Nine Years Gone (4 page)

Once we left the range, Tess excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, while I ordered two cups of coffee at the coffee bar. By the time she joined me again, I had already taken a seat at a corner table, as far from other patrons as I could get. The large, open room afforded us little privacy, but the distance from others helped.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” said Tess.

“Nine years.”

Tess smiled and then waved at the table awkwardly, reminding me of the girl I knew. “You still drink coffee, I see.”

“I do,” I said, looking around to make sure no one was watching us. When I caught her gaze after my sweep, her eyes were so cold and devoid of emotion that they might as well been made of glass. I almost shuddered and quickly looked down at my coffee.

“The way your eyes dart away,” she said. “It almost makes me think you’re nervous.”

I stirred my coffee. “Sorry. I’m just . . . I . . .” I took a breath, collecting myself and blinking away the memory of the look I had just seen. When I looked up again, my old friend was back, her smile and her eyes as warm as ever. “I never expected to see you again. I thought you were gone.”

“You can stare. I don’t mind,” she said, scooting her chair closer to the table and relaxing her posture. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years, about what I’d say to you when I saw you again. I missed you at Montauk State Park.”

The night before my friends and I helped Tess disappear, she and I spent the night together in her apartment, where, after making love for the last time, I asked her to promise me that she’d forget about us and move on. She refused and said it was unfair of me to even ask. We eventually came up with a compromise: if we still cared about each other in five years, we would meet on a certain day in a certain parking lot at Montauk State Park and disappear together. If one of us didn’t show, it meant he or she had found someone else.

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t make it.”

Tess looked down and stirred her coffee. “I hear you married the girl.”

“Yeah. We’d been engaged for a while, but we finally got married about six months ago.”

When she looked up from her coffee, she smiled but I caught a flicker of pain in her eyes and an only partially concealed grimace on her lips. “You going to keep me in suspense, or are you going to tell me about her?”

I looked at my coffee and then to Tess. “I married Katherine McNeil.”

“Oh,” said Tess, the smile leaving her face. “You married one of my sorority sisters. A friend of mine.”

“She’s pregnant.”

I didn’t even know where that came from. I simply blurted it out, as if that were some kind of excuse. Tess covered her grimace with a too-tight smile. Maybe that was what I had seen in her eyes earlier. It wasn’t a cold look; it was a pained one.

“Congratulations.”

We settled into an uneasy silence with both of us looking everywhere but at the person in front of us. After a few minutes of that, I sighed.

“This is more difficult than I thought it would be.”

Tess finally looked at me. “Nobody said it’d be easy.” She started and stopped talking before getting a complete sentence out. “Is Hellboy still alive?”

“Yeah, he’s hanging in there, but I don’t know for how much longer. After you disappeared, I renamed him Simon, after my Uncle Simon.”

She looked down at her coffee. “Probably a better name with a child on the way.”

We slipped into another silence, but with the awkwardness previously acknowledged, it seemed easier to take. Tess blinked rapidly and stirred her coffee. I didn’t know if I should say anything or let her lead the conversation, but eventually I cleared my throat. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” she said, shrugging. “I finished college. Go Utes!”

She halfheartedly pumped her fist in the air, and then smiled sheepishly and looked at the table.

“What is a Ute?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” she said. I returned her smile and found it came easier than I had expected. She turned her attention to her hands. “Did you go to Dominique’s execution?”

I nodded. “I was one of the witnesses.”

“Did you see my mother there?” she asked, looking up and squinting at me.

I shook my head. “No one visited him.”

“Good. He deserved to die alone.”

“Did he?” I asked. “I don’t know any more.”

She looked directly in my eyes, an intimate gesture I normally shy away from, but I held her gaze. “Yes,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Believe me. He deserved everything that happened to him.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I wanted to give you a second chance,” she said.

“For what?” I asked, furrowing my brow.

“To choose me.”

I didn’t have any coffee left, but I picked up the cup and pretended to drink anyway. “I’m glad to see you, but a lot has happened since you left. I’m married, I’ve got a mortgage, a family. I can’t leave that.”

Tess started to reach across the table, presumably for my hand, but I pulled my arms back before she could. She crossed her arms on the table.

“Katherine will find someone else. She’s beautiful, she’s smart, and she’s kind. I don’t mean to be crass, but as soon as you and I leave, she’ll have men breaking down doors to get at her. Good men, men who will treat her well. You won’t have anything to feel guilty about.”

“I love my family. I won’t leave them.”

“We’re supposed to be together. You know that.”

“I thought that, too,” I said. “But a lot has happened in the last nine years. I won’t leave my wife and family.”

“You once told me you’d always love me.”

“And part of me always will.” I cringed internally even as the words left my lips. Tess looked away, but I couldn’t tell if she was hurt or angry. “We were apart for a long time. I’ve created a life without you. I’m sorry, but I’m happy.”

“And there’s no room in your life for me.”

“Given the situation?” I asked. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

Tess blinked watery eyes. She swallowed and looked at the door. “Coming back was a mistake. I need to get out of here. Can you walk me back to my car?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll see my sister and try to get some money together,” she said. “After that, I’ll disappear again.”

“Can you do that?”

“Dominique had men chasing me until the day of his execution,” she said. “I’ve gotten pretty good at disappearing.”

“At least they should leave you alone now.”

She almost chuckled. “No. Now they’ll start using bullets instead of trying to catch me. That would have been Dominique’s last order.”

“He’s dead. You don’t have to worry about him any more.”

Tess exhaled through her nose and shook her head. “You didn’t know my stepfather or the sort of people who worked for him. Some of the men weren’t right. They were sick.”

“If you’re really scared, my father left me a cabin on Table Rock Lake. Nobody outside the family knows about it. You can hide there, and we’ll get you a lawyer to figure this thing out.”

She smiled at me, but it was patronizing. “I remember your father, Steve. He slept with every woman he could. He used to take them to that cabin. He and my mom went there when we were kids. It’s not a secret.”

“I want to help you. Katherine and I don’t have much, but I just signed a new publishing contract. I can give you my signing money.”

She smiled again, a crooked smile that once melted my heart. “I don’t need your money. I’ll be fine. But I need to get going.”

She started to stand, and so did I. “I’m sorry it turned out this way. I never planned my life to turn out like this.”

“I know, honey,” she said. “If you want to do something, pretend that I never left, for just a few minutes, and walk me back to my car. I want to feel normal again. I’ve almost forgotten what that’s like.”

“Sure.”

We left the building like a couple on a stroll, arm-in-arm, and walked to her car. It felt as awkward as anything I’ve ever done, but I didn’t want to say no to her. A truck roared by on the interstate, but I kept my eyes on Tess.

“I’ve still got a room in the Ritz-Carlton,” she said. “I’d like you to come back with me, just for the afternoon. You don’t have to stay the night.”

“You know I can’t.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I do know that. I’m going to miss you.”

“Me, too,” I said. She held her arms out for a hug, which I obliged. When I tried to pull back, she shivered slightly and brushed her lips against my neck and then my cheek. Before I could stop her, she kissed me hard and full on the lips. I immediately reached to the back of my neck to pull her hands apart. She looked almost sheepish as she stepped back.

“Sorry,” she said, looking at her feet. “It’s hurt being away from you. I had hoped that seeing you again would make it easier. I don’t think it will be, though.”

“I’m sorry. This is the most unfair situation I’ve ever been in.”

Tess looked at her car and shook her head. “You’re not sorry. You got everything you wanted. I’m just the past you’d like to forget.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Please don’t patronize me. I’ve got to go.”

I wanted to tell her that we could still be friends, that she’d find somebody, that things would work out. None of those would have helped either of us, though. “Take care of yourself. And whether you believe it or not, I am sorry.”

“You ruined my life, Steven,” she said, opening her door. “Sorry doesn’t cut it.”

Before getting into her car, she paused and stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something else. I cleared my throat.

“Are you going to stay in town long?” I asked.

I counted to five before she shook her head. “I don’t have much to stay for. I’m going to visit my sister, and then I’m going home.”

“I’m glad you have somewhere you can call home.”

“Me, too.”

“Goodbye,” I said. She nodded and then got into her car and drove off. I watched her disappear from my life once again before climbing into my vehicle. It was a short meeting, but it was good, I thought. I said what I needed to say and hopefully Tess heard what she needed to hear. Something nagged at the back of my mind, though, and it wasn’t until I drove back to Webster Groves and pulled to a stop in front of my office half an hour later that I recognized it for what it was.

She had held back on me.

Had Tess asked me for something—money, a place to stay, a gun, something—I could understand why she needed to see me in person. If she just wanted to talk, though, she could have called, or sent an email, a letter, a text message, or even a message on Facebook. As an author, I’m not hard to find. And hell, had she truly wanted me to go somewhere with her, she could have come back before Dominique died. I know we had our agreement, but if she really wanted me to go with her, she could have come back anyway. Had she come back before Katherine and I became serious, I might have even gone with her.

But she didn’t come back then. She returned at great risk to herself and to me the day after her stepfather was executed, knowing I was married, presumably knowing I wouldn’t leave. I took the stairs to my office and grabbed a coffee mug—the only type of cup I kept in the office—and filled it from a bottle of Scotch I kept in my desk.

In all the years I had known Tess, I rarely saw her act without reason. Even when we were kids, she was always calculating, always playing groups against each other in a game of playground politics. I couldn’t see that changing now, which meant she came back for a reason, and it wasn’t solely to talk to me. I didn’t think she’d try to hurt me, but she certainly had the ability if she wanted.

What is it you really want, Tess?

Before I even finished my drink, someone inserted a key into the street-level door that led to my office. Only three keys for that door existed, and I had one in my pocket, my wife had the second, and Vince had the third. Katherine would have called before coming, so I knew it was Vince even before he stepped foot inside. The front door opened and then banged against the wall.

“Come on in,” I called out. “Don’t bother knocking.”

“You wouldn’t have given me a key if you didn’t want me to come over,” he said, wiping his feet on the welcome mat at the foot of the stairs. The treads creaked and groaned beneath even his slight weight as he started up.

“Speaking of which, can I have my key back?”

“You’re hilarious,” he said, cresting the stairs. Vince had a widow’s peak so pronounced it looked like an arrow pointing to the bridge of his nose, while he plodded along with the gait of a man prematurely affected by the ravages of arthritis. In contrast, his eyes held the sort of mischievous light that dimmed in most young men around their thirteenth birthdays. I had liked him from the first time I saw him in kindergarten almost thirty years ago.

He walked across the office to the coffee pot and touched the carafe. “This still good?”

“I brewed it this morning and forgot to drink it.”

He flicked on the burner to heat it up before picking up two brown ceramic mugs from the shelf above the coffee maker. He sniffed the cups to see if they were clean and, apparently satisfied, poured coffee into both. He sat on the couch across from me.

“It’s lukewarm, but it ought to wake you up,” he said. He picked up the mug with the remnants of my Scotch and held it to his face before wincing. “This smells like a swamp.”

“It’s a single-malt Scotch from the Isle of Islay. It’s probably older than that girl you brought to my last Christmas party.”

“She smelled better.” He put the mug down. “When did you start drinking in the middle of the afternoon?”

“When you’re a writer, you don’t call it ‘drinking in the afternoon.’ It’s called ‘pulling a Hemingway.’”

“You hung over?”

I yawned. “Just tired. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. What’s your news?”

“I had a friend of mine on the force look up Holly Olson,” said Vince, leaning against the couch and throwing his arm over the back. “He called the Ritz to get the credit card number she used to reserve her room and then ran a credit report and background check on her for me. Supposedly, she died a couple of years ago.”

“Aside from her death, did the background check mention anything that should concern us?”

Vince took his arm from the couch’s back and reached into his back pocket and pulled out a spiral-bound notebook. He flipped through a couple of pages.

“Not really. Holly Olson, born August 19
^th
, 1980. Died December 13
^th
, 2002, just a couple of months shy of her graduation from the University of Utah. She was never arrested or even given so much as a speeding ticket. She was a solid citizen.”

That caused something to click in my mind. “What’s the mascot of the University of Utah?”

Vince looked up from his notes and shrugged. “Aren’t they the Cougars?”

“No, that’s BYU,” I said, shaking my head and reaching for my cell phone. A quick Google search gave me my answer. University of Utah students were known as Utes after the Ute Indians. I put my phone in my pocket and grabbed a notebook from my desk. “And you’re sure she didn’t have a criminal record?”

“Yeah,” said Vince, leaning back on the couch and putting his feet up on the coffee table. “My buddy thinks it’s a run-of-the-mill identify theft.”

I returned to the couch but didn’t sit down. “I talked to Tess again today.”

“What does she want?”

“She asked me to leave town with her.”

Vince took his feet off the coffee table and sat straighter. “You told her no, didn’t you?”

“At first I asked if she’d have a threesome with Katherine and me, but she declined. That’s when I turned her down.”

Vince smiled a little and nodded. “At least you’ve got your priorities straight. How was she?”

“I don’t know,” I said, plopping down on the end of the couch opposite Vince. “She looked fine, but she seemed a little off.”

“What do you mean by that?”

I slouched and turned so my feet could rest on the coffee table.

“You were a cop,” I said. “So you’ve seen people look at you.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t have to be a police officer for people to look at you.”

I nodded and shrugged, my eyes directed at the coffee table. “True, but you’ve got training. When you see somebody, like a really bad guy, can you tell something’s not right about him?”

Vince put his mug on the table and then laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back, nodding sagaciously. “You’re asking if I can look into someone’s eyes and peer into his soul to find out if he has ill intentions. Sure, I can do that. They teach that in the police academy.”

“Don’t do that,” I said, looking up at him. “I asked a serious question.”

Vince stared down at me for a moment, but then removed his hands from his head and leaned forward. “On the street, everybody’s a hard ass. They’ll try to stare you down, get in your head, prove how tough they are, but as soon as you slap a pair of cuffs on them, most of them back down. Those who don’t, yeah, there’s something about them that’s a little chilling. They don’t have to say anything, but you can still tell something’s not quite right about them. Are you telling me Tess looked at you like that?”

I took a breath. “Not like that, maybe, but there was something off about the way she looked at me.”

“Like you were a piece of meat she wanted to slather barbecue sauce on?” he asked. “The way you two went at it in college, she might have just been horny.”

I didn’t crack a smile. “She looked at me as if I wasn’t even there. I don’t know how to describe it.”

Only I did know how to describe it. Tess had looked at me with a cold, intense expression that neither wavered nor hinted at what lay beneath. I had seen a look like that before, but it was on a lion at the zoo and there had been steel bars between us.

“Did she say where she’s been?”

“I asked, but she didn’t give me a lot of details.”

“What
did
she say?” asked Vince, lowering his chin.

I tossed the drink back and grimaced as the liquor burned down my throat. “She said she finished college and that Dominique’s men have been chasing her ever since we helped her disappear.”

Vince furrowed his brow. “If someone was chasing her, how’d she go to college?”

I shrugged. “Maybe it took a couple of years to find her. Maybe she was safe for a while.”

Vince swore and closed his eyes. “I think I’m going to need some of that Scotch.”

“Help yourself.”

He grabbed the bottle from my desk drawer and poured a generous amount into his coffee mug and a slightly less generous shot into mine. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, but he stared at me intently between sips.

“We need to bring Isaac in on this. He deserves to know what’s going on.”

“I agree,” I said. “If you call him, we can meet in my garage tonight.”’ I paused for a second to think of how I wanted to word my thoughts. “Tess took a big risk to come back here today. I can’t figure out why.”

Vince looked thoughtful for a moment, but then he nodded. “I’m sure that in a couple of days, she’ll go on her way, and this will blow over. If it doesn’t, you, Isaac, and I will deal with this together.”

“I hope it blows over,” I said, after taking a deep drink and feeling the liquor run through my system. “But you didn’t see her. When I saw her today, I swear there was a moment when she looked at me like I wasn’t even there, like I was nothing.” I paused. “She also said I ruined her life.”

“And that bothers you?”

I looked up at him, and then looked at the window. “Knowing her, that scares me.”

Vince stared at me for a moment and then sighed. “I held back on you. Holly Olson didn’t die of natural causes.”

“How’d she die?”

Vince shrugged. “They never found her body. She left her apartment, got in her car, and disappeared. The police questioned her boyfriend overnight but released him without charges.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Must not have had enough to charge him with a crime.”

“What about her car?” I asked.

“Hikers found it in the Wasatch Mountains southeast of the school a couple of months after she went missing,” said Vince. “The gas tank was empty, and the front door was open, but no Holly. The police speculated that she ran the tank dry and then abandoned the car to search for help. That high up, people don’t even build hunting cabins. She probably died of exposure.”

“Did the police find out why she was in the mountains in the first place?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“And you couldn’t find anything else on her? Nothing that mentioned a resolution to the case?”

Vince shook his head. Even as a casual observer without law enforcement experience, that didn’t sit well with me. A boyfriend picked up and questioned by the police overnight, no known explanation for why Holly went to the mountains instead of straight to her parents’ house, no clear understanding of what happened between the time she left her university to the time of her death, and no body. That story should have had legs.

“I should follow up on this.”

“It’s probably a coincidence,” said Vince, standing. “I’m sure Tess picked the name out of the obituary section of the newspaper.”

Except she wouldn’t have done that. Tess volunteered at a battered women’s shelter—one my mother tried to escape into once—in high school, helping women set up new lives for themselves. She wasn’t an expert criminal, by any means, but she knew enough about starting fresh that she wouldn’t have stolen a dead woman’s ID without very good reason. What that reason was, I couldn’t figure out.

Vince started toward the stairs, but stopped before going down. “And don’t forget to tell Katherine about tonight. I like her and would rather not piss her off by showing up at your house unexpected.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said. He started to turn again, but I cleared my throat. “You got a name for any of the detectives involved with the case?”

Vince put his hands in his hip pockets. “You were a reporter. Isn’t that the sort of thing you can figure out on your own?”

“I still am a reporter, but you’re right here.”

“Roger Arteaga from Idaho Falls, Holly’s hometown,” said Vince, raising his eyes. “He was the only guy mentioned by name. Anything else you want to know? Maybe you want me to find his number for you?”

“I think I can handle that, but thank you, sweetheart,” I said, reaching into my pocket for some loose change. I pulled out a quarter and tossed it to him. “Go buy yourself something pretty.”

Vince pocketed the quarter and gave me the finger before leaving. Under normal circumstances, I would have thought of a witty but juvenile response, but my mind was already on other matters. I had work to do.