Stride shook his head. “It’s not that simple. There’s a reason why a court wouldn’t compel a DNA sample. We don’t have any probable cause. Even if we run the test and find out that Stanhope was sending Laura those notes, that doesn’t change anything. It’s not like Pat Burns is going to put him in front of a jury. It’s not going to happen.”
“Are you saying you won’t run the sample?”
“Do you think I just snap my fingers and get these things done? There’s a backlog. There are other priorities. It’s one thing to compare DNA in a stalker note against a database to try to break a cold case open. It’s another to test one specific individual just because you’ve got it in your head that he’s guilty.”
“Don’t make it worthless, Jon. Tell me I didn’t do this for nothing.”
“I’ll talk to Pat Burns. That’s all I can do.”
“I can’t believe you’d ignore this,” Tish insisted. “I can’t believe you’d walk away from the one chance we have to find out what really happened. You heard Finn’s story. Peter assaulted Laura that night. He was in the field with the bat after Dada rescued her.”
“Finn has no credibility. If there’s one person whose DNA I’d like to run, it’s Finn.”
“What are you talking about? You think Finn killed Laura?”
“I think it’s a damn strong possibility. Finn is deranged, Tish. It’s not a big leap to think he was capable of murder.”
“You’re giving Peter Stanhope a free pass. Is it because of his money? Did you learn your lessons from Ray Wallace?” She stopped. Her eyes widened as she realized what she had said. “God, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”
“No one gets a free pass from me,” Stride said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You’re the one who can’t see past Peter Stanhope,” Stride said. “There are plenty of other people who are hiding things about Laura. Including you.”
“Me?”
“Rikke said you were jealous of Laura’s relationship with Peter.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It looks to me like you’re obsessed with him,” Stride said.
“This isn’t about Peter. No one else was standing up for Laura, so I decided it was up to me.”
“Why?”
“She was my best friend.”
“So why were the two of you fighting that spring?”
“We weren’t. We were past it.”
“What was the fight about?”
“I told you that I don’t remember. It was thirty years ago.”
“You’re lying, Tish. Don’t lie to a cop and think I won’t know. Were you fighting about Peter Stanhope? Is that why you’re so focused on Peter? It makes me wonder whether you had a motive to kill Laura.”
“That’s crazy. You don’t honestly think I would go through all this trouble if I had anything to do with her murder, do you?”
“Where were you that night?” Stride asked.
“I already told you. I was living in St. Paul.”
“No, what specifically were you doing that night? Where were you? Who were you with?”
Tish shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“That’s strange. I’d think you’d remember what you were doing the night your best friend was brutally murdered.”
“You’re making too much of this,” Tish said. She stood up, and the chair toppled backward into the sand behind her. “Laura was killed by a stalker. You’ve got Peter’s DNA. It’s up to you now.”
“I have one more question,” Stride told her. “And you’d better answer this one.”
Tish folded her arms in annoyance. “What?”
“When did Cindy show you a photo of our house?”
Tish’s mouth fell open. Stride thought she had slipped, that she had said something she never intended to share. “I don’t know. It was probably something she included with a Christmas card.”
“Stop lying to me. You said Cindy showed you a photograph. She didn’t send it to you. She was with you. When was this?”
“A few months before she died,” Tish admitted.
“Where?”
“She visited me in Atlanta.”
Stride searched his memory. In those last terrible months, Cindy had begun to wrap her mind around the fact that she was dying, that the treatment options had finally run out. The only time he could remember her being gone was a weekend where she went off by herself, vanishing from his side for three long days. To make peace with the past, she said. She never told him where she went or anything about her trip. Back then, he had been afraid that she might commit suicide to spare him and herself the agony of a slow death. He now knew that she had gone to see Tish.
Someone she had never mentioned to him in her entire life.
Why?
“You owe me the truth,” Stride said.
Tish picked up the fallen chair and steadied it in the sand. She sat down again but didn’t look at Stride.
“Cindy first wrote to me about fifteen years ago,” Tish said. “It was shortly after her father died.”
“Did you know William Starr?”
“Enough to despise him.”
Stride nodded. He remembered the long weeks in which Cindy had sat at her father’s bedside while he waged a losing battle with cancer. William Starr had always been a hard man to like. Judgmental. Rigid. Obsessed with righteousness and punishment and all the while terrified of going to hell for his own sins. Death has a way of softening even the toughest of men. Stride remembered Cindy holding her father’s hand, listening to him weep, giving him absolution in a way that no priest ever could.
“Cindy had no illusions about her father,” he said.
“Neither did Laura. She loved him despite everything he did to her, but I knew he was a gutless piece of shit. He cheated on their mother, did you know that? Multiple times. Laura heard them arguing about it.”
“Why did Cindy contact you when he died?”
Tish hesitated. “I guess when she lost him, it brought up all her old emotions about Laura. It’s that aloneness you feel when your family is gone. So she thought of me. She knew how close Laura and I were, and she decided to rekindle a friendship with me.”
“Then what?”
“We wrote back and forth for years. Not often, but enough that we became close.”
“She never told me about you,” Stride said.
“Well, we had a bond because of Laura. Cindy and I both lost someone we loved. Neither one of us ever put it behind us.”
“Why the visit in Atlanta?” Stride asked.
Tish’s voice was soft. “Cindy knew she was dying. She wanted to see me. To say good-bye. And to tell me things. She told me everything that happened to her that night in 1977. With Laura. With you. In the lake. Everything. Things she had never told anyone else before. That’s why I chose to put so much of the book in her voice.”
Stride shook his head. He felt as if he were falling, fast and hard. “Why would she do that?”
Tish took his hand.
“Because she didn’t want me to let it go. She wanted me to do something. That’s why I’m obsessed. That’s why I have to see this out and do whatever it takes to get to the truth. Don’t you see, Jon? That’s why I’m here. I’ve resisted it ever since Cindy came to me, but I couldn’t resist it anymore. Coming back after all these years wasn’t my idea. Writing a book about Laura’s murder wasn’t my idea. It was Cindy’s.”
25
When Serena arrived home after midnight, she found the door to their attic hanging open. The unfinished space had an Alice in Wonderland feel to it, like crossing over into a different dimension. The stairway was built right into the cottage’s great room, with five dark walnut steps leading up to two narrow locked doors. Behind the doors, a single lonely bulb gave light, and the old wooden beams climbed to a high ceiling. Several more steps ended in another set of doors, where century-old paint flecked off the finish. Tonight the upper doors were open, too. She c
ontinued to the attic level.
Up here, the heat gathered like a cloud during the warmer months, and during the winter it was frigid, and the old chambered windows collected frost. The space was wide open. The sharp peaks of the roof rose above her head. The unfinished floor was a minefield of splinters and nail pops. Spiderwebs hung like draperies from the beams. There was nothing but unpacked moving boxes strewn on the floor. They had plans to convert the upper floor into a master suite someday and take advantage of its quirky angles and lake views, but for now, it was a dumping ground for remnants of both of their pasts.
“Hey,” she said.
Jonny was seated on the floor in the middle of the attic. He wore only black boxers. His feet were bare, his hair damp and wild from the shower. The contents of two open boxes were scattered around him. She saw shoe boxes filled with photos, rubber-banded stacks of letters and postcards, and other paraphernalia from his marriage that he had long ago packed away.
He didn’t reply.
“God, it’s hot,” she said. She sat down near him and reached for a stack of photographs that showed Jonny and Cindy on the strip of lakeside beach on the Point. Both were young. Jonny’s hair was dark. One picture, slightly off center, had obviously been taken on a self-timer, with the camera balanced on a tree stump. It showed the two of them kissing. The kind of kiss you felt down to your toes. Serena couldn’t help herself; she felt a pang of jealousy. She put the photos back, not wanting to look anymore. She felt as if she had intruded on something sacred.
“You okay?” she asked.
Jonny looked lost. He didn’t share his memories easily. Serena had made it a point never to push him, because she had spent years dealing with the ghosts in her own past, and she knew that you couldn’t open up about them on anyone else’s time. Every now and then, he opened a window to her. Only a crack. Only when he was ready.
He lay back, propping himself up on his palms. When he looked up into the shadows of the high ceiling, she saw dark stubble on his face. For a man in his late forties, he was fit and strong. His stomach was taut. He worked out ferociously, as she did. It was only a stall, of course. Age was catching up to both of them, in their skin, their eyes, their muscles, their hair, and their bodies.
“Did I ever tell you about the day I found out Cindy had cancer?” he murmured.
“No, you didn’t.”
She could almost see his mind traveling back, retrieving the memory from among the cobwebs. She knew she was about to learn something important.
“I was investigating a girl’s disappearance,” he told her. “You remember the Kerry McGrath case? I was working on it sixteen hours every day. Cindy had been having unusual pain and vaginal bleeding, and so she had an MRI scheduled. I was supposed to go with her, but I totally forgot. She had to go alone. I didn’t get home until nearly midnight, and I never even remembered the appointment. She was sitting on the bed, smiling at me. This fragile smile, like glass. I didn’t notice. I was talking about the investigation, going on and on, and Cindy just smiled at me.”
“Oh, Jonny,” Serena said softly.
“It was like I never took a breath, you know? I was so caught up in it. And then finally, I looked at her, and I still didn’t get it. I didn’t have a clue what was wrong. So she said, still smiling, ‘It’s not good, baby.’ Just like that. Her smile broke up into little pieces, and I knew. I knew what was coming. I knew that every plan we had made for the future had just evaporated. I looked at this little jewel of mine on the bed, and I watched her start sobbing, and I knew I was going to lose her.”
His voice caught. He closed his eyes.
Serena felt tears on her cheeks.
“I am so sorry,” she said.
He exhaled a long, slow breath. “No, I’m sorry. This isn’t fair to you.”
“You don’t have to keep things from me,” Serena told him. “It took me a long time to be vulnerable around you. I was so busy protecting myself that I forgot that you had demons of your own.”
“It’s this case. It’s brought it all back.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“I don’t know. I spent years getting over Cindy. Now I feel like the stitches have been ripped open.”
Serena wondered whether to say anything. “Is it making you question things?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Me.”
She saw his face cloud over.
“Don’t think that,” he said. “That’s not it at all.”
She thought he was trying to convince himself.
“There are days when I feel like I’m competing with a ghost,” she admitted. “Someone who’s always perfect, who’s always young.”
“There’s no competition. I apologize if I ever made you feel that way.”
“No, this is my problem, not yours.”
“It’s not that this case makes me miss Cindy any more than I do already,” Stride told her. “I always will, you know that. The hard part is that I’m learning things that make me question my whole life. Cindy was keeping secrets from me. I never would have thought that was possible.”
He told her about meeting Tish on the beach and about everything she had shared with him. He gestured at the boxes and said, “I’ve been through all of Cindy’s old papers. There isn’t a word about Tish anywhere. She was hiding something, and for some reason, she decided not to share it with me. I don’t understand.”
“Don’t be too quick to believe what Tish tells you,” Serena warned him. “This woman has her own agenda. I’m worried that she’s playing with your head, Jonny. I don’t know what her game is, but I don’t like it.”
“If she wanted to get me hooked, I’m hooked,” Stride said. “All I can do is keep following the trail.”
“Just don’t start doubting your past because of her. Maybe there’s a reason Cindy never mentioned Tish to you. Maybe Tish is lying.”
Stride nodded. “I know. I thought about that, too, but there’s a casualness in how she talks about Cindy. I really think they knew each other. She may be lying about other things, but not about that.”
Serena wasn’t convinced. “I think you should let this case go.”
“You’re probably right, but I can’t.”
“You’re not going to get the satisfaction you want. Pat Burns is right, and you know it. This case isn’t going to trial unless someone decides to confess, which isn’t going to happen. So exactly what do you hope to accomplish?”
Stride began to gather up the leftovers from Cindy’s life and put them back in their boxes. He handled each item delicately, as if it were an antique that might break apart in his hands if he was too rough. “I’m not sure.”
He reached inside one of the boxes and extracted a leather-bound Bible, its cover rubbed and smooth. With a puff of his lips, he blew dust off it. Stride turned it over in his hands and then flipped through the tissue-thin pages. The corners were worn and well thumbed.
“Did that belong to Cindy?” Serena asked.
“Her father.”
He tried to remember a time when he had seen William Starr without this Bible in his hand. It was always there, propping him up like a crutch.
“Cindy was different after he died,” he said.
“We all are.”
Stride nodded, but he didn’t put the Bible down. “This was something else. I saw a change in her. Back then, I thought it was grief, but now I realize it was more than that. It was Tish.”
26
Maggie stopped in the town of Gary on Saturday afternoon to visit Clark Biggs, but the house was empty. His truck was gone. She left a handwritten note wedged inside the screen door and used a cell phone to leave a message on his answering machine. She was worried about him. This was the worst time, in the days after a child died. More than once, she had witnessed a double tragedy, when a child was killed and a parent committed suicide soon after.
At the highway, she turned south toward Fond du Lac, rather than heading north to the city
. It was her day off, but she wanted to go back to the park where Mary Biggs had died. There was nothing more she could learn from the scene, but she often returned to places where crimes had occurred, as if echoes of what had happened, or what the victim saw, could still make their way into her brain. It was superstition, but she believed in it. It was also the perfect day to wander on the trails near the St. Louis River.
The heat hadn’t broken. The afternoon sun blistered the pavement. She kept her Avalanche ice cold as she drove, shivering in her spaghetti-strap top and white shorts. Her small feet barely reached the pedals. As she neared the gold reflections of the river at Perch Lake Park, she could see a flotilla of multicolored sailboats squeezed into the narrow inlets. Motor-boats dragged teenagers through the waves in old tires. On the shore of the nearest island, she spied rows of near-naked bodies, their bare flesh baking on beach towels.
Maggie got out of her Avalanche and adjusted her burgundy sunglasses. She took a seat on the nearest bench, pulled her legs underneath her, and tilted her face to the sky, relishing the sunlight. When she opened her eyes, she realized that, like Mary, she was alone here. Everyone else had someone with them to share the day. Husbands had wives. Mothers had sons and daughters. Boys had brothers. Even the old men walking by themselves had dogs on a leash.
Maggie thought it again. She wanted a child. Someone to raise, take care of, and be with. It was easy to wish for something when you couldn’t have it.
She pushed off the bench and headed along the dirt trail leading up the shore, past birch trees and lowland brush. This was the route Mary Biggs had walked, innocent and unknowing, from the safety of the little gray bench to a place where strangers and deep water took her away. From where she was, Maggie kept an eye on the highway. Donna Biggs, running to rescue her daughter, could have glimpsed a tall man through the trees as he climbed into a silver SUV, but at this distance, she wouldn’t have been able to identify him. She knew that Donna was right, because she believed that Finn Mathisen had been here. Stalking Mary. Driving a silver RAV. What she knew and what she could prove, though, were two different things.
In the Dark aka The Watcher Page 19
