“Anyway,” Stuart continued. “It’s a shame what happened to him. A real shame. He was such a talented young man, naturally gifted. He could have made a name for himself one day.” His thumbs stilled and he leaned slightly forward, his bug eyes growing even buggier. “Has there been any change in the case? Any new developments?”
“No,” Lucy said. “That’s why I’m here, actually. The police have been less than forthcoming, but I know you were a witness. You were the last one who saw him.”
The corners of his mouth twisted, like they were sharing a secret.
“So, whatever you can tell me about that night,” she added, “whatever you remember, I would be incredibly grateful.”
The smile stayed twisted on his lips as he studied her face a moment, then he shifted on the stool, unlacing his hands and smoothing them over his thighs. When he started to talk, his lips made a popping sound, like a seal breaking open.
“It started with the lights, really,” he said. “That’s how it began for me anyway. To this day I don’t know what they were or where they came from. For a while, I thought they were airplanes, certainly that must have been it, but having gone over it so many times, I realize now that they were just too bright, too low to the ground, and coming in too fast. Maybe it was kids driving their four-wheelers around in the boulder lands, but you know how those engines are . . . loud as hellcats . . . and these lights . . .” He shook his head. “They didn’t make a sound.”
Lucy stared at him. He had to be teasing her. He’d read the Strange Quarterly article, seen the pictures. He knew about Sandra and her baseless theories, and for whatever reason—maybe revenge for how Lucy treated him when she was younger, or maybe he’d seen her and Patrick flying the remote-control helicopter, or maybe simply because he was a sociopath—he had to be messing with her now.
Stuart must have recognized the incredulous look on her face because he held his hands in the air, shook his head, and said, “No, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not like that. I don’t have any reason to lie to you. I wouldn’t do that. Not after everything you’ve been through. These lights were real, Lucy. I saw them as clear as I see you in front of me now. And I saw them more than once, too, more than just the night he went missing. That’s why I was up so late. I’d seen the lights a few times in the weeks before and I was trying to catch them on video. That’s why I was outside in the middle of the night. How I was able to see what I did.”
He’d been sitting in the dark, in a folding chair in his backyard with the video camera ready to go, waiting for the lights to come up over the horizon the way they had in nights past, when he heard shouting start up across the street. He snuck around to the front and watched Nolan shove someone into his pickup and drive away.
“You got it on video?” Lucy couldn’t keep the hope from her voice.
“No. By the time I thought about it, he was long gone.” He looked sorry to disappoint her and rushed on, saying, “I called the police as soon as I heard about Nolan on the news.” He gave a sad little shake of his head. “I only wish I had called sooner. That night. I should have called that night, right away, as soon as I heard all that shouting, but I didn’t think . . .” He shook his head a second time with more ferocity. “He’d always been such a good kid, never in any kind of trouble, a nice boy. A nice boy.”
“You couldn’t have known.” Lucy tried to sound reassuring. She knew what it felt like to live ten years carrying the weight of one bad decision.
“Do you think it would have made a difference?” He smoothed his comb-over. “If I had called that night instead of waiting?”
Lucy shook her head. She truly didn’t know.
Her gaze shifted to the jewelry box that Stuart had been working on when she first got here. She stretched forward, twisting for a closer look. It was some sort of diorama, a miniature world wrapped in velvet. A plastic doll, fashioned to look like a little girl wearing a red polka-dot dress and black Mary Janes, hung frozen in midair, her blond curls streaming behind her, her legs kicked out as she pumped high on a tiny swing. She was caught midlaugh, her mouth a perfect, upturned bow. Tiny sparrows flew around her. Trees no bigger than a penny crowded the edges of the box, a mysterious and beckoning forest. The sky exploded, a gold and purple sunset that mimicked the end of the world. Or the beginning.
“Do you like it?” Stuart asked.
Lucy startled at his voice, not realizing how caught up she was in the scene.
“It’s remarkable,” she said. “Everything’s so small, and yet, it looks almost real. It must take you forever. All those details.”
Pink colored his cheeks. He smiled at his hands. “I have trouble sleeping sometimes, and I find the level of detail a piece like that requires to be especially soothing.” He glanced at the diorama. “I call this one ‘Misery in Gold.’ ”
She looked at it again, seeing things now that she hadn’t before: a park bench hardly big enough for an ant, a merry-go-round made out of a button, the figure of a man hiding in the trees.
“How do you decide what to make?” Lucy asked.
“I look to the world. News articles, memories, scenes from my favorite books, sometimes even real-life experiences. I made this one two weeks ago after a particularly stimulating walk through the park.” He reached to caress the box’s velvet outside and then made a fine, nearly imperceptible adjustment to the little girl’s skirt. “Her name is Molly. She has such a delightful laugh. Like a little bird.”
He tapped one of the sparrows and all of them began to bounce. They appeared to be connected somehow and attached to some kind of spring, but to Lucy it seemed like magic.
Without taking his eyes from the diorama, he said, “I made a world for you and your brother once. What’s that game you would always play? You’d run around in the front yard wearing those red and blue capes, pretending to be superheroes, I believe. Starman and Asteroid Girl, yes, that was it, now I remember.”
He laughed, and the sound made her fingers curl tight around the edge of the stool.
“So clever, the two of you together,” he said. “You reminded me so much of myself at that age. I had a sister, you know. We played together like you and your brother did, but she died when we were still young. Pneumonia, terrible thing. Anyway, you and Nolan, the two of you were such an inspiration, and the world I made, oh, how divine. One of my best, if I’m allowed to say such a thing. Do you want to see it?” His eyes snapped to hers and there was an eagerness there, a hunger that scared her, but despite her fear, she nodded.
He leaped off the stool and crossed to the wardrobe, fumbling a moment with a clump of keys before finding the right one, inserting it into the lock, and opening the cupboard doors. He leaned in and began moving things around, muttering to himself.
As Lucy waited, she scolded herself for leaving her phone in the car. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming here, and she had no idea what kind of man Stuart really was. She should have pushed harder to see the police report. Or she should have done what people did in movies and on television: create some kind of diversion and then steal the desired information. She could have at least tried. She could have asked Detective Williams for a cup of coffee or a Kleenex, something that would have required him to leave his desk for a few minutes, giving her the opportunity to slip Nolan’s file out of the drawer and walk out with it tucked under her shirt. Which was probably a crime of some kind, obstruction of justice or tampering or some other legal term she didn’t know, but at least she would have been better prepared than she was now. At least she would have known exactly what the police thought of Stuart after they questioned him, whether they considered him a suspect. She was a terrible detective. It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment that she might be dealing with someone dangerous.
Stuart returned carrying something the size of a shoebox. The outside was black and speckled with tiny white stars. On the lid was a paper moon, moving through all its phases. Stuart sat back down on his stool, then offere
d the box to Lucy. “I made it after you moved away. It was just so quiet around here with you and your brother both gone. Too quiet.”
She carefully opened the lid. It had a locking arm that held it upright so the underside of the lid became part of the inside scene. There was something familiar yet unsettling about the miniature world Stuart had made. In the foreground, a boy with a blue cape bent over a telescope that was pointed at a full and grinning moon glued to the underside of the lid. A girl with a red cape was frozen midstride, the cape fluttering out behind her, her arms bent at the elbow, one leg lifted, giving the impression that she was running circles around the boy. In the background was a rocket ship, spewing cottony smoke from its jet engines, red cellophane sparks lighting up the darkness. Lucy leaned closer. A face peered out a round window set into the rocket’s tubular, metallic body. A pale-cheeked man forever watching the girl in the red cape.
Lucy started to close the box, but Stuart darted his hand inside, jabbing a finger at something that looked like a purple rock leaning up against a tree trunk.
“I never told anyone about it, you know,” he said.
“About what?” Lucy squinted at the purple rock. Not a rock, a bag of some kind, a backpack maybe with black straps no wider than dental floss.
“The backpack.” He took the diorama from her, fiddled with something inside, and then gently closed the lid. “I still have it.”
A tingling sensation crept up the back of her neck, needle-like ant legs racing across her skull. She had no idea what he was talking about, and yet, some subconscious part of her was twisting, shriveling up in fear and dread, seeming to know something the rest of her didn’t. Stuart returned the diorama to the wardrobe. When he came back, he carried a purple JanSport backpack, an exact color match to the miniature version. A fabric patch of the planet Saturn was stitched onto the front pocket, the silver threads starting to fray.
He stopped in front of her, holding the backpack by one strap, letting it dangle at his side. “I’ve been keeping it safe for you.”
Lucy’s mouth went dry. Pressure built in her head, a vise squeezing tighter and tighter. “Where did you get that?”
He gave her a questioning look. “You know where.”
She shook her head. She reached for the bag, but he pulled it away.
“You hid it in the bushes outside my house,” he said, as if she was the one not making sense. “The night Nolan went missing.”
A buzzing in her ears, growing louder with each word. She was still shaking her head, couldn’t seem to stop, as if the motion could protect her from what he was saying, his lies, because this couldn’t possibly be true.
“After I saw Nolan drive away, I stayed out on the porch for another few hours,” he said. “Waiting to see if he would come back. Waiting for the lights, too, I suppose. Just. Waiting. I was about to go inside when I saw you limping up the road. It surprised me, seeing you like that. You sort of appeared out of nowhere. And you were alone. It was so late. I called out to you, but you didn’t hear me, I guess. You went halfway up the driveway and then you stopped and bent to pick something up. It was too dark for me to see what, but you carried it across the street and stuffed it under the bushes. Then went back to your house.”
Lucy stared at the backpack. An image flashed through her mind of her almost tripping over the bag, stifling a scream because she’d thought it was a body. But she couldn’t draw up any of the rest of what Stuart was telling her now, could only recall shivering hands, chattering teeth, the scrape of branches against her skin, the tangy scent of crushed spruce needles.
Stuart lowered his eyes to the backpack too. His voice grew quieter, like he was confessing. “I thought it was yours. I was going to give it back the next day, but in the morning I looked through it and there was some other girl’s wallet inside, some other girl’s clothes.”
Lucy pressed her hand to her mouth.
“I waited to see if you would come looking for it, but you never did,” he said. “And then the news came out about your brother and everyone was so busy over there. Cops in and out all the time. And then you moved away.”
“Why didn’t you give it to the police?” Her voice was hoarse and unfamiliar.
“Is that what you want me to do?” His eyelids fluttered in surprise. “I assumed you had a good reason for hiding it that night. I thought I was helping you.”
“You did,” she rushed to reassure him. “You are. Helping me. Thank you.”
She reached for the backpack, but he pulled it away.
“What do I get in return?” His gaze settled on her mouth. “I took a big risk, after all, not telling the police everything I saw that night. I could have very easily told them about the backpack. I still could.”
Lucy swallowed back a rising revulsion and moved closer to Stuart, pressing her body against his. His breathing accelerated. He smelled strongly of baby powder and something metallic. With the back of her hand, Lucy stroked his cheek and smiled like she meant it. He shifted closer. His mouth puckered in and out like a fish sucking up food. Briefly, she wondered if Stuart had ever kissed anyone before. Then his free hand moved to encircle her waist. Before his fingers reached her hips, she snaked her arm out and grabbed the backpack. In his distraction, he loosened his hold, and it took Lucy little effort to tug the bag from his grasp. She ducked sideways out of his half embrace, then turned and ran.
Stuart started to chase after, but by the time he reached the bottom of the driveway, Lucy was already in her car, pulling away from the curb, the backpack slumped and brooding beside her in the passenger seat.
10
Lucy knew the backpack belonged to Celeste even before she laid out the contents across her motel room bed. She’d known as soon as Stuart took it out of the wardrobe. No one else had a Saturn patch like that one. Even so, Lucy needed to be certain. She needed more definitive proof, because what if her memory on this was wrong, too?
In the largest pocket she found a fringed leather vest and other clothes, a string of puka shells, a pair of slim, cheap rubber flip-flops, a constellation book, four chocolate chip granola bars, a reusable water bottle, a Greyhound bus schedule and a ticket to Santa Monica, and a well-worn map of California that had grown soft and thin from being folded and unfolded a hundred times. In the smaller front pocket was a red cloth wallet with a thick wad of cash, a Subway punch card, and a provisional driver’s license issued by the state of Pennsylvania. Celeste’s smiling face stared out at Lucy from behind the smudged plastic sleeve. She wiggled out the license for a closer look, and another card tucked behind it fell onto the bed. It was a business card, cheap, maybe even homemade.
Wyatt Riggs, Field Investigator, UFO Encounters
For all your paranormal needs
The phone number printed on the card was not the same phone number Wyatt used now, and when she tried calling it, she got an out-of-service message. She turned the card over. Scribbled on the back were the words: If you ever need someone to talk to . . .
The handwriting was familiar. She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out the list of names Wyatt gave her a few days ago, then held the list up next to the business card, comparing the two, finding them to be a near perfect match. She slipped both the business card and license back into the wallet, then returned everything to the backpack, trying her best to arrange it as close as possible to how it was before. Then she called Wyatt.
“I found something.”
“Where are you?”
“At the motel.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
While she waited, she listened to a voice mail Robert left earlier that afternoon when she was at Stuart’s house. “I went by the new apartment, but you weren’t there. I’ll try again later.” There was a long pause, and she thought that was it, he would hang up, there was nothing more to say, but then he inhaled sharply and gushed out a slew of words. “Look, Lucy, I know you might be upset with me for kicking you out and that’s completely un
derstandable, but I haven’t heard from you in almost three days and that’s just not like you. Even if you are mad, will you at least send me a text? An email or something? Let me know you’re all right? I just . . . Marnie’s starting to get concerned. Okay, talk to you soon.” The message ended.
She sent Robert a quick text. Got your msg. Everything ok. Will call soon.
He was on the list of people Wyatt wanted to talk to, but Lucy didn’t know what information he could provide that would be even remotely useful. He’d been in LA the night Nolan went missing, oblivious to any trouble his two children might have been causing, and when the police did eventually call, he didn’t act the least bit surprised to hear his son was missing. In fact, he was the first to suggest Nolan had run away, said the only thing that surprised him was that Nolan hadn’t taken off sooner considering the kind of trouble he was getting into at home and at school. But it was possible the police told him something in the early stages of the investigation that could help her now, and he seemed to be trying to be a good father, some kind of father anyway, more than he ever tried when they were younger. Maybe he wanted to make it up to her, and to Nolan. Maybe this was his chance.
Everything We Lost Page 18