The Forgotten Girl

by Rio Youers

  “I understand,” I said, although I was horribly certain Dad was in no position to be interviewed. I’d done what I could to defend him, though. I’d fought for him because I loved him. That’s what you do.

  “So let’s get to it: the reason we’re all here.” Lambert found the edge of my personal space. His aftershave smelled like old watermelon. “Where is he?”

  I took a deep breath, then stepped around Lambert and headed toward the back of the house.

  “This way,” I said.

  Twenty-Two

  I led them to the backyard, stopping at a clearing between the shed and an old maple. I had Sharpe and Newirth train their flashlights on the ground and started kicking at the dirt and leaves.

  “It’s somewhere around here,” I muttered.

  “What are you looking for?” Lambert asked.

  “Entrance to the bunker.”

  The three cops looked with me, dragging their shoes across the dirt until it hung in a low, brown mist around our thighs, and it was Newirth who found it—felt a hollow spot in the ground and thudded his heel against it. I helped him clear the area, kicking aside leaves until we’d revealed a five-foot seam in the dirt. I dug around with my fingers and found the trapdoor’s handle: a flush-mounted ring pull. We lifted together. The earth separated with a creak, mud and stones rattling into the gaps. A moment later, the cops’ flashlights shone on several narrow steps leading to a door.

  “Well, Christ,” Lambert said, brushing dirt from his pants. “You’d never know this was here.”

  “Dad wanted to make sure it was invisible to Russian drones,” I said, emphasizing the fact that, yeah, Dad was crazy, but not the kind of crazy that raped and murdered women. “It’s a storage container, reinforced to withstand…”

  I trailed off, recalling how I’d thought of Dad’s bunker as a giant coffin. I licked my busted lips and shook my head.

  “Any surprises waiting for us down there?” Lambert asked. “Booby traps? Ravenous dogs?”

  “No,” I replied, thinking the only surprise would be to find Dad alive and well. “It’s safe.”

  Lambert didn’t appear convinced, but he started down the steps with Sharpe behind him. Chief Newirth followed, but not right away. He hovered for a second, looking at me with a curious expression. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to shake my hand or shoot me.

  “Stay there,” he said.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Lambert barked “Police! Open up!” and whapped on the door, then entered Dad’s bunker with his flashlight and weapon drawn. Sharpe and Newirth followed him in. I waited with a sickness rising and a quickness of breath. I could reel off the clichés: time stood still; minutes turned to hours. I watched dead leaves seesaw from the maple. One landed on my head, the stem snagged by my bristly hair. I plucked it free and remembered the leaf in Sally’s hair on the day she met Dad, how it had accented her verve and color, whereas this leaf was curled and old. In many ways, it embodied Sally and Dad now. A red thing. A dead thing. I dropped it to the ground where it blended with the others, then lowered my head and wiped my swollen eyes.

  I didn’t look up until I felt a hand on my shoulder. Chief Newirth. I wanted to seesaw to the ground, too.

  “I’m so sorry, Harvey.”

  * * *

  Only Dad and I knew about the bunker, and while it wasn’t as sacred to him as the lake, it was still special: his shelter from the storm. The reason he’d been killed—violated—here was because Lang and the hunt dogs wanted me to know that, in the end, Dad had no sanctuary, and no secrets. His mind had been torn apart.

  We will fuck you up, Harvey.

  Of course, it didn’t hurt that leaving the body in the bunker meant it would take the police longer to find him, and a missing suspect—a manhunt—will always grab the headlines, stamping Dad’s infamy, and his implied guilt, across the nation.

  We’ll crush everything you know and love.

  I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. My skeleton was granite, my muscles lead. Guilt and rage were two dogs fighting inside me. They growled and circled, equally vicious. I wanted to scream but there was no sound. I wanted to cry but everything was dry.

  “Come on, Harvey,” Newirth said. “You don’t need to see this.”

  On some level I recognized Chief Newirth’s voice—a distant interference, like the spikes Dad picked up on his radio telescope. I even felt his hand on my arm, but he was a thousand miles away.

  “Harvey…”

  Dad was slumped against the bunker’s far wall, which had once been pristine white but was now marked with a russet stain, broad as a peacock’s tail. The same reddish-brown color painted his upper body. The gun he’d used—that Lang had made him use—was still in his hand.

  It was Lambert who broke the spell, stomping forward with a sheet he’d ripped from one of the cots. He draped it over Dad, clumsily nudging his shoulder so that he flopped to one side. I saw the exit wound toward the rear of his skull and a part of his brain, pulp-gray.

  Lambert looked at Newirth but pointed at me. “Get him out of here.”

  “Let’s go,” Newirth snapped, taking my arm again.

  I can’t explain why I was there to begin with—why I’d blown past Newirth and down the bunker steps without pause for thought. I knew it was real; I’d known Dad was dead since being told that he’d confessed to the murders. Maybe I wanted to taste the pain, fuel myself for the fight ahead. Or maybe I wanted to witness what Lang was really capable of. Know your enemy, Sun Tzu had said. Seeing my father’s corpse—the ragged hole in the back of his skull, and now his legs extending from beneath the sheet—I’d say I knew my enemy very well.

  And on the back of this, my new violent mantra, having accompanied me from Oklahoma to New Mexico to New Jersey: Kill him. Kill the fucker.

  Before it was a spark. Now it was a flame.

  * * *

  Detective Sharpe helped Newirth lead me from the bunker, but not before I’d claimed a photograph from the box Dad had packed for me—the box in which I’d found my Book of Moments. It was the shot of me and Dad at the shore, the one where I’m doing bunny ears behind his head. I pressed my lips together to keep my jaw from quivering, then showed Sharpe and Newirth in a wistful, absentminded kind of way.

  In lieu of further condolence they nodded, then led me up the steps into the fresh night. I requested a moment alone and walked on jittery legs to the base of the maple, finding a comfortable spot among the roots. I looked at the photograph in the light pooling from the bunker, and the emotion finally broke through. Not a couple of thin tears and a whimper, but a body-clenching, mournful wail. Several of the more endearing Dad memories flickered in my mind, but the one shining brighter than all others was of the last time I saw him, standing at the top of his driveway with Michael Jackson clutched to his chest and one fist held defiantly aloft. It was a wonderful image—a real Dad image—and was accompanied by the last words he ever spoke to me: I love you, Harvey.

  I wanted to believe he’d taken his own life, because the thought of Dominic Lang in his mind was simply too awful. But suicide was not in Dad’s DNA. If it was, he’d have killed himself after losing his soul mate to cancer, or when the bandages were removed from his face, revealing the Halloween mask he’d have to wear for the rest of his life. No, this was Lang’s doing, his revenge for going against him. You’re on my radar now, he’d warned me. If you try to run away, or even consider keeping information from me … Staging Dad’s suicide was a necessary part of the plan; a dead man couldn’t retract his confession or reveal that his mind had been appropriated by the former Republican senator for Tennessee. All he could do was appear guilty, forevermore. Lang and the hunt dogs didn’t count on me being able to incriminate Swan Connor, though, and hopefully clear Dad’s name before it was dragged too deeply in the dirt. I’d like to say that lessened the pain, but it didn’t.

  * * *

  I heard a sound in the grass to my left. A timorous mewl. Some
small woodland creature, perhaps, separated from its parent or injured. I considered investigating when Chief Newirth emerged from the bunker, talking on his cell phone. I overheard the word coroner and imagined Dad’s corpse being photographed, examined, then zipped into a body bag. I wanted to be gone before that happened.

  I slipped the photograph into my back pocket and got to my feet. Stepping from beneath the maple, I heard the mewling sound again. I looked over my shoulder and saw a flash of pale fur. Despite my tiredness and grief, and every other emotion still rapping at the door, I knew exactly what—who—it was.

  I approached carefully, parting the grass like a wildlife photographer closing in on a rare shot, and there, as expected, was Michael Jackson. He whimpered. His coat was grubby and his ears low. Even so, I smiled at the sight of him.

  “Hey, Michael.” I held out my hand so that he could smell me, know me, but I didn’t need to. Maybe my voice was enough, because he sprang from the ground into my arms, nuzzling his face beneath my chin. “Okay, dude,” I said. “It’s okay now.” And all at once I was bawling again, clutching him to my chest as if I’d never let go, suddenly the only good thing in my life. The only family I had.

  Twenty-Three

  There were dead flies on the windowsill and the leaves of my plastic banana plant needed dusting. Other than that, my apartment was how I’d left it—hauntingly so, as if I’d never been away. It didn’t feel good to be back, either; I should have been in California, snuggled up with Sally in a comfortable hotel bed. Only my guitar—propped in the corner, where I’d left it—was a welcome sight.

  Michael meowed and I set him down. He looped once around my ankles, then padded into the kitchen and nosed at a few crumbs on the floor. Newirth told me that the other cats had been taken to an animal shelter, which was understandable; it’d be next to impossible for the police to search Dad’s property with them springing high and low. Michael Jackson had obviously been clear of the house during the roundup. Or maybe he’d been too afraid to return after Lang and the hunt dogs had visited. Judging from the way he’d been trembling in the weeds, I thought that quite likely. Whatever the reason, he’d avoided the cage and was temporarily in my care. I’d find him a new owner soon. Someone as crazy and affectionate as Dad, hopefully.

  “Where do you want this?” Officer Mimes asked, indicating Sally’s luggage, which he’d carried up two flights of stairs because the elevator—as usual—was too slow.

  “Next to the sofa is fine,” I said, and Mimes wheeled it dutifully into place. I shook off my backpack, unzipped it, and took out the three tins of Friskies I’d persuaded Chief Newirth to remove from Dad’s kitchen. I pulled open one tin, forked the contents into a cereal bowl, and set it on the floor beside Michael. He leapt at it and ate, his body tense and trembling, as if afraid someone would whip it away.

  “That is one hungry pussycat,” Mimes remarked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m more of a dog person myself.”

  “Right.”

  Mimes had been assigned to me for the night. Newirth had said that I shouldn’t be alone, but I think he was more afraid I’d run away again. I was still, from his point of view, a possible accessory after the fact. He wanted to keep a close eye on me. I didn’t mind; it was better than spending the night at the station, and Mimes was another of the good guys. He’d been a Green Ridge police officer for over twenty years, never progressing beyond his current rank, and more than satisfied with that arrangement.

  “I’ll just park my old butt here,” he said, choosing a seat by the window. “You should get some sleep.”

  I nodded. The clock on the stove showed 2:12, which meant I’d been awake for almost twenty-two hours—ever since Sally had woken me to restore my memories. I was halfway between exhausted and dead, given some semblance of life by all the emotion barreling through me.

  Sleep wouldn’t come easy, though. I found a box of Advil, downed three with a palmful of tap water, then hit the shower. I crouched beneath the spray until the back of my neck was raw, using the time to bemoan my fate. I must have bemoaned for a long time, because Officer Mimes rapped on the door and asked if I was okay, which was another way of asking if I’d used a razor blade to open my wrists. I assured him I was still alive, and a few minutes later crawled into bed with a towel wrapped around my waist. I thought I’d stare into the darkness for hours, but exhaustion won out. I slept until dawn, not deeply, but enough to smooth away the edges.

  * * *

  Officer Mimes had vacated the chair by the window and was sleeping—boots off—on the sofa with Michael Jackson curled up on his belly. They both purred contentedly, so I didn’t disturb them. I left the apartment, bought coffee and bagels from the deli on Trenton Avenue, and took a stroll through Green River Park. It had been a long time since I’d been able to walk through my hometown without feeling the threat of the hunt dogs. I didn’t plan on sticking around, so took a moment to savor it.

  The smell of coffee roused my guests (Dad was a big coffee drinker, and I wondered if, for one heartbreaking second, Michael thought he was home again). Mimes sat up quickly, scratching behind one ear with a surprised expression on his face.

  “Must’ve closed my eyes for five minutes,” he said, looking around for his boots.

  “Must’ve,” I agreed, handing him his coffee and bagel. He nodded sheepishly. I went into the kitchen and fixed breakfast for Michael: water and Friskies, which he consumed more patiently than the night before. Then I grabbed my guitar and played a few tunes while they ate.

  I spent most of that day at the station. I was questioned by Sharpe and Lambert before giving my statement to Officer Adams. There followed an agonizing wait, during which my thoughts went everywhere and nowhere was good. I sat on a hard chair in a small interview room. There was no clock on the wall but I felt every second.

  Finally, the door opened and Chief Newirth walked in, as drawn and somber as I’d ever seen him. He carried no file, no handcuffs, only a steaming mug of coffee, which I took as a positive sign. He sat opposite me, slurped from the mug—spilling some on the table, further evidence of his tiredness—and said:

  “I’ll begin with an apology.”

  “Okay,” I said. My jaw trembled and my voice cracked; I knew where this was going.

  “I didn’t believe you,” the chief said, “and I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Swan Connor’s vehicle—the red Cadillac CTS—was sold shortly after he suffered his stroke. We tracked it down, and although it had been fully detailed, forensics lifted blood residues from the trunk, as well as a human hair that is confirmed to have belonged to Grace Potts.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. Hearing it from an officer of the law gave it a haunting weight, a realness. It conflicted with the relief flooding from me. I lowered my head and imagined Dad smiling down at me.

  “You mentioned last night how police withhold certain information from the public,” Newirth continued, and I turned my bleary eyes back to him. “In this case, we withheld that the killer cut a square section of material from his victims’ clothing. Searching Swan’s house today, we found those swatches hidden behind the gold discs Swan was awarded for”—he took his notepad from his pocket and read from it—“San Francisco Morning, Breathe with Me, and Get Down with the Groove. We think the square symbolizes a record sleeve or album cover.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, and then shuddered. “No, it doesn’t. It makes no sense at all. It’s crazy shit. Did you check the Grammys?”

  “Blood is incredibly difficult to remove,” Newirth said. He took another slurp of coffee, spilled it again, down his shirt this time. “So is coffee. Shit.” He wiped it with his fingers, then shrugged. “Luminol revealed blood traces on all three Grammy awards. We’re still running tests, but there appear to be multiple blood types—as in more than three. We think Swan has been murdering women for a very long time.”

  “That sick son of a bitch,” I said.

&n
bsp; “We’ll take this as far as we can.”

  “Maybe you should look into that rape from ’74, too,” I said. “Some bullshit got him acquitted.”

  “I think all of Swan’s evils will be revealed.” Newirth shook his head, blinked his red-rimmed eyes. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but Sally was right: That stroke was such perfect justice.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing at all.

  “Although it does mean he’ll avoid prison and spend the remainder of his days in a high-security hospital,” Newirth said. “He’ll have his food cut up and his ass wiped for him. There’s nothing we can do about that. Even so, we’d like Sally to provide a statement. I know she’s … wayward, but if she gets in touch when this goes public, you can assure her she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore.”

  I thought that, wherever Sally was, she was more afraid than she’d ever been.

  “I won’t hold my breath. Sally is clearly on the run, and in deep with some bad people.” The chief leaned across the table and whispered, “Man to man, I think you should take a step back from that relationship. You’ve been beaten up twice. Badly. Next time, you might not be so lucky.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  Newirth nodded before continuing, “A press statement is being prepared, in which your father is cleared from any and all involvement. He made a false confession in the midst of a suicidal depression, and the press will be made aware of that. I’ll personally make sure he gets the respect he deserves.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “And thank you for listening to me. I know you didn’t believe me, but you listened, and I appreciate it.”

  “We follow all leads, Harvey. That’s the job.”

  “And you’re good at it,” I said honestly. “Always have been. Although you might want to put some eye drops in before you go on TV. And change your shirt. You look like hell.”

  He smiled, which brought a smile to my face, too. I reached across the table and he slapped his palm into mine. We shook. His grip was strong and assuring, despite his tiredness.