by Megan Goldin
‘I doubt it,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘but we have twenty minutes until my next meeting so I might as well give you a run-down.’ No cop, least of all a guy with a monumental ego like Captain Howard, likes it when questions are asked about a closed case, especially a case he’s built his reputation on.
He removed a hardcover book from his shelf and passed it to me. On the cover was a photograph of a man with a weak chin and thinning hair looking blankly into the camera. The book was a distraction. Captain Howard wanted to gather his thoughts. Figure out how he’d play me.
‘You’ve heard about the Edward Pitt case I assume?’ he asked.
‘Not in detail,’ I lied, flicking through the pages of the book. It was a true-crime book written by a journalist from the Richmond Chronicle. The inside cover bore a handwritten inscription by the author made out to Captain Howard of the Richmond Police Department for his ‘invaluable insights’.
‘Edward Pitt was a railway engineer.’ He began in a tone that suggested he’d told this story many times before. ‘For thirty years of his life, Pitt worked on the railways. Then he lost his job as part of general lay-offs and became an itinerant worker. He worked mostly in rural areas doing day labour, mechanical type of work when he could get it. Odd jobs. He didn’t have a record. Nothing. He hadn’t so much as racked up a speeding fine in all the fifty-eight years he’d walked this earth.’ He paused. ‘Pitt was for all purposes an exemplary citizen.’
I nodded like the wide-eyed small-town cop he took me for so that he would get to the point. Fast. I wanted time for questions.
‘All his life Pitt’s been in the best of health,’ he said, ‘then he starts wheezing. Night sweats. Loses weight. He’s working in Richmond at the time and he comes into our local hospital, which is just three blocks from here.’ I gave a firm nod. Cut to the chase, I thought.
‘The doctors tell Pitt that he has oesophageal cancer. He has a year to live, maybe less. They tell him to get his affairs in order. He asks if there is any treatment. The doctors say there’s a new drug that targets the vascular development of the tumour and slows the spread of the cancer. It’s not a cure, they say, but it could buy him a few years. Trouble is it’s a non-standard treatment and very expensive. Pitt doesn’t have health insurance. He lost it when he lost his job. So what does Edward Pitt do?’ He looked at me as if waiting for an answer.
‘He comes over here into this building,’ Captain Howard paused for effect, ‘and says he wants to confess to the murder of fourteen women.’
He watched my face for a reaction. I gave a slight nod to keep him talking.
‘Well, we didn’t know if this guy was messing with us. You’ve no doubt worked homicide long enough to know there are plenty of lunatics out there who want to get famous by pretending to be killers. So I asked him for details. He fed me a few scraps to whet my appetite,’ said Captain Howard.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘He gave me a couple of names and details of women abducted in this area over the previous decade. I looked them up while he sat in a holding cell. He knew stuff that hadn’t been released to the public. His story rang true.’ I tried to look suitably impressed.
‘I get the prosecutor involved,’ he continued. ‘He thinks it’s a ruse by Pitt to get medical treatment. But I’ve done enough digging by then to know that this guy is not bullshitting us. In the end, we cut a deal. He’ll tell us the locations of the bodies and the details of each victim and he gets prioritised for cancer treatment at the prison hospital. We figured it was worth it for the closure it would give the families. And, worst case scenario, he goes into remission and the state executes him before the cancer gets to him.’
‘He gave you all his victims’ names?’
‘He sure did,’ said Captain Howard. He took a sip of water. ‘We found all the bodies buried right where he said they would be, on an abandoned farm in West Virginia that once belonged to his family, as well as one body that had been burned. He claimed it was his most recent kill.’
‘Were you able to identify the burnt body that you found?’ I asked.
‘Pitt put the body in an oil drum and poured accelerant over it,’ Captain Howard said. ‘The body was almost incinerated in the flames.’
He opened the true-crime book and showed me a photograph of a woman with an angular face and a wide mouth. In isolation her features seemed irregular. Together they worked perfectly. She was beautiful. Around her neck was a pendant that seemed awfully similar to the pendant we’d found on the Kellers Way victim. Not that I shared that observation with Captain Howard.
‘Pitt confessed to her murder. Told us how he abducted her down in your neck of the woods while on a deer-hunting trip. He said he drove across state lines with her alive in his trunk before eventually killing her. He said he incinerated her body because the case had become high profile and he was worried about getting caught. When he gave himself up, the bastard demanded the reward the victim’s family was offering for information on her disappearance. He said it was to pay for experimental cancer drugs not covered by the treatment he was going to receive in prison. He was mighty upset to find out that the killer can’t claim the reward.’
‘Is there a chance he lied to get the reward money?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Howard vehemently. ‘He gave us enough information to confirm she was his victim. Even the coroner agreed.’
‘Where is Pitt now?’
‘Pitt was supposed to plead guilty to the murders as part of the deal. The night before his court appearance, he went to sleep in a holding cell and never woke up.’
‘Suicide?’
Captain Howard shook his head. ‘The bastard died in his sleep from a heart attack.’
Chapter Eleven
Julie
Matt returns home in time for lunch, ostensibly from the university. Of course, I know the truth. He was at the cemetery this morning. To leave flowers for Laura. On their wedding anniversary no less.
I know that I should be fine with the idea of Matt visiting Laura’s grave. Part of me, the part that feels bad for Laura, gets it. But another part of me resents it like hell, especially when he does it behind my back. The truth is that I’m jealous of what they had together. Nothing we have could ever measure up. Our relationship is weak and uncertain by comparison.
He opens the Sunday newspaper at the table as if he wants to create a barrier between us. I clear my throat and clatter the cutlery loudly as I serve up lunch. Matt gets the hint. He tosses the newspaper onto an empty chair and butters a bread roll still warm from the oven.
‘How did it go this morning?’ I keep my voice as normal as possible as I ladle pasta sauce on his spaghetti.
‘Very productive,’ he answers vaguely and then changes the subject abruptly. ‘So, what did my beautiful girls get up to today?’ He picks up his cutlery and curls the spaghetti around his fork as he waits for an answer.
‘We went to feed the ducks,’ Alice pipes up excitedly. She has a tendency to give an exhaustive account of absolutely everything that happens to her on any given day. ‘And then Mommy drove —’
I quickly cut her off. ‘Mommy drove Alice to a picnic breakfast by a pond,’ I complete her sentence, ‘and then we did some riding on your scooter. Right honey?’ I give Alice a sharp look. She is noticeably silent for the rest of lunch.
Afterwards, Matt and Alice plant herbs in clay pots Alice decorated at school. When I bring them a plate of freshly baked cookies, Matt mumbles something about needing to do work and disappears into his study.
He obviously milked Alice for information while they were planting. He must suspect that I went to the campus to check up on him this morning. I have a perfectly reasonable explanation, but he doesn’t ask me. He sits at his mahogany desk and contemplates what exactly? Me? Our marriage? I can’t remember ever seeing him so mad at me. It’s the first time I truly fear that everything is unravelling. I always knew it would eventually. I just didn’t know that it would happen
so quickly.
‘How about we go to the park?’ I ask Alice. She’s on the porch eating the last cookie.
‘Ok,’ she says. ‘Is Daddy coming with us?’
‘Daddy’s working today,’ I tell her. I help her into her jacket and woollen hat.
Even though the sky is a cloudless blue, the wind chill kind of makes you wish you were indoors. Still, the playground is crowded with kids and parents standing around watching them play. I stay with Alice until she strikes up a friendship with two other girls around her age.
‘You can go now, Mommy,’ Alice orders, crossing her arms until I’ve left.
I find an empty seat on a bench. The woman sitting next to me looks vaguely familiar.
‘You’re Alice’s mum,’ she says, pushing a stroller back and forth to get her baby to sleep. ‘Our daughters are in dance classes together.’
‘Of course,’ I say as if I remember her. We chat about the only thing we have in common which is, unsurprisingly, dance class.
‘How old is your baby?’ I grasp for a new subject when we run out of conversation about the extensive preparations for this year’s dance recital.
‘Fletcher’s four months,’ she says, tenderly pulling the stroller towards her to straighten his blanket. The baby sucks his pacifier in his sleep like a blowfish.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ I say, trying to hide the longing in my voice.
Out of nowhere a ball hits me in the left knee. Hard enough to leave a bruise. Two boys approach, both around ten. There is no hint of contrition on their amused faces as they stand there defiantly, waiting for me to pick up the ball and return it to them. I hold the soccer ball until they realise they might not get it back and their smirks disappear.
‘Sorry,’ says the younger boy grudgingly. He flicks his sandy hair in a gesture that tells me he’s not sorry at all.
‘Be more careful would you!’ I throw the ball back so hard the boy loses his footing catching it. Linda, the other mother, watches this exchange with an uncomfortable expression on her face. I look bad. Harsh. Aggressive. They are only kids after all. I soften my tone. ‘There’s a baby here,’ I call out as they walk off. ‘He could have been hurt.’
Linda rocks her baby’s stroller frantically. She thinks I overreacted. I want to tell her she’d have done the same thing if the ball had slammed into her leg. It hurt like hell. I don’t say anything. We’ve run out of conversation.
‘I’d better find Alice.’ I scramble up and scan the playground. I lost track of Alice during the incident with the boys. It’s hard to find her now, in a playground full of girls wearing similar outfits of jeans, pink jacket and a woollen hat.
Alice is not in my line of sight. I walk up the ramp right onto the play equipment to look for her. There is no sign of Alice. I head over to the slide, where I glimpse the back of a little girl wearing a pink parka whose dark hair is tucked behind her ears like Alice’s. ‘Alice,’ I call out. ‘Alice.’ The girl spins around curiously and then walks off. It’s not Alice.
‘Alice!’ I call in panic. Heads turn in sympathetic concern. ‘Alice!’ My voice rises into an urgent pitch.
The tune of an approaching ice-cream truck drowns out my frantic efforts to find my daughter. A frenzy of excitement follows as children run to their parents pleading for money.
‘Ice-cream?’ a father tells his daughter. ‘You must be crazy. It’s freezing today.’ He reluctantly takes out money from his wallet and she joins the throng of kids waiting in an unruly line by the ice-cream truck window. Alice is not among them.
The crowd of kids playing in the playground has thinned out as more of them join the line for ice-cream. The swings are empty. A few girls play jump rope on a path. They are all older and taller than Alice. I head over to a group of girls playing by a hedge. As I approach, Alice emerges from the branches and runs towards me.
‘Look, Mommy. We’ve opened a cafe.’ She points to a gap in the hedge. ‘Would you like me to make you a milkshake?’
‘You were supposed to stay near me,’ I whisper into her ear so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends.
‘I’m sorry, Mommy,’ she says. Her eyes are troubled.
‘Let’s go home, baby.’ I engulf Alice’s hand in my own as we walk towards the car.
We stop at the supermarket on the way back. I buy milk, macaroni and cheese; Alice’s favourite Sunday night dinner. We always do a light dinner on Sundays. It’s inevitably mac and cheese. Matt likes it too, probably because his mother never once gave him macaroni and cheese when he was a kid. It’s too bourgeois for Anne. I don’t think Anne even knows the term ‘comfort food’.
It’s late afternoon when I drive my car into the driveway. Alice is fast asleep in the back. She’s too heavy for me to carry into the house. Matt’s car is gone. He often plays racquetball on Sunday afternoons so I figure that’s what he’s doing.
I carry the groceries into the house. Once I open the front door, I figure I might as well take the groceries all the way into the kitchen instead of leaving them in the hall.
Then I figure I’ll quickly unpack the groceries. When that’s done, I realise I haven’t had a thing to eat or drink for hours, so I slide a coffee capsule into the machine and froth milk.
The coffee calms my nerves after the incident in the park. I pass our baby grand piano in the living room, off the hall. It’s been a long time since I played. Soon my fingers are on the keys and I am lost in the music of Chopin’s nocturnes.
‘What the hell were you thinking?’ Matt’s voice breaks through the harmony. I stop playing abruptly and look up at him numbly, my hands frozen on the keys.
I can’t hear his words through the buzz that fills my ears. But I know he is angry because his finger keeps poking at me accusingly as his mouth opens and closes in angry bursts.
Alice sobs hoarsely in his arms, her head pressed against his chest. I want to ask what is going on, but all I can do is look blankly at Matt and Alice. The throbbing in my ears gets so loud that I cover them to block out the sound.
How could I have forgotten Alice in the car? I wasn’t away very long. Was I? I look out the window. It’s dark outside.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say looking up at Matt in confusion. ‘I didn’t realise I was gone so long.’
‘Aside from the fact that Alice was terrified,’ Matt says through gritted teeth, ‘anyone could have come and taken her. Anyone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I repeat.
It’s too late. I’m talking to nobody but myself. Matt has stormed out of the living room with Alice in his arms.
Later that night, Matt and I have the worst argument we’ve ever had. Matt doesn’t do loud and dramatic. He’s too well bred. Even when he argues he does it courteously. He’s a psychologist so he likes to think he’s above getting carried away with base human emotions such as anger.
He argues with clenched teeth, cold and restrained. He never raises his voice. Quite the opposite: I have to strain to hear him. He chooses his words carefully. The psychologist in him asks lots of questions in a super reasonable tone that makes me automatically feel at fault. Why did you do this? How can we overcome this issue? Why are you feeling this way?
I think it’s passive aggressive. His questions are never directed at himself.
Then he asks me when I last took my meds. ‘Julie, you’re not acting responsibly by skipping doses. Do I need to hire a nurse to make sure you take your medication?’ He goes on and on about my meds until I block out his drone by imagining that I’m running in a forest. I hear the thump of my feet striking the ground, the hiss of me exhaling. In and out. Hard and fast.
‘Go to hell, Matt,’ I respond when I see from his pursed mouth that he has stopped talking. To emphasise my point, I pick up an ornament that I happen to love and I hurl it across the room. It hits the wall and shatters into a thousand pieces.
Matt says nothing. He looks at me as if seeing me for the first time. That’s when I break down in a flood of tears. I can t
urn on the waterworks on demand. It’s a childhood talent I’ve perfected over the years. This time, it doesn’t work. His expression is only one of disgust.
This horrible argument at the end of the worst day of our marriage concludes with Matt barging out of the house. He slams the front door behind him, which is very out of character because Matt likes to think of himself as incapable of childish gestures. Car tyres screech as he reverses the car down the driveway and tears off in a fury.
After he’s gone, I hear Alice sobbing on her bed. She heard the shouting and watched through the balustrades as Matt marched out. I can tell that she blames herself.
Her bottom lip wobbles as I cradle her on the bed. ‘Daddy asked me where else we’d been. I told him about how I rode my scooter and our visit to the library. But not a children’s library, a library with adult books and with a hole in the roof where sunshine comes in,’ she tells me.
‘Daddy’s just tired. He worked hard today.’ I hug Alice until her sobs abate. We lie together on her bed and she falls asleep in my arms. The exhaustion and emotions of the day make me drowsy. I close my eyes and doze off alongside her, our hands intertwined. I wake up close to midnight and go into our bedroom.
The bed is as empty and neatly made up as it was this morning. Matt has not come home. I climb into bed in my bra and panties. I’m too tired to shower or change.
He turns up an hour before dawn. He lies on the edge of the bed, as far from me as he can possibly get without falling out. I smell honeysuckle on his skin. He’s seen her again. I’m sure of it.
Chapter Twelve
Mel
Rattling around in the trunk of my car as I drove along I-85 were five boxes of files on loan from the Richmond Police Department. They were all stamped with the words ‘closed case’.
Those boxes are why I spent four hours driving to Richmond and back instead of filing request forms through the proper channels. I wanted the files immediately, without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get them.
