Chapter 29 After
After
By the time the sun is nudging against the horizon, I’ve been up for a couple hours. With Barry warming my feet, I hunch over my laptop, plugging in search terms. The notepad next to me is filled with half--legible scrawl.
Dev pads out of the back bedroom, wearing his boxers and undershirt and looking rumpled in a way that would normally be impossible to ignore. This morning, I barely glance at him. He leans over me, hand on the back of my chair. “You’re looking for them,” he says.
The names. They have to belong to someone, but without a sense of what time range I’m looking at, it’s been hard. Still, a pattern has begun to emerge.
“I’ve found three that might match,” I say. “Right name. Right general region. They all went missing in the same stretch of a few years.” I show him. Amanda Dennis. Madison Sebold. Isabel Whipple.
“They’re pretty common names,” Dev says. “It might not be them.”
“Right. But look at the pictures,” I say, pulling up the photographs of the three girls, and he sucks in a little breath.
Three girls. All of them in their late teens or early twenties, all of them with pale skin and delicate noses. Isabel’s hair is a deep strawberry blond, Amanda’s auburn, Madison’s pure ginger. They look like they could be sisters.
They look like Janie, I think, but I don’t say it, and I won’t. Because this is undeniable, objective. The moment I speak her name, though, I know how people will look at me. With pity. They won’t hear reason; they’ll only hear grief.
“Those dates,” Dev says. “Andrew Hill would have been in his twenties, right?”
I nod. Old enough, Dev means, that he might have something to do with the disappearance of these girls. “Back then he was gone most of the year,” I say. “The life of a pro football player isn’t exactly conducive to keeping girls in a bunker.”
“Then who?” Dev asks. “That guy who owns the land now?”
“Mason Hill was still alive then,” I say. Wasn’t he? I try to remember when he died, exactly, but it wasn’t like it was particularly relevant news to me. I only remember that it happened sometime after Janie came to the house that last time.
Not long after, though. Was it?
“The father,” Dev says. His grip on the back of the chair is tight. “That would be simplest, I suppose.”
“Simplest?” I echo.
Dev slides over to sit in the chair next to me. “If the bad guy’s dead already, I mean.”
“Except that there’s no one to confess,” I say. “To give us the names. Tell us where they are.”
Or what happened to them, before they died. Though maybe that much is a mercy. Knowing their suffering won’t lessen it, and my imagination fills in the gaps readily as it is.
“We should eat,” Dev says.
“Right, of course,” I say, closing the laptop and getting up. “Let me see what I can rustle up.”
“You sit,” Dev says, gently pushing me back down. “I’ll cook.”
“After committing crimes with me last night? I think I owe you breakfast,” I say.
“It wasn’t the only thing we did,” Dev reminds me.
“And I’m a very, very good cook. This is part of me making sure you don’t only keep me around for my criminal expertise.
” He opens the fridge. I brace myself, but I actually went grocery shopping this week, so it’s not too embarrassing.
Apart from the great wall of takeout in the back that I’ve been meaning to clear out.
Dev plucks out eggs, cheese, various odds and ends.
A few minutes later, he’s humming while the smell of sautéing onions fills the small kitchen, and I might be in love.
The way his shoulders fill out his white T--shirt don’t hurt, either.
“Do you think they knew that was there?” Dev asks.
“The Hills?” I ask. “Emily did.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Meghan saw a woman with red hands,” I say. “Those red prints on the wall—-Emily must have put them there.”
“Which suggests?” Dev prompts. He pushes a mushroom, spinach, and sausage scramble onto two plates as he talks.
“Which suggests that she didn’t just know about the bunker. She knew what happened there,” I say.
“If you found out your father had done something like that, would you report it? If he was already dead?” Dev asks.
I don’t like how quickly we’re settling into this story.
Mason Hill—-someone no one in the town particularly knew, someone long dead—-as the monster in the woods.
Nothing to be done but shake our heads over it.
No one to be punished, no one to be blamed who’s still drawing breath.
It gives me a bad feeling: the creeping sense that someone is going to get away with something. That they already have.
“Audrey?” Dev says. “What are you thinking?”
I take a bite of the food. The flavor bursts into my mouth with the first bite, exquisite, but I can’t enjoy it. I have to force myself to swallow it down. “I just have a bad feeling about what happens next,” I say.
“Whatever happens, our part of it is done,” Dev says earnestly. “It’s up to the police now.”
“Right,” I say, nodding. It’s out of my hands.
I wish that thought held some comfort.
Len meets us in the lobby. He doesn’t look like he got any sleep last night. “At least you’re on time,” he notes. He looks over at Dev, taking in the fact that he’s wearing the same clothes he was last night. Thankfully, he decides not to comment.
“I did some research,” I say. I hold out a folded sheet of paper—-notes I made before we came over this morning. “I think I might have found some of the . . . the names.” I don’t know what to call them. Girls, women, victims? They still exist in a strange half--world, guessed at, not quite real.
“Me too,” Len says. “I found four that fit.”
“More than me.”
“I have better resources.” He looks at the list. “Yeah. I saw these ones.”
“They look alike.”
He nods. And in his eyes, I see that he knows the rest—-the ghost who would stand among them and not look out of place. But he doesn’t say her name, and neither do I.
I’ve wanted to find her for so long, but not like this. Not in that place. I wanted a life for her—-or, if not, a gentler end. There was no gentleness in that shattered room. No mercy except the final mercy.
“Wagner’s waiting,” Len says. “Just let me do the talking.”
I don’t mind that at all. Chief Wagner is a man who reminds me uncomfortably of my father, minus a bit of hair and plus a few years.
He’s barrel--chested, with thick knuckles and a habit of rapping them against the table to punctuate his sentences.
Like my father, he always looks vaguely disappointed when he’s talking to me.
The three of us file into the room where Wagner is waiting. Dev and I hover in the back while Len steps forward, clearing his throat.
“You know Audrey Dixon, and this is Dev Khanna. He teaches at the high school,” Len says. “They found something alarming yesterday, and I thought I should bring it to you immediately.”
He’s printed out the photos I took. He has them tucked into a manila file folder, looking almost official. He slides them across Wagner’s desk. Wagner traps them under blunt fingertips and drags them in, looking down without comprehension.
“Audrey’s—-Ms. Dixon’s—-dog is trained in search and rescue,” Len says. “While they were walking the trails in the preserve, the dog broke loose. He alerted—-responded to a scent. When they investigated, they found this.”
“What is this, some kind of art project?” Wagner says, looking at the photograph of the handprints.
“It’s a bunker,” I say. Len shoots me a look, but I step forward.
“It looks like it was built as a bomb shelter or something. Barry—-my dog—-he alerted to the presence of human remains there, and one other spot in the woods nearby. And it looks to me like there was someone being held down there. The chain and—-”
Wagner grunts, cutting me off. He looks through the photos again. “Where is this?”
“South of the preserve,” Len says. Wagner fixes him with a hard look. Len swallows. “It’s on Terry Butler’s land.”
Something passes over his expression, and my stomach sinks. “Right next to the Hills’ land, then.”
“I believe that’s correct,” Len says. He straightens up. “I’d like to get a warrant to search this bunker, and get some official cadaver dogs out there. I’ve already matched several of the names to potential missing person reports. Cold cases from over a decade ago. I think—-”
“I think you need to slow down,” Wagner says. He folds his hands on the table and looks at the three of us. His gaze lands on Dev. “What was your name again?”
“Uh, Dev? Dev Khanna. I teach social studies at Franklin High,” Dev says, plainly nervous.
“And what were you doing trespassing on private property last night, Mr. Khanna?”
“Like he said, the dog . . .” Dev trails off, gesturing futilely at Len.
“It was my fault,” I say. “I’ve been neglecting his training a bit. He saw a squirrel and took off, and by the time we caught up with him, we didn’t even realize we were on private land.”
“If he’s so poorly trained, what makes you think he smelled anything at all?” Wagner asks.
I want to snap at him, but I catch Len’s expression out of the corner of my eye and I glue my teeth together until the urge passes. “He’s a reliable tracker. Just doesn’t have focus. He wouldn’t alert if he didn’t smell something.”
“According to you.” Wagner sits back in his chair. “All I see here is some graffiti and somebody’s idea of a joke. We’ve got this shit coming out our ears. There’s this damn story, you see. The witch in the woods. It’s mostly the girls that cause problems.” He’s talking to Dev, as if to inform him.
“Jenny Red--Hands,” Dev says. “I’m familiar.”
“Every few weeks, we get a call about a cult or Satanists or a ritualistic murder, and it’s just paint and Spirit Halloween props,” Wagner says. “And half the time they’ve painted ‘Jenny Red--Hands’ on the wall, like if she was real, she’d sign her name. And do it with spray paint.”
“This isn’t that,” I say.
“It’s not against the law to have a bomb shelter,” Wagner says.
“The names—-”