Chapter 4
4
The room smells like vanilla mixed with old paper, the sweetness of rot. I sit with my binder open before me. Everything I know so far is organized in chronological order and then categorized by what use it might have in the book. Blue for dialogue—hard to come by in a historical book. Green for important events. And then red, the rarest of all. Sometimes it’s a particularly vivid description or a scene that propels the story forward. It’s not any one thing. But I know it when I see it.
I turn to the first page—my map of Coram House. I’ve sketched three rectangles: Coram House, the rectory, and the church. Scattered circles represent the graveyard, leading down to a wash of blue for the lake.
My plan is to spend the day reviewing the binder and coming up with questions for the meeting with Father Aubry tomorrow, but I can’t focus. Yesterday’s conversation with Stedsan—his patronizing speech about getting comfortable with uncertainty—is buzzing in my head. And then his allusions to my last book at the end.
There are two versions of me sitting at this table. The one who knows I should sit down, review my notes, prep for tomorrow, who knows this book is my second chance and doesn’t want to think about what happens if I screw it up. Then there’s the other me, the one who breaks out in a rash at the thought of sitting quietly when there has to be more information out there. That one wins.
I get dressed. Black pants. A white button-down. Some concealer to cover the bags under my eyes. Perched on the edge of the bathtub, I take in my full reflection in the mirror above the sink. I look like a waiter. So I put on a pair of gold studs and a patterned scarf that Adam brought back from a trip to Mexico. I never wore it while he was alive. Not really my taste. But I couldn’t throw it away either. I look at my reflection. Better.
The parking lot next to the police station is mostly empty. I pull in, past the row of black-and-white cruisers, and park in a visitors’ spot. The entrance is strung with red Christmas lights, like it’s an Amsterdam sex shop instead of a small city’s police headquarters.
The automatic doors whoosh open, and I pass into a reception area: a row of plastic chairs and a desk festooned with tinsel behind which an older woman sits typing. Reading glasses dangle from her neck on a gold chain like she too is wound with tinsel. A placard on the desk says BEVERLEY WHITE .
“Good morning, Ms. White,” I say. People like it when you use their name.
She stops typing and smiles up at me. “I haven’t lost my marbles if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I feel disoriented, like I’ve wandered into the middle of a conversation.
“The decorations, dear,” she says patiently. “It’s the twelfth of January. And please call me Bev.”
“Right. Of course. They’re very… cheerful,” I say, thinking of my landlord and his bright-purple house.
“Now, how can I help you, young lady?”
Suddenly all business, she reminds me of a thousand other women who have come before her, guarding the gates of administration offices everywhere.
“I’m trying to find some historical records,” I say. “Specifically, I’m looking for records of deaths from the 1960s.”
She taps a pen against her lips. “Well, the city records would be your best bet for that.”
“Yes, well, these deaths might have been suspicious. So I was hoping to see if there’s ever been a police investigation.”
She pulls a sticky note off a stack and looks at me, pen poised. “What’s the name of the deceased and the date?”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” I say, starting to feel stupid for coming here. “It’s only a first name. Thomas or Tommy. But he would have been around ten years old. And it happened up at Coram House.”
Her friendly expression is still there, but now there’s something else behind the smile. “I see,” she says. “Could you give me your name?”
“Alex Kelley.”
“Please, wait here a moment, Ms. Kelley.”
Bev gestures to the plastic chairs in the corner set among a jungle of potted plants. Then she opens the glass door that separates the reception area from the rest of the station. There’s a brief swell of noise—laughter, a phone ringing—and then the door seals shut behind her.
I take a seat, wanting to be seen as following directions, but also because it affords the best view of the office beyond. The station is nothing special—stained drop ceilings, metal desks, chipped fake wood paneling. But behind all that, huge windows frame a spectacular view of the bay, frozen solid as far as I can see.
Bev stops before a desk and starts making dramatic, sweeping hand gestures that I hope have nothing to do with me. I crane my neck to see her audience, but it’s no use, her body is in the way. A few seconds later, the glass door swings open again. This time, Bev is trailed by an officer in a navy blue uniform.
I’d put him in his early forties. He’s good-looking in a tall, dark, and stubbly way. His brown hair is peppered with gray and he has a long straight nose straight off a Roman coin. But it’s his eyes that are arresting—light brown with a circle of gold around the iris. Unfortunately, they’re glaring at me. I get the distinct feeling that I’m not about to be offered a cup of coffee and a free pass into their historical records.
“Alex Kelley,” he says, “I’m Officer Russell Parker. Please come with me.”
He holds the door open for me, but the vibe isn’t so much chivalrous as angry principal inviting you into his office .
I follow him to a desk tucked in one corner of the open-plan room, right up against one of the big windows. He motions for me to sit in the chair with the view of the water. I wonder why he doesn’t turn the desk around.
“So, you’re the writer.” He says it both like he was expecting me and like he’s not happy about it.
“Well,” I say, “I’m a writer.”
He doesn’t smile. I clear my throat. Better to jump in. “I’m looking for historical records about Coram House. Specifically any investigation around a suspicious death or deaths that would have happened sometime in the late 1960s.”
“Up at the House.”
“Sorry?” I ask, thrown off.
“Coram House. That’s what people called it. The House.”
He leans back in his chair and taps a pen against the arm, impatient.
“Oh,” I say, fumbling, “I didn’t know.”
No matter how much research you do about a place, there’s certain knowledge that no one ever thinks to write down. The House.
“How could you know?” he asks. “You’ve been here—what—a week?”
“Ten days, actually,” I say. “Including today.”
He ignores me. The dynamic is clear. The out-of-town writer swooping in. The local cop protecting local secrets.
“I looked you up,” he says. “Even read your last book—the one about that lifeguard. My money was on the brother.”
The usual greasy ball of shame slides up my throat. I swallow it and force my eyes to meet his. “Mine too,” I say. “Too bad he didn’t kill her.”
“Sure made a good story, though.”
Behind him, the lake is a gray mirror. I should be better at this, given how many times I’ve had some version of this conversation over the last two years. With journalists. With my agent. With myself.
“The book was a mistake,” I say. It sounds like an excuse. Sweat prickles in my armpits. I just want to get up and leave, but I can’t. Not yet. “Look, whatever you think about my last book, I do actually care about the truth. This isn’t just about selling books.”
Officer Parker rests his elbows on the table and looks at me. The golden center of his eyes glow. “Is this how you do it?” he asks. “Convince people to give you what you want? You ask for their help telling the truth?”
He says truth like it tastes bad.
My stomach roils, but this time it’s anger. I’ve had enough. “Do you know what I’ve been doing for the last week? Reading depositions. From kids who were abused. Who saw others abused. I read testimony from one woman who saw a child pushed into the water and left to drown—and no one believed her. Can you imagine carrying that around with you?”
He leans back and says nothing. I riffle through my bag and take out a brown envelope, then open it and slide two photos across the desk, right in front of him. The first shows Sarah Dale, head tilted back in laughter. The other the children and nun standing beside the rowboat. I point.
“This woman is Sister Cecile. Sometime in the summer of 1967 or ’68, I believe she pushed a child into the water and watched him drown. And this girl”—I point to the photo of Sarah Dale—“saw it all happen. But no one believed her. She was locked in a wardrobe in the attic overnight as a punishment. She thought she was going to die. She was fourteen years old.”
Officer Parker picks up the photo. He turns it over, gently. The ink is faded so he holds it up to the window to read the name written there. Sarah Dale. I keep talking, wondering if any of this is sinking in.
“The people who did these things—none of them went to jail,” I continue. “Some of them are probably still out there. They just—moved on. While the kids at Coram House got—what? A couple thousand dollars in the settlement, if they were lucky. And a lifetime of shitty memories that no one wanted to hear about.”
He looks up at me then, and I think I’m finally getting to him. But when he speaks, his voice is granite. “And your book is going to fix it for them?”
Tears burn my throat. But I will not cry in front of him. I’m too tired to be having this conversation. Too many late nights reading about horrible things.
“You don’t like me,” I say. “Fine. And I get this is your home and I’m an outsider. I get that my last book was shitty and you wish that I wasn’t here or that I was someone better. But you haven’t read Sarah Dale’s testimony. She—” I pause, unsure how to explain the feeling of reading her words—like I was there watching it all happen.
“She saw a boy murdered and no one believed her. I know it’s been fifty years and I know it’s unlikely I’ll find out what happened that day. But I’m going to try. And I’d like your help.”
The silence drags on for five seconds, ten. Then he shakes his head and pushes the two photos back across the desk. As if the dismissal weren’t clear enough, he swivels his chair toward the window to stare at the smooth ice, the peninsula of Rock Point miles in the distance.
Right there , I want to say. He died right on the other side of that point, and no one cared.
I stand and slip the photos back into their envelope. I try to think of something to say that will sting, but my mind is a blank page. Instead, I turn my back on him and leave without a word.
I cross the parking lot so fast I’m nearly jogging. Reaching for the door handle of my car, I slip on a patch of ice and nearly go down, but somehow manage to half fall, half throw myself into the driver’s seat.
My breaths come in shallow gulps. There’s not enough oxygen in the car. I close my eyes and start reviewing things I can touch. The smooth leather of the steering wheel. The cold glass of the window. The tiny ridges on the radio’s volume knob. With each, my breathing slows until I can open my eyes again.
My second book has followed me for two years, but it can still ambush me like this, squeeze the air from my chest until I’m drowning. Because I should have known that book was a mistake from the beginning.
No, that’s wrong. I did know. But I wrote it anyway.
After the success of The Isle , I’d waded through true crime stories for months, waiting for the same spark I’d felt reading about the murders on Channel Isle. Meanwhile, I’d watched the money in our account dwindle. I’d ignored emails from my agent dropping references to my two-book deal. I’d shriveled with the worry that my first book had been lightning, striking only once. All the while, Adam had been getting sick—sluggish, losing weight, strange numbness in his legs—and I’d barely noticed.
Then my editor sent me an email about the unsolved murder of Madeline Curry, a sixteen-year-old girl who had disappeared in 1999. She was a lifeguard at a pond on Cape Cod. It was only her third week of work, but that summer was already sweltering, the pond jammed with children catching frogs, mothers standing up to their thighs in tepid water. On June 17, Maddy left the pond at five o’clock for the two-mile bike ride home, but she never made it.
The police assumed she’d gone off with friends and forgot to tell her parents in the way teenagers do. By the time they brought in bloodhounds the next day, it was too late. It was probably always too late. The dogs tracked her scent to the main road and then it was gone.
No one saw anything.
I read the long email Maddy’s parents had sent my publisher—about how badly they wanted to meet me, how they’d been looking for Maddy for a decade, how amazing my last book had been at uncovering leads from a cold case over a century old. I’d have their full cooperation to write about their Maddy. I told myself the spark was there. I agreed to write the book.
From the beginning, it was all wrong. Speaking to people still alive, still in pain, felt like a desecration. So I buried that feeling too, as I kept uncovering the pieces of a puzzle everyone expected me to put back together. Maddy’s parents especially. I felt haunted by their expectation, their eyes watching everything I did.
Maddy’s brother, Matthew Curry, remembered seeing a man in a white van parked at the beach the day before she disappeared. The police artists sketched a man with a thick mustache. The sketches aired on the national news. Maddy’s photo was mailed to seventy-five million people. Authorities offered a reward for any leads. The working theory was she’d been stalked by a stranger who knew her schedule and snatched her on the way home.
They never found him. They never found anything.
I spent months looking for the man in the white van, but came up with nothing. Then, one night, I moved the puzzle pieces around and a new picture emerged.
Matthew Curry was the head lifeguard at the same pond where Maddy had worked. He’d been the one to tell the police about the man in the white van. Matt was supposed to have been working at the pond the day Maddy disappeared, but had ditched work. He supposedly had an airtight alibi—on security footage at the mall—but what if the police had gotten the timing wrong? She could have arrived home and been killed much later. After all, her parents had been at a party, hadn’t arrived home until nearly eleven that night. Most of the time, the killer is someone who knows the victim. What if the answer had been right there?
As Adam got sicker, I spent more time taking care of him during the day, more time working late at night. I slept less and less, but I didn’t seem to need sleep anymore. I started looking more closely at Matt. After Maddy died, he had dropped out of college. Had been arrested twice for fighting. Had never moved away from home. Had never married. These could all be signs of a life derailed by a beloved sister’s death—or guilt at killing her. Same story, different angle.
The book started to take shape, weaving together two possible stories. The man in the white van. The brother. I congratulated myself on the balanced storytelling, but all along I was sure the man in the white van was a lie.
The book was published. The prosecutor reopened the case just as Maddy’s parents had hoped, but this time they pursued Matthew Curry. Adam got sicker. Matthew Curry went to jail. His parents divorced.
Later the publisher used this as an excuse, that my husband was dying while I wrote Ghost in a White Van . They said I had a breakdown. But that was just another excuse. The truth is, I’d loved writing the book. Living in someone else’s pain, it turned out, was a relief from my own. I was lucky in some ways that Adam was gone before the rest. The only mercy of what came next was I had the freedom to fall apart completely.
The summer Adam died, three months after the book came out, someone in prison stabbed Matthew Curry in the eye with a sharpened pipe. Matthew’s father died of a heart attack. And someone found a blue swim cap in the woods five miles away from the Curry house. It had two different sources of DNA on it. Madeline Curry’s and another.
It didn’t belong to Matthew Curry or some stalker in a white van. The DNA belonged to a man who’d lived three miles down the road and hunted in the woods behind the pond. He’d been convicted for aggravated rape and assault and served fifteen years, but somehow never made it onto the sex offender registry. It had been a crime of opportunity. The man had already been dead for five years. He drove a black pickup truck. I’d been wrong about everything.
The Curry family had invited me into their home, thinking I was there to help them, and instead I’d destroyed them. All along, I’d told myself my responsibility was to Maddy, to the truth. But I’d also wanted lightning to strike again.
My publisher pulled the book and dropped me. My agent was furious. You were just telling a story , she’d raged, based on the evidence. You weren’t the prosecutor who put Matthew Curry away. You didn’t stab him with a pipe. But I didn’t want to fight it. There’s a place between guilt and its opposite.
I called Matthew after he was released from prison. I offered to donate the money from the book, not much by then after Adam’s medical bills, in his name or his sister’s name. He was polite. He thanked me. He got off the phone. Relieved, I was about to hang up when his mother picked up. Devil , she’d hissed at me. You leave us alone. And she slammed the phone down.
Maybe I am a devil. Or, at least, I’m someone’s devil.
My phone rings. Stedsan. I want to let it go to voicemail, but then I think about the meeting with Father Aubry tomorrow morning.
“Hello?” I sound out of breath. A light skin of frost spreads on the inside of the windshield, a curtain between me and the outside world.
“Alex? Alan Stedsan here. I have some good news.”
He sounds buoyant. Well, I could use some good news. “Okay,” I say.
“I was at the club last night and Rob Baker, the chief of police, was there as well.”
“The club?” I will my brain to catch up.
“Golf. I told you. Anyhow, I told him about our project weeks ago. I assumed he’d forgotten, but he brought it up last night. Turns out he’s a history nut. He’s out on leave—cancer, very sad—so can’t meet you himself, but he’s already assigned you a media liaison from the police department.”
“A media liaison?”
“I know. He must have heard it on Law & Order . One of his officers volunteered for the job. Maybe he’s a fan of your books?”
Stedsan sounds giddy. He laughs like all this is the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
“Hang on, let me find his phone number.” There’s a rustling in the background. “Here we go.”
A tight ball of dread forms in my stomach like a peach pit. Somehow, I know before he says it.
“Officer Russell Parker.”
The name goes off in my brain like a foghorn, drowning out Stedsan’s voice.
“Alex? Are you still there?”
“Yeah—yes.”
“I’ll email you his information.”
My mouth is so dry I can barely croak out, “Great.”
“All right.” Stedsan sounds disappointed. Maybe he was expecting more profuse thanks. “See you tomorrow, then?”
“See you then.”
I hang up. Outside, the sky is a watercolor painting of pink and orange stripes. It’s going to be a beautiful sunset. My shirt feels clammy where the sweat has dried.
This day has gone all wrong, but it’s not over yet.
Tomorrow, we’ll meet with Father Aubry. That means I still have this afternoon to try to find something that will lead me to Tommy. A hospital record, a receipt, a goddamn library card—I don’t care what Stedsan says, there must be something out there that proves he existed outside a memory. Then I’ll track down Sarah Dale, Karen Lafayette, and anyone who’s still alive and willing to talk. I don’t need Stedsan or Officer Parker.
The defrost is on high, but the hot air doesn’t seem to affect the skin of frost coating the windshield. I claw at it with my fingernails until ribbons of white litter the dashboard. An animal trying to escape its pen. Then I throw the car in reverse and drive.