by Lisa Jackson
“Yeah, I read that.” Her face was noncommittal. “What about you?”
“Did I see her? Her ghost?” He snorted. “Come on.” The whole idea was bizarre and the subsequent “sightings” of her ghost over the years? Never had they proved to be founded, which didn’t surprise him. All of it was just local lore or legend.
“And the last time you saw Elle?”
“Was when we broke up. On the beach. It’s in my statement. Hasn’t changed. She just walked away from me, taking off into the fog.”
He remembered the night all too vividly.
“Good-bye, Lucas.” He could still hear her voice—breathy and sad—foretelling the future in a way he’d never thought possible. “I’m going to miss you and believe it or not, you’re going to miss me, too.”
“Disappearing into the mist?”
“I know it sounds weird, or overly dramatic. Whatever. That’s what happened.”
“And no one ever saw her again, except for all the ghost business, which, near as I can tell, happened right after she disappeared, the rest of that summer, and then not again for years, over a decade.”
“I can’t explain the sightings.”
“It’s just kind of strange,” Dobbs said.
“What isn’t?”
“About this case?” With a half smile, she said, “Nothing.” She asked a few more questions and he answered them, but, of course, there wasn’t much new to add.
“So, I just want to get this straight. Your story, like your statement, is that you couldn’t sleep, knew something was up or had a feeling. Is that right?”
“That’s about it,” he agreed. “I’d heard some whispers that the girls were meeting that night.”
“And you ran into your brother, had a fight, but didn’t see anyone else until Tyler showed up with a knife in his back?”
“Yes, he was rushed to the hospital, like I said.”
“What about his attacker? Did he say who that was?”
“No, it was dark. You read his statement, right?” Lucas had gone over it, as well as everyone else’s.
“He was waiting in the chapel, not the main one, but the older, smaller one that wasn’t supposed to be used. He had a rendezvous, he claimed, with Monica O’Neal, but he was attacked before she got there and woke up dazed. Pulled himself together and showed up on the path, where he met you.” Maggie regarded him silently a moment, then said, “So, his attacker could have been a man or a woman.”
“I guess.”
“But probably not a ghost.”
“Probably not,” Lucas said evenly.
She grimaced. “It just doesn’t add up, not really. Almost all of the female counselors were out meeting at the cavern. Your brothers were obviously not in their bunks either, nor was Tyler Quade, and you said Dustin Peters’s light was on, but we don’t know if he was in his room or not. And then Tyler is almost killed. Would have been, had the knife blade hit a vital organ. Lucky for him.”
“Yeah.”
“The crime scene? In the old chapel? They found Tyler’s blood there and what appeared to be a woman’s footprint running out of the chapel, blood on the bottom of a Nike running shoe. The tread pattern is consistent with the sole of one of Monica O’Neal’s. Meredith O’Neal, her mother, confirmed that, but since no shoes were found with Monica’s belongings when her cabin was searched, it is assumed she was wearing them and was in the chapel with Tyler before she disappeared.”
Lucas nodded again.
“But there were no other shoe prints, or fingerprints. No DNA, cigarette butts, or hairs, nothing. No sign of a struggle. Tyler apparently was jumped from behind and didn’t see his attacker. He said he fell, bumped his head, and blacked out. Later, when he came to, he stumbled out of the church and ran into you.”
“He was headed back to the main part of the camp to get help.” It had been a frantic night, he thought now, as he stared at the empty room with its dirty window, scarred tables pushed into the corners, spider webs, and dust motes.
Maggie also looked around the once-vibrant, now-empty, nearly forgotten building. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a stab at it.”
“The police concluded—”
“I know what the prevailing theory was, that somehow Waldo Grimes showed up here, but that seems just too convenient to me, where there’s no evidence to support it. He what . . . ? Attacked Tyler Quade and left him for dead, a knife in his back? Why not take the weapon? And then, what? As Grimes was finishing up with Tyler, he’s interrupted by Monica O’Neal and takes off after her, which could explain why Tyler wasn’t killed; Grimes didn’t have time to finish the job. And what about Dustin Peters? He disappeared the same night, having been paid earlier in the day. Maybe he took off . . . maybe he was done. You saw his light on, but no one saw him again. We know he was alive because he cashed his check, unless, of course, someone had his ID.”
She was regarding him expectantly. Lucas said, “I think there’s more to it than that. Four people disappeared off the face of the earth within a couple of days—Grimes, Monica, Elle, and Dusty.... I’ve always felt there’re big pieces missing.”
“I agree. It all starts with Eleanor Brady, Elle,” she said. “We’ve been assuming she was heartbroken that you broke up with her, that her disappearance was linked to the fact you called it off.”
“Nothing else had changed.”
“That you know of. You were barely more than a kid yourself. Wrapped up in your own teenage angst. Maybe it just seemed like you caused Elle to vanish. The girls at the camp said you thought she was despondent because she knew you were seeing Bernadette Alsace even before you broke up with her.”
Lucas’s jaw was tight, but he gave a curt nod. There was a thumping across the roof, a squirrel or rat or maybe even a bird scurrying overhead.
“What if she disappeared for another reason?” Maggie asked, her eyes narrowing. “Her family is still around, right?”
“Yes.” He’d checked. “Just her mother. Her father died a few years ago. Heart attack, I think.” Lucas remembered the man. Tall, stern, protective of his daughter, Darryl Brady had been an elder in the church. The mother, Jeannette, was tiny, like Elle, and had worked in a fabric store in Averille, but the shop had closed years earlier. He’d heard she now worked part-time at the preschool and volunteered at the local library. “They gave statements and were questioned over and over again.”
“And they blamed you.”
“Yep.” He hadn’t had to read their statements to know that much. Elle’s father had been very clear as to why he thought his daughter had “taken off,” as he called it, never wanting to believe she might have died.
“Your stepbrother dated her first.”
“Yeah, Ryan.”
“How’d he take to you moving in on his girl?”
“Maggie, what is this? We were kids. We’d both known Elle forever. She was always hanging out at the house. Ryan and I fought about it, yeah, and he was pissed as hell. We came to blows, but he backed off.”
“Quit seeing her?”
“Yes,” he said with more conviction than he felt. He’d known that Ryan had harbored a grudge, but believed his stepbrother had gotten over it.
“You’re sure?”
He gazed at her hard. “Why? Do you know something?”
“I read his statement, too.” In the report Ryan had admitted to fighting with Lucas. “And I talked to him. He admitted that he saw Elle that night, earlier, before you caught up with her on the beach.”
“That wasn’t in his original statement,” Lucas said.
“It came later. He said he was just a scared kid who was trying to stay out of trouble at the time.”
“We all were, but we didn’t lie.”
“No, Lucas. You didn’t lie. I’m not so sure about the others.”
He had a bad feeling about this. Who had lied? And why? Could Monica and Elle still be alive? And what about Dus
tin Peters? “Come on,” he said, standing. “I’ll show you around the place. Give you the personalized tour. Let’s start here, the heart of the camp,” he said, and walked her through the connecting hallways from the rec center, past the bathrooms, and into the reception desk and office area with its door to the back of the building. “Over here,” he said, leading her into the small anteroom, now devoid of furniture. “This is where we were all interviewed by Deputy Hallgarth, who served as the detective at the time.” From the office, he showed her upstairs to the suite of rooms that had housed his father’s family. The floors of the rooms creaked, hardwood that hadn’t seen a mop or duster in years. A chair sat near one of the windows, and a table had been left in the small dining area, but the rest of the space, two bedrooms with separate bathrooms, was empty. Windows opened to the front of the building to overlook the parking lot, and to the back gave a view of the trails that skirted the buildings.
“What’s in here?” Maggie asked as they left the apartment and stood in the short hallway at the top of the stairs. She was pointing at a closed door that led to the attic space, and in his mind’s eye he saw himself on a brass bed with a bare mattress behind that door, the space hot and close, a yellow jacket buzzing angrily as it flung itself over and over against the dusty windowpane. Naomi naked and breathing hard, her body slick with sweat, lay beneath him, her arms wrapped around his neck, her legs tight around his torso. Even now, so many years later, he felt a heated blush steal up the back of his neck as he remembered his own feeling of sick ecstasy, a kind of sizzling rapture heightened by the knowledge that their lovemaking was taboo.
“Storage closet,” he said, and swung open the door. The space was empty and dirty, smelling dry, the air stale, the bed long gone. “Come on.” Down the stairs they went and he showed her the dining room and kitchen, then outside to the grounds, the stable, and Dusty’s living quarters, a small room tucked under the eaves of the barn, accessed by the ladder to the empty hay mow, a cavernous space with a small, open window located at the highest point of the ceiling. It was located over the rafters, where evidence of a barn owl—feathers, droppings, and pellets—was visible.
“This camp hasn’t been occupied since that summer?” Maggie asked as she switched on her flashlight.
“Not that I know of.”
“Why?”
“At first, no one was interested in the property,” he explained as he opened the door to the room Dustin Peters had occupied when he’d worked at the camp. Maggie swung the beam of her light over the rough walls and single grimy window. Pegs lined the walls; no closet had been built into the small, confined space. “Lots of people were interested, the police, the television stations, news reporters, and then every kind of conspiracy nut on the coast. It didn’t help that Grimes was on the loose, but no one wanted to rent the place for any kind of camp or retreat.”
“Camp Horseshoe was owned by the church.”
“That’s right. And my father basically was the church.”
“But your stepmother’s family owned it all originally. Her great, great great whatever grandfather homesteaded it?” Maggie asked in the tight place where Dustin Peters had once resided. Little more than a closet with a few nails driven into rough plank walls, the space was dry and airless and empty, no evidence of the cot or tiny desk that had once been inside.
“Uh-huh.” He eyed the small window where he’d seen a patch of light on the night he’d run into David, the same night Monica O’Neal, and apparently Dusty, had disappeared, not unlike Elle the night before.
“Naomi’s father inherited this piece, the rest of the section was divided between his brothers. He was ill when Naomi married my father, but he signed over the deed to the church, as part of a wedding gift, I guess. She’d been married before. Her first husband was a low-life who left her and the kids, and Naomi’s father looked upon Jeremiah as some kind of savior for his only child.”
“Kind of an antiquated way of thinking,” she observed.
“Naomi thought so, but her father was insistent. She’d already been through one divorce and her father hadn’t liked that. No matter that husband number one was a low-life. So Jeremiah comes along, and Naomi’s father’s prayers have been answered. His little girl will be married and not only that”—Lucas held up a finger—“she was marrying a man of God, a man with his own Christian church. He wanted the church to have the property.”
“You remember this?” she asked skeptically.
“I heard,” he said, “from her. And the plan backfired. When Naomi and Jeremiah divorced, he essentially owned the camp, as he was the church.”
“How’d that go over?”
“How do you think? Like the proverbial lead balloon. Naomi fought him in court and lost. But they battled it out for years. Now, I guess, he’s given up on whatever plans he had for the place and is trying to sell it.”
“After all this time?”
“As I said, it was stained with the scandal, and that went on for years. The parents of the missing girls? The O’Neals and Bradys? They sued the church and my father and my stepmother for everything from negligence to mismanagement of funds, anything they could try. They kept at it for years, but since there were no bodies, there was no real crime. Sure, there wasn’t a lot of supervision and all of us were totally irresponsible teenagers, but each parent and counselor had signed iron-clad agreements when they signed on, and those agreements basically absolved the camp, church, and Mr. and Mrs. Jeremiah Dalton of any responsibility. The court battles continued for years and, since you’ve gone through all the files, you know Monica O’Neal’s mother, Meredith, has been a thorn in the side of the sheriff’s department for years, demanding answers every three or four months or so.”
Maggie nodded. “But without a body . . .”
“Right. Kind of a ‘no harm, no foul’ situation.”
“But now that we have a body, or at least a partial one . . .”
“She’ll be all over it, and I don’t blame her.” He was frowning, rubbing the back of his neck. “She’s been missing her daughter longer than she had her. Not knowing what happened to her. The same with Jeannette Brady.” He felt the same familiar hollowness, the guilt that had been his companion for two decades. Now, at least, if nothing else, there would be some answers.
And probably a lot more questions.
“Were you close to Dustin Peters?” she asked.
“Nah, we just worked together. I didn’t meet him ’til Dad hired him. He was from central or eastern Oregon, I think, maybe around Pendleton, and was looking for a job, at least for the summer. Dusty was good with horses, a hard worker who had spent time around ranches, so Jeremiah hired him just before the campers arrived.”
“What about his personal life? How’d he get on with everyone?”
“Okay. He was a little on the macho side,” Lucas remembered. “Had a swagger about him and rode a horse like a Hollywood stuntman, always working without his shirt.”
“He have a girlfriend?”
“Hard to say. I saw him with Reva Mercado a lot.” He frowned at the thought, remembering Reva sneaking up the hayloft ladder to this very room.
“You didn’t approve?”
“Reva was a schemer. And had a hot temper. She and Jo-Beth Chancellor were like this.” He crossed his fingers. “Tight. Always up to something. Throw Dusty into the mix and I don’t know. Dusty played the field, and it might have rubbed some people the wrong way. I saw him with Jayla, too. And I think he made a run at Elle.”
Maggie’s head snapped up. “Were they involved?”
“No, but she told me about it. Dusty seemed to think any girl over sixteen was fair game. He liked the chase, the ‘hunt,’ he called it.”
She made a face. “So the girls here were prey.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but . . .”
“What?”
“He was flirting with Naomi, my stepmother, but Leah was there and she was only about eleven, and I didn’t
like the way he kept glancing over at her. I almost called him out, but he saw me and stopped. I don’t know.”
“You think he was coming on to your sister?”
Lucas shook his head. “It was probably nothing. We done here?”
She gave the space one last cursory glance. “Yeah.”
They made their way out of the tiny closet of a room and climbed down the ladder. He showed her the trails leading to the flagpole and the cabins on either side, one grouping for the women and girls, the other, on the opposite side, for the males.
“Why were there more girls at the camp than boys?”
“Just how it broke up that year,” he said as he walked between the cabins, now falling down, roofs collapsing, siding rotting, interiors exposed. He thought of how many times he’d hurried down the path at night, making his way to the doorway of Bernadette’s cabin, his heart racing, his blood up, anticipation of the night ahead in his brain. “That’s why there were fewer male counselors than female. They put more boys into each cabin and my stepbrothers, Ryan and David Tremaine, they each had a cabin, as did Tyler Quade, Demarco Lewis, James Becker, and Rob Engles. Dustin and I filled in as counselors if they needed extras.”
“I’ve talked to them all,” she said. “Except Quade. I left a message, but he hasn’t responded. Becker is in the navy, stationed in Hawaii, giving a statement to the local authorities there. Engles is in Wisconsin, and his statement will come via the Milwaukee PD. Lewis said he’d show up here. Like the girls. That’s the odd thing,” she said, thinking aloud as they walked toward the parking lot. “All the women have agreed to come into the station and talk, but the men? Not so much.”
He started to voice his opinion, but she held up a finger. “Don’t give me any crap about the women staying home, able to get away, because most of them have jobs and families just like the men, but somehow they seem more . . . compelled to come and talk about it.” And then, as if she guessed where his mind was heading, added, “It is not because women talk more than men. No . . . there’s something else going on, I think. They didn’t immediately respond, but when they did, they agreed. Almost as if they’d decided among themselves to arrive down here en masse. Got any idea why that would be?”