Dark Road Home

by Anna Carlisle

  “You know, I’ve thought about that a thousand times, trying to see if there was something I missed that day. But no, Jake was up early like always, got in some time with the weights and a run around the neighborhood before he had to head to work. I’m not sure I even saw him before I left the house. A lot of days, I didn’t.”

  Gin watched him carefully, and could see no signs that he wasn’t telling the truth. “All right. Well, I guess the same was true at our house. I don’t remember anything unusual, other than I was getting ready to go up to freshman orientation. My ride was picking me up at noon, and I’d spent much of the night before ironing and packing, so I was tired. Lily slept in, as usual, until Mom made her get up. Mom made us breakfast, Lily refused to eat it, she wouldn’t help me clean up, she wanted me to walk with her to the drug store because we were out of conditioner . . . I probably snapped at her. I just couldn’t wait to leave, to get on the road.”

  “So nothing happened before you left?”

  “Well . . . Jake came by. To say good-bye.” Gin felt the twinge of painful ambivalence and took a breath. This was the memory she’d revisited so often when she thought about that day. “I was only going to be gone through Sunday afternoon, but we were . . . anyway, he made up some excuse to run to the hardware store and came by in the truck.”

  The memory was so exquisitely clear—except memory lied. Science had proven that, over and over again; humans convince themselves of versions of events produced in their own rich imaginations. So the memory of Jake picking her up and swinging her around, the memory of the warm, tan skin of his neck against her cool cheek, the smell of laundry on a line mixed with his shampoo and sweat—were these real? The faded green of the truck, the blue of his eyes, the flash of white teeth in his smile before he kissed her—they were exquisitely real in her mind. She could practically feel his lips brush against hers, his strong hands at her back.

  With a start, she realized she’d let her eyes drift shut, and she snapped them open. “He only stayed a minute. Mr. Nelson kept a close eye on him at work. Anyway, Lily had already left for school by the time he came by—she’d had to repeat her English class during summer school, so she was gone three mornings a week. That was the last I saw of either of them. I had the house to myself until my ride came.”

  “All right.” All the humor had drained from Lawrence’s voice. As they talked through the day, it was impossible to forget that they knew how it ended. “I didn’t see Jake at all, not until the next morning. Nelson’s crew was working on that apartment complex out on Second Street and they were framing that week, so he kept the whole crew busy through quitting time.” Other days that summer, when the work was slow, Mr. Nelson occasionally sent Jake home early. “Nelson backed him up on that: Jake wasn’t out of his sight until a little after five.”

  “And then two people saw Lily and Jake in the truck together between five thirty and five forty-five.”

  “Yes. Guinevere Morgan and Archie Chin. Their statements were nearly identical: they said Jake was driving well under the speed limit, and that Lily looked upset. Mrs. Morgan was sure she was crying.”

  “But that’s—Lily was so dramatic. I mean, she used to cry over commercials on TV!” Gin heard the defensiveness in her voice and closed her mouth. She was here for the truth . . . whatever it turned out to be.

  Lawrence nodded. “After that we’ve only got Phyllis Bannon’s statement.”

  “That she saw them when she was walking her dog . . .”

  “Correct. And unlike Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Bannon refused to speculate on what frame of mind either of them might have been in. They were at the creek. They were talking. He had his arm around her. That’s it.”

  “I remember,” Gin said. “So many people jumped to the conclusion that Jake and Lily were, you know, involved. Romantically.”

  “Which is a reasonable guess, based on the fact that they were touching.”

  “But it could have been anything. I mean, Lily . . . she was sunshine and storms, you know? There wasn’t a single person who knew her who hadn’t seen her get upset about some meaningless incident, and then five minutes later she was laughing again. If Phyllis Bannon had walked past them five minutes later . . .”

  She was doing it again. Trying to find a version of the story that didn’t implicate Jake.

  That had to stop.

  “Right, right,” was all Lawrence said. “We were aware of that, of course. By then it was a county case, and some said I shouldn’t have even been allowed to sit in on the interviews. But you know, I’m glad I did. I needed to hear it all to be sure. I—I never believed that Jake had it in him to do something like that. But knowing what I knew, about witnesses, about how we perceive what we see, I could easily understand how people came to suspect him.”

  “Well, to be fair . . .” Gin said carefully. “People knew that he lied. In an official investigation.”

  Lawrence glanced down at the table. “He wasn’t under oath . . . but yes.”

  “So in the first interviews, he said he was working on the shed.” That summer, Jake had been stripping the wood siding on the old shed behind their house, intending to repaint it. Gin realized that she had no idea if he’d ever gotten around to painting it, since after Lily’s disappearance, she’d never gone back to the Crosby house. Not until today.

  “They brought him back in after they talked to Chin and Mrs. Morgan. I didn’t attend that interview—at the county’s request, or perhaps ‘insistence’ is a better word—but I saw the transcript. The minute they confronted him with the witness statements, Jake reversed himself. He admitted that Lily had called him right after school and asked to talk, he’d picked her up after work, and he’d taken her to the old mall parking lot. But he said they only talked for a while, that she was, in his words, ‘rambling.’ They pressed him on whether she’d been drinking, if they’d been smoking marijuana, but he swore that none of that happened. Jake said she was obviously upset. At one point, she started crying and he did his best to comfort her, but she wouldn’t say what was wrong . . . only that it would all work out one way or another.” He paused, and looked at Gin intently. “You’ve never figured out what it might have been about? Trouble with your parents, boys, anything?”

  Gin shook her head. “No. I mean, like I told you guys back then, she’d been kind of moody, but that wasn’t anything new. The thing is, Lawrence, I’d seen her crying, too.”

  She didn’t look at him while she told him about that day, about how she’d seen Lily huddled on the tile floor of the shower, sobbing while the water streamed down her face and hair. How she’d returned to her own room without Lily knowing she’d been observed. Gin couldn’t tell their parents—Richard wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to deal with a hysterical daughter, and Madeleine would have overreacted and probably dragged poor Lily off to her therapist.

  “I just . . . pretended it never happened,” Gin said in a small voice. “If only I’d talked to her . . . tried to find out what it was, you know? Maybe then . . . maybe she . . .”

  Her voice thickened with emotion, and Lawrence offered her the box of tissues on the coffee table. “You can’t think that way,” he said. “No one could have prevented what happened.”

  Gin took a tissue and twisted it around her fingers. “It’s just, when people started saying Jake and her . . . well, it would have explained it, right? If she’d gotten involved with him, it would have given her a reason to be upset, because she would have known it would . . .”

  She couldn’t finish. Couldn’t say the words break my heart.

  “Ginny-girl. Look at me.” Lawrence’s voice was beseeching. When she peered up at him through her unshed tears, he looked stricken. “Jake loved you. I might be wrong about everything else—all of it. But there wasn’t any other girl for him. Not then, and sometimes I think never again. Just . . . no matter what happens, don’t ever doubt that.”

  Gin dabbed at her eyes with the tissue and nodded. But she hadn’t come
here for reassurance, didn’t want to think about what went wrong with Jake. She was here for answers. Truth. No matter how painful.

  “So the other witness statements? The hitchhiker?”

  “All discredited. Well, or at least, no evidence ever came to light to support them.”

  “But the sex offender . . .”

  “Yes, there was a man who matched the one description we got. But he had an alibi for that night. Of course, now they’ve got another shot to get DNA and other evidence.”

  “Okay. Then . . . well, there’s Tom.”

  Lawrence was nodding. “The obvious choice, but we couldn’t put a hole in his alibi back then. He’ll be questioned again, of course. Who else?”

  “Um . . . I guess me and Christine? Since we knew the area well and used the cooler?”

  “Good. Let’s leave you out for the moment. Why would Christine want to harm Lily?”

  “I . . . I mean, maybe she didn’t want Lily dating her brother?” Gin thought back to that summer, the excitement the four of them were feeling about college. Lily had been thrilled when Tom had chosen Duquesne, since he would be only a little more than an hour away, close enough to visit frequently. But Christine had not been nearly as enthusiastic. “I mean, she kept insisting it would be better if they broke up before Tom left for school. She said it was inevitable anyway . . .”

  “What did Tom think?”

  “He just mostly ignored her. Tom was used to getting his way. To getting everything he wanted.”

  “Well, then maybe, if he thought Lily was thinking of breaking up with him . . . ?”

  “Possible, I guess,” Gin said doubtfully. “But Lily loved him. Thought she did, anyway. I never heard her voice any doubts about their relationship.”

  “But then again, there were obviously things she didn’t tell you.”

  Gin tried to ignore the sting that his comment brought. “Okay. Well, so I guess that points right back at him. As for Christine, she definitely thought they didn’t have a future, and she wasn’t afraid to say it. But that was just the way she was. Opinionated, you know? And not always the most tactful.”

  “Anyone else? Like I said, we’re just brainstorming,” Lawrence said. “The wider you allow yourself to think, the better. Teachers who took a special interest in her, neighbors who maybe acted strangely in regards to her, girls at school who might have been jealous. Boys she rejected.”

  “It was so long ago,” Gin said.

  “Didn’t she see a psychiatrist for a while?”

  “A psychologist, and it was only a few sessions and only because Mom made her go. I guess she thought therapy might get Lily to calm down and focus on school, but you remember how well that worked.”

  Lawrence smiled sadly. “She sure was a spitfire. It’s a shame, though—since we ended up filing it as a runaway, we didn’t talk to all the people we might have if we’d had a body. But spend a little time thinking about this, all right?”

  “I will,” Gin promised. “But you have to know that none of this will help Jake if we can’t prove who the killer is.”

  “I know,” Lawrence said. “But I’m willing to take the gamble.”

  “Lawrence,” Gin said, wondering if she should ask the question that had been haunting her. “How can you be so sure? I mean . . . deep inside, how can you be certain if someone is telling you the truth?”

  Lawrence pushed his glasses up on his forehead and leaned back in his chair. “About a hundred years ago, when I was in the academy up in Pittsburgh, they brought in this specialist. Can’t remember now where they found him, some university, but his specialty was body language. How to tell if a suspect was lying. All this nonsense about if they looked up or down or sideways, that was supposed to mean something. Tell you what, that never did me one lick of good in all my years as a cop.”

  Gin had encountered similar theories in a psychology class in college—and like Lawrence, she found them suspect. “Every person’s different. Their reactions, their gestures, their tics.”

  “I figure folks have been lying to me pretty much since the first time I pinned on the badge,” Lawrence continued. “And not to brag or anything, but I’ve had a pretty damn good record for knowing when they do it.”

  “Lawrence, with all due respect, you can’t expect me to go on the strength of your track record—no matter who the suspect is.”

  “I appreciate that, young lady. But that’s not quite the point I was trying to make. I feel like I learned more from my mistakes than anything else, and I’ve been fooled plenty times. But now I’ve learned what makes for a really successful liar. The thing is, they don’t give themselves away when they’re lying to you—it’s when they’re telling the truth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They drop their guard, is what I’m trying to say. They reveal who they really are. You pull a guy over for speeding and he says he’s racing to his elderly mother’s house because she took a fall, well, okay, that’s a pretty good excuse. But in the next breath, he snaps at his wife, sitting in the passenger seat? Talks to her like she’s lower than the dirt on the bottom of his shoe? Well, that doesn’t add up. A devoted son isn’t generally going to treat his wife like that. You follow?”

  It was an awfully precarious argument, but Gin nodded. “I think so.”

  “Well, after Lily went missing—and I mean, the very next night, when your folks were calling around to find out if anyone had seen her—Jake overheard me talking to your father. He put it together, what had happened, from hearing my end of that conversation, and by the time I hung up he had his jacket on, ready to go looking. He was out half the night, scouring the town from one end to another.”

  And two days later, when they organized groups to search the trails, the woods above town, the creek, and Gin had returned from the orientation weekend, he had been there, too—dark circles under his eyes, tight-lipped and grim. He’d barely spoken to Gin, which was the start of the hurt and doubt that ended their relationship. His obsession with Lily’s disappearance was, paradoxically, the root of her suspicion of him.

  “I can understand why that might not mean much to you, Gin,” Lawrence said heavily. “But I know my boy like no one on this earth. Growing up without a mother like he did . . . well, I was both mom and dad to him. I was all he had, when he needed to talk.”

  The pain inside Gin twisted sharply. He had me, she wanted to shout, but she had never been enough for Jake. He’d never opened himself up all the way to her. There was always some part of himself that he kept closed off.

  At eighteen, reeling from her sister’s disappearance, it had been easiest to hide the pain of rejection by turning him away. At the time, she justified it to herself as payback for him shutting her out. But when people speculated about his relationship with Lily, her guilt morphed into something colder. Meaner. Uglier.

  And when people accused him—at kitchen tables over coffee, in the line at the grocery store, after church—she stopped defending him. Stopped telling people she was sure he couldn’t have had anything to do with it.

  And now? After all these years, could she still suspect him of something so evil? Could he have fooled his own father along with everyone else?

  “Lawrence,” Gin said carefully. “I don’t know what I believe. I wish I could tell you that I share your certainty . . . but you have to admit there is a lot of damning evidence.”

  “Like Lloyd’s old cooler? Listen, Virginia, I’m taking a chance here, talking to you about it, but it’s pretty clear why I haven’t said anything about it to the detectives. Question is—why haven’t you?”

  “The detectives already know who the cooler belonged to,” Gin said. “Lloyd ID’d it.”

  “But he didn’t tell them he passed it on to Jake. Truth is, I think Lloyd forgot. At any rate, they haven’t brought Jake in yet for official questioning. They’ve kind of shut me out, so this is just speculation, but I figure they’re waiting for lab results before they go down that road.
When they do . . . well, you know my boy as well as anyone, I guess.”

  Knew, Gin thought. Past tense. She hadn’t known Jake for a long time. Maybe ever. “You think he’ll tell them.”

  “I’d stake my life on it. Which . . . well, this is where things get a little gray for me. I mean, I can’t stop my boy from speaking the truth, and I wouldn’t if I could. That leads me to you.”

  “Me?”

  “Virginia, you may not remember, but when you and Jake were in fifth grade, you made it to the county spelling bee.”

  “I remember.”

  “You represented Trumbull Elementary, and Jake was your alternate.” He chuckled. “Man, he was unhappy about that. Couldn’t stand to be whupped by a girl back then . . . Anyway, I watched you two up on that stage up in Pittsburgh. Both of you nervous as ticks, and Jake tugging on his necktie like it was strangling him. He got eliminated in one of the early rounds. You hung in there until the very end. But when it came down to the last word, suddenly you looked as cool as a cucumber. The principal gave you your word, I don’t remember what it was now, and you looked up at the ceiling and thought for a few seconds and then you gave it your best shot, perfectly calm, like there weren’t three hundred people in that auditorium.”

  “But I got it wrong,” Gin said. “I still remember, the word was ‘inoculate.’ I spelled it with two c’s.”

  “Well, if you say so,” Lawrence said. “But it wasn’t the winning or losing that made such an impression on me. It was your focus. I imagine that served you well, all those years of medical school. You were just about the most ferociously determined kid I ever met. And now I’m hoping you’ll direct some of that focus at finding out who killed Lily.

  “You can’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about this night and day,” Lawrence continued. “And now I’m counting on you. The county chief wants this closed, badly, before the media starts talking about departmental incompetence. In a situation like this, there’s always the danger they’ll make a hasty arrest. Jake’s already got enough stacked against him without him being tried in the press. I need your help, Virginia. I know I said the other day that you should steer clear of the investigation, but I need to find the real killer and I can’t do it alone.”