by Rachel Ford
A few threatened to find me. “You’re a dead man, asshole.”
A few threatened to sue the park. “This is unconstitutional. I didn’t do nothing. I got as much right to be here as anyone.”
But having seen some of their party arrested, the fight went out of the others. By midnight, the sites were clear. Lori had already gone with Ashley and the kids. Wagner found me, while the other two deputies headed off to process their arrestees.
“Well,” he said, “we meet again. You certainly have a nose for trouble, don’t you, Mr. Day?”
Chapter Six
I don’t know if he believed my story. I had the impression he didn’t think I was quite as innocent as I let on. But he didn’t press it much.
He said, “You should have stayed put and called 9-1-1.”
I said, “I didn’t know if she was alright. I had to check.”
He harrumphed. “Well, mission accomplished, I guess. She is now.” Then, he shrugged. “We talked to some of the other campers. They say it’s been a problem for days, since they got here. And they say they heard you trying to de-escalate. So – aside from giving me yet another round of paperwork – I guess I should say thanks. Better to be called to a domestic now than a homicide later.”
“Ashley going to be alright?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “Too early to tell. Lori’s going to try. You know, get her in touch with domestic violence survivor’s resources and all that. But they’re from Illinois. So she’s going to have to figure out her own network when she gets back. That’s going to be the real test: when they get back home, whether she falls into familiar patterns or not.”
Then, because I was feeling particularly bold, I asked, “About the body?”
“The other, giant pile of paperwork you gave me?”
He half-grinned when he said it, so I forged on. “Yeah. The scars you were asking about…”
“You remember anything?”
I shook my head. “No. But to be asking, you must have someone in mind? Some other case?”
“FBI,” he said. “Not me.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “I can’t really say much more than that. Not because I don’t want to: I honestly don’t know much more.”
Which was where we left it. He bid us a good night, and we went back to our site. By now, I was ready to hit the sack. The kids, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more awake if they drank a dozen shots of espresso apiece.
Daniel had missed everything up until the first wail of sirens. Maisie took care not to mention just when she’d left her tent, but I had the distinct impression that it had been sooner than I’d first thought.
She whispered with her brother about what she’d seen, and whatever she told him, they both looked impressed.
They might have been impressed, but I was thinking about what Wagner said. I was thinking about what happened if Ashley decided to forgive her husband. Charges would be a given. But what kind of bail would he be looking at? What if he could pay?
What if Ashley paid it for him, or one of her husband’s friends? They had to have some inkling of the domestic situation. They’d come to his defense – his, and not hers. Would they put money up for him?
Probably. Usually, if you’d risk jail time for someone, you’d risk bail money too.
So what then? What happened when Aaron Tesch got out of jail? What happened when he decided to come right back here to settle scores?
Things I probably should have thought about before I threw my first punch. But I’d been too busy thinking about frightened kids and their cowering mother. I’d been thinking about what needed to happen for their sakes.
Not about what needed to happen for ours.
“Well?” Daniel asked.
I glanced up. “What?”
He was watching me with an eager expression. “Did you break his nose?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Nice.”
I frowned. Part of me thought, This kid needs therapy. Part of me thought, He’s a nine year old boy. Of course he’s a little weird.
Either way, his interest in death and violence was a little ghoulish. So I said, “I did what I had to. But it’s always better to avoid fights if you can.”
He and Maisie exchanged looks and laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I frowned at them. “Go on: get to bed, the pair of you.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Well I am.”
Maisie ignored that. “You think that guy will be back?”
“I think it’s well past your bedtime.”
“I’m hungry,” Daniel said.
“How can you be hungry? You ate enough to feed a wooly mammoth.”
“Wooly mammoths didn’t eat pizza,” Maisie said.
I ignored her. “Speaking of mammoths, you want to go look at that one in the museum tomorrow? Biggest wooly mammoth of all time?”
I figured, if Tesch got out and came back looking for trouble, we might come back to a wrecked site, but that would probably be better than if he found us in the area.
But Maisie shook her head. “No. I’m having fun here.”
“I want trail mix,” Daniel said.
“You already brushed your teeth.”
“So?”
“So no more food until tomorrow morning.”
Daniel sighed, and his shoulders slumped. I figured there’d be no persuading him, not right away anyway.
So I tried Maisie. “We can go swimming later. See the mammoth in the morning.”
“I don’t want to go,” Daniel said, matter-of-factly.
He was being contrarian for the sake of it. I knew that. I’d said no to trail mix, so he was saying no to my plan. “Well, we can talk about it tomorrow.”
“I want to see the killer,” he went on.
I frowned. I’d been a weird child, so I didn’t really have a lot of room to judge. I knew that. But damn, he was a morbid kid. “The what?”
“The killer,” he said.
“Me too,” Maisie said.
“Well, the police are working on that. But we don’t know who he is.”
“Not him,” Daniel said. “The killer.”
“What killer?”
“The one the FBI is looking for,” she said.
I frowned at her. “Were you eavesdropping on me?”
She flushed and shrugged. “No.”
“Okay. Well, whatever we’re doing, no killers. But we’ll figure it out tomorrow. Now go to sleep – both of you. Or we’re going to pack up and head home. I mean it. I won’t put up with two sleep deprived gremlins, you hear me?”
Maisie grinned and Daniel rolled his eyes. But they turned in anyway; and, once I was sure they wouldn’t sneak back out to raid the food stores, I headed to my own tent.
I slept poorly, so I was awake when the kids rose. We started with breakfast – my specialty, pancakes again. Then, I insisted that the little gremlins shower. “Pretty soon your mom’s going to be able to smell you all the way from Florida if you don’t wash up.”
They didn’t really stink. Not with all the time they’d been spending in the water. But their hair was starting to show the effects of a lack of soap and too much lake water.
Daniel rolled his eyes at me, and Maisie laughed: a pattern lately. But they headed into the showers. I waited until they were inside and I heard the locks click. Then I took a stall for myself.
I showered quickly, because I wanted to be done before either of them emerged. I wasn’t paranoid. Which, I suppose, most paranoid people will say. But it was true. I wasn’t the kind of person to obsess about abductions, or anything like that.
I knew they were extremely rare.
There were all kinds of abduction and trafficking statistics that parent bloggers, crime sites and even news organizations bandied about to terrify parents. There’s a decades old number, taken from a wildly misinterpreted study, that people love to trot out:
fifty-eight thousand abductions a year. There are unsourced estimates that range from thousands to hundreds of thousands. There are websites that warn a child is snatched away from his parents every five minutes.
And despite solid journalism and FBI statistics that debunked these kinds of numbers decades ago, they live on in the public imagination. Maybe because the crime is so horrendous that on some level the numbers don’t really matter: one, or a hundred, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand…it’s all a profound tragedy.
Maybe because, like the saying goes, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. A self-evident example of the principle if ever there was one, since it’s been falsely attributed to everyone from Mark Twain to Winston Churchill.
But whatever the reason, I knew the statistics. I knew they had a much higher chance of being struck by lightning. And I still wasn’t going to take unnecessary chances. So I was out, ready and waiting, when Daniel emerged. He looked pink and clean and very annoyed.
“There we go,” I said. “I can’t smell you anymore, so you must be clean.”
“You stunk, not me,” he said.
Not in a humorous mood, then. I decided to try another tactic. “Hey,” I said, pointing to a picnic table on the lawn. “Let’s grab a seat and figure out what we want to do today.”
He followed me but said nothing.
“So, you want to try another bike ride?”
He shrugged – the hate shrug.
No bike ride today. “Or maybe a walk? There’s a lot of trails.”
“Whatever,” he said, with the indifferent shrug this time.
I was getting warmer, anyway: closer to something that he might actually like. “We could go swimming again.”
Another indifferent shrug.
“I’m pretty sure we’re all going to turn into ducks if we spend any more time in the water.”
No response.
“But if that’s what you guys want, I’ll go.”
He shrugged in the same, indifferent way.
“What’s wrong, Dan?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
I glanced at him. He didn’t meet my gaze. He was staring at a patch of asphalt on the parking lot.
“You sure?”
He shrugged again.
“We can do something else, you know. If you want to go somewhere else, I mean.”
He said nothing.
“You can talk to me, Dan.”
He shrugged – a different shrug, one I didn’t recognize. “About what?”
“Anything you need to.”
He said nothing.
I decided I’d leave it there. I didn’t know what, exactly, was going through his mind. I didn’t want to press him, and anyway, I wouldn’t have even known where to start.
We sat there in silence for a long minute. People came and people went. A line started to form outside the showers, as the late breakfasters lined up for stalls. I thought, absently, that we’d gotten here at the right time.
“Maisie said you tried to call mom last night,” Daniel said.
I glanced over at him. “That’s right.”
“She didn’t answer.”
I hesitated. “I’m sure she was busy, Dan.”
He snorted, a quiet, bitter sound. “She’s always busy now, isn’t she?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. So I put my hand on his shoulder and said nothing.
Ten seconds elapsed, then twenty. Abruptly, he glanced back at me. “I wish Dad didn’t die.”
“Me too,” I said.
“It was different, before Dad died.”
I nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure it was all that different, not for Maisie anyway. She was the oldest, and her mother’s least favorite child. She was the one Megan projected all her own insecurities onto. She was the one Megan saddled with responsibilities that were probably beyond a ten year old’s purview.
But Daniel’s lot had been a little better. His mom had had more patience for him, back before Andy died. She’d loved him better. He was her eldest boy, her first son. Not her favorite, but her first at least.
“I’m sorry, Dan,” I said. “I wish things were different.”
“Me too.”
More people filed past us, some leaving the stalls, some entering them. Maisie’s door opened, and she scampered out. She was smiling and happy. She had none of Daniel’s misery about her.
But that didn’t surprise me. She’d navigated her relationship with her mother since birth. What was only a little choppier than normal to her were uncharted waters for Daniel.
Someone shuffled up to take her stall as she passed. “I found a spider,” she was saying. “It had a web–”
Then, she cut off, looking at the guy walking toward the showers. And she blanched and fell absolutely silent.
He noticed her. He must have, because he inclined his head in her direction. I couldn’t see much of him. Just a hint of a profile: a blunt nose and pale skin, topped off with dark hair, and not too much of that.
The guy with the nose turned away and stepped into the stall. He shut the door after himself.
Maisie ran to the table, pale and excited. “I saw him,” she whispered. “I saw him: the killer. The one the FBI are looking for.”
Chapter Seven
“He’s not a killer,” I said, a little exasperated. Daniel, I would have expected something like this from. He’d been obsessed with killers since we found the body. But Maisie – sensible, level-headed Maisie?
“Daniel says he is,” she said.
“Well, he’s not,” I said.
“He is, Uncle Owen. I saw him on TV,” Daniel said.
“On TV? You mean, he’s an actor?”
“No, he’s a killer. The FBI has a big reward for him.”
I was about to ask Daniel what kind of nonsense television he’d been watching when my phone rang. His eyes jumped to mine. So did Maisie’s. We all expected it to be the long-awaited call from Megan.
It wasn’t their mother, though. It was the sheriff’s department. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back.” Then I accepted the call and started talking as we walked. “Hello?”
“Mr. Day?” It was Wagner again.
“Yes.”
“Hello, Deputy Wagner here. I’m calling because I thought you would like to know, the individual you had the altercation with last night?”
“Yeah?”
“He posted bail this morning. It’ll be another hour or so, but then he’ll be out.”
“Great.”
“The family has been evicted from the park. One of our guys is on his way with Mrs. Tesch to collect the family belongings, and the park has the vehicle plates on a no-entry list. But – well, I thought you should know anyway.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Of course.”
“And Ashley? How’s she doing?”
Wagner paused a beat. “Mrs. Tesch believes the altercation was a misunderstanding. She is intent on reconciling with her husband.”
I shook my head, and said again, “Great.”
Maisie tapped my arm. “Tell him about the killer.”
I frowned at her. Wagner’s voice came through the phone. “What’s that?”
“Uh…we were just wondering if you had any updates on the body.”
“Nothing yet.”
We hung up after that, and Daniel and Maisie shot me annoyed looks. “You should have told him about the killer,” she said.
“He doesn’t believe us,” he said.
“Look, you guys, there’s no killer here. Whatever you saw – it’s just a TV show, right?”
“It’s not,” Daniel said. “They’re real.”
“And that’s not even the same guy, anyway.”
“How do you know?”
“Because what would an actor be doing in the Kettle Moraine forest?”
“He’s not an actor. He’s a killer.”
I sighed and drew up. “Okay, new rule:
no more talk about killers, or bodies, or zombies, okay? Nothing to do with death. We’re going to pick something to do today, and we’re going to do it. That’s it.”
Daniel rolled his eyes. Maisie surveyed me with disappointment in hers. I didn’t care. I was tired, and my mind was full of Aaron Tesch, and how far he’d be willing to go – sober and in the light of day – for revenge.
In the end, we settled on a bike ride. Or, I settled on a bike ride. The kids were too distracted by TV show serial killers to be interested in much of anything. I figured morning would be the right time for a ride: before the sun turned the park into a scorching, humid hellscape. And afterwards, even I would be game for yet another swim.
I hoped we wouldn’t come back to slashed tires or broken windows, compliments of Tesch or his buddies. There wasn’t much I could do about that, though. So I locked up what I could, took a picture of the site as we left it, and we headed out, just after nine in the morning.
The ride started cool. Maisie and Daniel seemed to be enjoying themselves. We rode through the campgrounds, and down to the lake. We paused at the fishing dock. We spotted a turtle in the water and heard a duck somewhere in the thick growth along the banks.
Then we headed out again, going off road this time. The gravel trails were a little tougher, and the day got a lot warmer. We were on a kind of loop, that would take us through a section of the park and spit us back out onto the blacktop again.
So I didn’t turn around when the kids started to complain. It didn’t make sense. I figured we’d already reached the halfway point or were close to it anyway.
The day got hotter, and the complaining got worse: Bike rides were stupid. Why was I so obsessed with them, anyway? Why couldn’t we have gone swimming, or gone up to look at the stupid mammoth? At least the museum would have had AC – and no mosquitoes.
Daniel was the primary offender, but Maisie was far from innocent. She huffed and puffed and rolled her eyes with an uncharacteristic gusto.
When the trail finally did end, we had a two mile stretch of road to get back to our site. Which might as well have been halfway across the country, for all the whining it provoked. They were starving, and hot, and tired, and half drained of blood from all the mosquitoes.