Disappearance at Devil's Rock (19 page)

Kate is blank-faced and staring quietly at the destruction of her room.

Elizabeth is crying now, and screaming through her teeth, and she doesn't stop tearing through Kate's things. She yanks all the clothes off their hangers and throws them fluttering out of the closet. Elizabeth knows that what she is doing, what she is perpetrating, is a disaster, a calamity, and it will change their lives and her relationship with Kate forever. In the aftermath of the evening she will sit with Kate on the bed, hold her, and repeatedly tell her that she is sorry. But in the great and terrible now, there are still the stacks of sweaters and sweatshirts piled on the built-in shelf above the hangers. Her hands reach out to them—

From somewhere behind her, in the yawning canyon of the bedroom, Kate says, “Mom, I have it. I'm sorry.”

Elizabeth stops, backs out of the closet, and turns around, momentarily unsteady on her feet. The room before her is a disaster, the rubble of her daughter's young life, there at her feet.

Kate stands in the middle of it all, and she has a book cradled against her chest. The cover is black and has no decorations that Elizabeth can see. Kate starts in with the apologies and self-recriminations and tears and she falls into Elizabeth's arms, stuffing Tommy's diary into her hands. Kate doesn't say the words
It's Tommy's
. Elizabeth knows it's his.

Kate's head is still down and pressed against Elizabeth. She says, “For like two days after Tommy didn't come home you were like in a coma, shut down, when you were home you barely moved or said anything and I'd never seen you like that and I was so afraid, and then the morning after you saw his ghost in your room it was like you were back to normal, back to you, and it was like it was almost okay again, or it could be okay again, so I wanted to help you keep believing, you know, believing that he was still here, that he would come back again, and so I left the pages out so you could still hear his voice and keep believing that Tommy was here in the house with us and sending messages. I was just trying to help, I swear. And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

They cry, they hug, and they apologize to each other. Elizabeth could stand there holding and hugging her daughter forever as long as it meant nothing terrible would ever happen again.

When Kate calms down she admits to finding the diary in the bottom drawer of his dresser, buried beneath old pairs of jeans, and then she kept it where she used to hide her own diary from Tommy; under her bedframe, wedged beneath the boxspring and one of the support beams. And now that she has admitted to having the diary Kate doesn't stop talking and she says that having and reading his diary gave her a reason to get up and get out of bed each day, and how Tommy continually talked to her in the diary, it was like the diary was shared, it was theirs, and they were having a secret conversation, and she wanted it to last as long as possible. She also admits to manipulating the camera with the app on her phone, and shutting off the camera when she dropped the pages last night and then turning it back on after.

Kate points at the diary and says, “One of the last entries is scary and I was going to show this, the whole book to you before, I swear, but I don't know, I wanted you to still believe in Tommy and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, and then it kept getting harder and harder to admit it and, I don't know, it's like I wanted to believe too, and—”

“Okay, Kate. It's okay. Thank you for telling me now, and please, you can tell me anything. You have to be able to tell me anything, especially now, right?”

“Yes, I will. I promise. So Mom, the camera went off twice last night, right? Once was me. But I have no idea why the camera went off that second time, when the pages were already on the floor and that video you thought you saw the shadow in and it happened like at the same time when I saw the shadow in my window. That wasn't me. I swear. I swear to God that wasn't me.”

Elizabeth: “Okay. We'll look at that again later. Come on. Let's get a drink of water.”

They walk into the kitchen, Kate following Elizabeth, and Elizabeth with the diary in the crook of her arm, a bird protecting an egg under her wing.

Elizabeth opens the unadorned cover. Protruding from the book's spine are the jagged remnants of torn pages, like rows of worn-down teeth. There are three pages with writing intact within the diary, and then after the three pages, more jagged remnants from torn pages.

The first intact page is a block of text. The second page, at first glance, features what looks like a large sketch of a zombie in the upper left corner, literally looming over the text below it. Tommy has shown her so many of his zombie sketches throughout the previous year and they all kind of blurred together in terms of tone and feel. This zombie is less cartoonish than the ones she has seen. Maybe
cartoonish
isn't the right word, but there was an undercurrent of his sense of humor, of his playful silliness, inherent in his zombie drawings: the odd and impossible bend of an arm or a leg, a goober tooth, rolling googly eyes. That the frail and ridiculous human body was condemned to an eternal pratfall was the ultimate zombie gag, and while Tommy wouldn't have been able to articulate it that way, he understood zombies were a gallows kind of funny in his artwork.

The zombie on this diary page doesn't have a trace of funny in it. Primordial in its grotesquerie, the drawing is wrong, just wrong, as it communicates an unspoken, deep, and terrible truth while being more abstract than his usual sketches. The normally sharp lines of his comic book style gave way to subtle shading, and a vague, unnerving topography; the exaggerated tallness and thinness of the torso and limbs, the body as an impossible, elongated smear, as though he furiously tried to rub the body out. The zombie's head is oversized and misshapen, as craggy as a mountain topped with a forest of hair. The eyes are two small black circles, like button eyes, spotted in the middle of swollen and puffy flesh, bruises on the page. Cheekbones avalanche and pool above a swollen and ruined mouth.

Elizabeth touches the drawing, sticking her finger to one of the eyes as though testing the temperature, and expects her finger to come away ink-stained black. Rot and decay is the violent promise, and this zombie is Tommy. A zombie Tommy. There is no question it's him, regardless of whatever the accompanying text might to say.

Elizabeth touches the picture again, testing for wet ink. She stares at her finger and then at the drawing and there's a nagging thought that she's missing something. Something obvious.

Kate, “I can't look at that for like more than a second. It's too—”

Elizabeth says, “Oh my God,” and then pushes away from the kitchen table. That night in her bedroom with Tommy, with the shadow crouched and hiding, and then right before it disappeared, she saw a flash of a face, and it was this face. It had those same dots for eyes. She saw this face.

Kate: “What, Mom, what?”

Elizabeth in that instant decides she's not going to tell Kate and she's going to keep this to herself, forever if she has to. She says, “Sorry. Like you said, that picture. It's terrible and I don't want to look at it anymore.”

The third and final page with writing has only two sentences, writ achingly small.

Elizabeth snaps photos of each page with her cell phone, never once taking her eyes off the drawing. She e-mails the pictures to Allison with a subject heading of
a few more pages from Tommy
and
call me in the morning
in the body of the message. The morning before, when Allison was at the house, Elizabeth thanked her for her hard work, support, and compassion. A day and night of madness later, she is angry at the detective who she now decides is emotionally detached to the point of being indifferent, is not forthcoming with information and leads, and is not leading the investigation with any kind of urgency or efficiency. That all of this is still happening and nothing has been solved is proof of the town's cruel ineptitude. Nice people she's known most of her adult professional life but clearly not up to the task before them.

The sent e-mail
woosh
sounds from her phone, and it's as though she has banished the photos to a vast nothingness.

Elizabeth then e-mails her photo of the page with the sketch to Dave Islander, the local weekly editor, along with a brief explanation about how it came from Tommy's diary. She wonders if he'll publish it, and she hopes that having as many people view the sketch as possible will somehow dilute its awfulness.

T
he article won't appear in print for a few more days, but a little after 9
A.M.
Dave Islander uploads his latest piece on Tommy Sanderson to the
Ames Patch
, the catchall local online news site. The article opens with a brief description of Split Rock and how it's become a makeshift shrine for Tommy. Along with the stash of gifts, flowers, and messages left at the site, the venerable brown trail-marking signpost for Split Rock has been crudely vandalized to read
Devils Rock
.

Islander then breaks the news that Tommy was befriended by a man in his early twenties, identity and whereabouts unknown. During the summer the man hung out with Tommy and his friends at the 7-Eleven in Five Corners and also met the boys inside Borderland State Park. Ames and state police have no official comment as to whether or not this yet-to-be-named man is a person of interest in their investigation. Islander then details a seeming epidemic of reports/complaints of late-night trespassing from numerous residents with homes abutting the state park. High school-aged kids sneaking into the park after hours has never been an uncommon occurrence,
and the police have been extravigilant in that regard. However, since the night of Tommy's disappearance, a group of residents have consistently reported a person walking or cutting through their property and into the park, with five residents even claiming that someone stood outside their windows, peering into their homes and bedrooms.

Islander segues from there into an obscure local folktale about the devil stalking the woods of Borderland and ultimately being tricked into disappearing by Oakes Eastman at Split Rock. How obscure? Islander could find only a few print references to the tale, with the most recent being a book called
Forgotten New England Ghost Stories
, published in 1993 by the now-defunct Willow Press.

Islander writes that Tommy and his friends were “obsessed” with the devil/Eastman story, so much so the boys renamed Split Rock to Devil's Rock, a name that seems to be catching on with local kids given their makeover of the S
PLIT
R
OCK
sign. Islander ends the article with Elizabeth's photo of Tommy's drawing, and it is presented as evidence of a young teen's obsession with the devil-versus-Eastman folktale, which is ostensibly a story about a clandestine rendezvous in the woods with a mysterious, charming, and dangerous stranger. The implications and connections Islander makes to the unnamed male who befriended Tommy are obvious and ominous.

Once posted, the Islander article quickly explodes in social media. On the Patch's Facebook page there are hundreds of comments, with more people claiming the shadowy figure has been walking through their properties at night. There are renewed calls to close down the state park to the public and for a curfew for Ames teens. #FindTommy trends on Twitter with thousands of article shares and retweets. The disturbing image drawn by Tommy is dubbed “shadowman” on twitter and it's what dresses up the clickbait headlines in online news feeds. The article is even picked up by the national online news-gathering site Gawker. By late morning the traffic overwhelms the Patch and the
bandwidth dries up. By lunch all the Boston media outlets are reporting on the unnamed male, and they have redescended upon Borderland. Two news vans are parked outside the Sanderson home as well.

Two camerapersons and reporters with microphones follow Detective Allison Murtagh up the walkway to the Sanderson house, asking questions that she doesn't answer. Elizabeth opens the door before Allison has a chance to use the bell and she walks inside without pausing.

“Thank you, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth wears cargo shorts and a blue T-shirt. Her hair is still wet from a shower. “It's been a madhouse all day. Come on in. Can I get you a coffee?”

Allison says, “Actually, I'd love a coffee.” She only had two hours' sleep and was up late with her father at the nursing home again; he is still in considerable pain after a fall in the bathroom. That's she even thinking of her father at all in the presence of Elizabeth makes her feel guilty.

“Sorry about all that out there.” The way Elizabeth says it, it's clear to Allison that she isn't sorry, and wants to talk about why she isn't.

“Why are you sorry?”

“Well.” She pauses in front of the cabinet with two coffee mugs. “All that out there is because of me, right? Not because of me, that's not what I mean. Because I told Dave, the local weekly guy, about Arnold and sent him one of the diary pages. Dave promised to help me out with support from his paper, and all the advice I get from this support group I belong to is to do everything I can to keep Tommy in the public eye. I'm not trying to make things harder for you guys, and nothing personal, but I think the press is Tommy's best chance to be found.”

“Elizabeth, you don't ever have to apologize to me. You keep doing what you think you need to do.”

Elizabeth's rigid defense posture visibly softens. She pours two cups of coffee and adds milk and sugar to both without asking. She says, “So, you guys aren't mad?” as she passes Allison her cup.

“No way. I'm not mad.”

“Yeah, well, I know a bunch of other guys in your department are probably mad. Drummond probably. Stanton definitely.”

“Eh, Stanton's always grumpy, if we're being nice. Especially if it means he has to answer a few more phone calls. Don't worry about him or anyone else.”

“Phone's been ringing like crazy all morning and I can't keep up with all the tweets and posts to the Find Tommy page. Everyone asking about the mysterious older guy. I didn't tell Dave the man's name was Arnold. I don't know why. I just didn't.”

“I did notice that.”

The kitchen table is covered in a dissected newspaper and what looks like pages from an instruction manual. Elizabeth says, “Sorry. The kitchen's kind of a mess. We can sit out in the living room. Have a seat on the couch. I'll move the little side table over.”

“Don't make a fuss for me, I'm fine.” Allison follows her out and sits next to the table.

Elizabeth: “So what did Luis and Josh have to say about Arnold? Did you have any luck with Snapchat?”

Allison gives Elizabeth an update of what's been going on for the last thirty-six hours.

Josh and Luis do not know Arnold's last name. They claim to have met up with Arnold a total of five times during the summer with the last time being more than a week before Tommy disappeared. None of the boys have Arnold's cell phone number, and all of their cell phone records bear that out. Collecting Snapchat data isn't quite the same. If they had Tommy's phone in hand there is forensic software that can recover any sent or received Snapchat images from the phone's data.

As far as Snapchat the company goes, they have been cooperating thus far and haven't yet asked for a warrant or court order given the emergency situation. The police can only retrieve images from the company that haven't been viewed by the user within thirty days of being sent. After thirty days, the unviewed images are deleted from the company's servers. There are not any unviewed images that have been sent to Tommy's account within the current thirty-day window, unfortunately. They have been able to attain a log of the last two hundred snaps that Tommy sent and received. The log doesn't include images, but is more like a map of who he was in contact with. There is one username in the log of “arnoldfrnd.” Tommy sent and exchanged snaps with that user, twenty-one in total, with seventeen sent in one night about two weeks ago, and the four most recent snaps sent two days before his disappearance. Allison and her colleagues have an e-mail address and phone number for that user. Attempts at contact have come up empty so far, and the phone number belongs to a pay-as-you-go or burner phone, or he's using a number created with a burner app.

Elizabeth: “Oh, God. Using a burner is not good, right?”

“It makes it harder to find him, certainly. I want to be clear that in and of itself use of a burner doesn't necessarily imply criminal intent or behavior. Pay-as-you-goes are a convenient and cheap alternative to standard phone contracts.”

Allison continues with the update, telling Elizabeth that the police have been reviewing surveillance video from the 7-Eleven at Five Corners. They've pored over hours and hours of film thus far with a focus on late June, when the boys were newly out of school and they first met Arnold. They've isolated three different dates and times with Tommy, Josh, and Luis in the store and hanging out front. The surveillance angle is from behind the register, with the sliding glass front doors in the upper middle of the video frame. Within the third
of the three videos, there is an approximately seven-minute clip with the boys outside on their bikes, gathered to the left of the front door. They take turns popping or landing the front tires on the concrete parking stop as they are talking to another male. It's not the best, most clear shot with where they are sequestered in the upper-left corner of the frame. Plus the sizable magazine rack and an energy drink display blocks out much of the view out of the bay window, and outside there's a large trash can in the way. They haven't been able to pull or isolate a clear, identifying shot of the male's face.

“Nothing? Can't zoom in on him?”

“No, we can't.” The video is maddening. Allison spent most of her morning watching and rewatching the clip, and whenever Arnold (she does presume the man in the video to be Arnold) was about to turn and directly face the camera, he didn't, or he veered off in another direction, or one of the boys stepped in front of him, almost as though their movements were choreographed. “The store's surveillance camera is not very sophisticated, severely limiting what we can enhance. As good as folks in the forensics department are, they can't magically make what wasn't filmed in high definition high definition.”

Elizabeth raises her hands and lets them fall against her lap. She looks away from Allison and at the small camera on the TV stand across from the couch. “Cameras, cameras everywhere, but—” and then she looks at back to Allison and then away again, as though caught looking at something she shouldn't have been looking at. “But not a drop to drink. Or something like that.”

When Allison came over yesterday morning for the diary pages that mentioned Arnold, she noticed the camera perched on the TV stand. “I totally understand your frustration and we're doing—”

“I don't think you do understand my frustration. And it's more than frustration, Allison. It's a hell of a lot more than that.” Elizabeth isn't quite yelling but it's close. She looks away and wipes her eyes.

“Of course. I'm sorry, Elizabeth. Truly, I am. I want you to know we're all working—”

“Yeah. Okay. I know. Sorry to interrupt. So you're saying we don't know anything for sure yet about this Arnold guy, but does this mean you can issue an Amber Alert now?”

Allison explains that while they already have issued a nationwide BOLO (be on the lookout) for Tommy, they cannot issue an Amber Alert unless there is clear evidence of abduction. “We haven't eliminated any possibilities. Given how thoroughly the park has been searched, it's unlikely that Tommy is injured or lost within the park, but, still, we don't know if he's been abducted or if he's an endangered runaway.”

“I know. I get it. But he wouldn't run away. He wouldn't do that to me and he wouldn't do that to his sister.”

Allison doesn't say anything.

“Is that what you believe, that he ran away, and now, maybe with this Arnold guy?”

Allison can't tell her that she's seen it before; young teen blinded by the allure of danger and the charms of an older person, particularly when alcohol and drugs were involved. She can't tell her that people always do things that their friends and loved ones never imagined they would do. Not only is everyone more than capable of making the worst decisions possible, those kinds of decisions are frighteningly commonplace and easy to make.

She says, “I haven't made up my mind, and it's my job to remain open to all possibilities until the evidence leads us to the truth.”

Elizabeth says, “I can't stop thinking about that picture Tommy drew. I know he says it's really someone else, someone he saw, had been seeing, I guess, thinking it was maybe even his dad, but my God it looks so much like Tommy. Like some horrible self-portrait. I mean, when I picked up the page, that's what I saw before reading any of the
rest of it, and it knocked me over. It was Tommy, and when I saw it I thought—I thought right there on the page is the terrible thing that happened to him.”

Despite the bloated facial features, Allison agrees that the drawing does look like Elizabeth's son. She says, “Does it look like his father too?”

Elizabeth stares at Allison for a beat. “Maybe. A little. I can't tell. I can't unsee what I already saw, you know.”