No Coming Back (9 page)

The case against me was simple and went like this:

Jenna wanted us to break up and I couldn’t stand it. We argued about it, both in school in public and afterwards in private. Things got heated and Jenna’s life was ended in a crime of passion. I covered up her murder and disposed of her body, never to be found.

The headline read:
Jilted lover kills beautiful girlfriend
. Case closed.

“Just quit with all the pretense and tell us where you hid the body,” Chief Krauss growled at the tail-end of a grueling three-hour interview. Kim’s dad was a balding man with sweat patches staining his shirt. Breath as foul as some of his accusations. “Give me something to take to the prosecutor. Anything, before they ship you out to Duluth. Work with me here, Olson. Stop this craziness spiraling out of control while you still can. You know the Luckmans. They deserve to know the truth. Don’t deny them the chance of burying their daughter. You’re not that kind of monster, are you?”

But I had nothing to give. I was empty, consumed by blackness. His blunt words beat me up and left me broken. Silence can be incriminating.

Shell-shocked, I was sent to pretrial detention, where I learned my lawyer was being provided by Lars Grossinger.

“Your mother was a valued employee of the
Harper Horn
,” the lawyer explained. “Mr. Grossinger thinks it only right that he should pay back her loyalty by helping you in your hour of need.”

For whatever his reason, Lars didn’t believe I’d killed Jenna. He put his money where his mouth was. It meant I owed him, if and when the nightmare ever ended.

At trial, my defense was defenseless. It wasn’t cheap, but they crumbled under the weight of the prosecution’s sustained offensive. They argued I was an angry teen with daddy issues, someone who didn’t like to hear the word
no
. They brought in psychiatrists specializing in teen angst. Talked about my upbringing, my issues, my emotional withdrawal, my failure to take my medication following my mother’s leaving. They made a big fuss about the fact that I was on mood-stabilizing medication in the first place. The world heard about my volatile state of mind, about how I was pinned with a label from an early age. They focused on the fact that my father had regularly beat up on my mother, about how my witnessing it had influenced me subconsciously, about how my mother had eventually left home to escape his brutality, about how her abandonment had traumatized me, and how I channeled all that pent-up rage into strangling the life out of an innocent seventeen-year-old
cheerleader
.

The jury heard that our argument in school was probably the catalyst and therefore probable cause. Jenna’s torn and bloodied sweater was a preponderance of proof. They went on to construct whole scenarios where I disposed of Jenna’s body in the woods, coated it in lime to throw the tracker dogs off the scent—lime I had access to in my uncle’s general store. Or I tied rocks to her feet and dropped her in the lake. It was all circumstantial, all wrong, all believable, all bullshit. Sure, I wept like a little girl, but there was no sympathy for me. No juror buying my sobs. I was found guilty of Jenna’s murder and sent to the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Stillwater to begin a twenty-five-year term.

My life was over. Just like hers.

Almost two decades passed by behind bars, time in which I grew, matured, planned. I learned how to manipulate the swirling blackness within me, using it to keep me alive. Using it to control the flow of memories. Then, from nowhere, I was granted parole and it was as though someone had breathed new life into my corpse. I left Stillwater with two goals: to find the person responsible for killing Jenna and to clear my name.

From my basic means in St. Paul, I spent weeks researching people back home, events, comings and goings on the lead-up to her disappearance. I was determined to uncover her real killer and to prove my innocence to the world. Even if I had to kill to achieve it.

Chapter Ten

E
ven those who knew his real name referred to him as
Tolstoy
, despite the fact he was neither of Russian descent nor a great author. The nickname had been his for as long as he could remember, bestowed upon him by an elementary school teacher as a play on words against his real name of Warren Peets. He didn’t mind the moniker; it made him sound distinguished and came with an air of authority, which was everything in his job.

Tolstoy had been born in a small fishing community clinging to the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, but he’d lived out his entire adult life here in Harper. Compared with the South, Minnesota was cold, even in the summer, and in spite of his thick skin he’d never quite acclimatized. Lately, the chill had taken permanent residence in the marrow of his bones.

Tolstoy had never felt a desire to marry and to father children, although he was and he had. When he was twenty-one he’d met a local Harper girl who didn’t mind the fact that his head scraped the ceiling, and together they’d started a family, leading a comfortable life in the house on the southern edge of town that had been their home for the past fifty years.

In his heyday, Tolstoy had been a force to be reckoned with. He could proudly boast he’d never lost a fistfight or an argument, even though he avoided both if he was able. With his towering frame and his three-hundred-fifty pounds of muscle, his presence didn’t just dominate, it intimidated. Protective parents pointed him out to their children as someone to be avoided from the other side of the street. To them, he was an enforcer, fearsome, never to be crossed. To their kids, he was an ogre, fascinating, and the stuff of urban
legends
.

But to those who mattered the most he was a gentle giant and a loyal friend. The kind who would willingly take a bullet or leap into a swollen creek to save a neighbor’s cat.

He thought about the text message on his phone as he followed the red Ford truck through town.

“Jake Olson is back”
the text message had read, and he knew exactly what had to be done.

Chapter Eleven

I
leave the Bronco parked at the end of a steep driveway and make my way up a slippery front walk toward a dilapidated house. The property is a tired construction of buckled walls fighting a losing battle against rot and neglect. A thick cap of snow presses down on the roof. It looks like the whole structure could collapse at any moment under the weight. Silvered wood with flaky remnants of yesteryear’s paint. Empty windows like blackened eyes. A moldy Christmas wreath hangs on a rusty nail on the front door. We’re a month beyond the holidays and the wreath hasn’t been changed in years.

“I’m not interested,” a woman’s voice calls as I rap my
knuckles
against the wood. “Whatever it is you’re selling, I got plenty already.”

“It’s Jake Olson,” I call back. “Open up.”

“Who?”

“Jake Olson. I used to date Jenna when we were in high school. Jenna Luckman.”

I hear footfalls approach. A lock turns and the door swings open. Immediately, I am hit by a blast of cooking smells mixed with tobacco and questionable cleanliness.

The woman standing in the doorway is as rundown as her home. Wintry skin-and-bones in a summer dress short enough to give chills. Years of erosion have worn her away. Instead of softening her features, time has sharpened them into crags and ravines. She has a bleached blonde thatch with black roots, pressing down on a face that has seen too much of hardship and decided to simply give up. There are food stains on her neckline and a map of bruises on her bare arms. I can see from the dullness in her eyes and her slight sway that narcotics play a leading role in her life.

The penitentiary introduced me to every drug imaginable. Sometimes we have no choice. I try not to sit in judgment anymore.

“Hello, Ruby. How’ve you been? It’s Jake Olson. Do you remember me?”

Shadows lengthen in the gullies of her face. It takes a moment for her to make the connection. She probably hasn’t heard my name mentioned in almost two decades, and thought about me even less. One thing I’ve learned is that we all share different memories of the same events, including people. Just because I remember her doesn’t necessarily mean she remembers me.

“Jake Olson?” She sucks hard on a hand-rolled cigarette before blowing the sweet smoke to the side. “You’re shitting me, right? The same Jake Olson who killed Jenna?” Her eyes bulge as they look me over. “No fucking way. It is you, isn’t it? Well, go ahead and hit me with shit on a stick. I thought they gave you the needle?”

Unexpectedly, she throws her arms around my neck before I can answer, squeezes me tight. Even more unexpectedly, she plants a wet kiss against my cheek. I get a mouthful of stale body odor and marijuana smoke.

“Fuck me,” she breathes in my ear. “I thought you were dead.” She hugs some more. Then she pulls her face away just enough to meet my gaze. “This is for real, isn’t it? I’m not hallucinating you, am I? Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“No, Ruby. It’s really me. I qualified for an early release,
six months ago. And here I am.”

“No fucking way.” She isn’t letting go, still has me locked in her embrace, still staring at me through dilated pupils.

“It’s nice to see you, too, Ruby.”

“Yeah. I bet. Like contracting hepatitis.”

Ruby Dickinson.

Back in the day, Ruby was Jenna’s best friend. She wasn’t mine. In fact, I couldn’t stand Ruby. In my eyes she was a leech and a bad influence on Jenna. What made matters worse was the fact the pair of them were as inseparable as best friends seem to be at that age. Pajama parties and beauty nights galore. Gossip and giggles. Girlie girls in every sense of the words. I didn’t buy it. They might have been Siamese twins had they not looked so radically
different
. As far as anyone could tell, Ruby and Jenna shared the same
interests
and attended the same extracurricular activities. I always had the
impression
Ruby wanted to be Jenna. She would buy the same clothes, voice the same likes, and hold the same opinions. In every sense, she was Jenna’s wannabe. But where Jenna was
princess
-cut, Ruby was unpolished. In the right light she was
unarguably
attractive
, but she was rough around the edges—the kind of
roughness
that runs to the core. And no amount of polishing can hide those flaws.

“I can’t believe they didn’t give you the needle,” she murmurs again as she finally disengages. “Now that would’ve been a real
travesty
, for sure. Waste of chemicals, right? Listen, I was just thinking of getting a drink. You coming with? You’ll have to excuse the untidiness; my housemaid hasn’t called this century.”

I follow Ruby down a short hallway and into a living room.

Her forewarning holds true: the place is a mess. Clothes and bric-a-brac scattered everywhere. Towers of old newspapers form an uneven skyline across the front window. A halogen heater is working overtime, blazing like the sun, trying to keep the room just above freezing. The rest of the house is probably abandoned and cold. A pile of blankets and a pillow are on the back of one couch, attesting to the fact that Ruby never ventures very far from this room. There’s a sense of despair in here, emphasized by a print of
Tretchikoff’s
famous blue-faced
Chinese Girl
hanging over a mantelpiece, projecting eternal sadness.

“So what happened with the needle?” she asks conversationally as I make myself a space on a cluttered chair. The fabric is worn, threadbare, like its owner.

“Minnesota hasn’t had the death penalty for over a century.”

“You’re shitting me, right? I had no idea they abolished it.”

“Well, even if it wasn’t, I’m not sure third-degree murder qualifies anyway.”

She settles onto the couch, facing me. “That’s criminal. Lucky for you, though, right? I can name several people on one finger who should get it. Starting with the people running Harper for instance, and working backward from there.”

Despite her words, there’s no malice in her tone. If anything, she sounds blasé. She could be commenting on foreign affairs or something equally insignificant to her. It’s the weed, I know. It relaxes reality. Ruby is a hard candy with a soft center. Deliberately, I don’t get into the whole capital punishment debate or how the rest of my sentence was commuted on the grounds of good behavior. My case was exceptional. I was arrested as a juvenile and sentenced to twenty-five years for murder without proof of a dead body. It doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen. But by no means am I another Donald Blom.

“All the same,” she continues, puffing out smoke, “and I don’t mean this personally, Jake Olson, so please don’t take it that way, but I can’t believe they didn’t ice you. I mean, come on. You were the number one suspect. They had you dead to rights.”

“Except I didn’t kill her.”

“Sure. Never stopped them killing an innocent guy, though, right? You know, I never believed all that hype about you killing Jenna. Wasn’t for me. But they believed it—all those God-fearing townsfolk.” Her eyes examine me, like she’s able to see through my own hard outer shell. “Jesus, you were one weedy kid back then. No kidding. And no insult intended. For the life of me I never knew what Jenna saw in you. I bet you broke a sweat pulling up your own socks.”

I keep my smile polite. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Ruby. It’s good to know you’re in my corner.” She means no harm and I’ve been hit with harder sticks and stones. “So that’s my life story, in a nutshell. What about you? How’ve you been?”

A flicker of unease passes over her face. She sucks on the
cigarette
and blows out smoke. “Okay, you know? I stay afloat, tread water. It’s not exactly the high life, but we’re not all meant for champagne and caviar.”

Life has been hard on Ruby Dickinson. It’s visible. And all by her own poor choices. Back in St. Paul, my research revealed Ruby had never married, nor had she birthed any children. Since her late teens, she’d seen more than her fair share of the judicial system, specifically for public disorder offenses, drug-related charges, and arrests for lewd behavior. She’d defaulted on fines and avoided community service work orders, which all contradicted the Ruby of my youth. In school, Ruby was one of the brightest sparks, top of her class. A promising future and the potential to go all the way. But then something had gotten hold of her and hadn’t let go, something that had dulled her luminescence and enslaved her.

Intelligence isn’t a barometer for addiction.

She pulls a long breath through her cigarette, eyes narrowing, holding in the sweet-smelling smoke and going for the oxygen rush.

Everything on paper says Ruby Dickinson is a bad egg, that her wires are fried and her mind is cracked. But I know firsthand that the truth can sometimes get scrambled.

“The truth is,” she says tightly, still holding it in, “I’ve never been better. No complaints here. There’s a roof over my head and food in the fridge. Life’s good, you know?” She exhales and seems to sink into the couch as a result.

Strangely enough, I believe her. To everyone on the outside, Ruby’s life must appear in a state of utter shambles. She is up to her eyeballs in trash and probably debt, maybe surviving on handouts, and hasn’t worked an honest day in her whole life. She’s a junkie through and through, one of society’s forgotten, but she seems
genuinely
content with her place. She really does—as though her aims were never higher than a step up from the gutter.

She holds out the reefer. “Want a drag?”

“No, thank you. I quit six months back.”

“Shame. It’s our vices that make getting out of bed worth it.” She stares at me with big pupils. “So, Jake Olson, freeman of Harper, how long you planning on sticking around this time?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

“Be cool to get to know one another. I don’t see anyone from the old days, you know? It would be nice to have a friend from the past come visit. Everybody’s either moved out or moved on. This was my parents’ place until they passed. Now it’s just me and my monkeys. You have someplace to bed down, Jake Olson?”

“My father’s house.”

She nods, then smiles, flashing uneven yellow teeth. There’s a gap in the crooked bottom row, food wedged in it. “Well, I was about to say you’re welcome to crash here, if you need the
company
, that is. I’m guessing there are people in town—probably
those
people
, those finger-pointing people—who wish you harm. No one will think of looking for you here. This is the leper’s house and everyone keeps their distance. Good riddance, I say. I can’t promise much in the way of food, just vodka and nibbles. But the pot is first rate and hardly anybody comes calling.”

“Thanks, Ruby, but I’ll pass this time.”

“Suit yourself. The offer’s there, whenever you need it.” She puts her elbows on her bare knees and leans forward a little, gazes at me through swirling smoke. The top three buttons of her summer dress are undone, and she knows it. “Say, would you like a drink with me, Jake Olson? We can celebrate the old times, see where it gets us. It can’t have been easy on you being locked up all these years without female company.” She reaches out and touches bitten fingertips against my knee. “Maybe I can help with that.”

“Ruby . . .”

The hand withdraws with a snap. “I’m just saying, is all. Don’t crucify me. Everybody needs a friend sometimes.”

“And I appreciate the offer. Honestly.”

“But you’re otherwise engaged.”

“Something like that.”

She takes another drag on the smoke. Her eyes work me over, as though she’s noticed my outline is blurred. “You after blood, Jak
e Olson?”

Her question catches me unprepared.

What am I after? I have spent a lifetime thinking about being back here in Harper, free to clear my name to the ninety-nine
percent
of the population who believe I am guilty. But what does that mean, exactly, for me or Jenna’s real killer?

All my mental energies are focused on unearthing the truth, with none of it reserved to serve up any kind of vigilante justice. I am not the angry, mixed-up kid I was when Jenna went missing. Sure, I tried holding on to my fiery pain as long as I could without getting burned. That’s what we do. We cling onto the hurt because it keeps it real and alive. I kept Jenna in my heart for months, maybe years, doing exactly that, with her cherished memory
smoldering
away, warming me at night. It kept me going, adjusting. It made my hell bearable, or almost. But time gobbled up all its fuel, slowly lessening the flame until the heat went out of my urgency for revenge.

“I know finding Jenna’s killer won’t bring her back,” I say slowly. “But if I can at least expose him, make him confess, then my name will be cleared and I can move on.”

“And then what?”

Good question. Everything beyond finding Jenna’s real killer is nonexistent, suspended in limbo, with nothing planned.

“A clean slate, I guess—in whatever shape that takes.”

“You’ll settle in Harper?”

“It’s my home.”

“So what makes you think you’ll even find him after all these years? I mean, let’s be brutally realistic here. He could be six feet under or living on the other side of the planet.”

“I have to start somewhere.”

She thinks about it, then nods. “Good for you, Jake Olson. You do know you’ll get no help from the dumbass authorities, or the good people of Harper?”

“I do. That’s why I’ve taken a job at the paper.”

She pulls back a little more. It’s a natural reaction when somebody thinks about Lars Grossinger. “You’re working for him? Shit, is that wise under the circumstances?”

“He’s in his eighties. Harmless.”

“Yeah, for sure. And an old snake still has venom. Take my advice and quit while you’re ahead. That shit will end up giving you a nasty bite.”

Ruby goes straight for the kill. Her words may be blunt, but her mind is still as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel.