The Dead Season
Page 8
There was nobody in the shop but the owner, an elegant older lady who said her name was Annette and looked ecstatic to see me. It was November in a town built for summer tourists; the poor woman had to be bored out of her mind. I let her show me to the birthday cards, even though they were displayed in plain sight not three paces from the door.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Annette said while I browsed. “About that boy?”
If Mac had alerted the local news, reports about Trey’s disappearance were being broadcast all over the county by now. No child would be walking the streets alone tonight.
“Horrible,” I agreed. “I know everyone’s hoping he’ll be found soon.”
It didn’t take long for me to select a card from the rack. When I was ready to pay I decided to wander the aisles. Mac had forbidden me from buying her a gift, but maybe I could find a token item too trivial and silly for her to refuse. A jar of mermaid bath salts maybe, or a bag of locally made cheese curds. Everybody loved those.
I was just starting to plot my next move—pay a citizen with waterfront property to ferry me to Heart Island? Gnaw my nails down to the quick?—when I noticed the bulletin board near the register.
It was a community board, the kind papered with homemade posters for teen babysitters and dented cars for sale by owner. There were layers upon layers of them, but a new poster had recently been added to the mix. Crisp, bright white card stock, placed dead center to cover the others. It showed two photos, side-by-side.
“Everything okay, hon?”
Without realizing it I’d taken a step back, straight into a wall of Thousand Islands T-shirts. The hangers clattered as I disentangled myself from the rack. “This poster.” My voice sounded weak. “Where did it come from?”
At the till, Annette craned her neck. “A man put that up, just before you came in. That’s him, the missing boy.” She shook her head. “What is this world coming to?”
I hadn’t seen a picture of Trey, but I knew from Mac’s description Annette had to be right. The kid was smiling, but barely, as if someone was forcing him to. The look in his eyes was pure terror. Next to him there was another face, another smile. This one belonged to my uncle Brett. Above them both, the word MISSING was written in dark ink.
With shaking hands, I pried the pushpins from the corners of the poster and peeled it off the wall.
Maybe I’m wrong, I thought as I clutched the stiff sheet of paper. Maybe this is someone’s sick idea of a joke. But there was no denying what I saw. There was a message on the back of the poster, handwritten in pen, and the words echoed through my consciousness like a scream.
Wanna play?
No, I thought. Please, not this. “What did the man look like?” I blurted out. “Tell me everything.”
The panic in my voice turned Annette’s expression from courteous to concerned. She was guarded now, apprehensive, and I knew what she was thinking. One of us was crazy. Was it the person with the poster, or me? I said, “Listen, ma’am, I’m with the local police. I need to find the man who left this here.”
That drew out a timid nod. Annette’s description was vague: he was tallish, blondish, youngish. His face, I implored, but she couldn’t recall. All she really remembered was his hat, the words Purple Pirates across the front. It was the name shared by the local grade school’s sports teams.
I ran past her and flung open the door.
Outside, every breath I took was like cold water rushing through my lungs. I scanned the street in both directions. The sidewalk in front of the variety store, fudge shop, and row of boutiques across the way was empty. It was the same story to the left, where James Street sloped down toward the river. I could see the water flowing black and smooth at the bottom of the road, and in the distance, Heart Island. This was A-Bay’s downtown strip, and it was crammed with retail stores and well-concealed alleyways. Plenty of places to hide.
I went back inside and searched the walls and ceiling for a security camera, some sort of tangible evidence. Nothing.
The hat.
I took out my phone and called Sam.
“Change your mind about the coffee?” His tone was optimistic.
“Tell me you’re still at the studio.”
“I just left. Why?”
“Can you go back? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”
He only hesitated for a second before saying, “Sure, okay. Did you forget something?”
“Not exactly.” I told him what I needed, and to text me as soon as he had it.
I dialed Tim next. When I left a message, heavy on the expletives, the shop owner looked nervously down at her hands. “Call me the second you get this,” I said, and followed it up with a three-character text to show him I was serious. 911.
At some point over the past two minutes, I’d started instinctively breathing through my nose. It was a coping mechanism Carson had drilled into me during therapy, and while I resented its origins, I had to admit it helped. My fitness for duty eval was three days away. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—lose my shit now.
At last, my cell phone rang.
“Shane, what the—”
“Tim, thank God. Trey Hayes. What was he wearing on the field trip?”
There was a pause. “Think you found him?” Tim’s tone was cautious; he could hear the urgency in my own. Finding a missing kid isn’t always a happy occasion, especially when you live by the water.
“It’s not that,” I said. “I just need to know.”
“Last seen wearing jeans and a lightweight blue jacket. Black winter boots.”
“What about—”
“And a baseball hat. Purple and black.”
I drew a breath. “Purple Pirates.”
“That’s right.” Tim sounded increasingly troubled. “What’s going on?”
My phone buzzed. Sam was back at the studio.
So, yeah, his text message read. The guy in the hat did leave a name. Abraham Skilton. Why do you ask?
“Tim,” I said, staring out at the street beyond the shop windows, my voice impossibly thin. “I think I know who took Trey.”
ELEVEN
The cat was only the beginning.
We’ll look for clues, Abe used to say. Want to, Shay? He’d bounce on his heels as he awaited my reply, even though it was always the same.
As a kid, my cousin poured all his energy into engineering mysteries where there were none. Swanton was small, and while it had its share of problems, real-world concerns like break-ins and unfaithful spouses weren’t on our radar. There wasn’t much material that appealed to a couple of kid detectives. And then, suddenly, there was.
When I was in fifth grade, forty-seven dollars disappeared from Mrs. Dooley’s patent leather purse. Our teacher left the bag sitting under her desk like always, and at dismissal time, the money was gone. The whole class was questioned, but Abe and I ran our own investigation parallel to our principal’s. I kept my ear to the ground and my eyes open, wholeheartedly believing I could solve the crime.
Weeks went by and the money still hadn’t been found, but we’d been analyzing our classmates’ behaviors, and felt confident a wayward boy named Will Thompson was to blame. Abe started calling him Willy the Weasel, and eventually that got him a punch in the nose. Only then did our principal find the stolen money. It was in Will Thompson’s backpack.
Then there was the case of Laurie Calvo’s brand-new tree house. It was the envy of every kid in town, lovingly built by her parents. In the middle of the night, mere weeks after the structure went up, the Calvos woke to find it aflame, the painted boards already blackened and charred. I theorized a jealous classmate had torched it. Though I never managed to prove it, I eventually discovered I was right.
Some of the mysteries hit closer to home. Like when someone scribbled Abe + Shay = kissing cousins on my locker door. I was never popular,
but I wasn’t a pariah, either. I occupied a comfortable middle ground where most of my classmates couldn’t be bothered to tread, and I wanted things to stay that way—so when word of the message spread, I started avoiding Abe at school. Already belittled for his hair, his clothes, his crazy mother, he became more of an outcast than ever. At night, the guilt of shutting him out sat in my stomach like a lump of cold stew.
After several weeks of this, similar graffiti appeared on other peoples’ lockers. The focus shifted, and Abe and I were saved, but I found the whole event unsettling. Before the backlash started, Abe had declared that he didn’t mind the message. Kissing cousins. It just implied we were close, he said, and we were. It took far longer than it should have for me to realize that aside from my parents and brother, Abe was the only one who called me Shay.
All the stories my kidnapper told me in the cellar beneath an apartment building in the East Village were about his childhood. They were also about mine. I didn’t need to dust off old yearbooks to ID him. No rifling through the memory bank for me. The man who murdered three women and a young cop, the guy who drugged me at an Irish pub, was my equal. We shared the same hometown, the same childhood experiences, even the same DNA. With every bone in my body, I wished it wasn’t so, but that didn’t change the facts, and denial wouldn’t erase the truth. He was the troubled kid on my mother’s side who ran away at the age of sixteen. Blake Bram was Abe, my childhood companion.
My cousin.
My friend.
TWELVE
My plan had been simple: I would show Bram my cards. Make it easy for him to find me, and keep him focused on me alone. It went against both my principles as an investigator and my police training, but for more than a year I’d kept his identity a secret from everyone. I didn’t do it for Abe. I was appalled and revolted and deeply ashamed, but more than that, I knew revealing what had become of him to my family would leave them with agonizing questions to which I had no answers yet. As for Mac and Tim, the more they knew about Bram, the less control I had over my pursuit. And I had to get to Bram first.
Back in the basement, he’d told me what to do: You’re going to have to figure this out, Shay. Why I did what I did to those girls. It’s the only way to make me stop. So, I recast myself as a diversion. I thought that if I could distract him, people would be safe.
But now a boy was missing, and there was a new game afoot.
The overhead lights in the interview room turned Tim’s skin the color of ash. His face was wind-chapped, his dense eyebrows cinched tight as a drawstring above bloodshot eyes. He hadn’t stopped wiping his nose since he walked through the station door. After nearly six hours on Heart Island conducting interviews and coordinating the search only to come back empty-handed, Tim didn’t just look tired, but unwell.
“Bram,” Tim said. The name altered his features as if he’d eaten something foul. “You think this has something to do with Bram.”
After discovering the poster, I’d borrowed Annette’s winter gloves to protect any prints left behind. Now it was tucked in an evidence bag and lay on the table between us. “McIntyre told you I was in Swanton?” I said.
Tim nodded. I tapped at the bag, the photo next to Trey’s.
“This man is the reason why. His name is Brett Skilton, and his remains were just found in the woods out there. It looks like he’s been dead for about twenty years. There’s no doubt it was a homicide. He was my uncle.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. We weren’t close. But as you know, Bram’s from Swanton, too.” I twined my hands. “He would have heard about the death on the news. He knew this poster would stop me in my tracks. It’s his way of flagging me down.”
Tim inclined his head. “The poster says missing. But your uncle’s dead?”
“He left Swanton when I was thirteen—at least, that’s what we all thought. As far as I know, nobody in my family had any contact with him after that. It’s sounding like he didn’t make it past the town limits alive.”
“And you think Bram left this here for you?”
“Yes.”
“But how did he know you were in A-Bay?”
This time I didn’t reply at all, just waited as Tim found his way to the inevitable conclusion on his own. After a minute, his expression soured and he said, “It was that picture of you in the paper, wasn’t it? Shit. Okay, let’s say he does know you’re living here. How could he be sure you’d find the poster?”
I saw the man with the hat clearly now, or at least the back of him, and rage bubbled up inside me. He’d been right there, that close, and I hadn’t felt so much as a tingle. I was the only one who stood a chance of picking Bram out of a crowd, and I couldn’t even get that right. After countless days of looking over my shoulder at gas station pumps and straining to see through the windshields of cars passing me in the Kinney Drugs parking lot, I’d allowed myself to become preoccupied with Sam, and I’d missed him.
I told Tim about karate, and my conversation with Sam about buying a card. “Bram must have gone straight to Smuggler’s Cargo. Who else could have put up this poster? Who else would write a taunt like that on the back?”
Tim still looked unsure, but as he eyed the poster he said, “That’s Trey, all right. I’ll run this past the parents, see if they recognize the photograph.”
“What did you find out there today?” I asked.
His sigh was heavy and rumbly with the mucus that coated his throat. “I was counting on there being surveillance footage. A historic house on an island, closed several months of the year, you’d think there’d be security cameras. The ones they’ve got point to the dock and main entrance, where we already had witnesses, so all that tells us is that Trey didn’t leave on the ferry that brought him over.”
“That’s because he was taken. Think about it,” I said. “Annette, the shop owner, is sure the guy who left the poster wore a Purple Pirates hat.”
“Tons of folks around here have those hats.”
“Including our missing boy. Trey didn’t fall into the river while his classmates and teachers twiddled their thumbs. Somebody took him, Tim, someone who knew what they were doing. Who’s abducted people before.”
Leaning back in his chair, Tim rubbed his red eyes. “I should tell you, there’s a possibility this is family-related. Turns out Trey’s adopted, and the parents think this might have something to do with his birth mother. She lives in Syracuse, but apparently she tracked them down last spring and pressured them to let her spend time with Trey.”
This was probably the outcome Tim was hoping for. He didn’t like to believe his friends and neighbors had it in them to commit reprehensible crimes, and would defend his hometown to the bitter end. The biological mother was a viable lead. But that poster. The hat. “I don’t think that’s it.”
“Less than one percent of missing kids are nonfamily abductions,” Tim said. “Meanwhile, the last known sighting of Blake Bram was three hundred and fifty miles from here.”
We’d only worked one case together so far, but we’d laid claim to our respective methods. When it came to investigating, Tim was organized and practical, while I tended to get creative. Take a different view.
“Explain the poster, then. The weird picture of Trey. The message on the back.”
Tim chewed his lower lip. “I’ll admit it’s strange.”
“Bram wants me to work this case,” I said. “It’s all a game to him, and he wants me to play it.”
Two loud, deep voices boomed in the next room, and we turned in the direction of the sound. Through the window in the door I could see Sol and Bogle marking up the whiteboard with a timeline of Trey’s disappearance and a list of potential suspects. The latter was woefully lacking.
“This is just so different,” Tim went on. “Bram’s crimes are against women.”
“The crimes we know about.”
“Right,” he conceded, “but why would he take a kid? Why leave this?” He reached for the poster once more, and flipped it over to display the note on the back. “‘Wanna play?’ That could mean anything. It could have been written by anyone. If I run with this, and we’re way off base, we’ve wasted valuable time. How can you be positive this is our guy?”
Tim was frustrated, and he had every right to be. He was the lead investigator on Trey’s case, and I was asking him to take a wild presumption on faith. I hadn’t given him enough information to support a theory that any halfway decent detective would see as ill conceived. But explaining the message would require me to explain a whole lot more, and I couldn’t throw open the doors to that part of my life.
“Because,” I said desperately. That’s how it is with us, how it’s always been. Trey Hayes is another one of Bram’s manufactured mysteries. “He’s trying to draw me out. You know what happened in New York. He wasn’t ready to let me go.”
I raked my hands across my scalp and said, “I don’t know his end game, but this is his way of reengaging me. The note’s an invitation. The opening bid. He took Trey, and I think I’m supposed to figure out why.”
Another sigh. “Let’s say you’re right. Where do we go from here?”
“I know some things about Bram now, beyond the Swanton connection. All those stories he told me while holding me hostage? There might be something there. A clue.”
Tim didn’t answer right away. When he did, he dragged his body upright in his chair and reached for his iPhone. “Look,” he said simply, placing the device in my hand. A sick feeling ballooned up inside me. He’d pulled up Trey’s most recent school photograph, but in this picture, the kid’s smile was real. “I was out there all day. Me and Mac, Sol and Bogle, the castle staff—we searched all over. We’ve talked to Trey’s parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, his best friend at school, and his worst enemy, a little jerk who torments Trey about his height. Nobody knows anything.” Tim dropped his head back and closed his eyes as the cruel reality of the situation set in. “Trey’s been missing close to eight hours. The temperature’s gonna drop to twenty-five degrees tonight.” When he lifted his head, he gave it a weary shake. “Just tell me what you think we should do.”