“We asked… once… but they looked at me like they didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. I didn’t mention it again. I hoped… I didn’t want to know… I wanted it to be a happy ending. And if I asked them… then it wouldn’t be.”
“So you never asked the authorities again.”
“No.”
“What about Elizabeth?”
Edith’s lips pressed together.
“Did you ask Elizabeth what had happened to Allen?”
She swallowed and looked down at the carpet, staring at it as if mesmerized. “No. I never did.”
He didn’t need to ask why. She wanted to believe to herself that her other little grandson was still out there, somewhere, healthy and strong, living a happy life.
Like Bobby.
Except that Burton’s life wasn’t happy either. It should have been. He’d had good parents after that initial five years. They had given him everything he had needed. They had been loving and kind and pleasant. They had, by all accounts, done everything right. But Burton needed more. He needed to know his past to become an integral person. He had to know the past to move into the present and to see past the bottle in his hand into the future.
“Did you meet Allen?”
She smiled, the sun bursting through the clouds. “Oh, yes. He was a lovely baby and little boy. Such a sweet little fellow.”
“And… when did things change? When did you notice that something was wrong?”
“We had a falling-out… a series of fallings-out, really. Sam was… not well. He was making strange choices. Always paranoid. Like he really did think that people were after him, talking about him. He was sometimes violent. Elizabeth and Allen would have bruises. They never admitted that he hit them, but what other explanation is there? They came over less and less, and it didn’t matter what we said to Elizabeth, we couldn’t convince her to leave him, to go somewhere safe.”
“It had to be her own choice.”
“Yes. And she wasn’t going to listen to her mother. She always was the rebellious sort, didn’t like to be told what to do. She knew better than her mother. She was an adult and could live her own life.”
Zachary nodded. Independent. Dysfunctional. Butting heads with her parents who didn’t think she was safe staying with her boyfriend or husband. She knew him, they didn’t. So she had let herself stay in a bad situation, thinking she could change Sam, help him or fix him, or that if she just made all of the right choices, he wouldn’t blow up at her. If she could just get things right.
“So they disappeared from your life when Allen was…”
Edith shook her head. “It must have been around the time she got pregnant with Bobby. She wouldn’t return calls. They moved and didn’t let us know their new address. We couldn’t contact her at all. She just disappeared.”
“And you didn’t hear anything about her until five or six years later?”
“I don’t know.” Edith avoided his eyes and shook her head. “Then we were hearing about this boy they had found, this boy in terrible condition, horribly neglected, held in a basement. They didn’t have the names right. Sam had talked her into taking a different name. But as soon as we saw their pictures on TV, I knew it was her.” Edith put her hands over her eyes, reliving the horror of it. “Oh, that poor, poor boy. I couldn’t believe that she could do anything so cruel. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
She had undoubtedly seen pictures of starving children before, but always in other countries, other contexts, not where she’d been so personally connected with what had happened.
“Did you see Elizabeth after that? Or did you stay away?”
“It was a while before I saw her. She was in jail, then in prison.”
“And did you talk to her about what she had done?”
“She said it wasn’t so bad.” Edith’s voice grew lighter, apparently imitating Elizabeth’s answers. “She said it had all been exaggerated. She hadn’t done anything to hurt Bobby. He had food and shelter. All of his needs were taken care of. What business was it of anyone else what room he had slept in? What difference did that make?”
“He just… slept in the basement? That was her answer?”
“More or less. She said it was all just an exaggeration. People trying to make her bad so that the jury would send her to prison. I couldn’t stomach it.” Edith shook her head. “It made me physically sick. I couldn’t bear her excuses.”
Zachary remembered being sick the night before at the thought of Bridget’s twins. They hadn’t even been born yet and he was worried about them. Bridget didn’t have a great track record for being a kind, loving person. She might be a wonderful mother toward them. But he was familiar with the sharp edge of her tongue. He’d been faced with it too many times.
“It must be pretty upsetting, knowing that your daughter could do something like that.”
“Yes. I thought we would go to the trial to begin with. Show our support. Be there every day. But I couldn’t listen to it. I couldn’t keep going, knowing what she had done. And that she wasn’t…” She bit her lip. “She wasn’t innocent. She was not locked down there with him. Them. She never called for help or to take him away to somewhere safe. She was… a participant. Not just a woman who was abused and trying to avoid getting hurt again.”
Zachary nodded. He could understand how hard it must be, even though he’d never been in that situation. He knew how hard it could be to believe that someone close to you was not what you thought they were. To have those buried layers revealed and exposed to the light of day.
“So if you didn’t attend the trial, you don’t know if they ever mentioned Allen?”
“They didn’t. If they had, it would have been in the news. There would have been more charges, more police investigation. No one knew about little Allen.”
And she hadn’t stepped forward to tell about him. She had been willing to ignore what had happened to him to spare her daughter the additional charges and prison time. While Zachary knew it couldn’t have been an easy decision, he had a hard time understanding how she could have made the one she did.
Because she loved her daughter.
Despite everything she had done.
“Now that Bobby knows about Allen… it may come out. You’ll need to be prepared for that.”
Edith stared at Zachary. “Why would you do that? You can’t… it was so long ago. What would be the point of making it public now? Let Allen rest… wherever he is. What good would it do to say anything?”
“No one has had to pay for what happened to Allen.”
“But no one knows what happened.”
“Someone does. Several people do. And they think they got away with it.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t do that… just out of revenge. It has nothing to do with you.”
“How long did Elizabeth end up serving? Do you know where she is now?”
Edith turned her head toward the hallway at the sound of running water. Her husband was apparently up from his nap or whatever he’d been doing when she answered the door. Zachary glanced at the time on his phone, trying to plan the next few things he would have to do to get the ball rolling with the police department.
There were footsteps in the hallway. Quiet, for a man.
“Mom? Is there someone here?”
38
A woman walked into the living room and looked at Zachary, her brows drawing down. Zachary got to his feet, shocked into action. He didn’t know if Edith had more than one daughter, but she had looked toward the hallway when Zachary had asked where Elizabeth was. It had to be her.
“I was just on my way out,” he told her. “Mrs. Johnson, it was nice to meet you. Thank you for your help.”
Elizabeth was staring at him. She looked out the living room window at his car parked out on the street, then back to him again.
She was in her fifties. Younger than her husband. He was more the age of the man who Zachary had seen trying to break into
his car the night before. Zachary took a few steps toward the door, feeling like his feet were on some kind of time delay. He always felt awkward when he had to change his pace or walk backward, ever since a spinal injury shortly after he had met Kenzie. After their first date, actually.
He was tripping over his feet to get to the door before Elizabeth could get through the thought process clearly taking place. He had no idea what her reaction to his presence there would be.
Nothing in his research had pointed to Elizabeth living at the same address as her parents. There had been a few possible addresses, all of them probably places she’d rented in the previous couple of years, moving from one place to another.
And now she was back to living with her mother.
And Sam? Where was he?
Zachary reached the door and twisted the doorknob.
“Hey!”
He ignored Elizabeth’s shout and kept going.
“Who are you? What do you think you’re doing here?”
He moved as quickly as he could, his toes hitting cracks in the sidewalk two strides in a row so that he was sure he was going to trip and fall flat on his face. But he managed to recover and keep his balance. He didn’t know whether to watch the sidewalk in front of him to avoid any further cracks, or to focus on his car, his goal, all the way down the sidewalk and a few vehicles down the street.
Elizabeth didn’t follow him, but stayed behind to talk to her mother. Until, apparently, Edith told her what Zachary had been there for, and then she let out a shriek.
Zachary couldn’t run, but he did his best, bounding toward his car at his top pace.
He really needed to spend some time with a physiotherapist learning how to run again. He felt like an ungainly giraffe.
Elizabeth came out of the house. Zachary hit the buttons on his key fob to unlock the door, unable to look down at it to press the right one. He knew the layout of the fob, but he couldn’t remember it or instinctively hit the right button in the heat of the moment. The lights of the car blinked. The horn beeped. The trunk clicked open.
Not quite the results he had been hoping for.
He got close enough to grab the handle of the driver’s door and just about sprained his fingers lifting it up when the door didn’t unlatch for him. Still locked. He pushed buttons on the key fob again, trying to do it more slowly now. Elizabeth was still coming after him.
The lights blinked and he saw the locks pop up. He wrenched the handle again and the door opened. He fell into his seat and pulled the door shut so quickly that he nearly shut his leg in the door. He hit the armrest button to lock the door, but nothing happened. He was trying to fit his key into the ignition at the same time.
He looked at the armrest to find the right button to lock the doors and managed to hit it just before Elizabeth reached the car. She banged into the side of the car and grabbed the door handle, but the door didn’t open. She howled again and bashed her fist on the window.
He turned the key in the ignition and the car roared to life.
Thank you.
He stepped on the brake and shifted the car into drive. He didn’t hit the gas right away, but took his foot off of the brake and let the car start to roll forward. He didn’t want to run over Elizabeth, no matter what she had done to Ben and his brother or what she had intended to do to Zachary. He didn’t need that on his conscience. She stepped back from the car slightly, still banging on the window and screaming at him that he’d better not ever come back again and that if she ever saw him again…
Needless to say, she didn’t welcome his return. She didn’t have any trouble thinking of creative ways she could hurt him if he happened to show his face again.
As the car pulled away from her, he put his foot gently on the gas and sped up. She ran after the car, but of course, she was no bionic woman and she couldn’t keep up with it. He drove away, leaving her behind.
He drove directly to the police station. He hoped he hadn’t royally screwed things up by going to Edith Johnson’s house. He had not intended to confront either of Ben’s parents. He had just meant to talk to his grandparents, to find out what he could about Allen. But now Elizabeth was in the know, and if she contacted Sam, he would be too. If he didn’t already strongly suspect that Zachary was going to cause trouble for them.
Judging by the motorcycle that had tailed him and the man who had tried to break into his car the night before, Zachary suspected that Sam was already fully aware that Zachary was on the case and was determined to get him off of it as quickly as possible.
His heart was still hammering hard when he got to the police station. He sat in his car for a minute, breathing slowly, trying to bring his body back under control, but he didn’t have much success.
At least he wasn’t having an anxiety attack. Those always seemed to be caused by emotional issues rather than imminent physical danger. He might not make the best decisions when he was facing a challenge, but he at least didn’t fold.
He’d kept it together. He was fine, and he had a job to do.
He got out of the car, testing out legs that were quivering like Jell-O. But they held his weight. He carefully locked the car, armed the security alarm, and walked from the parking lot into the police station.
“I don’t know if he’ll be free,” he told the officer of the day, “but I’m looking for Joshua Campbell. It’s Zachary Goldman, and it’s… somewhat urgent. If you could tell him that there have been developments…”
The officer of the day took down the information and nodded. “If you’ll have a seat, please, Mr. Goldman. You’ll be called up when we have an answer for you.”
“Thanks.”
He wobbled over to the seating area and selected a seat that wasn’t too close to anyone else. He was glad to get off of his feet so he could be sure that he wasn’t going to topple over anytime soon. For the first few minutes, he just sat there, breathing, trying to calm himself down, and pretending that he wasn’t watching the OD for any sign of whether he had been able to reach Campbell and whether Campbell was going to have anything to do with him.
He would probably end up getting shunted to someone junior. They would take his statement, roll their eyes, and tell Zachary that someone would get back to him.
Which they wouldn’t.
Ever.
Probably.
He checked his email and answered a few quickie questions. He didn’t want to deal with anything more complicated, so he switched over to his social networks to see what was happening. But all the time he was browsing through the mixture of friends’ posts, memes, and fake news, his brain was working away on what Edith Johnson had said.
She had provided him with what he needed to get started. And Zachary knew where Elizabeth was. Or where she had been. There was no guarantee she would stay at her mother’s house for any longer than it would take to pack a bag and get out the door.
But maybe she would have to wait for Sam, if they were still together. They had obviously been in communication, or she wouldn’t have looked at Zachary’s car when she saw him, ascertaining whether he was the person that Sam had told her was investigating the old child neglect case, and who might be digging into something that could send them to prison once again.
Whether or not they were together, they were still communicating.
Somehow, their relationship had survived their prison terms. Elizabeth had probably been out for longer than Sam. Unless there had been clear evidence given that Elizabeth was the worse offender. People didn’t like to give long sentences to young women, and she had been a young woman at the time. A young woman who, she could claim, had been abused and coerced into something that she hadn’t wanted to do.
It wasn’t her fault, of course. It was his.
“Mr. Goldman? Mr. Goldman!”
He looked up from his notepad. A young officer stood in front of him. Zachary straightened up. “Sorry. Far away thoughts.”
The young officer looked at him, evaluating whether he wa
s high or crazy.
“Just distracted,” Zachary said. “Thinking through a case. Is Campbell available?”
The officer considered for a long moment, then nodded. “Yeah. This way.”
Zachary pushed himself back to his feet. His legs were steadier, the chase fading from his mind and the adrenaline spike gone. He couldn’t quite keep up with the pace that the officer set, but the man slowed down, realizing he was outstripping Zachary, and settled into an easier speed for him.
39
Campbell was sitting at his desk, chewing on a pen. He pointed to the visitor chair facing the desk. Zachary sat down. The young officer stood close by, not leaving as Zachary had expected him to.
“Well?” Campbell demanded. “What’s happened?”
“I have more details for you, hopefully enough that you can get a warrant. But I also… ran into one of the suspects. Unintentionally.”
“And he knew who you were?”
“She. Yes. Afraid I spooked her and she may be on the run already.”
Campbell grunted and shook his head. “Nothing we can do about that. We can’t go after her until we have the evidence that she committed a crime. Which we won’t have until we get a warrant. Which we don’t get until you give me the rest of the details you were able to find.”
Zachary nodded. He settled back into his seat. Campbell was right, of course, there was nothing they could do to make sure that Elizabeth didn’t run. They had to go through the proper channels and hope that they’d be able to catch up with her later.
“I have evidence from several sources that there was an older son named Allen,” he told Campbell. He detailed the birth certificate and what Edith had said about Allen’s existence—and subsequent disappearance.
“She didn’t think it was important to tell someone at the time that there had been another child?” Campbell demanded, shaking his head.
“She knew that if she did, it would mean a longer sentence for Elizabeth and more notoriety for the family. She decided to avoid that.”
He Never Forgot Page 21