“It didn’t last,” he murmured.
Tish blinked. Her voice was so low he could barely hear it. “No.”
Tish lay awake, naked, and stared at the sky. The clouds had broken up into a patchwork of dark islands, and she could see open spaces crowded with stars. Near her feet, the lake slurped at the shore. Tufts of cottonwood blew like snow out of the forest and drifted to the ground beside wet masses of heart-shaped leaves. The two of them were on their backs, sand rubbing their skin. Their fingers were laced together, their legs apart, like two dolls in a paper chain. She propped herself on one elbow and watched Laura sleep beside her. She saw a teardrop of rain land on Laura’s breast, and she bent over and tasted it with her tongue and then closed her lips over the nub of a hardened nipple. She was rewarded with a sigh of pleasure, a stirring, a rumbling in Laura’s throat.
“Do you want to swim?” she whispered.
“Mmm, you go.”
Laura barely came out of her dream, and then she was sleeping again. A spider no bigger than the head of a pin scampered over Laura’s shoulder, and Tish pursed her lips and blew it off. Laura murmured and turned over, balancing her head on the down of her forearm. Hair tumbled like a wild mask over her face. Her curving back was slick with sand. Her tattoo fluttered its wings at her.
Tish got up, glorying in the night wind on her body. She glided to the wet beach, where an inch of water pooled between her toes, and then stepped over moss and rocks as she dipped lower into the lake like a mermaid. As she got farther from the beach, the bottom fell away, and the deep water lifted her off her feet. She stroked lazily with her arms, floating. She turned over on her back, feeling cold fingers on her scalp. Her feet kicked and barely stirred a splash, nudging her body out toward the far center of the lake. The water was silk on her naked skin.
She wanted to shout for Laura to join her, but the beach was far away and black, and the silence felt sacred, as if she were in church. She let her feet dangle below her, swishing her arms to keep her face above the surface. When a mosquito whined in her ear, she allowed herself to sink. The lake enveloped her and roared in her ears. She drifted down, and when her chest demanded air, she sprang up with a flutter kick. Water dripped from her eyelashes, nose, and chin and ran from her hair down the middle of her back like the tickling caress of fingertips. She couldn’t hear, except for her own breath. She could barely see the angry ripples of the lake where she had disturbed it. A swampy dankness filled her nose. She was cut off from all of her senses, and she didn’t care. Out in the center of the lake, in a nether land between past and future, she realized she was happy. This was a moment unlike any other in her life. A moment without worry, only bliss.
As quickly as it had come, it wriggled through her fingers like a sea creature and never returned to her again.
Back on land, where the trees and water intersected invisibly on the half-moon of shoreline, she heard a noise. It radiated across the lake and landed in her ears and traveled through her body like shudders of thunder. Her head cocked in confusion. The noise repeated itself, dull and wet, a noise that had no business here in the woods. Her body became indescribably cold. She knew, without any glimmer of how she knew, that the noise was very, very bad.
Breaking the cathedral silence, she screamed, “Laura! Are you okay?”
There was no response, and somehow she knew there would never be a response. No musical voice. No laughter. No call from the shore. “I’m fine, silly, what’s the problem?”
Just a beating, pounding, thumping drumbeat. A killing beat.
She swam. She put her face in the water and clawed with her arms and kicked up waves behind her. She swam so far and so fast that her body scraped on the sand before she even realized she had scissored into shallow water. Panting, she stood up, wiping water from her eyes. Her mouth fell open, and when she tried to scream again, she couldn’t make a sound. She saw Laura’s body where it had been before, but nothing else was the same. Her limbs were sprawled and twisted. She smelled of copper and death. Beside her, thrown carelessly to the ground, was a silver bat.
Tish dived across the sand, crying, and wrapped her arms around the girl on the beach, rocking her like a baby, bathing herself in her blood, whispering in her ear, telling her to wake up, telling her how much she loved her.
Over and over.
Until they were both cold.
Tish wept silently into her hands. Maggie squeezed her shoulder while Stride opened his office door and signaled for a bottle of water. Tish took labored breaths and then straightened up and wiped her face.
“I didn’t expect it to hit me so hard,” she said. “I’ve held it in for a long time.”
Stride nodded. One of the secretaries brought in a bottle of water, and he twisted off the cap and handed it to Tish. She sipped it slowly.
“How did Cindy know you were there that night?” he asked.
“I was still on the beach when she arrived,” Tish murmured. “I hid in the woods, but she heard me behind her. I told her what had happened. I told her the truth about me and Laura.”
“Cindy never told anyone that she saw you there. Why did she protect you?”
“She knew I didn’t kill Laura.”
“That’s not a reason to keep quiet. You were a witness.”
Tish shook her head. “I didn’t see anything. Besides, Cindy wasn’t just protecting me. She was protecting her father, too. If people knew the truth about me and Laura, it would have killed him.”
“You should have talked to the police.”
“And say what?” Tish demanded. “For God’s sake, I was eighteen. I was scared out of my mind. I thought whoever killed her might think I could identify him. I thought people would blame me. To be gay back then meant you were a deviant, a child molester. I had already lost Laura, and I couldn’t bring her back. I didn’t know who did this. I didn’t have any information that would help the police. I just wanted to escape.”
“Did you touch the bat?” Maggie asked. “Will we find your fingerprints on it?”
Tish’s eyes flashed with anger. “You see? Even now, you’re wondering if I did it.”
“You were the last person to see her alive,” Stride told her.
“I never touched the bat,” Tish said. “I don’t care what you think of me now, but I’m telling you the truth. Finn confessed. He must have followed Laura that night and seen us making love. He must have been crazy with jealousy. So when I went into the lake, he lost control. For all I know, he was stoned and had no idea what he was doing.”
“I’d like to tell you that this changes things, but it doesn’t,” Stride said. “Maybe you can put this in a book, but Finn is never going to see the inside of a courtroom.”
“Is this because I lied?” Tish asked.
Stride nodded. “I happen to believe you, but a jury could easily conclude that you and Laura had a fight. That Laura met you to say good-bye and you couldn’t deal with it. That’s what a defense attorney will say. Or maybe Peter woke up, took the bat, and followed the trail. He was stalking Laura, we know that. He had the bat all these years. Who knows what he was capable of? There’s also Dada. He fled the scene. His prints are on the murder weapon. Don’t you see? We may know what happened, but we’ll never prove what happened. You’re going to have to be satisfied with that.”
Tish stood up. She put the half-finished bottle of water on Stride’s desk and smoothed her clothes. Stiffly, she extended a hand for him to shake. Her grip was weak and unconvincing. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said.
She slipped out of the office and closed the door behind her.
Maggie looked at Stride. “What do you think?”
Stride frowned. “She’s still lying about something.”
38
Clark Biggs sat in a bar on the main street in Gary, with his big fingers laced around a bottle of beer. Donna nursed a Diet Coke beside him, but they had hardly talked. When she put her hand tentatively on his shoulder, he couldn’t eve
n turn his head to look at her. She laid her head against his arm, and he knew she was crying, but he didn’t feel anything. He couldn’t comfort her when he was numb all over. He wanted to cry, and he couldn’t. He wanted to get angry, and he couldn’t. It was like being in a dream where you wanted to run and your legs wouldn’t go.
He knew what Donna wanted-to see if they could rebuild a life, to put their marriage back together after Mary had forced them apart. She wanted something to fill the emptiness, but it was never going to happen. Without Mary, he had no life and didn’t want one.
“I wish you’d let me in,” Donna murmured.
Clark didn’t reply. He drank his beer. The bar was crowded, but the cacophony of voices created a bubble of privacy around the two of them. He would have been happier being alone. He didn’t want Donna or anyone else to share his grief.
“Do you still blame me?” she asked.
Clark hesitated and then shook his head. He had given up the anger he felt for Donna. She had no way of knowing that a monster was in the woods. It was just that life was so damn fragile, and there were so many predators out there. A girl goes to a store to buy a graduation gift and winds up kidnapped and strangled. A girl goes to a Halloween party and gets beaten to death in the backyard. A girl goes to an island resort and disappears forever. Fragile. There and gone in the time it takes to cry. No one was ever to blame, and no one ever seemed to pay the price.
“It wasn’t you,” he told her. “It could just as easily have been me with her when it happened.”
“Thank you, Clark. I needed to hear that.”
Clark realized that his hands were wrapped so tightly around the bottle of beer that his knuckles were white. The truth was that he wasn’t numb at all. He was holding his emotions down like a bathtub toy under the water, because he was afraid of them popping up. Afraid that his grief and fury would be like a tidal wave washing him away if he stared them in the face. He didn’t know how to deal with any of it. He could be hollow and dead, or he could open the locked door in his heart and go insane.
Behind him, wind and heat blew through the smoky air as the door opened. He heard a chorus of teenage chatter, and both he and Donna turned around as the players from a girls’ softball team squeezed into the bar, dressed in white jerseys and shorts, their long hair tumbling and blowing as they peeled off their caps. Their faces glowed with pinkness and sweat. They laughed and shoved each other; it was a postgame victory celebration. They dropped bats, gloves, and balls in a corner near the door, and one of the softballs rolled across the wooden floor and wound up at Clark’s feet. He leaned down and scooped it up. It was dirty and solid. A girl about Mary’s age, stocky and strong, with chestnut hair, clapped her hands and waved at him. Clark tossed the ball to her underhanded. She caught it with a big grin and juggled it in her hands as she slouched into a chair.
“Do you ever wish that Mary had been like that?” Donna asked. “Just an ordinary girl?”
“She was who she was,” Clark said.
“Yes, but she missed so much. Getting crushes. Getting her first kiss. Having a best friend. It could have been her on that team, Clark. She could have been any one of those girls.”
“She was happy,” Clark insisted.
Donna stared wistfully at the girls on the other side of the bar. “She was only happy because she didn’t understand what she couldn’t have.”
“What are you saying?” Clark asked.
“I don’t know. We always said it was God’s will, but did God really want her to be like that? Did God want us to split up because we couldn’t handle it? I don’t think God was watching us at all when He let it happen.”
“Are you saying Mary is better off dead?”
“No.” Then she said, “I don’t know. I can hardly put it into words, but yes, on some level, don’t you think she’s better off?”
Clark swung back to the bar. He didn’t want to look at the girls’ team anymore. He couldn’t bear their sweetness and young noise. “Mary’s not better off,” he said. “I’m not better off. Maybe you are.”
“That’s not what I mean. You know it’s not. I just need to find some meaning in this. Some explanation. Some purpose.”
“There’s no purpose at all.” He waved at the bartender. “Another beer over here.”
“Getting drunk won’t bring her back,” Donna said.
“What do you care? I’m not your husband anymore, so just leave me alone.”
Donna sniffled and took a sip from her cola. Clark was impatient as the bartender poured his beer, and he drank a third of it in the first swallow when the man put it down in front of him. The more he drank, the more the wall began to crack. Emotions slipped out. He felt his eyes burning with tears.
“Oh, no,” Donna murmured.
“What?”
She pointed at the television screen over the bar. Clark saw a press conference under way live on the nine o’clock news. The St. Louis County attorney, Pat Burns, stood in front of a battery of microphones in the lobby of the courthouse. Behind her, he saw the two Minnesota detectives he knew. Maggie Bei and Jonathan Stride. He caught the last few words of a crawl on the bottom of the screen.
NO CHARGES TO BE FILED.
“Hey!” Clark shouted at the bartender. “Turn that up, okay?”
The bartender aimed a remote control at the television. Clark leaned forward, straining to hear. Some of the conversation in the bar dwindled as faces turned toward the screen. It was a small town. They all knew Clark and Donna.
“… substantial speculation about the murder of Laura Starr that occurred in Duluth in 1977,” Pat Burns said. “Recent reports in the media have suggested that we have a suspect in custody and that charges in that case are imminent. Unfortunately, these reports are not accurate. We have made no arrests to date, and we do not have sufficient evidence at this time to put before a grand jury. We will continue to investigate any leads that emerge in this terrible crime, but it isn’t appropriate to raise false hopes in a community that wants justice.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Clark asked.
Donna wiped her eyes. “They’re giving up. That’s how lawyers talk.”
Clark heard one of the reporters ask a question. “Is it true that a suspect in the crime attempted suicide following interrogation by Duluth police?”
A photo appeared in the upper right corner of the television screen, and Clark saw the face of the man in the photo array that Maggie had shown him. He saw the name. Finn Mathisen.
“I can’t comment on that,” Burns replied.
“… heard there might be a confession in the case,” another reporter said over the chorus of voices.
Burns shook her head. “We’ve conducted numerous interviews with witnesses, and we’re still evaluating them. At this point, the police do not have any statement in hand from anyone claiming responsibility for the murder.”
“Has Peter Stanhope been cleared of involvement in the murder?”
“I’m not going to discuss anyone’s guilt or innocence.”
“Do you think this case will ever be solved?”
“I very much hope so.”
Clark didn’t look at Pat Burns. He studied Maggie’s face behind her. What he saw there turned the hope in his heart to dust. When she looked at the camera, it was as if she were looking directly at him, admitting she had failed, apologizing.
Another voice. “… is reporting that the suspect is a Superior resident named Finn Mathisen, and that Mathisen is also a suspect in the recent string of peeping incidents involving teenage girls?”
Clark held his breath. Donna clung to his arm.
“We are gathering evidence with regard to the so-called peeping tom cases,”Burns said. “Mr. Mathisen is a person of interest in that investigation, but he has not been charged. That’s all I’ll say.”
“Is it true that one of the peeping incidents led to a girl’s death?”
“We are investigating whether the death by drown
ing of a mentally challenged girl in Fond du Lac is in any way related to a peeping incident involving the same girl. It’s too early to draw any conclusions.”
“Turn if off,” Clark told the bartender.
The bartender looked back at him with his arms crossed. “You sure, Clark?”
“Turn if off,” he repeated.
The man switched channels.
“Too early to draw any conclusions?” Clark asked.
Donna stroked his bare arm. “They have to say that. It doesn’t mean he won’t be charged. You can’t obsess about it, Clark. Let them do their jobs.”
“He’s going to get away with it.”
“You don’t know that.”
Clark closed his eyes. His drunken mind was like a dam, cracking and sprouting fissures under the relentless pressure of a swollen river. Each time one of the girls behind him squealed with laughter, he heard Mary’s laugh. It was as if she were still alive, holding out her hand and calling for him. When he tried to picture her face, however, he couldn’t see it. Another face intervened in his mind.
The sallow, leering face of Finn Mathisen.
“Clark?”
He heard Donna, but she was far away.
“Clark?” she asked again.
“I’m here,” he said hoarsely.
“I’m going to take you home,” she told him.
Clark nodded.
“Let me run to the ladies’ room, and then I’ll drive us back to the house. I’ll stay there, okay? I won’t leave you alone. I’ll stay with you tonight.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be right back,” Donna said. She hesitated and added, “I need to tell you something, but not here. When it’s just the two of us, we can talk.”
She nudged past him, but he grabbed her arm. They were surrounded by people pushing and shoving against them, smelling of smoke and stale beer, screeching a jumble of words that made his head spin. He pulled her face close, so that he could inhale her lilac perfume. He saw yearning and despair in her eyes. The down on her neck felt soft and familiar under his fingers. Her chest rose and fell like a scared bird.
In the Dark aka The Watcher Page 27
