by Gregg Olsen
“Never push back on what anyone says about your past. Pushing back will only add more fuel to a fire in which you have no control. Like an arsonist who miscalculates how much gas it will take to burn down a house—and kills himself too. Your good work over time will see you through this.”
He’s right and I know it.
I scroll down and read some comments below the article. They are all written in the same vein.
Luke’s a creep.
Kill him.
Put him in the oven.
Stick him in a microwave.
Make him lick a cattle prod.
That last one is original, and more appropriate for a child molester, but the Internet mob takes everything to the nth degree.
The people of Grays Harbor County have been through a lot since the mills closed. While they have been smacked hard by the economy, oppressed by more cloud cover than just about anywhere in Washington, they are a people who want justice, especially among their own.
A woman from Montesano writes:
Jesus Christ! I have four kids of my own. I don’t have a good job. Things are hard. But they’ve always been hard. I would have taken baby Ally in a minute and loved her like my own. Some people are so selfish that they can’t see anything but their own reflection. That’s Luke. Piece of shit, I’d say.
Luke’s reptilian stare looks back at me from the computer screen.
She’s right, I think to myself. You are a piece of shit. And I’m going to make sure that you stay right behind bars for as long as we can. Ally deserves that. Mia too.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Friday, August 18
“The lead investigator has a lot of baggage of her own.”
That night at home that phrase circles back to me. Pushing me. Pulling me. I know who you are or some variant always reminds me of the name of a Jennifer Love Hewitt film when I was a teenager. The dark threat comes from nowhere but bores into one’s psyche until he or she is forced to do what they probably should have done all along. I avoid googling myself for the very reason that I already know what’s out there about me. I know who I am and what I’ve done.
The dachshund card niggles at me too, though I know I’m an idiot to let a printed piece of paper get under my skin. I know that. Even so, I find myself staring at my laptop, with a glass of sauvignon blanc taken from the shelf just above WinCo’s polished concrete floor. When I type in my name, I find what anyone can find about me. The first mention of me that pops up is in connection with the Kelsey Chase murder investigation. Before that, I was probably only listed in Classmates.com or in the posted board minutes from my old condo in Bellevue. I’d asked for permission to add a narrow—and I thought very tasteful—window box to my kitchen window.
Denied.
I think now that I should have said that the window box would be used to grow herbs for the disadvantaged.
Approved!
I look through the bread crumbs of my name online, just as I know someone else did before sending the dog card. As others have done since Ally Tomlinson died in her father’s sweltering Subaru.
Kelsey Chase Murder Case Baffles Bellevue Police
That article suggested that we didn’t know what we were doing—but that my ex-boyfriend and partner, Danny Ford, insisted that everything was under control. I know now that’s because he was wrapped up in it tighter than the expensive sheets in which the little girl’s body was found.
I sip and scroll through articles that highlight key points of the investigation and our focus on Alan Dawson, a registered sex offender who was married to his victim at the time. Both were teenagers at the time of his statutory rape conviction, and I know now that while there should never be a gray area in cases involving sexual abuse, that time there was.
I gulp instead of sip when the next headline jabs me.
Dawson’s Widow Says “No” to Suicide Claims
Charlene Dawson’s face comes to mind. I have never seen such assured fury before. She had every reason to be enraged at me, though at the time I really wasn’t sure if her husband had committed suicide or not. That’s a game I still play with myself, avoiding what really happened in his jail cell.
Detective on Leave from Bellevue Police Department
The beginning of my extended tour of shame began with my dismissal from Bellevue PD. While I hadn’t participated in any of Danny’s machinations to control the case, I had been with him every step of the way. I had been the healthy limb on the maple tree that had to be sacrificed in order to save it.
Ford Pleads No Contest on Obstruction Charge
Again a reference about me that only amounted to a single line. “Prosecutors say Nicole Foster, Ford’s former partner and girlfriend, was in line to be a chief witness.”
Ford Sentenced to Prison for Falsifying Records, Confession
They ran my academy photograph with this one. My father would have been so ashamed if he could remember who I was.
Detective Resigns, Seeks Treatment for Gambling Addiction
No picture this time. Just a short mention that I recall wasn’t even juicy enough to be on the front page—a gift from God or the night desk editor for which I will be eternally grateful. Whoever thought any publicity was good publicity was probably a publicist. Not a human being. Not someone like me. I could never apologize enough for the mistakes I made.
Two Dead in Kirkland Gas Leak Explosion
I’m buried at the end of the story that recounts the explosion that killed Cy Sonntag, Stacy’s husband, and Tomas Vargas, a nineteen-year-old gardener with no family in this country. The teen had been at the wrong place and wrong time. In the three years since it happened, the burden weighing on me has only grown heavier. I think about Tomas all the time. It weighs on me more than a pile of stones. I tried to find his family.
“That part was an accident,” Stacy had insisted, as if that absolved her from a second murder.
Gas Leak That Left Two Dead Ruled an Accident
Someone at the scene took a picture of me comforting Stacy as we stood on the street just after the blast. My name appears only in the caption. I can still feel the phoniness of Stacy’s embrace and the tears that she’d mimicked from watching others who have a heart that does more than circulate blood through the human body. Even now, I hear her whispers in my ear.
“You have to believe me,” she tells me like I’m a moron. “I didn’t want for this to happen.”
I didn’t answer her back. How could I? She set a trap for her husband. She cooked up a plan that got her what she wanted—rid of her husband, money beyond anything we could have imagined as kids, and a new lover. “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet” came to mind—an adage that our father frequently used when one of his schemes fell flat. Stacy was that cavalier about it. She was. She really, truly was.
And that was it. I was shamed. My sister escaped a murder charge. My new boyfriend, Julian, had been in cahoots with her all along. I was the safety net, I guess. Someone who would come to her aid if the investigation went sour. That was what I was to her. A thing to be used. Now, when I look back on it, I find something in the hideousness of Stacyland, a place in which she’s the princess and the rest of us are a herd of footmen or Cinderellas, that gives me hope and makes me want to breathe another day.
Emma.
It’s always been that little girl. She’s like me, I think. Not a mini-me in her looks. Not even her personality. She’s brighter. She’s comfortable in her own skin. She sees things to marvel at, instead of things to fear. She’s like me in that I knew that something was wrong with my mother. I knew that she didn’t have the capacity to really love me or Stacy. Emma didn’t deserve that kind of upbringing—the kind that makes a child an accoutrement, an accessory that can be shelved, boxed up, pushed aside. I goddamn wasn’t going to let that happen to her. Period.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Saturday, August 19
Saturday morning cartoons no longer captivate Emma, and she sits on th
e sofa with the family album in her lap. A planned day trip to Ocean Shores with Carrie Anne and the other kids the next day fuels more interest in my family’s past when I tell her that we still own a little cabin on the coast not far from there. She wants to go, of course.
“Renters moved out a few weeks ago,” I say. “I suppose we can go sometime soon and see what needs to be done.”
She looks up at me and smiles while turning the cellophane-covered color and black-and-white photographs.
I wish that I’d thought to burn the family album, but I didn’t.
“Is this you and my mom?” she asks, tapping on a photo.
I slide next to her and put my arm around her gently. The photograph is the one of Stacy and me standing next to Candy, Stacy’s pony.
“Yes, Emma,” I say. “That’s your mom.” I indicate Stacy. “And that’s me,” I say pointing to a girl I can hardly remember.
“Whose pony?”
“Your mom’s,” I say.
“I wish I could have a pony,” she says.
I wish you could have had a decent mother, I think.
“Maybe someday,” I say.
“Mom was pretty,” Emma says.
“Yes,” I say. “She was. She was the prettiest girl in the county. That’s what Grandpa said. Grandma too. When your mom was first born, Grandma and Grandpa used to go to the Wishkah Mall to push her around in her baby carriage just to soak up all the compliments.”
Emma’s already-enormous eyes grow even larger.
I don’t tell her that when I think of Stacy in that carriage, my mind touches on Rosemary’s Baby.
“Do I look like Mommy?” she asks.
“You do,” I say, turning her chin so she looks into my eyes. “You do. You are just as beautiful. But you’re more than that, Emma. You are smart and funny and caring.”
She smiles, returning to the photo.
I wonder if Stacy would have been a different person if our parents hadn’t focused so much on her looks. If they’d emphasized the importance of character instead.
“What happened to the pony?” Emma asks.
“The pony got old and died,” I say, lying to the little girl I love so much.
“That makes me sad,” she says. “Mommy wasn’t old when she died, was she?”
“No,” I tell her. “She wasn’t. Sometimes accidents happen and people are taken very young, like your daddy and your mommy.”
She thinks a bit.
So do I. I think about how Stacy killed Cy. I think about how I lied about the car accident that I said took Stacy’s life.
“I really miss my mommy and daddy,” she says.
No words are more difficult to hear.
“I know,” I say. “They are still with you.” I touch her heart. “Right here. Always right here.”
She turns a few more pages of the album, and I provide a kind of bland commentary on our growing-up years in Hoquiam. It’s the kind of speech one would give a neighbor, just enough to ring true, but nothing the recipient of the stories could use against you later.
“I don’t miss her as much as I used to,” Emma says, going back to thoughts of her missing mother. “Is that bad?”
“No,” I tell her. “Memories fade over time.”
She can see the sadness in my eyes, and she backpedals a little, I think to make me feel as though the loss isn’t so great and that she’s doing fine. “She wasn’t always nice to me,” she says. “She made me play in my room all the time. By myself.”
“She was very busy,” I say, unsure why I continue to defend Stacy.
But I do. To Emma, I always do.
“You’re busy too,” my niece says, closing the book. “You find time to spend with me. You never make me go to my room to watch a video. Mom did. She did that all the time.”
“Let’s get some ice cream,” I say, ending the conversation.
She grins. It’s a happy and genuine smile, and in my heart I know it has nothing to do with ice cream at all.
The rest of the day passes as all Saturdays should. Emma, Shelby, and I spend our time together. We’re a family. We have been one for three years. I won’t let anything get in the way of that.
Not even Stacy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sunday, August 20
The weather changes overnight as low clouds roll off the Pacific on Sunday morning. And nearly at once a steaming mugginess is replaced with a marine layer that hugs Aberdeen and Hoquiam like an oppressive grandmother. The temperature has dropped twenty-five degrees. At least. It’s a welcome change, of course. I don’t have AC in the house, and the quintet of fans that I’ve set up to force hot air out and cool air inside have left an octopus of extension cords that I know carry a risk. The scene outside my father’s house is slate and white, a kind of blankness that comes when the foggy curtain descends over the area, as it does for most of the winter. The heat wave that killed Ally Tomlinson is gone.
I think of Ally’s last ride with her father as I buckle my seat belt and turn on the ignition of my car. Yesterday was an anomaly. There is no Sunday during a homicide investigation. At least there isn’t in Aberdeen.
I wonder if Luke had the radio on when Ally fought for her life. If he played a Nirvana song to match the sticker on his back window. I wonder which one. “All Apologies,” I think, imagining that he had some feelings for the little girl who he let bake to death. Stupid me. After I drop Emma off at Carrie Anne’s for the trip to the beach, I drive the short distance along the flatness that is most of Grays Harbor County to the Clark Terrace Apartments. The spaces allotted to the Tomlinsons are empty. Mia is at work. Luke is in jail. I watch for a minute as a stoop-shouldered old man with a Smith Brothers beard swings a leaf blower over the asphalt of the parking lot. A cottonwood shed its silver-backed leaves during the heat wave, and the force of the leaf blower moves them like a cyclone to a vacant lot where they’ll be someone else’s problem.
I wish Ally had been discarded like that, given away to someone who’d love her. Or just left in that lot in the hope that someone would see her and scoop her up. At least abandonment would have given her a fighting chance. There were a zillion other choices that Luke could have made that morning. More than a zillion. All would have been better than what he ultimately did. Why, I wonder, was that the solution he settled on?
I start driving toward the McDonald’s where Luke gave Ally her last meal. Had he thought of it that way? Was there a moment after McDonald’s that he considered changing his mind? I order a cup of coffee in the drive-through speaker and pull up to pay at the cashier’s window. The girl who takes my debit card wears braces and a big smile.
“Have a really super day,” she says.
“You too,” I say.
I ease my car toward the second window, and this time a young man with shaggy black hair and a Band-Aid over a tattoo on his neck hands me my coffee.
“Warning label, ma’am,” he says. “Coffee’s super hot.”
As I pull away, I drive toward WinCo, tracing Luke’s route to work. Traffic is light, and as I pass by a vacant grocery, an astrologer’s storefront, and a tavern, I wonder if there was anyone out that morning who saw the wine-colored Subaru with the little girl in back as it made its way to WinCo.
I park and get out. River smells fill my nose. I peer up at the video cameras. I wonder how much they captured. Ally was so small. Had she drifted off to sleep after McDonald’s? Or as Dr. Beakman suggested, did she awaken in a weakened state, crying out for help before succumbing?
I think of the Internet links that Luke visited. All had decent and prudent advice on avoiding the scenario. None was a how-to-kill-a-child-or-pet website like the kind terrorists and anarchists put up to guide the gullible, the stupid, the angry, into doing harm.
Leave your window open if your dog is in the car.
Never leave a child unattended.
Break the glass if you see a child or animal locked in a car.
Every second counts.
Luke Tomlinson did what he wanted to do. I get back into my car and drive to the Starbucks parking lot where Luke would have a purported epiphany that his little girl hadn’t been dropped off at day care. Jordan Conway would spring into action, and Luke would stand there wringing his hands as if it were all some big human error.
All apologies.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sunday, August 20
After meeting at the police department, Carter and I return to Clark Terrace and park in the visitor’s space closest to the Tomlinsons’ unit. A wilted bunch of daisies sits forlornly on the welcome mat in front of their apartment. It’s quiet. Unbelievably sad. I wonder who brought the flowers. Some kids circle the parking lot on their bikes, and two cats hunker down in the shade under the sole landscaping near the entry, a rhododendron. The Tomlinson unit had been thoroughly searched, of course, but there is always the chance that neighbors can tell us something helpful. I lived in a place similar to this in Bellevue before I bought my now-foreclosed condo. Condo and apartment neighbors generally keep their distance, barely offering a nod or wave. Most times, neighbors pretend not to even see the person who’s getting out of their car and trudging up the stairs to the unit next door to their own. Despite all of that, they listen. They watch. They have opinions and complaints about everyone.
We knock, and the door is answered by a man who gives his name as Mick Hightower. His unit is to the north of the Tomlinsons’. Mick is a large man with a barrel chest and a white plume of chest hair that pokes like a fountain out of the top of his shirt collar. I tell him why we’re there, but he already knows.
“Look,” he says, opening the door a little wider, but not inviting us in, “that kid cried all night. All night. Every night. I had to buy a box of earplugs to shut out the noise.”
“That must have been annoying,” Carter says.