In the Dark aka The Watcher

by Brian Freeman

  “Wow, is this good,” she said with her mouth full.

  “If you choke, I am not giving you the Heimlich,” Serena said.

  Pamela came back, pushing a wheelchair in front of her. The woman in the chair had snow white hair that framed her head like a halo. Her sun-browned skin was wizened and flecked with black spots, and sunglasses shielded her eyes. She had a crocheted blanket spread over her lap, and below it, there was nothing at all. Her legs had been amputated below the knees.

  “Mary Ann, these ladies are here to see you,” Pamela said.

  “To see me? Well, isn’t that lovely.” Her voice crackled like Rice Krispies, but her demeanor was warm and sunny. Her dry lips curled into a smile. “I smell pie. Pamela uses my recipe. Four-time blue-ribbon winner at the North Dakota State Fair. Darling, I don’t suppose I could have a small piece?”

  “Mary Ann,” Pamela chided her gently. “You know better.”

  The old woman sighed. She put a finger to the side of her nose. “I can still tell when a pie is done just by the smell,” she said.

  Pamela turned off the music and sat down in the armchair next to her mother-in-law, who slid her hands under the blanket to warm them. Serena and Maggie introduced themselves again.

  “Minnesota?” Mary Ann said. “My husband and I had a favorite fishing resort near Brainerd. It’s a beautiful area. All those lakes and trees. Out here, it’s just miles and miles of corn.”

  “Your daughter-in-law says you’ve lived in this house since the 1970s,” Serena said.

  “Oh, yes, Henry and I bought a small parcel of land near Minot shortly after we got married, with some money we got from his grandfather. Henry did very well with it. He had a degree, you know. He was very scientific.”

  “Near Minot? How did you end up here?”

  “Well, my family was from Minot, and Henry’s family was from Fargo, and that caused difficulties at the holidays. Relatives always want you to be in two places at the same time. So eventually, Henry’s father told him about the Mathisen place going up for sale, and we moved down here. My parents were ready to retire anyway, and they got a small home in Casselton. So it all worked out well, you see.”

  “Did you know the Mathisen family?” Maggie asked.

  “Know them? Oh, no. As I said, we weren’t from around here. Henry’s parents knew them quite well, however. His parents had a farm about five miles east of here.”

  “I wonder if your in-laws ever told you any stories about the Mathisens,” Serena said.

  “Stories?”

  “We’re trying to find out whatever we can about the family. Particularly their children.”

  “I’m not sure if I can help you,” Mary Ann said. She tilted her head back, and her left hand darted from under the blanket to scratch her neck. “I don’t recall hearing very much about their children. They only had one, didn’t they? A boy? No, that’s right, the girl was older. She didn’t live there.”

  “Did you hear anything unusual about the boy?”

  “Unusual? I don’t think so. It’s just sad how it happened.”

  “How what happened?” Maggie asked.

  “Well, a teenage boy losing both of his parents. I hate to see it.”

  “I heard the father died in a car accident,” Serena said.

  “Yes, I think you’re right about that,” Mary Ann said. “It wasn’t easy to survive back then without a man in the house. It’s a wonder they made it at all. And then the mother-oh, how awful that was. I have to tell you, Henry and I weren’t sure we wanted to move into this house after that. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to sleep here.”

  “Why?” Serena asked. “What happened to Inger Mathisen?”

  “Oh, don’t you know? Being police, I just thought you would know. An intruder killed her. Murdered her in her bedroom. They said it was probably some drifter, looking for jewelry or cash. I just can’t believe anyone could do such a horrid thing. It’s bad enough to kill another human being, but how he did it-oh, dear, I still don’t like to think about it.”

  “How was she killed?” Maggie asked.

  “She was beaten to death,” Mary Ann whispered, tugging on her blanket. “Can you imagine? Beaten to death with a baseball bat.”

  32

  Stride bought a Chicago dog and staked out a seat near the British Airways gate in Terminal 5. He propped his legs on the opposite row of chairs. Outside the window, the international gates of O’Hare were like a parking lot for 747 jets sporting multicolored logos from airlines around the world. Inside, in the departure concourse, thousands of passengers streamed beneath overhead skylights and miles of white piping. He watched the bustle of people and planes while he finished his hot dog.

  He was behind the international security checkpoint, thanks to an emergency call to a friend on the Chicago police. Dada-if it was Dada- would be arriving in the next hour from one of the airport’s three domestic terminals. Stride guessed that Dada was flying in from Missouri on his way to Johannesburg. The man he had found on the Web, Hubert Jones, was a professor of African studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

  The school’s Web site included a faculty photo. Stride had stared long and hard at the picture to make a mental connection to the young drifter by the railroad tracks thirty years earlier. All he could say for sure was that Hubert Jones might be Dada. His dreadlocks were gone, replaced by a buzz cut of steel gray hair. His devil eyebrows had grown out thick and bushy. His broad, jowly face showed a man much heavier than the fit giant who had overpowered Stride. The eyes could have been Dada’s eyes-black and intense-but in the end, too much time had passed, and too much age was written in the man’s skin.

  Stride swigged a large bottle of Coke to wash down the hot dog. He reread the dog-eared sheaf of materials on Hubert Jones that he had printed at his office before the sun came up. Jones was fifty-two years old, with undergraduate and graduate degrees from Berkeley. He had traveled and lectured extensively in Europe, and the visiting professorship he had accepted in South Africa was his third academic stint on the African continent. As a scholar, Hubert Jones was a star.

  He had also written a book.

  More than anything else, the book made Stride believe that Hubert Jones was Dada. It was called Dandelion Men, and it told the story of three years that Jones had spent living with itinerant laborers around the South and Midwest after he dropped out of college in his early twenties. Over time, he had become one of those wanderers, part of a community of people who came and went as easily as seeds traveling on the wind. They hiked. They hitched. They hopped trains. They worked, stole, got drunk, went to jail, and never knew any area long enough to call it home.

  Stride found an excerpt from the book on the Web:

  These were not the men that you would call homeless, not the mentally ill deposited onto our city streets in later years when our tax dollars discovered the limits of our compassion. This was a time and era when men chose this lifestyle because it made them free. It was predominantly a rural, not an urban, phenomenon. These men were children of our roots, children of our soil, who lived at the mercy of weather, food, and water. On most days they knew violence. Sometimes it was from those among them, but more often, it was from outside, from men who wore uniforms. You could beat Dandelion Men, you could even kill them, but you could never strip them of their dignity and of their primal humanness. I think sometimes that the people who were most violent toward them, who were most afraid, were those who envied them their freedom.

  To Stride, the book sounded like Dada’s story, including its time frame, which spanned the years from 1976 to 1978. When he ran an online search inside the book, however, he found no references to Duluth or Minnesota or to the events that summer. No mention of murder in the park. No mention of escaping by coal train. If Hubert Jones was Dada, he had left those days out of his journal.

  Stride eyed the terminal escalators. In his mind, he relived the events by the railroad tracks and felt Dada swatting him away like
a fly. He remembered the panicked wheezing in his lungs as he struggled for air and the wet misery of the mud and rain. He heard the crack of Ray’s wild shots. Saw Dada, on the train, growing smaller.

  That girl had secrets.

  Thirty yards away, Stride spotted Hubert Jones on the escalator.

  The noise of the airport became a muffled roar in his brain, crowding out everything but the man gliding down the steps. He was huge, at least six feet six, and round like the mammoth trunk of an aging tree. He wore a dark suit, a starched white shirt with jeweled cuff links, and a bright tie. The colors of the tie, Stride realized, were the Rasta colors of green, gold, and red, just like in the beret that Dada had worn. Stride wondered if it was an inside joke, a little signal for him to recognize. When Jones swiveled his head, their eyes met across the concourse, and the big man’s thick lips curled upward into a broad smile.

  At that moment, Stride knew. He knew for sure.

  It was Dada.

  For a heavy man, he moved with grace and quickness. At the bottom of the escalator, he reviewed the people pushing around him, as if he were wondering whether Stride had arranged a welcoming party of police and security. When he saw that he was safe, he stepped nimbly through the crowd, which parted for the giant man in its path. Stride got out of his chair to meet him. He didn’t like looking up to other men, and Jones was as intimidating as an ogre at the top of the beanstalk. Jones extended his hand, and Stride shook it. He felt intense strength in the man’s grip.

  “I see you still have the scar,” Jones said, pointing at Stride’s face with a meaty finger. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “My wife always said it was sexy,” Stride replied.

  Jones laughed. It was the same booming laugh from long ago, like the villain on an old radio show.

  Stride recognized the man’s voice. “You called me last night,” he said. “Not a friend of a friend.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why the ruse?”

  “I didn’t know what kind of man you were, Lieutenant. For all I knew, you would clap me in leg irons if you got the chance. I wanted to hear your voice. I’ve always believed I could take the measure of a man by how he talks to me.”

  “I passed the test?” Stride asked.

  “Oh, I still wasn’t entirely sure whether you would surround me with a posse of Chicago’s finest. But I figured that the boy who stood up to me by the railroad tracks would consider it a point of pride to meet me alone. You haven’t changed, Lieutenant.”

  Stride hated to admit it, but Jones was right. It would have been smarter to bring backup, but he had wound up making the same arrogant mistake he had made as a boy. Taking on this man by himself. “If I wanted to have you arrested, I could,” he said.

  “You could, but I hope enough time has passed that you now believe again what you believed as a boy. I didn’t kill anyone. Wisdom comes with innocence and experience, Lieutenant, and it’s only the in-between time that causes us problems.”

  Jones sat down on the opposite row of chairs and laid his fists on his knees. Stride took an unopened bottle of spring water by the cap from the seat next to him. He handed it to Jones, who grabbed it in his big hand.

  “You must be dry after your flight,” Stride said.

  “In fact, I am.” Jones undid the cap and drank down half the bottle. He recapped it and then said, “May I keep this until I finish it, or would you like your fingerprint sample back right now?”

  Stride actually felt himself blushing. “Keep it,” he snapped.

  Jones grinned and put the bottle on the floor.

  “Why contact me after so long?” Stride asked. “Do you know about Tish Verdure and the book she’s writing about the murder?”

  “I still have friends in the Rasta community,” Jones explained. “As you know, there was an article in the Duluth paper recently that rehashed the crime and mentioned that a Rasta vagrant was a suspect. It made the rounds on our Web sites, and someone finally sent me the article with a note that said, ‘Was this you?’ ”

  “But why come forward now? I assumed you were dead. You were safe.”

  “I thought long and hard, believe me, but I decided it was time to put that part of the past behind me. I confess I was also a little curious about you. The article mentioned that you were a Duluth detective, and I was surprised to find out that you were the same boy I confronted that night.”

  “I looked up Dandelion Men on the Web,” Stride said. “You didn’t mention what happened to you in Duluth.”

  Jones eased back into the chair. His girth filled the space, and his waist squeezed against the armrests. “Oh, I wanted to talk about Duluth, but I knew that people were still looking for me. It’s like being a bear loose in the city streets. They don’t just put it in a cage when they find it. They shoot it dead.”

  “The cop who shot at you back then,” Stride said. “He was dirty. I thought you should know.”

  “That was a dirty time.”

  “Why did you choose that life?” Stride asked. “Why be a drifter?”

  “I guess you could say I was appalled by modern life,” Jones said. “I felt disconnected. Only a boy can be quite so naive. Still, the community I found in the shadows was deeper and stronger than any I have found since. It was hard to leave it behind. Every now and then, I try to find the dandelion men again, but they’re an endangered species. Like feral animals whose habitat has been destroyed. They scamper away when I come close. I’m no longer from their world, you see.”

  “You sound like you miss it,” Stride said.

  Jones tugged at the lapels on his suit with a bemused smile. “I do. Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing again. It’s only a fantasy.”

  “Tell me about Laura.”

  “Laura?”

  “The girl who was murdered.”

  Jones folded his hands over his chest. “Yes, of course. I never knew her name until I saw that newspaper article. She was just a girl in the park.”

  “All these years, I thought you killed her,” Stride said.

  Jones nodded. “And now?”

  “Now I’m not so sure. We have a new witness. Someone who says you rescued Laura instead of attacking her.”

  “A witness,” Jones said. “Yes, someone else was in the woods that night. I never saw him, but I knew he was there. I smelled the cannabis he was smoking.”

  Finn, Stride thought.

  “There was another boy in the softball field,” Jones added. “He was the one who attacked Laura. I stopped him from harming her.”

  Stride nodded. “After the fight, Laura ran toward the north beach.”

  “Yes, I know. I followed her.”

  “Did you go all the way to the beach? Did you see her there?”

  “I did,” Dada said.

  “What did you see?”

  Dada smiled. “I already told you, Lieutenant. That girl had secrets.”

  33

  We’re never going to make it back to Minnesota tonight,” Maggie said.

  They were an hour west of Fargo, seated on top of a park bench overlooking a boat launch that dipped into the waters of Lake Ashtabula. Immediately to their left was the concrete wall of the Baldhill Dam, which held back the Sheyenne River and created a narrow stretch of man-made lake. It was late afternoon. The air smelled of boat fuel and hamburgers. Jet Ski riders left wakes in the water. Nearby, in the camping area, children splashed and squealed along a strip of sand beach.

  “Peter wants his plane back,” Serena replied.

  “Yeah, but this guy could be out there fishing until the sun goes down.”

  After leaving the Mathisen farm, they had stopped at police headquarters in Fargo, where their North Dakota colleagues helped them identify the man who had served as lead detective investigating the murder of Finn’s mother, Inger Mathisen. The detective, Oscar Schmidt, had retired from the force more than a decade earlier and relocated with his wife to a town called Valley City. Serena and Maggie tracked down
the Schmidt home, where his wife pointed them north to Lake Ashtabula, Oscar’s favorite spot for fishing.

  “You want to go in the water?” Serena asked.

  Maggie tented her sunglasses and squinted at the park. “You mean skinny-dipping?”

  “I mean it’s hot. Let’s roll up our pants and dip our feet.”

  “You’re on.”

  They left their shoes on top of the bench and folded the legs of their jeans above their calves. The sand on the beach was scorching, but the lake was cold when they stuck in their toes. They shuffled a few feet out until they were standing in eight inches of water.

  “So is it a coincidence?” Serena asked. “Finn’s mother was beaten to death? Just like Laura?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe the intruder story?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. I wonder why Oscar did.”

  “That’s what we’ll ask him. Assuming he ever gets in off the lake.”

  Serena lifted her chin toward the warm sun. Maggie finished a can of Diet Coke while they waited, checking her watch impatiently as half an hour passed. Finally, a fifteen-foot aluminum boat that had obviously seen many years of service put-putted toward the boat landing. At the stern, an old man with shaggy gray hair and a mustache that curled over his upper lip cut off the Evinrude motor and let the boat drift into the shallow water. He wore navy blue swimming trunks with white vertical stripes and was shirtless. His belly bulged like a basketball, but the rest of his skin was loose and leathery. He was small, no more than five feet five, and wore sunglasses. As Serena and Maggie watched, Oscar Schmidt climbed into the water, dragged the prow until it was nearly beached on the concrete ramp, and then tramped toward his red Chevy truck in flip-flops.