The Damage

by Caitlin Wahrer

  The man who answered wasn’t working on Friday night, but he was happy to check the sheet.

  “I have a Tony Hall here on January fifteenth at four p.m. sharp.”

  “And the out time?”

  “It’s not filled in.”

  “It’s not filled in,” Rice repeated.

  “Correct, sir.”

  “So no way to tell when he left.” A neat little alibi evaporating on the spot.

  “You could talk to whoever worked the desk. I think it’s Ida but I’ll make sure. Or you could speak to the patient he saw, if you know who it was, but I can’t give—”

  “Is it normal to see the out time left blank?”

  “Yeah, or at least not not normal. I tell people when they come in to sign out when they leave. At the end of the shift I go down the list and make sure everybody’s gone. But sometimes people forget. I remind people if I notice them forgetting as they’re leaving. It’s really just record keeping and security, knowing who’s in the building.”

  “Can a visitor duck out without you seeing?”

  “I guess anything’s possible, but unless I’m in the can, I’m at the desk. And if he came in a car, he’d need his keys back.”

  “You hold the keys?”

  “Yup.”

  Rice asked the man to find out who was working on Friday and have that person call his cell. He asked about security footage of the entrance, but the man said he should call back during the week to talk to the right person about that.

  Rice hung up and sipped at his coffee. At first the convenience of Tony’s alibi had bothered him, but it wasn’t shaping up to be so convenient after all. If it turned out that Walker simply took off, all this signing-out business didn’t much matter. But if Walker turned up dead in the woods, well, Tony Hall was an obvious suspect. Rice set his coffee down in the cupholder. It was giving him a stomachache. That this all might spell trouble for Tony’s family—Julia, their kids, Nick—didn’t make any difference. That was the judge’s job: to decide how to sentence a family man who’d snapped, done something monstrous, but maybe understandable to on some level. That wasn’t Rice’s concern. First it was the judge’s problem, and ultimately it was God’s. Rice’s job was easier. He didn’t have to weigh right and wrong—didn’t get to. He just had to find the truth.

  67

  Julia Hall, 2016

  The sound brought Julia to her feet before she recognized that her phone was ringing. With it came a rush of acid up the back of her throat. She slammed her hand down on the phone on the table in front of her. Please, she thought, please be anyone but—

  It was Nick.

  “Is Tony there?” he asked.

  “No, he’s not.” Julia walked into the kitchen from the dining room where she’d been sitting. Tony was upstairs taking a cold shower, still trying to calm down after the detective’s visit. She didn’t want him hearing her on the phone when he got out. It would just stress him out more.

  “Is everything okay?”

  No, she thought as she stepped into the mudroom and shut the door behind her. Far from it. “Why, has someone called you?”

  “I tried him first, but he didn’t answer. Where is he?”

  “Nick. Tell me why you’re asking.”

  “The front desk guy said a detective called asking about Tony.”

  Julia kicked the kids’ shoes out of her way as she began to pace the length of the mudroom. “Have you talked to them yet?”

  “The police?”

  “Yes,” Julia breathed.

  “No, are they gonna call me? What’s going on?”

  There was no reason not to tell him, was there? It would look strange of her not to, if the police did talk to Nick and they found out he’d talked to Julia but she hadn’t mentioned it.

  Nick spoke again. “Is something going on with him?” It was a “him” reserved only for Raymond Walker.

  “Maybe.” She nudged a shoe against the wall with her right foot. “He’s missing.”

  Nick’s voice was quiet. “Ray’s missing?”

  “Yeah. Detective Rice came to the house this morning and told us. They can’t find him.”

  There was silence.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  Her stomach rolled. She took a deep breath; the mudroom smelled like wet rubber and stale feet. “Tell me Tony was with you on Friday.”

  “He was.”

  “Until eight.”

  Nick paused. “Did he tell you what we talked about?”

  Yes. He told her everything. Too late for her to do a thing about it, but he told her everything.

  “I don’t know how much we should talk right now,” she said. The possibility that the program monitored residents’ phone calls seemed slim, but there was no way she was going to risk it. They couldn’t talk details. But there was one thing she had to say. It wasn’t fair to ask a single thing of Nick. Not after everything that had happened to him; after everything that had been taken from him. But she had to make sure he’d give the right answer if he was asked.

  “They might call you,” she said. “To ask if Tony was there until after eight on Friday. It looks like they’re checking up on him, because, you know. But like he told them, he was with you until sometime after eight on Friday.”

  There was a beat. “Yeah, he was.”

  “I guess he didn’t fill in the sign-out sheet. So they might ask you when he left.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell them.”

  Julia slumped against the door to the kitchen; it was cool on her back. What she would have given to get off the phone now. To be able to run out into the back field and scream. To collapse on the floor with the dirty shoes. To cry. Why couldn’t she cry? Her belly was full of salt water—all the tears she had swallowed that weekend. She and Tony had always been good at calibrating: when one went up, the other came down. Tony was a wreck right now, so she was the anchor. She didn’t even have to work for it. It just happened; she just was. She didn’t want to be. She wanted to scream and cry and run. She wanted to expel everything that was inside her.

  “What a mess,” she said.

  “What do I do now?”

  What was Nick supposed to do? How could they burden him with this? He was in a facility, for Christ’s sake. He’d tried to overdose on his antidepressants. He’d been cutting himself. Keeping a secret had nearly killed him. What the fuck was he supposed to do with this?

  And then she thought of what Tony told her, about his last conversation with Nick. The last things they said to each other before he got in the car and drove south. Nick was tired of being babied. Tired of everyone handling him with kid gloves, acting like the rape proved he was weak. And she knew, maybe, how he could survive one more secret.

  “It’s your turn to protect Tony.”

  68

  John Rice, 2016

  Rice pulled up to Walker’s house late Monday morning. The driveway was taped off, deterring anyone from adding to the footprints in the snow there. The crew had been using the front door to get in and out. Searching a potential crime scene always meant causing some amount of damage to that scene. Because the front walk had been totally print-free on the day Rice met Darlene Walker at the house, that was the path they chose to walk.

  Earlier that morning, Rice and O’Malley had met at the station first thing, and they ran through their plans for the day. Rice was going to check in with the evidence team finishing up at the house. O’Malley was going to keep calling all the travel spots, trying to keep the pressure on them to check their surveillance systems and passenger lists.

  Before he’d had a chance to call Tanya Smith for an update, Smith texted Rice and asked him to meet her at the house—there was something he needed to see. Smith enjoyed the drama of an in-person reveal, but she’d have told him if he called and asked her w
hat she found. Rice hadn’t wanted to call—he hadn’t wanted to know whatever it was any sooner than he needed to. He also didn’t want to admit to himself how poorly he’d slept the night before, worrying about what Tony Hall might have done to Walker.

  By the time Rice got out of the car, officer Mike Basak was waiting for him in the front door of the house. He was the uniform who had talked to the neighbor about the two men she thought she saw in the area on Friday. Now, Basak waved Rice up the front walkway.

  “I collected some shoe prints in the driveway and at the side door,” Basak said, “so I’ll need to get a print of your boots at some point, since you were here with the mother. He’s got a lot of shoes inside, so they could all turn out to be his, but you never know till you know.” He shrugged and handed Rice a pair of covers for his shoes so he could go into the house. “Starting to look like we could have a crime scene, though. Smith wants you in the upstairs bathroom.”

  From the top steps of the stairs to Walker’s bedroom, Rice could see Tanya Smith in the dim bathroom on the far side of the room. Smith had blocked the window over the tub, casting the space into shadows.

  “You rang,” Rice said.

  Smith stood up and stepped out of view to grab something. Her voice echoed off the high ceiling as she said, “You know where this is going.”

  Rice’s stomach did a slow barrel roll, and he pictured a tub filled with the glow of a body’s worth of luminol. He forced the usual chitchat. “Bad cleanup job?”

  “Yep,” Smith said as she stepped from the bathroom. She held her camera in her right hand, the strap swinging. They met in the center of the bedroom, a faint waft of stale cigarettes on her hair. On the LCD screen of her camera, she pressed Play on a video. It showed the darkened bathroom with a hint of luminol glowing on the lip of the bathtub and a larger smear on the floor beneath.

  “Fatal?”

  “No,” Smith said. The video moved up to the inside of the tub to show it spotless. “We found a bloody towel in the waste bin, so I swept the bathroom but this was all that flared. The smear is only about the size of a hand towel, not a fatal amount of blood loss here. It’s more the location that gets me—don’t exactly look like a shaving injury.”

  “No,” Rice agreed as he moved to the edge of the bathroom. The glow of the luminol was long gone, but he wanted to see the tub. It was an old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub standing alone in the middle of the room—there was a separate shower in the right corner of the bathroom. Sink in the left corner. So there had been blood on the outer lip of the tub and on the floor beneath. Standard bathroom injuries were cutting yourself shaving like Smith said, maybe slipping in the tub and hitting your head—but not the outside of the tub, leaving you bleeding on the floor.

  “He’s got a basement with a utility sink and a washer/dryer,” Smith said. “I thought you’d want to join while I check the rest of the hot spots.”

  Rice’s cell buzzed and rang in his coat pocket. “Yeah,” he said absently as he pulled out the phone—Belfast area code. He waved the screen at Smith and said, “Goodspring.”

  He crossed the bedroom and went down to the kitchen as he took the call.

  It was Ida, she said, from the front desk at Goodspring. Her voice was friendly, if a little anxious. “They said to call you?”

  Rice introduced himself. “Were you working the desk this past Friday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did a man named Tony Hall come in to see his brother?”

  “I’m not supposed to reveal who’s a patient here—”

  “Well, I just meant—”

  “But,” she said, “Tony Hall did come on Friday.”

  “Okay. He show you an ID?”

  “He didn’t need to. I’ve seen him here before. Not a face you forget.” The woman laughed nervously.

  “He’s not bad-looking,” Rice said.

  “Nope. Is he in trouble?”

  “Do you remember when he left on Friday?”

  “They said you were asking about the sign-out time. He was here so late I had packed up to leave; I think that’s how I forgot to have him sign out.”

  “How late was it?”

  “Visiting hours end at eight, it was probably a few minutes after that.”

  “A few minutes meaning?”

  “Eight ten, maybe.”

  So Tony was at Goodspring until after eight. A two-hour drive away. Maybe he could shave off fifteen minutes with a lead foot.

  Ida went on. “He and his, uh, the person he was visiting, they were having a serious conversation, I didn’t want to rush them, but eventually I had to kick him out.”

  “What were they talking about?”

  “I don’t know. What’s going on?”

  “Why do you say it was a serious conversation?” Rice said.

  She paused. “The way they looked, I guess. I could see them from the desk. It looked like they were fighting, at one point.”

  “Did you hold his car keys when he signed in?”

  “Yeah, we have to.”

  “And could you see him the whole time he was there?”

  She paused. “Well, the visits aren’t, like, supervised. So I wasn’t watching them the whole time.”

  “But are they happening near your desk?”

  “Mostly the visits are in the visiting room, which I can see part of. But Tony Hall went back with a staff person first.”

  Rice thanked Ida and asked her to call back if she thought of anything else. Someone might be in touch with her about a written statement. She sounded disappointed to hang up with him. Maybe he’d misidentified the tone of her voice when she first called. Instead of nerves, maybe it was excitement in her voice. She wanted to have something important to say—wanted something to be going on, like she kept asking. But if Tony Hall was at Goodspring until after eight, he couldn’t have been one of the men on Walker’s street at seven thirty. They might have had nothing to do with this, but it felt like something. Whatever it was, did it involve the blood in the bathroom?

  “Smith,” he yelled up the stairs. “Ready for the basement when—”

  His phone started up again and he laughed aloud. It never ends.

  O’Malley’s name was on the screen this time. “Hold on,” he yelled up to Smith.

  Rice turned back to the kitchen counter. He answered gravely. “I’ve got blood in Walker’s bathroom and nothing but questions.”

  “They’ll have to wait,” O’Malley said. “I’ve got Walker.”

  69

  Julia Hall, 2016

  In the back seat, Seb’s sweet voice was muffled by the cotton scarf he’d been sucking on. “Could we play tag when we get home?”

  Julia eyed him in the rearview as she drove. There was a wet patch in the center of the scarf, where his mouth was.

  “It’s too snowy,” Chloe said as she reached over and tugged his scarf down.

  “So?” Seb replied.

  “I want to make a fort,” Chloe said.

  Seb squealed. “Will you help, Mumma?”

  Julia grimaced at the mirror. “I’m not feeling very well, honey. I think I need to stay in.”

  “What’s wrong?” Chloe asked.

  “I just have a headache. I’m going to put away the groceries and rest for a bit.” Julia twisted her hands back and forth on the steering wheel. “You two can play outside, though.” She wanted to give the kids some semblance of normalcy while she and Tony were so upset, but there was no way she could romp around in the snow today. She’d barely managed to pull on real pants and go to the grocery store before she got the kids from the bus stop.

  Julia steered into the driveway and parked. The kids unbuckled themselves as she grabbed the two totes of groceries in the trunk.

  Seb streaked by her, but Chloe paused at the gate. “Will you watch us?”
<
br />   “For a minute,” she said.

  Chloe grinned and ran after her brother.

  Julia paused at the fence and set the bags down in the snow. Chloe ran for the edge of the yard, to the spot where crocuses exploded from the earth every spring. They were buried now, sleeping deep under the snow. Julia felt, for a moment, that she had forgotten that the spring even existed. She had forgotten that everything, to some degree, was finite. Even the bleak winter that had, just days ago, seemed endless, would end.

  Seb yelped as he ran after Chloe, trying to keep up. The two tracked their boot prints all over the backyard. Behind them, the rolling fields of Orange stretched until they touched the snowy tree line.

  The earth would yawn and stretch in the spring, and everything would change again. Everything but one: what had happened would never change.

  Complicit. It was such a persistent word. The sun came up that morning, white-yellow and cold, and they’d made it to Monday, and now she’d be complicit for the rest of her life. She’d never be good again. The kids dropped to their knees and buried their hands into the snow.

  A dagger of a thought sliced down the center of Julia’s brain, and complicit was a lie. Complicit was too soft, too quiet, for this. Her ears began to ring, an electronic hum that grew louder, the yard before her began to dim. Julia grabbed the fence post. Squeezed it as hard as she could. For a moment the sensation of wood against her palm was the only thing she could feel. Her knees buckled but she stayed on her feet. She hung onto the post, and the world came back in, slow and warm in her ears. When her head had steadied, she straightened up and looked back out at the yard. The kids hadn’t noticed; they were scraping the snow into a mound.

  Julia’s heart pounded, but her stomach was settling, her vision was clear, and she loosened her grip on the fence. Her children were safe. Tony was safe. They were safe. They were whole. That was all that mattered. The rest would get easier. Spring would come, and she would forget who she’d become in the winter.

  Julia turned to pick up her grocery totes. One of them had tipped over; she crouched to scoop the spilled oranges and bread back into the bag. As she stood, a dark car drove past the house and down the lane. She thought nothing of it and went into the house.