by Chris Mooney
“I’ve thought of it, sure.” In fact, that night on the Hill, I actually wished for it, Mike added privately.
“So why don’t you?”
He picked up his fork, thought about it for a moment. “One morning, it must have been about six months after your mother had moved in here, I was having coffee with her. I was telling her how much I liked the house and she said, ‘There are no memories here, just echoes.’ That always stuck with me.”
“It’s not just about people staring,” Jess said. “When my father died, he left her two life insurance policies and a nice sum of money so my mother wouldn’t have to worry. She bought this house, figuring me, Rachel and Susan would live close to her and keep her busy with grandchildren. Then Rachel moved away, and Susan, well, she never wanted kids to begin with, and when Sarah disappeared, my mother … she just kept wishing for a different life. I don’t want to become that person. Being afraid all the time because I wished things were different. Can you understand that?”
“Sure.”
“You think you’ll ever sell the house?”
Mike shrugged. “Someday.”
“She’s never coming home,” Jess said gently.
He picked up his Coke and took a long sip, feeling it burn its way down his throat. He was getting angry and wasn’t sure why. It didn’t have to do with her comments about Sarah or selling the house. She had said them before, so why was he getting mad now?
It was New York. His only remaining connection to Sarah was moving away.
Mike put his can back on the table, rubbed his thumb across the label. “Can you still see her?”
“I haven’t forgotten her. I think about her all the time.”
“What I mean is, when you close your eyes, can you see her the way she would look now?”
“I remember Sarah the way she was.”
“I can’t see her face anymore. I can hear her voice just fine, and I can remember the things Sarah said and did, but her face is always a blur. I didn’t have this problem before.”
“When you were drinking.”
Mike nodded. When he drank, he’d lie on Sarah’s bed and close his eyes and he’d see her as clear as day, and the two of them would have the most amazing conversations.
Jess said, “Today I was in a bookstore and this boy, he couldn’t have been any more than four, was in line holding a copy of Make Way for Ducklings. You remember the first time you read her that story?”
“Sarah was around three. You purchased the book as a Christmas gift. It was Sarah’s favorite book.”
“The first time you read it, Sarah begged us to take her into Boston to see the ducks, remember?”
Mike felt a smile reach his face. He remembered how disappointed Sarah was to learn that the swan boats inside the Public Garden weren’t actually real swans. That disappointment had nearly turned into tears when Sarah saw the bronze statues of the mother duck and the baby ducklings. These aren’t the ducks from the story, Daddy. These ducks aren’t real. It was during the ride home that Sarah came up with an explanation: I know why the ducks are made of metal, Daddy. It’s ’cause so people can’t hurt them. Those kids were sitting on the backs of mother duck and baby ducks, and if I had people sit on my back all day my back would hurt too. They’re made of metal during the day so they won’t get hurt. At night when everybody’s at home in bed sleeping, that’s when they turn into real ducks and go swimming in the pond with the real swans. Sarah had been sitting in her car seat in the back of the Explorer when she said those words. The back window was down, and the wind was whipping her blond hair around her face and Sarah wore a white sunhat and a pink sundress, both birthday gifts from Jess’s mother, and Sarah had a chocolate stain on the dress. Sarah’s face blurred again and started to fade, no, please, Sarah. Please don’t leave me.
CHAPTER 10
Francis Jonah sat at the head of his dining room table, sucking in air from an oxygen mask. His skin appeared sunken, pulled tight against the bone, and the black cardigan sweater he wore looked two sizes too big. His hair, once gray, was now gone.
A thin woman with short brown hair parted in the middle placed a glass of water with a straw in front of him, Jonah nodding his thanks as the spidery fingers of his free hand reached across the table and clawed at the woman’s hand.
Had to be either a private nurse or a hospice worker,Mike thought. Jess’s mother had battled lung cancer, and when it was clear there was nothing more the doctors could do, Jodi opted to die at home, in her bed. A hospice worker, an overweight, patient man with a warm smile, had come in, his sole function being to relieve Jodi’s pain,make sure she was comfortable.
Mike sat inside his truck parked across the street, smoking a cigarette and watching as Jonah pulled his mouth away from the straw and started panting.
You need to turn around and leave.
Look at him. He could be dead tonight.
All he has to do is make one phone call and the police will haul your ass off to jail.
He knows what happened to Sarah. I can’t let him take that into the ground with him.
The way Mike figured it, the human side of Jonah, whatever bit of it was left, if that side had been strong enough to seek out Father Jack this afternoon and confess his sins, maybe that human part of Jonah was still there, and maybe it was possible to tap into it again. Father Jack couldn’t reveal what was said during the confession, but maybe he had mandated that Jonah, in order to be forgiven, had to confess what he knew and relieve the victims of their suffering.
Mike opened the truck door, got out and shut the door softly behind him.
The air was cold and raw as he walked across the street and then around the corner to Jonah’s front gate. The porch lights were off. Good. He unlocked the gate, pushed it open, and quietly moved up the walk and front steps and saw the same blue-painted door cut with the oval bubble of thick glass he had seen four years ago—only that night he had stumbled up these steps and banged on the door with one fist, the other punching the doorbell until the door swung open and there was Jonah dressed in a wrinkled pair of khakis and a yellowed undershirt, his gray hair tousled from sleep and sticking up at odd angles as he blinked himself awake.
Where is she?
I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to your daughter, Mr. Sullivan. I’m innocent.
Innocent men don’t change their names and go into hiding.
You’re drunk, Mr. Sullivan. Please, go home.
Jonah went to shut the door and Mike put out his hand and stopped it.
You’re going to tell me what happened to my daughter.
Only God knows what is true.
What? What did you say?
I can’t give you what I don’t have. I can’t give you back your daughter, and I can’t take away the guilt you feel for letting Sarah walk up that hill by herself.
When Mike snapped out of it, Slow Ed and his partner had him pinned to the floor. Jonah lay a few feet away, his body deathly still, his face swollen, bleeding and unrecognizable. As for how Jonah got that way,Mike was at a loss—still was.
Mike’s cell phone rang, the loud, chirping sound cutting through the silent air, startling him. He had forgotten to shut the ringer off, turn it to vibration mode. He ripped the phone off his belt, about to power it off when he thought it might be his P.O. and decided to answer it.
“Hello,” Mike whispered.
“You back off the porch right now, I’ll pretend I never saw you,” Slow Ed said.
Mike looked around the dark street for a patrol car.
Slow Ed said, “I’m giving you to the count of ten to get to your truck.”
“He went to see Father Connelly today,” Mike whispered. “You’re Catholic. You know what that means.”
“Ten.”
“Has Merrick talked with him?”
“Nine.”
“Ed, don’t do this to me.”
“Eight … seven …”
CHAPTER 11
D
addy, I need you.”
Sarah’s voice crying out for him through the darkness of the house.
“Daddy, please.”
Mike whipped back the sheets and marched down the hall, and when he opened the door to Sarah’s room, he found it flooded with sunlight. Sarah lay in her bed with the covers pulled up around her face. The house, he saw, sat on a sheet of ice that seemed to stretch on for miles in every direction. The ice looked safe. It could support the weight of the house no problem.
One of Sarah’s pillows was on the floor. He picked it up and saw a woman step up next to the window.
It was his mother.
“You can never trust the ice, Michael,” she said. “You think you’re safe and sometimes the ice breaks for no good reason. Once you slip underneath the water, it doesn’t matter how good a swimmer you are, your clothes will weigh you down, you’re going to drown.”
Sarah said, “Why are you ignoring me?”
Mike pulled down the blanket. He couldn’t see her face but heard her start crying again and she wouldn’t stop so he placed the pillow over her face and held it there while his mother started singing The Beatles’s “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the song she always sang when she was upset.
He woke up from the dream, his heart twisting inside his chest.
The dream was still fresh in his mind but Sarah’s face still eluded him. He kept his eyes shut, breathed deeply and tried chasing after her. Fang, all 130 pounds of him, snored beside him on the other side of the king-sized bed, the place where Jess slept, Sarah sometimes wedged between them when she had a bad nightmare. Man,did she have an imagination. She had somehow convinced herself that there were monsters under her bed and the only way to get rid of them was to take a flashlight, turn it on and leave it under the bed all night. Mike saw her body wrapped in her sheets, the purple Beanie Baby she carried with her everywhere she went lying beside her.Purple was her favorite color.One time Sarah dumped a Costco-sized container of grape Kool-Aid into a white load of laundry because she wanted all of her clothes purple. Sarah shoved a peanut butter sandwich into the VCR. Sarah snuck out of her crib and grabbed the permanent markers from his office drawer and used them to draw pictures on the wall above her crib, and he could see her standing in her crib, pointing at the wall that contained a stick-figured representation of the house that was colored brown and purple and had blue grass and a green sun and he still couldn’t see her face at all and it terrified him.
Mike opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.
“I haven’t forgotten about you, sweets,” he said to the empty room. “Daddy’s just having trouble remembering.”
Daddy.
The phone rang. Mike jumped, turned around and reached over for the cordless from the nightstand. Fang’s head was up, sleepy-eyed and staring.
“Hello.”
“I’m going to die in peace,” Jonah wheezed. “You’re not going to take that away from me, understand? Not you, not the police, not the press. You stay away from me or this time I’ll send you to rot in jail.”
Jonah hung up.
Mike yanked the phone away from his ear and stared at it as if it were a snake that had bitten him. He started to dial ⋆69, then stopped.
The conditions of the restraining order were specific: no contact at all—and that included phone calls. If he called Jonah back, Jonah would call the police, and the police in turn would go to the phone company who would have a record of Mike’s call. It didn’t matter if Jonah called first. Jonah had that freedom, that right. Mike didn’t.
Why did Jonah call? He had never called here before.
You’re not going to take that away from me.
Take what away from him?
The phone rang again.
“Mike, it’s Francis.”
Francis Merrick, the detective in charge of Sarah’s case.
“I’m sorry to bother you at such an hour,” Merrick said, “but I need you to come down to Roby Park.”
Mike’s heart was beating in his throat. “What’s going on?”
“It’s best if I explain when you get here.”
CHAPTER 12
Two police cruisers blocked the entrance to the Hill. A single uniformed cop stood out in the middle of East Dunstable Road, signaling the traffic out at this hour to keep moving. Mike pulled his truck over to the side, flung the door open and then ran over to the cop, the snow coming down in thick, heavy sheets.
The cop was Slow Ed’s partner, Charlie Ripken.
“Merrick’s at the top,” Rip said, his gaze cutting away from Mike’s and pointing past the cruiser’s bursts of blue and white lights toward the Hill’s floodlight. “Go on over.”
Near the area where Mike had placed the lilacs early this morning were four posts sectioned off with yellow police tape. Two plainly dressed detectives stood behind the tape, talking to themselves, their flashlights and eyes fastened on the item behind the tape, an item covered by a blue plastic tarp.
Merrick appeared out of the snow, holding a golf umbrella. As always, his black hair and mustache were neatly combed, and every time Mike saw him, he couldn’t get past the image of the man he saw at church—the lumpy, pear-shaped man dressed in pressed khakis and a crisp shirt who walked the aisle, working the collection basket. Even with the nine-millimeter strapped to his waist the guy looked soft.
“Let’s go over here,” Merrick said, and Mike followed him over to where the two detectives were standing. The one wearing a Red Sox baseball hat nudged the other and the two of them moved to opposite sides of the yellow tape. Both of them, Mike noticed, wore latex gloves. Whatever was under that bag was evidence.
Merrick faced the blue tarp. Mike stood next to him, under the umbrella, and watched as the two detectives picked up the tarp at the corners, gently shook off the snow, and then lifted it up.
Mike saw a flash of pink and his breath died somewhere in his throat.
The two detectives stepped back, and Mike could feel the three sets of eyes lock on him.
Merrick said, “I need to know if that belongs to your daughter.”
Sarah’s pink snow jacket was zippered all the way to the top. The hood was draped forward, both arms standing straight out. A piece of wood stuck out from one of the arm cuffs—a 2×4 by the looks of it.
His daughter’s jacket was on a cross.
This is a prank.
Early on, during those first couple of weeks when the police had been investigating Jonah—hell, even well after Jonah became the prime suspect—Mike’s mailbox was flooded with anonymous letters professing they knew what had happened to Sarah. A few were from prisoners doing serious time who were looking to trade information for a lighter sentence, but most of the letters were anonymous and completely bogus, except for that select few who, for reasons Mike never understood, insisted on mailing pieces of Sarah’s clothing. Like her pink jacket.
It was all bullshit. Jess usually bought Sarah’s clothes in pairs, Sarah being the type of kid who really did a number on her clothes and went through them quickly. The replacement snowsuit was sent to the FBI lab and the report came back with specifics: it was manufactured by a North Carolina company called Bizzmarket, the pink model one of the company’s most popular and sold all over the northeast in stores like Wal-Mart and Target.
This was a prank, another case of some sick, bored asshole who hated his life and, for kicks, decided to come out here in the middle of the night and place a look-alike jacket on top of the cross.
The detective with the Red Sox baseball hat reached forward and with his latex-covered hands gently folded the hood and pulled it back so Mike could read the tag. The other detective clicked on a flashlight.
Mike leaned in, slow and uncertain, as if the jacket might suddenly reach out and hug him.
SARAH SULLIVAN was written in black lettering across the jacket’s white tag.
“That’s Jess’s handwriting,” Mike said, remembering the day at the kitchen table when Jess wrote Sarah’s name on
the fabric BIZZMARKET tag with a black Sharpie marker. Sarah’s name on the inside tag was a detail that hadn’t been made public. “What about the pocket?”
The detective in the Red Sox hat pinched the edge of the left pocket and moved it forward, revealing the small tear in the stitching—another detail that hadn’t been made public.
Mike didn’t know his heart could beat this fast.
Buzzy’s was open. The lights were on and Buzzy’s owner, Debbie Dallal, was busy restocking one of the corner shelves with Snow Balls. She looked up when the door swung open, the bell ringing as Merrick stepped inside with his folded umbrella, Mike trailing behind him. Debbie straightened up, a weary smile on her face.
“I just put a fresh pot of coffee on the counter,” she said.
“Thanks for staying open so late,” Merrick said, brushing the snow off his coat. “We appreciate it.”
“It’s not a problem,” she said, Mike catching the look of pity in Deb’s eyes before she looked away.
The coffee area was set up on a long island in the middle of the store, across from the deli and grill. Mike poured himself a cup of coffee, remembering how Debbie had come in the morning after Sarah disappeared. The storm broke for a couple of hours, and Merrick used Buzzy’s as a makeshift base of operations to organize the volunteers who went door-to-door and blanketed Belham, Boston, Logan Airport and the airports in New Hampshire and Rhode Island with color copies of Sarah’s picture, her age, height, weight—her six years of life compressed into a single sheet of 8x10 paper, the word MISSING written in bold red letters up at the top, right above Sarah’s smiling face. Mike had stood in this very spot, drinking coffee to stay awake and looking out the window at the search-and-rescue helicopter hovering in the blue sky above the woods, the chopper’s infrared devices penetrating through inches of snow in search of Sarah’s body heat as bloodhounds tore through the trails.
Mike slid into one of the red leather booths by the front window. Water dripped from his face onto the table. He grabbed a wad of napkins from the dispenser and was patting himself dry.