“I’m not sure if it was locked or not,” the officer answered in a neutral tone. He kept his face down and continued to read. “She attempted to secure the door, but the intruder forced it open before she could. He threatened to hurt her if she didn’t tell him where Dinah was, and when she didn’t, he pushed her out of the way and went through the house looking for the girl. Did some damage in the living room and hallway—”
“I saw.”
Officer Wallace cleared his throat. “He found Dinah upstairs in her bedroom and carried her out to the car. According to your mother, she appeared to be a little confused but not frightened. He looked at his watch, “Happened approximately forty-five minutes ago.” He closed the notepad.
Tears continued to drip down his mother’s face, and every so often, she raised a hand to wipe them. “I’m sorry.” She pressed the towel to her cheek.
“Don’t you dare apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not your fault.” It’s mine. I wasn’t here to stop him. Enraged, guilty, helpless with grief, Damian wanted to cut his own throat, tear out his hair, run to the roof and jump off into blackness, as if the pain would somehow bring back his sister and punish him for his negligence all at once. He couldn’t believe he’d been careless enough to stay at Summer’s after dark.
Again he heard her confession that she’d given T.J. directions. It took all his strength not to punch the nearest solid surface. I trusted her. Okay, maybe she hadn’t known who T.J. was. But shouldn’t she have suspected something? Where was woman’s intuition at a time like that?
“What are we doing?” he demanded. “What can I do?”
The cop rested his hands on an ample belly. “Got two patrol cars out in town now. We’ve notified every department between here and Albany to the east, Syracuse to the west.” He cleared his throat. “If you can find a recent picture of your sister, that would help. Not much else you can do, except wait.”
Damian found some extra copies of Dinah’s school picture and handed them to the officer. Then he trudged to the sink and splashed water on his face. His fists opened and closed. Staring out the window, he pictured T.J. there, waiting in the shadows of the lawn, creeping around the house to find the weak spot. Like a fox sniffing out his prey. He brought a hand to his mouth and retched. His mother turned away, and the cop cleared his throat.
One hour passed. Then another. He paced around the first floor like a jaguar. Restless. Angry. Needing out. Hannah picked up a sponge and circled it over the kitchen counter in a sweeping motion, again and again, her eyes somewhere beyond the house.
The three of them waited, silent, as the hours marched by. Midnight came and went, but no one slept. The clock on the stove read one fifty. Two thirty. Three o’clock. Hannah returned to her seat at the table, her eyes glazed with fatigue. Damian continued to pace, cracking his knuckles and staring from the refrigerator to the countertops to his mother and back again. The policeman’s radio crackled with static.
Suddenly the cop who’d been watching the front door strode into the room. “We have a lead.”
Damian fought to keep his heart from leaping out of his chest. No bad news, it thudded. No bad news. If he’s done something to Dinah, I’ll rip every limb from his body.
“Apparently the kidnapper called the police station a few minutes ago. Says he wants guaranteed full custody of the girl.” He cleared his throat. “We weren’t able to get a trace on the call. But right now he’s considered armed and dangerous. From what he said, there’s a possibility he has a weapon of some sort.”
Hannah’s face lost all color. “He has a gun?”
“We don’t know that,” Officer Burdick responded. “Ma’am, we have our best negotiator assigned to this. Odds are, if your ex-husband really wants custody of his daughter, he’s not gonna do anything to hurt her.”
“But you don’t know that for sure,” Damian said. Fear choked him. He knew T.J. better than these men did. He knew what the guy was capable of.
“No,” the policeman said. “We don’t.”
Chapter Thirty
“Did you hear about Dinah?” Summer closed the ambulance corps’ break room door. She hadn’t slept much, just laid on her bed fully clothed and stared at the ceiling. Memories and guilt flooded her heart, making it hard to draw a full breath. A couple times, she thought about calling Rachael, but what would she say? Somewhere around two or three she finally fell into a restless sleep, but as soon as the light came through her windows, she was up again. She’d come straight to the ambulance corps as she could function properly, unable to think of anything else. When she walked in the front entrance, the young EMT sitting behind the desk pointed to where Gabe waited in the back.
“I did hear,” he nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“How can this happen? Here in Whispering Pines?” But that was a silly question, wasn’t it? The very town itself held secrets in its name.
“I don’t know.” He sat on the arm of a chair and cracked his knuckles. “Is that why you’re here? To see if I can help? I don’t know if I can. I mean, I’ll try, but the cops know more than I do.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I wanted to tell you...that I remembered. Just last night.” She drew in a deep breath. “I remember what happened the night Donny died.” She looked straight at him. “You lied.”
Gabe said nothing.
“You told the police you were driving the night of the accident.”
He waited an eternity before answering. “Yes.”
“But why?” She could barely breathe. “Why would you do that?”
He didn’t answer.
She walked to him and took his hand. “You let me drive that night because you were drinking. And because I wanted to.”
His chin dipped in acknowledgement.
“I didn’t have a license.” She recalled the arguments with her father over that, night after night. Too dangerous, he’d say. You don’t need to learn. Not until you’re eighteen. I’ll take you wherever you need to go.
She said the next words quietly, piecing them together as she went, unearthing her own history though it pained her with every breath. “You were at a party. At the Hadleys’.”
“Only until you got off work.”
“I know.” She’d never suspected Gabe of cheating on her, and she didn’t now. “We didn’t go to the drive-in?” That was the only part that remained fuzzy.
“We did, but it was crowded. So we left. It was late, anyway, and Donny was supposed to be home—”
Summer squeezed his hand tightly. She remembered the rest now. Taking the keys from Gabe when she smelled beer on his breath. Insisting she drive his car. Thinking the few times her father had let her practice were enough.
But with her teenage crush beside her, the warmth and excitement of the night and the bright headlights at the intersection had confused and distracted her. “I should have stopped.” There wasn’t a sign in her direction, just a flashing yellow light, but she should have stopped anyway. It was a dangerous crossing, and people blew through it all the time.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
She let herself lean against him and bear the weight of her head and shoulders. Of course it was.
“Summer, Mr. Hartwell ran the red light in the other direction. He was supposed to stop. Plus he’d been drinking. Everyone knew that. He’d been a hard-core alcoholic for years”
She couldn’t answer. That was why we rushed to get out of the car. Gabe hadn’t wanted anyone to see that she was driving. She, the one without a license. She’d been at the wheel the night her brother died. Not Gabe.
“Son, come over here, please. Just have a couple of questions to ask you...”
As the cop turned his back, Gabe peeled her fingers open and pried the car keys from Summer’s sweaty palm.
Her mouth went cottony dry. “You went to jail for me.” The enormity of the thought fell over her.
He sighed, and for the first time, she heard sadness in his voice. “Wel
l, I thought Hartwell was gonna make it. Thought they’d charge him. I never guessed...”
“That they’d charge you instead?”
She felt him nod against her cheek. With one arm around her, he leaned motionless against his desk.
“Why didn’t you just tell them the truth?” She whispered the words into his shirtfront.
He didn’t have to answer. She could tell by the pulse in the hand she still held, and in the way his chest heaved with the weight of the last ten years.
“It was the right thing to do, Summer,” Gabe said after a long time. His voice was rough. “Your dad lost his son that night. I didn’t want him to lose his daughter too.”
SUMMER SAT ON A BENCH in the town park long after Gabe had left for a call in Silver Valley.
“I didn’t want him to lose his daughter too...”
His daughter. Like Dinah. What if another child was about to die in Whispering Pines? They hadn’t heard anything yet. No news of Dinah, good or bad, had crackled over the police scanner.
The bench bit into the backs of her legs. An ant crawled over her toe and continued on to climb a blade of grass. She didn’t move. If she did, she thought she might break. She couldn’t go back to the house. She could barely remain upright. The sun burned the back of her neck, but she didn’t care. She was surprised she could still feel anything at all. A horn beeped somewhere over on Main Street. She didn’t look up. Instead she studied the veins on the backs of her hands and the blood that ran through them.
So much blood that night...
Now that she’d cracked open that part of her memory, the details wouldn’t stop coming. Her brother’s Yankees hat sitting on the double yellow line. The police sirens screaming in her ears. The tears that wet her shirt. A single stoplight flashing red one way, yellow the other, in a smear of color that lit up the sky. The blood on her hands and Gabe’s face, the shattered glass sprayed everywhere she looked.
How did I forget?
It was funny, the way the mind worked. If she hadn’t forgotten, she probably would have gone mad.
It wasn’t your fault.
But it was, of course. Gabe might not have avoided the accident if he’d been driving, but then again, he might have. He would certainly have slowed at the yellow light. And he might have paid better attention. He might have seen the other car, braked sooner, or swerved into the safety of the shoulder.
Or he might not have.
The historian in her whispered something else. You can study every last detail, her favorite college professor had once told a full lecture hall. You can put all the pieces of an artifact back together. You can match up all the edges, mend the lines until they become invisible, but you still won’t know it all. You will never be able to step back with both feet to that moment of creation and truly relive it. We can only work with the knowledge we have now. We can only imagine.
And so, Summer had made a life out of imagining. She’d spent hours putting together the pieces of other people’s lives. She’d become fascinated with unearthing clues and determined to write stories that would decipher them. She lived the museum, loved it, made it the career that consumed her. Until now. Until she was faced with her own pieces. Unlike all the rest of history, she didn’t have to conjure any part of this story; she knew it front to back and beginning to end.
After a long time, she opened her eyes. Every part of her felt as though it weighed a hundred pounds—her head, her eyelids, her hands, and her feet when she tried to make them work. It took her two tries to make it up. When she did, she took a deep breath and pushed her hair from her face.
She might have ruined her relationship with Damian, she might have endangered Dinah’s welfare, but one thing was clear: she couldn’t let the residents of Whispering Pines go on thinking Gabe had killed her brother. She had to make that right, anyway.
SUMMER WALKED A HALF-mile from the ambulance corps to Main Street. Zeb’s Diner had been a fixture there for as long as she could remember. As she crossed the street, she gazed with nostalgia at its red-and-white striped awnings. How many heartaches had she and Rachael nursed here? How much gossip had they shared? Not much had changed in ten years. The jukebox sat against the same wall, and the brightly lit menu hung above the same shiny counter. Even the color scheme remained the same—turquoise leatherette booths with silver chrome molding and a black-and-white checkerboard floor. Old photos of 1920s celebrities hung on the walls.
She met Rachael at a back booth and spilled the entire story in a matter of minutes. “...and Damian left as soon as his mom called,” she finished. “I haven’t heard anything else since then.”
Rachael nodded. “My dad told me about the guy breaking in and taking Dinah,” she said. “He heard it on his scanner. They’ll find him, Summer. Police have all the roads out of town blocked off.”
Summer blew her nose. “But what if they don’t?”
“They will,” Rachael said around her straw.
Summer stared at her phone, willing a text from Hannah or Damian. “I think this might be partly my fault.”
“How on earth would this be your fault?”
“I gave him directions to their house.”
“What?”
Summer told the story as quickly as she could.
“Stop it,” Rachael said before she had finished. “You told a stranger how to get to Red Barn Road? That’s it? That’s what you’re beating yourself up about?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Big deal. You know how long that road is? How many people live on it? You didn’t know who he was or who he was looking for.”
“But I should have.”
“Why?” Rachael dismissed her with a wave of one hand. “You’re being ridiculous. It wasn’t your fault. If you didn’t give him directions, the next person to come along would have. You know that. And if not last night, he would have taken Dinah another time.”
“Maybe.” Summer still couldn’t shake the guilt or the accusing look on Damian’s face as he stormed away. She took a deep breath. “That isn’t the only thing I wanted to tell you.”
Rachael cocked one brow. “This is turning out to be one heck of a Tuesday morning.”
“Remember how I told you I could never remember what happened the night Donny died?”
“The whole amnesia thing, yeah. I’m sorry. That must be awful.”
Summer took a deep breath. Get it over with. The first time will be the hardest. She’d have to tell this story more than once. People needed to know. “This morning, I did remember. I was driving. The night Donny died, I was driving Gabe’s car.”
“Wait—what?” Rachael stared at her. “But you didn’t have your license.”
“Exactly. Which was why I probably caused the accident.”
Rachael sat back in the booth. “I can’t believe it. You’re wrong. You have to be.”
“I’m not. I think maybe what happened with Dinah triggered the memory. I was thinking about her, and about Donny, and then I just remembered everything. I was driving because Gabe had been at a party earlier that night. He’d been drinking.” She gulped. “So I thought it would be better if I drove us home. Safer.”
“He went to jail,” Rachael whispered.
“I know.” Tears burned in her eyes. “But why didn’t anyone tell me that? Why didn’t you?” Maybe she would have remembered sooner, or been able to change the outcome of the sentencing. Frustration and guilt seeped through her. She’d never be able to give those two years back to Gabe. Never.
Rachael shook her head. “You and I didn’t talk for—what? Almost a year, after you left. And when we did, you were so fragile. I didn’t know what you knew and what you didn’t. All you talked about was college or your latest job. Never anything about the accident or your brother. And definitely never anything about Gabe. I just figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”
Summer met her best friend’s gaze. “I have to tell people. They have to know the truth. I was driving, and I didn’t see
the other car, and maybe Mr. Hartwell was drinking and didn’t stop either, but I was the one who went through that flashing light. I was behind the wheel. Not Gabe.”
“Oh, Summer.” Rachael got up and slid into the booth beside her. She folded her friend in a hug, and they sat there a long time without speaking.
“I want to go on Channel 6,” Summer said after a while. “As soon as I can.”
Rachael pulled back. “Are you kidding? You don’t have to announce it to the world.”
But she’d made up her mind. The only thing she needed to do was call the local cable station and find out when she could get airtime.
Chapter Thirty-one
Ginny Jameson, Channel 6 anchor, arranged her face and fluffed her hair. Summer stood across from her, frozen. The clock in the center of town chimed six times.
“I still can’t believe you’re doing this,” Rachael whispered from behind her left shoulder. “You don’t have to.”
Yes, I do. Summer looked out at the knot of people that had gathered near the steps of the Whispering Pines Central School. She was still startled that it had happened so quickly. One call to the police, another to the cable station, and a camera-and-lighting entourage hovered around them, ready for the evening news.
“Good evening. This is Ginny Jameson for Channel 6 News, coming to you live from Whispering Pines, where a startling turn of events has stirred up this small town.”
To say the least. Summer wound her fingers in her skirt and hoped she didn’t have to move. If she did, she’d catch a heel in the stairs and sprawl out for the entire viewing area to see. She squinted against the camera lights. She thought she saw Gabe standing at the edge of the crowd. She hadn’t told him about the news conference, but she was pretty sure Whispering Pines’s grapevine still worked as well as ever.
“Late last night, ten-year old Dinah Knight was kidnapped from her home by her estranged father...”
Summer pulled in a long breath. Don’t listen. Just figure out what you’re going to say. She could only deal with one tragedy at a time. Better not to think about Dinah, or Hannah and T.J., until later, when they were off camera. And better not to think of Damian at all. Ginny widened her eyes as she told the story of abduction, stringing together scant details. “...authorities have widened their search, but there have been no leads since early this morning.”
Second Chance Summer Page 17