by Nicole Baart
“I’d take her home in a New York minute.”
“That long?” Lucas teased.
Jenna rolled her eyes. “She’s just . . .”
“Completely stolen your heart?”
“Give me a bit more credit than that,” Jenna complained. “I feel for her, you know? No mom, worthless dad as far as I can tell . . .”
Lucas couldn’t argue. Since their first encounter in the grocery store, he knew that Jenna had tried on countless occasions to meet with Angela’s father, the town’s notorious recluse and all-around loser. But Jim Sparks didn’t want anything to do with Jenna. She tried calling, stopping by, and setting up meetings through Angela, but Jim avoided all contact. In the end, there was nothing for Jenna to do but be grateful that he tolerated her involvement in Angela’s life. It was the best she could do.
It was never quite enough.
“DCI is on their way,” Alex said, snapping the thin film of Lucas’s memories like a soap bubble.
“Pardon me?” Lucas blinked, still dazed from the surreal slant of his unexpected afternoon.
“The state guys are coming.”
Lucas nodded, checked his watch. It was going to be a long night.
“How long has it been since she disappeared?” Alex asked, honing in on Lucas’s thought pattern with the effortless familiarity of friendship.
“I thought we couldn’t assume that the body is Angela.”
“We can’t. But we do have to start asking questions. That’s my first. How long?”
Those were days that Lucas didn’t want to remember. They were long weeks that stretched into months of grief and loss—Jenna took Angela’s disappearance as hard as if the girl had been her daughter. “I guess it’s been almost eight years now,” Lucas finally guessed. “She was eighteen when . . .” But he couldn’t finish that statement. Angela was eighteen when she vanished? When she committed suicide? Or when Jim killed her?
“I questioned Jim extensively back then,” Alex said. “He swore up and down that she ran away. He tried to prove it to me by pointing out missing shoes, clothes, stuff like that.”
“And you believed him.”
“I never said that. But there was no evidence to the contrary.”
Lucas’s heart felt hollow as he thought of Jenna at the computer in the first year after Angela’s disappearance. His wife scoured Internet databases—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Data System, the National Center for Missing Adults, Iowa Missing Persons Database—squinting at grainy photographs and looking for any connection, any hint of where Angela had gone and why. Later, when too much time had passed for Angela to have merely taken some extended, solitary vacation, Jenna scanned the only photograph she had of the girl and posted it on sites herself. Nothing ever came of it.
“What did you think happened?” Alex prompted.
“Back then?” Lucas was answered with a brief nod. “Back then I thought she ran away.”
“She had it in her,” Alex agreed.
“Jenna didn’t think so.”
“I’m not sure your wife saw Angela very clearly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that the innocent little girl she fell in love with was not the same woman who evaporated into thin air.”
It was true. The young teen that Jenna took into her heart and, occasionally, into their home, changed much in the four years of their relationship. Jenna thought Angela was precocious, Lucas thought she was calculating. Angela often seemed motivated by a raw sense of self-preservation, and yet Lucas sensed a certain deliberate egotism behind her actions. Her beauty was both a bright halo and a dark shadow, something that she seemed to wield and not wear. Angela was a study in contradictions. In trouble.
“She was . . . interesting,” Lucas conceded, battling his own memories, his own awkward demons when it came to Angela.
“And perfectly capable of ditching this blip on a map for bigger and better things.”
Lucas shrugged.
“Are you telling me that you’d rather forget what you know, what we assume about Angela, and just conclude we found her body?” Alex pressed Lucas, his heavy-lidded eyes narrowed in objection.
Lucas considered for a moment, hating the rippling effect of their discovery and the raw wounds it would reopen. But he couldn’t deny what he believed, what he felt deep in his bones. Even if it couldn’t be explained. “Yes,” he said. “It’s Angela. I’m sure of it.”
“We’ll see,” Alex muttered, turning to walk away. “Make yourself comfortable. We’re going to be here for a while.”
They faded apart, Alex wandering back to the place where Jim’s body still hung over the partially exposed column of bone. As Lucas watched, Alex pulled a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket and snapped them on. Then he bent down to study the remains with narrowed eyes. The police chief seemed to analyze every detail as if answers were contained in the dust. Maybe they were.
All at once Lucas needed to sit. To rest his head against his hands and breathe—he felt like he hadn’t taken a decent breath since he arrived at Jim’s farm. The red evidence tags scattered about the barn floor were relegated to a rather contained area between the door and Jim’s body. Footprints were marked, as well as scrapes and unidentifiable cast-offs—bits and pieces of indecipherable clues that Lucas didn’t understand or even necessarily want to understand. Alex knew what he was doing, and Lucas just wanted to stay out of the way.
He wandered deeper into the barn, almost stumbling as he avoided discarded relics from a time he couldn’t claim to remember. Everything was so filthy and foreign. Suddenly Blackhawk seemed like a different world, an alien land where nothing was quite as he had imagined it to be.
A pigeon high in the rafters didn’t like his unsteady progress and took to flight, casting a fine sprinkling of grime across Lucas’s shoulders and hair. He ran his fingers through his short waves, fighting a shudder and mussing his hair to even scruffier proportions. Though he tried to keep it neat and trimmed, his hair was thick and unruly, adding a mischievous slant to his already boyish looks. It was why he wore glasses; he believed they made him look older. But now, with a haze of dirt on their normally immaculate lenses, Lucas wished for contacts. And a buzz cut. And that he hadn’t answered the phone when he checked caller ID and realized that it was Alex on the other end of the line.
Lucas found an overturned milk crate, the sort of slotted, wooden affair that the antiques stores in town would love to get their hands on. He gave it a quick dusting with the palm of his hand then sat down, slapping his jeans to get rid of the dirt. He didn’t bother to stifle the sigh that escaped his lips.
The sun was setting, sloping through the rotting roof of the barn and shedding golden particles in the musty air that looked like flung gems. He reached his fingers to touch a beam of light, splintering the cool glow into fragments on the ground.
That’s when he saw it.
A rectangle of blue-lined white tucked against the blade of what he imagined to be an old-fashioned plow. A folded piece of paper too pristine to be a natural part of the dingy surroundings.
Lucas didn’t think. He just grabbed.
The note was folded into a small, thick packet that obviously held something inside. His fingers fumbled with the corners, and he couldn’t tell if the tremors were because of the descending cold or because of what he feared he’d find.
The note was nearly open when Lucas was torn from the paper in his hands by an unexpected shout.
“Lucas! What are you doing?”
He read one word: Angela. Then something tumbled from the creased page and fell into the hard-packed dirt at his feet. Lucas would have reached for it, but all at once Alex was before him, ripping the paper out of his hands with a furious grunt.
“What is this?” Alex demanded, centering the page between his gloved fingers. “Where did you find it?”
Lucas didn’t answer, just watched in silence as his friend scanned the paper.
Beyond her name, there must not have been much else written. Alex’s eyes traced and retraced the same spot.
“What is it?” Lucas echoed, for it had been nothing more than a folded piece of notebook paper when he picked it up. “Is it a suicide note?”
Alex flattened Lucas with a withering look. “I can’t believe we missed this. Where did you find it?”
Lucas was shamed by the accusation in his friend’s tone, but he couldn’t help feeling annoyed, too. “You told me to make myself comfortable,” Lucas reminded him.
“It’s an expression. I didn’t mean tamper with a crime scene. Where did you find this?”
Indicating the plow with a kick, Lucas said, “It was there, against that . . .”
“Plow,” Alex finished impatiently. “Where exactly?”
“On the ground. The side closest to me.”
Alex groaned, making no attempt to disguise his frustration. “Wait here,” he said curtly. “Don’t. Touch. Anything.”
“What does it say?” Lucas called, watching the back of Alex’s plaid shirt as the police officer retreated.
The older man paused and turned his head just enough to shoot over his shoulder, “ ‘Angela, I’m sorry.’ ”
“That’s it?”
One quick nod was all he got in reply.
“No signature? Nothing?”
He was granted a terse shake of Alex’s dishwater-blond head.
Lucas watched Alex leave the barn. The police chief would come back with more tags, the camera, his officers. He’d explain that Lucas had contaminated the evidence—that he’d dared to touch it. And the story would be repeated for DCI. Lucas wanted to sneak out through a back door of the barn and walk home. No, he wanted to rewind the clock and erase his involvement in this miserable tragedy. The pain of old wounds, his wife’s inevitable sorrow, his best friend’s contempt . . . They were like boulders pressing against the narrow frame of his shoulders.
Putting his elbows on his knees, Lucas cradled his head in his hands. The white fabric of his shoes was scuffed and dirty and the hems of his jeans were brown with dirt. As the clock ticked closer to evening, the barn got dimmer and dimmer, and outlines softened into mere hints of substance. And yet against the shadowy backdrop of the floor, Lucas could just make out a glint of something incongruous between his splayed feet.
In the midst of Alex’s exasperation, Lucas had all but forgotten that in the moment he opened the letter, something had slid to the floor. He bent down, squinting at the object through clouded glasses.
It was a ring. And if his assessment was right, it was real gold, though grimy and neglected and discolored. The piece of jewelry looked sad lying there, like a dejected attempt at intimacy, an artifact of love that had long faded.
Lucas didn’t even know he was reaching for the ring until it was balanced between his thumb and forefinger. A rush of horror filled him—Alex was going to be livid—but it was quickly replaced by a feeling of lament that evolved into a quiet entitlement. They wouldn’t be able to get a usable print off such a delicate piece of metal, he reasoned. Not even the tiny, broken stone that still glowed with a milky opalescence was large enough to hold a clue.
Staring at it, Lucas tried to picture the ring that had graced the ring finger of Angela’s right hand during her teenage years. She had claimed that it was a gift, but she had never been willing to discuss who it had come from. Was this the same ring?
It had to be. Though Lucas couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like, he had to be holding Angela’s ring in his hand. It all fit: Jim’s three-word letter, the ring folded inside, and the body hidden beneath the sway of his lifeless feet. Sickened, Lucas palmed the ring and brought his fist to his forehead as if to pound out everything he knew.
Angela had been the beginning of the end. It was hard for Lucas to admit, but as he slumped in the dim barn, he was sure he could trace the slow unraveling of his marriage back to the little girl who had seen a loose end and began to pick it free. The distance between him and Jenna, her assertion that he just didn’t “get her,” their fights over Angela’s growing presence in their lives . . . and now the raw, ugly truth that they were drowning in the black hole of everything that had piled up between them. It all came back to Angela Sparks.
And she had been gone for eight years, buried in the floor of a barn only a few miles from his house.
Regret made Lucas’s throat ache. Regret for Angela’s wasted life and the barren wasteland of his own days. It wasn’t fair to link the two so intimately, and he knew it, but for a scathing moment it felt good to assign blame. It felt good to clutch the ring and hate her.
Just as quickly as his fury rose, it dissipated. How could Lucas blame a child? A hurting little girl with scars so deep Jenna claimed to have only scratched the topmost layer? Poor Angela, he thought. And then: Poor us. Poor all of us.
Lucas rose, ready to offer up the ring and face Alex’s fury. His trip down memory lane had left him bleeding, and nothing Alex could say or do would trump the misery he already felt. But instead of making his way to where Alex stood half shouting into his cell phone, Lucas found that his legs were weighted to the ground. The discarded little band in the palm of his hand was tiny and hot, a circle of agony that seemed to symbolize the brokenness of everything that he held dear. It was a piece of her that no one would be able to appreciate or understand. Who had mourned her? Who sought her with the fervor of a mother searching for her child? Who had given four years of her life to nurture a girl that no one else had taken the time to love? And, who had ultimately sacrificed her marriage on the altar of that love?
They would take the ring and strip it of any remaining tendrils of her humanity, faint and fragile as the broken strands of a spider’s web. It would be tossed in an evidence bag, examined, forgotten. It would languish for months or even years in a cardboard box before it would be forever lost, one last piece of Angela that could disappear off the face of the known world. He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let this small remembrance of her slip through his fingers.
As he studied the ring, Lucas was galvanized by the belief that dental records would prove what he already knew: the body buried beneath Jim Sparks was his daughter. He didn’t doubt for a second that they would have more than enough proof of her identity. The ring was inconsequential to everyone but Lucas’s soon-to-be ex-wife. Alex would never know. And if he ever found out, surely after all that they had been through, there would be forgiveness enough for this one small impulse, this moment when Lucas’s heart for once overrode his mind.
Closure, he thought as he slipped the band into his pocket. A reminder, a talisman, a lodestone that pointed back to the heart of all that they lost. With everything else crumbling to ashes around them, Lucas couldn’t help thinking that Jenna deserved it.
And maybe, just maybe, if Jenna said good-bye to Angela, she wouldn’t have to say good-bye to him.
When the bodies were gone and the farm was all but deserted, Lucas drove home in silence.
The remains DCI unearthed were no more than a bare skeleton of bones that had been crumpled and curled into a hole barely big enough to fit her small frame. The remnants of a dress, which must have once been a soft, leafy green but which time had turned the color of stone, was wrapped like hand-me-down clothes on a phantom body too desiccated to fill the crumbling folds. The fabric turned into dust in their hands, and before they managed to unearth all of her, she had become mostly undressed, an emaciated, naked figure lying prostrate on the ground. Jim’s deserted body lay zipped in a black body bag only feet from the exposed bones of her outstretched, partially mummified hand.
The DCI agents worked as if their lives depended on the fast, efficient, and gentle exhumation of the body. Lucas’s heart sank further and further as they revealed the tender curve of her spine, the spaghetti straps of what he imagined to be a favorite dress, the lone sandal that lacked a mate. He thought of the ring in his pocket and was pierced by a double-edged blade of d
isgrace and satisfaction. Though it made him sick to imagine what Alex would think if he knew, he hoped that the stolen gift would offer his wife a measure of peace. Peace that she had been unable to attain in eight long years of trying.
It was only when her body had been placed in a black bag and delicately lifted into the back of the hearse that Alex caught Lucas’s eye. “Go home, Hudson. I thought you and Jenna were going away this afternoon.”
Lucas squinted at him across the dark barn. “Maybe we’ll go away tonight,” he said, the slump in his shoulders indicating that they would do no such thing. Lucas and Jenna tried to date, tried to see each other beyond the walls of the house where they lived as little more than roommates, but it had become increasingly difficult to convince her that time together was worthwhile. Lucas knew that after abandoning her hours before, it would be even harder. At least Alex didn’t know about their secret arrangement, about the way their marriage dangled on a thread. Not yet.
“I’m sorry that it happened this way.”
Lucas arched an eyebrow. “Yeah, it’s all your fault.”
By the time he pulled into their detached garage and walked the thirty feet from the shed to the house, Jenna was outlined in amber through the kitchen window. Lucas could see his breath in diaphanous wisps that reminded him of ghosts. He stood in the cold for a moment and watched her, his breath haloing his face; his fingers on the ring in his pocket.
What could he say? How could he tell her?
“There’s nothing for supper,” she said in greeting when he finally stepped into the chilly mudroom. “Pizza? I think they still deliver this late.”
Lucas nodded.
She pulled a bobby pin out of her hair and held it between her lips while she refastened a stray curl. Her ponytails were notoriously chaotic and the gesture made Lucas catch his breath. She turned away from him and yanked the phone off the wall, pressing number 6 on the speed dial. As he listened to her order the pepperoni and mushroom, he had to restrain himself from crossing the few feet between them to place a kiss on her neck.
