Chapter 37 After
After
I cancel the scheduled email as soon as I’m back at the car, thrumming with new purpose. Kenny was right. I’ve been thinking about the girls, but I need to be thinking about the Hills. Melinda, Andrew, Emily—-Liam, too, I suppose.
They know more than they’re saying. And if it’s something worth hiding, it’s something worth finding out.
They’ll wall themselves off with lawyers and carefully calibrated statements that make it clear they had no idea, that they’re as horrified as the rest of us.
Melinda’s a politician, and a good one. She’ll know how to protect them from the press and the police.
But maybe I can find something, if they don’t think to stop me.
It’s back to searching through the thickets of the internet, then.
I’m far less accustomed to this particular wilderness, but I pick up where I left off, wandering aimlessly through the articles and posts that have touched on the Hills.
Melinda’s political career is overwhelmingly the best documented and the least relevant.
I like her politics—-I’ll give her that.
Practical, with a progressive streak she knows how to camouflage when the crowd won’t like it.
All politicians have to be liars. And she’s good at it.
Then there’s Andrew, and the foundation—-and it bothers me that they’re so tied to it, an organization for wayward young women.
Men, too, I suppose, but it started with girls.
They have teen shelters that work to mediate runaways’ return to their parents, as well as shelters for older youth.
They have extensive programs for foster kids who have aged out, which was why Hope’s Hands started—-their mother was in foster care.
The story is on the website. Elizabeth Hill—-Elizabeth Sellick at the time—-had been kicked out of her foster parents’ house and was on the street when she met her husband.
There’s a photo of them on the website, early in their marriage.
She’s young, with strawberry blond hair and a big smile.
Next to her, he’s bearlike, with dark, curly hair and a thick beard; he has to be at least ten years her senior.
There’s something off about him. His pose is stiff, and there’s a disconnect between the direction of his smile and his eyes, like he’s not sure where he’s supposed to look.
Maybe it’s only that I’m aware that he might be—-probably is—-
a killer, but his eyes seem dead to me, his grip on her waist too possessive. He rescued me, Elizabeth—-Lizzie—-said in interviews. He took me in when I had nowhere to go. It could read as romantic or predatory, depending on your leanings. I know which one gets my vote.
After Lizzie’s death, Hope’s Hands nearly shuttered. Its second life began when Lizzie’s oldest children, Melinda and Andrew, worked together to revitalize and expand the program in her honor.
I know all of this already. I skim through, but the PR pap isn’t going to unveil any dark secrets.
It’s all Melinda and Andrew. Hardly any mention of the twins.
I pull up another tab and plug in Liam’s name.
It takes some added search terms to even get him to surface.
After City Rescue, playing race car–-driving paramedic Kyle Barton, he was in one failed pilot and a few episodes of a hospital show.
Then he dropped off the radar. Just another TV actor who couldn’t make the leap from his first gig.
After that, he popped up online only in relation to his rap sheet.
I find one blog that’s put together a sympathetic biography, but even that plays like a tragedy.
Drug use on set even in the early days, sporadic arrests, his deteriorating performance on subsequent seasons.
I flip back to Hope’s Hands. Buried in the news section is a photo of Liam, sitting on the hood of a vintage muscle car while he throws a thumbs--up. hope’s hands blazes across a banner behind him. Melinda and Andrew stand to the side, beaming photogenic smiles.
Liam Hill is photographed after donating a car driven by his character Kyle Barton on City Rescue to be auctioned in the Hope’s Hands yearly fundraiser.
Toward the edge of the frame, captured incidentally, is Mason Hill; behind him, in profile to the camera, you can just make out Emily. Mason almost seems to be blocking her from view.
She looks painfully young, even compared to her twin. She’s dressed in a peasant blouse and jeans that look borrowed from a previous decade, her hair in pigtails. I stare at the image. Something is bothering me, but I can’t place it.
Maybe it’s only that I’ve never seen another photograph of her, I realize.
Unlike her siblings, she never participated in anything through the schools that would have gotten her picture taken.
She doesn’t appear in Melinda’s campaign photos; she’s not standing with Andrew to celebrate his winning game; she isn’t anywhere on the Hope’s Hands website.
My stomach tightens, nausea creeping over me before I can quite articulate why.
She was hidden from the world. Not just now, of her own accord, but all her life. I look again at the way Mason Hill stands in front of her. The way he looks angrily toward the camera. He doesn’t want her seen.
He wants her to himself, I think, and realize my heart is hammering in my chest.
She might not have been down in that bunker, but she was trapped all the same.
Why wouldn’t you run far, far away from a home like that? Something kept her there. The same thing, maybe, that draws her again and again down into the dark, to leave handprints like blood on the walls of another girl’s prison.
The road to the Hills’ house—-and Terry Butler’s—-is blocked off with a temporary wooden barrier.
I’m guessing I’m not the first unwanted visitor.
The police and investigators will be up by the Butler place, though, and I can only hope that Emily’s house is still accessible.
I park by the road and head up on foot, suppressing every sensible instinct I have.
I find myself walking along the side of the road, not wanting my footsteps to crunch on gravel. Emily’s isn’t the only car in the driveway. There are four—-I recognize Melinda’s and Andrew’s, and alongside them is a Kia that looks like a rental.
Liam? I wonder. They’ve called the family home.
I stop short of the house, not sure I want to deal with the whole clan. Emily’s not going to say anything in front of her siblings. Andrew will just slam the door in my face. Maybe coming here was a waste of time.
A burble of conversation comes from the house, voices tense but not yet shouting. The blinds are shut, blocking out whoever is inside—-and blocking me from them. Curiosity wins out over caution. I creep closer, straining my ears to make out Melinda’s clipped words.
“—-unreliable. You know how he is.”
“He looked good, I thought,” Andrew replies. They’re talking about Liam. Which makes me wonder where, exactly, he is.
“You mean he looked clean,” Melinda says bluntly. I’ve sidled up all the way to the window now. If anyone spots me, there’s no way to make this look like anything other than what it is.
“Well. Yeah,” Andrew says.
Emily says something, too soft for me to hear.
“It isn’t Liam I’m worried about,” Andrew snaps, as if in response.
“We all made the same promises,” Melinda says, and the hair on my arms prickles. I’m holding my breath now, straining to hear every word.
Emily’s voice comes again. I still can’t make it out, but I think I catch the last couple words, tilted up into a question. “—-find her?”
Or was it there? My skin is cold, my heart thumping.
“It’s not going to happen,” Melinda says, in a reassuring tone.
“You’re sure?” Andrew asks, quieter now, and Melinda answers, her words comprehensible only sporadically.
“—-made sure—-nowhere near—-no reason—-” Then silence again, and she clears her throat.
“Look—-we’re acting like this is complicated, but it’s very simple.
We’re horrified, but it has nothing to do with us.
We don’t need to say anything more than that.
Everyone already knows what kind of man Terry Butler is. Was.”
“Hold on,” Andrew says. “It’s Wagner.” A pause. “They’re starting the search. I should go over there.”
Search? He must mean they’re searching Terry Butler’s place, which means that there are dozens of cops just up the driveway from here, and I’m standing around eavesdropping.
“I’ll stay here,” Melinda says; if Emily answers, I don’t hear, because I’m walking briskly and quietly away from the house, my pulse galloping. Whatever I just heard, I wasn’t supposed to. None of it is specific. None of it damning.
But it obliterates my last doubt that there’s something they’re keeping quiet.
I relax a fraction when I get out of sight of the house, but all my fear and tension comes flooding back the instant I round the bend and spot my car.
A lanky man sits on the hood, dark bangs falling across his eyes and the last stub of a cigarette clamped between his fingers. Liam. My steps slow. He watches my approach placidly, letting out a long exhale of smoke--wreathed breath.
He doesn’t look like the heartthrob paramedic from City Rescue anymore.
Or the fragile teen I crossed paths with doing stage crew for the school play.
The lines of his face are too craggy for his age, and he looks both too thin and too slack.
But he smiles a little when he sees me, and in the spark of his eyes, I can see the hint of the young man he used to be.
“Liam,” I say.
“That’s me. You’re Audrey, right?” he says. His fingers fidget with the cigarette. “I heard you’ve been coming around a lot. I recognize you, don’t I?”
“I did a semester of drama. Romeo and Juliet,” I say, as if this is a normal conversation, two old schoolmates catching up.
He taps the side of his index finger to his brow. “Right, right. I do remember you. Been a long time.”