Don't Ever Forget (Adler and Dwyer)

by Matthew Farrell

  “You’ve built a legacy, James,” Cindy replied. “You’ve changed lives. More than you can ever know.” She took his hand and placed the ticket in his palm. “If you try hard enough, I believe you can remember the kind of man you were. You can remember the things you’ve done and the lives you’ve come in contact with. You just have to will it to be. Close your eyes. Smell the ticket. Feel its edges. Bring yourself back there. Open your mind.”

  He closed his eyes and brought the ticket stub up to his nose, inhaling deeply, smelling the paper and the ink and the dust, waiting for a memory to surface. Something. Anything.

  “Annie Tolas played the lead,” Cindy whispered.

  He was a teacher. He put on the production.

  “Do you remember Annie?”

  Beaverdale. Pennsylvania. Forest Hills.

  “Annie Tolas. The kids. Your kids. Your students.”

  Blackness. Just pure blackness.

  “Remember.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  He opened his eyes and put the ticket back in Cindy’s hand. “There’s nothing. I’m sorry.”

  Footsteps climbed down the basement stairs, and they both turned to find the man hopping onto the bottom landing. “Bedtime,” he said.

  James nodded and looked at Cindy, who was looking at him. “I know you want to make me remember. I don’t think I’m capable.”

  “But you have to. You have to remember.”

  “Why?”

  “You need to know who you were in this life. It’s important.”

  “Why is it important?”

  “It just is. It’s everything.”

  The man came up behind him and grabbed the handles of the wheelchair. “Say good night, Cindy.”

  Cindy’s entire body sagged. “Good night.”

  They watched as she walked back up the stairs. When she was out of sight, the man wheeled him toward the bed.

  “You okay?” he asked, his voice lowering to a whisper.

  James shrugged. “As good as I can be.”

  The man unstrapped the belts around his legs and lifted him into the bed. He helped him change into his pajamas and helped him with his bedpan.

  “How’s your face?”

  “It hurts.”

  “What’d she tell you happened?”

  “She said I fell and hit my head on the floor.”

  The man took the bedpan and placed it on the floor. He leaned over and adjusted the blanket. “That’s not what happened.”

  “Then how did I hurt my face?”

  “You didn’t. David hit you.”

  James looked at the man, his mind swirling in the darkness of his memories. “Who’s David?”

  The man stood up and placed his hands on his hips. “Look, I’m probably the only friend you have here, so pay attention. I’m trying to help you. You’re in the middle of something very serious, and you need to remember those names Cindy keeps asking you about. She needs some closure before all of this ends. She’s owed that much.”

  James tried to follow the conversation. “I have to remember.”

  “Yes. Your memories are in there somewhere, so figure out how to tap into them and tell her what she needs to know.”

  “Why did David hit me?”

  The man ignored the question and turned out the light on the nightstand. When the basement was dark, he placed a piece of paper in James’s hand, then made his way to the stairs.

  “Good night, James.”

  James waited until he heard the door shut above him, then reached up and turned the lamp back on. With fumbling fingers he unfolded the paper and read it carefully, feeling both confusion and fear.

  THEY’RE NOT WHO YOU THINK THEY ARE

  43

  The house was quiet. Cindy sat on the couch in the living room. Trevor sat on one of the overstuffed armchairs across from her. She noticed a few framed pictures of his wife and his son and wondered where they were at that very moment. She hoped they were okay and prayed they could all get out of this alive.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out who Hagen is since this whole thing started,” Trevor said, leaning up, his elbows resting on his knees. “At first I figured it was someone who has contacts in the medical field, because how else would he be able to promise an organ transplant to Rebecca’s mother? I also thought medical field because Rebecca was the first person he contacted, and she was always in and out of the hospital with James.”

  “Trevor—”

  “But that’s where I went wrong. Think about it. What’s the motive for one of his doctors to want James to confess to what he did? There is none. If they found out about his crimes, they’d just report him to the police and move on to their next patient. It’s not like James would be the first criminal these doctors ever had to deal with. There’s no incentive for them to keep his secret. There’s no point.”

  “So, you don’t think it’s a doctor?”

  “Who has the most to gain by playing this ridiculous game? It’s David. He had access to the old man through his sister. Rebecca could’ve passed him medical files or session notes from any one of his doctors because she was required to be up on everything that was going on. She was James’s full-time nurse, which meant she had total access to his house and everything in it. We already know she went through his personal stuff when he was sleeping. That’s how she found the compartment in the floor, which led to her finding the photo album and scrapbook, which led to Sonia, which led to you. But what if this all started years ago, and it took this long to get everything they needed in order to pull this off? Could be how they found out about me. No one else knows about me and James. They had to have found something at his house.”

  Cindy nodded as she began putting the pieces of the puzzle together. He was making sense. “But that would mean the promise of the organ transplant for David’s mother is a lie.”

  “Yeah, I think it is. I think it’s a lie to get us on his side so it seems like we’re all in this together. Then he can get to what he really wants, which is the story. That’s why he’s giving you time to get the truth from James. He needs that for his book.”

  “Okay, but why? Why does he care about James’s story? He has no ties to James like we do, so why is he kidnapping your family and trapping us here? Why go through all this?”

  “For the drama of it all.” Trevor stood up and began pacing the room. “It makes for one hell of a drama, right? The kind of true crime story that could launch a writing career and put a lot of money in his pocket. Might even sell the movie rights to something like this. I think he wants to write about what happened, what’s happening, and, like I said, he needs James’s confession. He needed me for location. He knew you were obsessed. He could hear it in your podcasts and blogs about your sister. He knew you’d already done a lot of research on your sister, but you never had the actual guy. Well, he handed you the man, and now he has proof about the other kids too. Once you were presented with the identity of your sister’s killer, your obsession to learn the truth would only get stronger. So he chose the one person you’d believe was legit to deliver that identity to you.”

  “Rebecca.”

  “Exactly. He knew if he got the old man in front of you, you wouldn’t stop until you got his confession. I think Rebecca agreed to be part of this so she could make sure we were taking care of James and that he remained healthy. But things started backfiring from day one. And now David’s scrambling. He’s panicking. I think he knows the cops are going to figure it all out, and he needs the full story before they close in. Once he gets that, we all go down. Me. You. My family. Everyone.”

  Cindy began shaking. She hugged her arms and tried to process what Trevor was telling her. “So what do we do?”

  “David’s coming here later. You keep him busy. Tell him I went to bed early. I’m going to go to his house and poke around. See what I can find. The more we know, the more we can control things on our side.”

  “You can’t leave
. What if someone spots you and calls the police?”

  “I have to take that chance. It’s the only way to try and learn something. If David is Hagen, we need to know.”

  He was right. And wasn’t it in their interest to take back some control of this situation from Hagen if they could? After all, she and Trevor were the ones who were on the hook for three deaths—three deaths she’d never imagined. They had to protect themselves.

  “All I ever wanted my entire life was to give my sister some kind of closure. I just wanted to know that she hadn’t simply vanished into thin air. That’s all. I didn’t want this. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “Too late. You’re in it.”

  She stared at Trevor for a long while before speaking. “You know Hagen wanted you for more than just your location. This,” she said, gesturing around the room, “isn’t worth kidnapping your family for. If Hagen is really David, your relationship with James was much more important. Makes a nice little twist in his book.”

  Trevor fell back in his seat and folded his hands in front of him. “There is no relationship between me and James, and if David thinks he can play with my emotions because the old man is my father, he’s mistaken. The person in that basement is a stranger, as far as I’m concerned. He can live or die, and it won’t make a difference. Getting my real family back—my wife and son—is my only priority.”

  44

  Susan burst through the double doors of the autopsy room to find Emily Nestor standing over the body of a woman the entire department had thought was Rebecca Hill.

  “I got here as fast as I could,” she panted, trying to steady her breathing.

  “I could’ve conferenced you in from the barracks.”

  “No. I need to see this for myself.”

  Susan walked around the table and looked at the woman for a second time. The large lumps on her forehead and just below the left cheek from where she’d been beaten gave the shape of the face a kind of deformity. One eye remained closed, and her lips were still double the size they should’ve been. She took out her phone and pulled up the picture of Rebecca Hill from her driver’s license, holding it next to the victim’s face. Between Rebecca being about ten years younger in the picture and the swelling in the victim’s face, there was no way to positively identify the person. Everyone had assumed it was her since the height, weight, general build, and skin color matched, and the body had been found in Rebecca’s car with Rebecca’s purse. That assumption had turned out to be a catastrophic mistake.

  “Talk to me,” Susan said, putting her phone away. “How did you find out this wasn’t Rebecca Hill?”

  “The prints didn’t match,” Dr. Nestor replied. She snatched a file from her desk and handed it over. “Plus, we got Ms. Hill’s medical files sent to us earlier. Still waiting on Darville’s. Turns out Rebecca Hill broke her ankle when she was in her twenties. ER report said she broke it after hopping off the back of a motorcycle while it was still going. I checked the body for the fracture. Wasn’t there.”

  “So who is this?”

  “I don’t know. As soon as we found out this wasn’t who we thought it was, I took this person’s prints and fed them back into the database. No hits in the county, so I’m running it through NCIC. Still waiting on those results.”

  Susan paged through the file and looked at the prints taken from the person they’d fished out of Rebecca’s car and compared them to the next page, which had Rebecca’s prints taken from her employment records and the ones they’d lifted from her apartment. Dr. Nestor was right. They weren’t close. Even with Susan’s untrained eye she could see that the loops and arches weren’t the same.

  “Did you find anything else we should be aware of?” Susan asked, closing the file.

  Dr. Nestor shook her head. “No. My initial inclination that she was strangled and dead before she went into the trunk was confirmed through the autopsy. The hyoid bone in her neck was indeed broken, and there was no water in her lungs. She was dead before she hit the lake.”

  “But we don’t know who she is.”

  “Not at this point. Hopefully, we’ll get a hit on her prints. Maybe you guys will hear something about her being missing, but there was nothing on her person that you hadn’t already bagged, and according to the report, it all belonged to Rebecca Hill. There were no unique features on the body. No weird piercings or tattoos or birthmarks. Nothing like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Whoever she is, she was used to make us think she was Rebecca.”

  “But why?” Susan asked. She began to walk around the body as she talked. “Whoever was trying to pass her off as Rebecca would know we’d eventually find out it wasn’t her, right? It’s not like we’d turn the body back over to the family, and they would be tricked into burying her as Rebecca. Eventually the truth would come out just like it did.”

  “Yeah, but we were never meant to find the body and make the mistake in the first place,” Dr. Nestor replied. “If the car had been dumped in a deeper section of the lake, this would all be moot. Rebecca would still be missing. Darville would be missing. So would her car.”

  “Okay. And this person matches Rebecca’s height, build, skin color, and weight. She was pretending to be Rebecca.”

  “And now she’s dead.”

  The two women looked at each other, the fluorescent lighting making both of them appear pale and sickly.

  “Darville is suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s,” Susan said. “Is it possible that this woman could’ve been playing the role of Rebecca for an extended period of time without him realizing it?”

  “Sure. If enough time passed or the disease was acute enough, he’d have a hard time remembering specific features anyway. It wouldn’t take much to pull that off.”

  “So she let the perps in, they find whatever it was they were looking for in the floor, they kidnap Darville, and when they didn’t need this girl anymore, they kill her and cover up the fact that she’d been playing the role of Rebecca by dumping everything associated with the ruse in the lake.”

  “Sounds like it could be right.”

  “Then where’s the real Rebecca?”

  Dr. Nestor smiled. “I was just going to ask you the same thing.”

  Susan handed the file back and began to run out of the examination room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Timelines,” Susan shouted over her shoulder. “I need new timelines.”

  Susan dialed David Hill’s cell phone as she walked to her car.

  “Hello?”

  “David, this is Investigator Adler.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “When was the last time you and your mother saw Rebecca?”

  “What?”

  “The exact last time you and your mother saw Rebecca. For dinner or whatever. When? Think.”

  He paused for a moment. “About three or four weeks ago?”

  “Which is it? Three or four?”

  “I’d have to check my phone.”

  “Okay, do it. I’ll hold.”

  She waited and could hear him fumbling with his phone.

  “We saw her for church on October tenth. So, about a month.”

  “No calls since?”

  “Sure. Texts and calls. We went over that already.”

  “What was the last communication you got from her?”

  “I spoke to her on Wednesday. When my mom got out of the hospital.”

  “And, according to your mom, she heard from Rebecca two days prior to the incident with the trooper.”

  “If you say so. What’s going on?”

  Susan climbed into her car and shut the door. She jammed the key into the ignition and started the engine. “I’m not sure yet, but the one thing I can tell you is that the woman we pulled out of your sister’s trunk isn’t Rebecca. I don’t know where your sister is, but she’s not in the morgue.”

  She could hear David take a quick, unsteady breath. “Is my sister alive?”

  “
I don’t know. But I’m sure as hell going to find out.”

  TRANSCRIPT

  The years passed, and the frenzy of two missing girls in a small town soon gave way to the general theory that they were both dead and would never be found. Before long, the residents of West Finley moved on with their lives, and the stories of Tiffany Greene and Sonia Garland became nothing more than warnings to the other children about talking to strangers or accepting rides from people you didn’t know. Parents used phrases like “You don’t want to end up like Sonia or Tiffany” to drive home points about being responsible and always knowing your surroundings. Their tragic tales became folklore, a secret every small town seemed to have, a story told around campfires at night.

  The police had given up within months of the girls disappearing. Local authorities had called in the state police, and when Sonia’s disappearance looked like it could be something serial, the state police called the FBI to come take a look at their case. None of them stayed long. There was no evidence to track. No suspects to look into. Noreen and I had made sure of that.

  Noreen and Jackson gave their statements, just like Tiffany’s folks had done some months earlier. Noreen had tried to hold it together, but the cracks in her facade were beginning to show, and the change in the woman I’d fallen in love with had become palpable. The people in town chalked it up to a despondent mother unwilling to accept what had happened to her daughter, but I knew there was something more. There was a period when Noreen stopped doing the normal things a person does. She stopped bathing and eating and would go days without leaving her bedroom. When we spoke on the phone, it was as if I were talking in a different language. She couldn’t keep up with the simplest of conversations. I could see her sanity fraying as the reality of what she’d done began to overtake her. It was all she thought about and all she talked about whenever I could get her out of the house. Over the course of the next three years, her condition remained the same, and the time we spent together was more therapy session than the stolen moments of passion we used to share so intimately. I was starting to grow concerned that her flailing grip on reality would force her to confess, which would implicate me as well. I’d learned to live with my sins, as disgusting as they were. I did this by completely shutting out the images of what we’d done and replacing them with the same fantasy we’d fed the town. The girls went missing, and it was a tragedy. Sometimes it worked. Not always. But Noreen had become a true liability, and I was scared. Yet even in that fear, I never imagined I’d witness what happened next. It never even crossed my mind.