Cold Woods Page 17

  Trisha ignored her, headed for the middle of the road, where the plow had gone through at least twice during the night. The road wasn’t completely cleared, but the packed snow made for easier walking. The wind picked up in the open space, gnawed at her ears.

  It seemed to Trisha that Carlyn hesitated. A second later she was by her side.

  Dannie ran to catch up to them. “Where are you going?” she asked. Her big puffy coat came down to her knees. It was a little too small and was pulled tight across her chest.

  “The trail,” Trisha said.

  Dannie grabbed Trisha’s arm. “Why?” she asked.

  Trisha shrugged her off. “Because I have to.”

  They stopped at the end of Second Street. A couple of boys on their block were in the midst of a snowball fight. Two little girls worked on a snowman in their patch of yard. The older kids, classmates, were walking up Broadway’s steep hill, dragging their sleds behind them. Trisha searched the street, squinting against the bright-white snow, looking for Scott’s black jacket with the silver racing stripes. She didn’t want to see him. He was the last person she wanted to bump into. He would know something was wrong.

  “You can’t go,” Dannie said. “There’s too much snow. You’ll never find the trail,” she insisted.

  “I have to try,” Trisha said.

  “I don’t understand why,” Dannie pleaded.

  “Something happened,” Carlyn said. “Something bad.”

  Dannie shook her head, her lips clamped, her eyes watery.

  Trisha started walking again. Whatever Dannie’s problem was, she didn’t have time to deal with her. Not now. Carlyn followed.

  “Please,” Dannie said and rushed to catch up to them. “You’ll never make it through the woods in this much snow.”

  Trisha spied Scott halfway up Broadway. He turned her way. He saw her. “Hurry,” she said and took off running, although she knew he wouldn’t follow them. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did.

  Carlyn chased after her. Dannie tried to keep up but fell several paces behind. They kept to the side of the road. Once they had to jump in a snowdrift to get out of the way of the plow.

  Trisha’s jeans were soaked up to her knees. Her legs were cold and numb. She continued jogging. She wouldn’t stop, even though the air burned her lungs and the wind stung her cheeks. When she reached the edge of the woods that would take them to the trail, she stopped and bent over, tried to catch her breath, work up her nerve. Carlyn was used to running; she was barely winded. Dannie finally caught up to them.

  “We can’t go up there,” Dannie said between gulps of air.

  “We have to,” Trisha said. “We have to check on something.” She kept her head down. Phlegm clung to the back of her tongue.

  Carlyn put her hand on Dannie’s shoulder, explained why they had to go up the mountain. Trisha didn’t stop her. Dannie had to know. She was a part of it now too.

  “He never came home last night,” Carlyn said.

  Dannie was shaking her head. “No, no, no, no.” She looked back and forth between them. “He must have. You just didn’t see him.”

  “I have to know for sure,” Trisha said. She didn’t think beyond that. She wouldn’t be able to wrap her mind around what she’d done until she was certain she’d actually done it.

  “I can’t go up there. I can’t.” Dannie covered her face.

  “You don’t have to,” Trisha said. Dannie was too slow. She’d only hold them back.

  “You can wait right here for us,” Carlyn said.

  “Okay,” Dannie said. She nodded, as though it wasn’t okay at all. Her cheeks were windburned, her lips blue. “Okay,” she said again.

  Carlyn turned to Trisha. “Ready?”

  Trisha stepped from the road into the woods. It was a small step but a momentous one. She pushed through the thigh-high snow in search of the trail. A small red dot blossomed in the palm of her mitten.

  Trisha shivered underneath her parka. Snow leaked inside her boots, her jeans now soaked to her thighs. The mountain looked different under a foot of snow, with its rolling white hills, frosted trees. It was desolate, colorless, beautiful. She had to guess where the Appalachian Trail was: a path she’d walked a hundred times over but was now playing a game of hide-and-seek beneath her feet.

  “Are you sure we’re heading in the right direction?” Carlyn asked, trekking a few steps behind, pausing every couple of seconds to look around.

  “Just follow me,” Trisha said over her shoulder, jumping when a bird screeched, scolding her for the intrusion. She searched the woods, tried to get her bearings. She continued upward, stopping when she spotted the tree with the Kilroy was here carving. She looked back the way she’d come. Carlyn stood next to her, teeth chattering. No one was behind them. Their solitary footprints were evidence they were alone. An uneasy feeling tightened her chest and throat.

  Think. Think about where she’d seen him fall. She looked to her left. She didn’t want to look but couldn’t stop herself. It was as though she were drawn to the horror of what she might find, what she expected to see. Next to a large maple tree, she spied a red baseball cap bleeding through the snow, and underneath, Lester’s head, his body slumped, buried in white.

  She covered her mouth, breathed into her mittens. The coppery smell of her own blood soaked the fabric, filled her nose.

  Carlyn saw him too. She turned her head away.

  Trisha stepped toward him, unable to resist this strange, strong pull toward the morbid.

  “Where are you going?” Carlyn asked, her words distant in Trisha’s ears.

  Her legs quaked as she pressed through the snow, a wet blanket around her thighs, weighing her down, holding her back. She stopped a few feet from his body. The area around his head was stained pink. Something dark and sticky had plastered his hair by his brow. A fallen branch poked through the snow. Hanging from the branch was a bloody icicle.

  She wasn’t fully aware of Carlyn coming up behind her, putting her arm around her, leading her away.

  They hiked down the mountain, pushed through the heavy snow, followed their tracks out of the woods. Trisha’s legs and feet were numb. Her limbs moved as though they belonged to someone else. Carlyn’s arm was warm around her waist. The next thing Trisha remembered was standing on the side of the road. Dannie was there, hollering.

  “What is it? What happened? Did you see him? Was he there?”

  “Shut up!” Carlyn yelled.

  “Was he there?” Dannie shrieked. “Was he? Was he?”

  “Shut up, Dannie!” Carlyn grabbed Dannie by the collar of her puffy coat. “Get a hold of yourself,” she said.

  Dannie nodded, kept nodding until Carlyn let her go. Trisha watched her friends, but it was as though she were seeing them through a dirty glass window. She raised her arm to wipe it clean, her hand floating in front of her like a balloon.

  Carlyn took hold of Trisha’s wrist, lowered her arm. “Come on, Trisha. This way,” Carlyn said. “We’ll get you home.”

  They were walking again.

  She recognized some of the side streets: neighborhood yards she’d cut through when she’d been a ten-year-old kid. When they reached Second Street, they stopped. Carlyn kept her hand on Trisha’s arm.

  “Don’t talk,” Carlyn ordered. “No one say a word.”

  Trisha was having trouble thinking, her mind fuzzy around the edges. She looked up and down the street. Two smaller boys whom Carlyn had babysat on occasion played in the snow in their yard. Others were sledding down Broadway.

  “Let’s take her to my house,” Carlyn said to Dannie. “My mom’s working a double shift. Some of the other nurses couldn’t make it in on account of the snow.”

  They were moving again, one foot in front of the other. Dannie was quiet. Trisha was vaguely aware of walking up Carlyn’s porch steps. Carlyn threw open the front door, pushed Trisha inside, led her straight to her bedroom, Dannie in tow.

  “Let me help you,” Carlyn
said and pulled off Trisha’s boots, unbuttoned her jeans, tugged them off Trisha’s cold pink thighs. “Here.” She handed her sweatpants, but Trisha didn’t take them, and they dropped to the floor.

  “What did I do?” Trisha asked.

  Carlyn picked up the pants, handed them to her a second time. “You protected yourself,” she said.

  Dannie cried.

  Trisha slipped on the sweatpants. Carlyn changed into dry clothes, then scooped up their wet ones in her arms.

  “Follow me,” she said and carried their soggy clothes to the washing machine in the basement, tossed in their jeans and socks. They could hide some of the evidence that they’d been to the woods, but they couldn’t hide the footprints they’d left behind.

  On rubbery arms, Trisha hoisted herself on top of the machine. The washer hummed beneath her. Cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. An empty container of laundry detergent had been knocked over, dripping what was left onto the cement floor. A clothesline ran the length of the room.

  Carlyn leaned against the dryer, arms crossed, head down.

  Dannie stood in front of them, rocking on her heels, hands in prayer. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God,” she whispered over and over again.

  Trisha couldn’t concentrate, focus, with Dannie’s constant rambling in her ears. Shut up! she wanted to scream. She tried to think, devise some kind of a plan, an alibi, but her thoughts scattered, crumbled, dropped to the concrete floor.

  The room, her friends, were blurry in her mind’s eye. But one image remained clear: Lester’s body. One feeling: the cold.

  She was so cold.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  After Parker and Geena had left the diner, they’d tracked down Scott Best and asked him to meet them at the station.

  “Officer Best,” Parker said, shook Scott’s hand, then introduced him to Geena.

  Scott had the salt-and-pepper hair of a man in his forties. It was quite possible he was closer to fifty than not. He was a big guy, fit for his age. They moved into one of the back rooms where they could talk privately.

  “Thanks for coming in,” Parker said, instructed Scott to have a seat at the small table where countless other witnesses and the occasional victim had sat before. The room was friendlier than the other interview rooms. It had a potted plant in the corner, tissues on the table. The walls were the same bland beige as the rest of the building.

  Parker asked Scott questions, the conversation casual. Scott said he’d been a cop in Bangor for the last twenty years. He’d served overseas in Iraq during Desert Storm, returned and attended four years of college on the GI Bill before becoming a police officer in his hometown. You couldn’t help but like him. He had an air of confidence about him. You could tell just by looking at him that he was one of the good guys. He was the real deal.

  But even good guys had their limits, made mistakes.

  “I didn’t know Lester Haines personally,” Scott said. “But I knew he was Trisha’s stepfather. Trisha and I were friends. I’d go as far as to say she was my girlfriend—well, for a little while, anyway.” He shrugged. “She was more or less my girlfriend, as much as anyone is anyone’s girlfriend at that age. It ended after all the trouble started when her stepfather went missing.” Scott cracked his neck, lifted his chin.

  “Did she talk to you about Lester? Did she tell you what she thought might’ve happened to him?” Parker asked. Geena remained quiet, letting Parker take the lead.

  “No, she didn’t know,” Scott said. “Or if she knew, she never told me. She stopped talking to me after that.”

  “How was her homelife? Did she ever mention Lester fighting with her mother? Did you ever hear her arguing with Lester, complaining about him?” Parker asked. Sharon and Lester had gone rounds, he knew. Sharon had a motive for wanting Lester dead.

  Scott stared at the empty corner of the room. “I never heard them argue. She didn’t talk about her family,” he said. “None of us did. We were too involved with other things to pay much attention.”

  “Did you ever go to her house, hang out there?” Parker asked.

  “No, she never invited me. Whenever we’d meet, it was always out with other friends around.”

  “You never went to her house? Ever?” Geena asked.

  “No.” Scott leaned back in the chair, rubbed the leather belt where he carried his weapon. He was wearing the standard-issue bulletproof vest underneath his uniform, pulling his shirt tight across his chest.

  Parker referred to Scott’s original statement. “It says here you were in school that day. After school, you went to an indoor baseball practice at the school gym, and then you went straight home.” It was the mention of baseball practice at the school gym that had piqued Parker’s interest.

  “Sounds about right. If I remember correctly, we had a pretty big snowstorm that week. We got like a foot of snow. I think we might’ve missed school because of it.”

  Parker nodded. He made a note to check the weather reports. He pulled up the image of the softball bat on his phone and handed it to Scott. “Does this look familiar to you?”

  Scott brought the phone close to his face. He nodded. “Yeah, it looks familiar.” He swallowed. “It looks like the bats from the high school gym.” He handed the phone back to Parker.

  “That’s what I thought too,” Parker said. “Do you know anything about this particular bat?”

  Scott stood, ran his hand across the top of his head.

  Parker and Geena looked at each other.

  “Maybe I do,” Scott said after a few seconds had passed.

  Parker was under the impression that Scott and Trisha’s relationship might’ve been more than he was letting on.

  Scott continued. “Trisha stole a bat from gym class. I know because we argued about it. I wanted her to return it. I don’t know. She was always doing these stupid things to get herself into trouble. She was her own worst enemy sometimes.” He rested his hands on the back of the chair. “But look, it could be anybody’s bat. I’m sure she’s not the only one who took equipment from the gym and didn’t return it.”

  “Do you remember when she stole the bat? Was it before Lester disappeared? After?”

  “A couple of weeks before, I think,” he said.

  “Take a look at this.” Parker zoomed in on the S. S. initials with the heart around the letters. He handed the phone back to Scott. “Do you know who or what it stands for?” Parker asked.

  “Yeah,” Scott said. “I know what it stands for.” He dropped into the chair, his whole body crumpling as though he were under a tremendous weight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  DECEMBER 1986

  Three days after seeing Lester’s body on the mountain, Trisha walked the halls of the high school. Faces blurred, voices carried, spinning around her, over her, through her. Dannie had avoided her, made the sign of the cross, cried whenever they’d crossed paths. Carlyn had sequestered herself in the library, studying, preparing for exams before Christmas break, keeping her own form of distance.

  Scott had approached Trisha six times that morning. She kept count: six times. He’d made several attempts to get her to talk, to tell him why she was ignoring him. The last time he’d asked her to please tell him what he’d done wrong. She opened her mouth, but only a strange guttural whimper came out. He strode away from her then, tears in his eyes, gripping the straps of his backpack.

  The bell rang. She slid into a chair in Mr. Cleaves’s history class.

  “You’re not dumb, Trisha,” Mr. Cleaves said and dropped a graded quiz onto her desk. D+ in red ink was at the top of the page. “With a little effort, you can pass this class. It’s up to you.”

  Trisha grabbed the quiz, picked up her books, and left the room. She went to the nurse’s office, lay on the cot. Her head throbbed. She was cold and she was sweating.

  The nurse stuck a thermometer under Trisha’s tongue. After three minutes she held it up, scowled. “You don’t have a fever.”

  Trisha sh
ivered, wrapped her arms around her waist.

  “Let me see your hand,” the nurse said.

  Trisha tucked it between her knees. The nurse coaxed it out, examined the cut on Trisha’s palm. “This looks pretty deep. Did you see a doctor?”

  “No,” Trisha said.

  The nurse frowned. She cleaned the cut, applied antibacterial ointment before wrapping it in a clean bandage. “How did you get this, anyway?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember,” Trisha said and grabbed her books. “Just call my mom and have her come pick me up.”

  It was now two weeks since Trisha had seen Lester on the mountain, and she still wasn’t sleeping. She was barely eating. The only time she left the house was when she had to go to school.

  Today, after getting off the bus and walking home alone, she’d lain in bed, staring at the ceiling. It wasn’t long before she’d heard her mother talking to someone downstairs. Her voice carried up the steps, down the hall, buzzed like a gnat in Trisha’s ear. Trisha slid from the mattress, went to see what was happening.

  She crept into the dining room, slipped into a dark corner unnoticed. Two police officers stood in the living room, their heft usurping the space, siphoning the air.

  “When was the last time you saw your husband, ma’am?” the officer asked. He was broad shouldered, the bulk of his upper body teetering on ostrich legs. He held a notepad and pencil in front of his expansive chest. The other officer, leaner, shiftier, eyeballed their home, not inconspicuously but blatantly, tossing his head from side to side, taking in his surroundings. His expression screamed what he thought of them, none of it good.

  “Two weeks ago. I’d seen him in the morning before he was supposed to go to work. I was trying to get some sleep.” Her mother took a drag from the cigarette, exhaled, snuffed the butt out in the ashtray. “I work nights at Foxy’s, bartending and stuff. You know it.” She pointed to the shifty cop. “I think I’ve seen you there.”

  “No, ma’am. Never been.” He exchanged a look with his partner before asking, “Do you know what day that was when you last saw him? Wednesday, Thursday?”