The Deepest Secret (10 page)

They’re in the car headed home when his phone buzzes. “You have to tell Cheryl not to give me Sammy anymore,” Melissa’s saying.

“She’s just trying to build your confidence.” He pats around the central console to switch the phone off when Melissa snatches it from his grasp.

“No texting and driving,” she says, mimicking the stern voice he uses when he goes over the driving rules with her. “Keep your phone in the glove box whenever you’re behind the wheel.”

“I wasn’t,” he says. “Give me the phone.”

“Ooh, this must be an important message”—she glances at the display—“from Renée?”

“She’s someone I work with.” He holds out his hand, but she leans away.

“She teach you how to text?”

“Melissa,” he says, warning, and his daughter gives him a sidelong glance before dropping his phone into his palm.

“Gee, Dad,” she says. “Chill.”

He should shut off the phone or set it down. But when he brakes at the stoplight, he can’t resist glancing down to see Renée’s message.

I’m going to kill Jeffery
.

“Dad,” Melissa says impatiently.

“Want to stop for ice cream?” he suggests. “Our last lesson together. We should mark the occasion.” He texts back,
Hang in there
, then slides his phone into his pocket.

EVE

S
he’s bone and sinew and flesh, empty and adrift. There’s nothing warm or good or whole about her. Whoever she once was, whatever she once was, is gone, scraped away and vanished. This is her true selfish and misguided self finally being revealed to her. This is what evil looks like. She stares at her hand as it turns the page in the binder. How can it look so ordinary?

The April day Charlotte moved into the neighborhood, Eve had been at her computer, reading an online article about an XP documentary someone was filming about a child in Arizona. She had been studying the photographs of the toddler, who had freckles and a vacant gaze, trying to figure out whether the boy had been blinded by the sun, when a sharp rat-a-tat on the window glass startled her. It had been Charlotte, asking if she had any bottled water for the movers—she couldn’t find her cups on the truck. Charlotte thought
she wasn’t very friendly because she didn’t invite her in, and so she kept her distance for a few weeks, before showing up one evening bearing a plate of brownies, having learned about Tyler from Rosemary Griggs.

I didn’t know
, Charlotte had begun apologetically, and now, sitting beside Eve in the police station, she says, “I don’t know.”

The two of them are flipping through the huge binders, staring at photographs of men and some women. How can there
be
so many sexual predators? How could Eve have lived in this area for thirteen years and not known that these monsters lived so close? They probably got their gas at the same station, shopped at the same stores. She could have passed them on the sidewalk, smiled at them in the library. They shouldn’t look so damned average. Their faces should be disfigured, scarred in some way. They should look guilty, but most of them wear a smug expression, even cocky. This one resembles Melissa’s riding instructor. This one looks the spitting image of the man who takes their monthly electrical readings. Every time she pauses to consider a particular image, Detective Watkins asks her if it’s someone she’s noticed in the neighborhood. Over and over, she has replied
no
. She doesn’t know any of these people. She’s never seen any of them before.

Amy lies a mile away. The police have searched the ravine, fanned out in all directions from where they’d found Amy’s backpack, lying beside that little wooden bridge near the playground. Why hasn’t one of them radioed in? Robbie’s at work, clearing his schedule.
I’ll meet you back at the house
, he’d promised Charlotte, holding her for a moment before letting her go. He’d nodded to Eve and then climbed into his car.

Charlotte pushes away the final binder. Her dark red hair stands out starkly against the pallor of her skin. Bits of mascara cling to her eyelashes. They collect in the hollows beneath her eyes. “I don’t know what to feel anymore.”

All morning Eve’s watched her friend ricochet between different versions of hope: that there’s a face she recognizes, that there isn’t. Only Eve knows that there’s no hope anywhere at all in this room, that Charlotte could sit here a thousand hours, study the faces of a thousand monsters, and it wouldn’t make any difference.

“I need you to think about that list you gave me,” Detective Watkins says. “Is there anyone else you can think of to add to it?”

“I can’t … I don’t know.”

“Think. Is there someone who worked on your house?”

“Just the painters. The maid service, the guy who drops off my dry-cleaning.”

“What about a friend of your son’s?”

Scott’s twenty. He’s never going to get over this. And then Charlotte will have lost two children.

“Is there, Eve?” Charlotte asks. “Is there someone I’ve forgotten?”

All these innocent people who are going to be getting a knock on the door. Innocent. The word is so lovely and round. “I don’t think so,” Eve says.

“I need you to keep thinking,” Detective Watkins says. “The fact is, most child abductions are committed by people the child knows.”

“I don’t know anyone who would steal my daughter!”

An accident. It had all been an accident and now she’s sitting here, in this airless room beside her friend whose agony is so raw that it’s reeling Eve back to that time when she had been filled with an endless dark despair. She had clawed her way out of it. She thought she’d been successful.

“Someone will have seen something,” Detective Watkins says. “It’s just a matter of time before someone comes forward.”

That car in front of her, had there been a brief red flare of brake lights? If the driver had seen something, they would have turned around. They would have called the police.

“Do you really think so?” Charlotte asks. Her hope is so raw, so vulnerable. Detective Watkins gathers the binders toward her. “I do. That’s how most of these cases are solved.”

Eve focuses on the dingy beige wall with a crack running through it. Her secret stretches out like a fissure. When Tyler doesn’t need her anymore, she’ll tell Charlotte. Three years, maybe longer if he’s sick. The crack on the wall wavers.

“You haven’t heard anything from the search teams?” Charlotte asks, and the detective shakes her head.

“Nothing yet.”

Owen’s out there, organizing people. They’re meeting in front of his store. He swears he’s going to find his daughter, and Eve knows that if anyone could, it would be him. But he hasn’t called, either.

How can Amy have vanished so completely? Is it possible that Eve’s imagined the entire thing? Just as soon as these questions flicker through her mind, she pushes them away. She’d been wrong. There had been some hope left in this room after all.

They find a deli a few blocks away. Charlotte would have kept on walking if Eve hadn’t taken her elbow and steered her toward the open door. The place is quieting down after the lunch rush, and only a few of the tables are occupied. They sit by the window, and Eve orders matzo ball soup for both of them. Charlotte sets her cell phone on the table in front of her, and so does Eve. David’s with the search teams. He’ll call to let her know if they find Amy.

“That little girl in California,” Charlotte says. “They found her two years later. I mean, she went through hell, but she’s okay now. And what about that girl who wrote a book? It’s hideous what happened to her, but she’s alive. She’s back with her family.”

“That’s true.” The words are broken pieces of glass in her mouth.

“And what about the baby who was taken out of her crib? They
got her back almost right away. They got it on the news and the babysitter confessed.”

Yes, Eve remembers that case, too.

Charlotte sets down her glass. Her nails are bitten to the quick, the red polish worn to smears like drops of blood. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?” Eve says, startled. Her guilt must be plain.

“Like it’s the end of the world. It’s not. It’s
not
. We’re going to find Amy. Tell me that. Say it right now.”

“Yes,” Eve says. She forces herself to smile. The muscles in her face ache. “We’ll find Amy.” They will find Amy, but Charlotte will never get her back. Eve’s falling from a great height. The air whizzes past her ears. Her stomach’s cramping. It’s a second before Charlotte’s face comes back into focus. Her friend is staring around the restaurant. Thank God she’s not looking at Eve.

“We have to get the flyers up,” Charlotte says. “We can start here. I’ll put one in the window.”

“We’ll ask.”

“It’s a good picture. Tyler always takes great pictures of Amy.”

Tyler had held up his camera as Amy grinned wide, her bangs crooked across her forehead. She’d followed Tyler around like a puppy and Charlotte and Eve had joked how Amy would eventually wear Tyler down. They never took the joke too far. There was that line that stopped everything.

“I just don’t understand why she went out,” Charlotte says. “She’s so scared of storms.”

The pieces of last night don’t fit together. Nothing makes sense. Amy’s backpack had been found in the park, but she had dashed across the road in front of Eve a full mile away. There’s that hope again, lifting its coy little head, murmuring that maybe none of this has happened the way she remembers. Hope is a liar.

“The police won’t let me have her teddy bear,” Charlotte continues. “It was in her backpack and they say it’s evidence.”

Eve had cradled Amy, kissed her cheeks. She’d cried, her tears dripping into Amy’s hair. She’d left behind plenty of evidence. But it had been raining so hard. Water had poured from the sky, washed across the landscape, drained into the rivers and creeks. It could have swept everything away, even fingerprints.

Their soup arrives. Eve craves a glass of white wine, something crisp and clean to drink. It would taste good going down and she would order another one, just keep drinking until either her phone or Charlotte’s rings and someone tells them something has happened, that Amy has been found. But by the time they finish their meal, neither phone has sounded.

DAVID

“T
here’s more to life than chocolate,” he tells Melissa, who’s holding her cone carefully over a paper napkin. She never eats any other flavor, no matter how long and tempting the list is. Raspberry swirl, apple pie, mocha hazelnut fudge. She doesn’t so much as glance at the selections. She just steps up to the counter and places her order.

“Chocolate’s good,” she replies, though she hasn’t taken a single lick.

He turns onto their street.

“Who’s that, Dad?” she says, squinting.

A woman stands at their front door, her black sedan parked at their curb. She turns to look at them as he steers the car into the driveway. She’s wearing a navy pantsuit and her expression is grim.

“I don’t know.” He parks the car, gets out to greet the woman walking down the path toward them.

“Mr. Lattimore?” She holds up a badge. Now he sees the gun holstered at her hip. “I’m Detective Watkins. I’m looking into Amy Nolan’s disappearance. I understand you spoke with an officer last night, and I wanted to ask you a few follow-up questions, if you don’t mind.”

They haven’t found Amy yet. Dread settles in his gut. Charlotte and Owen must be going through hell. “Of course.”

She’s looking at his daughter. “You must be Melissa.”

Melissa frowns. “Yes.”

“I’d like to talk to you, too. Is that all right?”

“If I have to.” Melissa drops her uneaten cone into the trashcan.

David would never have spoken to an adult that way, especially not a police officer. Melissa’s just frightened, he reminds himself. “Hold on,” he tells the detective. “I need to close the garage door.”

Gone from home so much of the time and yet this is his conditioned response, to make sure the exterior door is closed before opening an interior one. He finds himself doing the same thing hundreds of miles away, puzzling his coworkers as he scans the room before standing to open a door.

Detective Watkins makes no comment as the door thuds all the way to the pavement, sealing them in darkness. He opens the kitchen door, and she precedes him into the house, her gaze skimming the dishes in the sink, the sun chart pinned to the doorway. Melissa’s taken off her boots and is standing there in her tank top and jodhpurs.

“I have to take a shower,” she says, and he puts his arm around her slim shoulders. Can’t she understand the urgency? “Let’s talk to the detective first,” he tells her. “Okay?”

“Whatever,” she mutters, scowling. She won’t look at Detective Watkins. She stares at the ground, recalcitrant as the police officer guides her through the events of the previous evening.
I don’t know. I guess. No
. It’s a relief when Watkins finally says, “All right. I guess that’s it.”

“So can I shower
now
?”

David’s embarrassed. He looks at Watkins, as if to say
teenagers
, but the woman’s not looking at him. She’s looking around the dark room, the lamps on in various corners. “Go ahead,” he tells Melissa, and Watkins turns to him. “Is your son home?” she asks.

Of course she’d know he had a son. The uniformed officer who’d been by the night before had made a note of all their names, but this sudden request of hers sets him on edge. She knows more than she’s saying. “I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this to you, but my son’s got xeroderma pigmentosum. He can’t be exposed to ultraviolet light. It will kill him.” Blind him, deafen him, take away the use of his arms and legs, eat into his brain and make him a vegetable. A rare disease, and only a few thousand in the world had it.
Even with the best of care
, the specialist had said,
Tyler most likely won’t live past twenty
.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Detective Watkins asks.

“This way.”

They go up the narrow flight of stairs. This was one of the first things he and Eve did when they learned of Tyler’s disease—install a lightproof door here and give up the second floor of their house to their son.