Never Look Away (13 page)

I hope you're sad
, I thought.
I hope you're fucking miserable for what you did
.

When the Oldsmobile had pulled into the driveway, I'd initially had an impulse to get out, march over, and tear into Horace Richler. I wanted to tell him what a terrible man he was. I wanted to tell him that a man who would abuse his daughter--even if that abuse was limited to emotional--didn't deserve to be called a father. I wanted to tell him that his daughter had turned out well despite his attempts to sabotage her. I wanted to tell him that he had a wonderful grandson, but because he'd been such a miserable bastard he was never going to meet him.

But I didn't tell him anything.

I watched Horace Richler go into the house with his wife, Gretchen. I watched the door close behind them.

Then I drove home, and never told Jan about the stop I had made along the way.

FOURTEEN

I thought about my visit to the Richler home on the way back from the bridge with Dad.

What if Jan had been wanting, for years, to say to her parents what I'd wanted to say when I'd parked out front of their home? What if the way her father had treated her had been eating her up for years, in ways she'd never let on? Revealing how much her father's actions still hurt her might have made her feel vulnerable. And yet, Jan had told me over the past two weeks how fragile, how potentially self-destructive she had been feeling.

I just didn't know anything anymore.

I tried to put myself in Jan's position.
I'm in a bad place, thinking about taking my own life. Before I do such a thing, do I want to confront my father, tell him what I think of him? Tell my mother she should have stood up for me? Tell both of them how they ruined my life before I end it?

I shuddered.

"You okay there?" Dad asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"It's a good thing," he said. "That we didn't find her there. Under that bridge. That's a good thing. Because if that's the place she was talking about doing herself in, well, stands to reason that she didn't."

Dad was trying really hard. Driving out to that bridge, it had been a long shot at best. The fact that Jan wasn't there just meant that Jan wasn't there. The fact was, we didn't know where she was. But I didn't want to make my father feel bad by dismissing his hunt for a silver lining.

"I suppose," I said. "I suppose." Jan had also mentioned the much taller bridge in downtown Promise Falls, but if she'd tried something there, I told myself, there would have been witnesses. The police would have heard almost immediately.

Dad pointed up ahead. "You see that? Guy didn't signal. How hard is it to put your blinker on? Christ almighty."

Not long after that, we were riding behind a driver who moved into the oncoming lane in preparation for a left turn into a driveway, allowing us to scoot past.

"What the hell is that?" Dad said. "People in the country pull that stunt all the time. What if someone was passing us, or someone suddenly showed up in the oncoming lane? I swear to God, how do these people get their licenses?"

When I didn't respond to either of these observations, Dad decided to dial it down a bit. Finally, he said, "So, you been thinking about my idea? About Jan looking up her parents?"

"Yeah, I have."

"You got any way to get in touch with them? Your mother's told me Jan doesn't talk about them, that she's never even told you who they are or where they live."

"I think I could find them," I said.

"Yeah? How would you go about that?"

"They live in Rochester," I said. "I know the address."

"So she did tell you?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"Well, if I was you, I'd call them up, see if she's been in touch. If they're in Rochester, Jan would have had plenty of time to drive there by now."

In what? I was in my car, and Jan's was at home.

"How long a drive is it? Three, four hours?"

"Under three," I said.

"So when we get back, we'll give them a call. It's long distance but I don't care about that."

That was a major concession on Dad's part. He hated long-distance calls being made on his phone.

I glanced over and smiled. "Thanks, Dad. But I'm afraid the moment I say Jan's name, they'll hang up on me."

He shook his head at the thought of it. "How can parents be like that?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, you didn't always do what we wanted but we never disowned you," Dad said, forcing a smile. "You could be a real pain in the ass sometimes."

"I don't doubt it."

"You have to let your kids make their own decisions in life, good or bad."

"Is that why you're so reluctant to offer advice?" I asked.

Dad shot me a look. "Smart-ass."

We were getting back into Promise Falls, only a few blocks from my parents' house. It was nearly dark, and the streetlights had come on. I felt a sense of imminent doom as we rounded the corner, expecting to see one or more police cars parked out front. But there were no unfamiliar cars parked at the curb.

My mother was standing at the door. She opened it and came out as we pulled into the driveway. She had a hopeful, expectant look on her face, but I shook my head.

"Nothing," I said. "We didn't find Jan."

"So she wasn't--she didn't--"

"No," I said. "Any news here? Anything from the police?"

She shook her head. We all went into the house, where I saw Ethan on the third step of the stairs, preparing to jump.

"Ethan, don't--"

He leapt down to the main floor, hitting it with a thump. "Watch!" he said, ran up to the third step, and did it again.

"He's been a madman," Mom said. "I let him have half a glass of Coke with his macaroni."

Mom always liked to blame Ethan's rowdiness on something he'd had to eat or drink. It had been my experience that it didn't much matter.

I gave her a kiss and went into the kitchen to use the phone. I had Detective Duckworth's card in my hand and dialed his cell.

"Duckworth."

"It's David Harwood," I said. "I know you'd probably have called if you knew anything, but I wanted to check in."

"I don't have any news," Duckworth said. His voice sounded guarded.

"You still have people searching?"

"We do, Mr. Harwood." He paused. "I think, if there are no developments overnight, if Mrs. Harwood doesn't come home, we should put out a release in the morning."

I pictured her coming through the door here, into my parents' house. There was a loud thunk from the other room as Ethan hit the floor again.

"Okay, good," I said. "How about a news conference?"

"I don't know that we're at that stage," he said. "I think a picture and a description of your wife and the circumstances of her disappearance will do for now."

"I think we need a news conference," I said.

"Let's see where we are in the morning," he said. There was something in his voice. It sounded controlled, held back.

"I might not be here in the morning," I said.

"Where are you going to be?"

"Jan's parents are in Rochester."

Mom's eyes widened when I said it. I'd never told her about the trip I'd made to see Jan's childhood home.

With Duckworth, I continued, "She hasn't had any contact with them in probably twenty years. They didn't come to our wedding, they've never met their grandson. But I'm thinking, what if Jan decided to go see them? What if, after all this time, she had some reason to get in touch that she didn't share with me? Maybe she just wanted to finally tell them what she thinks of them."

Duckworth was quiet, saying only, "I suppose."

"I'd phone them, but I'm worried about doing this any way but face-to-face. I mean, they've never set eyes on me. What are they going to think, some guy phones them and says he's their son-in-law and oh, by the way, their daughter's missing and is there any chance she might have dropped by? And if Jan is there, and doesn't want me to know, I'm worried that if I call, she'll take off."

"Maybe," Duckworth said with little conviction.

From the other room, Mom shouted at Ethan, "Enough!"

I said, "I'm probably going to hit the road in a couple of minutes, get a hotel in Rochester, and see Jan's parents first thing in the morning."

Instead of addressing my plans, Duckworth said, "Tell me again about your wife and Leanne Kowalski."

The question threw me. "I told you. They work together. That's about it."

"What time did you and your son get to Five Mountains, Mr. Harwood?"

Why did he ask it that way? Why didn't he ask when Ethan and I and
Jan
got to Five Mountains?

"I guess it was about eleven, maybe a little after. Didn't they have it right down to the minute, when they scanned our ticket at the gate?"

"I think you're right," Duckworth said.

"Is something going on?" I asked. "Please tell me if something's going on."

"If I have any news, Mr. Harwood, I'll be in touch. I have your cell number."

I hung up the phone. Mom and Dad were both standing there, watching me.

"Jan told you about her parents?" Mom asked.

"I figured it out."

"Who are they?"

"Horace and Gretchen Richler," I said.

"Does Jan know you know?"

I shook my head. I didn't want to get into this. I leaned against the kitchen counter. I was exhausted.

"You need to get some rest," Mom said.

"I'm going to Rochester," I said.

"In the morning?"

"No, now." I realized it was suddenly very quiet. "Where's Ethan?"

"He collapsed on the couch," Mom said. "Thank God."

"Can he stay here for the night?"

"You can't drive anywhere now," Mom protested. "You'll drive off the road."

"Why don't you make me a thermos of coffee to go while I say good night to Ethan," I said.

Without waiting for any further protest, I went into the living room, where Ethan was resting his head on the end of the couch. He'd pulled a throw around himself.

"Gotta go, sport," I said. "You're staying here for the night."

No reaction. His eyes suddenly looked heavy. "I'll bet Mommy's at the mall."

"Maybe so," I said.

"Okay," he said, and his eyelids drifted down like flower petals closing for the night.

FIFTEEN

Barry Duckworth closed the phone and said to Lyall Kowalski, "Sorry about that."

"Was that Jan's husband?" he asked. He and the detective were sitting in his living room. Lyall was in a black T-shirt and dirty, knee-length shorts with pockets all over them. Duckworth wondered whether Lyall had gone prematurely bald at age thirty-five, or whether he shaved his head. Some guys, once they started losing some hair, decided to go the whole nine yards with it, make a fashion statement.

Even before he saw the pit bull coming out of the kitchen, Duckworth knew there was a dog here. The house was permeated with the smell of pooch.

"Yes, that was him," Duckworth said.

"Has he seen my wife?"

"No," Duckworth said, but thinking,
At least he's not saying he has
. There were things about this case that were starting to bother him, even before he'd learned that Jan Harwood's workmate was missing, too.

"Tell me again what time your wife left the house," Duckworth said.

Lyall Kowalski was leaning forward on the couch, elbows on his knees. "Okay, so she was actually gone before I got up. I got in kind of late last night and was sleeping in."

"Where had you been?"

"I was at the Trenton." A local bar. "With some friends. We had a few, and Mick gave me a lift home."

"Mick?"

"Mick Angus. We work together at Thackeray."

"What do you do at the college, Mr. Kowalski?"

"We're both in building maintenance."

"So you got home when?"

Lyall scrunched up his face, trying to remember. "Three? Or maybe five."

"And your wife was here when you got home?"

"As far as I know," he said, nodding.

"What do you mean, as far as you know?"

"Well, there's no reason to think that she wasn't."

"I don't understand."

"I didn't actually talk to her. I didn't make it as far as the bedroom. I camped out on the couch."

"Why'd you do that?"

"Leanne gets kinda bitchy when I come home drunk. Actually, she's kind of bitchy even when I'm sober. Plus, I kinda forgot I was supposed to take her out to dinner last night. So I didn't want to have to deal with that, so I didn't get into bed with her."

"Were you at the Trenton all night?"

"I think so. Except after they closed, I had a couple of drinks in the parking lot with Mick."

"Who drove you home?" Duckworth said disapprovingly.

Lyall waved his hands at Duckworth, like it was no big deal. "Mick can drink a lot and still drive better than most people sober."

"Where were you supposed to go for dinner?"

"Kelly's?" he said, like he was asking Duckworth for confirmation. "I know I said something on Thursday about taking her there for dinner but it slipped my mind."

"Did you talk to your wife at all last night, while you were at Trenton's?"

"My cell was dead."

"So you fell asleep on the couch. Did you see your wife in the morning?"

"Okay, that's the thing? I think I might have heard her saying something to me while I was sleeping it off, but I can't exactly swear to it."

"So what does your wife usually do on a Saturday?"

"She kind of has a routine. She goes out around eight-thirty. Most weekends, she goes out by herself, even if I haven't been out with my buds the night before. I've offered to go with her sometimes, but only because I know she'll say no. She kinda likes to go on her own. I don't take any offense or anything."

"Where does she go?" Duckworth asked.

"To the malls. She likes to go to all of them. Every damn one between here and Albany. She likes Crossgates and Colonie Center. How much clothes and shoes and jewelry and makeup does one woman need?"

"She drops a lot of money on Saturdays?"

"I don't know how she affords it. We're kind of on a limited budget," Lyall said. "What I don't get is if all the malls have exactly the same stores, what's the point in going to one after another?"

"I don't know," Duckworth said, thinking it was the first thing Lyall Kowalski had said that bordered on insightful.

"So after she's done with the malls, she makes the grocery her last stop, because she doesn't want all her Lean Cuisines melting while she's wandering around JCPenney."

"But you don't actually know where, exactly, she would have gone."

"No."

"Where does she buy groceries?"

Lyall shrugged. "Grocery store?"

The dog, built like a three-foot cross section of a punching bag with legs, walked through the room, nails clicking on the uncarpeted wood floor. He collapsed on a square of area rug in front of an empty chair.

"If this were like other Saturdays, what time would you be expecting her back?"

"Three or four? Five at the latest."

"When did you get up?"

"Around one," Lyall said.

"And did you try calling your wife at all?"

"I tried her cell but it goes straight to message. And she hasn't called here to say she was going to be late or anything."

Duckworth nodded slowly. He asked, "When was the last time you actually saw or spoke to your wife, Mr. Kowalski?"

He thought a moment. "I guess, middle of yesterday? She called me from work to check what time we were going out for dinner." He winced, as if someone had stuck a pin in his arm.

"So you didn't speak to her later yesterday or last night, not at all?"

Lyall shook his head.

"And you didn't actually talk to her this morning?"

Another shake.

"When Mick dropped you off here last night, did you notice whether Leanne's car was here?"

"I wasn't all that observant at the time."

"For all you know," Duckworth said, "she wasn't even here last night."

"Where would she be if she wasn't here?"

"I don't know. What I'm asking is whether you can actually say, with any certainty, that your wife was here when you got home in the middle of the night, or was here this morning."

He looked slightly dumbstruck. "I'm just assuming she was here. Wouldn't make sense for her not to be here."

"Do you have a list of the bank and credit cards your wife uses?"

"What for?" he asked.

"We could check, see where she used them, it would tell us where she's been."

Lyall scratched his head. "When Leanne buys anything, she tends to use cash."

"Why's that?"

"We kinda had our cards canceled."

Duckworth sighed. "Has Leanne ever done this before? Gone out and not come back until late, or maybe stayed over with a friend for the night? Is it possible--and I'm sorry to have to ask this--that she might have a boyfriend?"

Lyall shook his head, clenched his fists, and pressed his meaty lips together. "Shit no, I mean, no, she wouldn't do that."

Duckworth sensed something. "Mr. Kowalski?"

"She's my girl. She's not going to mess around on me. No way."

"Has she ever done anything like that before?"

He waited a beat too long before answering. "No."

"I need you to be straight with me here," Duckworth said. "This kinda stuff, it happens to the best of us."

Lyall's lips moved in and out. Finally, he said, "It was years ago. We were going through a rough patch. Not like now. Things are pretty good now. She had a thing with some guy she met in a bar. Just a one-nighter, that was all there was to it. Some guy passing through."

"Who was the man?"

"I never knew. But she told me. Not to confess, but to stick it to me, you know? Saying things like if I wasn't going to show her a good time, there was plenty of guys who would. I cleaned up my act after that."

Duckworth looked around the room, then let his eyes settle back on Lyall.

The man was on the verge of tears. "I'm real scared something's happened to her. Like maybe she had a car accident or something. Have you checked on that? She drives a Ford Explorer. It's blue and it's, like, a 1990, so it's kind of eaten up with rust."

"I don't have any report of an accident involving that make of vehicle," Duckworth said. "Mr. Kowalski, how close are your wife and Jan Harwood?"

He blinked. "They work together."

"Are they friends? Do they get together after work? Have they ever, I don't know, gone on a girls' weekend away?"

"Shit no," he said. "Just between you and me, Leanne thinks Jan's a bit stuck-up, you know? Think she's better than everybody."

Last thing, Duckworth asked Lyall Kowalski some basic questions, wrote down the answers in his notebook.

"What's your wife's date of birth?"

"Uh, February ninth. She was born in 1973."

"Her full name?"

Lyall sniffed, then said, "Leanne Katherine Kowalski. Well, her name before she met me was Bothwick."

Duckworth kept scribbling. "Weight?"

"Whoa. One-forty? No, one-twenty? She's kind of skinny. And she's around five-six or -seven."

"Hair?"

"Black. It's kinda short, with some streaks in it."

Duckworth asked for a picture. The best Lyall could come up with was a wedding photo of the two of them, a ten-year-old shot of them jamming wedding cake into each other's mouths.

Before he pulled away from the curb out front of the Kowalski house, Duckworth got out his phone, waited for someone to answer, and said, "Gunner."

"Yeah, hey, Detective."

"You still at Five Mountains?"

"I've been here all day," he said. "Just finishing up now."

"How'd it go?"

"Okay, so, the first thing we did was check a couple more times to see if we could track down that third ticket bought online."

"Right."

"We thought maybe there was a glitch in the system, but we've pretty much ruled that out. If she came into the park, she didn't do it with a ticket purchased over the Internet."

"Okay," Duckworth said.

"Then, with the pictures the husband provided, we spent the rest of the day looking at all the people coming in and going out through the gates, trying to spot the wife. We narrowed it down to the time frame basically established from when the husband and the kid got there, and when he called the police."

"I'm with ya."

"It's not easy. There's so many people, sometimes you can't make them out, sometimes they're wearing hats that cover half their face, so the thing is, she might have been there and we didn't see her. But we looked for a woman matching her description, dressed the way the husband described her."

"And nothing."

"Nothing. If she's there, we can't find her."

"Okay, look, thanks, I appreciate it. Go home."

"You don't have to ask me twice," he said.

"Is Campion still around?"

"Yeah, she's been here all day. I can see her outside the door."

"You wanna put her on?"

Duckworth heard Gunner put down the phone and call out to Officer Didi Campion. Twenty seconds later, the phone was picked up.

"Campion here."

"It's Barry, Didi. Long day, huh?"

"Yes, sir."

"I want to ask you again about the time you spent with the kid this morning."

"Sure."

"Did he actually say the mother was there with them at the park?"

"What do you mean?"

"Had the boy seen Mrs. Harwood that morning?"

"He was asking about her. He was asking what had happened to her. I certainly got the sense he'd seen her at the park."

"Do you think--how do I put this--he could have been convinced his mother had been there even if she hadn't?"

"You mean like, the dad says we're just going to meet your mom now, your mom just went into the bathroom, something like that?"

"That's kind of how I was thinking," Duckworth said.

Campion said, "Hmmm."

"I mean, the kid's only what, four years old? Tell a four-year-old enough times that he's invisible and he'll start believing it. Maybe the dad made him think his mother was there even if she wasn't."

"The kid was kind of dozy," Campion said. "Like, tired, not stupid."

"This Harwood guy, he says the three of them are going to Five Mountains for the day, but he only gets two tickets. He says his wife has been talking suicide, tells us his wife went to the doctor about it, but turns out she never went."

"She didn't?"

"No. I talked to Dr. Samuels today. And her boss, who runs the heating and cooling company? He says he didn't see any signs that she was depressed the last couple of weeks. If anything, she was excited about something. Kind of, I don't know, anticipating something."