She pulls up Facebook on her laptop and turns the screen so no one can see what she’s doing, even if she is actually using the site for research. It’s not like anyone is paying attention. Damon is in his office goofing off, and the only other people in the building are Margaret, the admin person, and Gary, who sells ads, which is a joke. The same businesses run the same ads in the same spots and have since about 1983.
For lack of a better idea, she sighs and types Annie’s name and “Ludlow, SC” into the search bar and waits to see Annie’s name and smiling face. Annie has her privacy controls pretty tight, because that’s all Laurel can see. Though she has requested Annie as a friend, Annie hasn’t accepted yet. With everything going on, she imagines Annie is leery of old friends in the media trying to be her friend, in real life or online. Though she resents Annie dodging her, she also understands it and knows if it were her, she would likely do the same.
She studies Annie’s photo, willing herself to think of who she could talk to next. But as she looks at Annie’s smiling face, the one thing she thinks of is how hard it must be having all this stirred up at the same time she’s getting married, the happiest time of your life overshadowed by the release of the man who may or may not have murdered your mother. Having both grown up with it and now covering the newest developments, Laurel knows the story all too well.
Laurel finds news stories and scans one after the other, eager to understand the scope of what has transpired, to perhaps put the events in some sort of context. Annie was three years old when her young mother, Lydia Taft, was murdered. Annie was found toddling down a hiking trail in Eden Hill State Park, hungry and dirty and still wearing pajamas, though it was nearing lunchtime. The police later found her mother in a nearby tent, strangled, her body cold. Though a three-year-old should never have been questioned and certainly not relied on, the precocious only child spoke clearly, and with certainty, telling a story about camping with Uncle Cord, a man the police would later learn was the name she used for her mother’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Cordell Lewis. The fact that the couple was “off again” at the time of Lydia’s murder raised immediate suspicions.
The police went after Lewis and never considered another suspect. Even though Lydia Taft’s best friend, Susan Reed, said Lydia had confided in her that she’d been carrying on with a married man whose wife was growing suspicious, which should’ve been investigated. By then it didn’t matter. With Faye Wilkins and a young officer, Hal York—now the Ludlow sheriff—pushing for it, the authorities built a case against Cordell Lewis, a gentle giant who never once asked for a lawyer when questioned. Why would he fear being convicted when he hadn’t done it? And yet, Annie’s testimony, which was taped—you could watch grainy footage from one of those true-crime shows of a little girl in a pink-checked dress with a blonde ponytail—asserted that it was indeed Uncle Cord who’d taken them camping and Uncle Cord who’d hurt Mommy.
Lewis had an explanation for that—earlier in the night, he’d come by to help Lydia set up the tent, never intending to stay the night. The night was to be a special time between Lydia and her daughter—no boys allowed, Lewis claimed. But he had helped her set up the site, making sure—in a twist of irony—that the two would be safe. He and Lydia had been playing around, tickling and play fighting, and he’d grabbed Lydia a little too hard. Lydia had cried out, and Annie had been concerned. That’s what the child meant when she said he took them camping and he hurt Mommy. He’d insisted on this story, and later so did his attorney, when he finally got smart and asked for one.
But Lewis had never stood a chance. Justice may have been swift, but it was blind to anyone else but him. And if the people with the pitchforks were satisfied, then that was good enough. Laurel read quotes from his family, the people who’d loved and stood by him for two decades, declaring his innocence even as other people called them names and shunned them. They finally persuaded the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission to take up his case.
Lewis had served twenty-three years of his life sentence when the Innocence Inquiry Commission attorney, Tyson Barnes, went before a judge earlier this year, citing that the prosecution hadn’t turned over evidence of DNA found at the scene that didn’t match the defendant. This past week, with the support of the victim’s daughter, the conviction was overturned, and Cordell Lewis was released yesterday. Though he could be retried, the new DA has admitted they likely won’t pursue a new trial. What’s left of Cordell Lewis’s life remains ahead of him.
This piece on Annie’s wedding is becoming more than a story. Laurel can feel her brain making connections between the backstory of Annie’s life and the new story of her wedding. She could make something of this, and it could be good. She knows this intuitively, before she has written a word. She feels herself leaning forward, leaning into the story. She recognizes it, the prickle right where her hair ends and her neck begins, the feeling of her heart going out of her body and toward something else, something that simply says more. She has forgotten this feeling—this pure, simple love of the story. All she knows right now is that she is not going to let Faye Wilkins’s rejection stop her from seeing what she can do to go deeper.
She thinks for a moment. Who else is close to Annie Taft; who else could she talk to? Annie isn’t responding to her calls, not that Laurel expected her to after the last time. She pulls up Annie’s limited profile again, sees the thumbnail photo of her there, standing beside a man. Her fiancé. Laurel finds his name in her notes: Scott Hanson. She scrolls back up to the top of the screen and enters his name into the Facebook search bar. She knows he lives in Greenville, so she enters that, too, to try to narrow it down. Several results come back, and she peers at the tiny faces, hoping to match the face in Annie’s shot to one of the faces there. She sees a photo matching Annie’s profile picture and knows she’s found the right guy.
Scott’s profile is not as limited as Annie’s. She checks out his “About Me” page as she debates whether to message him through Facebook or try to approach him another way. She glances around the mostly empty office, then back at the page, blinking from Scott’s and Annie’s smiling faces to the tiny bit of information about himself he’s allowed the world to see. She is just about to give the message idea a try when she sees something under his list of groups: the name of a very familiar fraternity, from a very familiar school.
She looks over at Damon’s office, sees the obnoxious orange tiger hanging on his open door, a literal sign that she’s on the right track. She stands up and navigates the desks, coffee station, and printers, propelled by excitement but also a bit of anger that Damon didn’t suggest approaching Scott Hanson in the first place. He obviously knows him, their being fraternity brothers and all. She strides into his office for the second time that day and speaks before he can acknowledge her.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Annie’s fiancé is one of your fraternity brothers?”
He looks up from his laptop but not before shifting it so that she can’t see what he’s looking at. Probably porn. Or one of his stupid video games. He is a manboy, but right now he’s the person who can help her with this story. A story he gave her.
“I mean, you assign me this story, then send me off to talk to the aunt without ever suggesting this other option. Which sounds like a better option to me. How long were you going to let me dangle like that?”
Damon yawns, bored with all this. “Look, yes, he’s technically my fraternity brother, but he was older than me, so it’s not like we were good friends. I know him, but I don’t know him know him. I don’t have his number or anything. We’re not buds.” The way he says buds makes him sound like an imbecile. Because Damon has buds, and he is actually proud of it.
She puts her hand on her hip. “I bet you have his email. Or could get it,” she counters.
The look on his face tells her she’s hit her mark.
“Send it to me.”
“It’s not something I should do,” he says. “I shouldn’t do something for a co
lleague that would infringe on a brother’s privacy.”
He sounds like he’s reciting from a memorized list of rules. She gives him a look that says, I’m not buying it.
“Especially not at a time like this,” he protests further. “I mean, the dude’s getting married in what? Three days?”
She narrows her eyes at him and ignores his question. “So you mean it’s okay if I go bug the bride’s aunt, who’s basically like her mother”—the video of three-year-old Annie talking to police with Faye standing beside her plays in Laurel’s mind—“who’s putting on this entire wedding, I will add, in the name of getting a story. But it’s not okay if I email her fiancé? I need to talk to someone associated with this wedding. So . . .” On the wall beside Damon, her eyes land on a framed newspaper cartoon of a tiger eating a chicken bone. “Throw me a bone here,” she finishes her plea.
Damon closes the computer a little too forcefully, no longer in the mood for a nice fake gun battle or some naked women, she supposes. He pulls out his phone and begins punching buttons. She waits patiently, hoping he’s doing what she wants him to do instead of merely trying to ignore her. Outside the room, in the open space where her cubicle is, she hears her phone go off, indicating she has a new message.
“I didn’t just do that,” Damon says. “Okay?”
“Do what?” she agrees readily. “A reporter never reveals her sources anyway.”
“Yeah, well I’m guessing this one ain’t gonna be too hard to figure out.”
She stops in the doorway long enough to thank him.
“Nice investigative work, Haines,” Damon calls.
She smiles in response and goes to get her phone, appreciating his attagirl, wishing all the while that it didn’t make her feel the tiniest bit better.
Faye
She is drinking alone when Hal arrives. He moves cautiously toward her, like she imagines he would approach an armed suspect. When he raises his arm to point to the open champagne bottle on the coffee table in front of her, his movements are robotic, calculated.
“Celebrating something?” he asks, then flashes a weak smile.
She shrugs. “It was the only alcohol I had in the house.”
Faye is not typically a drinker. Her parents were both alcoholics, and she fears becoming like them. But Annie is missing three days before her wedding, and Faye is getting more and more worried. She can’t stop her mind from circling back to the fear that this time her disappearing act is something more, something bad. If ever there was a time for self-medicating, this is it. When she’d spied the bottle chilling in the fridge, she’d popped the cork in desperation without putting too much thought into it. A customer gave it to her a few days ago in honor of Annie’s wedding. It was to be used for that. Now she wonders if drinking it beforehand has jinxed things somehow.
Hal takes a seat beside her but leaves the width of a whole person between them. This is how it always is with them. They literally keep their distance. It is not something they’ve needed to discuss in a long time. It’s just the way things have to be. She looks at him and raises the glass and her eyebrows in unison. He shakes his head and points at his name badge. He is here on official business, investigating a potential missing person. He is not here as a friend. But of course he is always there as a friend—wasn’t that what they’d promised each other all those years ago?
She would like it if he would drink a glass with her. If for no other reason than she would no longer be drinking alone. She thinks about Clary coming home to this: her mother and the sheriff sitting on the couch drinking champagne at four in the afternoon. She wonders if at this point it would even seem strange to her daughter. Hal York was a fixture of her childhood, their family friend, the first person Faye met when she arrived in Ludlow to collect Annie. She had been, come to think of it, exactly Annie’s age now: twenty-six years old.
Faye can still picture it, the way Annie wrapped her three-year-old self around Hal, clinging to him like a baby monkey, refusing to let go when he tried to hand her off to Faye. As they’d stood there awkwardly with this child between them, it had already felt like they shared Annie, that she was their child. She takes another sip of champagne and feels that bad feeling again. Annie is there, in that space they’ve left between them.
“I want you to talk to Cordell Lewis first thing,” she instructs him.
“I’m not going to go talk to Cordell Lewis yet,” he says. “That’s presumptuous. The guy just got out of prison for a crime he likely didn’t commit. If I go beating on his door making insinuations, that hotshot lawyer of his will have my ass.”
She raises her eyebrows at him over the glass; she will not be deterred by Hal or Cordell Lewis’s hotshot lawyer. “Annie helped send him to prison for that crime he likely didn’t commit. I think that would be an excellent reason to question him, seeing as how she’s missing.”
“She’s not missing,” he argues. “That’s also presumptuous. We’ll find her. And when we do, we’ll find out that there’s a perfectly good explanation for where she is.”
“Then you tell me why no one can get ahold of her!” Her voice is loud in the quiet of the house.
Hal inhales deeply, tries a different tack. “She hasn’t spoken to anyone since . . . when?”
“Yesterday,” Faye answers dully, hating the word as she speaks it. “And her phone’s d—” She stops herself. “Shut off. When I call, it just goes straight to voice mail.” For Christmas this past year, she’d gotten both Clary and Annie portable chargers so they could stop claiming that their phones were dead when they wanted to ignore her. It hadn’t done much good.
“And you weren’t worried when she didn’t come home last night?”
Faye shakes her head emphatically. “She told me she was spending the night over at Tracy’s house. They were going to give each other pedicures and watch Father of the Bride.” She feels like she’s talking about Annie the teenager not Annie the grown woman.
“But Tracy says she was never there?”
Faye shakes her head and sets down the glass. “She lied about that, I guess.”
“But why would she lie? Did you check with Scott?”
“Of course I checked with Scott!” she answers, defensive. “He called me, actually. He thought she was with Tracy, too.”
“When is the last time he spoke with her?”
“He said it was yesterday evening; I didn’t press for a specific time. She told him the same story about pedicures and Father of the Bride. He said he usually checks her location if she’s out, but he didn’t last night. He said he texted her a few times, and she didn’t respond. But he just thought she wanted some girl time before the wedding hoopla started.”
Hal has his detective face on. “And you don’t think it’s weird that he checks her location?”
“I guess not.” She shrugs. “How would I know? That’s how they all are now. They keep constant tabs on each other and think it’s normal to know each other’s every move. When we were growing up it was, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ Now it’s, ‘Love means never being out of touch with your significant other.’ You mean you don’t keep tabs on your wife everywhere she goes?”
He gives her a look that says she should know that he doesn’t. “I don’t care if they think it’s normal. I think it’s weird,” he says, moving the subject away from his wife, as he always does. “Why would he check her location unless he doesn’t believe she is where she says she is?”
“Last night he apparently did believe her. And look where that’s got us.” Faye shakes her head. “He said he’s been concerned about her, what with Cordell Lewis getting out and all. It’s like I said earlier—”
Hal interrupts her before she can start in on Cordell Lewis again. “I just don’t understand her need to lie.”
She hears his words, thinking of the lies they’ve told through the years: to other people and to each other. Sometimes, she thinks, there is a need to lie.
“It’s
probably nothing,” Faye tells herself as much as him. “Just her usual shenanigans, made larger by the fact that she’s due to get married.” She looks at Hal. “Maybe she’s got cold feet?” She begs him with her eyes to say, yes, that’s probably it. But he hesitates before doing so. And in that hesitation are all her greatest fears.
He reaches across the appropriate space they have left between them, putting his large hand on her bare leg. His skin in contact with hers is a no-no, breaking the rules they established for themselves all those years ago. But in the moment, Faye doesn’t care about the rules. She places her hand atop his, feels the heat of his skin radiating through hers. She swallows, forces herself to smile at him. She will not tend toward the dramatic. She will not be a hysterical woman. She will not assume the worst. “We’ll find her,” she says to Hal, her best friend and the man she’s loved for far longer than she likes to admit.
“Yes,” he says. He gives her an earnest, kind look in return, and it makes her love him all the more. She knows this is wrong, but she cannot let him go. She reaches to pour herself some more champagne, then raises her glass in a toast to hope.
Clary
For the first time since she lost Mica, she doesn’t go straight to the dove loft when she comes home to see if he has returned. She just walks into the house, mentally preparing herself for all the duties her mother will undoubtedly throw at her as soon as she lays eyes on her. She’s ignored her calls today, and she’s sure she’ll get an earful for that. It is go time as far as the wedding is concerned. This is the day they’ve all been waiting for. Or dreading, depending on who’s talking.
When she gets inside the door, she sees her mother waiting there for her, perched on the couch with a champagne glass in her hands, of all things. She springs into a standing position as she realizes that it’s Clary, and not Annie, coming in the door. “Is she with you?” she asks, craning her head to see past Clary, willing the door to open a second time.
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