by Kara Thomas
“Your sister’s trouble,” she says. “They all are. Don’t come around here asking about them again.”
She yells for the dogs, and they follow her inside the house. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the curtains in the window rustle. I think she watches me as I leave.
•••
Maggie’s gone when I get back, still at the Kouchinskys’, I guess. I have a text from her that says she left a key on a ledge in the shed for me, with strict instructions to hold on to it once I’m inside. The house is quiet, except for the purr of the air-conditioning unit in the living room.
I pour myself a glass of iced tea and suck it down in one breath. Then I wash the glass, dry it, and put it back in the cupboard so there’s no evidence I was in the kitchen, even though Maggie has told me hundreds of times I’m welcome to whatever I’d like.
I sit in the office chair and turn the computer on. As it hums to life, I take the now wrinkled picture of Lori that I tore out of the Gazette article out of my pocket and set it on the desk tray.
I don’t have Danny’s last name, but now I have two others—Tommy and Mike Faber. A search for their names and Fayette turns up their photographs. Or rather, mug shots.
Thomas J. Faber and Michael E. Faber of Fayette, Pennsylvania were arrested nine months before Lori Cawley’s murder and served thirty days for drug-related charges. The link accompanying the photos doesn’t work.
I search for both of the Faber boys’ names along with Lori’s name. If the police checked out the Faber family, one of the Cyber Sleuths would have gotten wind of it. There would be an entire forum dedicated to dissecting Tommy and Mike Faber’s pasts and possible roles in Lori’s murder.
But nothing turns up—even when I search directly in the forum archives. I try Cyber Sleuths, Crime Watchers, and Justice for Stokes, a site just for discussing the Monster case, before I’m out of ideas.
The day after Lori was murdered, a bunch of tips came in about a man who lived a few blocks away from the Greenwoods’. Some people had seen him driving up and down the street that morning, as if he’d been canvassing the houses. The cops cleared him after they talked to him and found out he was searching for a cat that had snuck out.
Still, the message boards are flooded with comments that the police should have looked at the guy more. They found out his name, and that he was a registered sex offender. His freshman year of college, he’d been caught in the backseat of a car with his high school girlfriend.
He should have been a suspect, the sleuths argued. They found the number to his workplace and posted it.
The man lost his job and eventually moved away from Fayette.
So if the police questioned the Faber boys about their involvement with Lori Cawley, they managed to do it without anyone finding out.
I erase the history of my searches and shut down the computer. I suppose I really should stop being an asshole and call my grandmother.
There are some things I need to ask her, anyway.
I head upstairs as I call the condo, because the chill from the AC on the first floor makes the hair on my arms stand on end. Gram picks up on the last ring before the answering machine would kick in. She’s wheezing, like she was outside in the garden maybe and had to run to catch the phone.
I feel bad, because Gram used to be terrible at picking up her phone and would take days to call people back. Then when I got to the eighth grade, I went through this phase where I thought she was dead all the time, and it was a whole big thing.
If I got home from school and Gram wasn’t home, I’d freak out and call her cell a thousand times, even though it was always either not charged or in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I’d knock on every door in the complex asking if anyone had seen her, and turn on the cable news channel in search of horrific car accidents.
One time she came strolling down the block, smiling, her pockets full of smooth white stones from the bay. She’d decided to take a walk, even though she’d never once before taken a walk in all the years I’d lived with her.
I screamed at her, “What’s the point of a frigging cell phone?”
A few months after that, when I wouldn’t stop sulking, she brought me to a child psychologist. The unofficial diagnosis was anxious-insecure attachment, with mildly depressive tendencies. They put me on five milligrams of Lexapro. “Not enough to knock a terrier out,” I heard Gram whisper on the phone to her friend June in Albany.
“Nice of you to call back,” Gram grunts, but I know she’s not really mad.
“Hi,” I say.
“Quiet without you here,” she says, which is supposed to be funny, because I barely even make noise when I fart.
“What have you been up to?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing. I’ve become one of those old people who waits for the mail every day.” Gram pauses. “Would have thought you’d be anxious to get home.”
“I am.” I pause. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
I sit on the bed and pull my legs up so I’m sitting pretzel-style. “Have you heard from my mom?”
Gram’s labored breathing fills my receiver. “You know I would’ve told you if I had. Nettie and I have our differences, but it’s not my place to keep your mother from you.”
I nod, even though Gram can’t see me, and trace the paisley pattern on the bedspread with my finger. “What about my sister? Did she ever contact you?”
“Tessa.” There’s a warning in my gram’s voice. “I don’t think sticking around that town is good for you. Sounds like it’s bringing back some painful memories that you’d be better off leaving behind.”
“Ten years, Gram,” I say. “Ten years and we haven’t heard a thing from them. Don’t you think that’s weird? That maybe they’re in trouble, or worse?”
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” Gram says, her voice heavy.
I grip my phone. Gather my nerve. “I want you to tell me who Joslin’s father is.”
“I told you, Tess. He didn’t want anything to do with her.”
“She came to see him,” I say. “Joslin came to see Glenn before he died. I can’t find her, but maybe she tracked down her real father too. He could know where she is.”
Gram sighs, a heavy, I’m too old for this sigh. “Honey, your heart’s in the right place, but it’s gonna get broken if you keep this up.”
My chest clenches. Gram rarely calls me honey—her stubborn refusal to use pet names is proof, in her own mind, that she really does love me. It’s just how she is. Honey is not a sign of affection. Honey is a word of warning.
And it’s not going to work on me anymore.
“I never ask you for anything,” I tell Gram, even though it cuts me up inside to play that card. “Please, for the love of God, just tell me who Joslin’s father is.”
Gram pauses. “Hold on.”
I hear her screen door slamming on the other end. There’s rustling, and I can see her as I’ve seen her a thousand times before, sitting in her rocking chair and using one foot to push back and forth off the porch as she rifles through her carton of cigarettes.
“Annette was nineteen,” Gram says. “She came to me so excited, like she was busting with good news….When she said she was pregnant, I just…I didn’t act how she’d hoped I would. I told her a baby would change her life and she better think long and hard about whether she was gonna keep it.”
Gram sucks in a breath. There’s a pause. I’ll bet anything, she’s lighting up. “The father was older. Was supposed to leave for a job on an oil rig in Louisiana. I asked your mother if that’s what she really wanted in life, to be alone with a baby in a one-bedroom apartment while he spent thirteen-hour days on the rig. But she went anyway.”
“You told me this,” I say gently, because sometimes her memory is bad. “And that’s the last time you talked to her.”
Gram exhales, and I picture the smoke tendrils coming out of her nose. “Yeah, I know. Except she called me a few months after.�
��
I freeze. This isn’t the version Gram always told before. “What are you talking about?”
“She was hysterical. Wanted me to go down to see her. She’d lost the baby.”
Lost. As in, died. The baby wasn’t Joslin.
“I told her to come home,” Gram says. “I begged, Tess, and you know I don’t do that. But she wanted to make it work with Alan, even though he hadn’t been happy about the baby to begin with. She was devastated, and he was relieved.”
Gram sucks in a breath. “I guess when she got pregnant again, with your sister, things got a whole lot worse. By that point she was done talking to me because she didn’t like what I had to say.”
My mother lost a baby. I might have had another sibling—or, maybe that baby would have been enough for Annette and I never would have been born at all, had he or she lived. I always felt as if Joslin and I were never enough for our mother—that we never measured up to what my mother thought having children would be like.
But now that I know about the first baby, it seems like we never had a chance at all.
“Do you remember Alan’s last name?” I ask.
“Oh, Tessa. It was twenty-five years ago. Of course I don’t remember.”
If she’d hesitated just half a second less, maybe I’d be able to believe her.
•••
At ten after twelve, I hear the front door close. I head downstairs, where Callie is dumping her gym bag onto the living room couch. She’s in black spandex shorts and an East Stroudsburg University T-shirt. She’s always wearing ESU stuff, like the clothes are constant reminders that her time in Fayette has an expiration date.
They’re reminders to me too. All of this is going to come to an end. I can’t spend the entire summer in Fayette, and if we don’t get answers soon, I’ll be going back to Florida with more questions than I had when I came.
“Hey,” Callie says after a swig from her water bottle. “Where’s my mom?”
“At the Kouchinskys’,” I say. “She left a couple of hours ago.”
“She’s probably helping Ari’s mom clean the house and stuff, knowing her,” Callie says. “Which probably means Daryl isn’t there. He’d never allow that.”
Something occurs to me as I picture Maggie scurrying around the Kouchinskys’ kitchen, washing dirty dishes and taking inventory of the fridge before Daryl gets home.
“Do you think he knew about Ari?” I ask. “The online stuff.”
Callie shakes her head. “Daryl would have killed—” She comes to a full stop. “That’s crazy. She was his daughter.”
“I know,” I say. “But, I mean, there had to be a reason the Monster started killing again after all these years. If he found out his own daughter was one of those girls…”
Callie snorts. “Daryl Kouchinsky, the Monster?”
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling crabby. “It’s not like we have any other real suspects.”
“What about Danny?” Callie takes another swig from her water. “Did you find his last name?”
“No, but I found Joe Faber’s ex-wife,” I say. “I saw her this morning. She still lives in town, across from the abandoned church.”
Callie almost spits. “The crazy lady with the rottweilers?”
“Yeah. Her.” I sit in Rick’s armchair. “Do you remember two guys who may have hung around Jos and Lori? Tommy and Mike Faber. Danny’s friends.”
Callie shakes her head. “Lori didn’t spend time around guys when she was here.”
Not because the guys weren’t interested in her. They were. But Lori had a boyfriend, a guy from Delaware who lived in her dorm building freshman year. An engineering major. She called him every night before bed that summer, and was always talking about how she was going to take a road trip to see him at the end of July.
“Joe Faber’s ex-wife says that Lori came to their house once with Jos.” I tell Callie the story about Lori leaving alone and upset. Joslin letting her leave alone and upset.
When I see Callie’s face, the full weight of my sister’s betrayal hits me. Jos chose Danny over Lori—Danny and his dirtbag friends who had done something to make Lori feel unsafe.
But it’s the part about Melissa Lawrence bringing up the police that disturbs Callie the most.
“The Fabers just left town? And no one thought it was a big deal?”
“They had people covering for them,” I say. Possibly, one of them was my sister. “The Fabers were arrested for drug stuff here,” I continue. “Danny could have been too. I think we should go to the police station and see if it’s public record.”
Callie frowns. “As in, the Fayette police station.”
“We won’t say anything about the murders,” I say. “As far as they know, we’re only interested in information that can help us find a runaway.”
Callie’s lips part. “Joslin.”
•••
The South Fayette Township precinct is a box-shaped building the color of sand with two entrances, one for booking people who have been arrested, and one for the police department. I direct Callie to park by the latter and notice that her knuckles are white on the steering wheel. The last time we were here, we sat separately in cold rooms for hours, sipping apple juice as the detectives took down our statements.
A chill creeps up my spine.
“We’re just asking about my sister,” I tell Callie. “You don’t have to do any talking.”
“Okay.”
But I can’t ignore the acrid taste in my mouth. If there were any way around talking to the cops, of course I’d take it.
The lobby is just big enough to serve its primary purpose—accommodating people making complaints about their asshole neighbor using a leaf blower before eight a.m., or reports about stolen car radios. It’s completely nonthreatening, all white walls and linoleum. There’s a map of Fayette County on the wall next to the chairs in the waiting area. And a soda machine.
I gesture for Callie to sit while I go to the desk. There’s no one here. Just an abandoned Tupperware holding the soggy remains of a salad. A radio behind the desk blips, followed by unintelligible garble.
Then laughing. Two men. I turn to the corridor adjacent to the desk. The laughing is coming from a room down the hall, not the radio. A young guy wanders to the front desk, carrying a manila folder and chuckling to himself. He stops short when he sees me.
“Help you?”
“I need to talk to someone about a missing person.”
“Are you here to file a report?” he says, a white piece of gum flicking over his tongue.
I hesitate. “No. I’m following up on one.”
“How long ago?”
“Um. Ten years.”
The guy blinks at me, not quite knowing what to do with that. Up close, I see how young he really is. Red bumps dot his jawline. He can’t be more than a couple of years older than me. Whatever hope I had of finding someone who will take me seriously deflates. He’s not even looking at me, but is staring over my shoulder.
“Callie?” he says, looking surprised.
I turn around; Callie has sunk so low in her seat, it looks like she’s melting. Trying to disappear.
“Hey, Eli,” she says, not unkindly. He’s smiling. She’s not.
“Long time no see,” Eli says. “What’re you doing here?
“Just helping Tessa. She’s looking for her sister.” Callie says the last part slowly, deliberately. Eli’s eyes flick back to me.
“Ah, yeah,” he says. “I’m just the paperwork guy. I’ll let one of the officers know you’re here.”
Eli disappears down the hall, and I sit next to Callie, who’s flipping through a year-old issue of U.S. News & World Report without actually reading any of the pages. She sets it aside and takes out her phone. I’m not sure if my head is thrumming or if it’s just the sound of the soda machine. I focus on reading the topics of the pamphlets positioned around the waiting room. “Rape Aggression Defense Training.” “High-Risk Drinking.” �
�Safety Tips for Students.” String them all together and they tell a horror story.
“Who’s Eli?” I ask Callie.
“Ryan’s friend. He graduated a year before us.” She doesn’t look up from her phone.
“So what’s the big deal?”
Callie shifts in her seat. “I don’t want it getting out that we were here.”
She means she doesn’t want it getting back to Maggie.
There’s talking in the hallway. We look up; a plainclothes officer is escorting someone to the lobby.
“Someone here waiting to see me?”
It’s a booming male voice. Next to me, Callie has her head bent over her phone.
When I look up, I see why. The voice belongs to Charlie Volk, the detective who arrested Wyatt Stokes and told our parents that Callie and I could help put him in jail.
Charlie Volk locks eyes on me and makes a sweeping Come on back gesture. His hair is white now. His dress shirt was probably white before he sweated through it. My knees feel weak in my seat. Get up, Tessa.
I force myself to stand and look down at Callie, who’s frozen in her seat. There’s no way she’s moving. I follow Volk down the hall. He wheezes and tries to figure out how to navigate with the extra twenty pounds he’s put on since the last time I saw him. He doesn’t look back at me, and it hits me: he doesn’t know who I am.
“Sit, sit.” Volk herds me into his office. I sink into the chair across from his desk, my heartbeat hammering in my ears. He balls up a greasy napkin and tosses it into the Burger King bag on his desk before sweeping it aside.
I read that Charlie Volk was being forced into retirement after all the blowback from Unmasking the Monster. The filmmakers portrayed him as a stubborn, bumbling cop past his expiration date who couldn’t admit he was wrong about Stokes.
There was something in the papers about a lawsuit—Charlie Volk standing behind his role in the Monster case and refusing to be bullied into taking his pension and shutting his mouth. Something about a settlement…
…and Volk being relegated to desk duty.
Crap.
“So. Missing person.” Volk plops into his chair, the leather giving a little pft under him. He reaches for his computer mouse, knocking over a picture frame with his elbow. “Damn it.”