Walk Into Silence

by Susan McBride

  That’s how you wanted it to go down, wasn’t it?

  Jenny had wanted Kevin Harrison to share in her torture. But in the end, she had sacrificed everything.

  “You’ll get him, won’t you?”

  She sucked in the cold air until it filled her lungs and quelled the restlessness she’d felt.

  Yes. I promise, I will.

  A gust of wind swept around the north side of the building, and its icy breath wrapped around her. Jo pushed her hands into the small pockets of her blazer, but they didn’t offer much protection. Her teeth chattered.

  “Jo?” She felt the weight of her wool coat settle on her shoulders, smelled the pungent scent of Old Spice. “What the hell’s up with you? It’s forty-two degrees, if you didn’t see the temp on the bank sign coming over.”

  She worked her arms into the sleeves, ignoring the twinge in her left shoulder. “I had to clear my head.”

  Hank grunted. “Well, they’re through in there, so you can relax. Dielman should be out in a minute, and the sister, too.” He zipped up his own coat, pulling on the gloves she’d borrowed from him earlier. “You want a ride back to the station, or you have other plans you haven’t told me about?”

  They descended the steps and stood off to the side at the bottom.

  “Kim wanted to talk.”

  “Well, then, I’ll stick around.” He crossed his arms. He had that Papa Bear look of concern on his face.

  Jo nodded. “Thanks.”

  She reached in her coat pocket for the loaner phone, making a quick call to Terry Fitzhugh. She asked Terry if she could mine her old family-services connections for any dirt on Elizabeth Ann Barton. She relayed what she knew about Lisa: the junkie mom, the cleaning-lady aunt who’d raised her, the scarred knuckles.

  She was pocketing the phone when the front doors of the church flew open, and mourners began trickling out.

  Within a few minutes, Dielman emerged with the black-robed minister. Barton trailed a few steps behind. They hesitated, the cleric taking Dielman’s hands and clasping them as they conversed.

  Hank jerked his chin toward the doors as Kim Parker emerged from the church into the dull afternoon.

  The preacher caught her hands and spoke to her as he had to Patrick. When she drew away, she looked around, saw Jo, and headed in her direction. Patrick Dielman and Lisa Barton followed in her footsteps.

  Jo introduced Kim to Hank, then asked, “You holding up all right?”

  She shrugged. “What choice do I have?”

  Her eyes looked pinched as she dabbed at them with a tissue. In her other hand, she carried a red carnation, taken from the spray on the casket.

  “Detective Larsen,” Kim began haltingly, “if you don’t mind, I have some questions about Jenny. Could we go somewhere more private than this?”

  “But, Kimberly, we need you back at the house,” Patrick Dielman said from over Kim’s shoulder. “Aren’t you following us home in your car?”

  “I’ll be a little late, okay?” Kim was unapologetic. “Like I told you in the church, there’s something I have to do first. Somewhere I’d like to go.”

  “It can’t wait?” Patrick asked, not sounding pleased in the least.

  Kim shook her head. “No, it can’t wait.”

  “C’mon, Pat, let’s go.” Lisa Barton grabbed Dielman’s arm and urged him around the three on the steps, though he wrested free and paused not far below, as if hoping Kim would change her mind.

  “Can we leave now, Detective?” Jenny’s sister said, impatient. “We can take my rental.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Jo.” Hank didn’t seem any too eager to let her out of his sight. “I could drive y’all wherever you want to go.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she told him. “I won’t be alone.”

  “You’ve got the cell?”

  “Check.” She patted her pocket.

  He gave a reluctant nod. “I’ll head back to the station and see what’s up. Then I’ll stop by the Dielmans’.” He hooked a thumb toward Patrick, who huddled in his tan coat with Lisa Barton hovering beside him, both near enough to hear every word.

  “If you’re still there when we’re done, Kim can drop me off,” Jo told him.

  “Sure, no problem,” Kim said, looking anxious. “Now can we go?”

  “Go where?” Jo asked.

  “To the quarry, please.” The dark eyes stared at her, beseeching. “If it’s all right with you, I want to see where my sister died.”

  I sat in the breakfast room after Patrick left for work, staring out the window and waiting until I saw her Acura zip through the alley. I had thirty minutes before I had to show up at the library, and I knew how I wanted to use them.

  I pocketed the spare key she’d given Patrick long ago, neatly labeled in an envelope inside a kitchen drawer, and I left through the back, crossing the driveway and lawn, not bothering to glance around as I let myself in. If anyone saw me, I didn’t care. I could always say I was returning something borrowed. Isn’t that what neighbors did?

  When I was safely inside, I listened to the house. The heat hummed through the vents. The TV was on in the living room, and morning-show voices chattered.

  I didn’t know where to go first. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in an oddly familiar smell: of someone who took a smoke now and then but tried to hide it. I had smelled it before in our house all those times I came home and knew something was wrong, that someone had been there uninvited.

  My guess was Lisa. She’d had a key to our place, after all, one she hadn’t been afraid to use until I’d taken it away.

  Curious, I looked around. She had pretty furniture and nice artwork, yes, but where was her past? What was her story? Who was she, really?

  I saw books stacked on a bedside table. They looked like mysteries with dark covers, all by the same author, Patricia Highsmith. I ran my fingers down their spines, then reached for the brass pull on the top drawer, tugging it open.

  There were blue earplugs, a pair of reading glasses, and a Bible that looked brand-new and generic, less like an old family heirloom passed down through generations and more like the one you find in motels. It had a red tint to the edge of the pages, only the red was interrupted by a bookmark in one spot.

  A newspaper clipping had been folded, the creases tight, like it had been there a long, long time. The date on the piece was more than fifteen years ago. It was an article about Dallas kids who’d gotten scholarships to college. There was a photograph at the bottom, depicting a handful of students surrounding a man: “Local philanthropist Jacob Davis touts the success of his KickStart Foundation with his first group of scholarship recipients.”

  I saw a familiar face among the girls. She was brown-haired then, but just as tall. She stood to the right of Jacob Davis, his hand resting on her shoulder. Her eyes stared dead ahead at the camera. She didn’t smile.

  The caption identified her as Elizabeth Barton.

  Lisa.

  The portable phone on the table bedside rang, and I jumped.

  I refolded the article and slipped it between the Bible’s pages; then I put the book back where I’d found it. Hastily, I shut the drawer and hurried to the door. I hadn’t been in the house longer than ten minutes, but now I wanted out.

  As I drove to the library, my heart pounding, I made a decision: tonight, I will tell Patrick everything.

  I don’t care if he doesn’t believe me. I’m sure he thinks I’ve lost my mind. Even if he doesn’t, it won’t stop me from going to the police. I will tell them about Lisa being in our house, the phone calls from the lobby of Presbyterian Hospital, the missing scarf, and the things out of place.

  I will get the shirt and glasses back from Kim and tell them about Finn. I will let them dig up my baby if that’s what it takes to find out what really happened. I couldn’t do it before, but now, I’m ready.

  If nothing comes of it, at least I will have tried.
At least I will have stood up for myself and my son instead of lying down to die as I’ve done the past three years.

  I will rub my locket for luck.

  I will get Ernie his favorite Fancy Feast to celebrate.

  I will free Finn from my nightmares.

  And free myself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Kimberly’s rental was a nondescript two-door coupe, white like so many cars in North Texas. The lack of color was supposed to deflect the heat, but it reminded Jo of white patent leather shoes, the kind Mama used to make her wear to church on Easter Sunday, the only time they attended, as if that would make up for sins racked up the rest of the year. She’d hated those shoes. They scuffed so easily and made her feet look two sizes too big.

  Jo thought the car smelled of plastic, like crayons warming in the sun. She clicked her seat belt on and settled in as comfortably as possible, despite the holster at her hip and the borrowed cell phone in her coat pocket.

  “You sure you want to do this?” she asked, turning to Jenny’s sister. “We can go somewhere else to talk.”

  “I’m sure.” Kim set the red carnation carefully on the dashboard, belted herself in, and started the car.

  Jo kept her eyes on the flower, on its gentle vibrations as they drove.

  Jenny’s sister didn’t say much at first except to ask directions, and Jo didn’t press her. But once they’d gotten away from Grace Church and the surrounding neighborhoods and strip malls that populated Plainfield proper, Kim sighed heavily, and Jo waited for the words she was certain would come.

  “You know that saying, Detective, that only the good die young?”

  “Very well,” Jo said.

  “It’s true in Jenny’s case. She was as good a person as there ever was. Not that she was an angel or anything. God knows, she could be a pain in the ass.” Kim expelled a noisy breath. “But she was the one who took on our dad because our mother wouldn’t.” Her voice softened. “She worked in the Des Moines food pantry after school for years, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How many teenagers do that instead of hanging out at the mall?”

  “Not many.”

  “She used to cry when she saw roadkill. She took in stray animals, too. She’d pluck them right off the street if she could catch them. My father never let her keep anything. He made her give them away or take them to shelters.”

  “She had a soft heart, huh?”

  “She was a marshmallow. She couldn’t say no, which makes me wonder if she picked up a stranger, gave someone a ride that night.” Kim took her eyes off the road to glance at Jo. “You think that’s what happened? Do you think she was helping someone when she died?”

  “Maybe.” Jo didn’t mean to mislead her, but it wasn’t a lie.

  “Do you have a sister, Detective Larsen?” Kim asked.

  “No.”

  “A brother?”

  Jo shook her head.

  “Have you ever lost someone close?”

  That one wasn’t as easy. But Jo answered with the truth as she knew it.

  “I have,” she said.

  The father she had barely known, the mother she’d never been able to please and who’d begun to slip away a long time ago. The little girl inside her who’d had to grow up far too quickly.

  “She felt damaged,” Kim went on. “No matter how hard she worked at living her life, Jenny never felt deserving. She always figured that happiness was fleeting, more fiction than reality. But, Lord knows”—she shook her head—“she could handle pain.”

  Jo said nothing, turning toward the window.

  “Every morning, Jen and I woke up afraid, because we weren’t sure what was coming.”

  Kim’s tone turned cool, and Jo shifted her stare, watched the young woman wrestle with old demons. “I can remember how we used to pray for Daddy to be smiling when he walked through the door at night. He got upset over the tiniest things, like a toy left on the lawn or dishes in the sink. If he didn’t take it out on Mom, he took it out on Jenny.” She grimaced. “But Jenny kept him away from me. She’d shove me into the closet and lock me in or tell me to run next door until she came to get me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jo said, understanding all too well.

  “I worshipped her.” Kim’s chin quivered, but she clung to her composure, kept driving as if nothing was wrong. “It near to crushed me when she left Des Moines. She’d gone to Drake on a partial scholarship, and she lived at home because our daddy didn’t want her in the dorms. He thought she’d go wild, told her if she ever got pregnant, he’d kick her out and cut her off.”

  “What did your mother do?”

  “Do?” Kim laughed. “God forbid Mom should ever stand up to Daddy. In her warped way, she loved him, maybe more than she loved us.” Her right hand released the wheel to rub her nose, but Jo saw no tears. “I wish she’d taken us away, before he’d hurt Jenny as bad as he did. I can’t blame her for leaving, because she had to. She stood up to him before she went, telling him if he ever laid a hand on me, she’d call the cops and turn him in. To this day, I still can’t believe she had the guts to talk back to him. But he never hit me again.”

  Jo strained against the seat belt, not sure how to ask what she wanted to ask. Knowing no way to put it delicately, she dove right in. “Did your father ever break Jenny’s bones?”

  She thought of the fractured fingers, forearm, and ribs discovered in postmortem X-rays. She needed to know who caused them.

  “Why? What did you find?”

  “Old breaks on X-ray,” Jo told her.

  Kimberly gnawed her lip. “Daddy was smart, Detective. He’d never have left a paper trail, if that’s what you’re wondering. He never would have taken Jenny or my mom to the hospital, not for anything. He knew how far he could go, and that’s what he did.” She scrunched up her forehead. “I do remember him grabbing Jen’s arm, twisting it so hard, she cried.” She made a noise that sounded like a hiccup. “I was so young when it happened, and Jen always kept me from seeing the worst. He was good at not leaving marks. Or, if he did, he’d keep her home from school for a while.” Her chin wobbled. “You think my father caused those injuries?”

  “If he didn’t, someone else did.”

  “Kevin Harrison?” Kim’s stare turned to stone.

  Jo felt a surge of adrenaline, wondering if Jenny’s sister knew more than she suspected. “What can you tell me about Dr. Harrison? Did Jenny say much about their life together? Did she ever mention how he treated her?”

  “Yeah.” Kim sniffed. “He treated her like crap, and I knew he would from the first moment she described him. The guy sounded like a carbon copy of our dad. I couldn’t believe she’d go through with the marriage, but she was already pregnant with Finn.”

  Jo waited for her to go on.

  Kim’s voice fell abruptly. “I told her I’d help her out. Our folks were gone by then, and I begged her to come back to Des Moines. Jenny wouldn’t leave him. I was so pissed at her, and she was so angry with me for not supporting her. We didn’t communicate much for years. She was so wrapped up with the baby after he was born that I don’t think she cared about anything else, not for a long time. Not until Finn’s accident.”

  Patrick had mentioned the sisters being estranged, and it appeared he was right.

  “I didn’t know Finn was dead until she called me, crying hysterically after his funeral.” Kim swiped at her eyes with her coat sleeve. “I feel horrible that I didn’t know sooner, that I wasn’t there for her when she needed me most. God, I’m sorry,” she murmured, pulling off the gravel road so the car came to rest on a tangle of weeds and grass in the shadow of the pines.

  Sobs shook her shoulders as Kim gave in to her grief. She dropped her head to her hands, making pitiful choking sounds as she wept.

  Jo felt like an intruder and looked the other way, out the window at branches ruffled by the wind. She thought of unhooking her seat belt and set her hand on the door latch, tempted to
get out of the car and leave Kim alone until she got ahold of herself.

  She wasn’t good at this kind of thing. She chewed on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.

  It was a few minutes before Kim stopped crying. She blew her nose and pulled herself together. Then she started the car, tires grinding on gravel until they were on the road, kicking up dust in their wake.

  Jo stared at the brown trunks of trees, rolling past them like flip cards, until the clusters of pine thinned out, replaced by the flutter of plastic flags: neon-bright triangles waving toward developments not yet built. Arrows pointed to dirt paths, forking off on both sides. JUST A HALF MILE WEST, a sign declared in bright red letters. STOP IN AT JACOB DAVIS PROPERTIES’ MOBILE OFFICE! SEE PLANS FOR THE PINE RIDGE DEVELOPMENT! OPEN SAT AND SUN 10–5!

  Jacob Davis Properties.

  Jo squinted at the name until it fell too far behind them.

  “My daddy’s got a couple homes picked out for us to look at. His company built them. Jacob Davis? You’ve heard of him?”

  Alana’s father had a development out here? It was so close to the quarry.

  Why hadn’t Mrs. Harrison mentioned it, considering where Jenny’s body had been found?

  Jo shifted in her seat, felt a prickle at the back of her neck.

  She would have Kim make a quick stop at the mobile office on their way back, as long as they were out here.

  After silently bumping along the rutted road for another few miles, they reached their destination.

  Kim slowed down as they headed off the road onto the quarry grounds, though the rental hit a pothole and jolted hard enough to shake the red carnation from the dash. It fell to the floor, near Jo’s feet. She picked it up and set it in her lap, fingering the petals and wishing she were somewhere else.

  When they approached the chain-link fence, Kim brought the car to a dead stop. Remnants of yellow crime scene tape tied to the mesh rippled with each gust of wind. The battered sign with the faded warning to trespassers banged against the opened gate. Someone had looped a shiny new chain through the links, but it had been cut, and dangled like a broken bracelet. A few forlorn-looking grocery-store bouquets leaned against the base of the fence.