The Deepest Secret

by Carla Buckley

  “What?” They can’t suspect Charlotte.

  “They say it’s standard procedure,” Felicia answers.

  “They aren’t asking Owen to take one,” Robbie says.

  “You should do it, honey,” Gloria says. “Prove that you have nothing to do with this.”

  “What if she gets a false positive?” Robbie says.

  “She won’t,” Felicia says. “Eve, could you help me bring in my suitcase?”

  Eve follows Felicia out to the garage. As soon as the door shuts behind them, Felicia whirls around. Her eyes are narrowed. “Robbie says he was at work, but the bartenders can’t swear he was there the whole time,” Felicia says. “So where was he?”

  “His place is a zoo on Fridays.” Charlotte’s told her this. Do you know how much money Robbie makes in a single night? “They were probably too busy to notice.”

  “She tell you he wants to move in together? Did she tell you he hacked into her email account, stole her Facebook password?”

  Charlotte had been so excited getting ready for her first date with Robbie. She’d bought her first thong, a lacy lavender wisp that she’d pulled with a flourish out of the shiny pink bag. I’m already dealing with stretch marks. I can’t throw panty lines at him, too.

  “He’s completely snowed her. He wants to open a joint account, the works. He got here last night and hasn’t left, not for one minute. He’s not worried about Amy. He’s watching Charlotte like a hawk. Why? What’s he afraid she’s going to do—or say?”

  The back door opens. “The police are here,” Gloria says, and for a moment Eve’s frozen in place. But the police aren’t here for her. So she follows Felicia and Gloria back into the house, where Detective Watkins is standing with Charlotte. The detective looks at Eve, unsmiling, her brown eyes flat.

  “Was it Amy?” Felicia’s voice wobbles, and Charlotte shakes her head. “It was another little girl on a school field trip.” She speaks in a monotone. Robbie pulls her toward him, and Charlotte rests her head on his shoulder. It’s disconcerting. Owen should be here. Charlotte and Owen, together.

  “We’re fielding dozens of false alarms,” Detective Watkins tells them. “I told your husband that’s what would happen if he offered a reward.”

  “I don’t care,” Charlotte says. “Whatever it takes. I’m with Owen on this.”

  “What do we do now?” Gloria asks.

  “Now we go over that last day again, minute by minute,” Detective Watkins says. “There’s got to be something we overlooked, or someone who’s not telling us everything they know.”

  Minute by minute. It doesn’t take even that long, Eve knows, for someone’s life to change forever.

  DAVID

  The way he remembers it, Eve had always just sort of been there, part of the larger group he hung out with at college. The six or sometimes seven of them would head downtown and eat Chinese, or at least what passed for Chinese in small-town northern Ohio. They’d bike to the reservoir and stretch out on the grass, fall asleep with the sun full on their faces; spread their books across the library tables and take turns fetching cups of coffee; stay up late and debate things that seemed essential at the time: Did altruism exist? Were people born evil or did circumstance make them that way?

  Occasionally, he and Eve would find themselves alone together. They’d start out in a group, but then people would separate and she’d be walking beside him, her elbow bumping his. Or the group would make plans and some would show up late or leave early, and it would be just the two of them at the table. He’s not sure when things changed, when he began to look forward to seeing her, when his heart beat a little faster when he did. This has always frustrated Eve, who could recite every detail of their first meeting—what she was wearing, what he was wearing, who else was there, what he said, what she said—but it was all just a blank for him. Eve couldn’t understand. How can you forget the first time you met your wife? she’d demand, and David would reply, I would’ve paid more attention if I’d known we were going to get married.

  David knocks on Tyler’s bedroom door. “Hey, buddy,” he calls. “You up?”

  “Uh huh,” comes Tyler’s muffled reply.

  “I’m headed out to join the search teams. Your mom’s at Charlotte’s. She’ll probably be there all afternoon. Your sister’s still asleep.”

  “… ’kay.”

  “The reporters are back, so don’t worry if you hear a commotion outside.” Tyler can’t look out a window to see. David had hated boarding up his son’s bedroom windows. It had felt like a punishment, denying his son the simple joy of watching the world. The only alternative would have been to fix up the basement, and Tyler would still have been without windows. “Need anything before I leave?”

  “Could you pick me up some photo paper?”

  “No problem.” As a boy, David had accompanied his father everywhere—to the post office, hardware store, barber, bank. Shake a person’s hand, his father had instructed. Look them straight in the eye. All the small ways his father had shaped and guided him. But David has never had these moments with Tyler. How will his son learn to be a man? Not that that was likely, anyway.

  Today’s search group includes a number of college students. They call to one another as they straggle along the grassy verge lining the highway. Deeper in the woods are other teams, armed with sticks to push things aside, cell phones, water bottles. The community’s rallying around. Surely with all this help someone will turn up some small clue that will lead to Amy.

  There’s a flurry of excitement when word filters through that Amy’s been found in Metro-Dade Park. David finds himself grinning at the man working beside him, a stranger. But on the heels of that good news rushes the bad: it wasn’t Amy, but another child who’d strayed away from her mother. Amy’s still gone.

  It’s mid-afternoon before he climbs back into the car. He’s tired, and yesterday’s sunburn prickles. He starts up the car and pulls out of the parking lot. The streets look normal, just as they always do on sunny weekend afternoons: sprinklers lazily rotating, the air filled with the buzz of lawn mowers and the distant sounds of children playing in the park. It’s a disjointed feeling, seeing how normal everything can appear. He pulls off the road and into the small parking lot outside Owen’s hardware store.

  Paper garlands of American flags droop overhead; the sale tags are bold red stars. Old yellowed linoleum, long rows of shelving. The smell of metal is heavy in the air. There are maybe a couple dozen shoppers, more than David’s ever seen before in the place at one time. It’s the drama of fear, of the terrible unknown, luring them in.

  “Howdy,” the man in the front of the store says. His name tag hangs from his smock. Bud. “You looking for a grill? We got a great deal going.”

  “No, but maybe you can help me. My yard’s covered with holes.” David had noticed them that morning—small depressions dug into the grass too irregularly placed to be from tent poles or soccer cleats. An infestation of some sort.

  “Shallow, big as a half-dollar?”

  “Exactly.”

  The man nods. “You got grubs. Those holes are where the skunk’s digging them up.”

  “So we have skunks, too?”

  “They’ll be gone the first hard frost. What you want is grub bait. Aisle five.”

  There’s someone stocking the shelves in aisle five, a lanky kid in a polyester smock who moves aside to let him pass, and David realizes he knows this particular boy. He’s Charlotte and Owen’s son, Amy’s older brother. “Scott?”

  Scott looks up, and recognition dawns. “Oh, hey.”

  Scott had been the kind of teenager who got into stuff, who skated on the edge. He ran around with a pack of boys armed with air guns, covering the neighborhood with tiny plastic pellets and scaring the crap out of Rosemary when one of them shot her wind chimes into a frenzy. Then it had been potato guns, which packed a hell of a wallop, and then it had been Melissa discovering him smoking weed at the playground. “How are you doing?�
� David asks.

  Scott shrugs. He stares down at the box in his hand. “Do people even use moth balls?”

  “Probably not many.”

  “I didn’t think so. I don’t know why we have half this stuff in here, anyway.” Scott drops the package into the carton at his feet. “I don’t even know why we’re open today, but Dad says people are counting on us.” He looks around. “What people?”

  True, the customers don’t look like they’re buying anything. They’re standing around in small groups, eyeing one another and whispering.

  “They bothering you?” David asks, and Scott shrugs.

  “They don’t know who I am. They’re not regulars. They’re just creepers. There was a reporter here earlier, but Bud wouldn’t let him in.”

  “It’s good to have some media attention.”

  “I guess. My mom posted Amy’s picture on some websites. The foundation people told her it was a good idea, but I think it’s stupid. I mean, who looks at those things?”

  Did putting faces on milk cartons work, or printing them on those cheap, flimsy postcards that occasionally came in the mail? Every one of those represented someone’s heartbreak, someone’s terrible desperation, but David can’t recall ever once actually focusing on the childish features looking out at him. Eve would have. She would have looked long and hard and committed those faces to memory.

  “You never know,” David says. “It can’t hurt, right? Anything to get the word out. Someone will have seen something.”

  “Then how come they haven’t reported it?”

  “The police are getting lots of calls.”

  “You always hear when kids go missing. But you never hear about them coming home.”

  Two women are looking over at them curiously. David meets their gaze, and they move on.

  “Why Amy?” Scott says. “She’s just a little kid.”

  David knows about terrible odds, about random bolts of lightning that skewer a person in place. “Sometimes things happen for no reason.”

  “Sure.” Scott’s twenty, barely a man himself. Amy’s only eleven. It feels like a particularly vulnerable age, old enough to comprehend but too young to withstand.

  “It’s going to be all right.” David reaches out to pat Scott on the shoulder, but the boy lurches away. Too late, he remembers Scott doesn’t like to be touched. It’s one of his many phobias. Eve had tried to persuade Charlotte to get her son some help, but Charlotte hadn’t wanted to force Scott to do anything.

  “So, you looking for something?”

  “Apparently we have grubs.” David can’t believe he’s dealing with holes in his yard when a child is missing. But things still needed to be taken care of. Bills had to be paid, home repairs made. The whole world couldn’t just roll to a stop. “I need something organic.”

  “I don’t know if this is organic, but it’s what people are using.” Scott pulls down a box. As he hands it over, his sleeve rides up, exposing a line of oozing red bumps along the boy’s forearm. “Whoa,” David says. “That looks painful.”

  Scott yanks down his sleeve. “Poison ivy. It’s everywhere.”

  David turns onto his street and brakes at the unexpected sight of dozens of vehicles choking the narrow cul-de-sac. Reporters’ vans, call letters emblazoned on their sides and antennas protruding from their roofs. The reporters themselves stand in the street, turning in a wave as he edges his own car past. Their shouts punch through the glass.

  “Are you a neighbor?”

  “How’s Charlotte?”

  “How does it feel, knowing a kid’s gone missing?”

  How does it feel? David has watched the news and seen questions like this hurled at survivors and victims. How does it feel?

  There’s a sharp tap on the window, a woman peering in. He knows her. She has looked out from the television screen, reporting on local events at six pm and again at eleven. She’s plain-faced, with strong features. He has always liked her serious demeanor, her sincerity, and so he powers down the window. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m Grace Sheridan, reporting for WCMU. Are you a neighbor, sir?”

  He knows who she is. Of course he does. Is there anyone in Columbus who doesn’t? “Has something happened?”

  “Did you know the missing girl?”

  This feels arrow-sharp, her use of did, not do.

  For years, David has been waiting for melanoma to rise up and claim his son. Eve takes Tyler to the dermatologist every three months, the ophthalmologist every six months. She combs through Tyler’s hair and shines a flashlight onto his scalp. She has him open wide to check his gums and tongue, searching.

  Now, however, evil has materialized, slithered out of Friday night’s storm to snatch an eleven-year-old girl off her own street. All the terrible things that gnaw at David and Eve since Tyler’s diagnosis, that drive them into long, weighted silences and cling to them at night, have been revealed to be illusory. Here, at last, is a real demon with teeth and claws that stalks quiet suburban streets and uses kittens and puppies to prey on the innocence of children. “I have to get home.”

  “Call me if you’d like to talk.” Grace Sheridan holds out a business card. He politely takes it but he longs to shove her back. He presses the button and the glass rolls up, separating the two of them. He’s surprised by how fiercely he despises her.

  In the gloom of his garage, he drops the business card into the trash can before opening the kitchen door and calling into the house: “Melissa?” Keep an eye on your daughter, Detective Watkins had said.

  EVE

  She walks along the shoulder of the road. She swings her arms and keeps her face relaxed, as if she’s simply out for an afternoon stroll. The earth is rutted by Friday’s storm; broken branches lie everywhere. The sparse grass is battered and defeated. Cars shoot past, making the skirt of her dress billow and whipping her hair across her mouth. The sun bakes the tops of her shoulders, shines into her eyes, and sends a drop of sweat rolling down her spine. It’s a long walk, but she can’t take the car. Not yet.

  She reaches the bend in the road and slows. Is this where it happened? There aren’t any telltale tire marks where she’d slewed her car around. The trees look untouched, no bright scrapes of bark rubbed bare, no flattened sections of muddy berm. There’s nothing at all to tell her where to stop, and she keeps her gaze trained on the woods, long shadows stretching across the pavement and into the trees, studying how two birches arch together in a certain way, how the pines sit stolidly in an undulating line. None of it sparks a memory. She’s gone almost a mile and is about to give up and turn around, when she sees a branch snapped at knee-level. It matches the cut on her leg. There aren’t any threads caught in the splintered wood. There seems to be nothing at all to link her to it, but still. She grips it and twists it free.

  The slope is much steeper than she remembers. The darkness had camouflaged its danger. How had she managed to make it all the way down intact? Amy hadn’t.

  Amy had appeared in front of Eve’s car and Eve hadn’t had time to stop. She’d struck Amy hard enough to dent her fender and send Amy crashing down through the trees to arrive at the very bottom. Amy was dead by the time Eve reached her. These are the facts. And also this: Eve had left Amy, abandoned her to the dark and pouring rain, and driven away.

  Had Amy been conscious as she hurtled down the steep incline to her death? Had she suffered? Children’s bodies were so fragile, everything soft and unformed. Little Amy, whom Eve had loved. Please let it have been quick.

  She concentrates on putting one foot after the other, making sure to step on soggy layers of leaves and tufted grass, places that won’t reveal her trespass. Others have been here before her: it’s shocking to see the curved ridge of a boot print pressed hard into the muck, another one by some low bushes. But mostly the surface shows the path of Friday night’s downpour, the dirt carved deep into rivulets, water standing in pools among tufts of grass and stands of weeds. The air is heavy with moisture. It clogs
Eve’s throat. It coats her skin.

  It’s slow going. Her breath rasps in her ears. She startles when a bird shrieks and flies up suddenly a few yards away. How can she explain her presence here? This is not a destination; this is not a place people choose to go. This is a place where they somehow end up.

  Trees reach tall into the sky, green, scarlet, orange, bright yellow. Sunlight flashes on the water below. She and the children have explored these woods in the nighttime. Tyler’s voice calling, Here I come, ready or not!

  At last, she reaches the bottom. The sandy ground levels out, the water begins. She picks her way toward the shore. Amy should be right here … and yet she’s not. The pebbled silt of the riverbank is pocked by soaked leaves and strands of rooted grass. There is no small girl. There is no pink raincoat. Was Eve psychotic? No. An animal must have dragged Amy away. Bile rises up her throat and she clamps her lips tight. She walks all the way to the water’s edge and stares down at the placid brown river, at the distant motorboat and the private docks across the way reaching into the water. It all looks so peaceful.

  Around the bend lies that old boathouse. Melissa had insisted the place was haunted, so Tyler hid one night, jumped out, and yelled, Boo! Melissa had pretended to be surprised, squealing, then chased Tyler around and around. Their laughter comes to her now, in and out through the trees, skipping across the air like a ghostly stone.

  Her eyes fill. How is she going to get through this? How can she still be standing, breathing? How can she be thinking of what to make for dinner, whether she’s remembered to wash Tyler’s jeans? How can she be filling her head with such ordinary things? This is her lot. She has to get through it somehow. She has to.

  She will go home and start dinner. She will do another load of laundry. She will hook herself to the things she can do without thinking. She must let the perfect normalcy of them carry her along until she can stand on her own. It’s everything else that will be so hard.

  She’s still holding the broken branch. She throws it high, into the river. It lands a distance away and floats, jagged ends stabbing the air. She watches, willing it to sink into the brown water and disappear, but it sits there, out of reach and resolute.