The Stolen Hours

by Allen Eskens

  “I didn’t tell the board a single word that wasn’t true.”

  Lila leaned back in her chair, turning her focus toward Dovey. “Fair enough; it was true. But, Frank, you found out about my hospitalization and my suicide attempt by reading the investigation file for my rape.”

  “I have a legal right to access to those files.”

  “Yes, you do, but you don’t have the right to share that information with anyone else, do you? The Data Practices Act is clear on that point. Active investigations are confidential—especially with regards to medical reports. Sharing that information with anyone is a crime. My case may be old, but it’s still active. You broke the law, Frank. You wanted me gone so badly that you committed a crime to get me out.”

  Bright red patches began to mottle Frank Dovey’s neck and cheeks. He opened his mouth to speak, then, apparently finding no words, closed it again.

  Lila turned back to Colin Nelson. “I just needed to tell you what he’s been doing. I expect I won’t have my job much longer, and I regret that, but you needed to know who this man is at his core. I care too much about the mission of your office to let this go unsaid.”

  Lila stood up. “I apologize for interrupting your lunch, Mr. Nelson.”

  With that, she turned and left the restaurant, her back erect and her mind clear. She didn’t even feel the need to count her steps.

  Chapter 46

  Every day, Gavin waited for the news that Sadie Vauk no longer walked the earth—and every night he went to bed disappointed. Committing murder, at least for most people, didn’t come easily, and Gavin understood that Jack would need time to see the inevitability of what had to be done. But time—like Gavin’s patience—was quickly running out.

  He had two days until his status hearing and an opportunity to send another text to Jack. It would be more urgent than the first text, more demanding, a message delivered with the nuance of a sledgehammer. After that, Gavin would have a mere twenty-four hours between the status hearing and the omnibus hearing on Thursday. Sadie Vauk had to be gone by then. Gavin needed to make it clear to Jack that if Vauk wasn’t out of the picture by Thursday, there would be consequences.

  Jack’s failure to act weighed heavily on Gavin as he busied himself with a small side project that day. He had purchased a simple green folder from the commissary to carry his legal papers. It would have a more important purpose soon—a hiding place for the burner phone’s SIM card. Gavin used a piece of plastic from a pen to jab along a seam until he created a slot big enough for the card.

  He had barely completed his task when a voice on the intercom called him to the guard station. He had a visitor.

  As he neared the visiting room, he could see his mother’s face on the screen, and it angered him. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “Can it wait until I get out?”

  “Those detectives came to see me again.”

  Gavin hadn’t expected that, and he held his expression in check as he considered the news. It should mean nothing to him. An innocent man would welcome a more thorough investigation. “Good,” Gavin said. “I hope they’re getting closer to catching the guy.”

  “They asked some strange questions.”

  “Like what—and remember, Mom, Big Brother is listening.”

  Amy nodded. “They wanted to know about the money I give you.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “What do you think I said? I told them it was an allowance. I’m taking care of my son. That’s what mothers do; they look out for their children.”

  “You are a good mother,” Gavin said, doing his best to sound sincere. Amy smiled as if she believed him. Was she really that stupid? Yes, she was. If it weren’t for Gavin, she would have been locked up a long time ago.

  His mother and Richard hadn’t been celebrating that night, they’d been arguing. It had been one of those long, simmering fights that grew in heat as the Scotch in Richard’s bottle dwindled, their insults whispered and hissed to hide their acrimony from the neighbors. But their harsh words climbed the ivy up to Gavin’s window, words like cheat, and gold digger, and divorce. He heard Richard say that he was sick of that retarded kid, and Gavin knew what kid he was talking about.

  He’d dug his camera out of its bag and trained its lens on the patio below, zooming in to watch his mother and Richard.

  Richard had downed the last of his Johnnie Walker Black Label and thrown the bottle to the concrete, smashing it into a thousand shards. Then he’d pointed his finger at Amy and said, “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” He struggled to form consonants as the alcohol thickened his tongue. “You think I’m an idiot? I’m done with you…and that defective kid of yours. I’m done with the whole thing. You wanna be a whore, go be a whore.”

  Richard turned to stumble his way toward the house and nearly lost his balance as he tried to navigate around the wicker footstool. That gave Amy the opportunity to grab a paver stone from the edge of the flower garden.

  Gavin snapped a picture—no flash—the aperture set for the low light of the patio.

  Amy brought the brick down on the back of Richard’s head.

  Gavin’s chest filled with a breath that refused to leave. What had she done? He snapped another picture.

  Richard crumpled to the ground, falling onto his back at the edge of the pool. Amy dropped the brick and took a step back, her hands pressed against her mouth as if to hold in a scream.

  Gavin dropped his camera and ran downstairs. When he got to the patio, he saw his mother with a phone in her hand—she was dialing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “He’s hurt. I need to call for help.”

  Gavin took the phone away from his mother. The look of shock on her face made no sense to Gavin. “You can’t call for help. You’ll go to jail.”

  Amy began to shake. “But he’s…”

  “He’s a jerk. We don’t need him.”

  “But…”

  “If he wakes up, he’ll tell the cops what you did. You’ll be arrested. You’ll go to prison.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  Gavin put his mother’s phone down and knelt beside Richard, who looked like he was simply asleep. He grabbed the man’s shirt and lifted to try to roll him over. He never asked his mother to help. He had planned to do it all himself, but when he failed at his first attempt, Amy joined him at Richard’s side. Together they rolled him into the pool.

  Richard never moved. He didn’t struggle or kick. As Gavin watched him drift, facedown, his only thought was that Richard Balentine had been killed by Amy’s “retarded” son.

  His mother tossed the brick into a shrub and suggested that they now call the cops—the woman was hopeless. Gavin told her to clean up the shards of glass from the Scotch bottle. There could be no signs of a fight. Gavin pulled the brick out of the shrub and cleaned it in the pool before replacing it in the flower bed. Then, using a paper towel to prevent leaving a fingerprint, he drained a full bottle of Scotch into the kitchen sink and placed the empty bottle on the patio next to Richard’s chair.

  When he finished the cleanup, Amy again suggested calling 911.

  “We can’t call until morning,” Gavin said. “We need that brick to be dry.”

  Gavin stepped back to survey the scene, re-creating it in his head. Then he pointed at the stub of a cigar in a nearby ashtray. “You went to bed, and he stayed up to finish his cigar. You have no idea what happened—got that? I’ll find him in the pool in the morning and call the police. If they ask, you were celebrating and drinking, but you don’t know what happened after you went to bed.”

  He made his mother repeat the story three times before they left the patio. Even then he didn’t trust that she wouldn’t screw it up.

  Yet, she now sat on the visitor side of the video screen while he was in jail. He shook the thought away and reminded himself that being locked up was all part of th
e plan.

  “I’m scared for you, Gavin,” she said. “I just want to help.”

  “I don’t want your help.” And then, for the benefit of the detectives who would be viewing this later, he said, “I didn’t do anything, so they can’t convict me of anything. Have faith. I’m innocent.”

  The smile Gavin shared with his mother carried the weight of their history, a wink between conspirators, saying more than words ever could. “Is that all they asked about—my allowance?”

  “No, they asked me about a bunch of names.”

  This caused Gavin to twitch ever so slightly. He took a second to compose himself and asked, “What names?”

  “They asked me about that girl you went to high school with, um, Eleanora what’s-her-face. And then there was a Chloe and a Virginia and…” Amy paused as she counted the names off on her fingers, stumbling to find the fourth one.

  Gavin stopped breathing as each name jammed a new scrap of rusted metal into his chest. How had they made those connections? They were random bodies, floating in the river. Were they guessing? Taking a shot in the dark?

  No, Vang wasn’t guessing. She must have puzzled together the thin nexus between his photography business and their disappearances. Surprisingly, the thought of those names passing through her lips brought Gavin a strange sense of accomplishment. His hard work, his art would finally be appreciated. But he had also been careful, and if that was all she had, then Gavin had nothing to worry about. Those women were all dead. There would never be a lineup. They could never sit in a courtroom and point a finger at him.

  Gavin almost smiled at the thought of Vang watching him walk out of court a free man. She would know the truth of his deeds, the depth of his skill, but she would be able to prove nothing.

  “Now I remember,” Amy said. “The fourth girl’s name was Lila Nash. That was the one.”

  Lila Nash? Had she finally remembered him? He had seen a look in her eye on that last trip to court, but he didn’t believe it. He pictured her sitting on the witness stand, pointing a finger at him and saying his name. The image filled his chest with something cold and thick and heavy. It suffocated him. Was this what it felt like to drown?

  “Are you okay?” Amy asked.

  Damn it! Gavin forced a smile onto his face, took in a slow breath. They wanted him to react. That’s why they fed Amy the names. If Nash had truly remembered him, they wouldn’t have given that information to his mother. They were grasping at straws and he had fallen for their trick.

  He pushed the panic from his mind and let his intellect cool the heat of those embers. He still had time to fix his mistake, put an end to the threat that was Lila Nash. He had a plan—a good one—and if he stuck to his strategy, everything would work out in the end.

  Gavin painted his face with a look of boredom, shrugged, and said, “Never heard of her.”

  Chapter 47

  Lila didn’t go back to work after leaving Dovey at the restaurant—stunned and muted and covered in red blotches. She refused to treat the remainder of her day as just another afternoon, a page plucked from the calendar and thrown onto a pile with the rest. She wanted to bask in her audacity. She wanted to let the tremble of adrenaline work its way out of her fingers. And she wanted to call Joe, but this—along with everything she needed to tell him—seemed like a conversation best had in person.

  A termination letter would likely be on her desk by morning. Or would they email it to her? She hoped that Dovey would at least have the balls to do it himself and not drag Andi into it. She sent Andi an email from her phone to let her know that Spencer’s status hearing was prepped and ready for the morning, adding a cryptic note about having a family emergency and needing to leave for the day. Then she climbed into her car and drove.

  Lila followed the flow of the traffic through downtown Minneapolis, replaying those few minutes in the restaurant, the memory both thrilling and horrifying. She tried to convince herself that her rash act had been a huge mistake, but every time she relived the memory, it played like music in her ears.

  Yet, there had been one moment at the table that didn’t feel right, a single sentence that had nothing to do with Dovey, or Nelson, or the letter from the bar examiners. In truth, that one sentence had no place in the discussion at all, but having said it, Lila could not rid it from her mind. My own mother refused to acknowledge what happened to me, and when it became too much, I swallowed some of her pills.

  It wasn’t the statement itself that bothered Lila. She’d understood long ago that her mother closed her eyes to the ugly parts of life. That’s how Charlotte coped with her husband flying off to the Philippines or her daughter carving lines in her skin. But at the restaurant, Lila had presented her mother’s oblivion not as a reaction to the suicide attempt, but as a cause of it.

  My own mother refused to acknowledge what happened to me, and when it became too much…

  As she slowed for a red light, another voice entered the conversation. Healing requires forgiveness, Dr. Roberts had said. Forgiveness isn’t for them. It’s for you. She had always seen those words aimed at the men who attacked her. Weren’t they the ones who Dr. Roberts wanted her to forgive?

  And when it became too much…

  Lila aimed her car south, toward her mother’s house.

  * * *

  Charlotte answered the door wearing a smile that had no memory, as if Lila’s last visit hadn’t ended the way it did. “Well, look at this—twice in one week?”

  “Can we talk?” Lila’s tone made clear that bad news lurked behind the request.

  “Of course, honey.” Charlotte stepped aside to let Lila in. “Is everything okay?”

  Lila took a seat on the couch. Charlotte sat on a chair across from her, apparently sensing that some distance between them was warranted. Despite having practiced her lines on the drive there, Lila struggled to start the conversation.

  “Mom, I’m going to ask you an important question, and I want you to give me an honest answer.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Okay.”

  “Do you know what happened to me…that night in Uptown?”

  “Oh, honey, why are you stirring that up again?”

  Lila kept her tone flat as she repeated her question. “Do you know what they did to me?”

  “Do you always have to bring that up? Can’t we—”

  “I’ve never brought it up. When have we ever talked about this?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It’s still there. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “It’s there because you never tried to move on. How can you get past something if you hold on to it like that?”

  “I’m not holding on to it, Mom.” Lila couldn’t stop her voice from growing louder. “For Christ’s sake, it holds on to me. Don’t you understand that?” Lila closed her eyes and took a breath to calm down. “I can’t move on unless I face what happened to me.”

  “Wasn’t that the point of all that therapy? Where did that get you? It’s like all he did was make it worse.”

  “Is that why you stopped my sessions with Dr. Roberts?”

  “I never stopped—” Charlotte saw the look in Lila’s eyes and didn’t finish her sentence.

  “I saw the letter. You forged my signature. Why would you do that?”

  “For goodness’ sakes, Lila—what good can it do to bring all this up again?”

  “I deserve an answer. Why did you stop my therapy sessions?”

  “All he was doing was rehashing it over and over. A wound can’t heal if you keep jabbing it like that. And look at you now. Look how you turned out. You went to law school, and you have Joe.”

  “Dr. Roberts was helping me.”

  “No, he wasn’t. He had you all mixed up. And they always blame the mother. One way or another, it’s always the mother. I have no doubt that that’s why he wanted me to come in. I was a good mom. I loved you. I tried—”

  “Wait. Dr. Roberts w
anted you…to come in?”

  Charlotte looked down at her fingers and didn’t answer.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I know how these things work. I wasn’t about to sit there and let him blame me for what happened to you. I did my best.”

  “You stopped my sessions because you didn’t want to talk about it?”

  “You were better. I could see it. You didn’t need—”

  “I wasn’t better!” Lila yelled, causing her mother to flinch.

  Lila had never before wanted to hit her mother, and the urge scared her. She clenched her hands into fists and squeezed, her teeth gritted, her eyes pinched shut. Then she took in a slow breath. “You didn’t answer my question, Mom.”

  “What question?”

  “Do you know what happened to me at that party in Uptown?”

  “Oh, Lila…please.”

  “I drank a lot back then—but you knew that.”

  “Can’t we—”

  “The night of that party, someone put something in my drink—a drug called GHB.”

  Charlotte closed her eyes like a child hiding from a monster. “I don’t want to hear that ugliness.”

  “That ugliness is a part of my life.”

  “Not anymore. It’s in the past.”

  “No it’s not—that’s the point.” Lila couldn’t stop the emotion from lifting inside of her. “You can’t know who I am if you keep pretending it never happened.”

  “I was watching you kill yourself and there was nothing I could do. First came the drinking. Every time you walked out that door I prayed that you’d come back safe. I’d stay awake, just to hear you walk in. Then the incident—”

  “It wasn’t an incident, Mom. Can’t you even say it?”

  “You were my little girl, and you were killing yourself right in front of me. I didn’t understand.”

  “You didn’t want to understand.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me?”