The Stolen Hours

by Allen Eskens

  Lila leaned in for a peek and saw the phone number—and recognized it.

  * * *

  At six o’clock on a dreary Thursday evening, Lila Nash knocked on Sylvie Dubois’s door, a microphone once again tucked beneath her clothing. In those few seconds as she waited for Sylvie to answer, Lila contemplated the truth she now knew, the one that broke her heart. Lila watched through a small window in the door as Sylvie approached, padding her way as if this were just another day and the knock at the door just another visitor.

  When Sylvie saw Lila, she paused, one hand on the knob, but then opened the door and said, “What are you doing here?”

  Lila looked into Sylvie’s angry eyes and struggled to find words, as though the axe she brought to destroy her friend’s world had suddenly become too heavy to swing. Finally, she managed to say, “Is John here?”

  “No, and you need to go.”

  Sylvie started to close the door, so Lila blurted out the one thing that she knew would stop her. “Gavin Spencer’s dead.”

  Sylvie tried to hide her shock, but failed. “Who’s Gavin—?”

  “Your cousin.” Lila watched the color drain from Sylvie’s face. Matty had been the one to find the connection. Sylvie’s mother and Gavin’s birth father were stepsiblings, a tie that Matty found only because he now had an idea of what to look for. It had been the last piece Niki needed before sending Lila in.

  “I don’t know what…you’re talking about.” The shake in her voice said more than words ever could.

  “I was with him when he died, Sylvie.”

  Sylvie looked behind her, to where her son Dylan stood in the hallway, a stuffed dachshund under his arm.

  “We need to talk.”

  Sylvie turned to her son, her voice so weak that Lila could barely hear it. “Mommy’s gonna talk to her friend. Go watch TV till I get back.”

  Dylan hesitated, but then headed into the living room. Sylvie walked onto the porch, and she and Lila sat in the same chairs they’d sat in the last time. When they got settled, Lila said, “I know it was you, Sylvie, in my car…that night in the bean field.”

  Sylvie shook her head and looked away, her breath faltering as it left her body. Lila watched as guilt wrapped its cold fingers around Sylvie’s throat.

  “Gavin told me it was you.”

  Sylvie’s breath caught in her chest.

  It was true that Gavin had confessed that information on the bridge, but not so bluntly. You wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up and spat in your face. In the heat of the moment, Lila had dismissed the odd phrasing as the ravings of a psychopath, but his words hadn’t been random. When she saw Sylvie’s phone number on the screen of her phone, Lila understood.

  “Why, Sylvie?” Lila whispered. “Why would you help him rape me?”

  Sylvie’s eyes shot up to Lila. “I didn’t. I swear. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We were only gonna take a picture. That’s all. I didn’t know he’d go back. I swear to God—”

  “Take a picture? Why would you do that?”

  Tears began to stream down Sylvie’s cheeks. She pulled her thighs up to her chest and wiped her face on the knees of her jeans. “You could’ve had anyone. John was all I had, and you took him.”

  “Gavin raped me!” Lila almost snarled as her emotions got the better of her. “Do you have any idea how that…? I tried to kill myself, Sylvie. I almost died because of that night.”

  “I was a stupid kid—and I was hurt. I just wanted to embarrass you. I wanted to hurt you the way you hurt me. Gavin was just supposed to take a picture, that’s all. He wasn’t supposed to—”

  “But he did. And you helped him.”

  “I didn’t know. I swear. When I found out…I’m sorry. If I could take it all back, I would.”

  “And all these years, you let me suffer.”

  “But you got better.” Sylvie looked at Lila with something hopeful in her eyes. “You went to college and law school. You got over it.”

  “You never get over something like that. You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?”

  “I didn’t know what to do. He was my cousin.”

  “He was evil—a monster—and you helped to create him.”

  “I hadn’t spoken to him since that night. I swear. I wanted nothing to do with him.”

  Lila leaned back in her chair to watch Sylvie’s reaction, and said, “Sylvie Jacqueline Dubois. Did he call you Jack because he couldn’t say Sylvie—because of his lisp?”

  Sylvie didn’t answer, but looked at Lila as though Lila now aimed a gun at her heart.

  Lila reached into her jacket pocket and handed Sylvie the printout of the text messages. When she saw them, Sylvie began hyperventilating. “I didn’t.” She looked at Lila, pleading. “He wanted me to, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I swear.”

  “What happened to you, Sylvie?”

  “No! Listen! I got those texts and the letters, but I didn’t do anything. I would rather go to jail for what I did to you than to…Please, you gotta believe me. I didn’t—I wouldn’t.”

  “The police are going to arrest you, Sylvie.”

  Two unmarked police cars lit up at opposite ends of the block. Sylvie could barely breathe as she pleaded. “I have a son. Please—”

  “They’re going to charge you with my kidnapping.”

  When Niki and Matty got out of their cars, Sylvie slid off her chair and fell to her hands and knees, her sobs heaving in her chest. “I swear I didn’t. I swear.” Lila could only imagine the chaos spinning around inside Sylvie’s head as the world folded in on her.

  Then Sylvie looked up at Lila, her cheeks wet with tears and said, “Please…forgive me?”

  Niki walked onto the porch, eased Sylvie’s arms behind her back, and ratcheted handcuffs around her wrists. Lila stayed in her chair as Niki escorted Sylvie to the squad car. Only then did Lila feel strong enough to stand and walk to her car, tears blocking her vision.

  In her car, Lila sat in silence as Sylvie’s pleas echoed in her head. Could she forgive Sylvie for what she did? They were different people back then, weren’t they? Dumb kids whipped around by torrents of emotion. Lila wanted to believe that Sylvie didn’t know that Gavin would rape her that night, that what happened in the bean field went far beyond what Sylvie had planned.

  Then she heard the gentle voice of Dr. Roberts say, Forgiveness isn’t for them. It’s for you.

  Chapter 62

  Niki read the Miranda warning to Sylvie in the squad car, while Matty stayed in the house with Dylan, waiting for the social worker to arrive. Sylvie jumped at the opportunity to tell her side, repeating, between sobs, that she had nothing to do with the death of Sadie Vauk, swearing that she was at home with her husband that evening.

  Niki and Matty had already prepared a search warrant, but in the end, they didn’t need it. Sylvie agreed to let them search her house, telling them where they could find the two letters that Gavin had sent. Because of the text messages, they knew that the letter held a code and easily read the first message: Kill Sadie Vauk. The second letter led them to a URL and photos of Sylvie Jacqueline Dubois posing Lila Nash the night she was raped.

  From there, they went in search of Gavin Spencer’s hidden server.

  “Think of the IP address as a telephone number,” the tech told Niki. “Every computer has one so they don’t get all mixed up online.” He continued to click away on his keyboard as he talked. “And with an IP address, we can get a longitude and latitude for the server. I should be able to narrow the location down to…Here you go.”

  The map on his screen had a pinpoint in Kenwood. When Niki leaned in to read the streets around it, she recognized the address.

  An hour later, Niki, Matty, and a crime scene tech named Bug Thomas pulled up to Amy Spencer’s house, a search warrant in hand.

  Amy opened the door, dressed in black, mascara smudged at the corners of her reddened eyes. “You killed my son” was her only greeting.

  Matty did t
he honors. “Ma’am, we have a warrant to search your house.”

  Her cheeks turned red with anger as he handed her the search warrant. “Haven’t you done enough?” she hissed.

  “I’d like you to step outside while we search, or if you prefer to remain inside, I can come in and sit with you—”

  Rage lit fires in Amy Spencer’s eyes. “I’m gonna sue you for killing my boy.”

  “Inside or out, ma’am?” Matty said.

  Amy turned and walked into her sitting room, lying down on the chaise without saying a word. Matty took a seat in one of the Queen Anne chairs to watch her.

  Niki and Bug began their search on the outside of the house, Bug carrying a flashlight, expecting to spend time in either a crawlspace or an attic. He located the junction box where the internet cable connected to the house, which led them to a utility room in the basement. Behind a hinged panel Bug found a splitter.

  “See this?” he said. “You normally have a single cable going from here up to a router, but there’s a second cable going somewhere.”

  The utility room had a dropped ceiling, so Bug climbed atop a washing machine, lifted the tile, and shined the flashlight along the joist. Niki could hear him mumbling to himself but couldn’t make out the words. When he jumped down, he walked upstairs without saying a word. He found the router, paused to consider something, then, like a coonhound on a scent, he followed something invisible into the garage.

  The space was large and clean—white walls, epoxied floors—and it held three cars: a Jaguar sedan, a vintage Corvette convertible, and a white Porsche SUV. Above the Porsche, a scuttle hole led to an attic.

  Bug grabbed a ladder that hung on the wall and set it up below the scuttle hole. “Not a very sensible place to have a computer,” he said as he climbed.

  “Unless you wanted to keep it hidden,” Niki said.

  He shined his light around the attic. “Is there a pry bar down there?”

  Niki found a crowbar and handed it up to Bug. He took it and crawled into the darkness.

  As she waited, Niki leaned against the Porsche, a beautiful automobile, sleek and compact, more expensive than anything Niki would ever be able to afford. She glanced down at the driver’s-side window, her curiosity pulled by the red leather interior, and something caught her eye.

  Above her, Niki could hear the screech of floorboards being pried up, but her attention remained on the door of the Porsche. The rubber seal at the bottom of the window had a tiny smear of something dark, a patch about the size of Niki’s thumbnail.

  “There’s a server up here,” Bug yelled from the attic. “Fully functional. They hid it below the floorboards.”

  “Bag it,” Niki yelled.

  She bent down to look more closely at the spot, pulling a lock-blade knife from her pocket and scraping loose a tiny speck—dark red, almost black. Blood? She stepped back and looked at the car, a white SUV. Sadie Vauk’s killer had driven a white SUV.

  Then Niki remembered the videos of Amy and Gavin in jail, some of the comments coming into a new focus. That’s what mothers do; they look out for their children. I’m scared for you, Gavin, she had said. I just want to help. And then there was that comment Amy made while standing beside the swimming pool, when she and Matty cornered Amy about Eleanora Abrams. What had she said? A mother’s supposed to protect her child, ain’t she?

  She pulled out her phone and called Matty. “You okay in there?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “Put cuffs on Ms. Spencer. I think we found Sadie Vauk’s killer.”

  Chapter 63

  The weight of all that had happened didn’t fully hit Lila until she got to work the next day. Some of the attorneys actually applauded as she stepped off the elevator on the twentieth floor. She tried to act like it was just another day as she went about the to-do list that Andi had given her, but people kept popping into her office to ask her about her confrontation on the bridge.

  Ryan stayed the longest and stared at the fingernail scrapes on her neck as he peppered her with questions. Even Patrick stopped by to offer congratulations. But it was the last visitor of the day that surprised her the most.

  Lila was packing to leave, relieved to have survived one more day without getting fired, when the knock came. She looked up to see Andi standing there. Andi had never been to Lila’s office.

  “Um…come in.”

  Andi took a seat in the visitor’s chair and glanced around at the bare walls. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  Lila shrugged. “Yeah, I haven’t gotten around to hanging stuff up.”

  Andi said, “I came to tell you that I can’t be your supervisor anymore.”

  Those words turned the air suddenly chilly, and it occurred to her that certain pigeons might now be coming home to roost.

  “I wanted to tell you before they announced it officially, but Frank Dovey tendered his resignation this morning.”

  Lila had to fight to keep the smile off her face.

  “I’ll be taking over Adult Prosecution in two weeks.”

  Lila let her smile go free. “Congratulations.”

  “I’m hearing rumors that Frank’s resignation wasn’t his idea. Word has it, someone got tired of his bullshit and did something about it.” Andi paused and gave Lila a knowing look. “If that’s true, I’d love to hear the story someday. For now, I wanted you to know that I’ll be the one writing that letter to the Board of Law Examiners. By the time I get done, they’ll be falling over themselves to admit you.”

  “Thanks, Andi. You’ve been great to work for—”

  “Work with. You’re my colleague, and you need to get used to that idea.”

  “Gladly.”

  Then Andi’s demeanor turned somber and she said, “I also wanted to tell you that they found a server in Gavin’s mother’s attic.” Andi leaned in and lowered her voice. “There were four pictures—of you—and one of them showed Sylvie Dubois’s face. They’ll be stored in a password-protected file until we resolve Sylvie’s case.”

  It sickened Lila to know that those pictures might someday be shown to a jury at Sylvie’s trial. Lila would have to testify and point at Sylvie and accuse her in court. Thinking about it made Lila’s stomach churn, but it had to be done.

  “There were four other files, with pictures of Abrams, Mercotti, Ludlow, and Sadie Vauk. Those cases will all be closed now.”

  Lila felt a wave of satisfaction, knowing that those families would finally get closure.

  “And there was another file,” Andi said with a hint of a smile. “It had pictures of Gavin’s mom, Amy, hitting her second husband with a brick.”

  “Assault?”

  “Murder. When they showed her the pictures, Amy confessed to killing her husband, but claims it was self-defense.”

  “A family of sociopaths.”

  “She also killed Sadie Vauk.”

  “So Sylvie…She didn’t…?”

  “Apparently Sylvie told you the truth about that. The mother hasn’t confessed to it yet, but they found a gun under her mattress. It’s the right caliber. We’re testing blood found on both the gun and the car. I’ll give you ten-to-one odds that it’s Sadie’s. Amy’s never going to see the outside of a prison.”

  Lila felt a sense of relief wash over her. Sylvie was willing to go to prison rather than help Gavin with his plan. “What about Sylvie?” Lila asked. “Who’s handing that case?”

  “I’m holding on to it.”

  “I believe her—that she didn’t plan for Gavin to rape me that night. What she did was…reprehensible, but she didn’t set out to have things go that far. I guess, what I’m trying to say is…I forgive her. I know she has to face the consequences, but…I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I don’t want to see her go to prison.”

  “You’re the victim, so of course your position will be taken into consideration,” Andi said in a very lawyerly tone. Then she gave Lila a slight smile and added, “I’m sure we’ll work
something out.”

  Andi stood to leave, but stopped. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She reached into her jacket pocket and produced a piece of paper, then handed it to Lila.

  Lila unfolded the paper and saw the letterhead of Edward Chappelle, Attorney at Law. She read.

  Dear Ms. Nash,

  I wish to extend my sincere apology for acting rashly in our first meeting. I look forward to many years of cordial yet spirited contests with you.

  Respectfully,

  Ed Chappelle.

  Lila laughed to herself, and said, “I think I’ll frame it…and hang it on my wall.”

  Chapter 64

  Joe called Lila that night to tell her that his assignment had run its course and he was coming home. It was a nine-hour trip and she ordered him to stay in North Dakota one more night. She didn’t want him driving tired.

  She didn’t tell him about Gavin Spencer or the bridge. She would save that discussion for when he got home—she knew it would be a long one.

  The next morning she stepped into the shower, excited for Joe’s return home. Like oil on an old hinge, the hot water seemed to work things loose. Her throat still hurt where Gavin had clawed her. She had a lump on the back of her head where she’d hit the stone of the bridge. When she closed her eyes, she could see Gavin’s face looking up at her as he fell to the river. She could hear Sylvie pleading as Detective Vang put the handcuffs on her. And she could feel Sadie’s hand in hers as they stood in the bailiff’s station.

  The more she thought about all that had happened, the more she wanted to cry—so she did. She reveled in the emotion as it pushed her to the floor of the shower, the water washing over her.

  Then she pictured the look on Joe’s face as she told him what she had done—dangling above the Mississippi River with a psychopathic killer wrapped around her—and she started to laugh, hard and loud. He would be pissed that she took the risk, and he would be disappointed at the secrets she’d kept. But in the end, he would be proud of her—although he could never match the pride she felt in herself.