Silence on Cold River

by Casey Dunn

  She stared at the window and watched a morning storm thrash the world outside. Beads of rain gathered on the glass, forming streaks, then trailed down the pane and pooled on the sill. She stared and stared and stared, but nothing came. A gust of wind sent rain pattering against the pane, blowing the streaks sideways. Stray light from outside refracted in the beads and lines as they blurred and bent. Pain stabbed straight through her eyes and into her brain. Ama breathed in and out through her mouth, trying to slow her pounding heart, the rush of blood in her veins like someone had opened an internal floodgate.

  The beads turned to a haze, drawing her eye past them, and in the gray bloomed the whites of two eyes and the silver nose of a gun. She could see it, short and gleaming, pointed at an angle just beyond her.

  Another cart hit an uneven lip of tile outside and something must’ve fallen out, striking the floor with a sharp and sudden sound. Ama jumped in her bed, her fingers strangling the pilling bedsheet. A flash of light played on in her mind’s eye, a platinum starburst of discharged gunpowder, and she felt herself move into it, lurch toward the explosion.

  “Hazel.” The name whistled between her teeth.

  Hazel. Hazel. Hazel.

  She jerked upright and swung her gaze from side to side in search of a phone, pulling at every tether with her fingers. Then her blood ran cold and she froze, her hand suspended midair, her lips ajar with an inhale.

  Michael Jeffery Walton.

  In an instant, she remembered jumping in front of the bullet, the need to set something right, to tell someone Hazel was alive, somehow greater than the need to save herself. She alone knew who had Hazel. But she also had a very good idea of what he was capable of, of how obsessed he could be, how careful. If she knew where to send police, she’d be screaming his location from the rooftops. But she had no idea where he was, only that he’d never been found or found out. If Michael got wind she was sending the law after him, he’d either kill Hazel and disappear, or run and take her with him.

  Seventeen years ago, she knew as she walked out of that courtroom that Michael would kill again, that he would escalate to humans. But she also knew she couldn’t look back. She’d defended other patterned killers since then, studied two or three times as many as that. Nearly all of them shared one trait in common: they would not have stopped on their own. They had to be stopped. Once their need was triggered and the ritual began, completion was the driving goal.

  Ama was Michael’s trigger, ritual, and completion. There was a very good chance he knew she was alive. Ama could only hope he didn’t know she was awake and talking. Michael was unique in that he didn’t live for the hunt, didn’t stalk, didn’t chase. He allowed. He waited. And he remembered.

  But what if Ama didn’t remember? He needed to cross paths at random three times, isn’t that what he’d said? That it was critical—necessary, even—for an instrument to remember all three encounters? He’d even let one go because he didn’t remember. That man went home never knowing how close he’d come to never going home again.

  What if she didn’t remember the attack, Hazel… how far back could she pretend to forget? Would people buy it? Would it buy Hazel more time? Could Ama survive Michael then? And if she did, could she live with what she’d done?

  Her thoughts turned to the man who’d fired the gun. She’d pull what strings she could to reduce or dismiss whatever charges he was facing. But what the hell was a grown man doing in the woods at night in the pouring rain with a gun, anyway? He might not have meant to shoot her, but Ama doubted he was up to any good.

  MARTIN Chapter 34 | 12:00 PM, December 2, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia

  CLEANING OUT THE OLD DETECTIVE’S office had taken the entire morning. An hour into the project, Martin was furious, cursing the detective for leaving so much shit behind and the captain for making him clean it up. He was already behind on the case, and several hours of his twenty-four-hour time were spent in a dark, musty room, cleaning up another man’s trash. He couldn’t afford to lose a morning to a housekeeping assignment, but he didn’t have a choice.

  While his body stretched and worked, Martin surrendered to the task, and his brain slid into a resting state. With each box identified and moved, his thoughts began to slide into place, too. He trusted Eddie more than he wanted to, he realized, especially after convincing him to remain at the precinct of his own free will proved far easier than the task of readying the old office for Eddie’s stay.

  Martin left Eddie, swallowed the remainder of his lunch—a Pop-Tart from the vending machine—and walked into incident room two. He found Captain staring at an empty whiteboard. Eddie’s jacket had been resealed in its plastic bag and now sat neatly on the far side of the rectangular table. Manila envelopes were stacked to the left of it. Captain had another one in his hands.

  “Did Eddie give you any trouble?” Captain asked.

  “I think the trouble would’ve been asking him to leave. He said he isn’t going anywhere until we find out what happened to Hazel. I told him we’d be working in here and to knock loud on his door if he needs anything.” Martin nodded at the files, spying the names labeled on the tabs. “Let’s get started. I want to go interview Ama as soon as I get a feel for how big this might be.”

  “Now hold on a second. I’ll walk you through what I remember from these old cases, but there’s something you need to keep in the front of that mind of yours: sometimes people die and didn’t nobody do anything to them. Accidents happen. So does bad luck. A kid tries to run away or gets lost in thirty square miles of untouched terrain like Tarson Woods, and those odds go up a lot. Then there’s Cold River. It’s a monster when it’s full. I remember one boy fell in my first year with the department. Looked like he’d tried to cross a fallen tree and slipped. We took his backpack to his mother. She didn’t even get off the couch. Barely looked at us. Just stared at the TV set, laying there in a tank top and underwear. There was a little girl toddling around the living room, kind of whimpering, and it’s like she didn’t even hear her.

  “The mother passed not long after. Was diagnosed with leukemia and died within a week, daughter wound up in the system. Maybe that’s why, when people go missing, others don’t look too hard. We just hope they made it where they were trying to go.”

  Martin stared at nothing, his mind adrift, his memory traveling on the captain’s words, racing thousands of miles northwest to the small, frigid Alaskan village he’d grown up in, to the kids who walked away from that cluster of squat, cold homes, and the mix of emotions it stirred inside his fifteen-year-old chest when a week passed without them being found. They got out… he would think to himself, and in his slumber he would dream of hot, noisy, fast, crowded places.

  “Tarson Woods wasn’t always a state park,” Captain continued. “About thirty years ago it was the site of a nuclear plant. Owned by an outfit called Evansbrite. Most people in Tarson and the surrounding areas worked there somehow—janitors, receptionists, assistants, secretaries, mechanics. They had to get security clearances, but those came with a little bonus. Made people in this town feel like we were a part of something, that good things were coming—growth, money, the future. Families could buy cars they never would’ve dreamed of before. A man could take his family out to dinner on a Friday night—and there was actually a place or two to go.”

  “What happened?”

  “The plant started having trouble. There was a small explosion, contained in one section, and they said it was taken care of. Then there was a bigger one, which caused a major mechanical failure, and a few people died. People started getting bad sick. Women lost pregnancies, or babies were born not… right…” He cleared his throat. “People weren’t just angry anymore. The mayor called for a town hall meeting with the plant higher-ups. They didn’t show. When employees went to work the next day, the gates were locked, razor wire curled all around the fences, and there was a letter on the main gate telling employees that Evansbrite had gone under and would be sending them all a two months’
severance in the mail.”

  “Did anyone ever pursue Evansbrite for damages?” Martin asked.

  “Plenty of people have tried, but it’s like the company was everywhere and nowhere. They had friends in DC—lobbyists, congressmen—but no brick-and-mortar address. Ownership had changed a dozen times and was split into so many fractions and offshoots you couldn’t tell where it all started. The buck was passed from hand to hand to hand. It was always ‘under investigation’ or ‘in review.’ Honestly, I think it still is. Companies with money in pursuit of even more money take advantage of towns like this. Desperate, hungry, hardworking towns. You look at us, and you think we’re less than. I can see it in your eyes.” His gaze fell to the manila folder in his hands.

  “I don’t think you or anyone else here is less than,” Martin said quietly. “I think your resources are less than. Your infrastructure. I know what that does to a town. To its people. The morale. In many ways, the simple life is a hell of a lot more complicated.”

  Captain looked up, a wisp of a smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “That’s a good way to put it,” he said. “Suffice it to say, Tarson Woods has become as close to a ghost story as this town has. I don’t have to tell you what kind of draw that can have on a bored teenager.”

  “But it’s not just bored teenagers disappearing,” Martin pressed, refocusing the conversation. In his opinion, a pattern there would actually point more to the captain’s theory, but he kept the thought to himself.

  “They range from fifteen to seventy years old, male and female, low risk, high risk. Less than half of them were local at the time they vanished. One had never been here before in his life that we could find.” Captain began plucking snapshots from each folder and taped them in a line across the top of the whiteboard.

  “First vic, Timmy Roberts, 1989. That’s the boy I just told you about, who looks to have drowned. Second, homeless girl, 1992. People knew her for playing the fiddle on street corners and shoplifting cosmetics and snack food from the general store. She called herself Sabrina but was never formally IDed. She was last seen leaving the square and was known to frequent the woods. Michael Walton was reported missing a couple months later. In 2004, Thomas Eads, a bartender from Chattanooga. Told his girlfriend he was going on a run in a state park, and his credit card puts him at the Shell station at our exit off State Route 411. He’s got a record, and we don’t have proof he was in Tarson long, but the girlfriend never heard from him again, and that gas station charge was the last activity on his card.”

  Captain paused for a moment, staring at the next picture, an old man. “Bill Blassing, 2005,” he started again. “He’s a local. Born and raised here. Missing for a little more than a year. We searched all over for that man. We found his car in the parking lot at the cemetery where his wife was buried, and there was a note inside saying he was leaving his future up to fate. Then we found out he had terminal cancer and had kept the diagnosis secret, and that seemed to make enough sense at the time. Maybe he’d wanted to go off the grid or travel with what time he had left. It was something he would’ve done.”

  “All due respect, Bill Blassing didn’t disappear in the woods,” Martin said carefully.

  “No. But he worked at the factory, and he hiked in those woods almost every weekend while he was still able. He led volunteer groups to clean up the trails after storms, and he loved the river. Took his lunch along the bank more days than he didn’t. During the search we combed them on horseback but never saw any sign he’d been there. You wanted to widen the lens, and it didn’t feel right leaving him out,” Captain said. “And six… Hazel Rae Stevens.” He carefully taped Hazel’s picture to the end of the line, his eyes lingering on her for several seconds, and Martin wondered what regrets might be whispering through him now.

  “Bill Blassing and Hazel Stevens disappeared within two months of each other.” Martin glanced at Captain over his shoulder. “That didn’t raise a red flag?”

  “Honestly, it’s the only reason Hazel’s active search lasted as long as it did. We kept the fire burning under that case for twice as long as we normally would and even brought in bigger brass. Then the case for a runaway kept getting stronger, we had a plausible explanation for Bill’s disappearance, and Hazel and Bill are about as different in victimology as two people can be—age, race, gender, social circles, location. I tried to connect those two, I really did. But there was no connection to be found other than proximity of time.”

  “I have someone to add,” Martin said. “Be right back.”

  Martin walked to his desk, grabbed the file he’d taken with him from Savannah, and came back. He pulled the snapshot of Toni Hargrove from the folder. It was a mug shot from one of her first arrests. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old in the picture, and her freckles and flame-red hair made her look even younger. Her red-brown eyes were another story, already ancient, propped up with thick eyeliner and puffy bags. When he’d seen her body at the morgue, she’d been nearly thirty years old. He hadn’t seen her in person in years by then. She’d left Savannah for Atlanta several years before, convinced she was going to make it big in the rising music scene. Six months later, when she was busted for prostitution, she gave the Atlanta PD Martin’s name and contact information, along with a story about working undercover.

  In the morgue, he’d touched her hand when no one else was looking. He’d been checking for her ring—a little silver crescent moon cradling a garnet stone. It was the one thing she’d ever been sentimental about. But her hand was bare, and for a second or two, he convinced himself it wasn’t Toni on the slab, just someone who looked a lot like her. Someone else who knew his phone number by heart. Someone else who called him in their most desperate hour. But standing there, even as high as he had been, he knew no one else relied on him like that anymore. The only person who still thought he was good and trustworthy was now mutilated on a metal table.

  The ring. Jesus Christ, her missing ring. The thought shot through Martin like he’d stuck a key in a light socket. Hazel’s ring, Ama’s watch, Toni’s ring.

  He swallowed hard, trying to keep the connection from bursting out of his mouth. Unless the ring had turned up inside the stone hutch where the other two pieces were found, he doubted the captain would entertain the link, especially since he couldn’t prove she’d been wearing it at the time of her murder. But in the spiderweb of possible evidence, Martin silently connected the strands as he positioned Toni’s picture to the left of Bill’s.

  “She was found murdered at the rest stop just south of Tarson,” he narrated. “Half her tongue was removed.”

  “I remember that.” Captain’s gaze shifted from the photo to Toni’s folder. “Do I want to know how a case file from your old precinct came to be in my station?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your vic’s body was found. I don’t know that she belongs up there,” Captain said, apparently deciding to listen to Martin, and pointed to the first three pictures in the timeline, all young and sullen-faced. “They didn’t find those boys, either. Timmy looked like an accident. There were signs he’d fallen off a downed tree and into the water. Michael Walton looked more like a suicide.”

  “Department is sure about a suicide without a body?”

  “Michael left his shoes on the bank and carved ‘I’m not sorry’ into a tree. His dad died in the plant explosion. His mother is a hard woman. She had been a secretary at the plant until she got pregnant again, then taught piano lessons out of their house for extra money. Her baby was born without a brain stem. Lived a matter of hours. Mother lost her sight a couple years later. Became a recluse. She didn’t even report Michael missing. A friend of Michael’s hadn’t seen him for a while. I guess they used to meet up pretty regularly. He went by Michael’s house and he wasn’t there. About a week later, a teacher from the high school went looking for him in the woods and found his shoes by Cold River. They’d been there long enough to be covered in leaves and moss.” Captain stared at the
boy’s picture. “He went to trial for an animal cruelty case when he was a kid. They tried him as an adult.”

  “For animal cruelty?” Martin arched a brow.

  “You didn’t see the animals.”

  “So how did he end up jumping into Cold River if he went away for animal cruelty?”

  “The jury found him not guilty.”

  Martin studied him, saw the shifting of his jaw, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, then asked, “What do you think?”

  Captain shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what I think. He got a fair trial, and his records are sealed. And he’s dead.”

  “Right.” Martin’s attention returned to the boy peering out from beneath a veil of greasy, chin-length hair. I’m not sorry. His eyes didn’t look menacing or scared or sad or guilty. They were empty. All color and no depth. Two locked doors.

  “Martin, no one has seen that kid in fifteen years. If he isn’t in that river, he definitely isn’t here. I never thought I’d have to beg you to focus on Ama and Hazel. Ticktock. Iceberg or not, you’ve got twenty hours to prove it.”

  “Sorry,” Martin murmured as he angled his body to Hazel’s picture at the far end of the board. But as Captain began rattling off details of the day she disappeared, Martin couldn’t help glancing back at Michael one more time.

  Stanton’s head and shoulders appeared in the door, his face lit up like Christmas morning. “Captain, the hospital called. Ama Chaplin’s awake and talking.”

  Martin went stone-still except for his eyes, which swung to meet Captain’s shell-shocked gaze. Ama could connect every thread. If all these cases were somehow related, Ama could very well solve multiple murders.

  “Go,” Captain said, and the single word sent Martin into motion. He swept several photographs and papers into a file, tucked them under his arm, and bolted for the door.