by Amanda Lamb
As Suzanne and I plodded down the path, hearing nothing but our heavy breathing and the rhythmic cadence of our sneakers striking the pavement, I felt my resolve beginning to crack. Why not tell her my story? I had learned to keep it hidden for so many years. It was a story that scared people. It made them wonder about me, look at me differently. Because I didn’t want to deal with that kind of intense scrutiny, I had kept it locked away. But keeping it private for so many years was exhausting. In a way, I was living a lie, lying to the people I was closest to—my friends, my co-workers, my children. Sure, it was lying by omission, but because they didn’t know the single most transforming event that had shaped my life, they didn’t really know me.
“I do know someone,” I said, after what seemed like a long period of silence as we crested the hill on the far side of the lake. “My mother.”
Suzanne grabbed my forearm with her sweaty palm. At first I thought it was a gesture of compassion for what I had just told her, for what I was about to tell her. But I was wrong. I turned and looked at her face and realized she was scared.
“Did you see him?”
“See who?” I replied, confused. I had been about to bear my soul to her, to tell her my deepest secret, and her question caught me completely off guard.
“Tanner. I think he’s following me, following us. I saw someone, someone in the woods back there. Just off the path. Oh, my God, he’s really lost it. We have to get out of here. I can’t believe I put you in this position.”
Suzanne was now clutching my arm with a vice grip and pulling me along the trail so fast I thought I might trip and fall. I hadn’t seen anyone in the woods, but I wasn’t looking either. As we got to the top of the hill, there was another offshoot of the trail that led away from the lake. I pulled my arm away from her and motioned for her to follow me. She followed but continued looking over her shoulder every few seconds. We sprinted toward a cluster of office buildings, and then slowed and started fast-walking toward a set of glass doors at the edge of a low brick building.
“I can’t believe I put you in this situation, Maddie.” Tears were streaming down her face. “I should never have come here. I put you in danger.”
She was scaring me, which didn’t happen very often. She pushed me through the glass doors of the closest office building, and then leaned against the brick wall just inside the doorway. She was hyperventilating, and I thought she might be getting ready to pass out as she leaned over and steadied herself by placing her palms on her bent knees. I put my hands gently on her shoulders.
As I comforted her, I was beating myself up for being so self-absorbed in my own personal drama that I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around me. That wasn’t like me. I had been so focused on thinking about my mother that I could have easily missed someone lurking in the woods, especially someone who was trying to hide. One thing was clear, whether or not Tanner really was here—she believed he was.
As Suzanne leaned over, the black elastic band holding her ponytail snapped and dropped to the floor. Her thick, dark hair cascaded across her shoulders and fell into her face. I pulled off a sturdy hairband I kept on my wrist and handed it to her. It was bright pink and emblazoned with purple smiley faces that looked like emojis. Miranda had given it to me for good luck when she was just five and I was running my first race. Since that day, I always wore it when I ran. Suzanne took the hairband, stood, and re-fastened her hair into a secure ponytail.
“It’s okay, Suzanne.” I glanced through the glass door of the office building into the mostly empty parking lot. “There’s no one out there. You’re okay.” I decided she had imagined the whole thing.
I put my hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes to get her to focus on what I was saying. Instead, she looked right through me, focusing on something just above my head through the glass doors. I turned to follow her gaze and saw a red car circling the parking lot and then leaving. It had a personalized license plate on the back that read TJP.
“See,” Suzanne was standing straight and looking at me. She was calm again, her tone serious and cold. “He’s never going to let me go. I’ll never be able to outrun him.”
5
Pacing
“It’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen,” Janie said without taking a breath. “I’ll send you the photo of the horse and the goat curled up together. It’s been shared, like, a billion times on Facebook!”
My mind used to freeze when the words Facebook or Twitter were used in the context of a news story, but I had finally made peace with it. Social media was news for an entire generation. We had to meet the people where they were spending their time, rather than force them to accept a more traditional, and some would say antiquated, way of delivering news.
Facebook was my hunting ground for my beat. Animal stories were social gold. That’s where I got most of my ideas. And because most people on social media loved animal stories, they also loved me. After years of letting soul-depleting comments under my crime stories allow me to doubt the goodness in humanity, my new beat helped to restore my faith in mankind. I didn’t realize how poisonous the negativity was until I was free of it.
“Great. And the horse is here? Is he here in town?”
“Well, not exactly. It’s a little bit of a drive, but not too far.” I could hear her banging on her computer keyboard in the background.
“It’s a farm, obviously, about, let me see…looks like it’s in Tindall County. About an hour and ten minutes. Not too far. Do you want to meet Buster there, or ride together?”
I tried to concentrate on what Janie was telling me, but all I could see when I closed my eyes was the terrified look on Suzanne’s face when she thought Tanner was following us. I still hadn’t figured out what was really going on between them, but she was genuinely afraid of him.
Once again, I urged her to call the police. I also gave her a contact name and number for an advocate at the local domestic violence shelter, someone who could better counsel her on the steps she needed to take to get out safely. But she insisted that Tanner would take their son, Winston, out of the country if he got wind that she was trying to leave him. She said he had done several tours with a nonprofit group that used volunteer doctors to help treat people in foreign countries in small villages where healthcare was nonexistent. She said he would know how to disappear. Then she would have no legal recourse.
The image of a doctor who volunteered to treat low-income people in foreign countries, once again, didn’t gel with the persona of a cold-blooded killer. I knew some people were good at compartmentalizing their various layers. Tanner could possibly be a well-respected doctor, a philanthropist, and a violent, controlling husband.
One thing that continued to bother me was the “P” on the TJP license plate that Suzanne and I saw on the car darting out of the parking lot after our run. I searched Tanner Parker, Tanner J. Parker, and TJ Parker, through multiple sites and got no results. Clearly he must have a different last name which also happened to start with “P.”
I wanted to confirm his last name with Suzanne the day we ran together, but she was so upset, it was all I could do to get her into my car and take her home. We both agreed she was way too rattled to drive and that she would pick up her car later at the park.
When I pulled up to her house, I was not surprised to see a lush green manicured lawn and a garden flanked by a large white brick home. It wasn’t over-the-top, but just fancy enough to make it clear that they were comfortable financially. I knew the house was most likely worth more than a million dollars based on its location, despite its modest exterior. Black shutters and a peaked roof above an expansive wraparound front porch complete with ceiling fans and large potted ferns gave it a regal look. I was reminded that beautiful houses had the power to hide the lives crumbling inside.
“Thanks so much for the ride,” Suzanne said, with a catch in her voice as she slid out of the car, looking disheveled. Her formerly sleek ponytail was askew despite the pink hai
rband I had lent her, and her tank top was stained with sweat and slightly rumpled. I couldn’t get over how much she had deteriorated between now and the moment I saw her get out of her car in the parking lot. Or had I seen her get out of a car? Suddenly, I was doubting my own memory.
“Maddie, did you hear me? Do we have a bad connection?”
My reverie about Suzanne vanished as soon as I heard Janie’s question pulling me back into the present.
“Yes, sorry. Off on a mind-tangent. You know how my monkey brain works, hopping from branch to branch, one idea to the next.”
“You? Never! Imagine that.”
“Anyway, yes, I’ll meet Buster at the station in a little while.”
“Awesome.”
I rolled my eyes through the phone. I was pretty sure she could see me.
O
“How was your night?” I asked Buster, as we drove on a winding country road to the farm in Tindall County.
“Good. Didn’t do much. Just a soccer game in the rain. Super-fun. Can’t believe they didn’t call it.”
Buster’s son, Noah, with his partner, Hugh, was adopted from a woman in Idaho. They hooked up with an agency that specialized in pairing same-sex couples with pregnant women interested in putting their children up for adoption. While Buster made a modest living as a television photographer, Hugh was a bigwig at a local technology company, who traveled around the world and made an impressive salary. They lived in downtown Oak City in a fabulous new townhouse development and had a rooftop deck. It was in a gentrified neighborhood full of coffee houses, breweries, artistic boutiques and organic grocery stores. And while the location fit Hugh perfectly, Buster felt a like a square peg in a round hole. He was more of a good old boy than a young, rich hipster. He didn’t know what quinoa was or how to pronounce it, and he preferred Kentucky Fried Chicken to kale.
Because Hugh traveled all the time, Buster was practically a single parent to Noah. Hence, he attended soccer games alone in the rain.
“How about you?” he said.
“Not much, just the usual. Blake had piano lessons and Miranda had a tennis match at school.”
I wanted so much to tell Buster all about Suzanne, but he wasn’t exactly great at keeping secrets. I also knew what he would tell me—that I should just let it go, that I had enough on my plate without adding this woman’s drama to it.
Before I had a chance to decide whether to fill him in, my phone rang.
“Hey, kid,” Kojak greeted me. “Just checking in to see if you ever found out anything out about the G6 chick?”
“I did. I went there. I saw her, but didn’t get a chance talk to her. I had to leave. Emergency at school.” I glanced at Buster to make sure he wasn’t paying attention. Thankfully, he was fussing with the GPS on his phone. He spent a lot of time ignoring me when he was laser-focused on a task.
“Well?”
“She was very pretty. In fact she looks a lot like a younger version Suzanne. But here’s the kicker. She’s pregnant. Very pregnant. Like ready to pop pregnant.”
As I waited for Kojak to respond, I looked over at Buster, who was now staring at me, wide-eyed. The word “pregnant” had wrestled his attention away from the GPS.
“Who is pregnant?” he mouthed. I knew he wasn’t going to let this go now. When Buster wanted to know something, he could be very persistent.
“Kojak, let me call you back, okay?”
I hung up and looked at Buster, who was looking back at the road, shaking his head.
“What in the hell are you involved in now? Didn’t I tell you to stick with hairless cats and runaway emus. That’s safe. I can just tell you got yourself into some waist-deep shit right now. I can see it all over your face. Raw shit. No lie. Just look in the mirror.”
I glanced in the side mirror, half expecting to see my face smeared with cow dung.
“Okay, I’ll tell you the entire story. But you’ve got to swear not to mention this to anyone.” As I said this, my stomach was clenching, knowing his idea of keeping a secret was not posting it on Facebook.
“Promise.” He winked and tapped the steering wheel along to the beat of the music.
“No, I’m serious this time. Remember when you told that woman what I said about her chapped lips in her Facebook picture? About how she was in desperate need of Carmex? It was supposed to be a private, little joke between me and you, but then we met her and you couldn’t help yourself. You told her. Remember how well that went over? I will never forget the awful look on her face. I thought she was going to cry. I felt horrible. I wanted to turn around and run out of her house.”
“I can’t believe you don’t trust me.” He took his hands off the wheel and swerved a bit for effect. He grinned like the hustler he was. Instead of money, he hustled for gossip.
“It’s not about trust. It’s about your lack of filter. You need to know when it’s okay to share something, and when it’s not. So to be clear, this story, it’s not okay to share.”
“Okay, never mind. I don’t want to know.”
And that’s when I told him everything.
O
“My boy used to help me out on the farm, but the crack done got a hold of him,” said the woman in the wheelchair, gesturing past her long gray braid to the expansive rolling green hills that surrounded her ramshackle farmhouse. “Now Brady, my nephew, he runs it. His horse, Peekaboo, he’s the one curled up with the goat. Cutest damn thing I ever seen.”
Marjorie’s mangled toes wrapped around the foot pedals of her wheelchair. Her tanned, weathered hands were balled up into tight fists resting on her lap. Brady had wheeled her out to speak with us on the crumbling front porch of the house. The barely erect banisters were covered in peeling yellow paint. Flecks of it were spread across the uneven wooden floorboards. The rickety steps were held together by rusty nails that protruded in every direction after what I assumed were many years of quick fixes. A thin piece of lattice covered the underneath portion of the elevated porch, but in between the spaces you could see trash piled high—rusty coffee cans, old twisted pipes, threadbare pieces of material, cardboard boxes. I couldn’t help but wonder if they simply pulled the lattice back, dumped their debris, and called it a day.
While Marjorie was tickled that Peekaboo’s love affair with the goat had gotten the attention of the news, Brady clearly didn’t share her affinity for the media. He glared at us beneath the brim of his dirty gray baseball hat. Thick chunks of black hair peeked out from beneath the cap. His face was pocked from acne, and spiderweb-like red lines framed his nose and spread out across his cheeks like a road map. It was hard to tell his age, but I put him in his early forties. He wore a flannel button-down over a white t-shirt, and baggy jeans with mud stains from his knees to his ankles, held up by a brown leather belt cinched around his waist and fastened with a large silver belt buckle.
After he deposited his aunt on the front porch and locked the wheels on her chair so it wouldn’t roll across the uneven boards, he turned and went back inside without a word.
I had met a lot of Marjories and Bradys in my job—characters. I was fascinated by them. It was one of the best perks of journalism, meeting interesting people I would never normally cross paths with.
“Mazie, that’s Brady’s daughter. She the one who put the story on the Internet. You know kids, they’re good with those computers. One time my Internet broke, and Mazie fixed it. She’s at the community college, studying to be a nurse. So proud of her. First grand-niece to get herself schooling. Ain’t that right, Brady?” she screeched through the screen door, which looked like it might be hanging on by one or two screws at the most. I could hear a blaring television playing a sporting event from somewhere deep inside the house. The crowd roared intermittently. Brady didn’t answer.
I tried to pay attention to the woman’s story, but I kept getting distracted thinking about Suzanne. It infuriated me the way her situation had highjacked my thoughts in the short time I had known her. I had always been good
at triaging. Normally I could focus one hundred percent of my attention on the story at hand and mentally file away other issues to be dealt with at a later time. This was different. I was different. I realized I hadn’t ever really dealt with my mother’s death, and now this woman’s crisis was becoming my path to facing those unresolved feelings.
“Princess, the goat, that’s what we named her, Princess. Well, her mama died in childbirth. And they get real attached to whoever feeds them. At first it was Brady, but he ain’t got no damn patience for little creatures. Never did like kittens or puppies. Not mean or anything, just got no softness in his heart, if you know what I mean,” Marjorie twanged, snapping me back into the present. “Not that he hasn’t had his troubles with the law. He surely has. But he wouldn’t hurt an animal or a child, no matter what that woman said about him. But that was a long time ago.”
Marjorie’s voice became like white noise. I caught a word here and there in between my jumbled thoughts. I made a mental note to get Brady’s last name and check his criminal record. I didn’t want to get burned by doing a cute animal love story, only to find out the owner was a hardened criminal.
“Mazie took on Princess.” Marjorie took a rare breath. It dawned on me that for an infirm-looking woman confined to a wheelchair, she sure did have a lot of energy, and probably a lot of good stories.
I thought about how close I had come to telling Suzanne my story, the story of my mother. Other than Kojak and Adam, no one in my re-invented life in North Carolina knew about my past. The people in the small town in New Jersey where I grew up knew the truth, but that’s why I left and never went back. I shed my past—changed my name, cut ties with everyone I knew, and started over. Every once in a long while, someone from the past would find me on Facebook. I ignored their friend requests and then blocked them so they couldn’t communicate with me further. As far as I was concerned, my life started with Adam, Miranda, and Blake. Before didn’t exist.