The Dead Season

by Tessa Wegert

  “Back then, I’m guessing she kept quiet because she didn’t want to risk getting in trouble,” I said. “If she ratted out Robbie, he’d turn around and do the same to her. An abducted teen forced to use illegal drugs against her will is one thing. A teen drug addict on a bender is quite another. When everyone assumed she was taken against her will, she played along. It’s likely Felicia put an end to that investigation because Crissy asked her to. I’m sure Crissy was afraid of what the cops would find out.

  “As for Robbie’s involvement in Brett’s death,” I said, “Crissy thought Brett went to Philly without her, remember? It wasn’t until Brett’s bones were recovered that she knew for sure taking meth and getting lost in the woods wasn’t nearly the worst thing that happened that night. Even then, she had no proof. Robbie’s well respected in town, he works for the Chamber of Commerce. Who would take Crissy’s word over his? Sure, she cleaned herself up, but people don’t forget the past that easily.”

  My lengthy report concluded, I heaved a breath. “I can’t believe I missed it,” I said. “Robbie was right in front of me. He has a history with Crissy. It was there all along.”

  “You figured it out in the end,” Tim said. “That’s what counts.”

  But his attempt at reassurance didn’t find its mark. Sure, Russell Loming had been a strong suspect, and I had yet to hear an explanation for the missed days of work and new watch all those years ago, but I shouldn’t have been so farsighted. Meanwhile, Crissy’s friendship with Suze had given me an uncomfortable tingle from the start. If I’d paid it more attention instead of letting my theories about Loming, Felicia, and Abe consume me, I would have unearthed Brett’s murderer sooner.

  A flaming log cracked inside the stove and settled with a sigh. In the clearing that doubled as Tim’s front yard, it was snowing hefty flakes, the kind that would stick and become the Thousand Islands’ first proper snowfall of the season. “So now what?” Tim said. “We did it. We know who killed Bram’s dad. Where do we go from here?”

  “If everything up to this point is any indication, we’re still missing a link between what Bram’s doing here and what happened to Brett,” I said.

  Now Mac was leaning forward, too. Her former career as an investigator had ended five years prior, but I knew she still missed the thrill of puzzling through cases. In the early morning light, her eyes blazed.

  “What does Bram want?” she asked. “He roped you into investigating his father’s murder. Why?”

  It was an excellent question. I tried to imagine Bram that night, back when he was just Abe. Crissy had told him the plan to leave. He could have seen Russell Loming negotiating with Brett for his share of the money, Crissy arguing with Robbie over drugs, Brett saying goodbye to Suze in his car. He might have overheard something that led him to believe Brett was in danger, and later, he snuck out of his house and rode his bike all the way to the refuge. How much had he seen?

  “If Bram suspected something happened to Brett, he can’t have been sure who hurt him,” I said. “If he knew it was Robbie who killed his father, he would have gone after the guy himself.”

  “That’s why he needed you to solve this,” said Tim. “But why wait so long? Why now?”

  I rubbed circles into my temples. “I don’t know.”

  “It may not matter,” said Mac. “You did what you were supposed to and identified Brett’s killer. That should be enough to point us to Trey.” She tapped her toe on the rug. “You collected accounts from a lot of people. What do they have in common?”

  “With the exception of Cheryl, all of our witnesses interacted with Brett the same night.”

  “So what happened at the drive-in pretty much sealed Brett and Crissy’s fates,” said Mac.

  “Totally. The conversations, the interactions—if it wasn’t for that movie, nothing would have played out the same way.” The truth is out there. “The drive-in is the common thread,” I said. “Maybe that’s the clue we’re missing.”

  Tim sat up a little straighter. “You said his clues link the past to the present, right? There’s a drive-in in A-Bay. Right on Route 26.”

  I felt my own spine go rigid. “All the key locations in this case have related to Swanton somehow. Swan Bay. Swan Hollow.” I turned to face Mac full on.

  She said, “It’s worth a try. It’ll be closed for the season, though.”

  “Let’s check it out,” I said. “Let’s go right now.”

  I was ready to argue my case, but Tim and Mac were already setting down their mugs and crossing the room to retrieve their boots. They knew as well as I did it had taken too long to get to this point. Trey was four days gone, and that was four days too many.

  At the door I said, “Hey, Mac. Happy birthday.”

  Barely managing a smile, she said, “I know what I want to wish for.”

  * * *

  * * *

  At first I couldn’t work out why I hadn’t thought of the drive-in myself. Carson had taken me all over A-Bay to familiarize me with my new home, and we’d traveled NY-26 many times, but drive-ins weren’t his scene, and with its long, high wall separating the field and parking lot from the road, the screen was barely visible over the barrier. I didn’t see it in its entirety until Mac turned onto a lane that cut a trail through a vast expanse of farmland. The chain that had been strung across the entrance by the star-spangled ticket booth lay coiled on the ground. It made a circular depression in the light layer of snow.

  Though I saw no car, there were fresh tire tracks on the road, and they led to a low building that was part restaurant, part snack bar. Instead of turning into the parking lot, we drove past the property line. Once we were out of view of the canteen windows, we parked and stepped out into the cold. Above the trees the sunrise was orange and teal, a candy-colored smear across the sky. Tim and Mac checked their weapons, and we backtracked to the entrance on foot.

  From the outside, the seasonal building looked as deserted as I’d expected. Its takeout counter had been boarded up for winter, and the windows on either side of the door were black. The handles themselves were wrapped in a chain and secured with a heavy lock. We jogged to the corner of the structure and tried to see inside, but the darkness was profound. When Tim reached for his flashlight, I put a hand on his arm. If Bram was in there, we didn’t want to alert him to our presence until we had him in our sights.

  At the side of the building, McIntyre made a sound like air escaping a balloon. Tim and I followed the wall around the corner, dividing our attention between the windows and the small grove of silver maples behind us. Was there movement out there? Transfixed, I assessed it, and wrote it off as the breeze.

  Images of Bram’s face at every age I’d known him flashed through my mind. At six years old, his tongue dyed cotton candy blue. At eleven, when the tilt of his teeth went from droll to disfiguring. Bram next to my mother, the two of them bent over the bathroom sink as she tenderly scrubbed mounds of suds into his oily scalp. Bram staring down at me while I trembled on the basement floor.

  There would be another memory made today. What would I see when I looked at him this time? The collection of faces he’d worn through the years were different, but the malice that simmered beneath his smile never changed.

  Beads of sweat formed on my forehead, and beneath my coat my underarms felt slippery. Tim was so close I could hear his breath, and I used its rhythm to regulate my own. Mac stood next to the back door, which I assumed led to the kitchen, and when we reached her she gave us a meaningful look. These handles were chained from the outside, too, but the lock was different. It looked brand-new. If Bram had been here, he was gone now. That didn’t mean there was no one inside.

  Tim reached for his flashlight once more, and together we circled the building, shining the light in every window. When we got back to the ones that flanked the entrance in front, he stopped.

  “I think”—he said, t
hen, more urgently—“there.”

  Days ago, when I first realized Bram was responsible for abducting Trey, I had decided I’d sooner surrender myself to my cousin than let a kid die. If I gave myself up, I reasoned, he might stop hurting others, and this senseless game could come to an end. The guilt I’d been carrying over the lives that were already lost would never go away, but others might be spared. As sacrifices go, I reasoned while shivering in the snow, it’s an honorable one. There was just one thing standing in my way. Or more accurately, two.

  In that moment, unarmed in the cold wind, my only concern was Tim and Mac. It wouldn’t be easy, convincing them to let a psychotic criminal take me away. If they fought me on it, I’d retaliate. I didn’t see any other option.

  “Step back,” Tim said, and with an almighty jab he brought the butt end of the flashlight down against the window. Again and again he struck the glass until, with a bright crunch and residual tinkle, the window shattered. He used his elbow to kick the remaining glass from the frame, and he and Mac raised their weapons. We were in.

  Inside, the air was nearly as raw as out. The restaurant was done up fifties-style, with red retro diner booths and a black-and-white checkerboard floor, sparkly black tabletops and plastic condiment caddies. There was no time to let our eyes adjust. We followed the beam of Tim’s flashlight to the items that had drawn his attention, empty soda cans and granola bar wrappers littering a table. We stole past the first few booths, and I scanned the darkness for movement, the floor for blood.

  The fourth booth came up empty, and the fifth. Tim turned his face partway toward me and gave a small shake of his head.

  An overwhelming hopelessness enveloped me then, a sense of failure and loss so intense it left me weak in the knees. I clamped my hand against the back of the nearest bench to steady myself. What now? Where would I go from here?

  “Shana.”

  The flutter in Tim’s voice whipped my head in his direction. He and Mac had reached the last booth. There, cowering in the far corner of the bench like a feral animal, was Trey Hayes.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mac said under her breath. Only one side of his face was visible, a single round eye and a cheek streaked with snot and tears. “I’ll call an ambulance.”

  I said, “Hey, Trey. We’re with the police. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  The boy tried to make himself even smaller. He wouldn’t look at me straight on.

  “Are you hurt?” The trauma this kid had been through, my God. Bram had torn Trey’s innocence from him like a strip of flesh. I knew his mouth must be aching from where Bram pried out the tooth, but I sensed there was something more to the child’s pain. Very slowly I reached toward him, and after a while, Trey put his small, cold hand in mine. Tim’s flashlight beam caught his face, and when the kid inched toward me, I sucked in a breath and had to swallow hard to keep from retching. A gash, long and wide, on the side of his face. A wound that would become a scar exactly like mine.

  I looked down at Trey. I wouldn’t let his disfigurement be in vain. This boy had been held captive by a killer, and like me, he’d survived. I’d learned a lot about Bram during those days, about his distrust of family, his malevolence toward women. He was a talker, always had been.

  That meant Trey might hold the key to catching him.

  “You must be freezing,” I said. Though I was shaking, I took off my jacket and enveloped him in my warmth. “It’s all right now. We’ve got you. But I need to ask you something. The man who took you. Do you know where he is?”

  Trey shook his head, hard and fast.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  He burrowed into my jacket and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “It’s okay, Trey. Hey, Mac.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You got your wish.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The day Robbie Copely is scheduled to be arraigned at Burlington’s Costello Courthouse, I get to the station early. I make a pot of coffee for Solomon and Bogle and admire their decorating skills. With days to go until Thanksgiving, my investigators tired of waiting for the holidays and made a run to the local hardware store. Garlands of blinking lights are strung chaotically over the windows. Snowflakes and holly-shaped jelly decals have been slapped against the glass. Their efforts give the office a festive air, but they also remind me of a preschool where the kids are in charge of the ornaments.

  In other words, I love it.

  It wasn’t easy, getting back to this place. Three days ago, I finally marshaled the courage to call Gil Gasko. I explained in detail why I’d missed my evaluation, which led to a lengthy discussion about my mental state. The concern in his voice was loud as a circus parade. He made me describe what he called my constellation of kin, their psychiatric history, the quality of those relationships, the events in which we’d been involved, and the impact they had—and were still having—on my life. After close to two hours on the phone, when he was satisfied I could recite the traumatic stressors I needed to avoid from memory, he sent me to Oneida.

  There, it was much of the same—but thanks to Gil, I knew the answers to my supervisor’s questions, and understood what the psychologist assigned to my case was looking for. Delusions. Hallucinations. Impaired communication. Short- and long-term memory loss. Did I engage in any obsessive behavior that interfered with my daily life? Was I experiencing problems with impulse control, or ongoing panic attacks? How would I rate their intensity, and what did I do to sate them? My responses were recorded in my file, already overflowing with psychometric data. I was a rat in a lab, but the torment was necessary, and I found I could muster the strength to weather it.

  All of this resulted in a PTSD score and a mental competency rating that distilled my intellect and psychosocial functional status into a few key terms, and a diagnosis. It included the two best sentences I’d ever heard.

  PTSD symptoms are not persistent enough to require medication.

  PTSD symptoms are not sufficient to interfere with occupational functioning.

  So here I sit, with a full inbox and a lot more to catch up on once Tim and the others arrive. For the moment, the station is quiet, and before I can reconsider, I pick up the phone on my desk and dial Suze.

  I don’t expect her to take my call, am surprised when she answers after the first ring.

  “Hey,” I mumble. “Hi. It’s Shana.” Already I’m questioning the wisdom of approaching her so soon. After decades of lost time we somehow managed to rekindle our friendship, and now her husband is going to prison in large part because of me.

  “Oh,” she says, and there’s a sluggishness to her voice I can only attribute to hours spent in tears. Mom told me Suze closed the dance studio, at least until Robbie’s case goes to trial. “I didn’t expect to hear from you,” she says.

  “Yeah. I wanted to . . . I don’t know.” Grovel. Beg your forgiveness. “Apologize, although that’s nowhere near the right word for it. I am sorry, though, that things worked out this way. That it was me who had to do it.”

  “Oh.” In the background I hear the sounds of a child at play. Little Erynn, whose daddy is gone now. “How is she?” I ask.

  “Oblivious. Small mercies.”

  I nod to myself. Small mercies, indeed. “Look,” I say, “I’ve been doing some research.” Some was an understatement; I’d spent countless hours studying preschool inclusion programming options, trying to pick up where Robbie left off. “There’s a center in Burlington that specializes in autism. They have an early childhood program that’s supposed to be excellent. I’m sure it was on Robbie’s list.” Suddenly, my throat feels scrubbed raw. I swallow. No change. “I could send you some information.”

  Silence. “Oh,” Suze says for the third time. “That’s . . . sure. Thanks.”

  “I’d like to stay in touch. I know you might not be comfortable with that.
”

  “No,” she says, and my stomach drops. “No, I’d like that, Shana. It’s not your fault. What Robbie did, that was real before you got here. It would have come out eventually.”

  “That’s not much consolation.”

  “No, but we don’t have to make it any harder than it is, either. I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Next time you’re in town, would you maybe like to get a coffee? You, me, and Crissy? The doctors say she’s doing well, that she was . . . lucky. I think you’d like her if you got to know her better. She’s not the same person she used to be.”

  Few of us are. I look out the station window at the road leading into Alexandria Bay. My family has changed. My friend, too. And with change comes opportunity.

  “I want to show you something,” Suze says.

  My mobile phone vibrates on my desk, and I see she sent a text message. It’s a video.

  “This was last night,” she tells me as I hit play. The video opens with a shot of Crissy and Felicia’s street. It’s lit up with Christmas lights, their reflection shimmering on Maquam Bay. Every homeowner seems to have made an effort to wrap their pine trees or staple strings of lights to gutters, but it’s Aunt Fee’s house that stands out.

  When she first described her plan to me, I pictured fat plastic Santas and gaudy wire stars strapped to the roof, but it turns out my aunt has an eye for décor. Lush green garlands studded with hundreds of white lights are draped over her windows and door. Her leafless trees have been swaddled in LED lights of periwinkle blue, and snowflake decorations hang from their branches, twirling and shimmering in the night breeze. I don’t know who’ll be judging the Chamber of Commerce contest now that Robbie’s in custody, but I have a feeling Felicia’s got this in the bag.