Murder Scene

by Richard Montanari

  After Dale Reese carefully slipped the knife from the man’s waistband, Donnie Reese took the suspect to the ground. Hard. During the process, Elton’s pulled pork went flying, as the story would be told later that night. Ivy stepped back, checked the front of her suit. It was her working best, purchased at the Calvin Klein outlet store at Aurora Farms. There was not a drop of barbecue sauce on her. This day was getting better and better.

  Donnie cuffed the man, then he and Dale lifted Elton Matthews to his feet like an empty bag of Doritos.

  ‘Elton Thomas Matthews, I am arresting you for the aggravated sexual battery of Wanda Marie Chester,’ Ivy said. ‘You have the right to remain silent.’

  Matthews remained so, to Ivy’s delight. She leaned close to the man’s right ear.

  ‘Not sure if they’ll let you bring your Secret Tall lifts with you to state prison,’ she said. ‘Not to worry, though. I’m thinking you’re going to have your dance card pretty full. Good looking man such as yourself.’

  Elton Matthews just stared at the middle distance. Apparently, he’d had the sass punched out of him.

  ‘Boys?’ Ivy asked.

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’ Dale and Donnie answered in unison.

  God she loved the Reese brothers. She’d hire them away from the Sheriff’s office if she had the budget.

  ‘Please take out the trash.’

  The Abbeville Police Department was located in six rooms behind the village library on the east side of the town square. A marked door off the parking lot gave way to a short hallway, and a bulletproof Plexiglas window and security drawer to the left. At least, bulletproof was the prevailing theory. In all the time since it had been installed – forty-six years next spring – it had never been tested.

  The steel door at the end of the hallway opened with a keypad entry code, and led to a small meeting area. To the right was a battered desk for the duty officer; a hard right led to the village’s only holding cell.

  To the left of the entryway was a cramped coffee room which served as a storage area for the detritus of police work. Ivy had petitioned six years running at the town council meetings for either the funds to put an addition on the station, or funds to rent a secure storage facility. Not a penny so far.

  At the back of the station, in what was no more than a large windowless cubicle, was the chief’s office, such as it was. Being a bit claustrophobic, upon getting the job, Ivy had immediately bought some framed posters of sunny settings, travel placards for Bermuda, Fiji, and Cancun.

  Since buying the posters at a flea market Ivy had not set toe number one on tropical sand. Maybe she’d go this winter, she thought, or perhaps the ghost of Paul Newman would walk into this dreary place, sweep her off her feet, and take her to Ibiza.

  Neither scenario seemed likely.

  When Ivy returned to her office it was just after 7 p.m. She made herself a pot of coffee, her stomach rebelling at having been exposed to the bounty at the Rivertown Buffet and not eating a bite of it.

  She finished her report on the arrest of Elton Matthews and checked the day’s activity. With a population of just over two thousand, Abbeville supported three full-time officers, and three part-timers. The two patrol officers on duty this day had responded to seven calls ranging from a domestic disturbance on Martinsville Road, and a break-in at the Culpepper farm on Route 87. Ivy made note of this call, as there had been a few more break-ins at remote farmhouses of late.

  There had been a grand total of thirteen citations written that day. Seven moving violations, six parking tickets.

  The only other call was one for backup – a mutual aid request in police bureaucratic jargon – from the Middlefield Police Department, regarding a loose horse. According to the summary the horse, a one-year-old colt named Falstaff, and its mother, were safely reunited.

  As Ivy did each night before handing over her watch to the night duty officer, she opened the file cabinet and removed a file. She first let her fingers riffle across the tops of the folders, felt each name and case number drawing her into the past, into the bellowing darkness.

  She had long ago reconciled the fact that she could, of course, make copies of the documents, and keep these copies at home.

  But that would have felt too much like failure, she thought. That would have felt like she was relegating the open cases to history, to the secret, whispered lore of her village.

  This would never happen on her watch, Ivy Lee Holgrave had long ago decided.

  She owed the dead girls more than that.

  7

  When Will arrived at Washington Square Park, twenty minutes late, he saw her sitting on a bench – the bench, as he had come to refer to it – and his heart skipped a beat. He was suddenly transported twenty years into the past.

  It was where he had first set eyes on Amanda.

  Like her mother, Detta Hardy was petite and graceful, a natural athlete. In school her sports were lacrosse and soccer. As a December baby, and thus always younger than her classmates, Detta was, in theory, a little too small to excel in these sports, but a fierce determination and a commitment to the repetition of practice had secured her a spot on the A-teams for the three years she’d played. Over the past few years Will had tried to get her interested in cycling, and they had taken a few day trips together, but she didn’t seem to take to it as he had hoped.

  She had her mother’s emerald eyes and flawless cameo skin. Where many of her friends had jumped on the fashion juggernaut that was long, flowing hair – Will was pretty sure Detta called it the News-Barbie style – Detta had cut her hair short the previous summer, and kept it so. It framed her pretty face in a way that made her look even younger.

  Her one vice, the one accessory to which she had taken, was eyewear. She had, at last count, nearly a dozen pairs of glasses. Some were inexpensive readers, purchased at Duane Reade, but most were top of the line designer frames. Will often wished cycling had taken hold. It was cheaper.

  Today, looking so much like her mother, Detta wore a very studious-looking pair of tortoiseshell frames by Kate Spade.

  She looked up, saw Will crossing the square, pulled out her earbuds.

  ‘Hi, honey,’ Will said.

  Detta Hardy tapped her watch, reminding him, as always, that he was late.

  The Film Forum was opened in the 1970s as a minimalist space, a haven for small and independent film, with only fifty folding chairs and a single projector. Now located on West Houston, the complex had grown to a three-screen cinema showing a mix of first run, classic, and independent features, and was the only autonomous non-profit theater in the city.

  Today they were showing a film in Will’s pantheon of classics: Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious.

  They settled in their seats, perfect locations for the wonderful sound system, about a third of the way back, near the center. Detta knew Will was a little OCD about these things, and she never resisted or rushed him when he was in film fanboy mode.

  The print was pristine. Ingrid Bergman never looked more luminous; Cary Grant had never looked more debonair.

  After the film they walked in silence to the Starbucks on Sheridan Square. While Will ordered, Detta fired up her phone. With blurred fingers she shot off texts to her friends.

  As he waited for their coffees, Will noticed that the kid filling the order, the boy barista in the Rasta Life T-shirt and dirty blond hair tucked up into a slouchy rainbow cap, was smiling at Detta. Will gave the kid a frosty look as he picked up the cups and stepped over to the table.

  Detta glanced up from her phone, read her father’s vibe. ‘What?’

  Will nodded toward the counter. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Justin Babyface over there.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s just being nice.’

  ‘Let him be nice somewhere else.’

  ‘He works here.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Will made a ceremony of adding milk and sugar. Detta fired off another text, put
away her phone.

  ‘What did you think of the film?’ Will asked.

  Detta gave the question its due. ‘I love the way Hitchcock did that shot from the balcony, the one where Alicia gave the key to Devlin so he could get into the wine cellar. That was great.’

  Like her father, Detta always referred to actors by their character names.

  Detta sipped her latte, slipped effortlessly into therapist mode. ‘It’s this Friday, right?’

  ‘Is what this Friday?’

  ‘Your date with Mom.’

  Will knew that his daughter knew exactly when the date was. And the time. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where are you guys going?’

  ‘I thought we’d meet at Boris.’

  Detta pulled a face. ‘The place on Bleecker?’

  ‘No good?’

  ‘Dad. You don’t want a bunch of slobbering millennials in Aeropostale hoodies.’

  ‘I don’t?’

  ‘My God, are you serious? It would be like spending two hours in an Apple Care queue. You want romance, don’t you?’

  ‘I want romance.’

  ‘You want piano music and warm lighting, preferably in the 2,700 K range. Do you remember your Kelvin as it applies to the romance axiom?’

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘Lower is better,’ Detta said. ‘Especially when you’re over thirty. Five thousand Kelvin is in the light-box therapy range. Nobody wants to get frisky in a Walgreens. Well, that’s not true, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Plus a million,’ she said. ‘Most importantly, at the end of the date, you want boozy, outer space kisses in a doorway.’

  The image of his daughter making out suddenly lurched across Will’s mind. It was scarier than Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.

  ‘What, and I mean exactly what, do you know about boozy, outer space kisses?’

  Detta ignored the question. She sneaked another peek at boy barista.

  ‘What are you going to wear?’ she asked.

  Will had only thought about what he might wear Friday non-stop for the past week or so. He had nothing. He was thinking about hitting Barney’s on Wednesday, spending money he really didn’t have.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘It’s important, Dad. You’ve got to go for suave, not desperate. Desperate is not a good look for you. It’s not a good look for anybody. You sweat when you’re desperate.’

  ‘I do not.’

  Detta lifted her iPhone, snapped a picture of him. She tapped the screen, turned it to face him. He was sweating.

  ‘It’s hot in here,’ Will said.

  Detta put her phone away.

  ‘But to answer your question, I was thinking about wearing a blazer and slacks,’ Will said. ‘Not a suit.’

  ‘That works. Wear your navy Zegna, the two-button one Mom got you. It picks up the blue in your eyes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Mom will notice that you’re wearing something she picked out for you. This is brilliant subtext.’

  ‘You don’t think your mother will see through such a lame attempt at manipulation?’

  ‘Of course she will. She’s been doing it with you for years. Wear it anyway.’

  ‘Okay.’

  As they got ready to leave Detta added, ‘I won’t be able to chaperone, you know.’

  On Friday Detta was going to the theater to see School of Rock, still a golden ticket. She would be spending the night with her friend Maddie’s family in Chelsea.

  Ten minutes later they stood on the corner of Barrow and Seventh. Detta lifted a hand, hailed a cab. Before long, a taxi pulled to the curb.

  ‘I forgot to ask,’ Detta said. ‘How was your first day of school?’

  ‘You know how psych majors are. They parse every syllable.’

  ‘Gee. I never noticed that.’

  ‘I also caught some flak from a know-it-all grad student,’ Will said. ‘A transfer from Princeton, of all places.’

  ‘Fire at Will.’

  Will laughed. It was an old joke of theirs. He opened the taxi door.

  Detta kissed him on the cheek, slipped into the cab, rolled down the window.

  ‘So, how often are you checking the Amazon sales rankings?’ Detta asked.

  ‘Hardly ever.’

  ‘Dad.’

  His daughter read him like the back of a cereal box. ‘Maybe every ten minutes or so.’

  ‘That’s progress. I’m so proud of you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Love you, too.’

  As the cab pulled away, Detta glanced out the back window. She waved. In that moment she looked exactly like her mother, right down to the half-smile that had stolen Will’s heart so many years ago.

  Friday, Will Hardy thought.

  He would do this.

  He had to.

  8

  Ivy Holgrave lived in a white frame house a mile north of the village square, at the end of a cul-de-sac off Platteville Road. The house was nearly ninety years old, with a one-bedroom cottage at the rear of the wooded property, as well as a barn, equipment shed, and two acres of what was once a working chicken farm.

  When she was growing up, less than two miles away, this had been the Rademaker spread. Jens Rademaker, the patriarch of the clan at the time, had been a crackpot inventor of sorts. From time to time Ivy still found strange items bolted or screwed or welded together as she tilled the back and side yards of her gardens. She could never quite throw them away, keeping them all in a pair of large wooden crates in the barn, just in case she had the inclination to take one of them onto Shark Tank one day.

  When Ivy flipped on the kitchen light her eye was caught by the glint of stainless steel on the floor near the sink. Out of reflex and memory she reached down to pick up the bowl in order to fill it with water. She caught herself, and for perhaps the hundredth time felt a pang of sorrow.

  Amos no longer needed water.

  Amos had been her two-year-old Cairn. Over the years, Ivy had had any number of dogs, almost all of them terriers – Jack Russells, Bostons, Westies, Wire Fox, even a pair of Kerry Blues, littermates named Checker and Domino.

  Of all the dogs with whom she’d shared her life, none had been half the ratter that Amos was.

  In the end it was a critter that was Amos’s undoing. Even though he knew better, had been lectured on the subject many times, he chased a raccoon out onto Bluestone Road and was struck and killed by a car.

  Ivy knew she should put his bowls in a cupboard, that she should move on, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. Not yet.

  She flipped through the day’s mail, made herself a sandwich, looked out the back door. The lights were on in the small house at the rear of the property.

  All was as it should be.

  She took her sandwich, and the files, and walked down to the basement.

  The photograph was dog-eared, color-leached by time. In it, the girl – no more than twelve or so – stood on the beach at Edgewater Park, the sun overhead casting a thin shadow at her feet. Her eyes sparkled like the lake behind her. She wore the smile of a young girl at the precipice of adolescence on a perfect summer day.

  The photograph next to it on Ivy’s desk was of the same girl, three short years later. In this photograph her face had all but been destroyed.

  Her name was Charlotte Foster.

  Charlotte had been found twenty-five years earlier, almost to the day. She was fifteen at that time. No cause or manner of death was ever determined.

  That same year three other girls went missing; never found, never returned to their homes.

  Ivy turned in her chair, glanced at the tableau behind her. The calendars filled one entire wall, corner to corner, floor to ceiling. There were now more than one hundred, in all different shapes and sizes and paper stock.

  The collection had been curated from garage sales and flea markets and house sales throughout the state of Ohio, and had take
n Ivy as far as Allentown, Pennsylvania. From across the room the calendars looked bright and colorful and festive, many given away free as premiums for various products and enterprises. Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills, The Centaur Almanac, Lustrolite Cleveland.

  Ivy had once created the timelines as a spreadsheet, but found it too impersonal and clinical, as if the days and dates did not belong to people, to the girls who had lived them.

  When you looked more closely at the calendars you could see what Ivy Holgrave saw: a diary of terrible secrets.

  On the wall opposite the calendars was Ivy’s collage of photographs. These, too, were a pastiche of images taken and collected over many years. All the subjects were Ohio girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen. All had vanished without a trace. Some of the photographs were more than a century old.

  The questions Ivy asked herself on this night were the questions she’d always asked:

  Had they willingly gone with their captors? Had they been enticed into a car or a truck or a van by promises of fortune? Of love? Of simple human kindness?

  Almost all of the girls were from hamlets and villages. Ivy knew well the thoughts and dreams and desires of small-town girls, the allure of the road.

  Wherever these girls were headed, they did not arrive. But until that time when the earth returned their bodies, Ivy would keep them on this wall.

  Ivy took the bottle of bourbon, switched off the lights, climbed the stairs to the attic. She stepped out of the dormer, sat on the roof, something she had done since she was a little girl.

  Beneath the cloudless night sky Ivy looked out over Abbeville, the village of her birth. Death knew the back roads here, she thought. Death knew the girls from poor families, girls who never wore a piece of clothing unstained by another, girls who sang their own lullabies.

  Somewhere out there, in the hills and valleys and forests of Holland County, they walked.

  They each had a plea for Chief Ivy Lee Holgrave in this year of dark remembrance, this time of harvest.

  It was the silent prayer of the vanished.

  Find us.