by J. J. Cagney
Danielle pondered what little she knew of Chief Hardesty’s motivations, studying him surreptitiously as she worked through another box. His face reminded her of modeling clay left in the sun too long. Except that it was age, not heat, that had caused the skin to blur and sag. He seemed a decent sort—hardworking, intelligent, maybe even empathetic. Danielle understood why Nancy had trusted him. She hoped she could, too.
In the next box, she found the photograph. The ugly brass frame was still shoved face down on top of some of Jonathan’s clothes. She remembered her frantic movements after her mother caught her in the attic, the corners of which were thick with shadows and cobwebs. It didn’t surprise Danielle; her mother hated dusting, especially places she rarely visited.
Nothing had changed up here—well, maybe more dust and cobwebs. While the rest of her life continued to march inexorably onward, the attic remained consistent in its secrets and grime. The warped plywood decking groaned under her feet. Danielle glanced up at the six A-framed joints overhead, thinking how fragile a house was, how fragile life was.
Rolling her head on her stiff neck, she wondered if helping Chief Hardesty was a good idea. Maybe she should just let the past be that . . . past.
She swiped at the thick film of dust covering the glass and tipped the frame to get a clearer view in the moldering light. Her eyes kept returning to Jonathan’s young beaming face above that bright orange shirt.
They, Jonathan and she, looked nothing alike. That might have been the one thing that kept Nancy able to function. Well, sort of. Nancy didn’t have to look at the face of her dead child every day once she’d packed away his things.
Danielle thought about Kevin, so grown up at eight. Reid, at six, shared the same eyes though not the same hair color or skin tone. With just one glance at her boys’ hazel eyes fringed with the thick, dark lashes, anyone could see they were brothers, their father’s sons.
Danielle set the photo to the side and continued to work her way through the box. Nothing worthwhile in it. She tipped the box and read the single word in black marker on the side: Attic.
She nibbled her lip. The last time her parents moved was into this house, nearly thirty years before. From the look of it, this box was put in the attic then and ignored since.
She glanced over at Chief Hardesty as he shoved a box to the side, and she shuffled on her butt to the next box nearest her, opening it. Danielle pulled out a newspaper clipping that had fallen loose from what looked like a scrapbook.
A 10-year-old Boy is Missing
Danielle continued to read past the headline. Yes, some of the details were like Jonathan’s kidnapping. Words jumped out: Chevy pickup truck. Kidnapped. Knife wounds.
Danielle flipped to the next newspaper cutout, scanned, exhaled, flipped, and read, eyes burning across the page, breath leaping out of her chest. So many of them.
Danielle shook the box. Her stomach roiled, and her heart beat painfully, loudly as more aged newsprint pages fluttered to the warped plywood at her jean-clad knee. Her eyes were already skimming over the words as she stooped to pick up the clippings. Hank’s name was near the bottom of the piece.
Hank Foster, Esq., whose son was abducted and murdered in 1983, contacted the Bethel family to offer his condolences and support during this time.
Foster’s organization, the Agency for Missing, Exploited, and Abused Children (AMEAC) is based in Dallas, Texas. It works with families across the country to help find missing children. The group has an educational arm that works with local communities, especially rural ones, to explain the importance of proper civilian vigilance, not only by parents but also by the community-at-large.
AMEAC is currently working with fifty-six towns and police departments to educate parents and teachers on how to spot an abused child or a potential child predator. Hays is on a waiting list to become an AMEAC-sponsored town.
The book—a journal like the ones her mother used to write in—lay beneath the clipping. She pulled it out with shaking hands. Flipping through the slightly yellowed, stiff pages, she found a table. A column of dates. Writing to the left. She scooped up the clippings. Yes, they matched. 1977 was the first. Entry: “Unknown. A possibility.”
Jesus. No wonder her mother hadn’t liked her digging through these boxes.
The next was 1980. “Hank at a conference in Little Rock June 17-23.”
Danielle frowned, not understanding why Nancy made note of this.
The next entry was dated 1983—the date of Jonathan’s death. “Hank stated he was in his office. Secretary can confirm he went in at 3:45. No one saw him again until 7:15 p.m. when he arrived home. He did not answer his phone at all that evening. Never admitted to having an affair with his secretary either.”
Danielle’s vision blurred as she continued to stare at the page. Affair with his secretary? Well, that wasn’t new. Hank seemed to like to screw his secretaries. He’d gone through . . . how many was it at AMEAC now? Six, maybe more.
She touched the page, running her forefinger over the words, trying to grasp their meaning.
But . . . none of this made sense.
Her mom couldn’t believe…it would mean Hank had hurt his own child.
13 Arlen
“Will you tell me about the investigation?” Danielle asked, her voice hesitant. She was clutching something in her arms.
Papers. She passed them over to him with a trembling hand. A few of the loose newsprint pages fluttered to the plywood flooring.
Arlen picked them up and scanned them, glowering. This better not be what Nancy wanted him to find.
“Yeah, I’ve seen these,” he grunted.
“Oh.” Danielle’s shoulders slumped.
“Your mom put a lot of her time and effort into helping with the investigation early on. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was unnecessary. We had manpower from the local FBI as well as most of our own team on the case.”
Not that any of those hours actually turned up enough evidence. He sighed, wishing he had better news for Nancy’s daughter.
They’d been up here a good forty-five minutes, close to an hour. Arlen pulled out a faded red bandana and swiped at his forehead. Different type of investigative work, this. Just as physically demanding as that day so long ago. Part of why he’d gone for chief when he hit fifty. The extra weight and the high blood pressure made this part of the job more strenuous than he cared for.
He shoved the bandana back into his pocket and shuffled to another box. He opened it and stared down at Matchbox cars. His boy had many of the same.
“I put out an APB after your mother gave the description. We found the truck, found some bloodstains on the vinyl seat, on the driver’s door. You got to remember this was before DNA testing was all the rage. We had all that—all those samples are locked up still. I had ’em run back when we got the equipment and the blood was a match for Jonathan’s. We got blood and fibers from under Jonathan’s fingernails—proved a dead end.”
Arlen’s throat ached with the need to yell, just as it always did when he thought back to the meticulously-preserved evidence that did him, did Jonathan and, now, Jonathan’s sister no good.
“The son of a bitch who did this in my town walked free,” he murmured.
He pulled out a birth certificate sealed in a large zip-top baggie near the top of the next box. Under trumpeting, stylized angels sat his name in a fancy script: Jonathan Henry Foster.
Clothes and toys were folded with sheets of tissue paper between each layer. The clothes smelled strongly of the mothballs mounded around them and were heavy on polyester, but they were all intact. Hardesty guessed these must be Jonathan’s toys—the beat-up ball glove was the obvious favorite—were in the next large box.
So, far no luck on the journals—or any legal papers. Just that goddamn table and those news clippings, taunting him.
“We never proved who it was. Gotta do that. Have proof. The FBI was in our little town; the special agent thought the killer might have gone
up through Oklahoma to Kansas because another kid was murdered there—like what we had here—but we never found him. Neither did the Kansas police. Neither did the group in Alabama where it seems to have started. Leastwise, best as I’ve been able to tell.”
“So, it’s possible that he’s out there, still hurting children.” Danielle pressed her hands to her stomach.
“It’s plausible. In fact, it’s likely.” Arlen heaved a sigh, hating the words, hating what he had to say. “We see cases like Jonathan’s every so often and I worry.”
“And?”
“I haven’t caught a whiff of a crime that matches Jonathan’s in the past few years. The killer’s gotta be old now. Hell, I’m old.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s stopped,” Danielle said, her voice quiet.
Tough young woman. She’d lived through types of tragedies that emotionally crippled people—he’d seen too much of that. In her mother, for one. Not that Arlen blamed Nancy for her difficulties. Hell, he’d been a hot mess himself afterward and he got to come home to his wife and kids each night.
“It doesn’t imply much except I haven’t seen the same knife or pattern of stabbings.”
“So, ah,” Danielle said.
Her brows knit as she struggled with the violent aspect of the murder. She had boys—that’s where his mind went, each time he talked about a crime like this: to his boy, to his grandkids.
“So, you can tell who’s done the killing by the way they, ah, use the knife?”
Arlen wanted to pat her hand, wanted to offer some level of sympathy. Instead, he turned to the next box, unable to watch her struggle.
“Yes, usually the forensics team can tell us the right hand or left hand, the length of the blade, that kind of thing, from the wounds themselves. I’ve been keeping an eye out for years to see if any new cases look like our report here and those in Kansas, Alabama. Haven’t seen anything. And that’s the conundrum. We can’t catch what we can’t find. And serial killers are damn good at hiding. Usually in plain sight.”
“What does that mean?” Danielle asked.
Arlen wiped his face again, needing the moment to get his blood pressure back under control. Goddamn heart. “Means we probably talked to the guy—if not us, then the PD in Kansas or Alabama did. Someone talked to him about the boys’ deaths. But he was smooth and he covered his actions better’n most.” He closed his eyes, trying to get his heart to settle back at a normal clip. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to nail his ass. I want it that bad.”
Arlen settled against one of the roof joists. It groaned under his shifting bulk, but he needed the moment to let the wave of dizziness pass.
“There’s no way for me to tell you the number of times I’ve laid awake at night, thinking about the call from your mother,” he said. He closed his eyes for a moment, reliving that awful memory. “The way she looked that day. The absolute misery when we had to walk your father into that funeral home to identify his son.” He opened his eyes and met her startled, terrified gaze. “It took just moments. Maybe just two or three, and your brother was gone.”
“That’s it?” she squeaked.
Arlen shook his head, his tone rueful. “I’d love to be able to tell you that it was possible to find him now, but I can’t. We could look for what’s on the record again. I have my DNA samples, got my original evidence. If you want me to dig deeper, I’ll do it even though your dad asked for me to close the case. Your mama decided against it when I talked to her a few years ago. I’da done it anyway but there’ve been even deeper budget cuts.”
Danielle snorted. Arlen, cynical to the core after forty-plus years of this work, didn’t bother to say more about how much money it took to investigate properly. No one wanted to pay for that kind of thing because no one wanted those types of crimes in their neighborhood. He still fought the good fight and tried to get more resources for her force, but he no longer gnashed his teeth and railed against the unfairness of it all when the city council decided not to add five percent to the police’s budget yet again.
Danielle fiddled with the edge of a box, peeling away the layers of brown paper in thin sheets.
“I told your mother we’d find him, and it’s always sat poorly with me,” Arlen said. Damn, it set poorly.
Danielle raised her green eyes to his, Nancy’s eyes but calmer. Clearer. The grief hadn’t created the mania behind these eyes. He wanted to keep it that way.
“You have children, possibly grandchildren.”
He nodded. “Yeah, three—boy and couple of girls. Two grandkids, boy and a girl. They sure are something.” He chuckled, a halfhearted attempt. Not the same as when he considered Jonathan’s murder could have happened to one of his kids.
“I remember watching America’s Most Wanted when I was a child,” Danielle said. “My mother hated the show. She refused to let me watch after she caught me. But I always wondered how many of those guys they caught. I guess too many are running free.”
He looked into her eyes, searching. Danielle sat still, waiting for . . . something from him. Arlen wanted to give it to her—whatever she needed. He rubbed the stubble on his chin, thick hand scrubbing over raspy, hairy knobs.
“If there’s one of those fellas out there,” he said, voice low, slow. “If just one of them is out there to do it again, it’s too many.”
“That’s why you do what you do,” Danielle replied, her head tilted. “I mean, here, when you could be doing the administrative side. Your job now.”
The ache in Arlen’s chest loosened. He puffed out a breath. Drew in the damp, stale air permeating the attic. “Yeah, that’s why.”
“You said Hank—my father—asked you to close the case?”
Hardesty nodded, breath held. He knew little of Danielle’s relationship with Hank. She might torpedo this before he got started.
Hank was a man Arlen had never been able to trust.
14 Danielle
The two of them continued to work in silence, moving deeper into the shadows of the eaves—the back realm of the attic. The longer they looked, the further Danielle’s heart sank.
This must be a waste of time even if Chief Hardesty kept working toward the payoff, trusting her mother.
Danielle wanted to have that much faith.
With a long sigh, Danielle opened a box shoved against the bare studs. She peered inside.
“Oh.”
Her hand trembled as she reached in, pulling out slim, canvas-bound journals.
Opening the cover, there it was: her mother’s small, loopy handwriting. Intrigued, Danielle scanned the first few lines.
March 12, 1985
A barely blue, dented Chevy. That was the vehicle. I saw it drive past.
A man drove. He was tall and wore a straw cowboy hat pulled down low on his forehead.
So normal I barely noticed. Until I realized the kids were no longer shrieking down the block. I couldn’t hear the crack of bat meeting ball.
Dusk had darkened into night while I was in the store. Never be out past sunset. I’d always told Jonny that.
“Chief?” Danielle said, her heart pounding faster than the NASCAR races she’d glimpsed on TV.
“Yep.”
“I think . . . I think I found her journals.”
15 Danielle
We never proved who it was.
As Kevin and Reid took their places at the table that night, Danielle’s mind returned to her conversation with Chief Hardesty and her mother’s journals.
After Chief Hardesty left, Danielle picked up her sons from school and spent the afternoon hearing about their day, making sure all their gear was prepped for the week’s practices and games. She made dinner, and they all sat down at the table now to eat it. And, finally, Danielle began to wonder . . .
All Nancy’s thoughts, all those emotions Danielle never understood, were in those slim, bound pages. Danielle wanted to see if that woman—Jonny’s mother—continued to exist, locked deep within the shell of the silence
Danielle grew up surrounded by.
Chief Hardesty had promised to return the books once they were no longer evidence. But he’d also explained that once logged as evidence, the books could be kept for years—even decades.
The journals were now evidence for her brother’s murder. With writings she might never see. She had to be okay with that because it’s what her mother wanted.
Unfortunately, Nancy rarely asked Danielle what she wanted.
She glanced around her kitchen, so different from the one in her mother’s house. Danielle’s was chic, probably oversized, but she loved the airiness. When they bought the house a few years before, Danielle spent hours picking out the right colors to give her men a sense of warmth. Would Garrett and the boys ever think of something so simple yet so important?
She knew they’d notice the lack because she missed those little details more than the grand gestures people always celebrated; Danielle craved Garrett’s small touches, notes, glances that kept her deeper in love because they proved his interest.
“Nah, that pop up was way easier to catch than the one I caught yesterday. Right, Dad? Reid’s was right to him. I had to run, and I even almost did a dive to catch it.”
Kevin’s dark, curly head swiveled, making the thick strands flutter across his crown. Danielle smiled at the sight, wanting to smooth them down but worried about the impatient look no doubt sliding into his eyes even now. Kevin’s acceptance of hugs and kisses diminished sharply this year, seeming to take time and energy away from his great passion for baseball. Just like his Uncle Jonathan.
Danielle reached for her glass of water, hoping it would help propel the bite of pasta stuck in her throat.
“Nah-uh, Kevin. My catch was at least as good as yours. I got the game ball for it. You didn’t.”
Reid’s smaller face flushed. His pale skin always betrayed strong emotion, just like Danielle’s did. This child she could still touch, and she did, reaching out, sliding her hand over his silky smooth flyaway hair. He leaned into her hand for a moment before turning to scowl at his brother again.
