by Matt Witten
Almost crashing into a man in a wheelchair, she raced to the passenger loading area. There were a lot of buses there. Which is the right one? But none of them looked like they were about to leave.
Then she saw another bus already pulling out of the station. That has to be it! “Wait!” she yelled. She ran toward the bus as it went down the driveway and turned right, heading away from her. “Stop!”
The bus kept moving, about to go through a green light and take off. “Stop!” she screamed louder, towing her suitcase and running.
The light turned yellow. Would the bus stop? Then the light turned red and the bus’s brake lights came on. Thank God! She raced up and banged on the front door.
The driver, a skinny guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his uniform jacket, eyed her skeptically. At last he opened the door.
“I have a ticket,” Susan said, gasping for breath. “I have a ticket.”
A minute later, her suitcase was stashed and she was on the bus as it headed west.
Eleven hundred miles to go.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SUNDAY, APRIL 14, TWENTY YEARS AGO
AFTER SUSAN ANSWERED all of Agent Pappas’s questions, she went to a bar down the street and had a burger and a couple of cheap happy-hour beers while some baseball game played on TV. Mainly she didn’t want to be alone with her mom in the break room while Pappas questioned Danny.
The alcohol and the finality of her daughter’s death exhausted her. When Danny and Lenora picked her up at the bar at dusk and they all drove home, Susan was too drained to join in their conversation. She looked silently out at the trees lining the Northway. They were beginning to turn green again after the long winter, promising renewal. Rebirth.
What a goddamn joke. She pictured Amy running through these woods, screaming.
Lenora was complaining to Danny about how Pappas had questioned her for over an hour and wasn’t at all nice about it. “I don’t know what you’re telling these cops,” she said, “but I wish to hell they’d quit harassing all the guys I go out with.”
Susan turned away from the window and focused on Lenora. “You think I care about that, Mom?”
Lenora knew enough to shut up, but Susan was on a roll. “You think I give half a flying fuck about your dickhead boyfriends?”
Danny stepped in, telling Lenora, “At least nobody’s saying you killed Amy. Pappas practically accused me to my face. Asking all these questions about my alibi.”
Their whole marriage, Susan had tried to downplay it whenever she got mad at Danny. She’d make nice or go in another room and wait for her anger to pass. But now she was at the end of her rope. “Why don’t both of you shut the fuck up,” she snapped.
Danny looked at her in surprise. She turned back to the window.
By the time they got home it was dark. Molly and Parson Parsons were there, along with several neighbors. Susan found Molly way more comforting than anybody else. She fell into her arms and sobbed until she had no more tears left inside her.
Her neighbors had made macaroni and cheese and hot cocoa, but Susan skipped all that and drank from another bottle of Jack Daniels that one of her regular diner customers had brought over. Within fifteen minutes, she was nodding off at the kitchen table.
Molly and Lenora took her off to the bedroom. Molly pulled back the blankets while Lenora removed her coat and shoes. Susan had a flash where she remembered she was furious at her mom, but she was too tired to scream at her. She was asleep before she was lying down.
When she woke up in the middle of the night, four hours later, at first she didn’t remember anything that had happened in the last two days. She felt a thickness in her head and wondered what it was about. Then she felt a tangy bourbon aftertaste on her gums.
And then she remembered everything.
She sat bolt upright and saw Danny lying on his side of the bed, his body turned away from her, asleep. She suddenly hated him. How could he be sleeping? Their daughter was dead!
She pummeled his back with her fists and screamed, a long wordless scream. He woke up and shouted, “Hey!” and as she rained down blows on him, he managed to break free and roll out of bed. She glowered at him and thought, He doesn’t care! He doesn’t care Amy is dead!
“Susan, calm down,” he said, and through the haze of her hatred she could see he was terrified of her. Then she realized how totally irrational she was acting.
She breathed heavily and started to cry. God, she had to stop punching people. Danny came back into bed and put his arms around her.
She pulled him to her fiercely, digging her fingernails into his back. She could feel him flinch from the pain, but then he held her tight.
I love this man, she thought.
They had been together for nineteen years now, since she was sixteen. Danny was her first love. Her only love.
She pulled back from him and looked in his eyes, as moonlight eased in through the window. Will we survive this?
She couldn’t imagine life without him.
But she hadn’t been able to imagine life without Amy, either.
“I love you, Danny,” she said.
“I love you too, Susan,” he said, and held her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, PRESENT DAY
THE FIRST THING Susan did after getting on the bus was hit the restroom. She wished she could brush her teeth, but her toothbrush was in her suitcase inside the luggage compartment, so that would have to wait.
She went back to her seat as the bus left Buffalo behind and got onto the cold, barren I-90 heading west. While it chugged up a long gray hill, Susan opened her purse, moved the pepper spray bottle out of the way, and took out her baggie of food. She figured she better ration it, so she only ate two handfuls before putting it away. At some point she’d probably have to call Terri for money, but she didn’t want to do it yet. Terri had already done so much for her, organizing that whole fundraiser at the Crow Bar. She felt guilty she’d lost all the money from it.
Running to catch the bus hadn’t done her right leg any good, and it started bothering her like it did sometimes. Susan had never gone to a doctor about the leg, hadn’t wanted to spend the money, but she suspected it was some kind of muscle pull. It helped to massage it, and that’s what she did now, kneading the back of her leg from her knee down to her ankle.
She didn’t have anything to read, so she looked around her. This bus was twice as full as yesterday’s, and she’d been lucky to get a seat to herself. Several of the other passengers were talking on their cells, but she hated hearing just half of a conversation so she tried to tune them out. She gazed out the window at the bare trees and occasional billboards and thought about what would happen this Saturday at five-thirty p.m.
From reading up on executions, she knew the condemned man gets to say some final words. She wondered what the Monster would say.
Would he finally admit he had done it? Would he ask for Susan’s forgiveness, and tell her where he had hidden Amy’s necklace?
She almost hoped he wouldn’t. That way she wouldn’t have to decide whether to forgive him. She was used to hating him and wanted to hate him forever, no matter what Parson Parsons said.
As she daydreamed about watching the Monster’s last breath, and how that would feel, a girl’s voice said, “Daddy, which do you think is cooler: singing kangaroos or dancing turtles?”
It was the little girl on the other side of the aisle, who had been quietly reading Magic Tree House books for the whole trip. She was talking to her father, a guy with serious eyes and black-rimmed glass who looked like a high school teacher or professor.
He smiled at her and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Boy, that’s a tough one.”
“I think dancing turtles ’cause they’re taller. But Zoey thinks singing kangaroos because they can be either pink or blue.”
“But dancing turtles can be purple, right?” the dad said earnestly.
So sweet, Susan thought. Except moments lik
e this always came with a desperate pang. The girl was wearing a pink dress with ruffled sleeves, just like Amy’s old dress. Susan closed her eyes and remembered a spring afternoon about two weeks before Amy died, when she and her dad were playing basketball in the driveway. The snow had barely melted and it couldn’t have been more than forty-five degrees out, but Amy insisted on playing without her coat. She had on the pink dress, which she’d worn to school that day.
Susan came out the front door to tell them dinner was ready and stood there watching them. Danny had bought a hoop low enough for Amy. She could already shoot layups into it, and in a few years, she’d be tall enough to dunk. She couldn’t wait.
Susan remembered feeling so happy that afternoon.
Amy dribbling toward the basket, saying, “Daddy, I wanna dunk! Lift me up!”
Danny swoops her up and holds her high in the air.
Amy slam dunks the ball. “Monster jam!” she shouts, and starts to giggle.
“Hurray for Amy!” Danny says, lifting her even higher.
“Daddy, let me down!”
Danny lets her down and Amy goes running after the ball.
Sitting in the bus with her eyes closed, Susan could hear her younger self calling, “Danny and Amy, time for dinner!” She had an odd feeling there was something else to the memory too, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what.
Before she could focus on it any more, she heard the air brakes and felt the bus shudder to a halt. She opened her eyes and saw they’d come to a red light outside some small town. Behind her, a woman answered her ringing phone and said, “Hi, honey, I’m almost home.”
She looked out the window and saw a sign advertising a Cumberland Farms convenience store, next to another sign advertising a Stewart’s. Funny, there was an intersection right outside Lake Luzerne with the exact same two signs. It was like she hadn’t even left home.
Then she saw another sign behind those two, a green road sign. It had an arrow pointing to the right and it said, “TAMARACK 2.”
Susan sat bolt upright. We’re two miles from Tamarack? She’d known it was west of Buffalo, but she had no idea it was right off I-90.
The light turned green and the bus turned right.
Toward Tamarack.
Susan looked out the window, in shock. She half expected to see Danny out there, walking down the sidewalk in one of those navy-blue blazers he used to wear to work.
They were riding up Main Street now. Tamarack looked the way she had pictured it: a small tourist town, like Luzerne but nicer, with a town green and stores that called themselves shoppes. But it was too far away from Boston or New York to be overly fancy.
The bus station was right on Main, in the middle of town. They pulled up out front, and the driver with the Hawaiian shirt called out in a bored voice, “Tamarack. Tamarack, New York.”
As the doors opened for two disembarking passengers, Susan looked through the opening and saw a storefront with a sign that read: “TAMARACK REALTY.”
Holy shit.
It was almost like God was sending her a sign. This sign.
There weren’t any passengers waiting to get on the bus, so the driver shut the door and got ready to take off. Susan made a decision. She jumped out of her seat and hurried up to the front.
“Excuse me,” she said. “If I get off the bus here, can I get back on later with the same ticket?”
The driver looked her over. “Yeah, but the next bus west isn’t for twenty-four hours.”
She hesitated. The driver put his foot on the gas and prepared to drive on, positive she’d decide to stay on the bus.
But hell, she could get off here and still make it to North Dakota by Thursday. She said, “I want to get out.”
The driver lifted his eyebrows. “Whatever you say, lady.” He opened the door.
“My suitcase is down there,” she said, pointing at the luggage compartment.
The driver helped her get it. “Have fun in lovely downtown Tamarack,” he said, like it was highly unlikely. Then he got back in the bus and started off.
Susan was tempted to wave her arms and get him to stop. She would tell him she had changed her mind, and she would leave Tamarack and Danny behind. She’d go on to North Dakota alone.
This was so not like her, to stop in a strange town with zero money to see an ex-husband who didn’t even answer her phone calls. It was nuts.
But before she could make up her mind to wave at the driver, the bus turned a corner and was out of sight.
She got her suitcase and headed for Tamarack Realty.
When she reached the storefront, she immediately got another jolt. There was a big picture on the window of a smiling Danny, fifty-seven now but still handsome, his hair still dark and full, flanked by two women realtors. Danny looked like he hadn’t gained a single pound since she last saw him. She had gained twenty.
The picture was captioned, “Tamarack Realty Supports the Police Athletic League.” Danny and the two women were holding up a huge, outsized five-thousand-dollar check made out to the police league. Susan stood there and gazed at Danny, at the man he was now. His smile was so open and friendly. She looked for traces of the trauma he had been through twenty years ago, but didn’t see any.
Then she remembered how good he had always been at hiding his feelings with a smile. Sometimes they’d be eating dinner together and she would think they were having a perfectly friendly conversation, and he would blow up about something he’d been stewing over all day.
She touched the picture of Danny’s face. What would it be like to see him again?
I’m right to be here, she thought. I need to do this.
She wiped her glasses with a tissue, straightened her shoulders, and walked inside.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
APRIL 16–21, TWENTY YEARS AGO
THEY COULDN’T HAVE a funeral because the FBI wasn’t releasing the body yet. But the well-wishers and casseroles kept coming.
Susan had no idea what to do with herself. She couldn’t focus on anything for longer than a couple minutes. She’d go to her bedroom for something and forget why she was there. She’d turn on the stove and ten minutes later the pot would burn and set off the smoke alarm.
During that first week, she called Agent Pappas at least five times a day. He was still optimistic, but Susan began to fear they would never catch Amy’s killer. The FBI continued to suspect Frank, but they didn’t have enough evidence to pick him up again.
Pappas asked her all kinds of questions: “Have you had any negative interactions with customers at Molly’s?” “Who do you know that has ties to Granville?” “Have you had any problems with other parents at Amy’s school?”
One morning Pappas asked, “Do you know anybody who likes to camp out in lean-tos?” This question perplexed her, until he explained they’d discovered Amy’s fingerprints on an empty soda bottle inside a lean-to forty yards from where her body was found. The FBI speculated Amy was assaulted there and tried to fight off her attacker with the soda bottle. Then she ran, trying to escape. The FBI had found two sets of shoe prints, from Amy’s shoes and a grown-up’s shoes.
Susan, on the phone in the kitchen with Danny listening in, got excited about that. “If you have shoe prints, you can figure out what kind of shoe he was wearing!”
“I’m afraid the prints are too indistinct for that.”
Danny took the phone from Susan. “At least you’ll know his shoe size, right?”
“All we know is it’s somewhere between 9 and 11,” Pappas said, and the remnants of Susan’s excitement disappeared.
Pappas continued, “We’re starting to piece together the crime. We think Amy tripped and hit her forehead against a sharp rock fifteen yards away from the lean-to. That’s what caused the cut. Then the killer strangled her, probably right near the rock, and dragged her body off into the woods. He was trying to hide it, at least for a while.”
Images flooded Susan’s mind, unbidden: Amy, fighting back with nothing
but a soda bottle. Running through the woods, looking over her shoulder and screaming, then tripping and falling, lying on the ground. Blood from the gash in her forehead streaming down her face and neck, covering her necklace beads in red. Holding up her little hands to try and fight off her attacker.
After Pappas told her the details of her daughter’s murder, she couldn’t get these pictures out of her head. It got harder to be alone. She needed people around to distract her.
But being with Danny didn’t help much, because the pain in his eyes made her feel her own anguish even more acutely. Being with Lenora had pretty much the same effect, plus there were all the layers of guilt and anger to deal with.
The visits from friends and neighbors helped a little at first, except nobody knew what to say, not really. They repeated the same things over and over, like “I can’t imagine how you must feel,” and “Amy’s in a better place.” She started to think they were all just stupid clichés, and that made her feel even worse.
Once somebody from the church said, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” and Susan started screaming about what a dumbass he was. There were several other people in the house at the time, but she didn’t care. “You think God doesn’t give you more than you can handle?” she shouted at him. “Are you fucking insane?”
Danny dealt with his grief by going fishing, usually by himself. He’d always needed a fair amount of alone time, especially when he was under stress. Also, she knew he wasn’t enjoying being around her now, the same way she found it hard being with him.
Lenora still came by Susan’s house, but she spent most of her time in the living room drinking, while Susan stayed in the kitchen. Finally, on Wednesday, three days after Amy was found, Susan called Molly and asked if she could come in to work.
“Are you sure you’re ready, honey?”
“I need to.”
So she came in for the lunch shift. But as soon as somebody asked for French fries she began to cry, remembering how much Amy had loved them. Molly took her into the back room and put her on the sofa, where she was able to cry all she wanted without worrying about disturbing the customers.