of thing you see in paintings in cathedrals, the sort of art that breaks your heart even as you stare at it. “She told you about me?”

Alice Metcalf had not told me anything, of course. She wasn’t at the hospital when I went back there the morning after the trampling to take her statement. All the nurse could tell me was that she’d signed her own paperwork for discharge, and that she mentioned someone named Jenna.

Donny took that as proof that Gideon’s story had been the legitimate one, that Alice Metcalf had run off with her daughter as she’d been hoping to. Given the fact that her husband was a whack job, that seemed like a happy ending. At the time, Donny had been two weeks shy of retirement, and I knew he wanted to clear out the paperwork on his desk—including the caregiver’s death at the New England Elephant Sanctuary.
It was an accident, Virgil
, he said emphatically, when I pushed him to dig deeper.
Alice Metcalf is not a suspect. She’s not even a missing person, until someone reports it
.

But nobody ever did. And when I tried to, I was stonewalled by Donny, who told me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d just let this one go. When I argued that he was making the wrong call here,
Donny lowered his voice. “I’m not the one making it,” he said cryptically.

For a decade, there were things about that case that didn’t sit right with me.

Yet now, ten years later, here is the proof that Donny Boylan was right all along.

“Holy shit,” I say, rubbing my temples. “I can’t believe this.” I let the door fall back so that Jenna walks in, wrinkling her nose at the crumpled fast-food wrappers on the floor and the smell of stale smoke. With a shaking hand, I pull a cigarette from my shirt pocket and light up.

“Those things will kill you.”

“Not fast enough,” I mutter, drawing in for that kick of nicotine. I swear, sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps me alive another day.

Jenna slaps down a twenty-dollar bill. “Well, try to pull it together for just a little bit longer,” she says. “At least long enough for me to hire you.”

I laugh. “Sweetheart, save your piggy-bank change. If your dog’s missing, put up flyers. If a guy dumped you for a hotter girl, stuff your bra and make him jealous. That advice, it’s all free, by the way, ’cause that’s how I roll.”

She doesn’t blink. “I’m hiring you to finish your job.”

“What?”

“You have to find my mother,” she says.

There is something I never told anyone about that case.

The days after the death at the New England sanctuary were, as you can imagine, a freaking PR nightmare—with Thomas Metcalf in a drugged stupor at a residential psychiatric treatment facility and his wife AWOL, the only caregiver left was Gideon. The sanctuary itself was bankrupt and in default, all the cracks in its foundation now laid bare to the public. No food was coming in for the elephants, no more
hay. The property was going to be seized by the bank, but in order for that to happen its residents—all thirty-five thousand pounds of them—needed to be relocated.

It’s not easy to find a home for seven elephants, but Gideon had grown up in Tennessee and knew about a place in Hohenwald called The Elephant Sanctuary. They recognized this as an emergency and were willing to do whatever they could for the New Hampshire animals. They agreed to house the elephants in their quarantine barn until a new one could be built for them specifically.

That week a new case got thrown onto my desk—a babysitter, seventeen years old, who was responsible for a six-month-old’s brain damage. I immersed myself in trying to get the girl—a cheerleader with blond hair and a perfect white smile—to admit to shaking the infant. Which is why, on the day of Donny’s retirement party, I was still at my desk when the medical examiner’s report on Nevvie Ruehl came through.

I knew what it said already—that the caregiver’s death was accidental, caused by the trampling of an elephant. But I found myself scrolling through the text, reading the weight of the victim’s heart, brain, liver. On the last page was a list of the articles found with the body.

One of those items was a single strand of red hair.

I grabbed the report and ran downstairs, where Donny was wearing a party hat and blowing out the candles on a cake shaped like an eighteenth hole. “Donny,” I murmured, “we have to talk.”

“Now?”

I pulled him into the hallway. “Look.”

I shoved the ME’s report into his hand and watched him scan the results. “You dragged me out of my own going-away party to tell me what I already know? I’ve already told you, Virg. Put it to rest.”

“That hair,” I said. “The red one. That’s not the victim’s. She was blond. Which means that there could have been a struggle.”

“Or that someone reused a body bag.”

“I’m pretty sure that Alice Metcalf has red hair.”

“So do six million other people in the United States. And even if it does happen to belong to Alice Metcalf, so what? The two women knew each other; trace evidence would transfer due to their interactions. This would only prove that at some point, they were in proximity. That’s Forensics 101.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I’m going to give you a little advice. No detective wants to be in charge of a town that’s on edge. Two days ago most of Boone was shitting bricks about crazy rogue elephants that could kill them in their sleep. Now everyone’s finally settling down again, since the elephants are leaving. Alice Metcalf is probably in Miami, enrolling her kid in preschool under a fake name. If you start saying this case might not have been accidental but actually a murder, you’re going to create a fresh panic. When you hear hoofbeats, Virgil, chances are it’s a horse, not a zebra. People want cops who keep them safe from trouble—not cops who go looking for it where it doesn’t exist. You want to make detective? Stop being Superman, and be Mary Fucking Poppins instead.”

He patted me on the back and headed toward the room full of revelers.

“What did you mean?” I yelled after him. “When you said it wasn’t your call?”

Donny stopped in his tracks, looked into the crowd of celebrating coworkers, and then grabbed my arm and pulled me in the opposite direction, where there would be no chance of us being overheard. “Did you ever wonder why the press didn’t go apeshit over this? It’s New Fucking Hampshire. Nothing ever happens here. Anything that smells like potential homicide is usually as irresistible as crack. Unless,” he said quietly, “people far more powerful than you or me inform them to stop digging.”

Back then, I still believed in justice, in the system. “You’re telling me the chief’s okay with that?”

“It’s an election year, Virg. The governor can’t win a second term on a zero-crime platform if the public thinks there’s still a murderer wandering around Boone.” He sighed. “That governor is the same
guy who increased the budget for public safety so you could get hired in the first place. So you could protect the community without having to choose between a cost-of-living raise and a Kevlar vest.” He looked directly at me. “Suddenly, doing the right thing isn’t so black and white, is it?”

I watched Donny walk away, but I never joined him at the party. Instead, I returned to my desk and worked the last page of the ME’s report free from its staple. Folding it into quarters, I slipped the page into the pocket of my jacket.

I put the rest of the ME’s report in the closed case file of Nevvie Ruehl and instead pored over the evidence I had for the shaken baby. Two days later, Donny officially retired, and I got the teenage cheerleader to confess.

The elephants, I heard, adapted well in Tennessee. The sanctuary land was sold—half to the state in conservation, and half to a developer. After all the debts were paid, the remaining funds were managed by a lawyer to pay for the residential care of Thomas Metcalf. His wife never came back to claim any of it.

Six months afterward, I was promoted to detective. The morning of the ceremony, I dressed in my one good suit and took, from my nightstand drawer, the folded page of the ME’s report. I tucked this into my breast pocket.

I needed to remind myself that I was no hero.

“She’s missing again?” I ask.

“What do you mean
again
?” Jenna answers. She sits down in the chair across from my desk and folds her legs, Indian-style.

That, at least, cuts through the fog in my brain. I stub my cigarette out in a stale cup of coffee. “Didn’t she run off with you?”

“I’m going to say no,” Jenna says, “since I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

“Wait.” I shake my head. “What?”

“You were one of the last people to see my mother alive,” Jenna
explains. “You dropped her off at the hospital, and then when she disappeared you didn’t even do what any policeman with half a brain would do—go after her.”

“I had no reason to go after her. She signed herself out of the hospital. Adults do that every day—”

“She had a
head
injury—”

“The hospital wouldn’t have flagged it as long as they felt she was safe to be checking out, or else it would have been a HIPAA violation. Since they didn’t seem to have a problem with her leaving, and since we never heard otherwise, we assumed that she was okay and that she was running off with you.”

“Then how come you never charged her with kidnapping?”

I shrug. “Your father never officially reported her missing.”

“I guess he was too busy being electrocuted as part of his therapy.”

“If you weren’t with your mother, who’s been taking care of you all this time?”

“My grandmother.”

So that was where Alice had stashed the baby. “And why didn’t
she
report your mother’s disappearance?”

The girl’s cheeks flush. “I was too young to remember, but she says she went to the police station the week after my mom disappeared. I guess nothing ever came of it.”

Was that true? I couldn’t remember anyone formally lodging a missing persons complaint about Alice Metcalf. But then maybe the woman hadn’t seen me. Maybe she’d seen Donny instead. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Alice Metcalf’s mother had been dismissed when she asked for help, or if Donny had tossed the paperwork intentionally so that I wouldn’t stumble across it, because he knew I’d want to follow up and drag out the case.

“The point is,” Jenna says. “You should have tried to find her. And you didn’t. So you owe me now.”

“What makes you so sure she can be found?”

“She’s not dead.” Jenna looks me in the eye. “I think I’d know it.
Feel
it.”

If I had a Ben Franklin for every time I’d heard that from someone
who was hoping for good news in a missing persons case only to have the remains turn up—well, I’d be drinking Macallan whiskey, not JD. But instead I say, “Is it possible she didn’t come back because she didn’t want to? A lot of people reinvent themselves.”

“Like you?” she asks, staring right at me.
“Victor?”

“Okay, yeah,” I admit. “If your life sucks completely, sometimes it’s easier to start over.”

“My mom
did not
just decide to become someone else,” she insists. “She liked who she was. And she wouldn’t have left me behind.”

I did not know Alice Metcalf. But I know there are two ways to live: Jenna’s way, where you hang on to what you have in a death grip so you don’t lose it; or my way, where you walk away from everything and everyone that matters before they can leave you behind. Either way, you’re bound to be disappointed.