Find You in the Dark

by Nathan Ripley

  “Why didn’t he just tell us where he put her? The police. And Mom, I mean, and Grampa and Gramma before they died. He could have told them where she was.”

  I cut myself off there, but I could have told her where Shurn had put Tinsley right then. An Irish cemetery. Containing the remains of Sean Dunsany’s forefathers, the Irish settlers whose steady issue over the generations had eventually produced Jason Shurn’s alcoholic stepfather, a man whose only function seemed to have been the steady beating and mental torture of the boy that his dead wife had left him to care for.

  “Shurn didn’t tell anyone where Tinsley was buried because it was the last little bit of power he had. Being able to hurt people by saying nothing,” I said. Kylie waved out the front window at one of her swim team pals, who was giving her a mystified, fake-annoyed why’d-you-skip-practice look.

  “Yeah,” Kylie said. “I think I get it. Um. There was no lunch in the fridge today, or did I miss it?”

  “I forgot. You could have taken the leftover Chinese, though,” I said, smiling as I leaned over to pull my wallet out of my back pocket. I gave Kylie a twenty and she left the car after squeezing my hand, a gesture meaning goodbye, and that we’d either pick up our conversation later, or never talk about any of this ever again.

  SANDRA WHITTAL WALKED OUT OF the station when she got Chris Gabriel’s text, changing her walk to a striding half-jog when she saw that the Greene woman was in front of the station, pressing leaflets on every cop. Four patrol guys had come in while Sandra was leaving the building and thrown her flyers into the recycling bin by the desk sergeant, one of them—Rick Garner, a new kid Sandra usually liked—seeing Whittal’s eyes on him and losing his grin fast. Bella Greene, missing for not that long but likely looking nothing like the smiling high school portrait her mother had photocopied, smiled out of the blue bin. Sandra and Chris didn’t talk on their ride to the scene they’d gotten hustled into taking a look at.

  Chris Gabriel badged the woman on the porch of the care home, then looked at his buzzing phone and excused himself. The lady who nodded back at Chris was black, and surrounded by three heavily medicated men in jogging pants and t-shirts. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, just a badly cut green t-shirt, dark slacks, and latex gloves. By the time Sandra had her badge out as well, the woman had gone back inside, bypassing the buzzer at the entrance with a swipe of the key card that dangled from her waist.

  Sandra looked at the men on the porch. They looked through or past her. The skinniest one was lounging, full-length, on the top stair. He had a face like that classical composer who’d done a couple of horror soundtracks: Philip Glass, Sandra remembered, from the DVD extras of a college ex-boyfriend’s copy of Candyman. This Glass clone, and it really was a close resemblance, had the sides of his head shaved and hair longer and with more volume than Sandra’s growing down out of the middle of his scalp. He yawned and looked at her.

  “Who landed that Bella Greene thing again?” Sandra asked Chris, who was sitting on the hood of the car, still texting. He had on the expression of suppressed pain and rage he always did when he was texting his ex-wife.

  “Greene? The hooker with the worried mom. Yeah. Nobody, yet.” He nodded at the building. “This body’s on the top floor, third.”

  “We’ll take care of it once you finish up with your little conversation,” Sandra said. “Sounds accidental anyway, from what the uniforms said. Pickett got the call on this, he’s good. Good instincts. Doesn’t step on things.” Sandra walked to the side of the building, still within earshot of the car. A city-owned house on a gentrifying street where all the neighbors could sell for upward of a million dollars. A few more of the patients—residents, actually, even if they were being treated—of the care home were in the grass and cement alleyway there, leaning against the garbage can, or sitting at a wet card table under a piece of overhanging ribbed tin that looked like it had been pulled out of a makeshift housing settlement in a different, poorer country.

  “None of us are on Bella Greene? We’re not doing anything? Her mom was down at the station again today. Cornered Gutierrez outside. Someone should be looking for that girl. Been three days.”

  “Bella Greene’s not a minor, and she’s in the life. Those girls drift, you know it as well as I do, come on. I’m sure someone’s asking around, maybe. Fuck,” Chris added, but that word was directed at his phone, which he slipped into his overcoat pocket. A dent had appeared in Chris’s forehead, a crease of annoyance that only solving the problem that had just come up would take care of. Sandra walked back toward the car and they spoke in quieter voices.

  “Everyone’s still out looking for that Todd Bisley kid. Even though he’s most definitely dead with a bloodstream full of MDMA, at the bottom of some ravine at a bush party his friends are going to finally tell us about in a couple days.”

  “Bisley’s seventeen, on the lacrosse team, with a rich dad,” Chris said, getting off the hood of the car and into the driver’s seat. “I gotta go. Take care of this thing, okay? Like you said, looks like an easy one.”

  “No fucking way I’m going in there alone,” Sandra said, with more fear and anger than she knew she was actually feeling. It stopped Chris, who took his hands off the steering wheel.

  “I have to get my kid, Sandra. Just from Caroll Elementary, like ten blocks away, then drive him to his mom’s. He’s throwing up. You can wait out here if you want, or we can meet up again when I’m done and come back. Come with me to the school if you want, even,” Chris said.

  “Hell, no,” Sandra said.

  “Knew that’d scare you more,” Chris said, turning the ignition key. “What’s the matter, anyway?”

  “I just don’t like these places.”

  “No one here likes the place, either. You’ll be fine,” Chris said, smiling for a second as he backed the car away, before his face got back to worrying about his son. Sandra turned around. The black woman with the key card was back on the porch, waiting, propping the door open. Sandra avoided a discarded plaid shirt on the walkway, before doing an athletic hop over skinny punk Philip Glass and landing on the porch.

  Sandra’s guide turned out not to be her guide. She gestured up the stairs then made a turn into the small staff room just right of the entryway, where a couple of other support workers were eating lunches with forks off tinfoil: pungent, delicious-smelling stuff Sandra wanted to move closer to, instead of going deeper into the atmosphere of the facility. Beyond was a small kitchen with a communicating window in the drywall, locks on the drawers where she figured the knives were kept. A short and very old woman, too old to be working, cooked discs of sausage in their own fat on the flat top grill, a huge stack of pancakes idling on a plate next to her.

  Sandra turned back to the stairs and put a foot on the bottom step. Just keep doing that, she told herself. Soon she was halfway up the first flight. Everything in these shared areas was clean, but it still smelled. Dankly human, with the chemical edge of industrial cleaning agents. When Sandra reached the first landing, she was struck with the smell of the rooms. That’s when it became too familiar.

  Male sweat. Cum. Institutional food that could only be choked down on a liquid flow of ketchup, syrup, hot sauce, mustard. Like a dorm hall, but with a different pH balance. The hot linoleum curling under the full-blast radiators that lined the walls. And from inside the rooms, stares. Sandra walked past doorways and saw either the flats of feet in bed or eyes, watching her, the way he’d watched when she came to see him, every third Sunday until she told her mother she never wanted to come again.

  “Detective Sandra Whittal. I used to visit my dad in a place like this,” Sandra said when she reached the third floor and was waved over by a woman sitting in a small vinyl and aluminum chair in front of the only closed door in the building. The woman was about six years older than Sandra, wearing latex gloves like the rest of the staff, but with a nicely matched and medical-looking striped green top and pants that looked like slightly more formal scrubs.


  “Oh,” said the woman, indicating the beginning and end of her interest in the topic. Sandra badged her and the keys came out. The rooms locked from the inside, but this one also had a padlock and latch.

  “Your name?” Sandra asked. She hadn’t taken her notebook out yet, thinking she could probably get through this on memory alone, make notes back at the station.

  “Emily James,” the woman said. The dead body was on the bed, an unremarkable stretch of bones and skin lying on top of the mattress, wearing a bathrobe. Sandra went over to take a look and Emily James stayed near the door, unlocking the cage around the small smoke detector and switching it off. James took out a pack of Marlboro Reds and opened the room’s window.

  “Should I not be touching things?” she asked Sandra.

  “Normally, no,” Sandra said. “But I think you’re okay.” There was piss on the mattress, but that seemed to be all. Guy didn’t eat much. Sandra had stopped thinking about her father as soon as she’d seen the body, taking comfort in her routine of sizing up the dull commonalities of a pill death.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Rudy Clive Fox. He was the worst person in here,” Emily James said.

  Sandra looked up at the woman, staring into her eyes, seeing a confession in there.

  “I’m the only white woman who works here. So he just called me cunt and bitch most of the day. The others got every racial thing you can imagine. They’re used to it, sure, from the other guys, but most of our boys are just scattered dopes, patients, you know? They can’t help it. Rudy was mean. He said chink and nigger and made up stories about their families and what was going to happen to their sons, talking like he needed it, like it was only spitting that evil that made him feel okay.” Emily James looked younger when she smoked, something Sandra had noticed in other men and women who had brutal labor jobs, including her own mom: smoking relaxed their shoulders, pulled some of the wrinkles flat when the smoke was drawn in. Sandra didn’t talk, worried that Miranda rights might tumble out of her mouth if she did.

  “I didn’t do it but I didn’t stop it. I knew he was stealing pills from the other guys, knew he was hoarding his own. And I didn’t do his bed check. Stopped last week when it started to be my turn to do this floor. So no one was up here for the hours when he was flat-lining, when I should have been in his room at least twice.”

  “Okay,” Sandra said. Emily James looked like a taller version of Bella Greene’s mother, especially now the smoke was done and the worry was back. “So you thought of this man as disposable, and allowed him to go through with a suicide plan.”

  “I didn’t.” James shouted the “I” but quieted down for the “didn’t,” the frank delivery of her story cracking now that the part she’d undoubtedly been running in her head since Rudy Clive Fox died was over. “I don’t think of any of these men as disposable. You can’t do this job if you start thinking of these guys as better-off-dead skin sacks.”

  “I know, Ms. James. My father was in one of these places,” Sandra said. Emily James nodded, as though that didn’t mean much in this context.

  “I let him kill himself because I’d gotten to hate him and he was poisoning everything around here. He made everyone feel awful. I truly hated him. It wasn’t that I didn’t think he mattered. It’s because he did matter, because he made every day bad for us, that’s why I was good with him dying.”

  Sandra leaned back against a dresser, then leaned forward, thinking not about smudged evidence, but potential bedbugs.

  “You tell anyone else about this?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone have any way of knowing?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell anyone else. Ever. And I’ll forget it. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” James said, confused. She’d practically had her wrists out for the cuffs. “But why?”

  “Some people do the world a favor when they decide to leave it early. It’s not necessarily my job or yours to stop that,” Sandra said. “And if I say any more than that, this conversation is going to turn into something neither of us want it to.”

  Sandra thought about giving Emily James her card, but didn’t. She left the room, climbing down the stairs fast and leaving through the front corridor faster, calling to give the coroner an all-clear for pickup while she was waiting at the end of the block for Chris Gabriel.

  “I wouldn’t have left if I’d remembered,” Chris said when he opened the door. “About your dad.”

  “I should never have told you about him in the first place. You’ve been fishing around for an origin story ever since, like it’s Spider-Man and he’s Uncle Ben.”

  “Life has stories in it, too, Sandra. That’s where stories come from, right?”

  “Oh my god. How’s your stupid son? Never mind, I don’t care.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Sorry. Kind of. Let’s get coffee.”

  WHEN I FIRST KNEW I was on Tinsley’s trail, THAT there was a high chance she was exactly where I thought she was, I fooled myself into thinking I could go find her and then cover her right up again. No call to the cops, no somber reburial ceremony a couple weeks later with Ellen and Kylie at my side, no nondenominational guy in black saying some words while we finally gave Tinsley Schultz a resting place in the real world, not in the nightmare zone where Jason Shurn had left her.

  I’d be found out, and not on my terms, if I called Tinsley in like the rest of them. An extra body in an ancient grave—that’s the kind of thing even the laziest cop starts to ask questions about, no matter how old the crime is. It’d be a news story that would get the police looking extra hard for the person making those calls. Especially when there’s a wealthy ex-CEO guy involved, even if he never made much of a tech-news imprint, just a lot of money when he cashed out. And especially when the serial is as infamous as Jason Shurn.

  But of all the bodies I’d brought out of the dirt and into the light again, was I really going to let my own sister-in-law—flesh of the woman who’d brought me out of my own darkness and into a life with her and our daughter—was I really going to let her, of all of them, stay underground?

  Of course not. It was all I could do to wait another week, a week of Ellen talking about the store in vague terms but letting me know, just hinting, that plans were further along than I thought. A week of taking Kylie to swim practice, picking her up from school, letting the peace in the household resume. Tinsley didn’t come up, and Kylie didn’t ask me any more questions about Jason Shurn. And I resisted the temptation of driving up on Friday, even when Ellen made it hard for me not to by mentioning the significance of the date.

  “Twenty years,” she said to me over coffee, after I’d come back from leaving Kylie at the pool and grabbing a couple extra hours of sleep for myself. My internal clock was still reeling from the adrenaline spikes and interrupted sleeps around the Winnie Mae Friedkin dig. I was getting old, and needed at least a week to get back on schedule.

  “I know,” I said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. No.” Ellen shivered over her mug, her hair dry and pinned back and her office makeup on, a pore-blankening foundation, soft pink on her lips, and a thing with mascara that changed the way the zone between her hair and forehead looked in a way I couldn’t quite understand. “Twenty years.”

  “You really should just not go in to work.”

  “Seems tacky to take a sick day in the middle of two weeks’ notice. I’m supposed to help train the new guy, and he’s really, really slow on the uptake. Byron something. Has the right degree and managed to escape without a single skill or useful instinct.” Ellen was so efficient at work that her bosses took for granted that her job was easy—but the delicate mixture of financial and people skills, the judging, weighing, rejecting, the management of grief and failure—being a loan officer who actually gave a shit would be beyond me, and beyond most people. Not Ellen.

  “Don’t go in, okay?”

  She didn’t. She went up to bed again, assuring me she was okay but wanted
to be alone, holed up with the records she and Tinsley used to listen to, away from any media or internet or texts talking about “Tinsley Schultz: 20 Years to the Day Since She Disappeared.” (None of the papers, and nothing I could find online, did talk about Tinsley. I made that headline up. I wish someone had used it, but the papers forgot her two weeks after she disappeared, remembered her again when Shurn was arrested, and forgot her all over again when he was executed.)

  It was hard not to leave that day for the dig, to close the shape of the ritual, taking Tinsley out of the ground on the anniversary of the day she was put into it. But I didn’t. I made dinner and I told Kylie to grab a cab home. We watched a Liam Neeson movie as a family without any of us saying a single word about Tinsley.

  It was the next morning that I decided to do it.

  I showered and went downstairs, where Ellen was midworkout. “Going to Federal Way for a bit,” I said to her. She was laboring on the elliptical we kept behind a curtain in the living room. It had a clear sightline to the TV, and she was watching an ancient rerun of Oprah. Judging by Oprah’s weight and hairstyle, probably early nineties.

  “What the hell is in Federal Way that you can’t get here?” She could have been talking at me from the couch, the way her voice sounded; she was in exceptionally good shape. Cardio, toning, the lot. My shoulders and lower back were already aching in anticipation of the shoveling to come.

  “There’s a guy out there, owns a few goats. I met him at the farmer’s market that time we got the pepper plant. He said he’d sell me raw goat cheese anytime I actually drove up to his farm—I’m not sure how legal or not it is. Supposed to taste way better. Plus, Kylie has that little swim meet at the school, and you’ve got your Gary meeting today, right? I figured you’d be busy with that.”

  “I am. Thought I might rope you into tagging along, though,” Ellen said, ratcheting up the intensity of her workout. Her ponytail whipped her in the face. She shook her head and blew out of the corner of her mouth to put it back in place.