He Was Not There

by P. D. Workman

  After he was directed into the car and was sitting in the back seat, a woman was escorted over to see him. His wife, Zachary assumed. Her hair was a somewhat unnatural shade of red, gray at the roots, and she had a sad face with more wrinkles than her husband. She looked like she had lived a hard life.

  She talked animatedly with the police officers around the car, obviously arguing to have her husband released or to let her talk to someone in authority, or whatever other concessions she could get. She didn’t like the idea of them taking Astor in for questioning. She kept shaking her head, looking at her husband waiting in the car, and shaking her head again. Zachary drifted closer, hoping to be able to hear some of what she was saying. He caught Jones watching him, but Jones didn’t stop him from getting closer, and neither did any of the other cops or authorities present. He listened carefully, trying to read her lips to catch the portions that he couldn’t hear.

  “I don’t understand why you think he’s done anything,” she said. “How is it that the victim of violence gets blamed for what happened? You can’t take him in to the station. If you want to talk to him, you can talk to him here. And you can wait until he’s feeling better. This… this doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t how you treat a victim.”

  “The subject in this case made a lot of allegations. We’d like to get everything cleared up.”

  “What allegations? I don’t know this person. Heather Garrity? Is she just some random person? She’s crazy. She just picked this house out because it reminded her of something from her past. There’s no way she knew what she was talking about.”

  Zachary frowned. For someone who didn’t even know what accusations had been made against her husband, she had made an awful lot of defensive statements.

  The cop who was trying to handle Mrs. Astor looked around and saw Jones watching. “Boss, you want to talk to this lady? Explain to her what’s going on…?”

  “I thought you were doing a fine job all by yourself, Walton.”

  “Boss…” Walton made a gesture toward her, frustrated, not wanting to deal with the disgruntled woman. He just wanted to get Astor in to the police station. Hopefully, he wasn’t the one who had been tasked in questioning him, and someone who had a little more training would be trying to get a confession out of Astor. Maybe Jones himself. Maybe a woman detective who knew how to handle scumbags like Astor.

  “You’re Mrs. Astor?” Jones asked gently, looking at her.

  “Yes. And I don’t see why my husband is being detained when he was the victim here! It’s ridiculous. Why should people who have been targeted be victimized all over again by the police like this?”

  Why indeed? She had seen it happen to Heather. Was she remembering that, or was she only concerned about her husband?

  “Your husband has been asked to come in to answer some questions about Mrs. Garrity and his history with her. I’m sure he can fill you in on it later.”

  “My husband? How would my husband know anything about her?”

  In the car, Mr. Astor put his face in his hands. As if that could shut out his wife’s argument and her voice.

  “Robert? You tell him. You tell him that you don’t know what they’re talking about. Who is this person? She’s not anyone that we know.”

  “Margaret…”

  “What? You don’t know her, so you can’t answer any questions about her. This is ridiculous. They shouldn’t be allowed to just interrogate anybody they want. There is a limit. And you don’t have to agree to talk. You can refuse and they can’t do anything about it.”

  “Margaret!” he said in exasperation.

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “It was Heather, Margaret. Not some stranger. Heather, our foster daughter.”

  “Heather,” she repeated, her face suddenly going slack. “What would she be doing here? She hasn’t lived here for years and years. And she never lived in this house. What did she want? Robert, you told her to leave, didn’t you? Someone can’t just go into your house and start threatening!”

  “Margaret, please… shut up.”

  She stared at him, unable to believe he would talk to her that way. Zachary took another step forward, watching with interest. Heather had said that she was afraid of Astor, that he was authoritarian, but Zachary wasn’t seeing a man who asserted his own position and bullied his wife. Zachary watched them both for the minutest tells.

  Margaret Astor regained her composure, and deferred to her husband rather than making further accusations.

  “What is this, then?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s accused your husband of aggravated sexual assault,” Jones told her.

  “Him?” Margaret’s voice was scathing, and Zachary expected her to run down her husband’s manhood right there. “He’s an old man. Why would he chase after some girl from the past? Heather Goldman was never any great beauty as a girl. She was knock-kneed and pimply and I don’t imagine she turned out to be much of anything. We did everything we could for that girl, officer, but she was sullen and ungrateful and it didn’t matter what we did for her, she never appreciated it. In the end, she left us and ended up in a group home for girls like her.”

  Zachary clenched his fists. He would have liked to have clocked her one for running down his sister after all that she had gone through at their hands. They thought that they had done everything for her? All they had done was to damage and traumatize her further.

  “Not recently,” Jones said, once he could get a word in edgewise. “She says that your husband assaulted her when she was fourteen. When she was living with you.”

  Mrs. Astor’s mouth snapped shut like a trap. She looked at her husband but didn’t say anything to him. She didn’t immediately jump to his defense, which Zachary found interesting. She was not afraid to speak her mind, but one thing that she hadn’t said yet was that Robert Astor had been a saint and that he had never done anything to hurt anyone. She didn’t immediately protest that he hadn’t raped Heather. That he couldn’t have.

  “Trust that little minx to come up with something like that,” she snapped, and shook her head. “I don’t know what happened in the woods that day, Mr. Jones, but my husband was at work, not at home or in the park. He could not have done that to her.” Her mouth closed, and her lips formed a long, thin, straight line. She glared at Jones, but she couldn’t keep quiet about the injustice being perpetrated on her husband.

  “The police investigated it at the time. If there had been any reason to suspect my husband, they would have arrested him at the time. She’s just making things up, and why she’s doing it now, thirty years later, I don’t know. The woman’s off her rocker. That’s obvious from what happened here today, isn’t it?”

  “She was highly agitated,” Jones agreed.

  “Probably off her meds. Those kids were damaged. All of the children in that family. I used to hear about their exploits sometimes from the social worker or the other foster parents. They were uncontrollable. Lighting fires, starting fights, running away. Our little Heather was quiet by comparison. But that didn’t mean she didn’t get in any trouble. Never thought she had to follow anyone else’s rules, that one. Did she think that they were told to stay out of the park because the school had nothing better to do than to think up unnecessary rules? But no, little Miss Delinquent had to do it anyway. And you look at what happened to her when she did.”

  Zachary swallowed. So there had been a history around the park. Maybe Robert Astor saw it as his own personal playground. And it hadn’t mattered to him that one of the girls was his own foster daughter. He wasn’t afraid of it being too close to home. After all, he wore a mask. No one could identify him.

  “We went to the police at the time,” Margaret insisted again. “Heather didn’t want to go to the police. She didn’t want to report it. But I did the right thing. I took her in. They questioned her and they gathered all of the evidence they could. None of it ever pointed at my husband. He was never a suspect in her c
ase.”

  Jones took all of this in with equanimity. He nodded understandingly, making Mrs. Astor feel like he was on her side. “I understand there was a baby,” he said, as if this were a shocking secret, something that pointed at Heather’s delinquency.

  “Yes, there was,” Mrs. Astor said with relish. She appeared to be perfectly happy to dish up the details on every detail of Heather’s ordeal. “She was terribly sick with morning sickness. I had hoped to leave her in school until later on in the pregnancy, but she was so sick all of the time that we had to pull her out. Said that she had mono and would be back the next year.” Mrs. Astor leaned toward Jones to confide in him. “There was no talk of abortion and no talk of her keeping the baby. It wasn’t like that then. She only had one choice, and that was to have the baby and put it up for adoption.” She straightened up and shrugged her bony shoulders. “I hoped that she’d miscarry and not have to carry it all the way to term, but in spite of the morning sickness, she was healthy enough. When the baby came, we wrapped everything up lickety-split and had that baby to his adoptive parents within a couple of days. That’s the way it should be done. Not all of this nonsense they have now.”

  “We have a sample of the baby’s DNA. We will be able to identify your husband as the baby’s father or rule him out. That should settle the question of whether he was the one who assaulted her once and for all.”

  Mrs. Astor went still again. She looked at Jones, and looked at her husband. Zachary wondered whether she had known or suspected back then. Surely she wouldn’t have insisted on Heather going to the police station and having a rape kit done if Mrs. Astor had any suspicion that her husband had been Heather’s rapist.

  But she didn’t say anything further and neither did Robert Astor.

  33

  Zachary eventually sat in his car, eyes closed, going over the events of the day. He was beyond tired. Exhaustion had come and gone several hours before. Everyone was at the police station, but he hadn’t been invited. In fact, Jones had made a particular point of non-inviting him, telling him to go home and not to show up at the police station.

  “You leave it to us now. You’ve done your part. It’s our turn to tie it all together and see if we can build a case that will stick.”

  “You’ll take care of my sister? Don’t let her talk to that woman or to him. Make sure that she’s comfortable, and that she sees a judge as soon as she can…?”

  “The wheels of justice move slowly, as I’m sure you know. They won’t be too quick to release an armed gunman. But I think things will play out, if you’re patient. She’ll be able to see her husband at the police station for a few minutes. Probably best if you aren’t working the case.”

  “Okay. But if she needs anything… call me.”

  As Zachary sat in the car by himself, reviewing it all in his head, his phone did ring. He worked it out of his pocket and looked at it. Tyrrell. Zachary looked out his window at the floodlights that had been set up around the house. There had been plenty of news reporters there to comment on the hostage-taking and the rumors surrounding what had happened there. Zachary had been sorely tempted to put in a few words of his own, but he hadn’t. He needed to let justice take its course, as Jones had suggested. Zachary didn’t need to be in the spotlight yet again.

  Zachary answered the call. “Hi, T.”

  “Zachary? Was that Heather on the news? What’s going on? What happened?”

  “Sorry I didn’t call… things have been moving pretty fast.”

  “It was Heather?”

  “It was Heather.”

  “But who did she go after? You found the rapist? After all this time?”

  “Yeah. It was the foster father all along. She went a little crazy when she found out it was him. But she remembered enough to know that it was true.”

  Tyrrell swore. “Poor Feathers. Is she okay?”

  “She’s safe. Her husband is with her at the police station. It might be a few days before they release her, but when the media gets wind of the story behind the hostage-taking… they won’t let her stay in jail for long.”

  “I hope not.” Tyrrell swore again. “At least she knows who it was, now. I think that was probably the worst part for her, not knowing who it was. At least if she knows, she has a direction to aim her anger. Without that, it’s just everything. Never knowing where he might be, if it’s the guy standing next to her in line. She could never start the healing process.”

  “Yeah.” Zachary knew which way to aim his anger, but he was far from healing. He hoped it wouldn’t be thirty years before he was able to face what had happened to him. He knew who the perpetrator was, and despite what he had told the police who had interviewed him, he remembered everything that had been done to him. But being able to move on… that was still too far in the distance to even see a pinprick of light at the other end of the tunnel.

  “Zach.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want company tonight? You want to stay over here?”

  “No. Thanks. I need my own space.”

  “Okay, man. But if you need to talk, just give me a call. Even in the middle of the night. I’m good at middle-of-the-night calls.”

  He didn’t call Tyrrell in the middle of the night. He didn’t call Kenzie either, and she didn’t call him, though he was sure that, like Tyrrell, she must have seen the coverage on the TV and internet and known what it was all about. She kept her distance, waiting for him to acknowledge that he needed her. That was for the best. There were messages on his phone and in his email from Mr. Peterson, Mario Bowman, and a few other acquaintances as more details became available and they wanted whatever tidbits they could get from him.

  He knew he wasn’t being fair. They were people who, for the most part, really did care about him and wanted to know how he was more than just gathering juicy gossip they could share online. But he felt like they were vultures circling his dead carcass.

  Or watching his dying body for his last breath, when they would swoop in and start the feast.

  There was a message from Rhys. Not a voicemail message, of course, which would have been too difficult for him, but one of his gifs, sent over a messenger app, waiting for Zachary to open it.

  He mentally prepared himself to interpret Rhys’s intention.

  Sometimes Rhys was more cryptic than others. Zachary didn’t know whether he was intentionally vague or symbolic when he could have been more clear, or if that was just the way that Rhys’s brain worked after the traumas he had been through.

  The gif was not at all hard to interpret. It was the same one as Rhys had shown him the last time they had visited face-to-face. The drowning man, giving the three-two-one count and waving bye-bye.

  Two meanings. Either Rhys was feeling worse and reaching out for help, or he was worried that Zachary would be feeling low and needing extra help. Despite the late hour, Zachary called Rhys’s grandma.

  “Vera. It’s Zachary.”

  “Oh, Zachary. It’s good to hear your voice. I’ll go get Rhys.”

  “No, wait. Is he okay?”

  She paused. “Is Rhys okay? Yes… why?”

  “He sent me a message. I wasn’t sure whether he needed help…”

  “Or whether you do?”

  Zachary laughed, a little embarrassed. “Well, yes.”

  “He saw you on TV again. He’s always impressed when he sees you on TV. But he always worries, especially if he can’t reach you.”

  “He’s very intuitive.”

  “That he is,” Vera agreed. “Now hold on and let me get him. It will only be a minute, you know he doesn’t chatter on like some of us.”

  Zachary waited while she walked to Rhys’s room. He heard her knock on the door to announce herself and then open the door.

  “It’s Zachary, Rhys.”

  Zachary closed his eyes, envisioning Rhys lying on his bed with his computer or his own phone, and tried to imagine how he wou
ld communicate what he wanted to say. Facial expression, body language, simple signs and gestures, and maybe a word or a picture displayed on Rhys’s phone.

  “Are you at home, Zachary?” Vera asked, after a few minutes of silence.

  “Yeah. I’m home.”

  “Is Kenzie there?”

  “No… I’m by myself.”

  “You should go to the hospital.” Vera paused and double-checked with Rhys. “Is that right, Rhys? You think he should go to the hospital?”

  Zachary sighed. He had told Rhys that he would check himself in if he was feeling any worse. And in the stillness of his apartment, isolated from the people who cared about him, wondering whether Kenzie was gone for good, what was going to happen to Heather, and stuck in a morass of his own memories, the darkness weighed him down inside and out.

  He texted Rhys a selfie or himself in the hospital waiting room as he waited for his name to be called so that Rhys would know that he had followed through. Rhys texted him back a thumbs-up and a sad emoticon. Zachary didn’t make any attempt to carry on a further conversation with Rhys. He powered off his phone and sat there waiting. His elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, he stared down at the floor.

  He knew he should have sought help sooner. Everyone had known that he was shattered after Archuro. They had all told him that he had checked himself out of the hospital too soon. When he had finally gone back to his therapist, she too had suggested that at the very least, he needed a med review, and that he should seriously consider a couple of weeks at the hospital to get stabilized.

  But like Heather, he was stubborn, and he figured he could just tough it out on his own. Checking himself into psychiatric always made him feel like a failure. The kid who couldn’t control himself. A lunatic. No different from the homeless schizophrenics he saw wandering downtown in the city, mumbling or even yelling at their hallucinations.

  “Mr. Goldman?”