In her message that day, Susanne told Tom that she wanted to hire him to find her daughter. “I get that the police don’t believe me,” she said, “but I know she ran away. We had a fight. She was doing some things she shouldn’t have—I’m sure you know she got arrested for selling drugs, but it wasn’t what it sounds like.” A pause made him think she’d hung up then, but then she’d ended the message by adding, “I know she wants to come home, but by now she’s too embarrassed.”
He did not want to call her back but couldn’t allow himself to let it go. He reminded himself that she’d have had no reason to guess that he’d been the diver who went down looking for her daughter two nights before. And especially no way to know what had happened down there, because he’d told no one: the fingers gripping his wrist and his shaking the hand away in panic, thinking that the girl (still alive? Already dead?) had tried to grab him as he swam by.
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” he’d told Susanne. Her voice saying hello had sounded distant, as if she held the receiver away from her mouth. “It’s not really the kind of thing I do.”
“You could ask people. Her friends, teachers. Anyone. Please.”
It was the last word—the desperation in it—that persuaded him. He owed her, didn’t he? Even if she didn’t know it.
And what if, by some miracle, she was right? What if her daughter was out there somewhere, and not under the frozen pond as everyone had assumed? In addition to being a hero for bringing the girl home, he’d be off the hook of his own conscience, knowing that it had only been mud or weeds, and not fingers, that caught him down there. He sighed, and probably sensing from the sound that he would agree, she offered to pay him a deposit. “I won’t take any money,” he told her. “And I can’t promise anything. But I’ll see what I can do.”
His attempts were halfhearted, because he didn’t expect them to turn up anything. Why would they? Everyone in their right mind—which seemed to include everyone except Susanne Enright—believed that Joy had, after yelling at her friends and stomping off, almost made it to the shore near the woods on the other side of the elbow’s crook when the ice cracked open and the pond sucked her under. A four-year-old boy, who’d skated out too far while his mother was distracted, claimed to have heard a cry from that direction, though he didn’t mention it to anyone until that night when he overheard his parents talking about a missing girl and a diver being sent below the ice to search for her. Police had already made the assumption that she was down there based on the ten-foot-square hole they’d found thirty yards from the farther shore, and the discovery of Joy’s scarf (made for her by her grandmother during Emilia’s last round of lucid knitting), which lay on the ice between the hole and the woods. Nobody offered a theory for how the scarf got so far from the hole; wind made the most sense, but the wind had been mild that day. Some animal might have carried it, someone suggested, without further suggesting what kind. An off-leash dog? A coyote or rabbit? It didn’t particularly make sense, but in this part of the country in winter, everyone was accustomed to nature being responsible for things they would never have guessed.
Nobody went so far (at least in public) as to suggest that Joy had fallen prey to the woods’ phantoms. For years high school students had gathered in a clearing by the crook to drink beer and smoke pot, but the parties stopped when they began hearing howls around midnight and seeing ghosts in the mist. This was about the time the obsession with zombies really took off, and kids began calling it the Undead Forest, moving their parties to King’s Hill.
After Joy’s body was found in the woods, the police figured whoever strangled her had left the scarf on the ice precisely to throw them off and lead them to the wrong conclusion. “If that’s the case, we’re dealing with a pretty clever killer,” Doug told reporters.
On his way to the shack the day Susanne enlisted his help, Tom had stopped by the Enrights’ neighborhood—not all the way “uphill,” where the best houses were, but decidedly not downhill, either—and knocked on a few doors. Asked a few questions and wrote down a few things, before approaching Susanne’s own house. “What are you doing?” she asked him, and he realized she’d been watching through the window. He explained that this was what PIs did, in a case like this—interviewed people who knew the subject. (He was proud of himself for switching to subject from victim a moment before it would have been too late.) He was tempted to ask her if she’d ever noticed, as some of her neighbors had, a black man in a parked car across from her house, or down the street on the same side. But he knew the wiser thing to do was wait. “You won’t find out anything here,” Susanne said, gesturing at the homes surrounding her own.
They talked about Joy then—who her friends were, where she went with them, what she liked to do. Tom took notes as if he believed any of it might matter. Susanne asked him not to let her husband know she’d called to ask for his help. After an hour, Tom excused himself (it seemed clear to him that Susanne could have talked all day about her daughter) and said he had to get to work, allowing Susanne to believe he was referring to the effort to locate Joy.
After stopping in at the shack to make sure the new guy had shown up for his shift, he swung by the art school where Susanne was a faculty member. Though he’d lived in Chilton all his life, Tom had never actually visited the campus before, and now he wished he’d done so sooner—it was a nice place, with contemporary buildings someone had put care into designing, and sculptures surrounding the quad: some he could understand and appreciate, even though they had snow on them (a man in a toga, reaching and gasping, looking as if he were parched or wounded or both), and some he could not (a stack of spray-painted milk crates secured to one another with bungee cords; this Tom assumed was a pile from the cafeteria, until he saw the plaque identifying the crates with a title: After Delivery). From the directory he found the sculpting department, and in Massey Hall he spoke to one of Susanne’s colleagues, a snobby-looking guy with a blond goatee, named Bart, who said that while he didn’t want to speak ill of another faculty member, he was pretty sure there was something not right going on between Susanne and her teaching assistant.
“Not right?” Tom asked, playing dumb.
“You know. Inappropriate.” Bart made a motion putting quotation marks around the word. “I know they’re both adults, but still. There’s the power thing.” Tom asked for the assistant’s name and wrote Martin Willett in his notebook. Later he would find the word hyperrealist next to the name and assume that Professor Richlieu had been describing Willett’s temperament.
“He’s black,” Richlieu added, and almost immediately seemed to realize he’d made a mistake. But he blustered through it. “I mention that because it’s unusual, you know, around here.”
If there had been any reason to believe that Joy Enright had been murdered, Tom might have told his father-in-law back then that it appeared Joy’s mother had had—might still be having?—an affair with one of her students, who showed more of an interest than he should have in the life she led separate from him.
But as far as he knew, everyone aside from Susanne believed that her daughter had drowned, so he kept the information to himself. Until this past weekend, when, after hearing on the late news that the autopsy showed Joy had been murdered (and that a black man was being sought), he’d gone to wake up Doug to show him his notes. Doug had answered the door with his Glock raised, peering out to the stoop, then asked anxiously “She okay?” as he let Tom in. Tom assured him that he hadn’t come about Alison, struck for perhaps the hundredth time by how strange it felt to share a love of the same person with someone who so obviously hated him. Maybe hated was too strong, but maybe not. Doug had never forgiven Tom for the fact that Alison had gotten pregnant their senior year, or for that first miscarriage she suffered a month after their hasty wedding a week after graduation, though in fact this had made it possible for her to start college on time. Tom knew Doug had advised Alison to file for divorce back then, but she refused, and Tom welcomed this as hi
s new wife’s first step of independence from her parents. Instead, it was the only step; taking it seemed to have a more traumatic effect on her than the miscarriage. After the second one a year later, it became clear that Doug actively believed his daughter deserved someone better.
Wishing Doug had lowered the Glock faster when he saw who was at the door, Tom handed his notebook over and said, “I knew you’d want to see this.”
After flipping through the pages, his father-in-law looked up, and Tom waited for thanks and congratulations. Instead, Doug said, “What the fuck? You wait until the body turns up to hand this over? An active investigation—we had a right to know.”
“It was a private job.” In the dimly lit kitchen, Tom had done his best to keep his fist from clenching, an automatic habit when he felt a situation slipping beyond his control. “And it was just a favor to the mother. I didn’t expect to turn up anything relevant. We all thought she was a floater.”
“‘Relevant,’” Doug said, mocking the word as he pronounced it. “You’ve hung around my daughter too long.” From anyone else, it would have sounded like the joke it was intended to be. From Doug Armstrong to Tom Carbone, it was a genuine message: You’ve hung around my daughter too long.
“You’re not afraid he’ll see it and run? The black guy?”
Doug reached for his phone and said, “He’s going nowhere. I’ll put Pancho on him, and we’ll get a warrant in the morning.”
His real name wasn’t Pancho, but Tom knew Doug didn’t give a shit. Raul Dominguez was the department’s most recent hire. He’d been forced on Doug by the Town Board, but that wasn’t the only reason Doug couldn’t stand him. “He’s got two strikes against him he can’t help,” he’d told Tom once. “Being the size of an eight-year-old and being a spic. But on top of that, third strike, he’s a pussy. That kind of cop doesn’t do anybody any good.”
When Susanne asked Tom now if he could help find out how Joy had come to possess Martin’s bookmark, he knew he should advise her to give it to the police. She was asking him to go behind Doug’s back, as he had done the first time. Recognizing this, Tom felt not apprehension (which would have been more apt), but a charge of excitement. “Are you doing this because you think he’s innocent?” Instinctively he knew better than to speak Martin Willett’s name.
She pressed a fist to her lips, and for a moment he worried that she was trying not to be sick. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I can’t bring myself to even imagine he might have done this. I don’t think I could survive. I was sure they got it wrong, but then—that.” She nodded at the bookmark on the bench between them.
“Did you tell anyone about this? Besides your husband?”
“I didn’t even tell him.” Guilt glinted in her eyes as they darted away from his. Then she rushed to justify herself. “I mean, we don’t know if it means anything, right? And if it doesn’t, then why—why—” Again she left her sentence unfinished, and again he understood what she was saying, anyway.
“If I do this,” Tom said slowly, knowing that as he spoke he was in the act of acknowledging that he would, “it stays between us. You can’t mention it to anyone. Okay?”
She agreed by nodding, and it looked to Tom as if the movement took the last of her energy. But he was wrong; she rose from the table and said she was getting another coffee. Did he want anything? He shook his head and said, “It won’t keep you up?” before realizing it was a stupid question—caffeine would not be the thing to interfere with her sleep.
The next day he waited until he knew school was over, then drove over to interview the best friend. He was surprised when Barbara Grove answered the door, because he knew this was the house with the mother who hardly ever left it. He introduced himself, and she said, “Carbone? As in the English teacher?”
“That’s my wife.”
“My daughter’s in her class.”
“Oh, really?” He’d assumed this would be the case, since he knew that Alison’s students included Joy and Delaney and Delaney’s posse. But he pretended it was news to him. “That’s great. Maybe I won’t seem like such a stranger to her.”
“You want to see Harper?”
“Harper, yes.” Susanne had given him her name, but he’d also seen it while scrolling urgently through the case notes, having accessed them on the computer at the police dispatch desk after telling Natalie he’d take over for an hour while she went Christmas shopping. Normally she just left the automated message on the phones when she took a lunch break, but she wanted to hit the stores at ten, before they got crowded, and she worried that Doug would discover she’d slipped out when she was supposed to be on duty. Tom told her no sweat, he had an hour to kill, she should stay out longer if she wanted. He felt guilty for taking advantage of her—they were partners from the rescue dive class, so when they were out there with the tether between them, their lives literally depended upon each other—but he told himself he wasn’t hurting anyone with what he was doing. He wasn’t interfering with the official investigation, merely conducting a parallel one of his own.
He watched Natalie pull out of the lot, leaving it empty except for his truck, then started searching for the key to the Property and Evidence room. He knew that in big-city departments these rooms had surveillance cameras and fancy access security, but in Chilton, Property and Evidence consisted of a utility closet they’d expanded by knocking a wall down and adding some shelves. The plan was to install a keypad code system, but it wasn’t provided for until next year’s budget. In the meantime, there was a simple lock on the door that opened with a key, which Tom found in an envelope marked “P&E” in Natalie’s middle drawer. If he hadn’t felt ashamed of what he was about to do, and for exploiting her trust, he would have smiled at how simple it was.
He put on gloves, and in bags labeled with Martin Willett’s name and a case number he found the black ski mask, the sketch of the dead girl, and a fine-ruled, classy-looking notebook that turned out to be some kind of journal. The final entry, dated the day before Monday’s arrest, was a reworked draft of something from the earlier pages of the book, called an Artist’s Statement. Tom knew he should hurry or risk Hal Beemon or one of the other guys coming in, but what he saw made him want to read more, so he flipped through to scan random entries from the previous year, each time telling himself it was the last one, then finding something else that interested him.
Back at the dispatch computer, he went through all the notes Doug had entered, including those covering his two interviews with Harper Grove—one from the second week in November, after her best friend had disappeared, and the other from this past Sunday, the day of the rush autopsy report. He copied the pertinent information into his own notebook, and when Natalie came back, he shot the shit with her for a while before saying he had to get back to the shack, then drove to the Groves’ instead.
Without offering any description of the capacity he came in, he told Harper’s mother that he was just looking to confirm some facts. “The chief likes to cross all his t’s so there’s no discrepancies when the case goes to trial,” he said, hoping she would assume Doug had sent him. It must have worked, because Barbara Grove pulled the door open further, invited him in, and called her daughter’s name up the stairs. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to cooperate in any way she can.” She hesitated, and above him Tom heard a door opening. When Harper appeared, her expression made it clear that she was not as enthusiastic as her mother about another interview. She sat down across from Tom warily, and when her mother mentioned the connection between him and Mrs. Carbone, she said, “I know that. You run the shack, right?”
He nodded. All the kids in Chilton had been buying Slurpees and hot chocolate from him for years, but not all of them paid attention to who was behind the counter. “And I do some investigating on the side,” he added.
Barbara Grove said, “That’s right. I’ve seen your ad in the paper,” and this confirmation seemed to loosen the suspicion in her daughter’s eyes. Tom adopted as easy a m
anner as he could, in an effort to warm the teenager up to him. “I promise not to take too much of your time,” he told her, flipping open his notebook.
“Do you mind if I take some notes, too?” Without waiting for an answer, the girl’s mother went into the kitchen and returned with her own notebook. Though he wanted to ask why, Tom recognized it wasn’t any of his business and reminded himself that he was here to talk to the girl.
“Maybe you could just tell me the whole story, starting with when you got to the pond?”
“What do you mean, ‘story’?” Harper pulled back in her seat.
“Nothing. I meant can you tell me what happened.” But he recognized what was in her face—fear—and made a note of it without writing anything. “No big deal,” he assured her. “Just—however you want to say it.”
Harper inhaled and then let the breath out with what sounded like a sigh of resignation. “I went to the pond that day because I thought Joy might be in trouble. I don’t know what I thought I could do about it—it was stupid of me—but I didn’t like the idea of her going to see Delaney alone.”
“How did you know they were going to the pond?”
“Facebook. I saw some messages.”
“And what kind of trouble would Joy be in?”
“Well, she got arrested, you probably already know that.”
“Right. But why in trouble with this Delaney, in particular?”
“I don’t know. They were fighting.”
“And you don’t know what about?”
The girl shrugged, which didn’t answer the question. “But then Joy yelled at me, so I left, and went up to the shack to use the pay phone. To call my brother to come pick me up.”
How Will I Know You? Page 6
