The Hiding Place

by David Bell

  “Something like that,” Ashleigh said.

  “Where’s your friend?” he asked.

  “Oh, he’s at work.”

  She regretted telling the truth as soon as the words came out of her mouth. She should have thought on her feet and told a lie. She could have said he was in the car or waiting outside or on his way to meet her. But the man now knew she was alone. She was halfway up the staircase, between the third and second floor, so the manager and his blandly happy face loomed above her. He came all the way out and set the broom down, leaning it against the wall. He wore a red T-shirt and great blotches of sweat encircled the area of his armpits.

  “Is Steven home?” Ashleigh asked.

  The man wiped his hands together, trying to clean the dust or dirt off. “You’re too late,” he said. “Or he’s too late really. He never paid me the back rent he owed, so I left him an eviction notice. Late last night, I see him carrying some stuff out to his car. You know, a suitcase, a couple of boxes. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was moving out, but he had the back rent for me. Next thing I know, he’s driving off.” The guy shrugged. “He never came back, the bum.”

  “You don’t know where he went?”

  “Sweetie, if I knew that, I’d find him and send the marshals after him. I see this all the time. There are a lot of crummy people in the world.”

  Ashleigh didn’t know what to think. She felt relief, yes. All the fears and anxieties she carried with her, all the worries about what might have gone wrong if she did end up talking to Steven Kollman eased and allowed her to breathe more freely than she had all day. On the other hand, a crushing disappointment lurked beneath everything. What was she going to do if Steven was gone? Everything-everything-she’d hoped for about finding this man and helping her family was gone. She had fallen back to zero.

  “Didn’t he tell you he was leaving?” the man asked.

  “No,” Ashleigh said.

  “He didn’t tell anyone in the family?”

  Ashleigh shook her head.

  “See, that’s crummy.” He pushed his glasses up.

  Ashleigh agreed. It was.

  “That guy came back looking for him.”

  “What guy?” Ashleigh asked.

  “Remember?” he said. He sounded frustrated, like Ashleigh should know exactly what he was talking about. “Last time you were here I told you that another guy came to see him and they had an argument. Remember?”

  Ashleigh did, once he mentioned it. “Sure. Okay.”

  “That guy came back, too, looking for Steven.”

  “And you don’t know who this guy is?” Ashleigh asked.

  “I’m not a secretary.”

  “I thought maybe he left a note or something.”

  “He didn’t. He just left. And that’s all I know.”

  But she couldn’t turn away. She remained on the stairs with one hand holding the banister.

  “What’s going to happen to all his stuff?” she asked.

  The man turned and looked into the apartment door, appraising the contents of the room. “The apartments come furnished, so none of that is his. I guess I’m lucky he didn’t try to swipe it. The rest of the stuff is just junk. Papers and bills and stuff. It all gets thrown out.”

  “Thrown out?”

  “What am I supposed to do with it? Make a scrapbook for him? Store it?”

  “Let me come in and see it,” Ashleigh said.

  The man looked surprised, like someone who finds a forgotten twenty-dollar bill in his pants pocket.

  “You want to come in? Here?”

  “If you’re just going to throw the stuff away-”

  “Of course. Come in.”

  He stepped back and into the door of the apartment, and while he moved he reached up with both hands, attempting to smooth the ragged strands of his hair down against the skin of his scalp. Ashleigh knew she was taking a risk. Her mom had already given her more than one talk about men-the kinds of situations to avoid, the times to turn and run. Mom wouldn’t approve of this one, Ashleigh knew. Being in an apartment with a strange older man. Alone.

  But Ashleigh put it all aside. The guy looked so pathetic, so nerdy. And how would she live with herself if she came this close and didn’t take the opportunity? She may never have the chance again to learn something-anything-about Steven Kollman.

  Ashleigh went the rest of the way up the steps to the third floor. The manager held out his hand.

  “I’m Nick,” he said, his body filling the doorway. “Nick Reeves.”

  “Ashleigh.”

  She took his dirty hand reluctantly, but tried to conceal her disgust. His skin was wet and clammy. Ashleigh wanted to wash the feeling off right away but didn’t see any graceful way to do it.

  Ashleigh followed Nick inside and looked around. A few boxes sat on the floor, their tops open. Junk filled them. Papers, magazines, plastic cups and dishes. A few pieces of clothing. Ashleigh noted that Nick didn’t shut the door behind them, and that brought her a small measure of relief. She thought again of what Kevin said about giving people a break. Shouldn’t she give Nick a break as well? Maybe he was just a harmless nerd, a middle-aged guy who didn’t know how to act around women of any age.

  “Is this all there is?” Ashleigh asked, pointing to the boxes.

  “There’s the trash in the hall,” he said. “But that’s basically it. I already cleaned out the bedroom. Are you looking for something in particular? There wasn’t any jewelry or pictures, if that’s what you’re looking for. I wouldn’t throw someone’s pictures away, and I’d sell the jewelry for the back rent. I’m allowed to do that.”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” Ashleigh said, bending down near the first box. “I don’t know. And it probably isn’t here anyway, whatever it might be.”

  “That doesn’t really make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” she said.

  She took handfuls of the paper and paged through them, letting each piece drop away to the bottom of the box when she saw it wasn’t important. And none of it was important. Junk mail, mostly. The same crap that filled their mailbox at home, the stuff everyone on earth must throw away but companies still felt compelled to mail.

  “Where do you go to school?” Nick asked.

  “What?” Ashleigh turned her head.

  Nick still stood there, just a few steps away. She had assumed he would go back to his cleaning and leave her alone, but he hadn’t. He seemed to be waiting on her, like he thought she might need something that only he could deliver.

  “Your school?”

  “Dove Point High,” she said. “I’m going to be a sophomore.”

  “DPH? I went to Dove Point West-you know, out in the country.”

  Ashleigh waited to see if he wanted to say anything else, but he didn’t. In fact, Nick turned away a little bit and looked around the kitchen of the apartment. Ashleigh could see dishes piled in the sink and some garbage in the corner. He still needed to clean there.

  She turned back to the papers and picked up her pace. She didn’t know how long she could stay in this little crowded room with Nick. She shuffled the papers quickly, almost not paying attention to what passed her eyes.

  “Are you going to drive next year?” Nick asked.

  “Sure. I guess so.”

  She kept looking at the papers.

  “You’ll turn sixteen, right?”

  “In April.”

  “You can drive then.”

  “Sure.”

  Wait!

  She picked up the paper she had just discarded.

  Across the top it said: “Clerk of Courts, Franklin County, Ohio.”

  Franklin County. Columbus.

  Ashleigh scanned the paper. A few words jumped out.

  Assault…second degree…warrant…

  And then she saw it-the name on the court summons:

  Justin Manning.

  Her hands shook.

  “Holy fuck!”

&n
bsp; Ashleigh didn’t know if she said the words out loud or in her head. It didn’t matter. They sounded like a scream in her own mind.

  For what felt like forever she just sat there, the paper raised to her eye level. She stared at the paper, made sure she really saw what she thought she saw.

  It was there. Her uncle’s name in this man’s things.

  Then the hands were on her. From behind, Nick’s sweaty, greasy hands. They fumbled across her breasts, brushed against her face. She felt his hot breath on her neck as he wrapped her up, tightening his grip around her so it was difficult to move at all.

  Ashleigh made a sound. Somewhere between a scream and a gag. She didn’t think it was very loud, so she made it again even louder.

  But who would hear her in the shitty building with everyone staring at their TVs?

  She dropped the paper and remembered something her grandpa had taught her: if someone grabs you from behind-

  Ashleigh brought her right arm up as far as it would go, then swung it back, her elbow aimed for Nick’s gut like a missile. She connected, felt the rush of air that came out as Nick said, “Ooof!”

  Ashleigh slipped away as he loosened his grip. She turned. Nick still stood between her and the door, but he was doubled over, his eyes closed tight. She swung her foot high and caught him in the chin. Her shoe against his face made a satisfying smack. She didn’t wait to see the damage done or how he reacted.

  She didn’t care.

  She ran. Her shoes pounded down the stairs. Pounded and pounded.

  She ran and ran until she looked back over her shoulder and couldn’t see the building anymore.

  Chapter Twenty

  Rose didn’t know Janet was coming. Janet went to call Michael before she left work, then realized he had never given her his cell phone number or even an e-mail address. She didn’t know what he did with his days. Maybe he looked for work in Dove Point, a thought that caused an unreasonable flutter of emotion to rise in Janet’s chest. He hadn’t said any such thing, but that didn’t stop Janet from hoping he might stay and settle down. In the immediate moment, she just wanted to talk to him, to hear his voice. She wanted to tell him about seeing the man again, this time on campus. And she wanted to tell Michael she wasn’t crazy-the man probably had been creeping around her house two nights earlier.

  So when she couldn’t reach him by cell phone, she decided to just stop by. Rose’s number was in the phone book-she found it with no trouble-but Janet didn’t bother to call in advance.

  Rose Bower lived north of Dove Point’s city limits. Everyone called the area Baileytown because the Bailey Foundry operated out there and most of the people who lived nearby had worked for the company. The foundry had closed when Janet was in high school, not long before Ashleigh was born, but the name Baileytown remained. The foundry still remained as well, its gates padlocked, its vacant and unused buildings slowly and inevitably crumbling.

  As far as Janet knew, Rose had never worked for the foundry. She’d split from Michael’s father when Michael was fourteen, so she must have moved to Baileytown then because of the cheap rents that were available as the foundry’s workers moved out. Janet remembered going to Rose’s house in high school either to pick up or drop off Michael. Rose always showed a great deal of interest in Janet. She used to ask Janet about school as well as her future plans, and when Janet talked about going to college and having a career, Rose nodded affirmatively as though that was the exact right thing to do. Janet chalked Rose’s interest up to the woman’s overall benevolent nature, but also supposed that she saw Janet as a kind of surrogate daughter. Rose never had a daughter of her own, and with Janet’s mother gone, it seemed like a natural fit.

  But Janet stopped going to Michael’s house once she became pregnant.

  Janet dealt with the shame of her pregnancy at school about as well as could be expected. As her stomach grew, and as she faced the stares and occasional comments from her classmates and teachers, she allowed herself to feel a measure of pride in the pregnancy. She knew some of the other girls were jealous and wanted nothing more out of life than to begin having children, so Janet managed to convince herself that she was doing something special and unique.

  But those thoughts-and years later, Janet knew they were just a defense mechanism, a form of self-preservation-didn’t carry over to facing Rose Bower. Of all the people in her life outside of her father, Janet hated the thought of letting Rose Bower down. A woman who’d always asked about Janet’s career ambitions, a woman who seemed to be pushing Janet to be better, wouldn’t understand how she’d managed to get herself knocked up. Janet didn’t know the answer to that question herself, so she simply avoided the Bower house from the day she learned she was pregnant.

  Which is not to say Janet hadn’t seen Rose over the years. Dove Point was too small of a town to not occasionally run into somebody. As Janet drove away from campus and across town on Old Hanover Road, she tried to remember the last time she’d seen Rose. They’d run into each other once at the funeral of the former principal of Dove Point High, an event everyone in town seemed to have passed through. And Janet could recall a few encounters in the grocery store, most recently…was it five years ago? Ashleigh was still young enough to want to tag along to the store with her mother, and still young enough to answer an adult’s questions without rolling her eyes or sighing. Even then, five years earlier, Rose’s frailty had struck Janet as somewhat disturbing. The woman seemed to be diminishing into herself, becoming just a shell of what she once was. How much more diminished would she be now? Maybe some part of Janet needed to see Rose again, to let the woman know Janet was doing okay, that she was making it despite becoming a mother while still in high school. And Janet could see how Rose was doing too.

  The streets of Baileytown looked even worse than Janet remembered. Plastic toys and junked cars littered the yards she drove past. Children played in the street under the suspicious eyes of parents who were smoking or drinking. Janet felt grateful to have a job, to have a life with future prospects. If she’d married Tony Bachus back in high school, would she be living on one of these streets? Would she have popped out more kids without regard for how to provide for them? One kid proved to be work enough…

  Two window air-conditioning units stuck out from the side of the dirty white house. The paint was peeling in large chunks, and the house appeared not to have been painted in the fifteen years since Janet last visited. A neighbor’s dog barked from a fenced-in yard, its white teeth visible like angry knives. Janet knocked on the rickety screen door, which despite the heat was all that stood between the natural elements and Rose’s living room. The sun was still bright outside, but Janet leaned close to the screen in an attempt to see into the house. No lights were on, and the curtains looked to be drawn against the heat.

  Janet knocked again. “Hello?”

  “Yes?”

  The voice sounded faint but close. Was she right in the living room hidden from Janet’s sight?

  “Hello? Rose?”

  “Yes?”

  Janet heard a rustling, and then the woman appeared in the doorway. It took a moment, but a smile spread across her face.

  “Do you remember me, Rose? It’s Janet Manning.”

  “Of course, of course.” She unlatched the screen door’s eyehook lock and stepped back to let Janet in. “I know you, honey. Come in.”

  While Janet looked at the furniture-which also hadn’t changed in fifteen years-Rose Bower scurried around opening the curtains and letting in daylight. Despite the furniture’s age, the house looked clean and well organized, as though someone took pride in its appearance.

  “I’m sorry to just show up like this,” Janet said.

  “I’m glad you did,” Rose said. “Sit, sit.”

  Janet chose the end of the floral-patterned couch and took her first good look at Rose Bower in the daylight. She looked even thinner and more frail than the last time. Janet reminded herself that the woman standing before her was roughly
the same age as her own parents-about sixty-because anyone else would have guessed she was closer to eighty. Deep lines creased her face-did she smoke? — and her hair looked thin and brittle, brushed back into place and held by a series of bobby pins. A gray housecoat hung loose on her body, and when Rose sat down-resuming her spot in a recliner near the couch-she let out a long breath, as though the effort of standing up and opening the door and the curtains had cost her a great deal. She didn’t offer to get Janet anything.

  “Are you looking for Michael?” Rose asked.

  “I am. But I was also hoping to see you.”

  “He’s not here, Janet. I don’t know where he is today.” She pointed vaguely toward the front door. “He said he had some business to attend to, but he didn’t tell me what it is.”

  “Is he looking for a job?”

  Rose’s face brightened considerably. “Do you think he might be? Here in Dove Point?”

  Janet wished she’d kept her mouth shut. She didn’t want to give Rose false hope that her son might be home to stay. Janet knew well the difficulties of false hope.

  “I don’t know, Rose,” Janet said, scrambling. “How are you doing?”

  Rose smiled without showing her teeth. “I’m okay. I’m doing okay. I don’t work. I don’t do much, to be honest.”

  “The house is clean.”

  “I manage to do that. It’s an old habit I can’t let go of.” She looked around the small room with pride. “How have you been? You must be working still. Or did you…?”

  Janet caught her drift. “No, I’m not married. I still work at Cronin. I manage the dean’s office. I’ve been doing that the last three years.”

  “And your daughter? Ashleigh, right?”

  “Yes. She’s good. She’s very smart, and she knows it. She’s fifteen, and I imagine she’s as challenging as any fifteen-year-old can be.” Janet paused a moment thinking of all she had to protect Ashleigh from. Not just the usual stuff, but all the other things like the man from the porch. Janet had been crazily vigilant in the house the previous two days, making sure every door and window was locked. “We moved back in with my dad. He lost his job.”