The Necklace

by Matt Witten

  “She cared more about her idiot boyfriend than her own granddaughter. My God, Danny!”

  “Honey, she made a mistake. Making her feel worse won’t help anything.”

  “I don’t care,” Susan said petulantly. But she knew he was right. When he asked if he could invite Lenora to search alongside them, she grumbled but said okay.

  Now, as they entered the Bon’s parking lot, she stole a glance at Lenora in the rearview mirror. Her mom looked back at her, eyebrows sagging over sad, pathetic eyes, like a beaten dog. Susan knew she would have to forgive her.

  But not yet. She tightened her jaw and looked away. She could feel her mom’s disappointment from the back seat.

  Danny parked and they got out. Ellen, one of the church ladies, was over by the closed ice cream window waiting for them. Susan greeted her, then gazed at the miniature golf course and thought about how much Amy loved this course, especially the hole with the big purple shark where it was pretty easy to get a hole in one. Would she ever get to play that hole again?

  Lenora and Ellen headed deep into the woods. Susan sensed her mom was keeping a distance from her.

  Meanwhile, Susan and Danny split up, her going off to the right and him going left, a routine they’d established in the past twenty-four hours. She took a deep breath, steeling herself, and looked behind a thick oak tree.

  No Amy.

  She headed to another oak tree, and another, and another.

  No Amy.

  She looked back toward Danny and saw he was walking with Lenora now. Maybe this whole thing is bringing them closer too, she thought. Danny and her mom never exactly fought, but they didn’t totally get along either. He got frustrated when she acted flighty, and she thought he could be too controlling, like when he told Susan exactly how he liked his chicken cooked.

  But now, in this moment of crisis, they had put aside their differences. Susan felt a sudden warm glow in her heart for both of them.

  She looked around and found another oak tree that might be thick enough for a girl’s body to be lying behind. Jesus, this is torture. She headed for the tree.

  But then a police car pulled into the parking lot. Looking closer, she saw Officer Lynch was inside.

  Something about the way he parked the car, something she would never be able to explain, terrified her.

  Then Lynch stepped out of the car. He saw Susan and took off his police cap.

  Literally took it off.

  Right then, Susan knew. She knew.

  She started to cry. By the time Lynch got to her, she was sitting next to the tree trunk weeping.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She was gasping too hard to speak. He leaned down and touched her shoulder, then just sat down next to her and took her hand.

  Danny and Lenora hurried up.

  “What happened?” Danny said, and Lenora asked, “Did you find her?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Lynch said.

  Lenora sat down on the ground too. Then so did Danny. The four of them all sank into the cold muddy leaves as Lynch told them what had happened.

  Four hours ago, just after dawn, a young newlywed couple was out running with their terrier on the shores of the Mettawee River near Granville, an hour’s drive to the east. The dog went off the path and began barking loudly. The couple called him but he wouldn’t come, so they went to where he was.

  They saw a little girl’s body. She was lying on her back, half-covered by leaves, with a bloody gash on her forehead. Her neck was bruised, and though Lynch would wait for confirmation from the medical examiner, he was pretty sure she’d been strangled.

  Susan rocked back and forth on the ground. “Are you positive it’s Amy?”

  “I’m afraid so. I just came back from there, and there’s no doubt. I can show you a Polaroid, if you want.”

  Susan didn’t answer. She just screamed. She screamed so loud people coming out of the church heard it almost a quarter mile away.

  Danny grabbed her and held her. She stopped screaming but stayed rigid in his arms.

  Through her pain, she sensed her mom wanted to hold her too, but was afraid Susan would push her away.

  Lynch said they didn’t have to look at the photograph now. One of them could look anytime they were ready, or if they preferred, they could view the body and identify it.

  “Where is she?” Lenora said.

  “She’s being transported to the police morgue down in Albany,” Lynch said. “She was found across the border in Vermont, so the FBI is getting involved. They asked that the body be taken to Albany because it’s closer to both Lake Luzerne and Granville.”

  Susan couldn’t make sense of what Lynch was saying. She could barely hear him. She didn’t care about the FBI or anything like that. All she knew was that her baby was dead.

  She didn’t care about revenge. She wasn’t even thinking about it.

  Not yet.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28, PRESENT DAY

  SUSAN SAT IN her immobilized Dodge Dart on the shoulder of the highway and told herself not to panic. Maybe she’d get lucky and the car would just need minor repairs.

  She waited for a pickup truck to pass by, then got out of the car and eyed the right front bumper where she’d banged into the guardrail. It was bashed in, alright, but didn’t look like something that would keep her off the road.

  Then she opened up the hood. She figured Clarence back at Rozelle’s wouldn’t have let her take this trip without topping out all the fluid levels, and she was right. There was plenty of transmission fluid. The problem was bigger than that.

  She checked for detached cables or wires, then called Clarence and described what had happened. “What do you think it is?”

  “I’m not sure. Could be some kind of transmission problem.”

  “Will it be expensive?”

  “That depends. Sounds like you’ll need to get it towed. Where are you?”

  “Just west of Galway.”

  “Okay, I know a guy out there who’ll give you a good price.”

  Clarence gave her a name, Louie Paterno, and a number, and she called it. Louie said he’d be there in forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.

  It turned out to be more like an hour and a half, but Louie did give her a nice price: only seventy dollars. He took her to an auto repair shop in Galway that he said was the cheapest garage in the area. It was run by a woman in her forties named Tina with beefy arms and a heavy way of walking.

  “We’re booked pretty solid today,” Tina said. “My guys can get to your car in forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.” Susan wondered if that meant an hour and a half too. She could forget about making it to Buffalo tonight.

  She walked several blocks to a nearby diner, where she got grilled cheese with fries. It was okay, but not nearly as good as the food at Molly’s. She waited until a little over an hour had gone by, then walked back to the repair shop to hear the verdict. Whatever was wrong with her car, hopefully Tina would give her a break like Louie did.

  Tina was standing by the Dodge Dart talking to a mechanic when Susan walked up. “Hey,” Susan said.

  Tina looked at her and sighed, and Susan’s heart fell. That sigh couldn’t mean good news. Sure enough, Tina said, “I’m afraid your transmission is totally shot. You’ll need a new transmission box, everything.”

  “How much will that cost?”

  “I’m afraid the best I can do for you is about two thousand dollars.”

  Susan had gotten nine hundred eighty-nine dollars from the fundraiser. She’d decided to leave a hundred bucks for her mom, not fifty; and she’d spent that seventy bucks on towing.

  “I only have eight hundred,” she said.

  Tina gave her a sympathetic nod. “I hear you.” She put her hand on the repainted but still rusty car roof. “Well, at least you got two hundred fifty thousand miles out of this car. That’s nothing to sneeze at.”

  “I’m kind of in a bind,” Susan said.

 
Tina folded her thick arms, obviously preparing herself to hear yet another sob story. Susan continued, undaunted. “I need to make it to North Dakota by Saturday. Is there any way you can help me out?”

  “Not twelve hundred dollars’ worth.”

  “Can you get the transmission secondhand?”

  Tina shook her head. “They haven’t been making these cars for twenty, twenty-five years. That’s why the parts are so expensive.”

  Susan chewed on her thumbnail. “Is there any way to keep it together with paper clips and duct tape for a little while?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Susan knew Tina was right. She’d heard that screech. Her old Dodge Dart was dead.

  But what should she do? She still had to get to North Dakota. She couldn’t just go back home.

  “How much can you pay me for the car?” she said.

  “Honestly, ma’am, it’ll cost me money to tow it to the junkyard. There’s nothing in here anybody’s gonna want.”

  “I got all new tires today.”

  Tina looked down at them. “Okay, I can give you a hundred dollars for that.”

  Susan nodded. She looked down at the damaged bumper, then put her hand on the car’s dark green hood and rubbed it gently. It felt ice cold. “Poor Juliette,” she said.

  Tina looked at her questioningly.

  “That’s what my daughter called this car. I drove her to school in this car the day she died.”

  Tina searched for words, then finally said, “I’m sorry. Maybe it’s good you’re getting rid of it. Bad memories.”

  “No. Best memories of my life.”

  Susan reached in her pocket for the car key, then remembered she’d given it to Tina. She was feeling scattered, her emotions all in a jumble. “You got the key?”

  Tina handed it to her, and she opened the trunk. She took out her old suitcase.

  She couldn’t afford the eight forty for a plane, even after she got a hundred for the tires. She’d have zero money left for food or anything else. And how would she even make it down to the Albany airport from here?

  “Where’s the nearest bus station?” she asked.

  Tina hesitated, considering. “Probably Gloversville.”

  Susan remembered passing a sign that said Gloversville was twenty-five miles away. Well, what choice do I have? she thought, as she expanded the suitcase handle.

  Tina watched her and said, “I’d ask one of my guys to give you a ride, but we really are booked solid.”

  “No worries. I can hitch.”

  Between hitchhiking and taking the bus, she should still be able to make it.

  I have to make it.

  Tina reached in her pocket for a wad of bills and pulled off five twenties. “Here.”

  “Thanks. Appreciate it.”

  Then Susan reached out and gave the hood of her car a love tap. “So long, Juliette.” She nodded goodbye to Tina and started rolling her suitcase down the driveway out of the shop.

  The wind was blowing in from the north now, and the blue in the western sky had gone back to gray. Susan wrapped the aqua scarf her mom had knitted for her more tightly around her neck. It was maybe a quarter mile back to Route 29. She’d stand at the intersection and put out her thumb.

  Okay, so maybe she wouldn’t be able to make it to Niagara Falls. But she’d sure as shit get to North Dakota.

  Behind her, she heard Tina mutter, “Oh hell,” probably to herself. Then Tina called out, “Hold up!”

  Susan turned and saw Tina heading toward her. Less than three minutes later, she was climbing into the front seat of Tina’s Ford pickup, getting a ride to the Gloversville bus station.

  As they pulled onto the road, Susan said, “I really appreciate this.”

  “So why are you so fired up to get to North Dakota?” Tina asked.

  Susan told her. Tina was so appalled she took her eye off the road and almost crashed into a lumber truck.

  After Tina got back into her lane, she said, “Guys like that, who mess with little girls, we oughta skin ’em alive and leave ’em in the desert for the coyotes to eat.”

  Susan nodded. She looked out the window at a lonely stand of cattails bordering a small pond on their right, and thought about the Monster.

  Some nights she lay in bed and it was like the Monster was right there in the room with her. She would see his face the way it looked on the opening day of the trial, when he walked into the courtroom for the first time and gazed up at her. Their eyes met, and his eyes had been so goddamn puzzling. They seemed so sad, even sympathetic, not angry or sneering as she had expected.

  “I want to ask him why he did it,” Susan said.

  “’Cause he’s a fucking psycho, that’s why.”

  “But why’d he pick my daughter? Why her?”

  Tina frowned, confused. “I thought you said he confessed.”

  “He did. I mean, then he tried to take it back and claim he didn’t do it after all, but, yeah, he confessed.”

  “So didn’t he say in the confession why he picked her?”

  Susan tugged at her ear. “He said it was because he liked Amy’s necklace. But that didn’t really make sense. How could he even see the necklace from across the street?”

  It was something that hadn’t occurred to her at the trial. The Monster’s lawyer never brought it up.

  But then two years after the murder, one Monday morning in April, Susan was driving past the elementary school. She did that almost every day, because if she tried to avoid that stretch of 9N, it would take her fifteen minutes longer to get to work and another two dollars’ worth of gas. She was a block past the school when it suddenly hit her.

  In the Monster’s confession, he said he was parked across 9N from the school when he saw Amy and her necklace. He talked for, like, a paragraph about the necklace, and how that afternoon was the first time he ever noticed it.

  But could he actually have seen the necklace from that far away?

  Susan did a U-turn and pulled up at the spot where the Monster said he’d parked that afternoon. She looked across the two-lane road and the stretch of grass on the other side to the pavement where Amy would have been standing.

  It would be very hard to see a necklace from here. Maybe impossible.

  Sometimes, driving home from the lunch shift, she would pull up at that same spot and wait for kids to come out of school. She’d watch them, to see if she would have spotted a necklace if they were wearing one.

  She wondered if maybe the Monster got it wrong and he was waiting on the other side of 9N, closer to the school. But he had been so clear about where he was parked.

  Maybe he was lying about seeing Amy’s necklace for the first time right then. But why would he lie about that, when he was telling the truth about everything else? It was strange.

  Tina broke into her thoughts. “Shit happens,” she said. “It just happens.”

  Susan had heard this many times before, from both her mom and Molly. She looked out the window again. She still missed Molly, even though it had been seven years now since she passed away.

  Tina said, “My advice? Don’t even talk to the fuckhead. Just spit in his face.”

  “He took her necklace for a souvenir,” Susan said. “I’m hoping he’ll tell me where he put it.”

  She touched the aqua scarf on her neck.

  “I’d like to put the necklace on Amy’s grave.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SUNDAY, APRIL 14, TWENTY YEARS AGO

  SUSAN NEEDED TO see Amy’s body. She wasn’t sure why, but she had to. So Danny drove her and Lenora down to the police morgue in Albany.

  “Fucking motherfucker,” Danny said, his fists tightening on the steering wheel. “Fucking Frank Simmons! And they let him out of prison, can you believe it? I don’t give a shit if they don’t have evidence, fucking lock him up!”

  It clearly hadn’t taken Danny long to get into revenge mode. Susan was still numb, not saying a word. Lenora, in back, wasn’t talking muc
h either.

  Susan knew her mom was tearing herself apart, but so what? They still didn’t know for sure Frank was the killer, but it seemed certain that her mom’s failure to tell Susan she wasn’t picking up Amy resulted in her death. Somebody spotted Amy waiting outside and grabbed her.

  Susan shut her eyes tight, trying to squeeze that image out of her head.

  When they got down to Albany Police headquarters, shared by the Albany cops and the New York State Police, Lynch was waiting for them in the parking lot. He walked them to the front desk and showed his badge to the desk cop, who had just come on duty a couple minutes ago.

  “I’m Officer Lynch from Lake Luzerne. I have the victim’s family with me.”

  “Which victim?” the desk cop asked.

  Susan snapped out of her shock when she heard that. God, she loathed this cop! Loathed him like he was a piece of dogshit stuck to her shoe. She wanted to reach across the desk, grab his head, and smash it against the wall behind him, over and over. Smash. Smash. Smash.

  “Her name is Amy Lentigo,” Susan snarled at the cop through gritted teeth. “She’s seven years old. Here’s her picture.” She shoved her photo of Amy, gap-toothed and smiling, in the cop’s face.

  He blinked. “I’m sorry, ma’am. She’s downstairs.” To Lynch he said, “Just follow the signs.”

  “Thank you, Officer,” Lynch said, and he took Susan, Danny, and Lenora down to the basement.

  Susan was expecting to look at her daughter’s body through a window, like on Law & Order, which she and Danny watched on Wednesday nights after Amy went to bed. But instead, Lynch opened the door and led them right into the morgue. It was cold. There were two long, stainless steel tables in the center of the room. A tall cabinet with big metal drawers lined one wall.

  To their left was a closed office door. Lynch knocked, and a woman in her early thirties with thick black hair and heavy purple earrings, the morgue attendant, opened up.

  She looked them over. “Can I help you?”

  Lynch said, “These are the victim’s parents and grandmother.”

  Susan was ready to kill her if she asked, “Which victim?” But the morgue attendant nodded solemnly and said, “Okay.” She stepped out of the office and asked Lynch, “Can you give me a hand?”