by Laura McHugh
CHAPTER 7
* * *
On the way into Fort Madison, we passed the state penitentiary, a massive stone building with turrets like an ancient castle. It was older than Arrowood, the oldest prison west of the Mississippi to still be in use, beautiful in a way modern prisons never are. I had often imagined Singer locked up behind the crumbling stone wall and the loops of razor wire.
“Are you still up for looking at the rest of the pictures?” Josh asked. “I understand if you’ve had enough for today.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I need to see them.” Up ahead, past the riverfront park and the old depot museum, a familiar sign caught my eye. “Is the A&W still here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Josh said. “Are you hungry?”
I didn’t know if I was hungry or not, I just wanted to eat. And while I knew, logically, that comfort food didn’t fix anything, I hadn’t wanted anything else since I’d returned to Iowa. I wondered what Dr. Endicott would say if I added nostalgic eating to my thesis. The irrational belief that consuming the foods of one’s childhood will take you back in time.
After ordering Coney Dogs, onion rings, and root beers to go, Josh drove through a neighborhood of run-down Victorians and parked on the street in front of a two-story with peeling yellow paint. I had already finished my root beer and regretted not ordering the ridiculously oversize one that Josh had gotten.
“I don’t know if I mentioned that my office is also my apartment,” he said as we climbed the steps to the porch.
“That’s all right.”
“Come on in,” he said. “I’m on the second floor.”
The front hall of the house still had what appeared to be its original staircase, though the woodwork had been painted over multiple times and paint was chipping off the banister in layers. Rubber treads had been nailed onto the steps. Entryways that had once led to parlors and sitting rooms had been sealed up to form apartments. I hated to see grand old homes chopped up into awkward living spaces with just enough of their old charm intact to remind you of what had been lost, but it was a matter of practicality. No one had live-in help anymore, or enough kids to warrant so many bedrooms, and few people could afford to heat or cool such a big, drafty house or keep it in good repair.
I followed Josh into his apartment and set the food down on the kitchen counter while he rummaged in a cabinet for plates. If the avocado-and-gold linoleum was any indication, the kitchen had been added sometime in the 1960s.
“We can eat at the coffee table,” he said, gesturing toward the adjoining room, where a large bay window jutted out from the front of the house. “I don’t have a real table.”
I carried my plate to the living room and moved some books off the couch so I could sit down. Cold Case Homicides: Practical Investigative Techniques. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. Gray Hat Hacking: The Ethical Hacker’s Handbook. An L-shaped desk took up the opposite wall, its surface hidden beneath papers and file folders and coffee mugs. A map of Iowa hung on the wall above the desk, dotted with red thumbtacks, and next to the map was a framed movie poster for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Piled in the corner were the ravaged carcasses of a dozen desktop computers. I tried to imagine the room as it had once been, before the wood floors were obscured beneath lumpy brown carpeting and decades of grime had built up on the molding and the windowpanes. Someone’s bright, airy bedroom.
Josh rattled the empty cup that I had left on the counter. “You need something else to drink? I have some Coke. And milk, I think.” He stuck his head in the fridge. “Wait, no, the milk’s bad.”
“Water’s fine.”
He joined me in the living room and removed his hat and jacket for the first time all day. I was fully prepared to see signs of cutting or cigarette burns, deformed limbs, birthmarks—something he wanted to conceal badly enough to wear a jacket in the heat—but his arms were normal, unmarked, his chest and shoulders unexpectedly well defined beneath a slim black T-shirt. I reminded myself that not everyone had something to hide.
We ate in silence, and when we finished, Josh set our plates on the floor. “Ready?” he asked.
I nodded, wiping my hands clean with a napkin, and he brought me a stack of photos from a folder on his desk. I started flipping through them, stopping when I came to one of me, out of focus. I must have moved as the shutter snapped. Pins and needles spread outward from the cold spot in my chest. Off to the side were Violet and Tabitha, their little faces and their matching shirts, the ones with the buttons shaped like ducks, stained with grape juice. They were wearing the clover crowns I had made for them that day. No one else had seen the crowns. No one but me could be sure that this picture had been taken just before the twins disappeared. My sisters and I were laughing, smiling. I dropped the photos onto the table.
“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked. “Like a real drink?”
He nodded solemnly and crossed the room to the kitchen, returning a minute later with a bottle of Kraken black rum, the saucer-eyed sea monster on the label looping its tentacles around an unsuspecting ship. I poured an inch of the molasses-colored liquor into my water glass and choked half of it down.
“They’re from that day,” I said. “From right before.”
“Hardly any shadows. Early afternoon.”
I nodded. “He still could have taken the girls. He could have done it earlier than I thought.” I wasn’t sure of the words as I said them. I had been wrong about the time. What else had I been wrong about?
“Or it could have been someone else,” Josh said.
I sipped my rum, not wanting to think about the pictures anymore. It was spicy, slightly medicinal.
“So this is your office?” I said, gesturing at his messy desk.
“Yeah. The headquarters of Midwest Mysteries. I know, it’s impressive.” He smiled drily.
“How did you get started with all this cold case stuff in the first place?” I asked. “What made you want to spend all your time thinking about murders and kidnappings?”
“My older brother ran away when I was eleven,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t the answer I had expected.
“Everyone’s pretty sure that’s what happened, anyway,” he continued, adjusting his glasses. “He was seventeen, almost eighteen, and he’d been fighting with our parents. He’d gotten in with a group of guys who were selling pills at the high school. Mom and Dad wanted to send him to rehab, or to one of those tough-love lockdown schools. Then he was gone before they could follow through with it. The things he took with him—his pocketknife, tent, sleeping bag—it was pretty obvious he’d made the choice to leave. But he didn’t come back, and we’d all thought he would.
“My mom got it into her head he’d been kidnapped like those paperboys in Des Moines, even though there was no reason to think that. Those kids were a lot younger, in a bigger city. My brother was pretty good at fending for himself. We all knew something bad might’ve happened to him after he left, but maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to be out there living on his own, and that’s what he was doing. My mom couldn’t take that. She was calling the police all the time, trying to get them to do something, but what could they do? It’s not easy to find someone when you have no clue where they might have gone. And a teenage runaway isn’t exactly a high priority when they have actual crimes to investigate.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Did they ever…?”
He shook his head. “No. They haven’t found him and he hasn’t come back on his own. I’ve tried looking, of course. My cousin Randy works for the police department, and I have a few other contacts who feed me information when they can, mostly people I’ve met through the website. Retired cops, private investigators. Sometimes unidentified remains come up that might be a match. That’s hard, though, without knowing where Paul was living or how old he would have been when he died. If he died. If he’s still alive after all this time, he’d have a new
identity, maybe a family of his own. No reason for him to come back, and no way for me to find him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He shrugged. “I’ve always had an interest in unsolved crimes, especially the cases everybody else has given up on and forgotten about. Like I was saying earlier, it’s like a puzzle with missing pieces, and I can’t leave it alone. I want to keep rearranging it until it makes sense. You know how it is, though, don’t you? That’s partly why I wanted to talk to you.” He paused, fixing his gaze on me. “You’ve been through the same thing. I was thinking, if someone could give me a clue, help me find out what really happened to my brother, I’d jump at it. I figured you’d feel the same way.”
I did want to know. There was nothing I wanted more. But at the same time, it was hard for me to let go of Harold Singer.
“The time thing,” I said. “It proves I was wrong, but it doesn’t prove he’s innocent. I wasn’t the only one who saw the gold car. There was another witness.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Ben Ferris. Your friend. Supposedly he saw the car from his bedroom window. I asked him for an interview and he refused. I hate to put this out there, but it’s true, Arden, and you need to consider it…you and Ben, you were eight years old. You were kids. And memory’s a strange thing. It’s malleable. A crowd of people could all witness the same thing and each have a different recollection of what happened. Eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable without evidence to back them up, because memory isn’t fact—it’s our interpretation of what happened, and it can change over time. Maybe you should talk to Ben about it. He’d obviously be more open to talking to you than to me. But I don’t think it matters, since you already know you were wrong.”
His words were harsh, unvarnished. I swirled the rum around in my glass. I didn’t need Josh Kyle to explain to me how memory worked. “What’s your theory?” I asked. “If Singer’s innocent, then what happened?”
Josh grabbed a thick stack of folders from his desk and thumped them down in front of me. “I’m not sure yet. Since I started looking into it, I’ve considered everything I’ve come across, no matter how far-fetched. Are you familiar with a case from back in the eighties, a girl named Heather Campbell who vanished from Burlington while a traveling carnival was in town?”
“No.”
“She was eleven years old. They never found her, never found a body. There was a string of unsolved disappearances along the Mississippi River Valley in the eighties and nineties that had investigators wondering if it was the work of a serial killer. They were having trouble, though, figuring out a connection. I talked to a retired detective who’d spent some time on the case, and he said each of the disappearances roughly coincided with a visit from a traveling carnival, but that nothing concrete was ever found to tie them together. It wasn’t always the same carnival company, and some of the girls who went missing hadn’t even gone to the carnival that day. A few of them disappeared fifteen or twenty miles away from where it was set up. And they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the carnival was a coincidence. All kinds of other things happen during carnival season, too. Could have been a schoolteacher who traveled around in an RV over summer break, or somebody who worked on barges going up and down the river, or a transient riding the rails in the warm weather.”
“So they never figured it out?”
“No. There weren’t any new cases coming up that seemed related, and after a while they figured whoever was responsible had died or moved on or gone to prison for something else. But I thought your sisters’ case might be connected. There was a carnival at the fairgrounds in Quincy that Labor Day weekend when the twins disappeared. Quincy’s only about an hour away.”
“You’re assuming they’re dead.”
“What?”
“If a serial killer took them.”
He shook his head, apologetic. “I spent a lot of time on it. Too much. It made for a great story, but I couldn’t make the pieces fit. All the victims were older than your sisters, and all of the girls were taken at night, within a much closer range of the carnival. What I’m trying to say is, I know what it’s like to be fixated on the wrong answer, like you with Singer, convincing yourself that you’re right, despite all the evidence telling you otherwise. I can’t rule out stranger abduction, but it’s rare, and the truth is probably much simpler. I think your sisters were taken by someone who knew your family, someone who could have gone unnoticed in your neighborhood that day.”
“Everyone in town knew my family. By that logic, Singer still fits.”
“Except for the complete lack of evidence against him. And he didn’t have any direct connection to the Arrowoods that I’m aware of.” Josh leaned forward, his elbows on the coffee table, his dark eyes searching mine. “Have you ever been in Ben Ferris’s bedroom?”
Heat spread across my cheeks. “Why are you asking?”
“Have you looked out his bedroom window? I haven’t, but I’m wondering if he could have even seen the car from there, or if his view would have been blocked by the carriage house.”
“Can you drive me back, please?” I asked. “I’d like to go home.” The air in the apartment had grown unbearably close. I felt unbalanced, like I would get sometimes after a day of boating on the Ruby Slipper, my head unable to stop compensating for the bob and roll of the water even with my feet on dry land.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out his hand but stopping short of touching me, as though he suddenly remembered that we were practically strangers, that a comforting gesture might overstep certain bounds. “I get a little carried away. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s okay. I’m just not feeling well. It’s hot in here, and the greasy food…”
He got up from the floor, his biceps flexing as he pushed up from the table. “I could get you some water?”
“Let’s just go.”
He nodded and grabbed his keys.
—
Josh stopped next to my Nissan at the roadside park and waited for me to pull out of the lot, following me onto the river road and then turning in the opposite direction. The foundering sun caught in my mirror as I rounded a sharp curve, blinding me for an instant and then disappearing abruptly as the car swooped through a tunnel of trees. I rolled down the windows and cool evening air sluiced through, funneling into my sleeves, stirring up straw wrappers and gas station receipts from the floorboard. An endless barrage of river bugs smacked into the windshield, smearing into cloudy arcs when I ran the wipers.
I couldn’t get Singer’s pictures out of my head. Me with my Hello Kitty shirt and missing tooth and sweaty bangs. I’d looked happy, unaware that my life was about to change. Unaware that Harold Singer sat in his car with a camera lens focused on me, watching, waiting, working up his nerve. Wondering what it would be like to lay his hands on an eight-year-old girl. What had he been thinking today, when we were alone, crowded together at his narrow table, close enough to each other that he could have reached out and clamped his calloused hands around my throat? I shuddered, recalling the curve of his lips when he smiled at me, his mouth inches from mine. You’re the one I was looking at.
I was supposed to be the unlucky one, branded with a tragic family name, the fourth in a line of Arden Arrowoods who had gone to early graves. What would have happened if the twins had stayed and I’d been the one to disappear? Would they have been okay without me? Maybe my family would have held together, and they could have remained at Arrowood and lived the life they were meant to. I wanted to believe that I would have done that for them, given the choice—that I would have taken the twins’ place in the car.
Singer’s picture had captured one of my last moments with my sisters, but it didn’t provide any clues as to what had happened next. All the events leading up to their abduction were firm in my mind, though as Josh pointed out, my recollection was obviously flawed. I wondered if Ben’s was any better. I would have to bring it up when we met for dinner. I’d ask him to tell me exactly w
hat he remembered.
As much as I didn’t like hearing it, what Josh said was true, that memory is a slippery thing. I had researched the mechanics of memory in relation to my master’s thesis, which was supposed to explore the effects of nostalgia on historical narratives. As I got deeper into the project, I began to concentrate less on history and more on my own past. Dr. Endicott had picked up on my distraction and warned me not to lose focus. You’re treading too far into the realms of psychology and sociology, he’d said, as though history was a discrete and separate thing, completely disentangled from other human threads.
I had worried, for a long time after the twins disappeared, that they would forget me. After we left Keokuk, I wrote letters to Violet and Tabitha and mailed them to Arrowood. I don’t know what happened to the letters—if they were forwarded or returned to us, my mother never mentioned it—but I imagined them sitting in a neat stack, waiting for my sisters to walk in and find them. I kept the girls apprised of any changes to my appearance—lost teeth, haircuts, growth spurts—to make sure they would recognize me when we were reunited. I informed them of each new address, so that they could easily find us when they returned. Gradually the letters grew more intimate, like journal entries, confessions that no one would ever read.
When I got older, I thought about it more realistically; I knew, even if my sisters returned, that they likely wouldn’t retain any memories of our family. They had been too young at the time of their disappearance. In my thesis research, I read about the phenomenon of childhood amnesia. Up until they’re seven years old, children can vividly recall things that happened to them very early in life. Then, for unknown reasons, around the age of eight, they begin to forget. The memory clock runs down and those old memories expire, deleted by the inner workings of the mind.
There were exceptions, of course, usually when an event had a strong emotional impact on the child. Those memories were deeply embedded, and lingered into adulthood. I assumed that was why I remembered so many little details from the day the twins went missing, like the grape juice stains, and the half-eaten sucker, and the clover crowns, and why, out of the hundreds of days I’d spent with my sisters, all but a handful had faded away. I could sense the weight and warmth of those missing days, the multitude of inconsequential moments we had shared. I hoped, if Violet and Tabitha were able to recall their abduction, that they might also remember me.
