Cold Woods Page 6

  “Do you want some pie?” Dannie asked Carlyn.

  “No, thanks,” Carlyn said.

  “I didn’t want it either,” Dannie said and licked the fork before pushing the plate away.

  “How are you holding up?” Carlyn asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Nothing feels right. I don’t feel right. I don’t feel like myself.”

  “I think that’s understandable.”

  “Is it? Is it normal that I don’t know how to live in a world without my mother?” Tears rolled down her cheeks. She swiped them away. “I’ve been taking care of her for so long. It’s like I don’t know what to do with myself now. I don’t know how to feel, how I’m supposed to act, without the constant worrying about her weighing on my mind.”

  Carlyn nodded like she understood, although Trisha didn’t see how she could. Carlyn had a terrible relationship with her own mother. They’d barely talked when Carlyn had been a teenager, and when they had, it had usually ended in a heated argument. Trisha wondered if that had changed through the years—if they’d become close during Trisha’s absence in their lives.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to do about the house?” Carlyn asked.

  “I’m going to put it up for sale,” Dannie said. “Vinnie and I and the girls love our house. We love being close to Vinnie’s parents. It doesn’t make sense for us to move.” She looked around the kitchen. “And this place needs a lot of fixing up. I suppose a thorough cleaning would be a good place to start.”

  “I can help you,” Carlyn said.

  Neither of them moved.

  Dannie played with a napkin, folding and unfolding the corners. Trisha stayed hidden, waiting, sensing a shift in the air. There was more they had to say.

  “The police were at Trisha’s mom’s this morning,” Dannie said.

  “Okay,” Carlyn said.

  Dannie continued. “There were two of them, but they weren’t in the typical cop uniforms. They were wearing plain clothes. Could’ve been detectives, I guess. They were there for about fifteen minutes or so before I saw them drive away.”

  “It has to be about the bones they found on the trail.”

  “Yes.” Dannie wiped her eyes, sniffed. “That’s what I thought too.”

  They were quiet for a while. Carlyn was the first to break the silence. “What do you make of Trisha showing up here yesterday?”

  Before Dannie could answer, Trisha stepped into the kitchen. She thought she’d want to hear what they had to say about her behind her back but found she couldn’t bear it.

  Dannie looked surprised.

  “I knocked, but I guess you didn’t hear me. I hope you don’t mind that I let myself in.”

  “No, it’s fine. Of course you’re welcome to come in anytime,” Dannie said, twisting the napkin in her hands.

  Carlyn and Trisha stared at each other.

  Dannie looked back and forth between them. “What did I miss?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Trisha said, looked away. She hadn’t talked with Carlyn since they’d exchanged words after the funeral.

  “Well.” Dannie cleared her throat. “Carlyn and I were just about to clean up the rest of these dishes.” She stood.

  “Let me help you.” Trisha picked up a dish towel.

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Dannie said.

  “I want to.”

  “Oh, well, okay, but not in that shirt, you’re not,” Dannie said. “Come with me. I have something you can slip over it.”

  Carlyn hadn’t said a word as Trisha followed Dannie upstairs to one of the bedrooms. The layout of the house was the same as Trisha’s mother’s, the same as Carlyn’s old house: not exactly row homes but darn close. There were three bedrooms: the master at the front of the house overlooking the street, the bathroom at the opposite end, and two small bedrooms in between, separated by the staircase. Dannie’s old bedroom was a replica of Trisha’s, but Dannie’s bed had a frame, her dresser had a mirror, and the walls had been painted recently.

  “Here.” Dannie handed her a sweatshirt.

  It looked too big, but she said, “Thanks” and took it anyway.

  “I’ll let you change, then,” Dannie said and walked out.

  Trisha lifted her arms over her head to slip on the sweatshirt. Her blouse rode up, exposing her stomach. Pain shot down her side. It was at that moment that Dannie peeked into the room, as though she’d forgotten something. Trisha covered her torso as fast as she could, but by the look on Dannie’s face, she hadn’t been fast enough. She’d seen the bruise that covered a large portion of Trisha’s rib cage.

  “What?” Trisha snapped.

  “I was . . . forget it,” Dannie said, taking a step closer. “What happened to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does,” Dannie said. “It matters to me. You matter to me.”

  Trisha had a strong urge to flee, to escape the concern in Dannie’s eyes. When was the last time someone had been worried about her? The meanness of people was what she understood, what she could take. But not this, this kindness.

  Dannie took another step toward her, made the sign of the cross.

  “Don’t pray for me,” she said and pushed past her.

  “Why not?” Dannie called.

  “Just don’t,” she said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OCTOBER 1986

  Dannie got off the bus with Carlyn and Trisha and the rest of their classmates. They were pushing and shoving, bumping into each other in a hustle for freedom. Dannie lagged behind, half listening to their chatter. She lifted her face to the cool breeze and fading sun. She loved this time of day in autumn and what she thought of as jeans weather. She liked wearing bigger, warmer clothes to hide her ever-growing body.

  “Come on, Dans,” Carlyn said, and both she and Trisha stopped to wait for Dannie to catch up.

  Dannie reached her friends at the same time a car raced up Broadway’s hill. She recognized Trisha’s mother behind the wheel. Trisha saw her, too, and for a second, Dannie could’ve sworn Trisha’s face had fallen.

  They turned then and walked down the sidewalk together shoulder to shoulder, Carlyn in the middle, the hub. They’d walked in the same formation ever since Trisha had moved to Second Street seven years ago.

  Trisha lit a cigarette.

  Scott jogged up behind them and pulled Trisha across the street. Carlyn and Dannie followed.

  “Do you want the bus driver to see you?” Scott asked Trisha. “You couldn’t wait to cross the street to light up? Do you want to get in trouble or something?”

  “I’m not afraid of getting into trouble,” Trisha said.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  They continued walking toward home with Scott at Trisha’s side.

  Dannie hugged her notebooks, hiding her chest behind them. She’d never gotten over the day at the quarry when Jeff the Meanie twisted her boob. She had been self-conscious of her size ever since. She’d started twelfth grade with her friends two months ago, and the boys in their class talked to her chest rather than to her face, rarely looking her in the eyes.

  They stopped walking when they reached Second Street. Some of their classmates milled around, kicking rocks, goofing off. A napkin blew in the gutter. The breeze turned the pages of a discarded magazine. Trisha and Scott stood close to each other, looking like a couple. Trisha wouldn’t admit it, but Scott had become more or less her boyfriend in the last few weeks.

  Carlyn shifted her books onto her right hip. She pulled a sheet of paper from her notebook and began reading whatever was written on it. Dannie noticed Carlyn had been spending more and more time studying, hanging out at the public library, intent on making honor roll again.

  Dannie looked away. She didn’t have time to indulge in her studies. She had bigger concerns than homework assignments. Her house was a few steps away. She spied pieces of slate from the roof lying on the ground near a broken downspout. One mor
e thing they didn’t have the money to fix.

  “Do you guys want to hang out on the trail?” Trisha asked and crushed the cigarette onto the pavement with her sneaker. She was always asking to hang out on the trail. Dannie knew it was because she never wanted to go home.

  Trisha looked first at Carlyn, who shrugged a shoulder, and then at Dannie, who shook her head.

  “I have to check on my mom,” Dannie said and slipped around the corner. She ran up the porch steps to her house, opened the front door that her mother never locked.

  She wondered if maybe her mother wanted someone to walk in, steal the few possessions they had—a TV, toaster oven, a radio. Or possibly, her mother didn’t care who walked in, a murderer even, someone to end her misery since Dannie’s father had left.

  In those first few weeks after he’d walked out on them, her mother had pretended nothing had changed. She’d fooled herself into thinking the other woman was nothing more than a fling, and he’d be back. But then the months had turned into years, and he still hadn’t returned. And her mother had never recovered.

  But Dannie didn’t really believe her mother wished to be murdered. In reality, her mother refused to stand up and answer the door if someone knocked. She’d rather shout, “Door’s open” and never move an atrophied muscle. Depression did this, and Dannie feared she would find her mother dead from gluttony more than anything else.

  When she walked through the door today, she almost dropped her notebooks on the floor, surprised to find Lester standing in the middle of her living room. Her mother was on the couch, where she spent most of her days in her nightgown.

  “Hello, Danielle,” he said.

  She looked to her mother for an explanation as to why he was here in their house.

  “Sharon sent him over to help us with the roof,” her mother said.

  “Why don’t you show me this downspout your mother’s been telling me about?”

  “Okay.” She put her notebooks on the coffee table, glanced at her mother.

  “We could use the help,” her mother reassured her.

  Dannie stepped back outside. Lester was close behind her. She felt his breath on the back of her neck. Trisha never talked about Lester, about what was happening inside her home, but Dannie knew something wasn’t right. More than not right. And she no longer envied Trisha’s relationship with him as she’d done when Trisha had first moved here.

  She rushed down the porch steps to put distance between them, looked up and down the sidewalk. Her friends weren’t anywhere to be found. Maybe they had already gone to the trail. The street was deserted.

  “It’s right there,” she said and pointed to the broken downspout.

  He walked to the corner of the house. She felt like she had no choice but to follow him. He was doing them a favor. Or was he?

  He crouched over the downspout and broken pieces of slate that had fallen from the roof.

  “We can’t pay you,” she said.

  He looked up at her, then stood, putting his hand on her shoulder. He stood so close that she smelled beer on his breath. “This one’s on me,” he said and slid his hand down her arm, his fingers brushing her breast.

  “Dannie!” Trisha called from across the street.

  Dannie turned to the sound of Trisha’s voice. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. The next thing Dannie knew, Trisha was standing beside her, pulling on her arm, leading Dannie down the sidewalk and away from the house.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Parker was waiting for confirmation on whether or not the baseball bat was the murder weapon.

  Apparently, aluminum bats were fairly resistant to extreme weather conditions and for long periods of time. Aluminum didn’t rust. If it had been a wooden bat, it would’ve rotted, turned to mulch, become a part of the soil they’d swept away.

  But sometimes in a case you got lucky.

  And Parker was feeling lucky for no other reason than the fish were biting. He wasn’t superstitious, but he took it as a good sign, a great start to what was going to be another long day. The six inches of snow they’d gotten overnight, the cold winter air that he loathed, couldn’t keep him from dropping a line into the icy river. He’d caught and tossed back a half dozen smallmouth bass in the last hour. Too bad Becca wasn’t here to witness it. She wouldn’t believe him otherwise. She’d accuse him of telling tall fish tales, which of course he never did. Well, maybe he did sometimes, adding an inch to the length when he was bragging: It was this big. But hey, he was a guy. It was what guys did to impress girls, or rather in his case, a certain girl.

  Ever since she’d returned to their hometown to take care of her ailing father, who had since passed, she’d sometimes joined Parker in the early-morning hours on his dock. Their childhood friendship had turned into something more since she’d come home.

  But she hadn’t shown up again this morning.

  Other than the occasional text messages, it had been almost two months since he’d last seen her. He tried to ignore his disappointment, turning over an old expression in his mind: These things take time. But how much more time did she need? Her father had passed in October. Parker had thought she would’ve come around by now, but her grieving had kept her away.

  He laid his fishing pole down, picked up a mug. The coffee had gone cold in the frigid air. His mind jumped to work—a built-in defense mechanism he relied on whenever he rubbed up against the void in his heart that only Becca could fill.

  Sharon Haines had been denied access to her husband’s dental records. The darn HIPAA law made it that much harder to do his job. And Sharon hadn’t thought to file a court order to have Lester’s dental and medical records placed in the missing persons and unidentified victims database in the years since he’d been missing.

  Parker made a mental note of her lapse in judgment and considered maybe she hadn’t been that broken up about her husband’s disappearance after all. Maybe she hadn’t wanted him found. Otherwise, the records would’ve been filed; measures would’ve been taken by family and friends to keep the case active.

  And yet, she’d given Parker permission to file a court order to have the dental records released, which the judge had approved finally. He’d sent the records straight to Hannah, the forensic odontologist. He’d submitted his request as a priority and expected to hear anytime now. The last he’d spoken with Hannah, she’d been certain she’d have the information for him today.

  His phone went off. He recognized the number lighting up the screen. It was really turning out to be a good day.

  “Detective Reed,” he said and listened, then promised to take Hannah out to lunch the next time he was in Lewistown, where her dental practice was located, a three-hour drive west of Portland.

  He hung up the phone and gathered his fishing gear, took his time climbing the snowy steps up to his cabin. Once inside, he passed the boxes full of Christmas decorations he’d stacked in the living room. He kept forgetting to pick up a tree—or rather he’d been putting it off, hoping Becca would show up and offer to help. She’d picked out Christmas trees with him when they were kids, riding along with his mom and dad to the Christmas tree farm. They’d spend hours walking up and down the rows of blue spruces and Douglas firs, searching for the fattest tree. His parents would head off in another direction to cut down a smaller tree to display in the waiting room of his dad’s medical practice. Parker’s fingers and toes would go numb as he lay on the frozen terrain, sawing the trunk while Becca held it steady so it wouldn’t fall on top of him. Then they’d drag it out of the field, laughing, singing Christmas songs like something in a Hallmark movie you’d see on television. He’d fallen in love with her then: the girl next door.

  After a quick shower, he was feeling better, focused. He’d do what he did best and immerse himself in work. He pulled the original missing person file on Lester Haines. There was one photo of Lester wearing a red Phillies baseball hat. He sent a quick text to the trace-evidence team, where they were working on the fibers they’
d collected at the scene. Photo of vic wearing red Phillies baseball hat. They would know what he was asking, whether the fabric was consistent with that of the hat. Also, he was waiting to hear whether they’d found any hair in the fabric. Even though his case was listed as a priority, he felt as though much of the lab work was taking forever.

  Next, he made a list of all the witnesses who had been interviewed back in 1986. Then there was the fact that Lester had been in the system on unrelated charges. He’d had two summary offenses for public drunkenness and several disorderly conduct complaints filed against him dating back as far as 1979. A couple of the neighbors on Second Street had called them in. He’d been suspected of domestic violence. Sharon had defended Lester, denied he’d hit her, refused to press charges. This wasn’t all that uncommon in these types of cases, where the woman was more scared of what would happen to her once her husband came home after she’d had him thrown in jail.

  He checked his phone. One of the techs from the lab texted about the hat: I’m on it.

  He texted Geena, updated her with the information he had received from Hannah, asked her to meet him at Sharon Haines’s house.

  He grabbed his car keys. It was time they let Sharon know it was official. The dental records confirmed the remains belonged to Lester.

  The people closest to the victim were the first people you looked at when dealing with a missing person case, and especially one that ended in homicide. The first time Parker had met Sharon Haines, she’d seemed genuinely upset upon hearing the news about her husband. She’d appeared shocked, a little weepy, and then very confused. But there had been something about her face, the expression she’d made, that didn’t sit right with him. And then he’d found out how little information there had been in the missing person file, raising more questions than answers.