by Laura McHugh
“Because I told him I wasn’t convinced he was guilty, that I was trying to find out what really happened. There was no physical evidence tying him to the disappearance, and I wanted to hear his side of things. I think I was the first person who was willing to listen to him.”
I glanced over at Riverside. I hadn’t gone to see Grammy and Grampy and Aunt Alice since I’d moved back, hadn’t checked on their graves.
“Have you told him you think these pictures can prove his innocence?”
“No. Not yet. I wanted you to see them first.”
I followed him over to the van, a nervous prickling sensation crawling across my skin. When he handed me the first picture, my hands began to shake. It was me, wearing a pair of purple shorts and a Hello Kitty T-shirt. The same outfit I’d worn the day the twins disappeared, and never wore again.
“This is you, right?”
I stared at the picture. Eight-year-old me had an animated face, like I was telling a story. My sweaty bangs were stuck to my forehead. I was looking outside the frame, at the twins. I thought of Singer, taking this photo, and acid crept up my throat.
“It’s me,” I said. “But I can’t be sure it’s the same day. I wore that outfit a lot that summer. It was my favorite shirt.”
He handed me the next photo. Me again, smiling wide enough so you could see that one of my front teeth was missing. The other would soon follow, and the tooth fairy would leave a worn Buffalo nickel under my pillow at the Sister House. I had been the last person in my class to lose those top teeth, and I had prayed to Saint Apollonia for them to fall out.
“I lost that tooth a few days before.”
Josh nodded, visibly relieved. “So that makes it pretty likely this was the day. Here’s what I was talking about.” He pointed at the picture. “See how the shadows are, here? They’d be much longer at four. The sun would have been high when this was taken. It couldn’t have been late afternoon.”
I looked closely at the photo, trying to take in what he was saying. I couldn’t have said how long shadows would be at any given time of day, except that they would be minimal near noon, as these were. He had a point, though it didn’t seem like conclusive evidence.
“Just because he took pictures when he says he did doesn’t mean he couldn’t have come back again later,” I said. “It doesn’t really prove anything.”
“It might. He was telling the truth about this much, at least. It introduces doubt to all the assumptions that were made.”
“What was it like, when you talked to him? Did he seem…credible?”
Josh shrugged. “His story hasn’t changed in all this time. He’s adamant about his innocence.”
“Do you think he would talk to me?” I had always wondered what it would be like to confront Singer face-to-face, to ask him what he’d done to my sisters. I thought I’d know, when he told me, whether or not he was lying.
“Why would you want to?”
“Maybe it would help,” I said, “to talk to him in person. Maybe it would be easier to believe what you’re telling me.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Talking to him isn’t going to make you feel any better. He’s…”
“The kind of guy who takes pictures of little girls. I know.”
“It’s not that,” Josh said. “He’s angry. At you, your family. He’s not the most upstanding guy, and he’s served some time for petty stuff, but he’s maintained from day one that he was wrongly accused in the kidnapping. Whether it’s true or not, he thinks you ruined his life. He’s really made an effort to rehabilitate himself in the past few years, but no matter what he does, regardless of the fact that no charges were filed, people still think he’s the guy who took the Arrowood twins. He’s not going to be pleased to see you.”
“I’m not expecting some sort of happy reunion.”
“Arden, I really appreciate you looking at the pictures. Why don’t we wait and discuss talking to Singer another time.”
“Please.”
We stared at each other. I couldn’t tell whose side he was on, if he thought he was protecting me from Singer or Singer from me.
“I can call him up and ask him, but I doubt he’s going to agree to it.”
“Okay.”
Josh sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. Then he took out his phone and walked around to the other side of the van to make the call.
He returned a minute later. “He’ll do it,” he said. “I can drive you, if you want. He’s up near Mount Pleasant. Or you can follow me, if you’d rather do that—if you’re not comfortable riding together.”
“You can drive,” I said. I had emailed my mother to let her know I was meeting the man from Midwest Mysteries to talk about the twins, so in the unlikely event that Josh Kyle decided to kill me and chuck my body into a ditch, she could give the police his name. She had emailed back, warning me that I shouldn’t get involved, that nothing good could possibly come out of rehashing the case.
He opened the passenger door, removing a storage tub full of computer parts from the seat. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Work stuff.” He stowed the box in the back of the van and then got in and started the engine.
“What kind of work do you do?” I asked. “Aside from the website.”
“Freelance programming, mostly. I do some computer repair on the side.”
“So Midwest Mysteries is just a hobby?”
“For now,” he said. “I’d like to have it the other way around—spend all my time on the website and writing my books, and only program when I want to. Hasn’t happened yet.”
He headed north on the highway. I could hear things rattling around in the back of the van as we swung around a curve.
“How about you?” Josh asked.
“What?”
“You’re done with school? Are you working? Or looking?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m looking. I’d like to do something at least vaguely related to history, if possible.”
“There are lots of museums around here.”
There were. I didn’t bother to tell him that most of them ran on donations and volunteers, or that an extensive knowledge of history was not necessarily profitable in the way that an understanding of computer hardware and software might be. No one would pay me fifty dollars an hour to explain the past. History, unlike technology, was irreparable and often ignored.
I caught Josh glancing at me a few times as we drove, and each time I thought he would say something, but he didn’t. We were headed away from the river, deeper into farmland, thousands of acres of corn swaying like a restless sea. Every so often, a long driveway cut through the fields, straight as a hem stitched with a sewing machine, a white farmhouse hazy in the distance.
“Why are you so concerned with proving Singer didn’t do it?” I asked.
“It’s not so much about him,” Josh said. “I want to figure out what really happened. If he’s innocent, we need to clear his name and move on. As long as everyone thinks Singer’s responsible, the case might as well be closed. It’ll never be solved.”
“And what does it matter to you, if my sisters’ case is solved?”
“It’s like a riddle,” he said, his long fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel at precisely ten and two. “I hate not knowing the answer. That’s what gets me with cold cases. Nobody has the time or money to pay attention to them anymore, so they just sit there, getting colder. It’s not that they’re unsolvable—they all have solutions, and I can’t stand not knowing what they are. It’s like leaving a Rubik’s Cube with the colors all mixed up.”
I’d bought a Rubik’s Cube at a yard sale when I was a kid. I’d never been able to solve it, though I eventually peeled off the colored stickers and rearranged them to make it look like I had.
“You said you had a picture of the twins,” I said. “Can I see it?”
“Of course,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to. If that would be too hard for you. I have the rest of the pict
ures at my office if you want to stop by there on the way back.” He slowed the van and steered onto the shoulder as we neared a gravel turnoff. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but I felt like I needed to. If I didn’t do it now, I never would.
Josh drove down the lane until we reached the end. A decrepit motor home sat amid a cluster of trees, a sagging lean-to tacked onto the side. Out front, a scrawny black dog trotted back and forth, tethered to a stake. The yard was cluttered with stacks of tires and scrap metal and hubcaps. We got out of the van, and the dog wagged its tail, parsing out strangled barks as it pulled against the chain. Panic numbed my limbs as realization set in—what I was about to do, the man I was about to see. It was too late to tell Josh that I wanted to go back, that I had changed my mind.
He knocked on the door and Singer opened it. Or, at least, I assumed it was Singer. I had never seen him in person. My memory of his appearance was based entirely on old newspaper clippings, and I barely recognized him. He was squat and balding, his puffy face splotched with rosacea and an assortment of flesh-colored moles. A cat with a shredded ear wove itself around his ankles in a figure eight, purring heartily.
Singer held the door open and we walked in, a current of fear buzzing through me as I brushed past him. The air in the motor home was stale and bitterly perfumed, air freshener trying and failing to mask the stench of cigarettes and cat piss.
“You want a beer, Mr. Kyle?” Singer asked, not looking at me. Josh said no thanks and Singer grabbed himself a Milwaukee’s Best from a half-empty case on the floor.
The three of us squeezed into the built-in dinette, Josh and me on one side with Singer facing us. Junk mail and grocery store circulars were piled on the tabletop, and tacked to the wall next to us was a crinkled certificate congratulating Singer for completing one hundred hours of community service at the River City Animal Rescue. It was difficult to comprehend that I was sitting two feet away from the man long believed to have kidnapped my sisters. Singer took a draw on his beer and smacked the can down on the table.
“You want to talk to me, huh?” he asked me, baring his teeth in a fake smile. “I want to talk to you, too. You fucked up a lot of things for me when you falsely accused me of shit I didn’t do.”
Josh jumped in before I could respond. “Hold on, Mr. Singer. You know she didn’t accuse you of anything. She never identified you as a suspect. She saw a car, is all. A gold car. Which you happened to have. So let’s not go blaming anything on Miss Arrowood.” Josh stared Singer down, and he backed off and took a swig of beer.
“All right, all right.” He held his hands up. “She didn’t say my name. Fuck me for having a gold car, I guess. Look”—he pointed at Josh—“I need a minute alone with her. That’s all. There’s something I gotta tell her in private.”
It was obvious that Singer wasn’t on his first beer of the day, maybe not even his third or fourth. I could smell his breath from across the table.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Josh said. “If you don’t want me to hear what you’re going to say, I’ll cover my ears.”
I poked Josh’s leg under the table, hard, and he frowned at me, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“This is a terrible idea,” he muttered, pulling himself up from the table. “I’ll be right outside the door.” He locked eyes with Singer. “Right outside. Arden, yell if you need me.”
Neither Singer nor I responded. My hands gripped the edge of the vinyl seat, while Singer spread his fingers out on the table between us. Grime lined his nails and the cracks of his knuckles.
“You have a watch on that day?” he asked, as soon as the door clicked shut.
I stared at him, not answering.
“Because I don’t know one goddamned kid that can tell time. I know good and well they only took your word because of who you are, and how that stacked up against who I am. Old Granddaddy Arrowood was calling in favors, throwing his weight around from all the way down in Florida. I got fired from my job and couldn’t get another one after everybody started saying I took those kids. I had cops up my ass for months, years. Nobody believed me. But I wasn’t there when you said I was.”
“Did you have a watch on that day?”
He sneered at me, his lips curling up over his teeth. “I know it was lunchtime because I was eating my fucking lunch.”
“You took them,” I said, my voice wavering. Something brushed against my leg under the table, and I jerked away, choking back the cry that rose in my throat. It was just the cat. “Your car was there, and when it left, they were gone. That’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
“Really?” he said. “I’m not that smart, and even I can see there’s plenty of holes in that story. You’re not saying it’s the only thing that could’ve happened, you’re saying it’s the easiest thing to believe. Doesn’t make it true. Maybe somebody had my car. Maybe it was a different car altogether. You didn’t have a license plate number. You got zero evidence on me, that’s all anybody ever had.”
“What about the pictures?” I said. “He showed me.”
“Oh, right.” Laughter rasped in his throat. “You think you got me all figured out. I’m one of those, a registered sex offender, a guy that likes taking pictures of kids.” He tipped his beer can back, emptied it. “You have no idea. You don’t know anything about me. I had a kid of my own, did you know that? Never laid a hand on him. I would’ve killed anybody who did.”
He leaned forward, his face inches from mine, and I shrank back involuntarily. His voice lowered to a rough whisper. “I took pictures of some kids. That was it. I never touched a one. Not a single one, ever. Doesn’t make me a saint, but it’s something. You even know how I got labeled an offender? Huh?” His words had begun to slur together. “Taking a piss in public. I was drunk. Waiting around my kid’s school to try and catch sight of him, because my ex got full custody and moved away after everything that happened. Didn’t matter there was no proof, everybody knew what you accused me of.”
I sat very still, tensing every muscle to keep from shaking. “I saw them. Through the window as you drove away.”
Singer squinted at me. “You couldn’t see something that wasn’t there.”
“I know they were in your car.”
He put his elbows on the table, spreading his hands wide. “How big’s that yard of yours, huh? Big fancy yard, isn’t it? You couldn’t see shit from that far away. I had to zoom in on my camera just to get a decent shot.”
The footage of that day ran through my head. The door slamming. The car pulling away, my sisters in the window.
“Their hair,” I said. “I saw their hair.”
Singer stared at me, blinking. And then he started to laugh. His hand slapped the table, and I jumped, banging my knee. “The dog,” he said, shaking his head. “That goddamn fucking dog. Had me one of them little white fluffy things, what do you call it, a Maltese? With all that soft hair? I was thinking it might work pretty good, lure a little girl over to the car. Never quite got up my nerve. Couldn’t do it.”
Frost crept through my veins, tingled across my chest. I couldn’t hold myself together any longer, and I began to shiver, my jaw threatening to chatter.
“I’ll be damned,” Singer continued, looking dazed. “So all this time you thought you saw them, all this time I’m on the hook, and what you saw was a goddamn dog. Don’t that beat all.”
“Swear on your life it wasn’t you,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Darlin’, I’ll swear on whatever the hell you want, but my life’s not worth much, thanks to you.”
“Please.”
“I didn’t take your sisters. They were practically babies. I couldn’t have cared less about them.” His mouth curved into a twisted grin. “You’re the one I was looking at.”
I got up and shoved the door open, nearly knocking Josh to the ground.
I pushed past him and he made no move to stop me.
“Thanks for agreeing to talk to us today, Mr. Singer,” he said.
“I’ll be waiting for my check,” Singer called after us.
Josh didn’t say anything until we were back on the main road, heading toward Fort Madison. “Are you okay?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him at first, afraid of what I might say. I kept my eyes on the corn that walled us in on either side of the road, the stalks six feet high and beginning to wither. My hands lay clenched in my lap, my nails cutting into my palms. “You’re paying Singer to talk to me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the only way he’d agree to do it. I had to pay to interview him for the book, too.”
“He tried to put all the blame on me. He thinks it’s my fault his son was taken away from him.”
“I’m sorry, I know. I shouldn’t have left you in there alone with him, but you didn’t give me much choice.”
Up ahead of us, a railroad crossing signal began to flash red, and the striped bar came down to block the road. Josh coasted to a stop, and we sat watching the train cars flick by.
“Did Singer have a little white dog?” I asked. “Back then?”
“Not that I know of,” Josh said. “He never said anything about a dog when I interviewed him. But I can look into it. Why?”
“He said he had a dog with him, to lure kids over to his car. He thinks that’s what I saw, the dog—not the twins.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
The end of the train zipped past and was gone, leaving a humming in my ears. I wasn’t sure Singer was telling the truth—about the dog or about my sisters. He seemed to have an answer for everything, and it was difficult for me to question the one thing I had always known to be true, that he had taken Violet and Tabitha. Was it possible that I was wrong about what I saw, that I had mistaken the white flash in the car for my sisters and saved that altered image as the truth? The implications were unsettling; Singer’s life had been all but destroyed and the case left unsolved. If I was wrong, and Harold Singer hadn’t taken the twins, where had they gone?
