by Bell, David
PRAISE FOR
CEMETERY GIRL
“Cemetery Girl is more than just an utterly compelling thriller—and it certainly is that. David Bell’s stellar novel is also a haunting meditation on the ties that bind parent to child, husband to wife, brother to brother—and what survives even under the most shattering possible circumstance. An absolutely riveting, absorbing read not to be missed.”
—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of Heartbroken
“Cemetery Girl is my favorite kind of story because it takes the familiar and darkens it. This story is essentially about a missing little girl, but trust me: you have never read a missing-persons story like this one. The reader is taken down the rabbit hole in this novel, and when he comes out at the end—just beyond that mysterious and hopeful last page—he is all the better for having been invited inside Bell’s disturbing, all-too-real world…. A fast, mean head trip of a thriller that reads like a collaboration between Michael Connelly and the gothic fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, Cemetery Girl is one of those novels that you cannot shake after it’s over. A winner on every level.”
—Will Lavender, New York Times bestselling author of Obedience
“Grabbed me by the throat on page one and never let up. An intense, unrelenting powerhouse of a book, and the work of a master.”
—John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of The Hunter
“Cemetery Girl is a smasher. It twists and turns and never lets go, and…it could happen just this way.”
—Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Second Nature
“A smart, tense, creepy take on the story of a missing daughter, told by her far-from-perfect father. If you think you know this tale—from all-too-familiar newspaper accounts, from lesser movies and books—then this terrific novel will make you think otherwise.”
—Brock Clarke, author of Exley
“[Bell] writes with a clarity of both vision and purpose, and his characters are eerily familiar because they are just like you and me.”
—Thomas F. Monteleone, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Night of Broken Souls
“With the psychologically twisted Cemetery Girl, Bell stakes his claim as a writer to watch…. Consider me a fan.”
—Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Assassin’s Code
“Every parent’s worst nightmare carries the story on a tense and terrifying journey that brims with emotional authenticity. Bell manages not only to build suspense effectively but also tell a story that goes way beyond simple thrills. Anyone with children who reads this will think twice about security and what is best for young people on the road to adulthood.”
—Booklist
“The story is engaging and tugs at the reader’s heartstrings immediately…fast-paced and compelling.”
—Fiction Addict
“Suspenseful [and] disquieting.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A nail-biting page turner…. David Bell has delivered a first-rate thriller that provides the reader with enough sketchy characters to engage and challenge even the most seasoned reader. Followers of the genre can celebrate the addition of another gifted storyteller.”
—LitStack
“A gripping and intense novel, keeping the reader on their toes until the end. Spellbinding and filled with angst, this absorbing story proves to be a page-turner.”
—Reader to Reader Reviews
“Smart, stark, and haunting. This is perfect reading for a spooky autumn night, but be forewarned you might have to later sleep with the light on.”
—Tucson Citizen
“Disturbing, brilliantly engaging, and a must read for thriller fans.”
—Suspense Magazine
ALSO BY DAVID BELL
Cemetery Girl
THE
HIDING
PLACE
David Bell
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, October 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © David J. Bell, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Bell, David, 1969–
The hiding place/David Bell.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-60675-9
1. Missing children—Fiction. 2. Children—Crimes against—Fiction.
3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E64544H53 2012
813’.6—dc23 2012013252
Set in Apollo MT STD
Designed by Alissa Amell
Printed in the United States of America
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Molly
THE
HIDING
PLACE
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
&nb
sp; Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
What do you remember from that day, Janet?
Janet remembered the heat. The way it shimmered in waves in the distance, making the edges of the trees, the cars in the parking lot blurry and indistinct. Wherever she stepped, the grass crackled or the dirt puffed. The heat rose from the ground and scorched her feet through the soles of her cheap plastic shoes.
She was seven years old and in charge of her baby brother for the first time ever.
Janet watched Justin. She thought of him as a dumb four-year-old, a silly kid with a bowl of blond hair and a goofy smile. He sat with the other kids in the sandbox, scooping piles of sand into mounds with his hands, then smoothing them over. Back and forth like that. Sand up, sand down. Dumb and pointless. Something little kids would do. She watched him. Carefully.
But no, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all…
Justin wasn’t silly. And he didn’t smile all the time. He was a quiet kid. A loner. He sat in the sandbox alone that day. And he didn’t smile much. Not much at all. No one in her family smiled much, not when she looked back on her childhood…or even her life now.
What did she remember from that day? What did she really remember? It was so hard to—
Michael showed up.
She remembered that.
Michael showed up, her seven-year-old playmate, the boy from the neighborhood and school. Their parents were friends. They played together all the time. Her boyfriend, she liked to think and giggle to herself, although they never touched each other. Never hugged or kissed or held hands. They were too young for that, too young for a lot of things.
But Michael showed up wearing denim shorts with a belt like a long rope and sneakers with holes in them. His hair hung in his face, and he brushed it out of his eyes constantly. He lived on the other side of the park. And so Michael called her name, and when he did her heart jumped and she turned away from the sandbox and the swings and the other kids. And she followed Michael wherever he went. Across the playground, over the baseball diamond, over by the trees. She followed him.
Is that all she did? Run across the playground?
It was enough. She let Justin out of her sight. Dad was at work and Mom was at home, and Mom let them go to the playground alone that day for the first time ever, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. The park was near the school and the church and the other kids would be there, other kids they knew and even some parents. And all Mom said on that day when they left the house was, “Janet, don’t let Justin out of your sight. He’s a little boy…”
But she did. She let Justin out of her sight.
Did she see the man?
Janet can’t say anymore. She’s seen his face so many times. At the trial. In the newspaper. The mug shot. His face stoic, his eyes round, the whites prominent. His full lips, his black face. Not really a man. Now when she looks at the face, she sees a kid. Seventeen when he was arrested, but tried as an adult. He would have looked like an adult back then, that hot day in the park…
But she doesn’t know if she saw him.
Other people did. Adults and kids. He was in the park, talking to kids at the sandbox and the swings. He carried Justin, according to some of the witnesses. He paid special attention to her brother, they said. Walked around with him. Talked to him. Lifted him on his shoulders.
For years, Janet thought she saw that, thought she remembered that. The young black man with the frizzy hair and the dirty clothes carrying her brother on his shoulders. Justin’s blond head up high, almost as high as the top of the swing set. Justin parading around like a champion. Being tricked by this man. And then being taken away.
But she doesn’t really remember that, does she?
She thought there was a dog. A puppy. It ran through the park, and Justin ran after it.
Is that what happened? Is that how Justin got away?
What do you remember from that day, Janet?
She can’t be sure anymore. Not after twenty-five years.
She isn’t sure she saw the man that day. But she wishes she had. She wishes she knew.
And she really wishes she had kept her eye on Justin, like she was supposed to.
She didn’t see the man and she didn’t see Justin.
And when it was time to go home, when Janet finally did look around and try to find her brother, he wasn’t there. The adults became hysterical and the police arrived and people asked a lot of questions, but none of it mattered.
Justin was gone. Long gone.
Chapter One
Janet hid the morning paper from her father. She saw it when she’d come downstairs, and even though she knew it was coming—knew for close to a week that an interview with her brother’s murderer would be on the front page—the sight of it, the sight of his face, hit her with the force of a slap. And then she thought of her dad. His anger, his roiling emotions at the mere mention of Dante Rogers. She folded the front page in half, with Rogers’s face inside the fold, and slipped it beneath a chair cushion.
Janet heard water running in the bathroom down the hall, then her father’s feet on the hard wood. She was breaking her own rule. When she’d moved back in with her father after he’d lost his job, she’d made a silent vow not to be his household servant. She wouldn’t become some version of a substitute wife to him—cooking, cleaning, laundry. But on certain days, she made exceptions. She took out eggs, cracked them into a skillet, and watched them sizzle. Summer work hours at the college left her just enough time to do it—and it might take the old man’s mind off his troubles.
“Where is it?”
Janet turned. Her father, Bill Manning, filled the entrance to the kitchen. He was still tall—over six feet—but since being laid off he had gained about twenty pounds, mostly in the stomach and the face. He’d been out of work for nearly two years, ever since the recession had hit and his company, Strand Manufacturing, “went in a different direction,” which meant laying off anyone over the age of fifty. Twenty-seven years working in product development and then an unceremonious good-bye.
Janet recognized the foolishness of trying to hide the paper. She pointed to the chair. Bill picked up the paper and sat down. Janet put the eggs in front of him.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t wait on me,” he said.
“I felt like it.”
“You felt sorry for me,” he said.
Janet didn’t answer, but there was some truth in what her father said. Years ago, he’d lost his son and then his wife. Then came the recent job loss, and Janet moved in to help make sure he didn’t lose the house. Her father might be reserved and distant—difficult even—but she never outgrew the desire to protect and help him. And that desire only became stronger as her father grew older. He was sixty-two and starting to look his age.
“Jesus,” he said. He folded the paper, snapping the pages into place with a flick of his wrists, and leaned close to read the story. “Not even at the top…”
Janet knew what the story said. Her brother had disappeared twenty-five years ag
o that day, and the local paper was running a couple of stories to commemorate the anniversary. The first one detailed the life of Dante Rogers, the man convicted of killing her brother. Paroled three years earlier, slowly adjusting to life back on the outside, working part-time at a church on the east side of Dove Point, Ohio…
While her dad read the article and cursed under his breath, Janet turned to the sink. She ran a rag over some dishes from the night before. “Today’s our day, remember?” she said. “The reporter is coming over at two. I’m leaving work early—”
The paper rustled and fell to the floor. When Janet turned, her dad was cutting into his eggs, shoveling them toward his mouth with machinelike quickness. He paused long enough to ask a question. “Do you know what I think of all this?” he asked.
“I can guess.”
He pointed to the floor where the paper rested, the article about Dante Rogers facing up. “This article—it’s like they want me to feel sorry for this guy. It reads like he got some kind of a bum rap because he went to jail for twenty-two years for killing a kid—”
“Did you read the whole story?” Janet asked.
Her dad kept chewing. “I already lived it.”
Janet leaned back against the counter and folded her arms across her chest. “He still says he’s innocent,” Janet said.
Her father’s eyes moved back and forth, giving him the look of a caged animal. His cheeks flushed. “So?” He looked down at his plate, pushed the remains of the egg around, making a runny yellow smear. He didn’t look back up.
“He says—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said, dropping his fork. “He just wants sympathy from people. Probably living on welfare.”
Janet took hold of the belt of her robe. She worked it in her hands, fingering it, using it almost like rosary beads. “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t really want to tell my story to the reporter either,” she said.
“I know the story. Rogers killed my boy. That’s it.” He pushed away his plate and rose to his feet. The first year after being laid off, her dad dressed just like he did when he went to work—shirt and tie, neatly pressed pants. The past year had seen a change. He no longer dressed first thing in the morning and went days on end without shaving. He stopped reading the classifieds a few months earlier.