When Kenzie was finished cutting the bread and getting the rest of the dishes on the table, Zachary looked over the place settings, again listing off plates, cups, knife, fork, spoon, and cloth napkin—because their fingers were definitely going to be greasy with the delicious garlic bread.
He raised his eyes and looked at Kenzie, waiting for her approval or criticism. At least Kenzie wasn’t Bridget, who would go up one side and down the other when he did something stupid. There was no way she would have trusted him to set the table. Not with all of the specialized silverware she liked to use, with special forks for salad, pickles, or caviar. He never knew what everything was for and, even though he tried to watch her and copy what she used everything for, he would still make a mistake, and she would rip into him.
“Zachary.”
Zachary blinked, swallowed, and looked at Kenzie.
“Looks good,” Kenzie said, sounding like she was repeating it for the second or third time. “Good job.”
“Oh. Thanks.” He sat down, and then wondered if he should have held her chair for her. They weren’t usually so formal but, thinking about Bridget, he wondered if he should do more to try to make Kenzie feel special. She did the lion’s share of the cooking and other jobs maintaining her house and many of the things in his apartment as well. He should be able to keep up better.
He smiled, hoping it didn’t look too strained.
“Relax,” Kenzie advised. “You seem really tense tonight.” She sniffed, “Have you been drinking?”
“No.” Zachary smelled his shirt. “Burton was, but I don’t remember him spilling anything.”
“You might have just absorbed the fumes.” She took a couple of bites of her salad. “Not that you can’t drink. I’m just surprised, because usually you don’t.”
“No. I didn’t have anything tonight either. It was all Burton.”
She nodded. “Everything went okay?”
“Well… no, not exactly. I mean, nothing went wrong, but he had a lot of problems with the information that I gave him.”
“He didn’t get violent?”
“Slapped the table and shouted. That was as bad as it got.”
“What was he so upset about?”
Zachary thought about it, tearing his bread into smaller pieces as he ate it. “We think that maybe he had a brother named Allen. Initially, I thought that was his last name, but it turns out it wasn’t. It could be a middle name, but he is quite certain that it was not, and that Allen is someone else. Best bet is that he was a brother.”
Kenzie nodded. “And this upset him because…”
“I think mostly because it was just a shock. He hadn’t realized before that he had a sibling. He wants to know where he is, what happened to him.”
“That’s going to be pretty hard, isn’t it? Unless his brother starts looking for him, the same as he did. There are adoption registries.”
“I told him I would do what I can. I’ll start on it tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Kenzie put a bite of roasted vegetables in her mouth. “Are you going to eat anything other than garlic bread?”
“Uh…” Zachary looked at the other dishes on the table. “Yeah, sure. I’ll have a bit of chicken and vegetables.”
“But mostly garlic bread.”
Zachary put another piece of bread in his mouth and grinned.
25
Zachary went through the records that he had already compiled on the residents of Peach Tree Lane, looking for families that had lived there at the same time as Burton would have been there with his family. There wasn’t anyone still living on the street from that time, which didn’t surprise him. As he’d told Burton before, it wasn’t the type of place people would live for more than a few years. Only as long as they had to. They would get kicked out or get enough money saved up to move somewhere else. Somewhere nicer.
But he was good at tracking people, and he was able to dig up phone numbers in order to contact a couple of them. A lot of people retained their landline numbers from the eighties into the new millennium, and only recently had started dumping them because they just didn’t use them anymore. Even the grandmas and grandpas were using cell phones now.
He looked at the first name on his list. According to the census numbers, Elise Perry was around the same age as Burton’s birth mother. With any luck, their kids had played together and she would remember the Weaver family, and maybe know something about what had happened to them. It was odd that Zachary hadn’t been able to trace Burton’s parents after he had been adopted. Unless, perhaps, they had died in an accident and that was why he had needed to be adopted. It was also possible that they had moved out of state, had changed their names, or a whole host of other possibilities. It should have been easy to track them by their SSNs and credit records, but sometimes people stayed under the radar intentionally.
He dialed Elise Perry’s number and waited. It went a few rings before being picked up, and he imagined that it was in her purse as she shopped or drove. But eventually, she found the phone and answered it.
“Hello?” She sounded a little breathless.
“Is this Elise Perry?”
“Yes?”
“I’m a private investigator, Ms. Perry, and I’m trying to track down a family that used to live on Peach Tree Lane. Which is where you used to live.”
“That was a long time ago, Mr.…”
“My name is Zachary. Goldman Investigations.”
“It’s been years since I lived in that part of town. I don’t think I can help you.”
“Did you happen to know the Weaver family?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Zachary had been hoping against hope for immediate name recognition, but if she did recognize it, she wasn’t announcing it.
“I don’t know. The name sounds sort of familiar, but it wasn’t anyone I had anything to do with.”
“They would have had kids. Did your kids play with them, maybe?”
“Weavers… I don’t think… there was a couple called the Weavers, but I don’t remember them having any kids. Maybe they were older than mine.”
“Bobby Weaver was five when they left. I’m not sure whether Allen was older or younger.”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t remember any kids by those names.”
“No Bobby?” Zachary was surprised. It was a common name. He thought there would have been a few of them around.
“No, not on the street. And I knew all of the kids that age.”
“And no Allen?”
“I can’t remember any Allens my son’s age, not even at school.”
“But Weaver sounds familiar.”
“That’s all I can tell you. I must not have known them very well, but maybe heard about them at Community Watch or something like that. You know how you can hear someone’s name a few times, so they get familiar, even though you never actually met the person.”
“Sure. So you don’t think you even met them? Maybe a community lunch or breakfast? Canvassing for the Heart Foundation or Diabetes?”
“No, sorry. I’m not much help.”
“Would your husband know, do you think?”
“I’m not in touch with him anymore. But I wouldn’t think so. He was always working during the day. I’m the one who got to know people in the community. He would just get home from work and sit in front of the TV for the rest of the night. Like he’d earned his right to sit there and didn’t have to be responsible for anything else.”
Zachary grimaced. It was probably a good thing that the two were no longer together.
“Okay. Well, thank you for your time, Ms. Perry. Can I leave you my number in case something occurs to you later?”
“It’s on my call log. I’ll let you know if something comes up, but I don’t expect it to. I just didn’t know them. Our kids didn’t play together and I don’t remember what either one of them would have looked like.”
Elise Perry hadn’t remembered very much, but her call confi
rmed that Zachary was on the right track. Neighbors remembered things. Even that many years later. The names and faces came back to them—or they didn’t. Her lack of memories of Bobby and Allen didn’t mean that the boys hadn’t lived there. Just that they hadn’t played with the neighborhood children, which Burton had already told him.
He didn’t have friends.
He didn’t play outside.
They had kept to themselves. Maybe the parents had been religious nuts. Or paranoid about the coming apocalypse. Who knew?
The next mother on his list was May Richmond. Zachary tried the first number he had for her, and got a recording that it was out of service. He was not surprised, and it wasn’t the only number he had found for her. And, of course, there might be several May Richmonds, but he was pretty confident in the information he had managed to dig up. He tried the next number on the list.
“Hello?” It was a male voice. Zachary looked down at his screen to see whether he had dialed correctly.
“Hello?” the man repeated.
“Sorry, sir. I’m looking for May Richmond. Is she at this number?”
“You can get her on her own cell.”
“Is it…” Zachary slipped down to the next number on the list and read it off.
“No,” the man answered, and dictated May’s number to him. Zachary wrote it down.
“Thank you very much. You have a nice day, sir.”
“You too.”
Zachary tried May’s cell phone, and she answered it quickly.
“Mrs. Richmond?”
“Yes, this is May.”
Zachary again explained his dilemma, how he was trying to find people who might have known Burton’s family all of those years ago. She gave a disbelieving laugh.
“I’m not in contact with anyone from that time anymore,” she said. “Those were not my friends. We didn’t keep in touch.”
“I realize that, I’m just looking for a little bit of direction. If you don’t remember anything, that’s fine. I’m hoping someone will remember this family and be able to point me in the right direction. I lose their trail after Peach Tree Lane.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to help you, but go ahead.”
“Do you remember the Weaver family at all?”
“The Weavers.” Her voice held a note of disbelief. “Why would you be trying to find them?”
“I’m sorry, does that mean you know something about them?”
“I remember them,” she said slowly. “They were not friends with anyone in the neighborhood. Kept to themselves. They were…” her tone was hesitant, “they were not the kind of people you wanted to be around.”
“Oh?”
“They were… you know what they did, don’t you?”
“No. What did they do? I thought Mr. Weaver was a trucker.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean… when we all heard what they’d done to that boy…”
“What boy? Bobby?”
“Yes! You must know, then.”
“No. I know that he went into foster care and later went on to be adopted. But I don’t know anything that happened before that.”
“He was just like a skeleton when he got out of there. They say they’d abused him. Kept him locked up all the time. Didn’t feed him. Beat him. It was horrible. We were all devastated that something like that could have gone on right under our own noses. You don’t know. You just don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.”
Zachary could attest to that. A person could never assume that he knew what things were like for someone, what kind of a person they were behind closed doors. Or what kind of person they lived with behind those closed doors.
“What do you remember about it? How did anyone find out?”
“He got out one day. Escaped. Somebody didn’t lock the door or pull it shut, something like that. So he ended up wandering down the street, this strange little boy that no one knew.”
“And someone called the police.”
“Yes. Exactly. By the time the police got there, we were all gathered around him, trying to figure out where he had come from, how he had gotten there. We thought… someone dumped him there. That he came from somewhere else and had just been abandoned there, where someone would find him. We didn’t know that he’d lived right on our street. That he’d lived just a few doors down from where we found him.”
Zachary nodded, fascinated with the story. “How did they trace him back to the Weavers, if no one knew him?”
“He was old enough to talk, to point out which house was his, who Mommy and Daddy were. They didn’t do DNA testing back then. But when they came looking for him, the police were waiting.”
“I guess that was a shock for them.”
“They were not too happy about it, that’s for sure.”
“What happened to them? They went to prison?”
“We didn’t hear much. It wasn’t a story that got into the newspaper, and we didn’t have internet back then. I heard rumor that they were both convicted, but I don’t know what the sentences were. Less for her. She said it was all his fault, she had just been doing what she was told and she was afraid of him.”
“I didn’t come across any of this when I was searching. If they served prison time, that should have shown up on my searches.”
“Weaver wasn’t their real name. I don’t remember what it was. And like I said, there was no internet and I don’t think it ever made it into the papers. Maybe a line or two on a slow news day.”
Zachary sat there with the phone, thinking about everything.
“That was Bobby?” he asked eventually. “The little boy who wandered off?”
“Bobby… yes it was something like that. Yes.”
“And what about the other boy?”
“The other boy?”
“They had two children. Bobby and Allen.”
“No. They only had one. Just Bobby.”
Zachary tried to keep his breathing steady.
Then what had happened to Allen?
26
Zachary wasn’t sure how to go back to his client with more bad news. Not only did he not have anyone who remembered Allen, but he didn’t even know the right surname. After considering it for a while, he called Aurelia Pace.
“Aurie. It’s Zachary Goldman. The private investigator.”
“I remember who you are,” she sighed.
“Then you probably know why I’m calling you back, too.”
“You went back there, didn’t you?”
“Yes, we went back to Peach Tree Lane. And Ben Burton went into the house.”
She made a sympathetic noise. “Why did you let him do that? Why couldn’t you let him think that the place had been knocked down and there was no point in going there?”
“I’m working for him, not for you.”
“But you must know that wasn’t good for him. He should never have gone back there.”
“My job isn’t to do what’s best for my client. It’s to do what I’m hired for.”
She sighed. “How was it?”
“Initially… okay. He got to see the house, wander around, find a link to his past.”
“And then?”
“And then… he found his name and Allen’s written on the wall beside the furnace.”
“Allen’s?” Pace repeated in a blank tone.
“Allen. His brother.”
“Bobby didn’t have a brother.”
“Then who else was down there with Bobby? Who else was it that wrote his name on the wall?”
There was only silence from Pace.
“You never had any clue that there was another child,” Zachary said.
“No. Never. Bobby didn’t say anything. His crapbag parents didn’t say anything about another child.”
Zachary snorted in surprise at Pace’s choice of language.
“Well, they were,” Pace asserted. “I don’t sugarcoat it. They were evil people who should never have been allowed anywhere near children. Horrible
people. It’s the kind of existence that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.”
“No,” Zachary agreed. “I sure wouldn’t.”
Neither of them said anything for a few minutes.
“They had another child?” Pace said finally.
“Yes, apparently there was another boy.”
“And no one knows what happened to him.”
“No one knew he existed until now.”
She swore.
Zachary thought about the dimly-lit basement. He thought about it back when Burton lived there, when there had been a dirt floor.
Zachary knew that Joshua Campbell was probably his best bet in the police department, but he was a busy man and might not have any time to see Zachary. So he decided to give Mario Bowman a call and see what he thought.
“Zach, my man,” Mario greeted. “What’s going on in your world today?”
“Well, I have a case that needs some police involvement.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“No,” Zachary agreed with a little laugh. He seemed to be attracting more and more of those lately.
“So what kind of case is this?” Mario asked. “Another serial killer? Breaking up a trafficking ring? What’s on the menu today?”
“It’s a cold case. A child who disappeared in the eighties.”
“And you found him?”
“No… I think he met with foul play, and that I know where his remains might be found.”
“Do you know for a fact that they are there? Is this something that you’ve seen and are calling the police in to ‘stumble’ across it themselves?”
“No. I haven’t seen them. They’re probably buried under concrete.”
“And what makes you think so?”
“My client is his brother. The children were both imprisoned in the basement for most of their lives.” Zachary hoped this wasn’t stretching the truth too far. “My client managed to escape and was rescued, but his brother was never seen or heard from again. I think he died before Burton escaped, and the basement was unfinished with a dirt floor. Awfully convenient place to dispose of a body.”
He Never Forgot Page 14
