The Deepest Secret (15 page)

“Are you a neighbor?”

“How’s Charlotte?”

“How does it feel, knowing a kid’s gone missing?”

How does it feel? David has watched the news and seen questions like this hurled at survivors and victims. How does it
feel
?

There’s a sharp tap on the window, a woman peering in. He knows her. She has looked out from the television screen, reporting on local events at six pm and again at eleven. She’s plain-faced, with strong features. He has always liked her serious demeanor, her sincerity, and so he powers down the window. “What’s going on?”

“I’m Grace Sheridan, reporting for WCMU. Are you a neighbor, sir?”

He knows who she is. Of course he does. Is there anyone in Columbus who doesn’t? “Has something happened?”

“Did you know the missing girl?”

This feels arrow-sharp, her use of
did
, not
do
.

For years, David has been waiting for melanoma to rise up and claim his son. Eve takes Tyler to the dermatologist every three months, the ophthalmologist every six months. She combs through Tyler’s hair and shines a flashlight onto his scalp. She has him open wide to check his gums and tongue, searching.

Now, however, evil
has
materialized, slithered out of Friday
night’s storm to snatch an eleven-year-old girl off her own street. All the terrible things that gnaw at David and Eve since Tyler’s diagnosis, that drive them into long, weighted silences and cling to them at night, have been revealed to be illusory. Here, at last, is a real demon with teeth and claws that stalks quiet suburban streets and uses kittens and puppies to prey on the innocence of children. “I have to get home.”

“Call me if you’d like to talk.” Grace Sheridan holds out a business card. He politely takes it but he longs to shove her back. He presses the button and the glass rolls up, separating the two of them. He’s surprised by how fiercely he despises her.

In the gloom of his garage, he drops the business card into the trash can before opening the kitchen door and calling into the house: “Melissa?”
Keep an eye on your daughter
, Detective Watkins had said.

EVE

S
he walks along the shoulder of the road. She swings her arms and keeps her face relaxed, as if she’s simply out for an afternoon stroll. The earth is rutted by Friday’s storm; broken branches lie everywhere. The sparse grass is battered and defeated. Cars shoot past, making the skirt of her dress billow and whipping her hair across her mouth. The sun bakes the tops of her shoulders, shines into her eyes, and sends a drop of sweat rolling down her spine. It’s a long walk, but she can’t take the car. Not yet.

She reaches the bend in the road and slows. Is this where it happened? There aren’t any telltale tire marks where she’d slewed her car around. The trees look untouched, no bright scrapes of bark rubbed bare, no flattened sections of muddy berm. There’s nothing at all to tell her where to stop, and she keeps her gaze trained on the woods, long shadows stretching across the pavement and into the trees,
studying how two birches arch together in a certain way, how the pines sit stolidly in an undulating line. None of it sparks a memory. She’s gone almost a mile and is about to give up and turn around, when she sees a branch snapped at knee-level. It matches the cut on her leg. There aren’t any threads caught in the splintered wood. There seems to be nothing at all to link her to it, but still. She grips it and twists it free.

The slope is much steeper than she remembers. The darkness had camouflaged its danger. How had she managed to make it all the way down intact? Amy hadn’t.

Amy had appeared in front of Eve’s car and Eve hadn’t had time to stop. She’d struck Amy hard enough to dent her fender and send Amy crashing down through the trees to arrive at the very bottom. Amy was dead by the time Eve reached her. These are the facts. And also this: Eve had left Amy, abandoned her to the dark and pouring rain, and driven away.

Had Amy been conscious as she hurtled down the steep incline to her death? Had she suffered? Children’s bodies were so fragile, everything soft and unformed. Little Amy, whom Eve had loved.
Please let it have been quick
.

She concentrates on putting one foot after the other, making sure to step on soggy layers of leaves and tufted grass, places that won’t reveal her trespass. Others have been here before her: it’s shocking to see the curved ridge of a boot print pressed hard into the muck, another one by some low bushes. But mostly the surface shows the path of Friday night’s downpour, the dirt carved deep into rivulets, water standing in pools among tufts of grass and stands of weeds. The air is heavy with moisture. It clogs Eve’s throat. It coats her skin.

It’s slow going. Her breath rasps in her ears. She startles when a bird shrieks and flies up suddenly a few yards away. How can she explain her presence here? This is not a destination; this is not a place people choose to go. This is a place where they somehow end up.

Trees reach tall into the sky, green, scarlet, orange, bright yellow. Sunlight flashes on the water below. She and the children have explored these woods in the nighttime. Tyler’s voice calling,
Here I come, ready or not!

At last, she reaches the bottom. The sandy ground levels out, the water begins. She picks her way toward the shore. Amy should be right here … and yet she’s not. The pebbled silt of the riverbank is pocked by soaked leaves and strands of rooted grass. There is no small girl. There is no pink raincoat. Was Eve psychotic? No. An animal must have dragged Amy away. Bile rises up her throat and she clamps her lips tight. She walks all the way to the water’s edge and stares down at the placid brown river, at the distant motorboat and the private docks across the way reaching into the water. It all looks so peaceful.

Around the bend lies that old boathouse. Melissa had insisted the place was haunted, so Tyler hid one night, jumped out, and yelled,
Boo!
Melissa had pretended to be surprised, squealing, then chased Tyler around and around. Their laughter comes to her now, in and out through the trees, skipping across the air like a ghostly stone.

Her eyes fill. How is she going to get through this? How can she still be standing, breathing? How can she be thinking of what to make for dinner, whether she’s remembered to wash Tyler’s jeans? How can she be filling her head with such ordinary things? This is her lot. She has to get through it somehow. She has to.

She will go home and start dinner. She will do another load of laundry. She will hook herself to the things she can do without thinking. She must let the perfect normalcy of them carry her along until she can stand on her own. It’s everything else that will be so hard.

She’s still holding the broken branch. She throws it high, into the river. It lands a distance away and floats, jagged ends stabbing the air. She watches, willing it to sink into the brown water and disappear, but it sits there, out of reach and resolute.

DAVID

R
obbie shows up late that afternoon, the rat-a-tat on the front door summoning David from where he sits on the couch, working at his laptop. He peels back the strip of duct tape covering the peephole, expecting to see another reporter’s bland face looking back at him, and instead sees Robbie’s dark features. David opens the door. “Hey,” he says, shaking Robbie’s hand and holding the door wider. Eve’s asked David to give the man a chance, so David had nodded at the guy’s jokes, listened to his stories about the customers at the bar he owns, but that’s as far as it’s gotten. They’ll never be friendly, not the way it was with Owen. He closes the door behind them and locks it. A conditioned response from when Tyler was young and loved latching and unlatching the front door. “Any news?”

“No, but you’d never know it, the way those reporters are after us. They’re calling, looking in the windows, swarming around the
car when we pull out. I had to go the back way just to get here. But Charlotte won’t let me tell them to buzz off. She says it’s a small price to pay to keep Amy in the news.”

They’re standing awkwardly in the front hall. What does Robbie want? “Offer you a beer?”

“Wish I could, but I told Charlotte I wouldn’t be gone long. I just came by to see if Tyler could take a look at my cell phone. The mike’s not working.”

His son, the neighborhood tech genius. David glances at his watch. “It’s almost time for him to come out. Come on in.”

They sit in the living room. “How’s Charlotte doing?”

“Oh, you know. She’s trying to be strong, but the whole thing’s so fucked up. I don’t know about that police detective who’s running the case. Detective Watkins. She’s giving Charlotte a real hard time. I don’t think she has a clue. What did you think of her?”

Who is Robbie, anyway, but the guy Charlotte’s dating? “She seems to know what she’s doing. I don’t think the fact that we haven’t found Amy is a reflection of her inability to do her job.”

“She keeps asking Charlotte the same questions over and over. When did she last see Amy? What did they argue about? Like it’s going to do any good.”

This is the real question, isn’t it—does Charlotte know more than she’s saying? The mother’s always the first suspect. But Charlotte had seemed genuinely worried when David saw her Friday night. She’d been out in the pouring rain, running heedlessly along the side of the road. Unless she’d been running away from something.

“What was Amy doing outside?” David asks.

“Charlotte says she went out to cool off.”

“Why leave the porch?”

“Who knows? Probably trying to scare Charlotte.”

Who hadn’t known her daughter had gone off into the storm. “You ask me, she was lured away.” Kittens and puppies.

“Huh.” Robbie hunches forward, elbows on his knees, hands knotted together.

“Too bad no one saw anything.”

David and Tyler lay the pieces of the grill across the stone pavers. Tyler’s wearing his sweatshirt, jeans, socks and shoes. His hands are covered with cotton gloves. It’s a beautiful evening and here his son is, hiding from it.

The French door opens behind them, and Eve comes out to join them. She’d dressed quickly that morning, moving from the bed to the closet. How many times has he watched her draw up a zipper, fasten a button? It’s been six weeks since they’ve had sex, and even then it had been quick and passionless. Eve has made no gesture, no comment at all to show she’s aware. Does she even miss him? He had thought they’d gained some ground at the airport, the way she had clung to him, but that moment had fizzled into nothingness. Look at the night before, when he’d told her about Detective Watkins’s insinuations about Tyler. She wanted him to be upset, too, but what did she think he could do about it, sue the police force? He’s been home two days and Eve won’t even look at him. It’s Amy’s disappearance; it’s Tyler’s birthday. It’s everything, balled up into sadness and anxiety and fear.

“Are the reporters still out there?” he asks, and she nods.

“You don’t think they’ll be there much longer, do you?”

“I hope not.” He snaps a burner into the control valve.

“Is Melissa home?”

“She’s in her room. She’s been there all day.”

“Oh.” Dark shadows ring her eyes. She sinks into a chair and puts her elbows on the glass table. “What are you two up to?”

“I got us a new grill.” Tyler loves grilling, and their old grill was well past its prime. David had imagined that Tyler would enjoy assembling it with him. What kid doesn’t like wielding tools and making
things work? But Tyler’s listless in his help. David’s asked him for the wrench and his son only looked at him blankly.

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s got six burners and a warming rack.”

“Double wow. I guess we’re cooking out tonight?”

“How do hamburgers sound?”

“Great. Burgers sound great. What do you think, Ty?”

“Sure,” Tyler says. He’s got the instruction sheet spread out and is studying the small print.

“Any news?” David asks, though he already knows the answer. Eve would have said something right away. The energy around her would have been different.

“No.” It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk about Amy. She watches Tyler, her eyes soft with hope. He wishes he could see what she sees.
I don’t know how to be the mother of a boy
, she’d confided when they learned she was pregnant with Tyler. It bothered her those last few months. She wandered the aisles of the baby boy clothes in the department stores; she’d pick up a toy truck and put it down again. Then came that early morning when he returned to the maternity ward after phoning his father with the news, to find her propped up in bed, gazing down at their newborn son in her arms. It had been a full minute before she’d even realized he was in the room.

“I see you mowed the lawn,” she says.

“Half of it, anyway.” He’d gotten lucky. The police detective had emerged from Charlotte’s house to issue a statement, and all the reporters had flocked to her. He’d never mowed a lawn so quickly in his life. He’d left swaths of grass untouched. “I’ll tackle the backyard tomorrow.” This is what they talk about lately, the lawn, the bills, what kind of floral arrangement to send his sister on her birthday. “Did you know we have grubs?”

“No. Is that bad?”

“The skunks will eat them,” Tyler says.

“How do you know that?” David asks. Tyler possesses such a
wide and strange assortment of trivia. It saddens him, thinking of what could have been.

Tyler just shrugs.

“There are holes all over the yard.” David has spent this day searching the ground in one way or another. “I’ve looked into it. There’s some poison I can spread around, but nothing natural.”

Eve never allows weed killers or fertilizers in their yard. She scrubs the counters with baking soda and cleans the toilets with vinegar. She buys organic food. They don’t know what could harm Tyler. They don’t dare find out.

“We could always tear it up and put in a rock garden,” Eve says. “Then Tyler could pretend he’s an astronaut landing on the moon.”