The Vanishing Season Read online

  The top of his hair was flecked silver in the moonlight as he stopped and shook his head. “No,” he called back. “They never did.”

  * * *

  She was still thirsty, so she stopped off at the lone convenience store, the tiny shop that was attached to the gas station. Big, bald Joey Bartlett barely looked up from behind the counter as she stepped into the store. He had one eye on a tiny television that played the Red Sox game and the other on his cell phone, and behind his ear sat one cigarette, awaiting his next smoke break. “Evening, Joe,” she said. “How are the Sox doing?”

  “Losing,” he replied with disgust. “Just like usual.”

  Ellie picked up a couple of bottles of Coke, one for now, one to grow on, and added a candy bar at the last minute. She was just about to pay when the door opened, tinkling the bell, and Detective Jimmy Tipton appeared under the garish fluorescent lighting. He didn’t look surprised to see her in the store, but then again, Jimmy never did look surprised about anything. He had concocted a world-weary air of self-assured ennui: nothing transpired in his life that he did not fully expect. “Hey, there, Ellie,” he said casually as he sidled up beside her. “I hear you’ve been digging around in my old cases again.”

  She lifted her chin, ready for a challenge. “It’s July already,” she explained again, as though they hadn’t been over this a million times before. “We need to do something.”

  “I understand that something is the FBI,” Tipton said. He made a scrunchy face at the rows of chips, as if trying to decide between regular and nacho flavor. “Reed Markham.”

  Ellie glanced over in mild surprise. “That’s right.”

  “He’s the guy that broke the Coben case back in Chicago.”

  Fear crawled up the back of her neck like vines. “Yes,” she managed after a beat of silence. “I … I heard that.”

  Jimmy looked at her sideways, making eye contact for the first time, and his gaze was so intense she had to force herself not to look away. “Man, what a trip that must be, to have nailed Coben’s scalp to your wall. He was like the ultimate psycho. I heard he had sex with those girls after they were dead—you know, necrophilia and shit.”

  Ellie’s hand fluttered and she clamped it to her leg. “I … I didn’t ask about his past cases. I want his help here now, with our missing persons investigation. I don’t care what he did before.” Her voice was high and thin to her own ears, and she realized how incurious and ridiculous she sounded. Any cop worth his or her stripes would want to know about Francis Coben.

  “Not me,” Jimmy told her. “I’d take him out for a beer and get the whole damn story. All the stuff he didn’t put in the book, if you know what I’m saying.” He snatched a bag of chips off the shelf. “Yeah, I’ll just bet Markham has some tales to tell. Too bad because he shit the bed last year.”

  She was so focused on not throwing up or running out of the store that it took her a minute to parse what Jimmy had said. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I looked him up when the chief told me Markham was here. Some kidnapping out in Idaho last year and your buddy fingered the wrong guy. A little boy died.”

  “What?”

  “Seems the FBI wants nothing to do with him these days. I guess that explains why he’s got time on his hands to come up here and hang around with you.” He tossed the chips back on the shelf. “Shouldn’t be eating this garbage, am I right? We’ve gotta stay in shape.” He clapped a heavy hand on her shoulder. “See you later, Hathaway. Be careful out there. I hear we’ve got a big, bad killer on the loose.”

  She stood there rooted to the floor as he sauntered away whistling, without buying anything, leaving her to wonder if he had come inside looking for her all along.

  * * *

  At home, she rushed Bump through his late-night routine, and then they both moved to her makeshift office, where she powered up her laptop and did what she had once sworn to herself she would never do: she searched deliberately for Reed Markham. His name returned hundreds of hits, with the book being number one. Little Girl Lost. The title alone made her shudder, and although she had never dared to read it, she couldn’t work up any ire at Markham for writing it. She was really no better, she supposed. Markham’s bestselling book. Coben’s million-dollar pictures. After what she had done, Ellie was in no position to judge anyone making money from the whole sordid tale.

  She steeled her stomach as she clicked on Reed Markham’s Wikipedia page. She skipped over the part about his famous politician father, his personal life, the Coben case and a handful of others, down to the last link available: the Adam Kennedy kidnapping. Clicking this link produced the face of a red-haired, freckled little boy smiling out from his own Missing poster. Apparently he’d wandered away from his parents in a Boise furniture store, and by the time they figured out that he wasn’t asleep in some bed somewhere, whoever took Adam was long gone. Reed had joined the case early and leaned hard on the local pedophiles, in particular one named Barnaby Tate, who was caught on security footage at the fast-food place next door to the furniture store around the time Adam disappeared. Everyone in Adam’s life was also interviewed, including his family, teachers, and neighbors, but there was no trace of the boy. After forty-eight hours, Adam’s parents went on television to beg for their son’s safe return, and Reed apparently spoke too (there was an embedded link to that video, which Ellie did not watch). The text said Reed had promised the kidnapper that they would never stop looking for Adam.

  Two days after that, little Adam was found dead in a city Dumpster. The autopsy placed the time of death only twelve hours before, meaning Adam had been alive for several days after his abduction. Hair and fibers on the body led to the arrest of Paul Cryderman, a construction worker who had been part of the team that installed the new playground at Adam’s school earlier that month. Cryderman had been questioned and released earlier in the investigation. Upon his arrest, he supposedly told authorities that when Agent Markham said they would never stop looking for Adam, Cryderman felt he had no choice but the kill the boy and dump the body. Adam’s parents were threatening to sue the FBI for negligence, and Reed Markham had stepped down from his position in the Behavioral Sciences Unit.

  “Funny, he didn’t mention that part to me,” Ellie said to Bump, who raised his head and thumped his tail in agreement. Markham was supposed to be the answer man, the one who saw what everyone else missed. Turned out he could be just as wrong as the rest of them—wronger even, because the stakes were so high.

  Bump froze and cocked his head, listening toward the window for something. Ellie swung the chair lazily around to look at him. “What is it, boy? Squirrel in the well again? Or maybe it’s a fox.”

  Bump growled low in his throat and the fur at the back of his neck stood on end. He was still staring toward the window, so Ellie got up to go take a look. It was too dark to see much out in the yard, but she didn’t notice anything amiss. Behind her, Bump got up on his stubby legs and repeated his warning growl. “Okay, okay. If it’ll make you happy, I’ll go take a look, all right?”

  Her revolver in hand, she turned on the outside floodlights, and some sort of animal—a raccoon, maybe—scurried at the edge of the shadows, disappearing into the thicket of trees. Ellie walked around the perimeter of her yard but didn’t see anything out of place. The night was cool and strangely quiet; she heard only her boots in the wet grass and the sound of her own breathing. Beyond that, there was silence. She looked up the empty road into the black night as she recalled Darryl Franklin and his threat to pay her a visit.

  Summer moths darted back and forth in her spotlights, like tiny ballerinas on the stage. Bump had propped himself up in the window to watch, his long face sagging because he’d been left out of the action. Ellie took a few more steps toward the edge of the light, where the shadows on the ground seemed joined with the tall trees. Bump barked his encouragement—or was it a warning? She ventured farther into the dark, her short, quick breaths taking in the damp night air
as gooseflesh broke out across her arms. You’ve been in these woods hundreds of times, she reminded herself as she picked her way through the low-lying branches and the soft crust of dank moss and brambly bushes. Somewhere, she hoped not close by, there was a skunk.

  “This is ridiculous,” she muttered after a few minutes, but as she said the words, her foot hit something, a glass bottle that rolled at the touch of her toe. She picked it up and immediately caught the scent of beer. “What the…?” As she held it toward the light for better inspection, she saw her house, right there just beyond her hand. The trees parted just so to allow anyone standing in this exact spot a perfect view of her east-side windows. Her kitchen. Her bedroom.

  You ever get the feeling like someone’s watching you? Reed Markham had asked her just a few hours earlier. Following you around?

  Ellie had scoffed at the idea. Of course not. Believe me, I would notice.

  Her blood went cold as the night creatures chattered down at her from the trees. In the distance, in the warm yellow windows of her beloved home, Bump began to howl.

  4

  It was the Fourth of July, a holiday for the rest of the country, but for Reed it was just another day off. He squinted out at the bright morning and took in the decorations as they drove through Woodbury: the American flags, already limp in the summer heat, and the slightly faded red, white, and blue bunting on the town streetlights. “Do you think people can ever change?” Ellery asked him from behind the wheel of her truck as they headed toward the Nesbit home.

  “People change their behavior all the time,” Reed answered, not turning his attention from the window. It was barely nine o’clock but already the sun had burned off any clouds from the sky. “They quit smoking. They become new parents. They find God on the road to Damascus and renounce their wicked ways.”

  “I’m not talking about behavior,” she corrected him. “I mean can they change who they are. Become someone else.”

  Reed stared out the window at the waving meadows, careful not to catch his reflection in the glass. His own life had become one he did not recognize. Growing up, he’d always had a knack for finding lost things. His mother would misplace her glasses somewhere in their thirteen-room stately brick mansion and Reed invariably found them just by imagining his mother as she moved through her tasks for the day. He could close his eyes and call her up, how she would be in the kitchen, where she laid out the eggs and bacon next to the stove for cooking, and it would soon the sizzle would be perfuming the downstairs, and Mama would go wash her hands in soft soap at the sink, where the bird feeder stood just outside the window, and oh, was that a painted bunting pecking away at his own breakfast, until his vermilion belly was stuffed and fluffed to bursting? Better take off the glasses for a closer look. Sure enough, that’s where they would find them, set forgotten on the windowsill next to the African violets.

  Since those early days, he had crossed the country a hundred times in search of the lost. Their faces were plastered on the news, on posters and flyers and milk cartons, these missing people who were everywhere at once and yet nowhere at all. Reed would learn their lives as best he could and try to trace them back to the beginning, to the place they’d been standing when it all went wrong. Sometimes he presided over a happy reunion; more often he discovered only bones. “Each time you go, you come home a little bit less than you were,” Sarit had told him once, “like you leave part of yourself behind at their graves.” She didn’t understand what it was like to be the one who had parted the woods and performed the miracle, the one he could never quite repeat. The awed whispers, the palpable hope at his arrival—that’s the one who found her, the Coben girl—he felt his own history sit heavy on his shoulders each time he joined a new scene, because more often than not, the victim in question was dead before his plane even touched down. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he’d done everything he could, that there was no way he might have changed the outcome. Only the last time, in Idaho, the words turned out to be a lie.

  “I don’t know you anymore,” Sarit had said the day she asked him to move out of their home, a solid brick colonial that had stood through the Civil War and yet it couldn’t keep his family from falling apart.

  Reed turned his face back to Ellery and studied her profile—the determined set of her chin, the porcelain shell of her ear, and the dark tendrils of hair that had escaped the knot at her nape. Who would you be, he wondered, if Francis Coben hadn’t intervened? But out loud, he said, “I think there are many ways a person can be lost.”

  Ellery tightened her hands on the wheel and did not ask him any more questions.

  * * *

  Dave and Annie Nesbit lived in a Cape-style white house with forest-green shutters and well-tended bushes. As Reed stepped out of the truck, the overpowering scent of cut grass hit him like a silent scream. There was a large stone pot on the porch filled to overflowing with pink and white impatiens, and a cheery red mailbox out front. There was a row of houses down the block just like it, shaded by the protection of tall, leafy maples that signaled the strength of the neighborhood’s history. It looked, Reed thought, like nothing bad could ever happen here. Grackles jabbered at each other in the trees and a trio of young boys went sailing past on their bikes clear on the other side of the road, as if to avoid passing too close to the Nesbit property line.

  When Dave and Annie Nesbit opened the door, both of them together crowding the narrow space, Annie’s hand shook slightly as she reached to greet Ellery, and Dave’s blue eyes held a wild and desperate look, as though he were holding back the sea. Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote, and Reed felt the truth of those words every time he met the families. Hope could take you so high that you no longer saw the ground.

  “Thank you,” Dave said, pumping Reed’s hand with forced enthusiasm. “Thank you for coming. The FBI didn’t want the case three years ago—they said the State Police were doing an adequate job with the investigation, and they would reconsider if more evidence became available.”

  The bitterness in his voice told Reed all he needed to know about how Dave felt regarding that assessment. “I don’t know what Officer Hathaway has told you,” he said carefully, “but I am only here to take a look at the facts and offer any insight I might have. There have been no new developments.”

  “Anything … anyone who wants to help us find Bea, we’re grateful for the help,” Dave replied.

  They sat on the back patio under the shade of a navy blue umbrella, and Annie Nesbit served them iced tea in tall glasses that started sweating immediately in the warm summer air. She had a pleasant oval face that sagged a bit around the edges from middle age, and huge brown eyes that rimmed with emotion when she talked about her daughter. “Bea only knew a handful of English words when we brought her home, but she was talking so much by age two that her pediatrician made a note of it in her charts.” Almost shyly, she drew out some childhood photos that showed a delicate Chinese girl in various growing-up stages, in one shot wearing a pink party hat and sitting in front of a birthday cake with three candles on it, and in another playing the violin on a school stage. “She made straight A’s all through school and participated in a ton of clubs—debate, French, yearbook. She also played on the volleyball team and volunteered on weekends sorting donations at the local food bank. Partly it was to look good for college applications, of course, but Bea really seemed to love doing it all—you know, pushing herself, seeing how many different activities she could cram into one day. We used to tease her that she was so good at everything, she would never be able to pick one profession—she’d be a musical cowgirl doctor who illustrated comic books in her spare time.”

  Reed heard the familiar bewilderment in Annie’s words: How could a girl with that much potential have ended up like this? “She went to Amherst?” he asked gently, skipping the story ahead to where Bea’s life started to lose some of its glow.

  The warmth drained out of Annie’s face as they left Bea’s childhood
behind and entered the place where the story went wrong. “She was so excited to get in,” Annie said. “It was her first choice. We were just happy she wasn’t going to Stanford, her number two, because it was so far away. Bea was just going to be down the road.” She shook her head to show how foolish she’d been. “I got a cat around the time she moved out. Smokey. Bea had begged and pleaded with us for years to get her a pet, but we always said no. She was so busy with her activities, how could she look after an animal? But we adopted Smokey a few weeks before she left for school, and Bea laughed at me. I said the cat was to keep me company when she was gone, but she said it was a bribe to try to get her to come home on weekends.”

  Dave reached over and squeezed her hand. “Bea was right.”

  Annie smiled sadly. “It didn’t work, though.”

  “Bea struggled with a few of her classes during that first semester,” Dave continued, taking over the story. “For the first time, she didn’t make easy A’s. She didn’t get along with her roommate.”

  “A little floozy named Nicki,” Annie cut in tartly. “More interested in boys than books.”

  Dave patted her arm, maybe because he recalled where Bea’s tale ended. “We tried to talk to her through it, but everything we suggested just made her angry. So we tried backing off and waiting for her to call us. She did, finally, at which point she accused us of not caring about her life. We couldn’t do anything right.”

  “Still, we were so happy to have her home with us at winter break. My family came up for the holidays and Bea seemed to relax a little.” Annie’s voice was wistful. “Then she went into Boston with her friends for First Night. That’s where she met Derek.”

  “Her boyfriend,” Reed said, recalling the files.

  “Bea didn’t tell us much about him,” Dave said. “She said he was in school at BU, but that turned out to be a lie.”