Darkness My Old Friend

by Lisa Unger

  “What bothers me the most is that you know how important it is to me that you continue your therapy. I sat right here and told you.” She tapped the dining-room chair for emphasis. “And you just don’t care.”

  “I didn’t stop therapy, Maggie,” he said. “I just rescheduled an appointment. You’re overreacting.” It was a lie. He hadn’t rescheduled.

  She put her hands on her hips, gave him a flat look. “When? When’s your appointment?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What time?”

  “Four.”

  She gave him a quick, skeptical glare.

  “I have a patient,” she said. She took the cup of coffee on the counter and moved toward the door that connected their house to her office and waiting room.

  “I do care,” he called after her. “It’s important to me, too.”

  She turned back to look at him. He didn’t like the look on her face-sad, disappointed. He could have handled angry and annoyed. That he was used to; wives were always annoyed with their husbands, weren’t they? Her angry frown might easily melt into a smile or a little laugh. But sad? That was dangerous.

  “You know what?” she said. “I’m not sure I believe that. I think if you start getting work like this from the department, you’ll let it swallow you back up. You’ll forget that you have work to do on yourself.”

  She was right, of course. He could feel already the blessed relief of being busy with work. All the navel-gazing was getting old. “I thought you wanted me to do this. You said it would be good for me.”

  She rolled her eyes at him like he was some kind of moron.

  “Not if you use it as an excuse to avoid everything else. And P.S.,” she said. “Dr. Dahl’s office called to ask when you wanted to reschedule the appointment you’d canceled.”

  He didn’t say anything, tried for a sheepish grin. She didn’t melt for him.

  “So now we’re lying to each other?” she asked.

  But she didn’t wait for an answer. The door closed behind her, and she was gone. She was one to talk about disappearing into work.

  He was remembering their encounter as he pulled up to the Holt house. He could see Holt’s truck parked in the drive. The house had an aura of abandonment. Even the For Sale sign in the yard looked hopeless, stranded in a sea of weeds.

  He’d already talked to Chuck about the hole in the Hollows Wood. Chuck would need a warrant to bring a team back there, but there wasn’t much to go on. And that would mean officially reopening the Marla Holt case, which he wasn’t ready to do.

  Jones suggested that it was private land and if they could get the Grove family to let them dig, that might be the way to go. Just quietly send a couple of guys with shovels back there. If there was nothing there, then no harm done. They hadn’t made a ruckus for no reason. But if there was something, it wouldn’t look as if they’d put convenience before crime solving. Chuck had been skeptical; he couldn’t imagine the Groves cooperating with the Hollows PD.

  Jones had pulled one of their cousins from a mine shaft a year back, and the family never forgot a kindness.

  “Should I call in a favor?” he’d asked Chuck. Chuck had wanted Jones to talk to Holt first, catch the vibe. Was he a dog with a bone? Or did Jones think the kid was just going to give up and leave town once the estate was settled? In other words: Would this go away?

  In an understaffed department, Chuck didn’t want an open cold case cluttering up the board. If Jones were still heading the division, he’d feel the same way. Mainly because that was how Chief Marion Butler ran the department. She liked the board clean, cases solved or closed. She frowned upon reopening cases, unless a wrong could be righted, an injustice reversed.

  But as a free agent, Jones didn’t have any of those concerns. And though he wouldn’t have said the Marla Holt case bothered him, now that the questions were being asked again, he wanted some answers. He was starting to remember the uneasy feeling he’d had while investigating. Like a rotting smell of unknown origin, something that couldn’t be cleaned or aired out, something that lingered. But the younger Jones Cooper didn’t always follow his instincts.

  He got out of his car and walked up the drive. In his pocket his phone started to vibrate. He took it out to see Paula Carr’s number flashing on the screen. He hit the “ignore” button. He had some feelers out for Cole Carr’s mother but hadn’t heard anything back. He couldn’t talk to Paula Carr and focus on what he was doing now. He wasn’t a multitasker and didn’t know how people ever concentrated on anything with something always beeping and ringing in their pockets-e-mail, text messages, that idiotic Spacebook or MyFace or whatever it was that Ricky seemed to like so much. Dad, you and Mom need a page. It’s a great way to stay in touch… How about we just talk on the phone, son?

  His son’s generation seemed to think that everyone needed to know what you were doing, thinking, feeling, every single second. He couldn’t figure out if it was narcissism or fear-the idea that everyone wanted to know you were on your way to the mall or the idea that if you are alone in your own head with your own thoughts and plans that you are somehow invisible, dispensable. If you are not part of the wild, rushing current of information, then you are swallowed by it whole, you disappear. When Jones was a kid, there was none of this. There wasn’t even a cordless phone in his house, growing up. If he’d wanted privacy, he stretched the long cord from the phone to the headset and stood in the pantry. Even then sometimes he could hear his mother quietly pick up the extension in her bedroom. Abigail could never let him have an inch of space to himself.

  As he walked up the driveway, he thought about how he could have called before he left the house to reschedule that appointment. But he didn’t. There was a mean, stubborn place inside him that wouldn’t allow it. He would reschedule-when he was good and goddamn ready.

  He lifted his hand to knock on the Holt door and found it ajar; it drifted open with a creak under his hand.

  “Hello? I’m looking for Michael Holt.”

  He steadied the door with one hand and knocked with the other. Still, when he let it go, the door swung open until a hallway, lined with stacks of newspapers, lay ahead of him. He found himself reaching to rest his hand on the gun he wasn’t carrying. It was his training to do this when entering a building where an unknown threat might be lurking. But he didn’t carry his gun every day anymore, as he had when he was on the job.

  Ricky would have been proud of his old man. Jones had Googled Michael Holt last night, interested in what Henry Ivy had said. Jones had found an elaborate website, designed by Holt himself, detailing various mine locations, histories, lots of photographs of tunnels and abandoned entrances. The site offered Michael as a tour guide, a guest speaker, and a “consultant for filmmakers, novelists, and television producers.” Everybody wanted to be a star these days; it was never enough merely to be good at what you did. But maybe that was just Jones being a cynic, although on this point Maggie agreed with him. You couldn’t simply have an interest in mines, do the work you loved, and try to make a good living. You had to have your own reality television show. Kids badly behaved? Need a new house, want to be a rock star, a supermodel, want to protect the whales? They’ll make a show about you, and people will watch.

  Michael Holt had dedicated the site to his mother: Mom, we’re still waiting for you to come home.

  “Hello?”

  Jones could hear banging deep inside the house, and although he had no business entering, that’s what he did. He followed the sound down the hallway; the space had been reduced to a narrow tunnel; Jones’s shoulders touched on both sides as he made his way through. He was about halfway down the hall when the stench hit him, some stultifying combination of rotting food and urine. It stopped him like a concrete wall. There was a closed door at the end of the hallway, light shining through the bottom and sides.

  “Hello?”

  The banging stopped abruptly. Suddenly he felt like he was in another space and time. The light from outs
ide seemed not to have followed him in. The place was dank and dark, and the air seemed to grow thin. Then the door opened and a huge form dominated the space. Jones found himself taking a step back.

  “Who’s there?” the form asked.

  But Jones couldn’t find his voice. Something-the dust in the air, maybe-had coated his throat. He started to cough and couldn’t stop as the form approached. He turned and walked to the foyer, stepped outside into the cool air. When Michael Holt stepped out after him, Jones saw earnest apology on his face.

  “I’m sorry. I’m in the middle of fixing up the kitchen, kicking up some dust, I guess,” said Michael. “Can I get you some water?”

  Jones held up a hand. Through the coughing he managed to get out, “I’m okay.”

  “Are you interested in the house?”

  Jones glanced over at the sign on the lawn, which flapped lightly in the wind like a sad wave good-bye.

  “No,” he said. He’d found his voice. “I’m Jones Cooper. I was the original investigator on your mother’s disappearance back in 1987. I’m doing some consulting for the police department, going over my old files.”

  “Are they reopening her case?” Holt asked. He looked so young, so nakedly hopeful, that Jones felt ashamed for a minute, though he couldn’t have said why.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “I think I remember you,” said Holt. His eyes were no less startling than they had been. Jones remembered that the kid had been tall for his age, but as an adult Holt seemed huge, was massive about the shoulders. He’d let his hair grow long. It hung wild around his face. He had a smear of dirt on his cheek, presumably from whatever project had him banging away in the kitchen. There was something weird about him, a kind of boyishness in spite of his size. Not in a cute way.

  “I just had a few questions.” Jones forced a single hard cough to clear his throat once and for all. “Do you have the time?”

  It looked to Jones as if Michael Holt had nothing but time.

  Michael led him through the filth to the sitting room, an oasis in a sea of garbage. He offered Jones something to drink, and when Jones declined, Holt squeezed himself into one of the small chintz chairs, motioning Jones over to the couch.

  “I’m sorry for the condition of the place. My father was a hoarder, I guess.”

  There was a show about that on television, too, wasn’t there? People who collected and stored things, buried themselves alive in garbage? It was a condition, a mental illness or something. Jones had seen pictures of Holt climbing through tunnels and squeezing himself into narrow passages. Now he imagined Holt spelunking through mounds of garbage, sifting through the debris in his father’s house. Hard hat, headlamp, waders.

  “I’ve been going over my notes from back then. You were at a sleepover the night your mother left, as I remember,” said Jones.

  “That’s right,” Michael said. Jones noticed a sheen of sweat on the other man’s brow. Michael wiped it with his sleeve.

  “But you came home about ten. Rode your bike from the neighbor’s place. Is that how you remember it?”

  Michael looked out the window, up at the ceiling. Anyplace, apparently, but at Jones. When Jones had first arrived, Michael, in spite of the striking nature of his physical appearance, seemed open, engaged. In this room, in that chair, surrounded by his mother’s things, Michael seemed to be drifting, closing off.

  “Did you see your mother then?”

  “No,” he said. “I just went to my room and went to sleep.”

  “Why did you come home?”

  Michael was staring at Jones. Some people might have found the young man’s gaze menacing. But Jones could sense its vacancy. Michael was looking in, not out.

  “I just did that sometimes, you know,” he said. He ran his hand through his hair. “Wanted to be in my own bed, you know what I mean?”

  “Of course.”

  Jones had no idea what he meant. As a kid he’d slept away from home as often as possible. He jumped at any opportunity to spend time away from his mother, from her need and criticism, the constant litany of her complaints and worries. He didn’t recall Ricky ever coming home from a night away, either, or making weepy calls from camp, like so many kids did.

  “Do you remember anything about that night?” he asked. “Things you didn’t want to say then?”

  Michael picked up a snow globe that held a New York City scene, turned it in his hand. After a few moments, it became obvious that he wasn’t going to answer. Jones cleared his throat. And Michael looked at him, startled, as though he’d forgotten that Jones was there.

  “I noticed that your desire to reopen your mother’s case coincides with your father’s passing,” Jones said eventually. “I just wondered about that.”

  Holt still stayed quiet, kept turning that snow globe.

  “Did you find something here?” Jones asked.

  Finally Michael seemed to come back. “I heard voices that night. They were fighting, I think.”

  “Did you leave your room to investigate?” Jones asked.

  “No. I never did. They weren’t happy with each other. They had a terrible marriage, always fighting.”

  “What did they fight about?”

  Holt blew out a breath. “I don’t know. What do married people argue about? Money-she spent too much, he didn’t make enough. He was always gone, leaving her alone with us. Like I said, they just weren’t happy together. She didn’t love him. All those arguments, whatever they were about, were about that, I think.”

  Holt tapped out a staccato rhythm with his right foot. Jones kept quiet.

  “Coming back here,” said Holt, “seeing this place, looking at her things-I just want to know what happened to my mother. We’ve hired people over the years. No one has ever found a trace of her. I feel like if there are answers, they’re here in The Hollows.”

  “That’s why you hired Ray Muldune and Eloise Montgomery?”

  Holt leaned forward in that too-small chair. His face had taken on the open expression again, the normal one.

  “The Hollows PD kind of blew me off. Eloise knew my mother, used to baby-sit for me and my sister. She’s got this ability, supposedly.” He lifted his shoulders, looked out the window again. “She tried to talk me out of it. Did they tell you that? She said that sometimes people don’t like what they find when they start asking old questions. She said maybe I should just consider letting my mother go. But I insisted, and they agreed to take the case. Well, Muldune did. But they don’t seem to be getting anywhere, either.”

  “Is that why you were digging back in the woods?”

  Michael Holt turned those eyes on Jones. Jones couldn’t say what he saw there now, but he didn’t like it.

  “Where did you hear that?” Michael asked. His voice was flat.

  “There aren’t too many secrets in The Hollows,” said Jones. He kept his answer purposely vague, not wanting trouble for the girl. “And that’s private land.”

  “It’s my work to study and record the mines in this area.” Holt recounted the legend that he had already shared with Bethany Graves. Again, even in Holt’s retelling, it didn’t ring true. And Jones had not been able to find anything about it on the Internet.

  When Holt was done, Jones asked, “Is there a mine where you were digging? I didn’t see a shaft head or any other evidence of a tunnel.”

  A slow, easy blink. He could see Holt processing the fact that Jones had visited the dig site. “I didn’t find anything,” he said.

  “But why there? I’m curious.”

  Michael shifted in his seat. “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

  Jones nodded. “I get those, too. So your work-you’re a historian, a tour guide?”

  Michael Holt picked at a fleck of something on his pants.

  “I guess I’m both of those things,” he said. “I’m trying to record a fading history. The earth, soil, is like a slow-moving liquid. It falls and flows like water; it covers things and washes them away, buries
them deep. I’m trying to photograph what I can, write down the lore and legend, make a record. I have a website. I’m working on a book.”

  Jones offered a slow, considering nod. The guy was in his late thirties, unmarried, crawling around in mines, still looking for his lost mother.

  “So there’s a living in that?” That’s the kind of comment that would have drawn a frown from his wife. Invasive, belligerent, that’s what she’d say. You’re not a cop anymore, she’d remind him.

  “I get by,” Holt said vaguely.

  I can see that, Jones thought but didn’t say. He bet if he started digging into the guy’s financials, employment history, credit records, he’d find that Michael Holt didn’t have a penny to his name. This house and whatever he had inherited from his father were probably the total of his assets.

  “My father and I were estranged,” Holt said. “I’ve always believed he was hiding something from us about my mother’s disappearance. Now that he’s gone, I want to know what it was.”

  Jones opted for silence again. People didn’t like silence. They rushed to fill it.

  “I don’t think she would have run off on us,” Michael went on. “Maybe him. But not us. She always told me that I was the center of her world, that she couldn’t live without me. And for her never to contact us in all these years? It’s not right. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t have left me.”

  Jones heard the pitch of petulant rage, the anger of a young boy. It was right beneath the surface, eating this guy alive. Jones found himself remembering Michael’s lurking form back in 1987, how he hung at the top of the stairs. He was big, powerful, even then.

  He didn’t ask, wouldn’t have asked him. But Holt said, “I think she’s dead.”