Laura didn’t know. She shook her head.
“I used to do it like that.” Timinski snapped his fingers. “I’d let the guy tell me his story, and by the time he finished I’d already know. Got quite the reputation,” he said again. “Back in ’08, in Lexington, we got called in on a kidnapping. Woman married to the golden boy of an old-money clan. It was all bourbon and seersucker suits and half-million-dollar racehorses with that crowd. She was white trash born beautiful, good-looking enough to go big time. Every family member I interviewed, I could see a flash in their eyes when they talked about her. Brows crinkled. Noses turned up. It was contempt. She was beneath them. They believed that in their very bones, in the way only the rich ever can.”
“So a husband takes a trophy wife—is that really so suspicious?” Laura asked.
“No, my alarms went off because he was the only one of them who didn’t come across like he’d treated her as hired help.”
Laura frowned. “So, what, he loved his wife? That made him a suspect?”
Timinski fixed her with a look. “You know, sometimes you come across as one of the toughest, most tenacious women I’ve ever met. In other words, you can be a real pain in the ass when you set your mind to it.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“But it makes me forget just how naive you can be. Parents make their children. And his parents had had a silver spoon up their collective asses so long, it had probably transmuted into gold. So what, a series of nannies raised him to be a saint?” He shook his head. “Come on.”
“You thought he was acting. You didn’t believe him.”
“No, I did not. Two days after she was kidnapped, we found her shot dead in a motel room along with some stable boy who worked for the family. He’d leaned a hunting rifle against his chest and pulled the trigger with his toe. The story we pieced together was, he’d been obsessed with her from afar. Seemed possible. He’d had a few restraining orders in the past, allegations of stalking. He finally blew his top one day, grabbed her, took her to the motel and killed them both in a fit of love. Or rage. Same thing if you ask me.”
An icy wind fired through the trees and caught Laura’s hair, tussling it. She stuffed her hands deep into her pockets.
Timinski didn’t seem to feel it. He stared off into space, transported. “It couldn’t have been the husband, you see. No physical evidence linked him to the crime, he had an airtight alibi for the kidnapping, and there was no motive. They had a prenup, the marriage seemed to be going all right. He wasn’t our man; everyone seemed to agree on that.”
“But not you.”
Timinski smiled bitterly. “No, not me. My fingers started tingling the first time I talked to him. That Cinderella story he told me about meeting her and falling in love—it was just too perfect. And as things progressed, everything was. Perfect, that is. Every question answered, every dangling loose end tied up. The only suspect gift-wrapped in a body bag, conveniently unable to answer any questions.”
Laura leaned closer. “What happened?”
“In the end I just lied to him. I told him we found his fingerprint in the motel room, on the wall near the doorknob. It’s one thing to make a plan, but it’s quite another to stand up to interrogation. I put him in a room and made him tell the story again and again until he couldn’t be sure if he’d made a mistake somewhere along the line or not, then hit him with the fingerprint.”
“And?”
“And he cracked like an egg. Got life.”
She breathed out. “How did you know?”
“When I was young, I couldn’t have answered that. I would have said it was just a feeling in my gut, a feeling that was right more often than it was wrong. As I got older, though, I realized it was the stories they would tell. The guilty, I mean. The liars. We all learn as children how to tell stories. We learn from books, from movies, from other people. Narrative aims to answer questions like why and how. But real life isn’t a story. In real life, there are always unanswered questions. A story that ties up all the loose ends is just—”
He searched for the word.
“—manufactured. So the fact that Hobbes’s legs were atrophied? I don’t like it. It doesn’t sit right with you, and it doesn’t sit right with me either. But I’ve learned to accept things like that. More than accept them, Laura—I welcome them. They convince me the wool isn’t being pulled over my eyes.”
CHAPTER
27
“HERE,” TIMINSKI SAID, and pulled open the door to the second bedroom.
They were back inside the cabin, shielded from the cold wind. Laura unbuttoned her coat and followed him inside. She’d never made it this far during her last visit. The space had clearly been used as a storage room. Cheap metal shelves lined three walls, with rows of them running down the middle. Everything had been covered in a thick layer of dust. The last six months had left footprints and smudges everywhere. Timinski flicked on his flashlight, and the particles in the air sliced across the beam like tiny comets.
It smelled like death.
“You want some Vicks to rub under your nose?”
It was the same stuff they used around a corpse to deaden the smell. Her eyes widened.
“It’s not what you think,” Timinski said. “They found a dead raccoon over in the corner. The damn things have been living in here.”
Laura walked down one aisle between the center row of shelves and the wall. The shelves had boxes on them in places, all marked with evidence stickers. Some of the shelves sagged in the middle even though there was nothing on them.
“They took almost everything,” Timinski said, reading her face. “This room was packed to the gills. All the shelf space taken.”
“What was in them?”
“These,” he said, and pulled a box down onto the floor. It was brown cardboard gone soft with age, and it threatened to crumble at any moment. He pried the top open and gestured.
Laura reached inside and came out with a shoe. It was a loafer, a man’s size nine. At some point the tassel had fallen off.
“Is it evidence?”
“Everything’s evidence, but this stuff isn’t connected with any kind of actual crime. Anything that seemed like it might be useful we packaged up and sent to the lab within the first few weeks.”
“So what is this stuff?”
“As far as we can tell, it’s just junk. The same sort of thing you or I might collect over the years. Actually, it’s particularly boring junk. Who keeps a box of old shoes?”
Laura pictured Hobbes wearing the shoe. She could see it in her mind: the loafer snug around his sockless foot, the sweat seeping out of his pores and soaking into the leather. The shoe suddenly burned hot in her hand. She dropped it back into the box and wiped her palm on the front of her pants.
Timinski said, “I’m loading these up today, taking them back with me. That’ll be the end of it.”
“And you wanted me to see.”
He let out a sigh. “I don’t know why I brought you here. Samantha Powell deserves to be home safe in her bed, but I don’t think anything here is going to make that happen.”
She didn’t look at him.
“Here.” He shoved the flashlight into her hand. “Take as long as you need. I’ll be outside.”
She pulled the boxes out randomly, laying them on the floor and peering inside. None was more notable than the next. Old magazines. Costume jewelry. A particularly heavy one yielded rusted tools. More shoes.
The last one she opened was crammed with papers, clearly more than a few decades old. The box smelled like a library book checked out for the first time in ten years and pulled open, spine creaking, giving off that distinct odor of aging paper.
There was nothing else to look at, so she sat on the floor and pulled the top stack of papers onto her lap. Newspapers dating to the late 1990s, and pressed into the middle of the stack, something that made her stomach turn: coloring books and crayons. The paper, thin to begin with, had started to
crumble. She laid the coloring books out on the floor and used her thumb and forefinger to turn the pages.
There was nothing to date them. Water had gotten into the box at some point, and many of the pages were blurred beyond recognition. The one page she could make out featured a large foot in a strapped sandal, the toenails yellow and curled. The straps wound their way up the leg, ending midcalf. It was the sort of sandal she pictured an ancient Greek would wear. Another smaller leg wearing the same sandal appeared on the other side of the page. Everything at the top of the page had been melted away by water damage.
She moved through the boxes again, landing on the one filled with costume jewelry. Something about it was different than the others. All the other boxes had a distinctly masculine feel to them. All the objects were the sort of thing a man might accumulate in his cabin over the years, but a box of jewelry didn’t fit the pattern. She started pulling out pieces: strings of fake pearls, gaudy gemstone earrings, brooches set with diamonds the size of almonds. At the bottom lay a crude wooden box. The latch was rusted shut. She jammed her thumb into the edge and pressed. The edge was sharper than she’d thought and it cut into her flesh. She was about to give up when the latch squeaked and moved to the side. The box opened.
Inside were four gold crosses, small, on thin chains. One looked like it might be real gold, albeit of inferior quality.
“You almost done in there?” Timinski asked, standing in the doorway. “It’s getting late. I’ve got a long drive.”
“Tim, look at this.” She handed him the box and shined the flashlight inside so he could see.
“Crosses,” he said.
“Didn’t the description for Susan Gilroy include a small gold cross?”
He furrowed his brow. “I think so.”
“Maybe this is it. No one opened this box, Tim. It was rusted shut.”
“Are you sure it’s not just rusty? They may have opened it once already.”
She licked her lips, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“And even so, there’s nothing about a gold cross in the description of the other two.”
“No, but the Scopolotos didn’t speak English very well, and the Mendelsohns…” She trailed off.
“Were distraught.”
“Exactly. I mean, no description is perfect, and a gold cross is a small thing. It could have been left out.”
Timinski reached in and drew the crosses out one by one. He examined each, then returned them to the box. “No identifying marks or inscriptions.”
“These could be trophies, right? Something he took from the girls.”
“They could be anything, but a small gold cross has to be just about the single most common piece of jewelry in North Carolina, don’t you think?”
“But it could be,” she said.
“It could be,” he agreed, and snapped the box shut. “That’s why I’m taking them back with me.”
“Jesus, Tim. Just promise me you’ll take the idea seriously.”
“I promise. But I also don’t want you to get your hopes up.” He rattled the box in his hand. “Besides, there are four of them.”
She froze.
Four of them.
He was right. But a wheel started spinning in her mind. All this time she had spent thinking about Hobbes and the man who killed Frank Stuart, she had gotten nowhere. The facts had piled up until they were like a wall in front of her, hiding the truth.
Four of them.
Suddenly, and without warning, she saw a chink in the armor.
“I have to go, Tim.”
“Me too, I guess.” He reached out, stopped, then finally put a hand on her shoulder. “I wish I could do more to help.”
She nodded.
“You can find your way back through the woods?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
He frowned. “One day you’re gonna say that in a way that makes me believe you.”
* * *
She walked slowly through the woods, careful not to twist her torso or lift her legs too high, until she got to the car. She opened the trunk and cleared a flat space, then gently tugged the coloring books out from where she’d hidden them, in the back of her pants under her coat. She laid them down and then placed a few heavy books on top, securing them for the drive east back to Hillsborough.
CHAPTER
28
SHE WOKE TWO hours before dawn, tossed and turned, and finally gave up. She showered, dressed, brewed coffee, and drank it until the soft buzzing in her head gave way to something resembling quiet.
By eight that morning she was parked outside Olive Hanson’s house. Her former house, Laura reminded herself. At eight thirty, the sun finally crested the trees and poured weak light down onto the street. At nine, Laura knocked on the front door.
The door swung open. “Who is it?”
Emily Hanson wore a stained pink robe over jeans and a T-shirt. Her colorless hair stood on end on one side of her head and lay flat on the other. She reeked of booze and stale cigarette smoke. The overriding impression was that she had slept in her clothes.
“Mrs. Hanson?”
“I said, who’s asking?”
“My name is Laura. I’m a reporter. I’m doing research for a story that involves your daughter.”
Emily Hanson plucked a Newport from behind her ear and lit it, all without taking her eyes off Laura. She drew deep and then craned her neck back and blew the smoke straight up. One hand waved back and forth as though she was trying to keep the smell away. The entire house reeked of cigarettes, but that didn’t seem to register.
“I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”
“Don’t talk to reporters,” Emily Hanson said.
“I understand it must be difficult.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to you a bit,” she said, as though changing her mind had been the easiest thing in the world.
Laura’s mouth opened in surprise.
“Because you ain’t no real reporter,” Emily said. “You think I don’t recognize you?” She chuckled and then drew on the cigarette hanging in the corner of her mouth. “You the one that got that cop killed. They got you doing weather duty in the Gazette.”
“I still write news stories, Mrs. Hanson.”
“I suppose that’s so. But then so can anyone. I can sit in my breakfast nook and scribble away. I can write down all my pussy feelings about how we should pay welfare for people to sit on their asses and all hold hands afterward. Maybe I could write me an editorial about what makes right and what makes wrong, and then tell people who to vote in for judge. I could just take it all down in my Mickey Mouse notebook. Then I’d be writing news stories too, for all the good they’d do.”
Laura turned and walked to the rickety-looking porch swing. It groaned, but supported her.
Emily Hanson didn’t object, just ground out the Newport with the toe of her slipper and crossed her arms.
“It seems like you know my background, Mrs. Hanson.”
“Like I said, killin’ that cop. That part doesn’t bother me none. Cops never did me any favors.” She spit on the porch and it made an oblong wet hole in the dust.
Laura stared at the spot and felt her blood pressure spike. She took a minute, waited until she felt certain her voice would come out even. “Frank Stuart was a lot of things, but he didn’t deserve to die.”
“Who does, missy?”
“Maybe the man who killed your daughter?”
“He deserved to die by someone’s hand, just not his own. One more life where he got to pick and choose the moment it was snuffed out. He was playing God right up until the end, wasn’t he, Miss Chambers? You couldn’t even take that away from him.”
“You believe in God, Mrs. Hanson?”
Emily Hanson spit on the porch again. “Fuck no. Do you?”
“Maybe. I used to.”
“Everybody used to. Everybody used to believe in Santa Claus too. The world beats those kind of notions out of you.”<
br />
“There are good things in the world too.”
“Tell that to my daughter.”
Laura had nothing to say to that. She studied Emily’s face, expecting a tear or a quiver in the lip, but her face was rock solid. The expression reminded her of a pit bull, lip half-curled in a snarl. All anger and not an ounce of grief.
Emily lit another Newport and sat on the rattan chair next to the porch swing. “So why are you here talking to me?”
“Besides Frank Stuart getting killed—”
“I know about your little horror story. The ghost who runs around taking kids.”
Laura fixed her with a stare. “It happened.”
“Bullshit.”
“It happened just like I said.” Her voice was louder now.
“You’re crazy or a liar. I’m betting on liar. All you people are just in it for the cash and the glory, see who can write the most sensational headline.”
It took every ounce of willpower not to throw Samantha Powell in this woman’s face. Laura was perfectly willing to use the girl as leverage during an interview. It had been less than forty-eight hours since the ear arrived at the Gazette, and she’d yet to speak to Bass Herman, but she would never agree to suppress the truth. Only Bass got to decide what was fit to print, but if telling people about the new missing girl would help shake the trees, she would do it without a second thought.
On the other hand, Emily Hanson might be the worst person in the world to tell.
Laura reached out and took the woman’s knee. Her hand was shaking. “Please, I need you to listen to me. Eugene Hobbes didn’t kill your daughter. He didn’t take Teresa Mitchem either, but I plan to find the man who did. You can help me.”
“Don’t care,” she said.
She said it so quick, so brusque, that for a second it didn’t process.
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