Chapter 27
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, RUTH AND LARRY ARE BACK.
JUST AS THEY walk through the door, Sunny pulls in.
She’s driven back and forth between Boston and Evansport like a ping-pong ball lately, as if she doesn’t want to leave her father alone with the rest of us, but she still needs to attend to things in Boston as well.
Detective Bellman stands in the middle of the front room. Sunny sits beside Alex on the sofa, while I’m standing near the arched doorway to the dining room. There, but not in the middle of things, perched on the outer edge.
“Alex, you sure you want everybody here?” Detective Bellman asks.
“Why wouldn’t I, Tom? I have no idea what this is about.”
“All right then. We ran the plate on the vehicle we pulled from the lake.” He rubs his hand over his mouth. “Car belonged to a Carol Lawson.”
“Jesus.” Alex drops his head in his hands.
“Like I said, you want the girls here?”
“I don’t understand.” Alex’s eyes peep up under his brows. “How did Carol’s car end up in the lake?”
“You tell me.”
“I have no clue. I haven’t seen her in years.”
“When exactly? When was the last time you saw her?”
Alex jumps up from the sofa, goes to the window as if he could see the car out there in the lake. “Years. We broke up in, I guess, 1995?”
Sunny rushes to Alex’s side and pulls on his arm. “Who was she, Dad?”
“A girl I dated. We were engaged actually. I was really young, long before your mother.”
“Let’s all sit down,” Detective Bellman says. He collapses into the chair by the fireplace, takes out a notebook.
Sunny leads Alex back to the sofa.
“Tell me about the last time you saw Carol.” The detective’s bushy brows rise, his gaze on Alex.
“Did you find her, in the car, that is?”
“No.” Detective Bellman holds up a hand. “When was the last time you saw her, Alex?”
Alex runs his hand through his dark hair, the bits of silver seem like they’ve multiplied in the short time I’ve been here. “The day we broke up. Summer of 1995.”
“You never saw or spoke to her again after that?”
“No.”
“What do you remember about Carol?”
Alex leans his elbows on his knees; his fingers tap his chin as if he’s thinking back in time and needs to pull memories from a place deep inside.
“Carol and I were engaged, but things weren’t going too well.
My parents had died the year earlier, and they didn’t approve of her.
She wasn’t the right kind of girl for their son.
I think that made me rebellious, you know how young people can be.
” He glances toward the detective. “I met Carol at a party in Boston. She was working serving drinks and we hit it off. She was gorgeous, but a little wild. She lived with her single mom, and they didn’t have much.
She told me she ran away when she was sixteen.
She and her mother didn’t get along, but she went home eventually.
She dabbled a little in drugs. She was just different, and I was really attracted to her.
But after my parents died, and I sold my first manuscript, I think I grew up finally and I wasn’t ready to get married.
I told Carol that, but she was really angry.
Alex stands, walks to the window again. “She showed up here, that summer.”
“Did you argue?” the detective asks.
“A little. It was no big deal. We agreed to call off the engagement and we went our separate ways. That was the end of it.”
“No idea how her car ended up in the lake?”
Alex lets go a deep breath, looks at the detective. “Tom, I had no earthly idea that happened. I figured all these years that Carol left Cheshire Lake and went on with her life.”
“Uh-huh.” He’s writing in his notebook.
Sunny jumps up. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about her?”
Alex wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Why? Why would I tell you about an old girlfriend? I haven’t thought about Carol in forever.”
Alex turns toward the detective. “So, what’s next, Tom?”
“We’ve called in help from the state. We’ll need to do a more thorough search of the lake.”
“But you didn’t find her?”
“No. No personal effects either.”
“Well, then, she must’ve made it out of the car. It looked like the driver’s door was open when you pulled the car out.”
“It was.”
“Maybe she walked out to the main road then. Hitchhiked into town and called someone to pick her up. She was like that. She would’ve been too angry to come back here and ask me for help. And she hitchhiked occasionally even though I told her it was dangerous.”
“Could be, Alex.” Detective Bellman stands and stuffs his notebook in his pocket, zips up his jacket.
“The thing is, though, her mother filed a missing persons report that summer. I went back and read the files. I remembered that we’d looked for her then but found nothing.
” The detective’s eyes meet Alex’s. “I read that the people here—you, Ruth, and Simon—were questioned.”
Alex wipes his hand over his mouth. “Yes. I do remember that, vaguely. But we had no idea where she was.”
Detective Bellman nods. “Well, it doesn’t look like the search went anywhere. Carol was an adult and we figured she’d show up at some point. And although we’ve just started looking again, no one that we’ve found so far has seen Carol Lawson since 1995.”