“The French toast yesterday was really good,” Ellery admitted with a rare smile.
“Done. Just let me freshen up so I don’t add my own personal grime to the mix.” He still wore yesterday’s clothing, which had bits of dried mud stuck to it from their hasty foray into the ditch.
Before he could head for the bathroom, someone knocked smartly on Ellie’s front door. He looked to her and her eyes were wide. “I take it you’re not expecting anyone?”
“I’m never expecting anyone.”
They both went to the door and took turns looking through the peephole. On the other side stood a woman in an expensive pink suit, matching heels, and a head full of coiffed hair. “Who is that?” Reed asked in a whisper.
“Reporter,” Ellery whispered back. “TV news. She’s popular.”
As they were whispering, the knock came again, more forceful this time. “Ms. Hathaway? It’s Monica Jenkins from Fox News. I’d like to speak to you about a piece we’re running today.”
Ellery looked horrified, so Reed held up one finger to her. “I’ve got this,” he said. “Years of experience handling the press. You stand back, okay?”
He straightened his shoulders and opened the door. Monica Jenkins greeted him with a perfunctory smile as she extended her hand. “Agent Reed Markham,” she said. “What a pleasant surprise! I didn’t expect to find you here, but it’s so fortunate that I did. You were next on my list of people to interview.”
“I’m afraid we’re not granting any interviews, ma’am,” Reed said. “It’s per policy of the Woodbury Police Department. All media requests have to go through Chief Parker.” He was firm but polite, with just a bit of a shrug, as if to say, I’d like to cooperate, but what can you do?
Ms. Jenkins appeared unfazed and unmoved, not budging from Ellie’s porch. “I will definitely want to speak to Chief Parker too, but since you are the focus of my story, I think it’s best to start with you—don’t you agree?”
“Me? Why would I be the focus?” He stumbled a bit as Bump surged between his legs, eager to slobber all over the woman’s expensive, pointy shoes. Ellery yanked Bump back inside the house.
“Well, you and Officer Hathaway. I confess I just love true-crime stories—let me say I loved your book—so I recognized you straightaway yesterday at the police station. What a coincidence, I said to myself, that Reed Markham would be here in Woodbury at the same time that the local police discover a severed hand. It’s just like the Coben case all over again.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, if you’ve read my book, you’d know this is nothing like the Coben case.” Reed’s thin, pleasant smile was still in place, but the hairs on his neck rose at the mention of Coben’s name.
“I know!” she exclaimed, too loud to be sincere. “That’s what I found out when I went to research the case—you know, to refresh my memory. I had my interns do some Internet sleuthing. It’s amazing what you can find on the Net these days.” She opened her briefcase and started sifting through the contents. “Anyway, I just couldn’t believe it, because it has to be a huge coincidence, right? You arrive just as the severed hand is found.” She glanced up. “No, wait. You were here already, isn’t that right? It’s like you even knew it was going to happen.”
“I can assure you, I did not.” He could feel the conversation slipping away from him.
“So then I found out it was Officer Hathaway who called you, and I thought, well, that’s just another fascinating coincidence because look what we found…” She withdrew a facsimile of the Missing poster created fourteen years ago. “That young girl you rescued from Coben’s closet, her name was Abigail Hathaway.”
Reed felt the blood drain from his face. Next to him, Ellie pushed into the doorway to peer out at their visitor. Monica greeted her with a wide, bright smile, as though she were some long-lost relative. “Officer Hathaway!” she said, pushing forward so that Ellie shrank away. “Monica Jenkins from Fox News.” Reed wanted to grab Ellie up like he had years ago and run like hell, but he had no choice but to stand there and take it. The story was out now. The media maggots would spread thick and fast.
Monica held up the poster so Ellie could see it, glancing back and forth from one to the other, as if to affirm the likeness. “Lovely to meet you,” she said. “I understand you go by Ellery now.”
9
The woman standing on her porch called to Ellie’s mind a thoroughbred—lean and toned, sporting an expensively styled dark mane, and evolved beyond the rest of her species. Ellie was conscious of her own ratty college T-shirt and her paint-spattered sweatpants, of her bare feet and the visible scars on her arms. She hung back behind the door, fingers white-knuckled against the frame so that she dug her own elbows into her ribs. It was worth the awkward position not to put herself on display. For his part, Reed remained firmly planted between Monica Jenkins and Ellie’s house. The reporter could not even glimpse the inside from her vantage point, but Ellie anticipated that moment when she would push her way in, maybe bringing her cameras with her, and the closets with the nails in them would say more than Ellie ever could.
These past few days, with Bea’s hand turning up on her doorstep and someone creeping around in her woods, and last night, getting run off the road by a maniac, Ellery had mostly been fearing for her physical safety—sleeping with her gun, imagining footsteps behind her every place she walked—and yet here stood this woman who was calmly tearing Ellie’s life to pieces using only words.
“… your thoughts on the fact that the only surviving victim of Francis Coben received a gift-wrapped severed hand?” Monica was saying to Reed.
Reed’s jaw clenched, but he was polite. “I really have no comment.”
“Bea Nesbit seems like she might have fit the general description of the girls Coben abducted fourteen years ago,” Monica said.
“Francis Coben is in prison, on death row,” Reed replied.
“Do you think this might be a copycat?”
“I really can’t comment.”
Monica turned her attention to Ellery. “Ms. Hathaway, I understand you’ve been pushing the Woodbury Police Department for years to investigate a connection between the disappearances of Bea Nesbit, Shannon Blessing, and Mark Roy. What made you convinced that the three cases were related?”
Ellie licked her lips. The woman was good. She knew all three names of the missing persons without having to refer to any notes. Ellie tried to speak, but no sound came out, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “No comment.”
Monica sighed and shook her head with a trace of impatience, disappointed, maybe, in their naïveté. “I realize you would prefer not to talk to me, and believe me, I sympathize with that response,” she said, looking to Ellie rather than Reed. “I am here because I happened to recognize Agent Markham yesterday, but if you send me away, it won’t stop the story. The rest of my colleagues are going to put two and two together soon.” She paused and tried again. “Something about these disappearances must have reminded you of Francis Coben even before Bea Nesbit’s hand was discovered on your porch.” She cast a look down at her fancy heels, inches away from where the macabre gift had stood. “This is your chance to get your story out,” Monica urged her. “What I am saying is—use me! Let me tell your side.”
“I have a side?” Ellie wondered aloud. She barely had a home to herself anymore.
“You’re at the center of this whole thing.”
“You don’t know that,” Reed said sharply. “You can’t just throw around statements like that when you don’t understand the situation.”
“Please explain it to me, then,” Monica replied. “I’m here to listen.”
Ellie exchanged a look with Reed, but neither of them said anything. Where would she even start?
“Fine,” Monica said after a long stretch of silence. “Let me give you a snapshot of how the story is going to air without any context from you. Abigail Hathaway, now Officer Ellery Hathaway, was living a peaceful life in the small
town of Woodbury, Massachusetts, until three summers ago when local college student Bea Nesbit disappeared. A year later, Shannon Blessing also disappeared, and Officer Hathaway immediately pressed for an investigation into a possible link between the two cases, although no one else seemed to agree with her theory. Last summer, when postman Mark Roy disappeared, Officer Hathaway claimed that he, too, was a victim of the same perpetrator—an apparent serial killer. This assertion, despite any evidence linking the cases, and despite plausible alternative explanations for the second and third disappearances. Then a few days ago she called in Agent Reed Markham, the man who caught Francis Coben—just in time for Bea Nesbit’s hand to arrive, wrapped up like a birthday present, on her doorstep. People are going to ask themselves: How did Officer Hathaway seem to know this was coming?”
“Just what are you implying?” Reed asked, as if he didn’t know, as if he hadn’t made the very same accusations about her guilt himself just the night before. Only Reed had said the words with harrowed eyes and fevered skin, sweating bullets down the barrel of her gun, because Ellie knew he’d understood the enormity of the question. Monica Jenkins might have read Reed’s book, but she clearly hadn’t absorbed the vicious reality of Francis Coben or she wouldn’t be so calm and collected, standing on the porch where Ellie supposedly gift-wrapped a severed hand. If you’re going to insinuate I’m a monster, Ellie thought, you’d damn well better look afraid.
“I’m not implying anything in particular. I’m laying out the facts as they appear.”
“Here’s a fact,” Ellery said, pushing past Reed and into the open air. “Coben’s eighth victim, Renee Higgins? She bit off her own finger, the tip of the left pinkie.” Ellie took a step forward, forcing Monica to step back. “Can you imagine how insane with fear she must have been to do make herself do that? How desperate? She thought if she destroyed her hands then Coben wouldn’t want her anymore, and he’d let her go. Well, he got rid of her, all right. He took all her fingers, one by one, and she was alive when he started cutting.”
Ellie had pushed Monica backward to the edge of the uneven wooden steps. Ellie’s heart was hammering in her throat, but she felt the bitter taste of triumph because now, at last, the woman was pale with fright. “That’s horrible,” Monica stammered. The papers in her hand rustled as she fumbled, then recovered. “You could come to the studio, tell your story. People will want to know.”
“Trust me, they don’t.”
“Those young women who died, they no longer have a voice. You can speak for all of them.” Monica was pleading with her now, desperate to keep Ellery talking, but she’d unknowingly said exactly the wrong thing.
“No one can speak for them.” This was the point, the thing Monica and her viewers were never going to understand, that Coben didn’t just fancy pretty girls with delicate hands. He wanted to keep them and devour them, to erase them from the world forever so they would be his alone, and so he had. Sixteen young women—this one maybe had a chipped front tooth, that one, perhaps she had a talent for singing—Ellie didn’t know them, but she’d imagined them through the years, pondering their possible hopes and dreams. All of them were dead now, their voices lost to the ages, their names reduced to a footnote in Coben’s story. Who the hell was she to presume to speak for any of them?
Ellie left Monica teetering by the steps, her mouth open in silent protest, and stalked back into the house, making sure to bang the screen door shut behind her. She braced her back against the wall and covered her face with shaking hands. Outside, she heard Reed taking up the good fight: “I think you need to leave now, Ms. Jenkins. This is private property, and you’ve overstayed your welcome.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Monica replied. “Both of you.”
“Good day to you, ma’am.”
There was a scraping sound, the soft cry of the old hinges on the screen door, followed by the heavy wooden door sliding firmly shut. She heard Reed’s footsteps, familiar to her now, and took her hands down from her face. She was done hiding. He searched her with a sober, probing gaze. “We never found Renee Higgins’s body or her hands,” he said after a moment. “Coben wouldn’t say what he did with her.”
“Well, he damn sure told me,” she replied wearily. Reed wrote the book on Coben, but there were certain things he could never know. Maybe it didn’t matter now, what Reed wrote and what he didn’t. Maybe they were all just different parts of the same story.
“Did he tell you? Did he tell you what he did with her body?” The intensity of Reed’s gaze was too much, and Ellie turned her head away from him. She knew he must still feel the pressure, even after all these years, to bring Renee home.
“I don’t know anything about her,” she said finally. “Except what he wanted me to know.” Reed looked to the floor, frowning as he absorbed this idea, and she felt a stab of sympathy for him, this man who had saved just one girl out of seventeen. He’d locked up the monster but failed to notice: the monster had already won.
* * *
In her bedroom, Ellie struggled momentarily with the decision about whether to close and lock the door. She could shut Reed out, but that left her alone with the gaping closet. She rested her hand on the knob as she considered the dilemma and ultimately compromised by shutting the door but leaving it unlocked. She could hear Reed moving around in the kitchen, preparing the breakfast he’d meant to start before Monica Jenkins arrived. Ellie took a few tentative steps toward the closet, which she had not confronted since the day she’d taken ownership of the house and promptly nailed every single closet shut. She approached it on silent feet, drifting toward the dark open maw.
The closet was steeped in shadow and gave off a musty smell of wood and dust and dead air that had sat undisturbed by humans for years. Ellie screwed her eyes shut and stuck her hand out, inching it over the threshold. It can’t hurt you, she coached herself. It’s just a closet. Her fingers trembled and she waved them blindly in the empty space. Nothing, nothing, she said inside her head. There’s nothing there.
She gasped when her fingertips brushed the wooden planks that lined the wall. His closet had been made of wood, too, swollen and warped by tears and blood, gouged by desperate women trying to carve their way to freedom. Ellie yanked her hand back and all but ran to her dresser, where she grabbed the first clothes she touched and fled to the bathroom. Once there, she turned on the shower to almost scalding hot, but she had to stand under the spray a long time before she felt all the way clean.
* * *
After a tense breakfast, Ellery and Reed set out into the sticky, humid morning. Gray clouds hung low and thick, pregnant with the coming storm; the only way to break the heat was to crack it open, thunder-style, and the air nearly quivered with anticipation. Après moi, le déluge, Ellie thought darkly as she climbed into her truck and gunned the engine, adding some noise of her own. Reed was quiet in the passenger seat, and she couldn’t guess where his thoughts might be. At least he seemed convinced for now that she was not the killer.
The town rolled past like something out of an 8mm historical film, with cedar-shingled homes and winding roads and ten-story pines waving in the breeze. Woodbury’s citizens had gathered at their separate places of worship, with half the cars lining Main Street by the white-steepled church and the other half crammed into the tiny Dunkin’ Donuts lot on the corner. The two sides were united by their faded Red Sox bumper stickers—a higher power that everyone could get behind. She saw the Goldberg sisters, seventy-five if they were a day, sitting in plastic chairs outside the Friendly Suds laundry, drinking their coffee and trading sections of the Sunday Globe as they did every week at this time. One twin looked up at the sight of Ellery’s truck and waved to her, but Ellie pretended not to see. No one would be waving once the story got out.
Reed straightened up when he realized she’d driven right on past the station house. “You know, Monica Jenkins is right about one thing,” he said. “You want to get out in front of the story at least a little bit. You�
�re going to have to tell Sam.”
“I know it.” Ellie didn’t take her eyes from the road. “There’s someone else I want to talk to first.”
She came to a hard stop outside the Parker home, where the big weeping willow tree bowed and swayed, and the rows of red and white impatiens trembled in their beds. The house itself sat dark and silent under the rumbling sky. Ellie twisted in her seat as she searched the place for signs of life and wondered, not for the first time, what life was like on the inside. Julia and me have more of a transactional relationship these days, Sam had told her one night in bed at the motel. We each do just enough to keep the other one’s reality intact. I don’t ask what she does with her money. She doesn’t ask me what I do with my time. Ellie hadn’t really cared one way or another about Julia Parker; she was Sam’s concern, and Sam never seemed too worried. Maybe, in hindsight, he should have been.
“Are we watching for something in particular?” Reed asked finally.
Ellie stroked the steering wheel in silence for a long moment. “When Julia said the other day that Shannon Blessing only had one OUI on her record, that didn’t make sense to me. I knew she had been cited multiple times. But I looked it up, and Julia is right—there is only one official OUI in Shannon’s file.”
“So someone made the other citations disappear,” Reed said, catching on, “and you think Julia knows who it was.”
“I think if she knows, then there’s only one person it could have been. I just want to hear her say it out loud.”
Ellery climbed out of the truck and Reed followed. The air was so wet that the black tar of the driveway was already slick, despite the lack of rain. Wind slapped at her face and whipped her hair into her eyes. As they walked up toward the house, Ellery abruptly changed course to the garage. Julia’s black SUV normally sat parked outside in the summer months, and it wasn’t in the drive, so it was possible she was not at home. Ellery cupped her hands around her eyes and peered in the window of the garage. There sat Julia’s Lexus, and something about the shape of it up close made Ellery shift to a different window for another perspective. Again, she put face up to the glass, which was coated in a light film of dirt and pollen. “Oh, my God,” she murmured when she saw the dent in the right front panel. The damage lined up perfectly with Ellie’s sore hip. You’ll get what’s coming to you.
The Vanishing Season Page 18