by Sophie Stern
I push the gate open and step aside so Finley can drive through. Once she’s safely inside the gate, I close it and lock it back up. We don’t need any other visitors. I’m not exactly expecting anyone, but you never know with a place like this or a time like this.
People really, really don’t like me.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone happened to “just wander by” on a morning jog and then call the cops when they see us.
She drives a little farther down the road. It’s still dirt, but it’s choppier up here. We’re almost to the mill. On the other side of the woods is the high school and the football field. It’s close, but this is the only way to access the mill by car. You can reach it on foot from other directions, but the woods are so overgrown these days that I doubt that’s an easy task.
Finally, she stops the car, and we both stare at it.
“There it is.”
“There it is,” I agree.
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yeah,” I say, but that’s a total lie.
I’m not sure.
I’m not ready.
I’m not certain of anything at all, but I reach for the door handle and I pull it.
Then I get out of the car.
Chapter Nine
Finley
Something seems to change in the air. I can’t quite explain the feeling or the emotion that’s coursing through my veins, but it’s not anything good.
I never thought I’d see this place again.
Now that I’m here, I’m even less sure.
“This is where it happened,” he says, walking toward the grated door that leads down to the mine.
“Outside?” I ask.
“Inside,” he says.
“Then let’s go in.”
I’m not sure if he’s ready for that.
I mean, I’m not sure if I’m ready for it, either. Somehow, I feel like we both need this, though. We both need to get this closure so we can start moving forward with whatever comes next.
I grab a couple of flashlights from the trunk of my car and flick them on. Luckily, they still work. The batteries seem strong. I should have tested them out before we drove out here, but honestly, I was so distracted by Neil that I didn’t even think to do it.
“Let’s go.”
We head to the door. This one has a rusty lock on it, too, but Neil is a man of many surprises, and of course, he has a key. He manages to get the lock to open, but just barely.
“I’m just glad you didn’t have to break the lock,” I tell him.
“With what?” He shakes his head. “I mean, my hands are strong, but not that strong.”
“I have a crowbar in my trunk,” I shrug.
“Planning on kidnapping someone?” He asks curiously.
“Not today.”
He goes first, stepping into the old mine, and the scent of mold and dirt wraps around us. There’s dust in the air and everything feels…strange.
It feels abandoned.
There’s a certain heaviness in the air, as though the mine knows what happened here so long ago, but it just doesn’t care. I suppose that’s probably the worst thing about all of this: there’s no way to make sure that the memories of the past don’t leer their ugly heads and pull us under water.
We step forward. I have to duck down a little because the opening to the mine is a bit narrow and the ceiling is very low. We walk at a downward slope, moving carefully into the mine. We’re both quiet, lost in our own thoughts, but finally, the entryway opens up to a larger space, and then we’re there inside the mines.
“Not much left here,” he murmurs.
“Is this how you remember it?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve never been down here before,” I admit.
“Good. Nothing good ever came from being down here,” he tells me.
“You hung out here a lot, huh?”
I look around at a couple of dust-covered lanterns that were abandoned long ago. There are even a couple of mine carts up here, as well as some random items: a notebook, a hat. There’s a backpack against one wall that probably belonged to a highschooler who came down here to escape from their parents.
“Where did it happen?” I ask.
I don’t want to.
It’s a question that can’t possibly have a good answer, but that’s where we have to start.
“I haven’t been down here,” he says. “I wasn’t here when it happened. I read the reports. They all said he was shot by the first mine cart.”
“That’s there,” I point to it. It’s knocked on its side.
I feel a little sick as we walk over to it. I can tell that most of the blood was cleaned up, but there’s still evidence that Sammy died here. The side of the mine cart is stained from his body, and I don’t think any amount of scrubbing would get rid of that. I reach for Neil’s hand and squeeze it, silently letting him know that I’m here for him.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“No, it’s not.”
There are marks in the dirt where the body was dragged away by the paramedics or emergency team, as well as a million sets of footprints. A lot of people came down here to look for evidence. What are the chances of us finding anything at all?
I have to think like a detective though. I have to think like a criminal.
“If he was shot from here,” I say. “Then where did the killer stand?”
“He was talking to his dad when it happened.”
“They were fighting, right?”
“Arguing, yeah.”
“About you?”
“About Ted.”
“Because his dad didn’t want him to be gay.”
“Nobody wanted Sammy to be gay, love. Not the cheerleaders, not the jocks, and not his parents.”
“Ted didn’t care, though.”
“They weren’t together, but yeah. Ted didn’t care.”
“So Sammy was shot and his dad just pointed the finger at you.”
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sammy had mentioned to his dad that I was coming there. His dad told the police that he’d followed his son to find out who he was meeting. The fact that Sammy was gay was left off the police reports. They made it sound like I was going to sell him drugs.”
“But his dad never saw you.”
“Or anyone else.”
“Do you have any idea who else didn’t like him?”
Neil scratches his chin but shakes his head. He looks around the space, shining his flashlight here and there. There honestly aren’t a lot of hiding places here: some overturned mine carts, but that’s it. The space is pretty empty. It leads down deeper into the mine. I suppose someone could hide down there, but wouldn’t Sammy’s father have noticed them?
Why didn’t he see the killer?
“Walk me through what happened after Sammy was shot,” I say, curious. At this point, we’re talking about it analytically. I get the feeling that Neil is trying to disassociate so he can do the same thing.
I haven’t read the reports, and I haven’t poured over the case like Neil has. I’ve had five years to think about him, but he’s had five years to think about that night.
“He was shot, and the police were on the scene within minutes.”
“You think someone tipped them off.”
“I have no idea.”
“You think Sammy’s dad told them to come out?”
He nods.
“I think he was going to arrest me for something. Maybe he was even going to plants drugs on me. I don’t know. In the end, they didn’t have to plant anything on me. They just had to catch me, which wasn’t hard. I was lurking in the woods when they found me. It wasn’t difficult for them to argue I was hiding after what happened.”
“But there was no gunshot residue on your hands,” I point out the obvious. “Shouldn’t that have mattered?”
“I would have thought that it did,” he shrugs. “In the end, they needed a lot less evide
nce than they should have.”
The entire thing sounds fishy and strange to me, but whatever. We’re here now, and we can hopefully find out what really happened. We walk around in silence. I swing my flashlight back and forth, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for.
Any sort of footprints or fingerprints would be long gone by now. Anything like that would have been taken away by time and animals.
So instead of looking for actual items, I ask myself a different question: where could the killer have hidden?
There’s really nowhere. It’s an open space, and even if the killer hid behind a mine cart, there wouldn’t have been any way for them to escape unnoticed.
And then I think of something else.
“Neil?”
“Yeah.”
“Were any of these mine carts ever outside of the mine?”
“What?” He looks over at me, and I wait a second.
“Outside of the mine. Were any of these ever dragged out for people to take pictures in or to horse around in?”
Neil stares at me and finally, he nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “Me and Sammy, we pulled a couple of them out so we could sit in them and talk. It’s stupid, but it was fun.”
“Where?” I ask.
Then we go back outside. It seems like such a strange thing to think of, but there really isn’t any other explanation. Sammy’s dad didn’t see Neil because Neil wasn’t here. There’s nowhere down here for a killer to hide.
So the only real explanation is that Sammy wasn’t killed in the mines.
I don’t know why Sammy’s father would have lied about that, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is figuring out what actually happened. If the cops missed the location of the death, then they probably missed something else: maybe even a lot of somethings.
We go back outside and he looks around for a minute. The space is filled with brush and leaves and branches. A tree has fallen over up ahead and it lies on its side. A squirrel is perched on it, watching us, but we both ignore the little creature.
“Where were they?”
“There.”
He points near where the tree has fallen, which is what I was afraid of. Okay, so the area is definitely totally and completely compromised. I don’t want to say anything out loud because I don’t want Neil to completely lose hope that we’ll find out who did this, but the reality is that our chances of finding anything basically dropped completely.
Still, we’ll comb the area. We might find some abandoned stuff or forgotten items. We might find some old sneakers or even a broken beer bottle.
What we won’t find, in my opinion, is hope.
That’s quickly vanishing.
I walk over to the tree and he’s close behind me. We both look around. I don’t know what we’re searching for at this point: anything, really. Could there have been anything left behind that could point us in the right direction?
Is there anything that could help us find what we’re looking for?
“The carts were here,” he says.
“And you sat in them?”
“All the time.”
“So if they were here, and his blood was on them, then he must have been standing near them.”
“He was shot and hit his head on them when he fell,” Neil murmurs. He speaks almost so quietly that I’m not quite sure I heard him correctly, but I know that I did.
We stand there, walking around in the silence when we hear the sound of footsteps. We both look up sharply to see a short, stocky man traipsing toward us. He’s trying to march, but he’s too chubby and round.
“Sheriff Peterson,” Neil says dryly.
“I knew it was you,” the sheriff growls.
Why did he come out here?
Someone must have been watching the mine. Why else would the sheriff show up here? I hate how small this town is sometimes, and I hate the fact that now we’re having to confront Sammy’s dad.
This isn’t a meeting any of us want.
“Can I help you?” Neil asks politely. I notice he’s standing still with his hands at his sides. He hasn’t balled his hands into fists. He looks demure, almost, and completely harmless. I realize this is something he must have learned in prison.
He doesn’t want to appear to be a troublemaker, I realize.
“You’re trespassing,” the sheriff says gruffly. I know there are a million other things he wants to say to Neil. His eyes dart from me to Neil and back again.
“I’m not trespassing, Sheriff,” Neil tells him. “I own this property.”
“That’s not possible,” the sheriff grunts. “This belongs to Edgar Richardson. This is his land. It’s been his land for years.”
“My grandfather purchased it from him recently,” Neil says. Again, his voice stays calm. He doesn’t raise it or yell. He’s not shaking, but I bet that inside, he wants to. I know that I do. “And he left it to me when he passed on. If you want to verify this information, I have the information in Miss Finley’s car. Otherwise, you’re free to call my attorney to verify this.”
I look over at Neil.
How does he do that?
How does he speak so very calmly?
The sheriff looks like he wants to say something to Neil. Anger plays all over his face, and I can only imagine what he’s feeling. After all, Sammy was his only son. To lose him like that…
Well, it must have been horrible.
It doesn’t excuse the lying that he did. It doesn’t excuse the fact that an innocent man went to prison.
It does, however, mean that even the sheriff is just a human.
“What are you doing here?” The sheriff turns his attention to me.
“She’s helping me determine where my fencing should go,” Neil doesn’t miss a bit.
Fencing?
Uh, okay. I can roll with that.
“Since when does a librarian know anything about fencing?” Sheriff Peterson asks. He looks me up and down, like he’s totally disgusted with me. I mean, I get it. In his mind, I’m hanging out with the man who killed his son, but that’s not what happened.
Neil couldn’t have done it.
I’ve never doubted his innocence. I don’t know why. I don’t really have a good reason. Maybe everyone else is right. Maybe my vagina really has gotten in the way of my brain. I don’t know. All I know is that Neil doesn’t have it in him.
There is literally no chance he could have done this.
“Actually, librarians have a wide breadth of knowledge,” I finally manage to sputter out. My words don’t carry their standard amount of confidence, though. Somehow, I don’t think he’s the kind of person who’s going to believe me.
“I see,” he finally says. The sheriff looks from me to Neil and back again. “Although to be fair, Finley, I never saw you as the type to get with murderers.”
I open my mouth to call him out, but Neil reaches out and places his hand on my shoulder. I know what he’s trying to tell me. He wants me to know that it’s not worth it, that it’s not that big of a deal. He wants me to know that we don’t have to fight this.
He wants me to understand that what’s happening right out is out of my control.
The sheriff turns and walks away, and he disappears back up the road. Once we’re both certain he’s gone, Neil sighs and slumps to the ground.
“Hey,” I run to him. “Are you okay?”
He just shakes his head.
Shit.
Okay, so seeing Sammy’s dad hit him hard. Why wouldn’t it? Sammy and Neil were BFFs and his dad basically threw Neil to the wolves. I think it took all of his strength to stay cool when approached by the guy.
He basically took everything from him.
I kneel beside my friend and I wrap my arms around him. Maybe he’s more than a friend. I don’t know. We’re sleeping together, so maybe friends-with-benefits would be a more appropriate term. Maybe I should call him my boyfriend. I don’t know.
What I do know is that our time
together at the mine has come to an end. It’s time to leave.
“Let’s get you home,” I tell him. I stand up and reach for him, hauling him to his feet. As I do, something glittery catches my eye, and I look behind where he’s standing and see a very bright pink hoop earring. It’s not a very common style of earring, especially in Kurlin. Most people here are all about studs or no piercings at all. In fact, a lot of people here think having pierced ears is making some sort of religious statement.
I squat down and grab it, picking it up. It looks exactly like the ones Ted’s wife was wearing yesterday morning at the library, and suddenly, my stomach begins to twist and turn.
Chapter Ten
Neil
“What is it?” Something is wrong. She found earring, but I don’t know why that should matter, but I can instantly tell that it does.
“It’s an earring.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“It’s exactly like the one Marcy was wearing in the library yesterday.”
“Marcy…Ted’s wife?”
Finley nods, and suddenly, I start to feel sick. It couldn’t be her. She couldn’t have been the one that shot him. There’s simply no way.
Could she have?
Could it have been her?
I think back to that night. Everything was so crazy and chaotic and wild. Things are sometimes so clear and sometimes so blurry. That’s the problem with memories like this. Things aren’t always exactly like we seem to remember them.
“Yeah. Did she…did she dislike Sammy?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know she even knew him.”
“Oh shit,” Finley says, and I realize what she’s thinking almost instantly.
“You think she had her eye on Ted all along.”
“They got married really fast, Neil. I know you were away, but…well, it was fast. I mean, everyone thought it was a shotgun wedding, you know? No one could have known that it was anything else. I mean, who would have thought that? Literally no one would have thought that she’d killed Sammy to get him out of her way.”
Only, it kind of makes sense, and I wonder how nobody ever saw this before.
“You think she was hiding behind the mine carts.”
“Maybe she was near them, or even in the trees. If it was chaotic enough, Sammy’s dad wouldn’t have seen her. He could have hauled everything inside and made it look like you ambushed them. If everyone knew he was shot from outside, there would have been a better investigation.”