The Vanishing Season Read online

  When they reached the doorway, Franklin blocked them with one solid arm. “S’pose I don’t feel like letting you by,” he said, his voice hard.

  “Then I radio downtown and explain how you’re holding an officer of the law hostage, and you go to jail for a really long time.”

  They all stood frozen while Franklin digested this information. Finally, he dropped his arm to let them pass. Ellery exhaled in relief as they hit the night air. Rosalie and Anna were both barefoot, Anna dressed in some sort of Disney princess-themed nightgown that barely covered her bottom, and Ellery ushered them both over the half-dead grass to the edge of the lawn. Franklin remained at the front door, saying nothing but casting a long shadow. “What happened tonight, Rosa?” Ellie asked her in a low voice.

  “Nothing,” Rosalie insisted, hugging herself and glancing over her shoulder. “I’m okay.”

  “He hit her because he wanted tacos for dinner tonight but Mama didn’t have the time to go shopping today.”

  “Anna!”

  “It’s true.” The girl folded her thin arms and glared at her mother.

  “It’s not true. He was just upset because his boss reduced his hours this week,” Rosalie said in an urgent whisper.

  “Last time it was because his back was acting up,” Ellery replied. “What excuse is he going to give you next time?”

  “You don’t understand,” Rosalie murmured, her shoulders slumping, her gaze trained on the ground. Ellie looked away, up toward the streetlamp that hosted a frenzy of swarming gnats, because she knew she could raise her sleeves, march Rosa into the white light, and show her the scars. I lived, she could say, and you can too. Maybe then Rosa would listen to her and get that order of protection. She could kick Darryl out, get a better job, go back to school, make a peaceful home for herself and Anna, and cook whatever the hell she wanted for dinner every damn night for the rest of her life.

  Ellie swallowed hard as she imagined it because she knew she wasn’t going to do it. She wasn’t going to blow up her whole fragile existence just for a pile of maybes. Ellery drew in a long breath and fixed Rosalie with a hard stare. “You don’t have to take this from him. You don’t. Say the word, and I can take you away from here, you and Anna, right now, to someplace safe. Or you can swear out a complaint against him and I’ll have him arrested on the spot.”

  “You?” Rosa looked her up and down in skeptical fashion.

  “Me,” Ellery said, with more certainty than she felt. She risked a look at the door, where Franklin was watching them with a sullen expression, and she wondered if he kept a gun in the house. Ellery was five seven and athletically built, but Franklin had nearly a foot on her and outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds.

  “He’s not gonna go anywhere with you. Besides, what good would it do? You take him away and he’ll be back here in a day or two, and then me and Anna, where’re we supposed to go?”

  There was a women’s shelter one town over, but seeking it out meant walking away now with the clothes on their backs, and Ellery knew Rosalie wasn’t wrong about the likely outcome: she could arrest Franklin, but it would be for simple assault and he would be out on a minimal bond, probably within twenty-four hours. The house was his. The bank account was his. Rosa and Anna would have to start over again from nothing. “There are people who can help you,” Ellery tried again, her frustration rising as she realized she was losing yet another battle. “I will personally do everything I can to help you.”

  She heard the limitation of that statement even as she said it, read the truth in the way Rosa’s expression shut down. “No, no. We just have to make it a few weeks, just through the summer, then his hours’ll pick up this fall and everything will be okay. You’ll see.” Rosalie tugged her daughter back toward the house, and Anna twisted around in her grasp, stumbling over the uneven ground as she shot a pleading look back toward Ellery. Ellie took a few steps after them, but she was helpless under the weight of the law.

  The screen door opened and closed again with a sharp slap, and then Rosalie and Anna disappeared from view, leaving Ellery alone again with Franklin. He was huge and back lit, his face in shadow, but she could make out the whites of his eyes as he stared her down. “Stay away from my family,” he said, holding up a warning finger at her.

  “Stop giving me reason to come out here, and I will.”

  He dropped his hand, chugged the last of the beer, and crushed the can flat between his strong, fat fingers. “You come out my way, maybe I’ll do the same to you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He shrugged and tossed the can at the ground near her feet. “You drop in at my house like this in the middle of the night, seems it’s only fair if I return the favor. You live out down Burning Tree Road, ain’t that right? Yeah, seems I’ve been out there hunting once in the woods, and I seen where you live. A little old farmhouse. All alone.”

  “Are you threatening me, Mr. Franklin?”

  He held up his palms in an exaggerated gesture. “Hell, no, Officer. I’m just bein’ neighborly.”

  “We’re not neighbors,” Ellery told him flatly. “If I see you on my property, I will shoot you.”

  He grinned again. “Now, is that a threat? Or maybe it’s an invitation. Either way, you can be sure I’ll see you around, Officer Ellie. Oh, yes, I will.”

  * * *

  Ellery gripped the wheel of the truck a little tighter as she navigated the long bumpy dirt road that led to her house. The previous owners had smoothed the road before putting the tiny farmhouse on the market four years earlier, but the intervening seasons had thawed and frozen the ground into a lavalike series of mounds and crevices. The lack of summer rain thus far meant the road was cracked and dusty, kicking up pebbles and grime as she rolled on home. It had never been a working farmhouse, not in the commercial sense, zoned at best for perhaps a pair of horses and some chickens. Ellery liked it because it was set well in from the main road and backed up against the thick woods, acres upon acres of protected land, because that was how she felt living by herself among the stars and the trees: protected.

  “Don’t you worry about bears and coyotes and that sort of thing?” Her mother had fretted back when Ellery first moved into the place as a twenty-four-year-old new homeowner. Ellery had used the last of her funds, the blood money, to make the down payment, marking a clean break, she thought, between her past and her future.

  “No bears around here,” she had reassured her city-slicker mother, not mentioning, of course, that surely her mom must realize by now that there were plenty of things out there more frightening than bears.

  As she stepped out of the truck, Ellery inhaled the cool, dark scent of home in the summertime: a unique mix of wildflowers, cut grass, and the earthy smell of the forest just beyond. It was dark, the only light provided by the pinprick stars and a wedge of moon overhead, and quiet enough that she could hear the thick rustling of the distant trees. At her porch, she took the pair of worn-down wooden steps in one stretch and unlocked the dead bolt at her front door. Immediately, she heard the scratching of toenails on the wooden floor. “Hey, Bump,” she called, just before her basset hound came hurtling into the room with a frantic wagging tail. “Did you miss me?”

  She knelt with a grin and rubbed his long, silky ears as he pressed his solid, wriggling body as close as possible to hers. He snuffled every inch of her, cataloging her outside adventures with his generous nose, and she figured he got a good whiff of Darryl Franklin in there someplace. Franklin’s attempt at intimidation did not frighten her; he was a dumb heffalump who spent most evenings drunk off his ass. If he tried anything stupid, Ellie knew she’d see him coming a mile away.

  She gave Bump’s ears a last scratch before rising to her feet. “Let’s go out back so you can do your business, okay?” He trotted after her eagerly, through the living room, down the short hall, and into the kitchen, where she undid the dead bolt on her back door and let the dog out into the small yard. “Just stay away fr
om skunks this time,” she called as he bounded into the shadows. She flicked on the back-porch light in an effort to keep the unwanted critters at bay while Bump scampered out to the forest’s edge. She couldn’t see him well, but she tracked him by the jangling of the tags on his collar. While Bump went about his routine, Ellie pulled out her cell phone again and found no new messages or texts, not even from Sam, which was actually kind of a relief.

  She opened her messaging program and saw the little green dot that indicated Brady was online. It’s 2 A.M., she wrote him. Go to bed.

  Can’t, he typed back. Feeding time.

  He sent her a picture that showed his large hand, a small bottle of milk, and adorable ball of gray-and-white fur. Brady Archer worked at the Angelman Animal Shelter, where she had adopted Speed Bump a few years ago, soon after she moved in. They had struck up a friendship of sorts over a shared love of animals and ’80s music. What cemented the relationship was that he was an insomniac, like her, so they could chat like this in the wee small hours of the morning. Cheesiest ballad, he would write.

  Easy, she would type in return. “I’d Do Anything for Love” by Meat Loaf. The man’s name alone makes it a surefire win.

  I’m going with “Don’t Stop Believing.” The lyrics are just a bunch of random stuff the guy sees outside. Street light. People. What the hell does it even mean, anyway?

  Blasphemy! That song is a cultural touchstone, and Journey is a legend.

  Yeah. Legendarily awful.

  Trading zingers with Brady reminded her of late-night talks she’d shared with her brother, Daniel, in their hot Chicago walk-up, nights when it seemed like the heat might peel the paint from the walls. They would sit by the overworked fans in the window with sweaty cans of pop and make up stories about the people down on the street. Ellie hadn’t told Brady about Daniel, or much about anything personal, and he hadn’t asked for any details. This was why their friendship worked. She hadn’t believed she could have any friends, because friends tended to ask questions she couldn’t answer, like Where are you from? or How’d you get those terrible scars? They wanted to come visit your house and talk about your family and just basically pry open the whole box of your life and rummage around inside. But Brady was different. She’d waited, cautious at first during their initial conversations about big-haired dogs and big-haired bands, but the barrage of questions never came. They kept the discussion loose and fun, and finally she had relaxed a little, just enough to allow herself one friend. The terms seemed to suit him just fine. She got the feeling that Brady had a rough upbringing too, just from the one sentence he’d ever uttered about his mother: “She lives in Texas.”

  Sometimes, it was hard not to share more, like when he’d typed to her, Know anyone famous?

  Yes, she thought, me. Or maybe infamous was a more apt descriptor. Last year she’d switched on the TV to find some skinny blond girl playing her in the movie of the week, only she was named Annabelle in the film and had much more of a chest on her than Ellery ever had at age fourteen. The movie was called Mind of a Madman, but it wasn’t her story; she was neither the hero nor the villain, just an inexorable link between them. We live in Woodbury, she’d typed back to Brady. What kind of famous person shows up here?

  Why are you up at this hour? He wrote to her now. Can’t sleep?

  She looked down at the glowing screen as she thought of the three missing people. When Ellery was lost, a whole city had turned out to look for her. No one was searching anymore for Bea, Shannon, or Mark. In a few weeks, there would be a new name and a new search, with officers and volunteers spanning out in lines through the woods, like ants at a picnic. Ellery bit her lip and typed her question quickly, before she could think about it too hard. Would you trade your life for someone else’s?

  There was a long silence before Brady replied, Depends on who it was.

  A stranger, she sent back.

  Another long pause. Maybe, I guess. I’d have to think about it.

  Ellery had thought of little else for almost three years.

  She signed off with Brady and called Bump back inside the house, where he tanked up at his water dish and collapsed with a doggy groan on the hardwood floor. Ellie went to the second bedroom, which she had set up as an office, although she rarely had to bring any work home with her. The Bluetooth speakers connected to her phone automatically, and the music picked up right where she had left it that morning: in the middle of “West End Girls.” Ellery liked to fill the silence of her house with music, because when there was noise outside her head she didn’t have to pay too much attention to her own thoughts. The ’80s songs, she had learned to love them when she was a kid riding around in her father’s van as he made weekend deliveries. Her father was long gone now, but Bruce Springsteen would be with her forever.

  Her desk had a locked file drawer at the bottom, where she kept what little information she had on the three missing persons cases. This time, she bypassed those folders in favor of a plastic Snoopy pencil case she had owned since the third grade. The Snoopy and Woodstock sticker was faded and worn away at one corner. She popped the lid and found the usual treasures: a photo of her, Daniel, and Mom taken down by the pier at Lake Michigan by her father the summer before he left them; a ribbon she’d received for winning the fifth-grade spelling bee; Daniel’s Yoda watch; and a card from the FBI.

  She lifted the card and read the name to herself. Reed Markham. The man playing him in the TV movie had a strong jaw and black hair that flopped in his eyes. She had no idea if Markham still worked at the FBI or if he would agree to help her. Sam was right that she had precious little evidence of any sort of crime, let alone proof of the monster she felt was out there, probably stalking a new victim even now. When summer rolled around, her fellow cops looked at her like she was the crazy one, rambling on about murder, but they didn’t know how it was. They hadn’t been close. They’d never sat in a killer’s closet and felt the claw marks in the wood, left there by the girls who had already died. Touched, Ellie liked to think of it sometimes as she traced her scars in the dark. She’d been touched.

  Ellie knew “touched” could mean gifted or insane. Maybe she was both.

  But she wasn’t wrong, and if anyone out there was ever going to believe her, it was Reed Markham. Because he’d been touched once too.

  2

  Reed Markham knew women. He had a genteel, warm-hearted mother and three older sisters, none of whom seemed to mind that they’d had to go outside the family to get their longed-for baby boy. He’d grown up in their pink-and-white bedrooms, ensconced on the flowery bedspreads while they confided in him about their victories and troubles, big and small, like the time Kimberly managed to convince their mother to let her put up a single poster of Kurt Cobain, even if it had to be on the inside of the closet door, or when Lynnette’s best friend inexplicably stopped speaking to her through all of eighth grade. His sisters argued constantly with each other, but never with him, and so Reed just shuttled between the rooms and became the only member of the family to know all its secrets—a role he honored by keeping each and every one. “Thank the Lord and heaven above that Mama and Daddy found you,” his sisters would declare with high drama, enveloping him in tight perfumed-scented hugs that squeezed his heart as hard as they squeezed his body. Because if they were his found family, then it was possible that maybe he could lose them again. So he made sure to become everything they’d ever wanted.

  All those years of practice paid off, because as he grew, Reed found himself in other girls’ bedrooms, girls who were not his sisters but who liked how he listened completely to their stories without interrupting them, how he was willing to brush their hair, how he knew to compliment their shoes because they’d tried on eighty-seven pairs before buying the perfect ones. He had not appreciated at the time he was watching his sisters model endless clothes that this experience was somehow priming him for the right winsome smile, the exact special words, that made other girls want to take their clothes off. Later, a
fter many girls, when he found he could use those same intuitive skills to ferret out criminals, his colleagues would sometimes ask, “How do you read people so well?” He would answer that it was easier than anyone believed; people would gladly tell you who they were if you only cared to listen.

  So yes, indeed, Reed Markham knew a lot about women—everything except the name of the one in bed with him. His head hurt like it was in a vise and his dry tongue felt too large for his mouth. He shifted gingerly under the sheets as he assessed the situation. It was her house, he realized, blinking owlishly in the gray morning light, taking in the unfamiliar beige walls and the dresser that seemed crowded from end to end with miniature porcelain … he raised his head for a better look … whales? He fell back into the pillow with a thud that made him wince, but the woman next to him did not stir. He remembered the bar and the first couple of rum and Cokes. He tried to conjure the moment the woman approached him so that he could replay her name inside his head, but his brain recalled only the scalloped neckline of her tight yellow dress. Debbie? Donna? It was something with a D, he thought, rubbing his face with both hands so that the stubble scraped across his palms.

  Dimly, he heard a buzzing sound, and it took him a few moments to realize it was his phone vibrating across the nightstand. His companion stretched and blinked as Reed shot out a hand just in time to keep the phone from falling. There was no name on the caller ID, but he recognized the central office number. No one had phoned him from the office in twenty-seven days now, and he was under the impression they liked it this way. He cleared his throat twice before answering. “Hello?”