Last Girl Gone

by J. G. Hetherton

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “You don’t remember me playing gopher? I’d get your sheet music, carry your instrument.”

  “Hell, Frank, it was a flute. It only weighed about two pounds.”

  “Then why were you always telling me to carry it for you?”

  She stood up and pinched the two sides of the robe across her chest. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Well, I do. I used to give you something from my lunch almost every day. That was right after your stepdad took off, when your mom wasn’t feeding you right. You’d show up with the same wrinkled paper bag every morning, but most days there wouldn’t be much in there besides a baloney sandwich. But I’d share. I’d give you something.”

  “Maybe once or twice,” she said. The feeling of hunger came crashing back to her, knives in her stomach, as vivid and painful as it had been a decade ago. But skinny Franklin Stuart saving her each day? She searched her memory, but nothing like that presented itself.

  He turned and looked at her, eyebrows up, forehead crinkled. “You really don’t remember it, do you?”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

  “Look, if I was shit to you back then, it was only because I was shit to everyone. I was angry, and a teenager. I’m not the same person now.”

  “No?” He stood. “Then why does this”—he pointed back and forth between them—“give me that same feeling in my gut?”

  “What feeling?”

  “Like it’s a one-way street. Like I’m being used.”

  “Frank, I—”

  He picked up his watch, looked at it, then picked up the alarm clock and shook it.

  “Shit, the damn cord came loose again. I was supposed to start a shift five minutes ago.”

  “Frank,” she repeated.

  He raised a hand. “Just forget about it, okay? I’ve got to grab a shower.”

  Had she really been so terrible to him ten years ago? As hard as she tried, Laura couldn’t conjure more than an occasional disjointed image of him in high school. Whatever had left such a deep impression on him apparently hadn’t even scratched her surface. She waited until the water had been running long enough to get hot, then found his jacket in the closet and started going through the pockets.

  She found his notebook and smoothed its pages flat among the tangled sheets, making sure the bedside lamp lit them evenly. Her phone’s camera wouldn’t focus on his handwriting without the right kind of light. She moved to unlock it, but her finger slipped. On her second try the phone flashed once and displayed WRONG PATTERN—ATTEMPT 2 OF 10. She entered the pattern a hundred times a day. It was burned into her muscle memory, and now, when she needed it most, it was gone. She chased it through her mind, and it fled from her, the void it left filled with Frank’s face. One second he was smiling like he had all those years ago; the next his eyes were pleading with her to remember.

  The shower faucet creaked and the hiss of water turned to a drip.

  Without thinking, her thumb traced the pattern and the phone unlocked. She kneeled next to the bed, flipping through the notebook, capturing every last word.

  CHAPTER

  6

  OF THE PAIN of losing a child Laura knew little, but it didn’t take an expert to see the torments reflected in Angie Mitchem’s eyes. She looked like a picture of a concentration camp survivor from 1945. She looked hollow.

  And angry.

  “Get off my porch,” she said, a half second after opening the door. Laura hadn’t spoken a word. “You damn people are vultures, just hovering overhead, waiting to pick the carcass clean. In case you didn’t notice, my daughter isn’t dead yet. That’s the other one.”

  “Mrs. Mitchem—”

  “And I’m sure that sounds cold. Any other situation I’d be grieving with them. But this isn’t any other situation, is it? I can’t spend any time or thought on a dead girl, not while mine is out there still alive. Won’t spend no time with you neither.”

  She pulled the screen door shut and disappeared back into the house.

  Laura had been prepared for anger; she hadn’t been prepared for that.

  * * *

  Eight thirty on a Saturday morning and already her office felt like a furnace. Humidity dampened the papers. Even the Lucite slit had fogged over, like the window of a car parked at a lovers’ lane. What light managed to filter through painted the concrete room a flat beige.

  Laura turned on her computer and got to work, carefully transcribing everything in the images taken while Frank showered. Then she backed the file up in two separate locations before finally printing a single copy. She pushed it onto the center of her desk and read it over and over again.

  Reading between the lines, it was possible to trace the path of the investigation.

  * * *

  The essence of the notes revealed that, despite his best efforts, Frank had been relegated to the fringes of the case. Sheriff McKinney had refused his request to take the lead, saying he would take it himself. The rest of it was more quick jottings than any kind of organized investigation. Two pages were just a list, a series of road intersections, and she interpreted these to be assignments. In the hours after the discovery of Olive Hanson’s body, he’d been posted to a series of roadblocks, mostly around the edges of town.

  Then came pages of interview notes. At some point McKinney had declared the roadblocks obsolete. Presumably it had been hours between the placement of the body and deputies starting to check vehicles entering and leaving Hillsborough. McKinney had decided that the perpetrator had either already left town or, if he was a resident, already blended back into the surroundings.

  Frank was reassigned to interviewing potential witnesses. Emphasis on potential. One person after another reported nothing more than their movements and those of their compatriots around the time the girls went missing. Mostly he had been working the neighborhood where both girls lived, finding groups that had been outside shooting off fireworks and then pressing them hard for anything they might remember.

  In a small way, it had paid off. He’d found one family, the Clonfers, whose daughter Sophie had spoken with Olive Hanson on her way down the street. Sophie Clonfer was in the same grade as Olive and said they had talked briefly about a math assignment due the next day. Sophie reported asking Olive where she was going, and said she hadn’t given an answer.

  Frank had taken this as a clue about where to start in Teresa Mitchem’s neighborhood about a mile away. He’d spoken with every family with a son or daughter in the same grade, then to anyone with a child in the grade above or the grade below. He came up with nothing. Finally he started conducting house-to-house interviews, just talking to anyone who would answer the door. That’s when he located another potential witness.

  Jasper Collins and his brother Wilbur were both in their thirties, unmarried, working part-time at a garage on the west side of town. Both were alcoholics with beer bellies that made them walk as though pushing a wheelbarrow. They’d been on the back porch of the house they rented together, drunk, on the night of the fourth.

  Jasper, answering his door early Friday morning, had reported seeing the “little Mitchem bitch” wandering down the alley that night. Wilbur, who had to be rolled off the couch and force-fed coffee, claimed he had no memory of any such thing. Frank had recorded some of the exchange verbatim.

  “You were drunk.”

  “Not as drunk as you, Jasper.”

  “No, but I hold it better. That girl waved right at you. You waved back.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  At that point it devolved into name calling, then a fistfight. Both brothers were considered suspects at first, notwithstanding the fact that Jasper had brought up seeing Teresa Mitchem of his own volition. Frank cuffed them on the pretense of disorderly conduct and then transported them to the Sheriff’s Office. McKinney stuck them in interrogation rooms and sweated them for over eight hours.

  They knew n
othing.

  Officially they were cleared via alibi. During the hours of late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, the brothers had been at a poker game with four other men. Neither had left the room for longer than it took to take a piss.

  Unofficially, McKinney and his deputies found them to be massively, legendarily stupid. Both had criminal records, but only for driving under the influence in one case and assault in the other. Frank had also noted that Wilbur had an IQ of only seventy-five, and he’d wet himself during the interrogation. The sophistication of the current crime was deemed far outside the reach of the Collins brothers. They were cut loose, and the OCSO was back to square one.

  Frank, for his part, had developed a pet theory. He had presented it to McKinney two separate times, and twice the big man had shot him down. He’d started checking it out once his shifts ended.

  The girls had both lied to their parents. Teresa Mitchem had told her mother she was going to the Hanson house, and Olive Hanson had told her father she would be with the Mitchems. Obviously neither had been telling the truth. But where exactly were two ten-year-olds planning to go after dark?

  The question clearly bothered Frank, and he’d developed his theory in response. The girls had worked together to deceive their parents, so he assumed they had planned to meet up. Plotting the Mitchem and Hanson homes on a map, he had added points marking the Clonfer home and the rental belonging to the Collins brothers. He drew two lines to represent the approximate route and direction taken by each girl.

  Neither one was heading for the other’s house. Instead, the lines converged in a wooded area on the banks of the Eno River just north of the old racetrack. The track hadn’t seen a race in decades. It had a few historical plaques commemorating the 1949 inaugural NASCAR season, but otherwise it was little more than a mile-long dirt oval set into a bend in the river. Mostly it was used by joggers and dog-walkers during the day, and at night by teenagers looking for a secluded spot to drink or make out or skinny-dip.

  Why would they have been going there?

  As far as Laura could tell, Frank couldn’t prove they ever had been. He had discovered no witness that could place them, no physical evidence in the woods that could tie them to that location. They had evaporated like mist.

  The second time he’d presented the theory to McKinney, it had bought him an ass-chewing and a reassignment to guarding the crime scene. But he’d visited the woods twice more in the past few days, still looking for any trace of the girls.

  On the last page of the notebook he’d written a single word in capital letters, TIMINSKI, and circled it twice.

  * * *

  Laura finished reading and folded the sheet in half. Sweat had formed on her brow and now trickled down across her cheekbones. She ignored it, too taken with the ins and outs of Olive Hanson’s death and Teresa Mitchem’s disappearance. Even though neither girl was anywhere in those pages, the notes managed to evoke the hole where once they had been. She could suddenly see the shape of that hole, could feel the presence of the girls in a way she couldn’t before. They were real to her now.

  It was time to play a hunch.

  A quick search of the phone book gave her the number of the closest FBI field office in Raleigh. She dialed the number and tried to sound detached.

  “Raleigh office,” a man answered.

  “Agent Timinski, please.”

  The man on the other end clicked at a keyboard. “Can I ask who’s calling?”

  “His tailor. I have a suit ready for him.”

  “Um, hold on.” More clicking. “I can leave him a message if you like.”

  “I can call back. Will he be around this afternoon?”

  “No, I’m afraid he won’t be in the office at all this week.”

  “I see. Well, just give him the message.”

  She hung up before he could ask for a name or number. He hadn’t sounded very interested in the call. Probably he would write something on a scrap of paper and drop it on Timinski’s desk.

  Out of the office all week—it couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Her phone rang, and she jumped a foot. For a second she thought it was the FBI calling her back, but the light indicating an internal call blinked away on the phone’s top.

  “Chambers.”

  “Are you free?” Bass Herman’s baritone echoed through the earpiece.

  “I’ll be right over.”

  The temperature was a few degrees cooler on the newsroom floor. Laura made her way through the desks and the conference room, into the cubby that sat behind it.

  Herman’s office was a testament to dedicated clutter. Back issues of the Gazette and every other local and major daily stood stacked to the ceiling. The couch along one wall seemed designated for internal memos and communications. The desk, a varnished piece of walnut the size of a church door, was remarkably clear, sporting only a phone, a desk lamp, and an ink blotter with a manila envelope centered on it.

  Even from across the desk, Laura could see her name scribbled on the outside. Bass caught her looking at it and she raised an eyebrow.

  “Leon’s shots from last night,” he said by way of explanation.

  Laura fitted herself into the one small guest chair not buried in papers. “Any good?”

  “Here, see for yourself.” He flicked the envelope into her lap.

  She slid the glossy eight-by-tens onto the desk and organized them into a grid, then whistled under her breath. Crisp, clear shots of everything. McKinney, the man in the suit, Frank Stuart. The crime scene vans, the cruisers in the background, all of it surrounded by that beautiful yellow crime scene tape. The shots had a stillness and a kinetic drama all at once. McKinney in particular had a desperate look in some of them, as though he was about to fall to his knees and pray. Something about the failing light had given the scene the look of a stage play, and the obvious tension between the players hinted that someone was about to fall through a trapdoor.

  Laura realized she’d been holding her breath and said, “Leon’s got real talent.”

  Bass chuckled. “You can say that again. He’s wasted photographing football games, though he frames the action just as succinctly.”

  Laura tore her gaze away and looked up at him. “So is this meeting to congratulate me?”

  “More of a progress report.”

  She gestured toward the pictures. “These pretty much say it all.”

  “The photos are great. Leon knocked it out of the park. I was wondering more about the words I might be printing next to them.”

  Laura ran down everything Frank had told her in bed this morning, although she neglected to mention the setting. She also left out everything gleaned from the notebook. There would be no explanation for that kind of depth of knowledge about an ongoing investigation. He would be able to guess what she had done. While her editor at the Globe had always championed a get-ahead-at-any-cost attitude, she suspected Bass would find theft to be an ethical violation worthy of a good old-fashioned firing.

  No, she’d have to sit on that info until she had a way to introduce it without incriminating herself.

  “So the police have nothing,” Bass said when she’d finished.

  “Right.”

  “And what do you have?”

  “Well, I’ve got the inside scoop on the police.”

  “Meaning, by the transitive property, that you also have nothing.”

  “I can only report facts, Bass, and I can only report those as they’re discovered. Are you expecting me to find something the police didn’t?”

  “Of course not. But there are other ways to approach this story, other angles we can cover.”

  “Such as?”

  “What about the family?”

  “I told you, Angie Mitchem practically spit in my face. And you know what? I wouldn’t have taken it personally if she had. Her little girl is missing and talking to the press is just about the last thing on her mind.”

  “And the Hansons?”

  �
��From what I’ve heard they’re barely leaving the house—they’re not even answering the door. Maybe they’ll want to tell their story in a few days, but no one can get to them right now.”

  Bass leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “That’s not exactly true.”

  “No, believe me, I asked around.”

  “Maybe you didn’t ask the right people. Or the right questions.”

  “Again, there just isn’t—”

  Bass held up a hand. “Smythe got the interview.”

  Laura groaned. “You’ve got to be kidding me. How?”

  “Same way you win at boxing. Footwork.”

  “Meaning he hounded them into submission.”

  “Meaning he kept at it until he earned their trust,” Bass countered. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy, not with the state that family’s in.”

  “Some people would call that state vulnerable.”

  Smythe himself would probably have described them as ripe for the plucking. Laura had to keep that thought to herself; Smythe was very careful never to show that side of himself in front of the editor-in-chief.

  Bass waved a hand. “Whatever. They gave the interview of their own free will. He didn’t hold a gun to their head.”

  Laura looked at him.

  “I know, I know. Not the best figure of speech, given the circumstances.”

  “You said I had until the Sunday edition. I still have”—she checked her watch—“almost nine hours until deadline.”

  He shrugged. “That was yesterday. Today we’ve got this. The pictures are great, though. They’ll compliment the interview nicely.”

  “So that’s it.” She sat back. “Smythe gets the story.”

  “I warned you it might happen. I know he doesn’t have your experience, but he’s a local. People trust their own, people around here especially. This interview with the family just proves it.”

  “You promised me until deadline,” she said. “You gave your word on that.”