Without any further transcripts from Cora, Colin could only assume whatever else she’d told the police didn’t shed any further light on where Caleb went after the party. If Cora and Caleb had gotten together after the party, that would likely have made her the last person to see him alive. That fact would certainly have been noted in the cold-case file, which it wasn’t.
Caleb wasn’t reported as seen by anyone else after he left Ron Finch’s house. He was reported missing by his parents around eight the following morning. Twelve hours after that, the search parties commenced. Over the following weeks, volunteers—many of them high-school students—searched parks, fields, and the vast woods that encased large swaths of the town. Divers from a search-and-rescue team checked the Bury reservoir. Flyers printed and posted. Nightly TV coverage from the Manchester network affiliates. Caleb’s case even earned a segment on America’s Most Wanted.
But nothing.
Not a single clue. Not a substantive lead. Nothing.
Caleb Benner vanished as completely as if he’d never existed in the first place. Four months later, the police announced they would be keeping the case open but suspected the teen was more likely a runaway than a victim.
After all his research into the case, Colin didn’t necessarily agree with the assessment. Usually there was a telltale sign of a runaway. Kids talk, and at least one of Caleb’s friends would have known something. But every single person expressed genuine shock at Caleb’s disappearance.
Colin checked—Caleb’s parents still lived in Bury, though they’d moved to a different house. Outskirts of town. What an awful thing, Colin thought. All those years. Just wondering. Waiting. Hoping for as long as you could, then losing hope along with your child.
Through all his research, Colin kept coming back in his mind to Cora Yates. And that made him think of Rose Yates.
These two.
Sisters of Bury.
Their protective father.
A disappearance twenty-two years ago.
A possible homicide four months ago.
All connected by the Yates name.
Without too much difficulty, Colin had been able to download the advance reader’s copy of J. L. Sharp’s upcoming book, The Child of the Steps. This was the only one of Rose Yates’s books he hadn’t read, and he planned to start reading it on his Kindle that night.
Step, Colin thought.
The word made him flash back to the end of Cora’s transcript, where Logan Yates mentioned having parts of the wood flooring and stairs refinished. It made him remember his brief time in the sprawling house on Rum Hill Road and how the energy inside its walls unsettled him, like a low wave of radiation.
Then he thought, Who only refinishes part of a floor?
Thirty-Five
Bury, New Hampshire
November 6
I’ve reached enough of a buzz to calm my nerves. It’s taken almost two whiskeys. Alec is still on his first beer.
A half hour ago, I walked into Rust, a tapas bar on the west side of Bury. Such an ugly name. Rust. Especially when combined with Bury.
Alec was waiting for me at the bar. Thin gray sweater, snug. Black denim jeans, spotless leather shoes. I hugged him like an old friend, and when I did, I had a moment of wanting to never let go. I forced myself to push the moment away rather than let it escape from me, just to give myself a little control over something.
On Halloween night, I told Alec I could use a friend to talk to, but the truth is I almost canceled tonight. I had the dream again last night, and with everything else in my head, I’m being turned inside out. I’m not sleeping well, have lost a good bit of my appetite, and am trying to quell my anxiety by running miles on end, the combination of which is threatening to crumble my sanity and my bones into dust.
At the last minute, I opted to keep the date. The hell with it, I thought. I look like shit and am barely keeping things together. I need someone to see the real me.
So here I am with this man who is little more than a stranger, and I have this incessant, looping thought that he’s the only person in the world who can save me from myself. I don’t even know what that means, but the irrationality of the thought does nothing to keep it from fading.
We’ve spent the last thirty minutes with pleasant small talk, of which I’ve been letting him do the most. During a brief lull in the conversation, he clears his throat and asks, “How are you, Rose?”
Such a simple question. In fact, one he even asked when we first saw each other tonight, and I replied with my usual fine. But how he just asked it was different from before. This time, his words were laced with concern.
I exhale, as if accepting I’ve been caught in a lie.
“Life is hard,” I say.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is. Anything in particular?”
I want to tell him nothing. I want to tell him everything. I start somewhere in between.
“I’m sure you’ve heard about the Milwaukee cop coming to visit me.”
He nods, his gaze steady and assuring. “I might’ve heard something about that. Small town and all.”
Yeah, I think. And Tasha Collins makes sure word travels fast.
“Something about your husband’s death?” he adds.
“Yeah.”
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
I look around the bar, which is three-quarters full on a Friday night. It’s loud enough in here no one can overhear us, and I don’t recognize any of the other faces. Still, we’re exposed.
Turning back to him I say, “I… They have questions about his death.”
“What kind of questions?”
Exhale. Close my eyes. Get the words out while trying to keep my heart from racing. “They aren’t convinced it was accidental.”
I don’t open my eyes. It’s safer in here.
“But you already know this, don’t you?” I add.
I hear him say mmm-hmm.
“Because of your horrible ex-wife, right?”
He chuckles, and that gets me to open my eyes. “She mentioned something about a book club where you got upset. And then she saw the cops at your place. Add that to the fact that she’s friends with Lisa Simmons, who’s the wife of a Bury cop, and she probably figured out more than you want people to know.”
“I really hate her,” I say.
He lifts his beer bottle, and I clink my glass against it. “Here’s to things we have in common,” he says.
“Cheers.” I sip and know I’ll be wanting a third whiskey before too long. “So tell me what she thinks she knows.”
Alec shrugs. “Well, since you asked. In short, she thinks they might be treating the case as a murder.”
This is the first time I’ve talked about this with someone outside my family, and there’s relief with it. Relief and horror, like a Catholic teen’s first confession.
“And so, knowing this, you still decided to come here tonight?” I ask. “You weren’t concerned about having a drink with a murderer?”
He smiles. “It’s why I chose a public place.”
“Seriously,” I say. “Why would you want anything to do with me?”
Alec sips. “You didn’t kill anyone, Rose.”
The words rip open my chest and squeeze my heart, a horrible, beautiful pain.
“What…what makes you say that?”
Then he puts his hands on the table, palms up, on either side of the solitary burning candle.
“Give me your hands,” he says.
I don’t. I just stare at him, feeling the stinging glisten in my eyes.
“It’s okay,” he says. His voice is deep, calm. Confident.
I hesitate a moment, then place my hands on top of his. He gently grasps them, enveloping my fingers with his.
“These aren’t the hands of a killer. No…” He looks down
at my hands for just a second and then locks into my gaze. “I don’t think you’d hurt anyone.”
And with that, I lose it. Right there, in this classy tapas bar named after decay, I sob. I can’t control it, and after the first few gasps, I don’t even care. It’s as if my ability to maintain control has been a balloon filling with water and Alec just added that one final drop, the one that made me burst. I pull my hands from his and cover my eyes, feeling the heat radiating from my face.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t,” I choke. “Just…give me…”
I cry under the weight of all I’ve carried for so long. The weight of this town, of Cora and my father. The weight of Riley. And, the heaviest of all, the weight of Caleb Benner’s ghost.
To his credit, Alec gives me my space and time, saying nothing else. I’m not loud, but I’m certain anyone at a nearby table notices this scene. Again, I don’t care, and I don’t think I could stop this if I wanted. It has to come out.
I don’t know how much time passes. An eternity in minutes. At last, I pull my hands down and look at Alec through burning eyes.
“Can we get out of here?” I ask.
He nods.
Thirty-Six
We’re sitting in the front seat of his car, engine on, heat blowing, seat warmers blazing, going nowhere. When we left Rust, he started driving, and when he asked where to, I said nowhere, followed by anywhere. So we’re cruising gently through the night, up and down the streets of Bury, like cops on a patrol. He isn’t asking questions. He isn’t trying to give advice. Alec is silent, just being the person I need him to be in this moment.
Ten minutes pass. I wipe my eyes again and break the silence.
“I could hurt someone if I had to.”
He glances over. “’Scuse me?”
I stare directly out the windshield, watching the headlight beams sweep the empty residential street in front of us.
“You held my hands and said you didn’t think I could hurt anyone. But you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’m capable of doing.”
He takes this in for a moment. “And why would you have to? Hurt someone, I mean.”
“If I felt threatened. Or if I had to protect Max. Or both.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
A thousand reasons swirl in my head. “Because I was always the little girl,” I say. “The runt no one paid attention to, the plain Jane living in the shadow of her cover-girl sister. The girl who left town, married someone she realized she didn’t love, and couldn’t find the strength to leave her husband as soon as she found out he was cheating on her. Looking from the outside, I look so weak.” I turn to him, watching his silhouette glow and dissolve in the passing streetlight. “But I’m not weak. I don’t know why that’s so important for you to understand, but it is. I’m not weak.”
“I believe you. And you never seemed weak to me.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’re not a runt. Also, you’re much better looking than your sister.”
He sounds sincere, but I don’t even really care if he’s not. This is the first time in my life anyone told me I was better looking than Cora, and I’ll soak in the warmth of those words for however long they radiate.
“I’m not saying these things to fish for compliments,” I say.
“And I’m not saying anything that isn’t true.”
“Just because I’m not weak doesn’t mean I don’t have faults. I’ve got history.”
“Everyone has a history. Good and bad.”
An easy answer, I think. Yes, everyone has a history, but I doubt he has a history like mine.
“I suppose,” I say.
He glances over. “So what, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fault-wise. You say you have faults. What’s your worst fault? If you want to talk, let’s talk. Tell me what you think your worst fault is.”
My mind rushes back to the evening after the book club in my father’s study. The smell of cigar smoke and taste of whiskey. My father asked me what my vices were, and now Alec is asking me my worst faults.
“You go first,” I say.
He leans back, moves his gaze away. “So many to choose from,” he says.
“I’m sure. What, you leave dirty dishes in the sink at night?”
He shakes his head, smiles. Closes his eyes, as if remembering something distant and sweet.
“Maybe I’m not better than your late husband, because I cheated on Tasha,” he says. It’s so sudden and dissonant with what I was expecting that I have to replay his words in my mind.
“She was trying,” he says. “She was really trying. After Micah was born. I have to give her credit, she wanted to make it work, and I didn’t. I wanted to blow things up. I thought I could be a perfect dad without her help. But I was wrong. I cheated on her… I think just to get caught. God, I was so arrogant.”
“Wow,” I say.
Now he looks at me. “You know what? You’re the first person I’ve ever told that to. Ever.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“I don’t need you to say anything,” he says. “But it feels good for me to tell you.”
I appreciate his honesty, but there’s a tinge of a stain to Alec now. We are all weak in some way or another, but the pain of infidelity is particularly acute with me.
“I have a hard time moving on from the past,” I say, not wanting to hear more about his faults.
“No fair. That’s too vague. Look at what I just told you.”
“It’s true.”
“So that’s it, then?” he asks. “That’s your worst fault?”
God, I want to open up to him, and maybe my inability to fully do so is truly my defining fault. My whole life is a secret, and I’m too scared to have it any other way. I want to tell him how I think of death as touching a rainbow, one appearing in a cornfield after a summer storm. I want to tell him how I’m so scared Max will grow up like anyone in my family and I have no idea if I’m able to parent him away from that. I want to tell him about my books and the place I go in my head when I write, a soft darkness that’s both a sanctuary of comfort and horror all at once, and maybe the only place I’m truly myself.
I want to tell him about Riley, about what he became in the end and what that did to me.
But more than anything, I want to tell him about Caleb Benner.
But I won’t.
And that is my biggest fault.
I don’t answer his question. Instead, I tell him the things I’m able to say, which is still more than I’ve told anyone else.
“I came back to Bury to…try to face up to some things from my past and to give Max some stability I didn’t think he could have back in Milwaukee. But now this detective shows up and starts questioning me about Riley’s death, like I had something to do with it. Just because there’s a scene…” I pause, searching for the right words.
“A scene what?”
He probably already knows this, but I tell him anyway.
“A scene in my last book where a husband is murdered by his wife. He dies the same general way Riley died—overdose. That’s why the detective was out here asking questions.”
“But that’s just fiction.”
I look at him, flames searing my guts. “Is that a question or a statement?”
“A statement, I think. I mean, that’s just fiction, right?”
“Of course,” I say.
“So that doesn’t sound like any kind of real evidence.”
“It’s not,” I tell him. “And I didn’t do anything anyway. Which is why the detective went back to Wisconsin without me. But now the gossip is spreading and I don’t know where it’s going to end. Max doesn’t know about it, but that’s probab
ly just a matter of time.”
Alec leaves the neighborhood and heads in the general direction leading back to the restaurant.
“Hell,” he says, “maybe there’s an upside. Maybe your book will start taking off.” He tells me this with the lightest chuckle attached to it, and I know he’s trying to be helpful, but Alec doesn’t understand that’s not a potential upside. The idea of selling more books because people think I’m a murderer is horrifying. I think of Clara Tomson, the past she had to fight to leave behind, and yet her truth is forever attached to each and every one of her novels. I don’t want notoriety. In this moment, I don’t even want success. I don’t want anyone to have ever heard of me, and I want The Child of the Steps pulled from publication.
But I know there’s a current here, a powerful one sweeping me out to sea. If I do nothing, it will take me. I can’t swim against it, but I can swim with it and at least try to make it to some distant shore.
I need to be an agent of change in my life, not just a victim of its forces.
This realization is so suddenly forceful that it ripples through me, causing me to shake. Here, in this car, crawling the streets of the town where so many lives have changed, I realize I’m doing nothing to change my own. I’m just letting everything happen to me.
I vow to myself that starting now, I take control. I don’t even know what that means, but I’m ready for a transformation.
I never respond to Alec’s comment about my book, and he glides his sedan gently into the restaurant parking lot, where my car sits. He pulls into a space but doesn’t turn off the engine. Soft heat from the vents huffs at my face.
“Do you want to go back in?” he asks.
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