by Lisa Unger
I had also found something else: the location of Luke’s next clue.
Then one night, her son returned
His mind ruined by secrets and lies.
He started digging beneath the earth
Where the truth so often hides.
There was a slew of articles about Cooper’s first case as a private investigator, a cold case. A woman named Marla Holt had gone missing back in the eighties, and she was never found. There was always some suspicion surrounding the husband, but ultimately, because she had been having an affair, the police concluded that she’d run off on her family.
Last year, after the husband died, her son returned to The Hollows hoping to find out exactly what had happened to his mother. He discovered her body buried deep in The Hollows Wood next to an abandoned barn. And in finding her, he discovered the real truth of her death.
As I read the articles, my whole body started to shiver. Though it wasn’t quite the same set of circumstances, the similarities between that story and my own cut a deep valley of dread through me. The details, like the details of Harvey Greenwald’s suicide, just grazed the boundaries of my truth. Did he know me? Did Luke know who I was? The panic of the discovered liar was a drum beating in the back of my head. I wanted to race out the door, and go straight to that abandoned barn in The Hollows Wood. I needed to find out what he knew about me; it was a desperate and terrified drive. But I looked out my window and saw Cooper’s SUV idling in front of my building.
Like his pal Detective Chuck Ferrigno, the lead on Beck’s disappearance, Jones Cooper seemed like a nice guy. He was big and beefy, ruddy-faced and clean. He was the kind of guy who could wear a barn jacket and still look tough. He got out of the car to open the door for me. He waited until I climbed inside, then closed it carefully after me. His handshake had been warm and firm, but not too firm, the way some men use it to show how strong they are.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to take a ride with strange men?” he joked as he got into the driver’s seat. He had a scent, not cologne but something soapy, and crisp.
“Well, since Dr. Cooper seems to think you’re all right,” I said, “I figured you were a safe bet.”
“She is an excellent judge of character,” he said.
He started the engine and the big SUV rumbled to life. He pulled slowly onto the drive that led out of the school.
We passed by the crowd of volunteers still gathered in the parking lot. The gym was lit up brightly and milling with people. I knew it was where the police and Beck’s parents were running the command center. There were more news vans than there had been this morning. The story was heating up. Beck hadn’t used her phone or any of her credit cards since the day she went missing. I knew this from my last check on the Facebook page. I hadn’t heard from the police or from Beck’s parents. It seemed like I was being purposely kept out of the inner circle. But again, maybe that was just paranoia talking. Not everything is about me.
“Must be a hard time for you,” Cooper said.
I nodded, still staring out the window. I found I couldn’t use my voice, didn’t trust it not to betray me. I drew and released a deep breath.
“She’s my friend,” I said. “I hope she’s just pulling another one of her stunts. I really do.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Three-time runaway, right?”
I nodded.
“But never like this?” he said. “Causing so much worry?”
“No,” I admitted. “Usually she was in touch with someone after a day or so.”
As we pulled past the gym, I saw flashlight beams bouncing in the woods. They were still out there looking.
“Do you remember me?” he asked after a minute.
“Yes,” I said. “You worked Elizabeth’s case. You were there when they found her.”
He’d had a lot of questions for me back then. Someone said that they overheard Elizabeth and me arguing. Someone had heard me say: You can’t tell anyone, Liz. It’s not true. I didn’t have any memory of that event, just the floaty, foggy images that came back in my dreams. But there was no evidence of any foul play in Elizabeth’s death. So eventually, they dropped it.
“That’s right,” he said.
He’d been involved in a number of missing-persons cases over the course of his career, according to the Web. Though, of course, it was a small town with a small police department. So naturally, as the lead detective, he worked most of the big cases.
“Did you find anything today?” I asked. “I wanted to be out there. But—I just couldn’t go through it again.”
“I understand,” he said. “No one should have to go through a thing like that twice.”
Three times, I thought, but naturally didn’t say.
“We didn’t find anything,” he said. “Not a trace. The Hollows Wood knows how to keep a secret.”
I looked over at him to see if he was making some kind of an insinuation, but he didn’t look at me, just kept his eyes on the road. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. He was right. It did keep secrets.
By the time I’d gotten to the lookout point that night, Beck had trailed so far behind me that I figured she had turned around. I felt the unloading sensation I always felt there, as if I could drop all the bullshit of my life, put it down like a backpack filled with stone. I was glad she was gone. Part of me kept waiting for her to come through the trees, but she didn’t. And after a while I relaxed. There was a patch of icy, crunchy grass, and even though it was cold, I lay down on it, flat on my back, looking up at the stars. I could hear the breath of the wind and nothing else, not a hooting owl or critters moving over the leaves on the ground. I was bundled up tight in my wool coat, hat, hood, scarf, and gloves. So only the skin on my face was bitten by the cold.
How I craved solitude. All my life, even before the worst thing happened, even as a child, I just wanted to be alone. Out in the world, I had to hold it all in, all my dark thoughts, my anxieties, my twisted thoughts and fears. All the things that made me a misery to my mother, that caused me trouble in school, with other children. All the things that were quieted now with medication, I had to hold it all in as best I could. But alone, I could just let the tension unfurl. No eyes on me, no judgment, no whispers. They mark you, you know, when you’re different. Children can smell a freak and seek to ostracize him, eject the diseased member from the group—and rightly so. I’d be rid of myself if I could.
You might wonder why I wasn’t afraid to be alone in the haunted woods in the night. What went on inside my head was infinitely scarier. I was the monster hiding in the woods. I wasn’t afraid of anything out there.
Finally, after I lay there awhile and calmed myself down, I heard Beck moving through the trees.
“Goddammit,” she said breathlessly as she moved into the clearing. “You really like to make people work for it, don’t you?”
I was aggravated and relieved all at the same time, a familiar response to Beck’s arrival anywhere.
“I didn’t ask you to follow me, did I?” I said. I didn’t like the sound of my voice, sharp, deep, and angry.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean what I said.”
She sat herself heavily down beside me.
“I know you’re not fucking Langdon,” she went on. I still didn’t say anything. Her nearness was making me uncomfortable. She didn’t seem to notice, as usual, or care. She lay down beside me so that our faces were side by side, both of us looking up at the night sky. She reached out for my hand and I didn’t pull it away. She turned to look at me, but I kept my gaze up at the sky. It was safe and her eyes were not.
“Sometimes anger is the only emotion I can tease out of you,” she said softly. Her breath came out in white puffs.
I was quiet a minute. “How do you know I’m not?”
“How do I know you’re not what?” she asked.
“Fucking Langdon.”
“Are you?” she said, jaw dropped. I enjoyed seeing her look surprised; it was
so rare that she didn’t know everything. She was one of those people who got angry and confused when they were proved wrong, as if she couldn’t believe that her instincts might be fallible in some way. “You’re not!” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m not. He’s not my type.”
That face, that pretty, pretty face, was so close. The memory of her kiss came rushing back at me, and my body reacted in all those horrible, wonderful ways that it did whenever she was near me.
“What’s your type?” she breathed.
It was a short drive. And Jones Cooper was not the kind of guy to rush to fill a silence. Most cops know the value of keeping their mouths shut, understand that nervous people rush to fill in the quiet spaces where their anxious thoughts and guilty feelings tend to expand and become unbearable.
I thought about prying for more information about the case, but I figured it was risky. With that nonsense on Facebook, and the uncomfortable conversation I’d had with Detective Ferrigno, I figured it wouldn’t be too long before I was talking to the police again. I didn’t want Jones Cooper to have anything to add, like: She kept asking about the search, wouldn’t let it go. Even after I told her that we hadn’t found anything. I probably needed to call Sky. I was probably going to need a lawyer. Innocent people always think that they don’t need lawyers. But I knew that innocent people need them most of all.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said. We were pulling up the gravel drive of the Coopers’ lovely house. There was a warmly lit porch with a painted red swing, still a wreath on the door. In the spring, the walk to the front door and the edging along the porch were always alive with colorful perennials, cheerful and welcoming. A huge bare oak tree dominated the yard; I’d seen Cooper out there often, raking leaves. He seemed to take some satisfaction in it, had a meditative air about him as he worked. Otherwise, it was probably a job most people would hire out to a neighborhood kid. Did neighborhood kids still do jobs? Or were they too busy broadcasting themselves and their silly little lives on Facebook and playing Angry Birds?
“You have a lovely home,” I said. I had opened the car door myself, but he had come around just the same.
He looked back at it. “It’s a lot of work,” he said. “I guess I don’t always spend enough time appreciating it.”
“Thanks again,” I said. I know I felt his eyes on me. He had cop’s eyes, searching, seeing, knowing. And I felt the heat of his gaze on my shoulders as I walked into the door of Dr. Cooper’s office, which adjoined the house. I noticed, not for the first time, a plaque on the other side of the door. It read: JONES COOPER INVESTIGATIONS. And there was a separate bell for what I imagined was another office space.
“Anytime,” he called out. I turned back toward him, and he wore a slight, musing smile that I didn’t much like. He was one of those, the ones that see.
18
Dear Diary,
I keep thinking that I’ll have something nice to write here someday. But so far, that’s not the case, as you know. I’m sorry.
My husband has grown ever more distant and cold. And when he’s not an automaton in our life, our battles have become increasingly bitter, almost always escalating toward violence. He travels often now, seems to be gone more than he is here. And my son and I have grown used to living life without him. He’s a guest, a visitor, and not always a welcome one. I think there’s someone else. I wish I cared.
When you’re young and in love, you only think of the future as a bright light that you will enter together. You never imagine that the day-to-day of work and home life and children is a spinning wheel that dulls down rather than sharpens your love. I can’t even remember what I thought was so wonderful about him. I think it might have simply been that I thought he was nothing like my father.
I hate to say it, but it’s better when my husband is not here. It’s just easier, because when he’s here I have to choose between them. There is a terrible tug-of-war between father and son, and I am the rope.
You’ve got it wrong, my husband said when I expressed this idea to him. You should never have given him so much power. I am your husband. He is our child. He doesn’t get to hold one end of the rope. That’s not how it should work.
I know he’s right. When he’s home, he holds up a mirror that shows how unhealthy my relationship is to my son. And I don’t like to see it. Because it’s not like I chose this; it’s not as if I wanted things to be this way. It’s just that there’s a terrible chemistry between my son and me. His personality extracts all sorts of things from my personality that I didn’t even know were there. Dysfunction isn’t a choice, it’s a disease. In parenthood, we only do what we know how to do. What I know how to do: cater to, coddle, acquiesce, comfort, and condone. Turns out what my husband knows how to do is run. He has dropped his end of the rope. And all I feel is relief—because I can never please both of them and you can’t stop being a mother.
This is not what I’ve come to tell you, dear diary. And even as I sit here in this dim room, shame keeps me from writing. How can I tell what my son has done? I don’t even know where to begin.
A couple of weeks ago, after he went to bed, my mother and I shared a glass of wine on the back porch. It was one of those fall evenings when the heat of Indian summer has left the air, but before the chill of winter has settled in. The humidity has disappeared for the season, taking with it the mosquitoes and gnats. And the air feels like someone just lightly touching your skin. The sun had set but the sky was still glowing. I was actually feeling good. I was enjoying working part-time at a local bookstore. My son hadn’t been in trouble in his new school (of course, it was his fifth in five years and the year had just begun).
Maybe it was because she’d had more than her usual one glass of wine with dinner, or maybe it was because she’d been with him every afternoon that week while I worked.
“Darling,” she said. “I have some things I need to get off my chest.”
You have to know my mother, how easy she is, how unfailingly kind, how warm and funny. In my life, I have never heard her utter anything but the most patient and loving words. Even when my father was arrested, tried, and convicted of murdering five teenage girls while he was working as an office-equipment salesman— even when he was executed—she never said a bad word about him to my sister or me.
We had to move to another town, change our last name to my mother’s maiden name. And, thankfully, since this was long before the age of the Internet, we were able to live a seminormal life in his wake. She never uttered a word, except to say that he was a man in terrible pain, who’d done horrible, unforgivable things. But that he’d always been a loving husband and father who had provided for us. And, of course, she’d never had any idea what he really was inside.
That was a true thing that we could cling to, she’d said. And it would serve us all if we could pretend that it was another man, a stranger, who’d killed those children. Because in a sense it was. I don’t know about my sister, but that is indeed what I did. I pretended all my life that my father was not the man he was. And it worked for me.
It did not work for my sister. I secretly pitied her for how she suffered through years of therapy. I was angry with her for confronting my mother with her difficult and indignant questions: How could you not have known? And how could you counsel us to live in denial? How could you take us on a cruise the week he was executed? Did you think we could all run from the horror of our reality?
My mother just said she was sorry, but she did what she knew how to do. She was trying to protect us the only way she could. How could she have done more? There was no blueprint, no helpful book written on how to help your children move on from the murder conviction and execution of their father. Remember, she begged us, that she, too, was in terrible pain. And of course my sister and mother worked it out. I stayed away from the conversation, because I was really fine with denial, with holding it all in, pretending it never happened. That was so much easier. I wondered why my sister didn’t see that.<
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But that’s my mother, unseeing, uncomplaining, utterly accepting of the people in her life. She didn’t like to talk about unpleasant things. So, I felt my whole body stiffen as we sat on the porch.
“I’ve been doing some research,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Your sister has been helping me.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a place, a school that specializes in children like my grandson.”
“Children like him?”
“Disturbed children,” she said, looking straight at me. “Troubled children, dear. He is that. Of course you know he is.”
A little gasp caught in my throat and my eyes filled. She reached out a hand and laid it on top of my arm.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “But you need to do something. You know that your sister will never come here again with her children. Your husband has all but left you. And I have to say, I’m at my limit with his rages, and those visions—which, by the way, I don’t believe are quite sincere—and all his lies. He’s isolating you.”
I sank my head into my hand, not knowing what to say.
“There’s a school,” she said again. “They’re making some headway with children like him. There’s therapy, discipline, a different way of teaching. The children live there eight months out of the year, so it’s not forever. It’s like boarding school.”
A cold dread settled over me. What was she saying?
“I can’t send my child away, Mother,” I said softly. There was a crow sitting on the railing of our deck. He was big and jet black, looking straight at me. I tried to shoo him away, but he wouldn’t go. I couldn’t look at my mother, heard her take a swallow of wine and put her glass down on the table between us.
“He’s getting older,” she said. “And bigger. He’ll be eight next month. How much longer will you be able to control him?”
My mother was a woman of allusions, of subtleties. She was the kind of mother that led you to making the right choices and then allowed you to take all the credit. This kind of direct confrontation was not her style. How desperate she must have been, how worried.