Silence on Cold River

by Casey Dunn

  Now Jonathon wasn’t just a stranger in the woods. He was little more than a stranger, with a reason to hate her. The adrenaline surging through her numbed her injured leg to a degree, but she knew she still wouldn’t be able to run on it. She backed up a step, and her left ankle threatened to buckle. The trail was morgue silent, and the sudden heaviness in the air had brought a hush over the usual chatter of birds.

  “You must have a lot of bad days and bad nights, Ama. And you carry a lot of cash,” he mused as if he hadn’t heard her. “That’s not safe, Ama.”

  “I was a total asshole. I’m sorry. It really wasn’t about you. If I could go back to that night, I’d smack myself. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?” Her mind raced. She didn’t have any cash on her, and she wasn’t wearing any expensive jewelry. She had nothing to barter.

  “Stop saying sorry,” he barked, his calm demeanor splintering for a second. “Don’t say sorry,” he repeated, regaining his earlier tone. “Say thank you. This is where you say, ‘Thank you, Michael.’ ”

  Michael?

  Ama swallowed hard. Familiarity washed over her. Why did that phrase hit her straight in the gut? Before she could respond, Jonathon brought his cane behind his head and swung hard. The thicker end connected with Ama’s temple. The woods went bright white in front of her eyes, and a dull crunch filled her head. She was unconscious before she hit the ground.

  MARTIN Chapter 5 | 4:30 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  DETECTIVE MARTIN LOCKLEAR SAT AT his desk at the Tarson Police Department and spun a pen between his fingers, swiveling back and forth in his rotating chair like windshield wipers in slow motion. There was one critical difference: windshield wipers were useful. When he’d been considering taking the position as Tarson’s only detective, he’d figured a little mountain town like this would at least have a friendly hum to it. But now, after three months on the job, he’d concluded that Tarson was more like a morgue than it was like Mayberry.

  Martin’s old station in Savannah, Georgia, where he’d spent a decade as a detective on the narcotics unit, was a living thing; loud as a freeway at rush hour and just as pissed-off. If there was a spell of quiet, it was understood to be an eye in an ever-present storm, a moment to prepare for battle. But the eye of the storm always passed. He’d been on edge, loaded and ready, for three long months.

  He exhaled, planted his feet on the threadbare carpet, and put down the pen. Last night, Martin had pulled up to the one-bedroom brick house he rented and found himself standing in the bathroom, his hand on the medicine cabinet’s mirrored door where sleeping pills and painkillers should’ve been—would’ve been, had he been standing in his old home in Savannah.

  The stagnant quiet of this station, of this town, made him feel like he was the storm. His recent track record certainly read like the wake of one.

  Martin glanced at his left hand, the fog of memories clearing for just a moment, and the stale, slow drone of the department returned. His thumb was absently gliding over his ring finger, spinning the ghost of his wedding band, his skin still faintly striped from the nine-year shadow. His marriage had almost been a casualty of his old job. Then his addiction had eaten them both, fast and whole.

  His wife, Stacy, went first. He came home one night to find her gone, her closet empty. She hadn’t left a note; there wasn’t anything left to say that hadn’t been said a thousand times before. His job had been next. They’d said it wasn’t personal—budget cuts, plain and simple. They’d offered to write him a letter of recommendation anywhere he wanted to go, as long as it was somewhere else.

  Martin’s gaze traveled the perimeter of the main room of the Tarson Police Department, the only somewhere else that had even offered him an interview. Gray walls, gray carpet, a black plastic clock ticking away on the front wall, six basic desks arranged in two rows facing forward with a bigger desk by the main door for the receptionist, a woman who had an army of little fluffy dogs she knitted clothes for and absolutely no interest in answering the phone if anyone else was around to take the call. The whole setup reminded him more of an elementary school classroom than the beehive feel of his old precinct. The department chief’s office loomed off to the right like an Orwellian principal.

  On the back wall were doors to two incident rooms, then a short hall to a pair of interrogation rooms, a storage room, and a janitor’s closet no one ever seemed to open. Just past the locked door began the second half of the building, where people under arrest were printed, processed, and detained while awaiting bail, arraignment, or transfer. Those arrests generally fell into one of three categories: drunk driving, drugs, and bored teenagers with spray paint. Sometimes an overachieving citizen managed to land in all three categories, which Martin had unofficially coined the Tarson Trifecta.

  The main door swung open, lifting Martin’s gaze. Eric Stanton, a baby-faced, second-generation beat cop born and raised in Tarson, walked in with two white plastic bags of Chinese takeout. Stanton dropped one bag on his own desk and then strode to the captain’s office with the other bag tucked under his arm.

  Captain James Barrow was visible in stripes through the open blinds that covered the large office window. He was sitting at his desk, the side of his face illuminated by a small lamp, the overhead lights turned off. One hand raked through what was left of his silver hair. The other pressed a phone to his ear. Martin watched Stanton walk into the office and set the bag on Barrow’s desk. Then he retreated from the office and back to his own workstation, Captain Barrow never once looking up.

  The white plastic bag slouched down, revealing a slender brown paper bag beneath, the top twisted as if wrapped around the throat of a bottle. Martin narrowed his eyes, entertaining a prick of resentment, but quickly dismissed it. What was the chief of police supposed to do, walk into the liquor store? And how could Stanton—groomed since birth to respect rank and badge—be expected to say no?

  Martin had a soft spot for Stanton. The patrol officer had taken Martin out to lunch and on a tour of the jurisdiction his first day on the job, right after the captain had more or less reamed him out in place of a welcome: I know about your record. No one else needs to. This is your second chance, so don’t blow it.

  The entire tour lasted less than an hour, and Stanton’s dispatch radio had remained dead. Martin had been tempted to ask him if it was on. Stanton was a talker, especially when it came to telling stories about Tarson’s history. Turns out, the foothills ringing the town weren’t as untouched as they looked. Beneath the earth ran a labyrinth of Cold War–era fallout shelters and abandoned gold mines. Stanton’s favorite anecdote was about an evangelical group that had custom built a tiny underground village, complete with a chapel, and illegally sold sections of the subterranean real estate by the square inch.

  Then the recession struck in the eighties, and it hit Tarson and places like it harder than most. What jobs there were dried up, including an old factory that had employed half the population that shuttered its doors overnight. Most of those who had the means to leave left. What remained of Tarson had been on a morphine drip for twenty years.

  Martin caught himself staring at the boundary map of the Tarson jurisdiction pinned to the wall by the front door, his gaze roaming the green, unsuspecting range of foothills. Six months ago, when the posting for a detective position in Tarson had shown up on a job board the same day he got out of rehab, he’d decided to pretend that Tarson had been entirely unknown to him, that it would be new, fresh, untainted with any smudge of personal history. Telling himself an outright lie on his first day of freedom probably wasn’t setting himself up for success, but here he was: three months employed, six months sober, and miserable.

  The truth was Tarson was the last pushpin marker on a murder case Martin had worked that had gone cold two years prior. The final clue was at a rest stop at the edge of town, the last place a person could take a piss behind a locked door without buying something first before they reached the Tennessee state line:
a garbled, seven-second message left by Toni Hargrove, a prostitute-turned-informant, from a parking lot pay phone to Martin’s cell phone. Two years later, he still couldn’t fall asleep without thinking of Toni, terrified and desperate, calling the one person she thought would hear her, help her, and instead of that person answering her call, he’d been adrift on a cloud of diazepam and Xanax.

  When local PD arrived at the rest stop the next day, the receiver on the pay phone she’d used still dangled from the box, and two of the number keys were missing—the three and the nine—although no one who worked at the rest stop could tell investigators whether the phone had been tampered with before or after the call. It took them an hour to find Toni’s body, her throat sliced from the base of her chin to the dip in her collarbones and her skin flayed open. They never did find the tip of her tongue—or any scrap of a lead on who had killed her. But Martin knew the blame was his to bear.

  Martin half believed it was fate that had drawn him morbidly back to Tarson, but whether fate was shining a beacon of guidance or telling him to run like hell was a mystery. He’d wanted to shake the satellite images he’d memorized of two-lane roads crisscrossing the scar of mountains. But he saw them when he closed his eyes, a pattern seared into his mind’s eye like looking too long at the sun. He did know this much: the past would always nip at his heels if he stayed in this line of work. So he took the job.

  Martin bent over his computer, the burn of memories rekindling his motivation, and as he brought up the browser to check chat rooms Toni had once frequented, the department tip line chirped. It was the number citizens used to call in nonemergency situations and tips for older cases. Captain Barrow took the call from the master phone on his desk. Martin studied the older man through the glass. His expression didn’t change as he jotted down a note before hanging up the phone. Then he emerged from his office, his eyes squinting with the shift in light from his dim room into the blue wash of the fluorescent lights overhead, and walked to Stanton’s desk.

  “Run this plate for me,” he said. “Call was about some creep in a van. Digits look familiar.”

  Stanton took the paper. His brow lifted. “Don’t have to look it up, Captain. That’s Eddie Stevens’s van.”

  “Christ.” Captain massaged his temples. “Should’ve known. It’s been a year coming up soon.”

  “Today, Cap. A year today,” Stanton said, his voice dropping off. “Should we go check on him?”

  “No. We’re the last people that man wants to see today,” Barrow responded, showing the first signs of softness Martin had seen since meeting him. “He can spend all day in that parking lot if it suits him,” he said, and returned to his office.

  Martin turned off the computer screen and strode to Stanton’s desk. “Who is Eddie Stevens?” he asked.

  EDDIE Chapter 6 | 5:00 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  EDDIE CLOSED THE BACK COVER on Hazel’s journal. He could probably recite every entry by now. He hadn’t found anything new. At least the passages about Hazel’s love of music brought him bittersweet joy. When she described learning something new, her handwriting would get bigger and loopy. She’d doodled notes in the margins.

  She described her devastation when her regular chorus teacher went on medical leave. Then in one entry, she’d marked the date with stars and wrote: The vocal coach from the Music Box is our new chorus sub! He asked me to stay after class and told me I AM MORE TALENTED THAN ANYONE HE HAS EVER MET BEFORE. He said he’s going to help me after school free of charge and push himself to be the teacher I need to bring out the music inside.

  Mixed emotions passed through Eddie as he remembered hearing that news. He’d initially suspected something ill-intentioned from the coach, but he was reluctant to refuse the offer. Hazel hadn’t made any friends and had sunk deeper and deeper inside herself. If this was a way to bring her back out, he owed it to her to try. Eddie had sat in on their first meeting. The coach, Jonathon Walks, was calm and soft-spoken. He had immediately agreed to Eddie’s request that Hazel’s meetings never take place in an empty building or behind a closed door. Hazel was also a no-nonsense type of girl and would’ve told Eddie the moment she thought something was off with Mr. Walks.

  Eddie wondered about him now. Jonathon had joined the search effort, even taking time out of work to help comb the woods and pass out flyers. He kept looking long after the police had stopped. When he took a temp job in Dalton, he had given Eddie his phone number and asked him to please call with any news of Hazel. But there had been no news.

  The patter of light rain against his windshield made Eddie look up. He glanced from the rain to his clock. It had already been an hour. If he’d done this last year, Hazel might still be with him. They could be on that hike together right now. Then again, even if he’d waited in the parking lot, whatever happened that day had happened behind the wall of trees separating the parking lot from the woods.

  This is stupid Waiting in a car isn’t going to do a damn thing.

  He exhaled, closing his eyes. He should’ve spent the time on the trail.

  He drew the collar of his jacket close around his neck and pulled his hat snug against his bald scalp. It had rained that day, too. How cold had Hazel gotten? Had she been wearing enough clothes? She hated the cold. As soon as the temperature dipped below seventy, she lived in her long black coat and boots. The girl would wear three scarves at once.

  Eddie pulled off his hat and shoved it in the console. It didn’t seem right to strive for warmth when Hazel could be out there, cold and wet. He knew it was silly to think she was still in these woods. The only reason she’d still be there would be that she was dead. Eddie wondered if that was what he was trying to make himself see.

  The dark of evening moved in with no courtship, and without warning, the world in front of him was all shadows. He gently stowed Hazel’s belongings and the case file in the floor of his van and tucked his gun under his seat before turning over the ignition. The engine begrudgingly came to life. Eddie stared down the trailhead once more, then put the van in reverse. He switched on his headlights. As he made the turn, they caught on the silver sedan parked on the opposite side of the lot. He stopped the van. The lady must still be out there.

  He swung his gaze back in the direction of the trail. He could tell he’d spooked her. And why wouldn’t he? Since Hazel vanished, Eddie had learned how different a female’s reality was than a male’s. When a man walked to the store, his biggest worry was he’d forget something. A woman’s biggest worry was that she might not make it home. He thought he’d understood that difference before Hazel went missing. He’d taught Hazel basic self-defense and little tricks like how to get out of zip ties. He thought it had been enough. But she was barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet.

  The blond woman was taller than Hazel but just as thin.

  What if she’s waiting for me to leave before she comes out?

  The reasoning seemed solid to him, and he let his foot off the brake, rolling toward the two-lane road.

  But what if she’s not?

  He braked again and put the van in park where it was, and then stepped out. Rain blew sideways in a gust of wind, pelting his exposed skin and sliding down his neck.

  “Hello?” he called out, shielding his eyes. “Miss?” He waited, trying to listen through the storm. “If you’re out there, I’m leaving now. Will you just shout or something so I know you’re okay?”

  Eddie waited. The wind wailed. He moved closer to the mouth of the trail. “Hello?” he shouted. He could barely hear himself. There was no way she’d hear him. He couldn’t leave without knowing she was okay. She hadn’t had on a pack of any sort. Just running clothes. Not even a bottle of water.

  “Dammit,” he muttered as he hustled back to his van. He pulled a flashlight out of the console and, after a moment’s hesitation, plucked his gun from under the seat. He made sure the safety was on, then holstered it at his back.

  Eddie crossed the parking lot an
d looked inside the woman’s car. There was a bottle of water in the cup holder. A change of clothes was folded in the passenger seat, and a pair of shoes was tossed on the floorboard. On the back seat, paper and manila envelopes sat in uneven stacks. It looked very much like she intended to come back to her car, change into clean clothes, and head back to her normal life, not spend the night in the woods.

  Eddie jogged to the tree line. He glanced behind him once more, not sure what he was looking for, then stepped onto the trail. The rain was lighter under the canopy, but between the storm and the onset of evening, the darkness was nearly complete. He swung the beam of his flashlight up the first rise. No signs of movement except for the water, which was already coming down the hill in tiny rivers.

  “Hello!” he called again. His voice sounded louder here, bouncing off the trees and shielded from the roar of the wind.

  Just get to the top of the first hill I bet I’ll be able to see a good piece from up there.

  There were two ways up. The first and more obvious path was the hiking trail, which cut back and forth in long, slow hills across the face of the mountain. That was no doubt the way the woman had gone. The second was nearly a straight shot from the bottom to the top. It was less than a quarter the distance, but it was a hell of a climb.

  His knee throbbed, stiff with the cold and from sitting in the van for over an hour, and he knew his good steps were numbered. Eddie illuminated the path once more, searching for any sign of movement, but it was empty. Before he could talk himself out of it, he stepped off the trail and headed straight up the hillside, sacrificing the easier terrain for a shorter distance. The incline quickly steepened, and he had to slow down, securing footholds against roots and rocks so the muddy earth didn’t slip out from under him.

  Eddie paused, panting, and glanced back, expecting to be halfway up, but he was nowhere close.