A Map of the Dark

by Karen Ellis

Elsa adds, “It looks like he never flies. He drives, and somewhere between Ohio and Pennsylvania, he slips into the Ishmael Locke identity.”

  “His mom passed away about a year ago,” Rosie says, “and his dad died eight years ago. I spoke with one of his older sisters, Beth. She’s married with a couple of kids, lives in Seattle, seemed a little irritated when I first called but then she calmed down. My impression was that this is not a very nice family. Anyway, once I got her talking, she admitted she feels bad about pushing him around as a kid, tried to apologize to him a few years back but he didn’t want to hear it.”

  “Has she spoken to him lately?” Joan asks.

  “Beth says she hasn’t seen or heard from him in a long time,” Rosie says, “and that he isn’t close with either of the other sisters. Sammy is a loner, always has been.”

  Joan reaches toward the middle of the table, where the button has settled, and lifts it up. Sits back, studies it. “This the daughter? I’m kind of surprised no one’s mentioned her yet.”

  “He told me it’s his daughter,” Elsa answers, “but we haven’t found anything about a kid or a wife or a girlfriend, nothing like that. Have you?”

  “Took a little digging, but yeah. Zoe, she’s five now. The girl’s mother, Maryanne, says they weren’t together very long. They weren’t married; that’s probably why she doesn’t show up in most of his records. He was violent with her and she kicked him out when Zoe was an infant. Sent him a picture of the kid a couple of times but otherwise keeps her distance.”

  Lex asks, “You talked to her?”

  “I did.”

  Owen clears his throat. “If it was me, the minute the Amber Alert went public, I’d worry my time was limited, I’d want to go see my kid.”

  Joan nods. “Of course, that’s what most people would do. But the ties there sound weak; Nelson hasn’t shown any interest at all in Zoe since he left Alaska.”

  “He wears a button with her face on it,” Elsa argues.

  “Yeah, maybe that means something, or maybe it’s just for show. Obviously, I recommend we put a pair of eyes on Maryanne’s house, keep a lookout.”

  “Agreed,” Lex says.

  Rosie’s stomach grumbles so loudly, everyone laughs. Tate gathers lunch orders and twenty minutes later they’re picking at sandwiches, salads, coffee, water, a mess of refuse gathering in the center of the table as they continue to work.

  Elsa’s phone rings, screen flashing a number she now recognizes as McCracken’s cell. She drops her turkey-on-rye onto the mayo-smeared sheet of wax paper it came in.

  “Sang—hello.”

  “Good call, Elsa, about the floor.”

  “What did you find?”

  “He dug out a space and buried two toolboxes. Same size, same make, holding pretty much the same stuff. But, strangest thing, one’s a lot older-looking than the other one. Rusted. The tools inside that one look real dirty and caked. To my eye it looks like it’s been down there longer. My tech sprayed them with luminol, and, Elsa—there is definitely the presence of blood in both toolboxes.”

  Her stomach turns; she pushes away what remains of her sandwich. “Get it all to the Bureau’s Albany lab right away.”

  “On it.”

  “Take photos?”

  “I’ll zap ’em right over.”

  “Perfect. Thanks.”

  “Wait.” He stops her from hanging up. “One more thing. Two, actually. Locke’s van was found this morning at Manchester Commons, abandoned, in the parking lot outside the Yankee Candle. And a blue Ford Escort was reported stolen a little while later from in front of Crabtree and Evelyn.”

  “Manchester Commons is a mall, I take it.”

  “Big one, parking lots sprawling every which way. Cars get stolen from there every week, but because of the van, this one seemed worth mentioning.”

  “Put an APB on it.”

  “Already done. And we’ve impounded the van—going over it with a you-know-what.”

  Immediately after the call, McCracken texts half a dozen photos to her phone, and she scrolls through them. Two red toolboxes containing a matched set of items. A screwdriver, a wrench, pliers and a hammer, masonry nails, along with things that wouldn’t make sense in a typical handyman’s kit: a variety of carabiner hooks, cuticle trimmers, a shrimp fork, loose cigarettes, a partially burned stick of incense, a plastic lighter, a knot of filthy rope. Two identical sets of illogically gathered tools, everything crusted and bloody and used.

  Elsa thinks of Sammy Nelson and hates this, hates him. Suddenly she hears her mother’s voice from thirty years ago: Hate is a strong word. Try dislike. Emotion fountains and Elsa pushes it back.

  She thinks of Ruby.

  If you wait long enough, someone comes to get you.

  But they don’t always. Sometimes, you wait and wait.

  She feels the hard smack of hand on flesh, terror rippling through icy surprise. You recoil, as if that will protect you, but it won’t, not when the person holding all the rage is stronger than you are.

  She reaches to the center of the table, pulls a tissue from a half-empty box, and wipes dry her forehead. Sits there, hiding her growing panic in the intentness of listening as the task force continues to analyze the true nature of the man they’ll need to understand if they have any hope of finding Ruby in time. The thing is, Elsa feels she already understands him, more or less, but she doesn’t know how to begin to explain.

  A quote she’d used in her Ralph Ellison essay jumps out of a deeply buried memory bank and into her thoughts: I remember that I’m invisible and walk softly so as not to awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

  Yes, she understands that, not as a black man unseen in plain sight in racist America—“the novel’s major theme,” as teenage Elsa had dutifully informed her eleventh-grade English teacher—but more generally, as a person who learns how to hide her true self, how not to leave footprints. She hadn’t made the association when she was a teenager but now it resonates in the most awful way.

  But her Invisible Man isn’t Nelson’s; she doesn’t know his book. She goes online and calls up a sample from the Wells novel, her eyes landing at random on a passage: A feeling of extraordinary elation took the place of my anger as I sat outside the window and watched these four people…trying to understand the riddle of my behavior…I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

  And then another: To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think!

  But what does it mean? What does this idea, or vision, or whatever it is, of the temptations of invisibility and impunity—what does it mean to Sammy Nelson? She doesn’t even know whether the invisibility is supposed to be literal or figurative, if he’s reacting to some powerful metaphor by carrying that old book around or if he’s just out of his mind.

  Or maybe it means nothing. Maybe at home, wherever home is for him, maybe he has a whole shelfful of spine-broken books he’s studied for clues to his place in the universe. Books his sisters pressed on him to better himself.

  His trio of cruel sisters.

  Lex’s voice interrupts her thoughts: “Elsa? You okay?”

  She blinks. “I think the sandwich made me a little queasy.”

  “Deli mayo,” Rosie says. “Gotta watch out for it.”

  “Charlie and his mother are here,” Lex says. “Come on, Elsa, let’s get this over with.”

  20

  Mrs. Hendryk’s heels jitter a staccato rhythm on the linoleum floor. Charlie, seated beside her in the interrogation room, stares at his folded hands on the table. The mother refuses to let them begin without their lawyer, which wast
es another fifteen minutes. Finally he appears.

  “Apologies for holding you up,” the lawyer, Norman Osprey, says without a hint of remorse. He yanks out a chair and sits beside Charlie, but Charlie, Elsa notices, doesn’t even glance at the older man, whose horseshoe of black hair, she also notices, looks as if it’s been painted on.

  Lex pushes the stack of mug shots across the table. “Let’s get started.”

  As Charlie studies the array, his mother coaches him, saying, “Listen to your instincts, Charlie,” as if helping him prepare for a tricky exam. “Don’t overthink.”

  Elsa says, “Please, just let him look.”

  “Can’t I talk to my own son?” Mrs. Hendryk turns to her lawyer for guidance.

  “Of course you can,” Osprey answers firmly.

  Satisfied, she resumes her rigid posture, spine straight, hands joined, knees pressed tight. She instructs Charlie, “Go ahead.”

  He slumps, reviewing every face. Elsa sits across the table, leaning back as if they’ve got all the time in the world, which they emphatically don’t. Charlie’s omission about Friday night has already cost them valuable days they couldn’t afford to lose.

  Ignoring Mrs. Hendryk and the mind-warp she emits is almost impossible, and Elsa’s thoughts loop to her own mother, then to Mel, then to Tara. She’s glad she isn’t a mother because she wouldn’t have a clue how to correctly raise a teenager.

  Suddenly, Charlie’s face brightens with recognition. His finger stabs hard on Sammy Nelson’s mug shot from the Indiana case in ’08. “This is him.”

  Lex responds by striding briskly to the table from across the room, where he’d propped himself against the wall. Elsa leans forward, galvanized by the sight of Charlie’s fingertip on Nelson’s image. She asks, “You’re sure?”

  “That’s enough,” Norman Osprey says. “We’re done here.”

  Charlie continues as if the lawyer hasn’t spoken. “Absolutely, yeah.”

  Lex asks, “You’d testify to it?”

  “Norman said stop.” Mrs. Hendryk stands abruptly. “Charlie, I mean it, don’t say anything else.”

  “Come on, son.” Osprey lifts his briefcase from the floor and stands beside Mrs. Hendryk. “We’ll talk about this outside.”

  Charlie defies them both. “Yes, I’m sure this is who I saw that night, and I’ll definitely testify if you need me to.”

  “Charlie!”

  “Mom. I already fucked up enough. I have to tell them what I know.”

  You could practically see Charlie’s future draining out of his mother’s eyes. Elsa holds back the vitriol percolating in her mind—what’s the point? Once the DEA gets their rope around her son, Mrs. Hendryk will face a real reckoning. Norman Osprey opens the door for his clients. Elsa and Lex follow them out.

  “Svolosh,” Lex mutters, just the two of them in the windowless hallway. Somewhere in the near distance, a door slaps shut. Another opens, releasing a pair of investigators who move in silence in the direction of the elevators. “So now we know for sure.”

  Whether Nelson still has Ruby is another question, four days and nights having been squandered since she vanished. She says, “I feel like such an idiot.”

  “Elsa.” Lex’s hand on her back zippers warmth across her skin. “You couldn’t have known.” She wants to lay her head on his shoulder, but doesn’t. Wants to fall in love with his brother and be part of their family, but can’t. Whenever Lex Cole comes too close, warning bells go off, familiar, confusing.

  “I thought she probably ran away. You came to me—your instinct was right. I was wrong.”

  “We’re all wrong sometimes.”

  “I can’t afford to be wrong, not in this kind of work.”

  His palm rubs a circular motion on her shirt and her skin ignites. “Come on, let’s get back to work.”

  “Meet you there.” She gestures toward the women’s room down the hall. “Nature calls.”

  In the quiet of the bathroom stall, Elsa lets her mind rip free. It’s been years since she cut herself but today the urge is calling so loudly, pulling so hard. Thoughts racing and crashing with things she’d like to say to Charlie, narcissistic Charlie, who might have cost his former girlfriend her life; with thoughts of Ruby, and Sammy Nelson, and Roy, and Tara, and Mel.

  Mel, whom Tara hit. Beloved Mel.

  Elsa always believed that the violence would end with her if she didn’t have kids; another thing she was wrong about.

  Clearly, telling Tara about the Adderall was a mistake. But when Elsa thinks of that greasy little packet of heroin, she also knows that she had little choice.

  She wonders how long it will be before Roy dies.

  And she wonders about Ruby: What will her death be like?

  She can’t bring herself to return Tara’s call. Instead, she leaves a message for Mel: “Hey, sweetie, how are you? Can we talk? I need to hear your voice, okay?”

  And then the separateness of the stall, it’s cold isolation, engulfs her. No one will come for her here. Even if someone enters the bathroom, they won’t notice her, not if she’s quiet.

  She unhooks her bag from the door and finds her Swiss Army knife. The neat, reliable package of it, its parts tucked together like sleep, lends a perfect weight to the palm of her hand. She runs a finger along the smooth steel edges, flat on the sides, rounded at both ends. And then her fingernail finds just the right notch and pulls out the reamer. Calmness overtakes her. She rolls up her pants leg, sits on the toilet, props her leg up against the wall, and gets to work.

  21

  Why is it always me?”

  A fist forms in your gut. Your parents’ words volley above you as you stand there between them, trapped, small. Monkey in the middle.

  “It isn’t always you, Deb.”

  “You never discipline her.”

  “I still don’t know what she did.”

  “She threw a hairbrush across the room. It nearly hit me.”

  “No, Mom,” you protest, “you threw the hairbrush and it hit me.” A tender spot still echoing on the back of your leg. You’d been trying to get away.

  The veil of reasonableness snaps off, her tone blistering with heat. “Roy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  It’s her silence that does the trick. No one is as scary as she is when not-speaking. A decade of volatile marriage roils her features. You think that when your father looks into your mother’s face, he sees both his daughters, one lodged in each fierce eye, around which the storm of troubled motherhood swirls. You think he thinks that if he obeys the face, the eyes won’t blink. He must keep his daughters safe however he can.

  He addresses you while looking at her: “Elsa, come with me.”

  You are eight years old. You follow him up the stairs. She stands below, watching.

  Your bedroom door slaps shut and for a second you think your cat’s been caught in the door and you feel horrible because it’s your fault (again) but then you remember that Peabody ran away two months ago. Good for Peabody, you think while your father looms beside your narrow bed and says, “Pull down your pants.”

  You do it. You pull them down.

  He unbuckles his belt and snakes the leather out of the loops.

  “Daddy,” you whisper. The fist in your stomach reaching into your throat. He has never hit you before. If you lose him too, you’ll have no one. You feel yourself slip out of your body and flee to the ceiling, where you look down and commit the moment to memory. “Daddy, please.”

  His lips purse in a silent shush. He winks.

  He sits on the edge of your bed, nods at his lap, and speaks like an actor trying a new line that comes out too loudly: “Bend over!”

  You do it. You bend over. Ashamed of your naked butt.

  “When I slap my hands”—his whisper so low, you can barely hear it—“scream.”

  He claps the air above you as hard as he can, making a loud flesh-on-flesh noise. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Pause. A second set of five. He kno
ws the drill.

  For every clap, you scream your heart out.

  He isn’t touching you but still you feel the fear, knowing that she’s downstairs, standing where you left her. Listening.

  22

  Elsa walks through the detectives’ unit, the fresh wound on her shin chafing under the crisscross of too-small bandages she fished out of the bottom of her bag, and then stops at Lex’s desk. She puts down the rain-soggy cardboard tray of ordered-in specialty coffees that she just retrieved from reception and is taking back to the conference room. The weak department coffee isn’t cutting it anymore, and she needed an excuse to step out of the room, where the task-force members have circled everything they collectively know, again and again, in a mind-numbing roundelay—the presence of blood in both toolboxes—while they await results from the lab. Whatever the tech comes back with, presumably it won’t be good news about Nelson’s intentions—this man who presumably abducted Ruby Haverstock right out of Queens Beans and also presumably means her harm.

  Everything a presumption now. No, not everything. He carries that book around. Wears the photo pin. Collects identical sets of tools in matching toolboxes that he might, presumably, revisit in order to…what?

  What does he think he’s doing? What does he want?

  The task force has gone round and round the questions, trying to make some kind of sense of it, but the presumptuous nature of every answer makes it impossible to latch onto anyone without a hard set of facts to anchor them.

  And anyway, what does it matter why he’s doing it or what he wants? All they need is Ruby back. And to stop Sammy Nelson from ever doing it again.

  Elsa sits at the desk, then bends underneath it. She uses her phone’s flashlight app to illuminate the dusty shadows where apparently neither sunshine nor broom has visited for some time and sees it: the spare ammo clip missing from her bag. She already checked the bathroom, thinking it might have fallen out when she rescued her knife from its oblivion or succumbed to it in desperation, so blinded by a desire to cut herself that she might not have noticed anything else. Tracing further back in time, she recalled the clunky sound of something shifting inside her bag—maybe, she guessed, not shifting but falling out—when she tossed it onto the floor under Lex’s desk after retrieving the Zoe button to show him. Little Zoe Nelson, cherub-faced on a souvenir that the man who happens to be her father but doesn’t know her wears on his shirt.