Nowhere Girl (9 page)

Gabby rolled her eyes. “It wasn't a rally; it was training for the race, and it was a bunch of bike geeks who are as crazy as I am and want to ride across the country in the blaring sun as fast as they can.” She grinned.

I loved that the braces she'd worn when we were in junior high had never closed the gap between her front teeth.

“It was amazing.” She checked her watch, a pink plastic digital with Minnie Mouse on the face. “Holy camels. I'm late for Libby.” Her nickname for Sarandius Library. “You know I love ya.” And then she was gone.

After the oversized door clicked behind her and the motion sensors went on with her footsteps, a familiar knot traveled from my stomach to my throat. Once I was alone, I remembered again the depression on my side of the bed that morning, the flash of blond I'd seen in my sleep, an exhale as though someone had said my name. I'd woken with a start, and Greg had woken with me. “What was that?” he'd said instantly. But I'd rolled over and feigned sleep. I didn't want to tell him that Savannah had come to me again. I waited until he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth and get changed into his running clothes before I saw what I knew would be there—an imprint next to where I'd slept.

*   *   *

Since Savannah had died, I broke time into before and after. There was before her murder, when we were a perfectly happy family of five. And there were the sixteen years since, when nothing made sense anymore and my family slipped past one another instead of ever really talking. My parents said they'd moved south because the winters were too much, but I secretly thought it was easier to not be around everything that reminded them of their lost daughter.

I was thinking about going to Savannah's grave. It had been a while since I'd been there, but the phone rang. It was a number I didn't recognize, so I almost didn't answer it, but there was something about the dream I'd had the night before that made me pick up.

“Hi, this is Cady,” I said, hoping it wasn't Deanna trying to trick me into talking to her.

“Cadence.” The voice sounded familiar. “This is Patrick Tunney.”

“Shit,” I said softly. It couldn't be a coincidence that I'd had another Savannah dream the night before. “Officer Tunney? Is everything okay?”

“Are you busy? I'd like to talk to you in person.”

Fifteen minutes later, I watched a black Suburban with tinted windows pull in my driveway. Patrick Tunney got out of his car, bent down by the side-view mirror for a moment, and headed up the walk. I opened the door before he rang the bell.

“Cadence.” He put out his hand. “It's so good to see you.” He stopped speaking abruptly and stared at the ceiling for a moment, as if thinking. “Sorry. You prefer Cady, right?” I nodded but didn't speak. Had he remembered that from sixteen years ago?

I took it and remembered how comforted I'd felt whenever he was around after Savannah. I led him through the formal living room into the great room. We never used it, and it reminded me of my parents' house. In all the years I lived in that little yellow colonial on Bickford Lane, the only time I ever remember using the living room as anything more than a shortcut to the TV room was at Savannah's funeral. It seemed like every high school student in town was crammed in there during the reception.

We sat down on opposite sides of the white couch, and I watched Patrick as he put a cracked, brown messenger bag on the floor by his feet. It had been fifteen years since we'd been in the same room. The last time I'd seen him was when he'd come by the house when Fisher had put Savannah's case in cold storage. I remembered the bitter December night like it was yesterday, how sorry he'd been. There was no reason for him to be here now, years later. Unless … unless they had a new lead.

“Officer Tunney,” I said, thinking of Savannah in the dream, her quick flash of white-blond hair, “is there something new?”

“It's actually Detective Tunney,” he said, picking at a callus on his palm. “But please call me Patrick.” His auburn hair was darker, and his shoulders were broader if that was possible, thicker, but he still had that gentle voice, that presence that made me feel maybe everything would be okay.

“Patrick,” I repeated.

“Captain Fisher is retiring.” He shifted so he was facing me. “Actually, he's been asked for his resignation, and so have about six other officers on the squad.”

Emma's father? “What happened?” I asked.

Patrick sounded apologetic when he spoke. “I'm not at liberty to say. We're going through quite a transition. I wanted to come and tell your family, because—”

“My parents don't live here anymore.”

“I know, which is why I called you. But if you don't mind giving me their number, I'd like to talk to them too. And David.”

“I'm sorry, but I still don't understand why you're here.” I pulled my hair back to put it in a ponytail, but I didn't have an elastic. “Is this about Savannah?” It was weird, saying her name, and as soon as it was out of my mouth, I felt a strange hush. I never talked about her. It was too much.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “It is.” He stretched his fingers toward me, and for a second, I thought he was going to take my hand. “Fisher was the one who decided to make her case inactive, cold.” Patrick watched me with his dark eyes. “And as of next Friday, he's gone. I'm being put in charge of cold cases, along with a detective named Jon Caritano.”

I remembered him. He was the cop with Captain Fisher at the school.

“We're going to investigate her case again, because—” He stopped himself. Patrick's hair was short, and he had a muscular build, but there was something soft about his face, and I thought how he might be one of those sweet, tough guys who cried at weddings. “There's a lot I can't say right now. But we're going to go back and look at forensics, evidence, anonymous tips.” He stopped talking, and something about his expression made him seem sorry, regretful.

My stomach twisted. I couldn't believe it. Finally, finally, someone was going to do something for my sister. “You're really opening her case again? Why?”

Patrick inched forward. “Because I owe her that much. Your sister deserves justice, and I think now I'm ready to give it to her.”

His words stopped me. “Don't you mean
get
it for her?” But he stared at the floor.

Finally, he spoke. “The nature of Savannah's injuries was so disturbing…”

But I didn't hear the rest of his sentence. I was remembering how often, in the months after Savannah was murdered, people whispered that her attacker must have been deranged, a sociopath, an escapee from a mental hospital. Normal people would never choke the life out of someone with a belt.

“We were told to view the case as if she were a victim of opportunity.” Patrick watched me. “We spent a year building a profile based on a perp—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Um, a bad guy who was disorganized and erratic. Possibly mentally ill. Maybe schizophrenic.” He wasn't fat but husky, and that made me feel more comfortable. Suddenly, I didn't think I could ever handle hearing news about my sister from anyone but him.

“And now?”

Patrick tented his hands and fixed his gaze at the middle space between us as if planning what he was about to say. “And now I want to examine it from all angles. It's been my experience on the job that sometimes when this much time has gone by, perpetrators are ready for confession. They don't want to carry the burden of their crimes any longer. I know I don't.”

I'd tried so many times to channel my connection to Savannah and feel who hurt her, but either I didn't have the capability to make myself feel her in that way, or—and I sometimes tried to make sense of this when I couldn't sleep at night—Savannah didn't want me to know. My sister had kept secrets from my parents. She'd gotten stoned in the woods with the upperclassmen girls. She'd had sex with Chapman Sharp and three other boys. She'd sneaked out countless times. It only dawned on me after she died that she could also have been keeping secrets from me.

“Excuse me?” I asked quietly.

He was wearing an upside-down shamrock on his right ring finger. “We all made mistakes back then, but now that Fisher is out, it's time to make things right.”

For a minute, I felt like we were the only people left on earth. “Are you going to tell all this to my parents and to David too?”

“Yes,” he said. “The more people we can talk to, the more it'll help us understand what happened, what we may have missed the first time around.”

There were things I'd never told my parents. The medical examiner had determined the bruising on Savannah's neck was caused by someone choking her with a belt or a strap, probably something leather. Her hymen wasn't intact, and the investigators concluded, based on conversations with my parents about Savannah's history, that she'd been raped. I'd never said anything different. I felt sure I never wanted my mother to know Savannah wasn't a virgin. For that reason, I couldn't tell Patrick everything.

“Cady.” Patrick leaned in as though confiding in me, his voice as soothing now as it had been years ago. “We think it's worth taking a second look. That's the only reason I'm here.”

“Is there anything you need from me?”

He pulled a manila envelope out of his bag. “In here is the original list of contacts, everyone we talked to.”

I wondered if Chapman Sharp was on there. He'd cried to me after Savannah died. He'd called me up, and we'd stood on the empty football field one Sunday when my parents were at church, freezing our asses off while he cried so hard I thought he'd collapse. “I loved her,” he kept saying. “I should have been there.” But Chapman had been at lacrosse practice when it happened, along with almost every boy Savannah had ever kissed.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“We need to reach out to everyone from her past. Well, as many people as we can.” He leaned forward, and I saw the skin around those kind eyes had grown crow's-feet from squinting. And smiling. “We checked out all her friends,” he said. “No one raised any red flags. What we want to do now is to concentrate on people who knew Savannah but who she may not have been aware of.”

“If she wasn't aware of them, how are you going to find them? Especially now?”

He answered as if he'd been waiting for the question. “We'll start with the funeral. Is there any chance your parents might still have the guest book? Do you remember if they packed it when they moved?”

“They didn't take it with them.”

He opened the envelope and pulled out a typed list of names. “Oh. That's too bad.”

“It's in storage.”

His face brightened. “That's great news. Okay, then we'll definitely need your help. A good place to start will be to check every name in it and see if there was anyone present who Savannah didn't know.”

“There are 333 names in it,” I told him. The reason why all my books were that many pages.

He held the envelope very still. “How do you know that?”

The same way I knew it'd been 5,951 days since Savannah died. I remembered everything about her murder. “Because I went through that book after the funeral,” I said.

And now I felt my hopes crashing down. There wasn't anyone suspicious in that guest book. I'd studied it again and again before my parents hired movers to pack up everything of Savannah's and put it in a storage unit on Cranberry Street. I knew as well as anyone that criminals loop back to crime scenes and often show up at funerals and grave sites. And I'd done my homework. I'd been through all this. Now here was Patrick, almost seventeen years later, asking me to do the same thing all over again. This wasn't a lead. It was a recycled approach to the same old thing.

“I'll do whatever I can to help, but I'm telling you right now, there's no one suspicious in that book.”

He looked resigned when he stood, but he drew a card out of his wallet. “Please call me,” he said, handing his card to me, “when you find the guest book.” Navy print on nice card stock.
PATRICK TUNNEY, DETECTIVE
.
Unaffected and strong, like him.

I walked him to the front door and thanked him for not giving up on Savannah. After he left, I stood in my driveway, facing the abandoned house across the street, its dark windows like closed eyes. The daughter of the people who'd lived there had gotten hooked on heroin and run away into the bowels of Hell's Kitchen. The mailbox still had their name on it in fancy script, but they'd moved to LA, because they couldn't stand driving by Rebecca's elementary school or the hotel where her prom had been held, the shelter where she'd adopted a matted dog. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to cut that cord. I'd gone to college and graduate school at a university twenty minutes from where I grew up and bought two houses less than seven miles from where my sister was attacked.

 

CHAPTER

10

I called Emma four times before she texted me back, a cryptic and acerbic message that told me how busy she was at work. I scoffed as I read it to Gabby. Emma's idea of work was to ring up overpriced clothes at Sarah Bryson's boutique ten hours a week for the employee discount.

We finally settled on a Monday morning at Witherspoon Bread Company in Princeton, which struck me as odd, since Emma was absolutely a Stanwich girl who loved to show her flawless face in public. But when I came downstairs that morning to find
The Stanwich Star Banner
on the breakfast table, I understood why she was hiding out in Princeton. A simple headline ran across the front page:
FISHER FALLS
. Once I'd made my coffee and had a muffin in front of me, I sat down and read the entire article.

Malcolm Fisher ended his twenty-five-year career Friday as Stanwich's police chief by announcing his retirement, the first jolt in what appears to be a cleaning out of the city's top ranks. He follows in the footsteps of former city manager Stanley Lawson, who resigned in December. The new city manager, Adrian Allay, is planning what some are calling a “clean sweep” of Stanwich's police force. Four directors of city departments have announced plans for resignation.