“Peter’s rich and powerful. That’s always a problem.”
Tish shrugged. “I’m not afraid of him. Look, I know that Peter was after Laura. They dated for a while that spring. Peter was looking for another conquest. If Laura had put out, that would have been the end of it.”
“But she didn’t?” Stride asked.
“No way. Peter was hot for sex, but Laura didn’t want to do it. So she broke it off. He took it badly. You know how rich young punks like Stanhope can be. They think they can have whatever they want because their daddies have money. He wanted Laura, and he was furious when she turned him down. The letters started arriving not long after that.”
“That’s not enough to make a connection,” Stride said.
“Well, I know what Peter was like. He came after me before Laura, and I didn’t want anything to do with him. He got nasty when I told him no.”
Tish shivered as the sun sank below the crest of the hill. Long shadows accompanied a damp chill off the water.
“Listen, Tish,” Stride said. “I’m going to tell you a couple things, but like I said before, it’s off the record. Okay?”
Tish nodded unhappily.
“I need to hear you say it,” Stride said.
“Yes, this is off the record.”
“Good. You have to remember that I know this case inside and out. I lived it back then with Cindy and with Ray Wallace, who was the cop in charge of the investigation. When I took over the Detective Bureau, I went through the file page by page. I reviewed all the evidence, because I had my doubts, too. I didn’t find anything new that pointed at Peter or at anyone other than Dada, the man I confronted near the railroad tracks.”
“So what did you find?” Tish asked.
“First, there was a fingerprint report. There were prints on the baseball bat that matched Dada’s.”
“Except it was Peter Stanhope’s bat,” Tish said. “I read about that in the paper. His prints must have been on the bat, too.”
“Yes, but his prints made sense. Dada’s prints didn’t.”
“Laura was being stalked,” Tish insisted. “Someone had been pursuing her for weeks. That wasn’t a stranger. It was someone who knew her.”
Stride put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “The police knew about the stalking.”
“Are you sure?”
“Cindy told them. I was there when she told Ray. Look, Cindy thought the same thing you did-that whoever had been pursuing Laura was the one who killed her. She even had one of the notes that this guy sent her. A porn photo with a warning scrawled on it.”
“So?”
“So there weren’t any fingerprints on the photo,” Stride said. “It wasn’t helpful.”
“That was then. Don’t they have better techniques for raising prints now? Maybe there’s still something there.”
Stride nodded. “We have much more sophisticated techniques for that kind of thing, but what we don’t have is the photograph. It’s gone, along with the other crime scene photos they took back then. So’s the bat. Somewhere along the line, much of the physical evidence from the case was lost.”
“Son of a bitch!” Tish exclaimed. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”
“You’re talking about a case from thirty years ago. Things get misplaced.”
He didn’t tell her his own suspicion that Ray Wallace was the one who had made the evidence disappear.
Tish walked away. They were near the lighthouse at the end of the pier. She climbed the steps and leaned back against the chapped white paint of the light tower with her arms folded. Her purse was slung over her shoulder. Stride followed her up the steps.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
Tish looked up at him. “Can I trust you?”
“What?”
“You said you don’t trust me. Can I trust you?”
“I think you can. There will always be things I have to keep confidential, but I won’t lie to you.”
Tish unzipped her purse. She slid out a small, clear plastic bag that contained a yellowed envelope. He could see block handwriting, and even without taking it in his hand, he saw the name written on the front.
LAURA STARR.
“Here,” Tish said. “Physical evidence.”
“What the hell is this?” Stride asked.
“It’s one of the stalking letters that Laura received. She sent it to me while I was living in St. Paul.”
“You’ve had the letter all this time, and you never told anyone?”
“In the old days, I didn’t think it mattered,” Tish said. “Then I put it away and forgot all about it. I was clearing out old boxes in Atlanta a few months ago when I moved out of my partner’s apartment, and that’s when I found it again. Don’t you see? This changes everything. That’s when I started thinking about the book again, because I knew I had something that could reopen the case.”
Stride did see.
The letter to Laura wasn’t a note that had been pushed through a school locker. Whoever sent it to her had put it in the mail, using a stamp and licking an envelope. Even thirty years later, that meant one thing.
DNA.
4
Clark Biggs watched his daughter squirm on the living room floor with her legs tucked underneath her. Mary picked up her colored blocks and carefully stacked ten of them one on top of the other, until she had built a rainbow tower. When she was finished, she beamed at Clark with the biggest, most beautiful smile he had ever seen, the kind that made his heart ache every time he saw it. Then she toppled the tower by blowing on it like the big bad wolf, giggled at him, and began setting up the blocks again. She could do it over and over and never tire of the game. She was like every other five-year-old girl in the world.
Except Mary was sixteen.
To anyone looking at her, she was a typical teenager. She had a curly mop of blond hair and eyes that Clark thought of as Caribbean blue. Her face was round and bright. She was almost six feet tall, with a stocky frame. A big girl. She could have been a runner or a wrestler. It seemed so wrong and unfair that she kept growing into a pretty young woman while remaining trapped in the mind of a child. Clark lay awake nights blaming himself and God for the accident in the water. He consoled himself with the belief that Mary would be perpetually happy, perpetually innocent, without the awkwardness, pain, doubt, and self-consciousness of becoming a real teenager. It was little comfort.
“It’s bedtime, Mary,” he murmured.
She pretended not to hear him. She kept playing with her blocks and humming a tune to herself. Clark realized it was the theme song to a television show they had watched earlier in the evening. He was always amazed at the things that made it inside her brain, when so many other things did not.
“Bedtime, Mary,” he repeated without enthusiasm.
Mary stopped and frowned. Her lips turned downward like a clown’s. He laughed, and she laughed, too.
“Five more minutes,” he said.
Clark hated Sunday nights. At ten o’clock, Mary would go to bed, and he would be alone in the small house for another hour while he watched TV and poured himself a last beer. In the morning, his ex-wife, Donna, would come by the house, and they would silently make the exchange. Mary would cry and go with her, and Clark would cry and watch her go. Then he would pour coffee into a Thermos, silently wrap up a turkey sandwich for his lunch, and head off to his construction site on the Duluth harbor, knowing that the house would be empty when he returned home. Five long, lonely days awaited him. During the week, it was as if he were in a trance, waiting for that moment on Friday evening when Donna’s SUV pulled up in front of his door, and Mary ran up the sidewalk to get folded up in his arms. His beautiful girl. His baby. He lived for the weekends with her, but they were over almost as soon as they began, leaving him right back here, dreading her bedtime, feeling his soul grow cloudy at the thought of a week alone.
“Come on, honey,” he told her, his voice cracking.
Clark got off the sofa. Mary got her big bones
from him. He was burly and strong. He had worked construction since he was eighteen, and after twenty years laboring outside through bitter cold and ninety-degree summers, he woke up every morning with his muscled body stiffened into knots. In his twenties, he could take a hot shower and come out refreshed and limber. Not now. Pain dogged him through his days.
Mary bounded up and held out her hand. He took it to lead her to her room. Her skin was pink and soft, and his own skin was like leather. She knew he was sad on these nights, and she tried to cheer him up by making faces. He smiled and let her think it was working, when the truth was that nothing could lift him out of depression at these moments.
“Blocks, Daddy,” she said.
“Yes, honey, I’ll take good care of your blocks. They’ll be here for you next week.”
Her bedroom was at the rear of the small house, with two windows looking out toward the woods at the back of the lot. Mary danced into the bathroom behind him to brush her teeth. It was dark, and Clark went up close to the windows and studied his reflection in the glass. Puffed-up brown pouches sagged under his eyes. His sandy hair was too long; he needed to cut it, which he usually did himself to save money. His jeans were fraying. He could poke a finger through his left pocket to his skin. He wore a NASCAR T-shirt and a camouflage baseball cap.
“Meeeeeeee!” Mary shouted, flouncing back into the room and jumping onto the squeaky frame of her bed. She slept in a twin bed that was too small for her, but she didn’t mind that her feet dangled off the end. There was barely room for Mary among the beanbag animals she collected. She wore a frilly nightgown that came to her knees. That was one thing that worried Clark whenever Mary was out in the world without him. She had no concept of sexuality, but her body said otherwise. She looked like a normal, healthy, attractive girl. She had no embarrassment, and she often stripped off her clothes and wandered around the house naked and couldn’t understand why Clark insisted she stay dressed.
“That was quick,” Clark said. “Did you really brush your teeth?”
Mary nodded seriously.
“Really?” he repeated.
She folded her arms tightly and nodded again, her whole body quivering like gelatin.
“Okay,” he said.
Clark turned off the overhead light but left the lamp lit by her bed. Mary liked the room bright throughout the night. He checked her windows and locked them, because otherwise, Mary had been known to climb outside and run through the backyards of the neighborhood. She didn’t sleep well. She might close her eyes for an hour, and then she would get up, and Clark would hear her bouncing an inflated ball against the bedroom wall. If he wasn’t too tired himself, he would get up and play with her, until finally she grew drowsy again. Sometimes she simply curled up on the floor, and he would pull the blankets off the bed and cover her.
He tucked her into bed. Her eyes were bright. “Good night, Mary.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, too, honey.”
The ache in his stomach at the thought of her leaving in the morning was so great that he couldn’t say anything more. He kissed her forehead, and as he closed the door, he saw her waving her hands at the ceiling in bed, as if she could see the stars and conduct them like an orchestra.
Clark returned to the sofa and finished his beer and opened another one. He thought about seeing Donna in the morning when she came to collect Mary. Donna lived across the bridge in Superior and worked as a legal secretary. Clark was in Gary, living in the white concrete block house that had once belonged to his parents. For five years, he had shared Mary with Donna from a distance, and for five years, he had hated the arrangement so much that it felt like a disease inside him.
It wasn’t Donna’s fault. The bitterness between them had long ago died into loneliness. They had married young and tried to make a go of it, but the pressure of raising Mary together had destroyed them. They each loved their daughter, but Mary demanded so much that they had run out of energy to love each other. Donna thought they should try again. She had made noises about making a fresh start. Two weeks earlier, when she had come to his house to drop Mary off, she had stayed there all evening, the three of them together like in the old days. After Mary went to bed, they had drunk wine, and laughed, and wound up sleeping together. They were kids again, the way it was before Mary, before the divorce. The sex felt warm and familiar. But when he awoke, he was alone. Donna couldn’t face him. That told him all he needed to know.
He knew he should go to bed, but he didn’t get up from the sofa. He watched television until his eyes began to blink shut and his head fell forward on his chest. He slept heavily, as if he had been drugged by exhaustion and alcohol, and had no sense of time passing.
Clark woke up to Mary screaming.
A terrible, wailing, nightmare scream.
He was instantly awake, but he was disoriented, unsure what was real. At the end of the hall, in shadows, Mary’s door flew open and banged against the wall. His daughter was silhouetted against the pale light in her room.
“Him him him him him!” she shouted.
Clark dove over the back edge of the sofa and pushed himself off his knees, shaking his head to drive the sleep from his brain. He spread his arms wide. Mary bolted for him and grabbed his body so hard he nearly spilled over onto the carpet. Her skin was wet with sweat and fear. Her blue eyes bulged, and her nose flared as she sucked air into her lungs. Clark felt her fingernails digging like knives into his back. She held him with such fierce strength he could hardly breathe.
“Mary, what is it? What’s wrong, baby?”
“Him him him him him him him him!”
“Oh, Mary, it’s okay, it’s okay, there’s no one there.”
“NO NO NO NO NO.”
Clark stroked her hair and sang to her under his breath. She trembled like a bird. This had happened the previous weekend, too. She had had a bad dream and imagined there was someone in her room and refused to go back in there for the rest of the night. Mary didn’t know what was real and what was not. When she imagined something, it was the same as if it were really there.
“Shhh,” he murmured over and over.
She cried into his shoulder. He grabbed a fleece blanket from the sofa and wrapped it around her skin, covering her. Her tears were damp on his neck.
“Come on, I’ll show you it’s okay,” he told her. “I’ll show you that no one’s there.”
“No, Daddy, no, him him him him.”
“Oh, I know, I know, but it was just a dream, honey, that’s all it was.”
Mary shook her head while it was buried against his chest, and then she looked up with a panicked face, put her mouth against his ear, and whispered so clearly it made him shiver: “Window.”
Clark felt chilled.
His fists clenched, and adrenaline made him alert. Clark’s eyes streaked to the living room windows, which he had left open. They looked out on dark squares of night. The curtains breathed with the wind. He smelled pine and rain. He didn’t understand what had happened, but Mary wouldn’t use a word like that unless it meant something important.
Clark lifted Mary off her feet. She was heavy, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and let herself be carried to the sofa. He laid her down among the cushions and kissed her and looked deeply into her eyes, trying to understand her, trying to make her communicate with him. He always cherished the idea that there was a place somewhere in both of their minds where they could come together and erase the canyon that her disability put between them. He just wished he could find it.
“I’m going to close the windows now, Mary. I’ll still be in the room.”
She pulled the blanket over her head. He went to the four windows that looked out on the front yard and slammed them shut and locked them. He saw spatters of rain on the glass. He went back and slowly peeled the fleece down from half of his daughter’s face.
“Did you dream that someone was in your room, honey?”
She said again: “Win
dow.”
“Did you see something outside?”
“Him him him him him.” She pulled the blanket up again, hiding.
“You stay right here, honey. Daddy will take a look.”
Clark returned down the dark hallway to Mary’s room. It was past midnight. He turned off the lamp by her bed, and with the room black, he went to the window and looked out at the back lawn and the woods a few feet away. He didn’t see anything. He stayed there for several minutes, watching, but nothing moved outside.
When he returned to the living room, he found that Mary was asleep again, with her blond hair messily sticking out of the blanket. He could see half her face, which looked peaceful and angelic. His own heart was racing, and he knew he would be up into the early hours. He sat down beside her, caressed her cheek with one calloused finger, and was rewarded with a sigh. She made little noises of happiness.
Clark eased himself off the sofa again without disturbing her. He was nervous, and he wasn’t sure why. Children had bad dreams, and that was that. Even so, Mary rarely used such a specific word. Window.
He retrieved a heavy flashlight from the kitchen and went to the front door and let himself outside. He locked the door behind him. When he stepped down off the porch, drizzle spit on his face. The leaves murmured with the night breeze. He switched on the yellow beam and waved it around the yard, seeing everything that should be there and nothing else-the weeping willow, the swing tied to the branch, the three old cars he scavenged for parts, the long grass that needed to be mowed. He stepped silently and carefully toward the rear of the house. He held the flashlight in a tight grip and led the way around the corner with the light.
Clark examined the backyard carefully. He didn’t come back here often, except to push the mower around every few weeks. There was only a narrow strip of lawn, and behind it, the dense stand of birches and their white bark peeling like paint. He stared into the woods and had the strangest feeling that someone invisible was staring back at him.
He shrugged. His mind was playing tricks on him.
In the Dark aka The Watcher Page 4
