by Lisa Regan
“Is Shana still here?” Noah asked.
“Oh yeah. She’s still here. Just got married. Nice gal, like I said. You can talk to her. If you go in that door…” He pointed to a nearby door and reeled off an elaborate set of directions that would take them deep inside the building, but Josie didn’t want to risk them getting thrown out of the place for not having a warrant.
“We don’t want to make Shana relive the whole thing,” Josie said. “Especially if she’s in a good place now, having gotten married and all.”
Josie could feel Noah’s eyes on her. She shot him a look that said trust me. Tim had mentioned “trouble”. The most likely trouble between male and female coworkers was harassment. She was taking a gamble, but her instincts turned out to be right.
Tim nodded vigorously. “Oh yeah, you’re right. That’s true. It was hard on her. Brave of her to speak up, I said.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Josie said. “If you don’t mind then, maybe you could just clarify a few things for us? That way we don’t have to bother her with it.”
“Oh, well sure. Like I said, I don’t want to upset her.”
Josie’s mind worked at warp speed, trying to think of questions that would bring out the information she needed without tipping him off that she didn’t actually know a damn thing. “When did it start?” she tried.
He scratched under his helmet, just above his ear. “Oh, maybe about a month after they hired him. Someone said they saw him follow her after work, like out to her car, and that he hid behind someone else’s car. At first she just, like, blew it off. Everyone thought he had a crush on her. She’s a cute girl, Shana.”
“Did anyone say anything to him? I mean, that’s pretty creepy.”
“After maybe the third or fourth time. When Shana started asking people to walk her to her car, then someone talked her into reporting it to the bosses. They brought him in and gave him a warning.”
“It was all very innocent, according to him, wasn’t it?” Josie said, hoping she was reading things correctly.
“Of course. He said he was just making sure she got to her car safely. But then he gave her flowers.”
“How did Shana react to that? Seems like it could go either way: creepy, or a nice gesture,” Josie said.
“Well, like I said, Shana’s a sweet girl so she thought it was nice. They started talking a little. Saying hi and stuff. Nothing serious. But then he kept asking her to go places with him after work and she didn’t want to. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Started waiting by her car at night again—you know, more obvious this time.”
“She must have had to be really firm with him,” Josie said. “It doesn’t sound like he took no for an answer.”
Tim shook his head and gave a short laugh. “He didn’t take it well, that’s for sure.”
Here, Josie had to be careful and open-ended. She said, “We heard a couple of different versions of what happened to actually get him fired.”
“Yeah, that happens in a place this big. Lots of different stories floating around. But two guys from my department were out there that night when she finally told him nothing was going to happen between the two of them. They said he lost it, man. Started shouting at her, cursing up a storm. Then he kicked her car real good. Put a big old dent in her door. Then the guys went over and told him he had to leave. They made sure she got home okay, and the next day they all went to the bosses. They called him at home before he came on for his shift and told him not to come back.”
“We were told that was the end of it,” Josie said.
Tim nodded. “Thank goodness. Yeah. No one saw him again after that.”
She extended a hand. “You’ve been very helpful. We really appreciate it.”
“Oh sure,” he said. “Happy to talk.”
Josie could practically hear Noah’s thought: No kidding.
Forty-Four
Back at the station house, they got coffee from the break area and gathered with Mettner and Gretchen in the conference room so they could update each other on everything they’d found out that day. They took seats around the table, which had already been covered in paperwork on the Bestler, Yates, Gresham, and Kelly cases.
Mettner took notes using the note-taking app on his phone while Josie and Noah spoke. When they finished, he looked up and said, “Jack was married and he’s at a new job hitting on someone else?”
“Not hitting on her,” Josie said. “Stalking her.”
“He gets fired for harassing this poor woman and leaves to go to the Sanctuary,” Gretchen said, jotting something down in her notebook.
“He’d been out of sorts for a long time before he even started at the factory,” Josie pointed out. “Remember Haylie said that Charlotte told her to leave and then come back? I bet he had been there already. When the job at the snack factory didn’t work out and Shana spurned his advances, he gave up. I think that’s when he went to the Sanctuary and stayed.”
“But he didn’t stay,” Mettner said. “He wasn’t there when we questioned everyone. Either he left or they’re hiding him.”
“How did he get there in the first place?” Noah asked. “Mett, did you get anywhere checking for the owners of the vehicles we saw at the Sanctuary?”
Mettner tapped the screen on his phone and then scrolled until he found what he was looking for. “There are thirty-two people presently living at the Sanctuary if you include Charlotte. Five of them have vehicles registered in their name, and all five of those are on the premises. That includes a car registered to Charlotte. Jack Gresham has no vehicles registered in his name. Emilia Gresham has one car, and it’s outside of her apartment.”
“We can’t say how Jack Gresham got to the Sanctuary then,” Noah said. “That’s a dead end.”
Josie sipped her coffee. “Can we run a background check on Charlotte Fadden? See if we can turn up anything unusual? Something we can use when we go talk to her?”
“Already did,” Gretchen said. “Let me pull it up.” She reached toward the end of the table where Noah had placed the box of Maya Bestler’s belongings from Garrett Romney. Next to the box was a laptop which Gretchen pulled over and booted up. After a few clicks, she turned the screen so that all of them could see it and she began talking them through what she had found. “She’s lived in the farmhouse that then became the Sanctuary since she was nineteen, so there wasn’t much in terms of old addresses. No known jobs. We’d need authorizations from her to ask the IRS for her records, but I can’t find any evidence she’s worked on any of the databases I used. She’s got the one vehicle, as you know, registered and on the premises. One old phone number—a landline. No email addresses. No social media. No criminal record. Husband died in 1978. Charlotte was thirty-two.”
“He must have left her a chunk of change for her to be able to live off the Sanctuary land for forty years,” Josie said.
“He was fifty-one. Much older. Like nineteen years older than her,” Mettner said.
“Double her age when they got married,” Noah said. “What else did you get? Anything?”
“Not on her,” Gretchen said. “But a report was filed with the Lenore County sheriff’s office against Mick Fadden in 1974 for inflicting injury on his wife. I called the Lenore County sheriff’s office, talked to someone besides Moore, and asked them to look up the file. Everything from before 2005 was scanned into their computer system so, the file was easily accessible. I had them email it to me.” She clicked a few more times and brought up a police report.
Josie leaned in closer to read it. “Mick Fadden beat Charlotte pretty severely according to this,” Josie said. Her eyes skimmed the report. “Why does this officer keep mentioning that the beating took place after ten p.m.? It shouldn’t matter what time it happened. A beating is a beating.”
Gretchen said, “Apparently, in the seventies in Lenore County there was still a law on the books that said that husbands couldn’t beat their wives after ten p.m. or on Sundays.”
�
��Are you kidding me?” Noah blurted. “So it was okay for husbands to beat their wives the rest of the time?”
Gretchen nodded solemnly. “In Lenore County in the seventies, yes.”
Mettner gave a low whistle. “That’s disturbing.”
Gretchen continued, “I don’t know what the laws were in the rest of the state. Every county is different. Anyway, that law was removed from the Lenore County books in the eighties. I guess the only way Charlotte could have him charged was if he beat her after ten p.m. or on a Sunday.”
Josie reached over and clicked through, past the report, until she found photographs of a barely recognizable, twenty-something Charlotte. She took in a sharp breath. “Wow. I can’t believe she survived that.”
The photos were in black and white but there was no mistaking the effects of the beating that Mick had inflicted on his young wife. A chunk of her hair had been torn from her scalp, blood dripped down her forehead, and her eyes were slits swallowed up by puffy, blackened skin. Her bottom lip was almost split in half. There were other photos of her arms and legs, also swollen and dark with bruising. In some of the photos, they could clearly see boot prints on her thighs, buttocks, and where her kidneys were.
“1974,” Josie said, reading off the date on the photos. “Four years before he died. Did he go to prison?”
Gretchen shook her head. “No. The charges were dropped.”
“She went back after this. Jesus,” Josie said. “How did the husband die?”
“Car accident.”
Josie closed the lid of the laptop as a shiver ran through her. She’d seen a lot on the job, but few domestic violence cases as severe as this.
Mettner pointed to the box at the end of the table. “What’s with the box?”
Josie said, “That needs to go to the hospital, to the Bestlers.”
“Come on,” Noah said. “You’re not even a little curious about what’s in here?”
Josie shook her head but pulled the box over to her and opened it. She asked Gretchen, “Has anyone heard from Hummel about the piece of rope?”
“Oh yeah,” Mettner said, bouncing in his chair with excitement. “He tested it. It was definitely blood. He already sent it to the lab for DNA testing. Chitwood asked that it be expedited, but it could still take weeks.”
Josie opened her mouth to speak but Gretchen held up a hand to silence her.
“Before you ask,” Gretchen said. “We already got a warrant for our ERT to process the cabins at the Sanctuary since that’s where you found it. Hummel and the team are over there now.”
“That’s great,” Josie said. She started taking items out of the box of Maya Bestler’s things: a neck pillow, a Chris Stapleton CD, a pair of sunglasses, a blanket, a candle, a half dozen bottles of nail polish, a lanyard, and a mug from the Cancer Survivors’ Alliance for Hope, the non-profit organization Maya had worked for. Then there were some random work items: a policies and procedures handbook, a keycard, and a company newsletter.
Gretchen said, “By the way, I got the phone records for Tyler and Valerie Yates and Emilia Gresham, including text messages. They definitely believed that Jack was at the Sanctuary three days ago when they went camping. They were there to get him out. The plan was to sneak onto the property in the middle of the night, try to find him, and convince him to come home. Apparently, Emilia thought if the three of them showed up together as a united front, it would be more like an intervention, and they’d have a better chance of convincing him.”
As Gretchen spoke, Josie’s eyes roamed over the various photos in the Cancer Survivors’ Alliance for Hope newsletter from almost three years ago. It outlined all of the non-profit’s efforts to raise money and where the money went, which appeared to be mostly to local families struggling financially with their cancer diagnoses.
A headline caught her eye:
Lantz Snack Factory Teams Up with CSAH to raise over $50,000 for Community Survivors.
She skimmed over the article which discussed a joint fundraiser between Lantz and the non-profit which had raised a large amount of money for the cause. She turned the page and came to a color photograph taken in front of the Lantz building. Roughly thirty people gathered beneath the large sign, squishing together to get in the frame. All of them were smiling broadly and wearing matching teal T-shirts displaying the words “Nurture Hope” and the name of the non-profit. Josie’s gaze took in the faces until she found Maya. How different she looked back then. Not just younger but more innocent. Her smile was still relatively untouched in spite of the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Garrett.
“Tyler and Emilia had already tried to get Jack to leave the Sanctuary on prior occasions with no success,” Noah said.
Josie studied the other faces in the photo.
Gretchen said, “Right. I don’t think Jack would have left with the three of them. I think he was there to stay.”
Josie’s gaze landed on a familiar face, and she gasped.
“What is it?” Noah said.
She held up the newsletter with the photo. “I think that Jack Gresham and Maya Bestler knew one another.”
Forty-Five
Noah, Gretchen, and Mettner stood up and crowded around Josie, staring down at the photo as she pointed out Jack in the far left, back row of the photo and then Maya front row, center. She checked the date. “This picture was taken just over two years ago. Two years and four months.”
Gretchen said, “I thought that Maya Bestler and the Greshams lived in different towns.”
“They did,” Josie said. “But still relatively close to one another. Maya’s organization did charity events with businesses all over the southeastern Pennsylvania area.”
Noah said, “This doesn’t mean they knew one another. It just means that they were in a photo together.”
Gretchen said, “I have to agree there, boss. This was a one-time event. They’re not even near one another in the photo and there are at least thirty people there. We really don’t know that they ever actually met.”
“But Jack Gresham had stalking tendencies. He wouldn’t have had to officially meet her to see her and fixate on her. This is only a few months before Maya was kidnapped.”
Mettner said, “But we already know that the hermit took Maya from her campsite. That’s what she said.”
“Plus we’ve got her prints from inside the caverns,” Gretchen agreed.
“What are you suggesting?” Noah asked.
Josie stared at the photo. Maya and Jack had been in a photograph together. Maya’s non-profit had done a charity event at Jack’s place of employment sometime during the three months he worked there. Jack had joined a cult in Lenore County, roughly eight miles from where Maya went missing while camping with her boyfriend. Maya had then disappeared from that campsite months after Jack joined the cult. Two years later, Jack’s wife went camping near the Sanctuary and disappeared after her—and Jack’s—best friends were murdered. Renee Kelly, a girl living on the Sanctuary, had then been murdered in exactly the same way that Valerie Yates had been. All these things had proximity but that didn’t mean they were all connected. Ultimately, it was her job to follow the evidence. Gut feelings, hunches, suspicions were all fine and good, but she had no evidence that Jack Gresham and the Sanctuary were somehow connected to Maya’s abduction, or that anyone besides the hermit was responsible for the recent murders.
What were the odds, she wondered, of one woman going missing and another being found within hours of one another, both connected to the same man: Jack Gresham? Although, admittedly, Maya’s connection to him was tenuous at best.
Josie sighed. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just strange.”
Gretchen and Noah looked at her, as if waiting for her to say more. She tossed the employee newsletter back into the box and said, “I think we’ve got enough to go back and speak with Charlotte again. We’ll go to the Sanctuary tomorrow and see what we can shake loose. This time we need to show everyone a photo of Jack Gresham. Some
one should recognize him, even if he’s left. Although, I expect they’ll all lie. In the meantime, someone can take this box over to the hospital and give it to one of the Bestlers. Show them a photo of Jack Gresham as well, just for the hell of it.”
“I’ll do it,” Noah said. He packed the box again and carried it out of the room.
Josie watched him go. In her pocket, her phone buzzed. She took it out to see that the display read SCI Muncy. She sent it to voicemail.
Gretchen said, “You okay?”
Josie managed a smile. “Yeah, fine. I’m going home. I need some rest. We’ll head over to talk to Charlotte and her people first thing tomorrow. See what we can turn up.”
“You got it,” Gretchen answered.
Josie took the long way home, not wanting to be alone with the bottle of Wild Turkey in her kitchen for longer than she had to. Luckily, Noah arrived home a few minutes after she did.
“Did you show the Bestlers a photo of Jack Gresham?” Josie asked him as they trudged upstairs to their bedroom.
“I did.”
“Did they recognize him?”
“Nope. Not at all.”
Forty-Six
Josie left the light on in their bedroom. Noah was too tired to even notice, sleeping deeply within minutes of climbing into bed. She watched his eyelids twitch as her head sank into her pillow beside him. Sleep drifted in, wrapping her consciousness in a fog and carrying her away. But some part of her brain remained alert, so that when she found herself in childhood again, begging Lila not to hold her fingers over the blue flame of their stove, she fought her way back to wakefulness with a jolt. Her chest heaved as she sat up in bed. Sweat poured from her scalp. She dared not go back to sleep. She couldn’t face another night of reliving the unspeakable horrors Lila had inflicted on her. She got out of bed and went downstairs to review her case notes until it was time to get ready for work.
