Sleeping in Eden (5 page)

“Fakie?” Meg repeated, too startled by his admirable knowledge to worry about sounding dumb.

“Riding backward,” Dylan explained.

“I have a bike,” she countered weakly.

“I know.”

“I broke my arm trying to do a double peg grind.”

“I know.”

“You do?” They were in front of her house now, and Meg stopped with her hands on her hips, considering Dylan with cool curiosity. “How do you know that?”

“Jess told me.” Dylan thought for a moment then continued with a glint in his eye. “You're sorta famous, Meg.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

“Oh, chill out,” he said. Meg bristled at the familiarity with which he chastised her, but he went on before she could complain. “You're just not like other girls,” he told her. “It's not a bad thing that people find you . . . interesting.”

She wanted to be defensive, but Dylan's honesty was so candid, so ingenuous, she ended up laughing. “I'm interesting? Because I broke my arm?”

Dylan shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and held it in his hands. “I could teach you how to do it,” he offered.

“Excuse me?”

“I could teach you all kinds of grinds. And some flatland tricks, but without a pipe of some sort, the air tricks are a no go.”

Meg didn't even have to think about it. “Deal.” She stuck out her hand with a definitive air, and when Dylan took it, she squeezed hard and shook fast, a good handshake, a man's handshake.

He shook his head at her, but his lips were curled, smiling.

T
he silence inside the barn was thick and viscous. Lucas could feel it pressing against his skin, a malevolent, threatening force bent on choking him. He cleared his throat loudly and fought the unexpected burn of bile in the back of his mouth. “Uh,” he stammered, “it's a tibia. See? Here's the fibular notch, and here”—he dug his fingers into the earth beside the ridge of bone—“is the fibula.”

“Back away,” Alex commanded, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him roughly backward. “We've probably done enough damage already.”

“She must be lying on her back. Legs pulled up against her chest . . .”

“You don't know that,” Alex insisted. He yanked Lucas to his feet. “You don't know that that bone belongs to Angela.”

“Of course it's—”

Alex's glare was enough to silence Lucas. “I know you're not used to this,” he said, “but you're a doctor. I expect a little more professionalism from you.”

Lucas swallowed, nodded. He took a quick look at the two assisting cops and was reassured to see that they looked as pale and shell-shocked as he felt.

“I'm calling DCI,” Alex declared, his voice steely with resolve.

“DCI?”

“The Department of Criminal Investigation. They have a Major Crime Unit that assists in death investigations, and this is way over our heads. They'll know what to do, how to exhume the body. If it is a body.”

“If?”

“All we've seen is a leg bone.”

Lucas didn't know if he was more disturbed to imagine that Angela's body lay crumpled beneath him or that it was just a pair of her shinbones.

“How long?” one of the younger officers asked.

“The nearest DCI office is in Sioux City, but there are a couple dozen agents statewide. I don't know who they'll call in or where they'll come from. An hour? Maybe more? But nobody is going anywhere until they've given clearance.”

“I need to call my wife . . .”

Lucas watched as the three men dispersed to different corners of the barn so they could make the necessary phone calls to excuse themselves from taking kids to baseball games or for being home late for supper. He wondered what Jenna would say if he called to let her know that he would be later than expected, not to worry, everything would be okay. Would she even pick up the phone? He couldn't bring himself to dial the number and find out.

The blow of what they had found still rang and clattered inside his head as if he had been slugged. Angela Sparks was much more to him than simply a name, or now possibly a body beneath the floor of an abandoned barn. And though Alex was right to chastise him, to remind him that he was a professional and had a job to do, it wasn't easy, with her memory haunting the air above him.

Angela came back to him in bursts and impressions, remembrances of colors and feelings like a scattering of haphazard photographs in a forgotten shoe box. It was strange how the mind preserved things. He saw her as a young woman, cheeks framed by white-blond hair so fine that it blew like corn silk and was forever obstructing her mouth, her eyes. Then she
was a whip of a girl sitting bare-armed and bare-legged at his kitchen table, chancing an impish grin. Now she was bruised, blinking up at him from beneath a shiner the color of ripe plums. The outfits changed, her expression, her age. But her eyes were always the same: big and sad and green as damp moss.

Jim Sparks's neglected daughter was Jenna's first client at Safe House, even though no one ever solicited her services on behalf of Angela. Jenna just happened to bump into the poor child during her very first trip to Blackhawk's only grocery store.

“You should have seen her,” Jenna told Lucas afterward, as she stacked cans in neat rows on the shelves of their empty pantry. “Sweetest little thing. All by herself. She was just walking up and down the aisles, touching the boxes of cereal and bags of chips with the tips of her fingers.”

“Where were her parents?”

Jenna shrugged. “It's a small town, I guess kids can go to the grocery store without their parents.”

“But it doesn't sit good with you,” Lucas prompted.

“No.” Jenna set a can of pinto beans down with more force than necessary. “Something's not right there.”

They ran into each other a few more times, the new-in-town social worker and the little girl who Jenna learned wasn't so little after all. Angela was fourteen years old when the Hudsons moved to Blackhawk, but she was such a tiny thing, so delicate and slight that she hardly seemed a day over ten. Maybe it was her innocence that drew Jenna in. Maybe it was her undeniable beauty or her deep silences or doleful eyes. Whatever it was, it wasn't long after meeting the small, seemingly parentless, grubby Cinderella that Jenna was beyond smitten. Within weeks she had taken Angela in like a would-be adoptive mother.

“I'd take her home in a New York minute.”

“That long?” Lucas teased.

Jenna rolled her eyes. “She's just . . .”

“Completely stolen your heart?”

“Give me a bit more credit than that,” Jenna complained. “I
feel for her, you know? No mom, worthless dad as far as I can tell . . .”

Lucas couldn't argue. Since their first encounter in the grocery store, he knew that Jenna had tried on countless occasions to meet with Angela's father, the town's notorious recluse and all-around loser. But Jim Sparks didn't want anything to do with Jenna. She tried calling, stopping by, and setting up meetings through Angela, but Jim avoided all contact. In the end, there was nothing for Jenna to do but be grateful that he tolerated her involvement in Angela's life. It was the best she could do.

It was never quite enough.

“DCI is on their way,” Alex said, snapping the thin film of Lucas's memories like a soap bubble.

“Pardon me?” Lucas blinked, still dazed from the surreal slant of his unexpected afternoon.

“The state guys are coming.”

Lucas nodded, checked his watch. It was going to be a long night.

“How long has it been since she disappeared?” Alex asked, honing in on Lucas's thought pattern with the effortless familiarity of friendship.

“I thought we couldn't assume that the body is Angela.”

“We can't. But we do have to start asking questions. That's my first. How long?”

Those were days that Lucas didn't want to remember. They were long weeks that stretched into months of grief and loss—Jenna took Angela's disappearance as hard as if the girl had been her daughter. “I guess it's been almost eight years now,” Lucas finally guessed. “She was eighteen when . . .” But he couldn't finish that statement. Angela was eighteen when she vanished? When she committed suicide? Or when Jim killed her?

“I questioned Jim extensively back then,” Alex said. “He swore up and down that she ran away. He tried to prove it to me by pointing out missing shoes, clothes, stuff like that.”

“And you believed him.”

“I never said that. But there was no evidence to the contrary.”

Lucas's heart felt hollow as he thought of Jenna at the computer in the first year after Angela's disappearance. His wife scoured Internet databases—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Data System, the National Center for Missing Adults, Iowa Missing Persons Database—squinting at grainy photographs and looking for any connection, any hint of where Angela had gone and why. Later, when too much time had passed for Angela to have merely taken some extended, solitary vacation, Jenna scanned the only photograph she had of the girl and posted it on sites herself. Nothing ever came of it.

“What did you think happened?” Alex prompted.

“Back then?” Lucas was answered with a brief nod. “Back then I thought she ran away.”

“She had it in her,” Alex agreed.

“Jenna didn't think so.”

“I'm not sure your wife saw Angela very clearly.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just that the innocent little girl she fell in love with was not the same woman who evaporated into thin air.”

It was true. The young teen that Jenna took into her heart and, occasionally, into their home, changed much in the four years of their relationship. Jenna thought Angela was precocious, Lucas thought she was calculating. Angela often seemed motivated by a raw sense of self-preservation, and yet Lucas sensed a certain deliberate egotism behind her actions. Her beauty was both a bright halo and a dark shadow, something that she seemed to wield and not wear. Angela was a study in contradictions. In trouble.

“She was . . . interesting,” Lucas conceded, battling his own memories, his own awkward demons when it came to Angela.

“And perfectly capable of ditching this blip on a map for bigger and better things.”

Lucas shrugged.

“Are you telling me that you'd rather forget what you know, what we assume about Angela, and just conclude we found her body?” Alex pressed Lucas, his heavy-lidded eyes narrowed in objection.

Lucas considered for a moment, hating the rippling effect of their discovery and the raw wounds it would reopen. But he couldn't deny what he believed, what he felt deep in his bones. Even if it couldn't be explained. “Yes,” he said. “It's Angela. I'm sure of it.”

“We'll see,” Alex muttered, turning to walk away. “Make yourself comfortable. We're going to be here for a while.”

They faded apart, Alex wandering back to the place where Jim's body still hung over the partially exposed column of bone. As Lucas watched, Alex pulled a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket and snapped them on. Then he bent down to study the remains with narrowed eyes. The police chief seemed to analyze every detail as if answers were contained in the dust. Maybe they were.

All at once Lucas needed to sit. To rest his head against his hands and breathe—he felt like he hadn't taken a decent breath since he arrived at Jim's farm. The red evidence tags scattered about the barn floor were relegated to a rather contained area between the door and Jim's body. Footprints were marked, as well as scrapes and unidentifiable cast-offs—bits and pieces of indecipherable clues that Lucas didn't understand or even necessarily want to understand. Alex knew what he was doing, and Lucas just wanted to stay out of the way.

He wandered deeper into the barn, almost stumbling as he avoided discarded relics from a time he couldn't claim to remember. Everything was so filthy and foreign. Suddenly Blackhawk seemed like a different world, an alien land where nothing was quite as he had imagined it to be.

A pigeon high in the rafters didn't like his unsteady progress and took to flight, casting a fine sprinkling of grime across Lucas's shoulders and hair. He ran his fingers through his short
waves, fighting a shudder and mussing his hair to even scruffier proportions. Though he tried to keep it neat and trimmed, his hair was thick and unruly, adding a mischievous slant to his already boyish looks. It was why he wore glasses; he believed they made him look older. But now, with a haze of dirt on their normally immaculate lenses, Lucas wished for contacts. And a buzz cut. And that he hadn't answered the phone when he checked caller ID and realized that it was Alex on the other end of the line.

Lucas found an overturned milk crate, the sort of slotted, wooden affair that the antiques stores in town would love to get their hands on. He gave it a quick dusting with the palm of his hand then sat down, slapping his jeans to get rid of the dirt. He didn't bother to stifle the sigh that escaped his lips.