Fragile (32 page)

“What are you doing here, Cooper?” Travis came up close to him.

“Where is she?” Jones asked.

“Who?” said Travis. He narrowed his eyes in what seemed to Jones a caricature of menace. All he saw when he looked at Travis was fear.

“Sarah.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Travis leaned back and looked up at the sky.

“Travis. Come on. It was an accident.”

Chief Crosby stepped out of the house then. Jones stared at him, felt the familiar dread he had whenever the chief was around. The man was a ghoul, a monster. Jones would see that later. But then, he was a titan, somebody everyone in The Hollows looked upon with respect and admiration. The sight of him shut them both up.

“Boy,” the chief said. “It’s done. Walk away and keep your mouth shut.”

“No. Where is she?” Jones’s whole body quaked—with fear, with anger. The expression on Travis’s face was a mirror of his own heart.

The chief came down off the step and strolled toward them easily. “You left your jacket,” he said. “It’s got her blood all over it.”

And Jones remembered again that Sarah’s things were still in his trunk. Chief Crosby must have seen the understanding dawn on Jones’s face, because he let out that hooting Crosby laugh, a laugh Jones would hear every time he heard Travis laugh.

“Well, I can see you’re not stupid like your old man,” said Chief Crosby. “Question is, are you a coward like him?”

The words sliced Jones to the bone. In that moment, all his righteous anger, even his fear, deserted him. All he felt was a crippling shame. And it was in that place of shame that he made the decisions he made that night, and every decision that followed.

It took Jones a second to differentiate Marshall from the tree he leaned against. The boy sat on the ground, a gun in his hand. In the moonlight he was ghostly pale, looked as limp and weak as a scarecrow off his pole.

It was so strange to see Marshall there that, for a second, Jones thought he might be hallucinating. This strange mingling of the past and the present had him badly off-kilter. If Jones had been standing, not
kneeling, he might have walked right by Marshall. The kid was so still and quiet.

“Are you hurt, Son?” Jones asked.

Marshall didn’t seem to hear him, appeared dazed and not present. Jones stood and approached him slowly, reached down, took the gun from his hand. The gun, a semiautomatic, was warm to the touch, recently fired. He could tell by the weight that it was loaded. The boy let it go without resistance, let his arm flop to his side. Jones tucked the gun into his empty shoulder holster.

Marshall turned his face to look up at Jones. “How do you know if you’re a good person or a bad one?” he asked.

Jones didn’t know the answer. How could he? He thought about his wife again. If Maggie were here, she’d know what to say to Marshall. Maggie was sure about these things. She knew the answers to the hard questions.

“I don’t know,” said Jones. He had a sense that the situation called for honesty, and that was about as honest as he could be. “I really don’t know.”

Marshall gave a slow nod and looked at him with something like gratitude.

“What’s happened here, Marshall? Talk to me. Where’s your father?”

But Marshall had the glassy gaze of someone slipping into shock. Jones leaned in close, but the boy didn’t seem to be injured. There was no blood, no outward sign of trauma.

“Did you bring her here, Marshall? Is this where you brought Charlene after you picked her up?”

Marshall nodded absently. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for every bad thing.”

“Marshall,” said Jones. He bent down to pick up the rifle he’d dropped when he fell to his knees. “Where is she, Son?”

Jones thought he saw a flash of light then and heard the approach of a vehicle. He hoped it was Chuck. It wouldn’t be too far a logical leap for him to go to Travis’s house after Strout’s, then proceed here in the search for Marshall. Chuck would see the vehicle in the drive, notice that the rifle had been removed from the hatch. Chuck would move into the woods, gun drawn, good cop that he was.

Why hadn’t he told someone where he was going or called for
backup? Jones could tell himself that it was urgency, a rush to get to Charlene if she was, in fact, here. But really it was just arrogance, a lack of foresight. The same personal flaws that had allowed him to turn his back on Travis, that would allow him to proceed to the boathouse, rather than turn around and get help first.

He looked at the boy on the ground, though he wasn’t really a boy anymore, with stubble on his jaw, at least as tall as his father. If Jones still had his handcuffs, he’d have made Marshall lie on his belly, secured his hands behind him. But those were gone, too. He had a hunch the kid wasn’t going anywhere.

“Marshall, stay where you are. Don’t move until I come back for you.”

“Yes,” Marshall said. But Jones felt as though he was answering a question Jones hadn’t asked.

Jones left the Crosby property that night so many years ago. And just as he was told, he never said another word to anyone about what happened to Sarah. When he returned home, his mother had been near hysteria—Where had he been? What had he done?

“It’s over,” he’d told her. “It never happened.” And so it was.

He’d kept Sarah’s belongings locked in the trunk of his car for a few days, while the storm of her being declared missing and her body discovered miles from where he knew she died raged around him. He was ready for the police to come with that jacket, to kiss his life and all his hopes good-bye. In fact, he almost hoped uniformed men would walk through his front door and take him away.

On the night her body was found, Jones moved Sarah’s things deep into the attic of his mother’s house. She never went up there, and even if she did, she’d pretend not to see, because that’s who she was.

He knew he should have been rid of those things, burned them or driven them far from The Hollows, somewhere they’d never be found. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. As long as he held on to them, he could hold on to hope, too. Hope that he might find the courage to do the right thing, to be the man he wanted to be, the man he should have been. But that day never
came. He was a coward. He had always been that, just like his father. His father couldn’t manage the simplest thing, just to be around for his family. He didn’t have the strength for even that. Why should his son be any different?

Jones never said a word. Even when the psychic fingered Tommy Delano and he told them where the body was, so far from where Sarah had actually died. Even when he learned that someone had mutilated Sarah, cut her with razors, sexually violated her, he stayed silent. Who had done those things to her? He thought of her, so pretty and so sweet, so strong and honest. He could barely stand to think of her as he’d seen her in the open casket, gaping wounds in her face filled with putty, bloated, unnatural. He knew how Sarah had died. Travis hadn’t violated her. Unless … unless he’d come back later and done those things to her while she lay bleeding? But he wasn’t that, was he? He couldn’t have done those things, could he?

Jones never understood Tommy Delano’s role in it all, why he’d say he killed her when he didn’t. Through the confession, the trial, the sentencing—they all stayed quiet. Only once, after Sarah’s viewing, did Jones and Melody Murray ever discuss the horror of it all. She was waiting by his car. He’d parked far down the road from the funeral home, and she stood in the dark by the trees.

“What do you want, Mel?” he said. He didn’t look up at her, just unlocked the car door.

“I need a ride.” He opened the door, considered getting inside and driving away without a word. He didn’t want to be close to her, to talk to her. But he couldn’t leave another girl alone in the night.

“Get in,” he said. And she did.

He pulled onto the road; behind him people milled out of the funeral home, returning to their cars, going home stunned and horrified.

“Why would they have her like that?” Melody asked. “Why did they want us to look at her face?”

She looked sunken, wrecked by grief and fear.

“Where’s your mother?” he asked.

“Where’s yours?” she shot back.

Then there was quiet, a horrible quiet between them, when they both realized how alone they were with their dark knowledge.

“Who did all of that to her, Jones? Who cut her that way? Who raped her? Tommy Delano didn’t kill her. Did he do those things?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“I heard there are over two hundred cuts on her body.”

“Stop it.”

“We did wrong by her, Jones. We left her there.”

“You
wanted
to leave her there.” He pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car.

“No.” She shook her head. “No.” Then she started to cry. “I was so scared,” she wailed. “I was so scared.”

He took a deep breath and, for an ugly moment, wished that Melody had been the one to die that night, that Sarah was sitting beside him.
She
wouldn’t be hysterical;
she
would be strong, brave. She’d have done the right thing, the good thing, that night. She wouldn’t have left her friend behind to be scavenged and violated. But the truth was that the only one of them who was any good at all was gone forever.

“Don’t ever talk about it, Melody. Don’t ever tell a soul. And don’t ever bring it up to me again. She’s gone. Nothing we do will change that now. Nothing.”

Melody looked at him with such naked despair that he looked away. Every time he looked at her again over the years, that was the expression he saw. It was always there, right beneath the surface. But she never talked about Sarah again, not to him.

Later, when Tommy Delano hanged himself in prison, his death created a seal that could not be broken.

The Crosby boathouse was in worse shape than the carriage house had been, on a dramatic tilt to the left. When Jones entered, he saw that the roof was riven with holes, the sky visible in jagged patches. The wood beneath him groaned under his weight. The lake water lapped against the dock, and the boat, loosely tied, knocked a slow beat against the rubber bumper surrounding the slip.

“Crosby,” he said, making his voice boom. “You missed. A bad shot even at point-blank range.”

His voice bounced back at him. He sounded strong, powerful. But he was scared, heart hammering. Everything was shadows; Travis could step out, gun drawn, from anywhere.

On the dock, down by the stern, Jones saw what looked like a pile of sailcloth. As he moved closer, he realized that it was the chief, his giant chest and belly rising like a mountain. Jones heard a horrible wheezing, a deep rattle coming from the old man. In the dim light, the blood spilling from his center was black.

Jones knelt down beside him. He knew that blank look, the stare of eyes that were already seeing something the living cannot. He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. He knew he should be feeling something—compassion, regret, sorrow—something other than the cold indifference he often felt in the face of suffering.

“Where’s my jacket, old man?” Jones asked.

It was all he could think to say. The other man moved his jaw, as if to say something, but then he just sighed. And Jones could swear that, just before Chief Crosby released his final rattling breath, he smiled. Then he felt something, the bile of rising hatred. Hatred for Chief Crosby and what he’d asked all of them to do years ago, and hatred for himself for having done it.

“Is he dead?”

Jones spun around with the rifle. There was a dark form at the entrance to the boathouse.

“Don’t move,” said Jones. “Put your hands in the air.”

The figure quickly complied. “Jones, it’s me. Henry Ivy.”

Jones felt a wave of relief. “What are you doing here, Ivy?”

“I came with Maggie.”

He said this as though it should make some sense. There was a mist descending around Jones. He found himself hyperfocusing on the sound of the water hitting the dock, the strange scent coming off the chief.
Why was Ivy riding around with his wife in the middle of the night?
But Jones found himself nodding. Of course she wouldn’t wait alone by the phone. She could never do that. And who else would she call to ride shotgun but Ivy? Her childhood friend who she was too naïve to know had loved her for decades.

“Where is she?” Jones asked, lowering his gun. “Where’s my wife?”

“With Marshall,” Ivy said. He moved into the light. “Are you hurt, Jones?”

“Is she okay? Is Maggie all right?”

“She’s fine. She’s taking care of Marshall. Is the chief … dead?”

“Looks that way,” Jones said, glancing back down at the body.

He wondered if Ivy had heard the question he asked of the chief, wondered if it would mean anything to him if he had. Ivy was staring at the body on the dock, his expression blank. Jones wondered if anyone would cry for Chief Crosby, and if it was his son or his grandson who’d killed him.

“I need you to call for backup,” said Jones.

“Already done. As soon as we saw your vehicle, we called 911.”

Jones could hear the wail of sirens then.

“You don’t look well, Jones. Let me help you.”

“Travis shot me.”

Even as he said the words, it didn’t seem quite real. It seemed like something that had happened so long ago the details had gone blurry. The solid things around him were disappearing; the dock beneath him, Henry Ivy standing in front of him. He was starting to see bursts of white light.

Ivy moved toward him, saying something, reaching out to help him. But Jones didn’t hear. He was thinking about Charlene, thinking that if Marshall was going to hide her on this property, it might be on the boat. It was isolated from the house; any sounds would be carried out and over the water. He wondered if, like always, he had too little to give and was too late to give it.

Jones managed to stumble off the dock and onto the boat. It pitched with his weight, and he almost lost his balance.
Don’t fall
, he told himself.
If you fall now, you won’t be getting back up
. He heard Ivy calling after him, the sirens growing louder, but Jones just walked to the narrow stairwell that led to the cabin and, with effort, moved down.