The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  Leaves were everywhere.

  Rocks were, too.

  I was looking for a ghost.

  Everything seemed suspicious, to the same extent that nothing did.

  But about twenty yards past the overlook, something caught my attention: another small plank bridge running across the dried-up creek, this one oddly fortified underneath with large, flat rocks. I squinted through the misty air, noticing an unnatural object sticking out from the rocks. Something folded and shiny.

  “What is that?” I said, pointing.

  Meeks frowned. “What are we talking about here?”

  Instead of answering him, I made a beeline for the bridge, thinking I just wanted to see, I was just curious. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the tarp that Mallory Evans was buried in. The tarp that haunted my father. That’s the work of someone cold as hell, Tom had said.

  Behind me, footsteps descended on the leaf-covered steps. “Russ, everything okay down here?” a familiar voice said.

  I kept walking but looked over my shoulder to see Sergeant Derrow, also draped in a plastic poncho. He gave me a seen-it-all smile. “What’s going on?”

  “I was just telling her that the chief would like a word,” Meeks said.

  “He does. An urgent one,” Derrow said. “Come on along.”

  “Not sure why she’s down here,” I heard Meeks reply.

  “Miss Weary, I’m going to have to ask you to come with us. Now,” Derrow said.

  But by then, I was already at the bridge and I jumped down into the creek bed beside the rocks. Up close, the shape became a triangle of plastic, wrinkled and mud-covered but distinctly blue. The rocks themselves were flat and and mossy. One of them lay a foot or so from the others, like it had recently dislodged itself to expose the tarp. I moved a few of them away and found myself looking at another piece of wood, flush against the bed of the creek. Only a few inches of the blue tarp stuck out from under it.

  Meeks and Derrow had now caught up to me. “Let’s go,” Derrow said. “Now.”

  But Meeks was looking down at the creek bed. “Is this why you were down here?” he said to me.

  “No,” I said, then, “I don’t know.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again.

  Without saying anything else, Meeks got into the creek on the other side of the bridge and peered at the rocks, toed the blue triangle. “Jack, take a look here.”

  Derrow stepped down into the creek bed and frowned.

  “It looks out of place, doesn’t it?” I said, my nerves vibrating.

  Meeks started helping me move the rocks, and then Derrow joined in as well. The rocks weren’t too heavy, but there were a lot of them. We began stacking them on the bridge in neat rows, like teeth.

  “Maybe we should get the Parks department,” Derrow said. “Looks like maybe someone didn’t finish what they started. Easy to get away with it. Nobody comes this far out here anymore.”

  “I don’t know,” Meeks said, uneasy.

  “What kind of Parks department project involves a blue tarp buried in the woods?” I said, but both cops looked up at me like I wasn’t entitled to an opinion on the matter. Maybe I wasn’t. But at least they were helping me, rather than dragging me away by my hood.

  It took ten minutes or so to clear them away, and then we stared at the sheet of chipboard in silence. Wet and muddy, no more than an inch thick. It didn’t look like much, but I had this terrible feeling that it was actually a hell of a lot.

  “There’s just going to be a hole with worms and shit under this,” Meeks said, in a way that told me he knew better.

  “Yeah,” I said, even though I knew better too.

  I held my breath as we lifted it up.

  Underneath it, another layer of rocks and mud couldn’t quite cover a long, blue bundle.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Derrow said, but I was already reaching for the edge of the tarp.

  “Sarah,” I heard myself say.

  SEVENTEEN

  Chief Jake Lassiter was not happy with me. I doubted there were any circumstances under which he would have been, but he was especially irritated with me now that I’d discovered human remains inside his town’s jurisdiction. More cops had come quickly, cut a bolt on the chain-link fence to allow entry to the ravine from the access road, and set up a perimeter that ran from the fence to the bottom of the cliff, and a few hundred yards north and south. I was banished to the viewing platform, where I now stood in the rain with Chief Lassiter. He reminded me of Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men as he delivered a long, red-faced lecture to me on the importance of trusting The Justice System, a phrase he seemed to capitalize with his mouth.

  “The system,” he was saying, “doesn’t work if just anyone thinks they can go around playing detective.”

  I did not remind him that I actually was a detective, that my license, though not on par with a peace officer certification, was nonetheless part of this system. I just stood there, arms folded across my chest against the chill in the air and, also, the chill in my blood—from the sight of the brown, brittle bones nestled in the folds of that blue tarp. The sparse strands of long, blond hair. My cases usually stuck to the problems of the living, to the trouble people make for each other. It seemed like a meaningless distinction, that I’d never seen anything quite so dead before, but I hadn’t, and I couldn’t stop thinking that.

  “And you have no idea how upsetting it is for the residents of Belmont, having you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong,” he added. “This is a real nice town.”

  At that point, I’d had enough. “Sarah Cook has been buried in these woods for fifteen years and you still want to say it’s a nice town?”

  He bit off a laugh, shaking his head. “Sarah Cook.” He spit the name out, like he had every other time he’d said it during our conversation. “We don’t even know if the remains are human.”

  Then it was my turn to laugh. “Are you kidding me?”

  We both glanced down at the bed of the ravine, where the tarp had been laid flat on the muddy earth as Franklin County forensic technicians in white suits collected evidence into plastic bags. A ring of work lights had been set up around the tarp, casting a clinical glow through the foggy dusk. I had to look away, my stomach twisting.

  “If the remains are human,” Lassiter went on, “we will work tirelessly to identify them.”

  I wanted to tell him to save it for his press conference, but instead I just said, “Of course.”

  “And if you think you’re the first hotshot who ever got the idea to take a look at the Cook case, you’ve got another thing coming,” the chief said. “Every couple years, we get some reporter, some random crazies, people just obsessed with the whole idea. You know we used to have a citizen ride-along program? Had to close it down because we got too many people just wanting to talk about the case, see the scene, see where Bev Stockton lives—it’s disgusting.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “The fact is, you never should have been down here in the first place,” he finished. “I told you myself. So don’t go thinking you should get some kind of a medal for discovering this today. Got it?”

  I wasn’t acting like I wanted a medal. I was acting like I wanted him to listen to me. But all he wanted to do was to be mad. “It’s not like I killed her,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re pissed at me.”

  Rage flashed through his face, like he didn’t know either and it made him even madder. “No,” he said evenly. “Brad Stockton did and he’s already in jail.”

  So that was why he hated me so much, maybe: he had all the hassle of a homicide on his hands here, with none of the potential glory that could come with solving the case. I felt sick when I thought about Brad—or, not so much him, but his sister, who was stuck believing in something impossible.

  “Now,” Lassiter said, “I want you to get in your car and go back to the city. We’ll handle it from here.”

 
It didn’t seem right to just leave. But my case appeared to be over. Brad had basically directed me right to Sarah’s body. I still didn’t know why. Maybe he was tired of the charade. Maybe he’d been wanting to tell somebody every day for the last fifteen years. Maybe I would never know why. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t up to me. It never had been.

  I passed several television news trucks on my way back down from Clover Point and I realized that if the story wasn’t on the wire already, it would be soon. I called Danielle, thinking I didn’t want her to have to hear about this on the news the way she’d heard the Cooks were dead in the first place, but she didn’t answer.

  Another job well done, indeed.

  * * *

  I went straight to my kitchen and poured a shot, downed it fast, then poured another. I hadn’t turned the lights on and the apartment took on an eerie glow from the streetlights outside. I leaned against the counter, swallowed my second shot, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t get the sight of the bones out of my head. I wondered how my father had been able to stand it for almost forty years, bearing witness to that ugliness every day. Maybe he hadn’t, I realized, and that’s why he was the way he was, hard and distant and drunk every night within thirty minutes of getting home. I dropped my shot glass into the sink. From the clatter it made, it sounded like there were a dozen others in there already.

  I flipped the light on. It was not looking good in here: The pizza box from Yellow Brick was still sitting on the stove, though now with a square cut from the bottom. The sight of it reminded me, again, that a full day had passed and I had failed to get the door fixed. The sink was full. Someday, I told myself, someday soon, I was going to resume life as a normal person. It was easy to think of my life now as broken into two segments—before my father was killed, and after. The after part seemed like it might unfold forever. Maybe it would. Maybe every morning people like Joshua Evans and Cass Troyan woke up wondering if this was the day the after ended and their lives morphed into act three. Somehow, I suspected it wouldn’t be that easy, not for them, and not for me.

  I ran hot water in the sink; then I noticed I didn’t have any sponges. Okay, fine. At least I tried. I flipped the lights back off and peeled off my damp clothes and dropped them in a pile on the laundry room floor. Then I stood under the steady stream of the shower for thirty minutes and might’ve stayed there all night, except the hot water ran out. I towel-dried my hair and got into bed naked and lay there waiting for something else to happen. I couldn’t place what I was feeling. No one was any worse off than they had been before this afternoon, not even Sarah. But I had a sensation in my chest like we all were, and like it was my fault.

  I thought about Sarah’s parents. What had happened that night? What did they interrupt? I wanted to think that they died without knowing what had happened to their daughter, but it probably didn’t matter. There were no silver linings here, no small bits of comfort to cling to, not for anyone. I closed my eyes but all I could see was the blue tarp, the curve of a clavicle, the blond hair.

  I opened my eyes again. My apartment felt suddenly, acutely haunted. I needed something but I didn’t know what. And then I wondered how long Catherine’s husband would be in London and if she was alone in her house tonight too. I grabbed my phone but before I could dial her number, Unknown called me again.

  I didn’t even bother saying hello. “Who the fuck is this?”

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  “Cass?”

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  It had to be Cass after all. Brad was in jail. “Stop calling me,” I snapped, hanging up.

  But thirty seconds later, the phone began vibrating again. I was about to throw the device at the wall, until I saw that the universe had finally intervened on my behalf: it was Tom.

  I sank back to the pillow.

  “I just heard the craziest story about you,” he said when I answered. “Belmont?”

  I covered my face with my hand. “Is it the one where they gave me the keys to the city?” I said, and he laughed a little. “And who did you hear this from? It literally just happened.”

  “News travels fast around cops,” he said. Then he added, “Someone I know in the coroner’s office was at the scene and heard your name. Like it or not, most of the police in Ohio know who you are.”

  I sighed. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that: the fact that people I’d never met, and probably never would, still somehow knew that I was Frank Weary’s kid. He used to run into people he knew everywhere, in the city and out, once even on a family vacation to Niagara Falls. I pulled the blankets over me. “It was horrible,” I said, as the image of the tarp slipped back in front of my eyes. “I thought I’ve seen my share of ugly already, but something like that? I don’t know how you do it. I really don’t.”

  “Listen,” Tom said. “Do you want to grab a drink? An actual drink, that’s not code for—you know.”

  I rolled over and buried my face in the pillow. Vaguely disappointed that he wasn’t calling for the you know part, but I didn’t want to dwell on it. “Right,” I said, “since you’re basically engaged now.”

  “You’re never going to make anything easy, are you.”

  I smiled into the pillowcase. “No,” I said. But the thought of not drinking alone was very appealing. “I will take you up on that offer though. I keep seeing ghosts.”

  He was quiet for a second. “Yeah,” he said, like he knew his share about seeing ghosts, “it happens.”

  * * *

  We met at the Olde Towne Tavern on Oak Street and I ordered shot after shot of Crown Royal while Tom nursed a single beer. He shrugged when I called him out on it. “I can’t keep up with you, so there’s no sense in trying. Plus, I have to drive home.”

  I, on the other hand, had walked over. The bar was probably chosen strategically by Tom for this reason, since he lived on the other side of the city. It was a good, old-school bar, exposed brick and pressed-tin ceiling. And it was full of people. That usually wasn’t my favorite thing about a bar, but it was tonight.

  “Frank and I used to drink at Bob’s Bar. Do you know it?” he said after a minute.

  “The Cultural Hub of the Midwest,” I said, reciting the tagline of the place, a strange little hole in the wall near where my parents lived. I wondered if the proximity to Frank’s house was why they drank there. Walking distance if necessary. The Weary family, in constant need of handling. “Did you stick to beer with him too?”

  “That depends on why we were drinking,” he said, “and what we saw that day.”

  I buried my head in my arms on the bar top. “Does it ever get any easier?”

  “Short answer?”

  I nodded.

  “No.”

  “What’s the long answer?” I said, sitting up. The bartender had refilled my glass and I downed the shot, aware that I probably should slow down. It wasn’t a great sign if Tom couldn’t keep up with me, considering that he drank with my father for years and years.

  He thought about that for a second. “Long answer. Fuck no.”

  I laughed, not because it was funny, but because.

  “After a while you get better at isolating it and shoving it into a compartment so it doesn’t mess with you, after. But it never really gets easier, seeing what people do to each other.” He took a long swallow from his glass. Then he looked at me. “Most of the time, I try to look at a scene like it’s a puzzle, a series of objects to process. But sometimes you can’t. Every cop has a case or two that just got in and won’t get out and there’s nothing you can do. That’s when you drink.”

  I wondered what my father would have been like if he hadn’t been a cop. If he’d been an electrician or a mechanic or any other profession that didn’t involve seeing things you had to drink to forget. “What’s the one you can’t forget? Sorry—you don’t have to answer that,” I added quickly, suddenly afraid that he was going to say my father’s death was the case that stuck with him. That was the last thing I wanted to
think about today.

  “It’s okay,” he said. He leaned on the bar so that our elbows were touching. He took a minute before continuing. “Jada Pierce. She was two. Her piece of shit father took her with him to his buddy’s meth lab. She somehow got her hands on a cup of sulfuric acid—drain cleaner. It was just sitting around while they cooked up. She drank it. The acid ate through her throat, through her stomach. She might have lived if they’d gotten her medical treatment, but they didn’t. Instead they panicked and put her body in a Coleman cooler and they dumped it in the Olentangy River.”

  I said nothing.

  “About a dozen witnesses saw them, so it wasn’t hard to put them away. But I couldn’t stop seeing this kid, jammed into the cooler, acid burns around her mouth and a hole in her throat—for weeks, it fucked with me. I’m talking majorly here—I couldn’t sleep, I was a mess. I didn’t understand why everyone who’d been on the scene wasn’t a complete wreck over it and I resented it. I thought I could never be the kind of person who saw that kid and felt nothing. Frank said, and I’ll never forget this, he told me, No one feels nothing. Your job as a cop is not to feel nothing. It’s to neutralize what you see, so no one else has to see it, and no one else has to feel it.” Tom paused, blinking up at the tin ceiling. “I don’t know if that makes any sense to you,” he added. “But it helped me. A lot.”

  I wasn’t a cop. And what I’d seen wasn’t on the same level as what Tom had seen—what he had probably seen many, many times. But it did make sense. “So it’s okay to feel like shit, because there’s a certain amount of shit that needs to be felt in this world, and some people have signed up to feel more of it than others,” I said.

  “Exactly.”