The Vanishing Season Page 8

  She made a face. “We broke up last year.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “Not half as sorry as my mother. She was always so sure we were getting married. Now she’s trying to set me up long-distance with her cable guy.”

  “Hold out for a satellite provider,” Reed advised, and Danielle tilted her head back with a laugh. “Danielle, let me introduce Officer Ellery Hathaway of the Woodbury Police Department.”

  “My mother once tried to set me up with my cousin,” Ellery told her as they shook hands.

  “Holy crap, really? I think you win—or lose, as the case may be.”

  “He was a second cousin, but my objection still stands on the record.”

  “Thank you for coming in to help us today,” Reed said. “I owe you one.”

  “You owe me about three by now,” Danielle said, eyeing him up and down. “But you get a discount this time because my A/C is out and there’s no way I was going to sit around frying my eggs off at home. You said you wanted some letters analyzed?”

  Reed nodded and pulled out the cards Ellery had given him. “We’re hoping you can pull saliva samples from these envelopes. Maybe we’ll get lucky and there’ll be a hit in the system.”

  “Should be easy enough to check,” Danielle replied as she accepted the bag with the cards in it. “Why don’t you guys help yourselves to a soda and I’ll let you know if we even have anything here worth testing?”

  “Actually,” Ellie said, “I was wondering if you could test something else too.”

  Reed regarded her with mild surprise, and he noted for the first time that she was holding a small paper bag.

  “There’s a beer bottle in here,” Ellie said. “I was hoping you could check it for prints or DNA.”

  “Where is that from?” Reed asked, because there was nothing in the files about a beer bottle. Ellie took a long time with her answer.

  “The woods behind my house,” she said finally. “I found it last night.”

  Danielle looked from one to the other. “Just what funny business do you two have going on here?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Reed said, but he was still looking at Ellery.

  “Well, like I said, take it easy for the next twenty minutes or so and I’ll let you know what I can do.”

  Reed and Ellery found the soda machine and bought a couple of Cokes. Reed drank his sitting on the hard bench, but Ellie paced the length of the floor in front of him. “You didn’t tell me about the beer bottle,” he said as she walked past.

  She halted with a shrug but did not meet his eyes. “It may not mean anything. Tad and Erin Bashir next door have a couple of teenage boys. Could be they were drinking in the woods.”

  “You ever see anyone out there?”

  “No, never.”

  He took a long swill of cold soda. “Have you given any more thought to who might have sent you those cards? Even if we get DNA, we may need a sample to compare it to.”

  “Of course I’ve given thought to it,” she replied impatiently. “And I’ve told you—there’s no one. I have been very careful not to talk about my background with anyone.”

  “What about going back farther—to the training academy, to college. Maybe you told a friend or a roommate.”

  She shook her head. “I’d changed my name by then. I’ve been Ellery Hathaway for ten years now.”

  He thought back to the hundreds of people involved in the case at the time. Everyone from the patrol officers to the EMTs who showed up in the woods behind Coben’s farm would have known a piece of the story, and there was a time when those pieces might have fetched a pretty penny. The public’s appetite for the story seemed insatiable. A few years ago, Reed had dental surgery, and just as the anesthesia hit him, making his head float free from his body, the nurse’s voice had materialized out of nowhere: “Mr. Markham? Tell me … what is Francis Coben really like?” His fat tongue had laid numb in his mouth, too paralyzed to answer. If these strangers haunted him with their questions, what would they do to Ellery when they found her out?

  “You really haven’t talked to anyone about it?” he asked her. “Even people who might swear to keep your identity confidential—no reporters, no doctors, no lawyers.”

  “No,” she insisted, almost stamping her foot, looking more like the fourteen-year-old girl he remembered. “There’s no one.” The instant she said the words, her cheeks developed two bright spots on them. “Well, okay, there’s just one person. But it was a long time ago, and she’s dead now.”

  “Tell me.”

  Ellery cast a long look down the empty hall before sighing and walking over to join him on the bench. “After it happened,” she said in a low voice, looking straight ahead and not at him, “some people sent us money. Not a lot, usually—twenty bucks here or there. But this one woman, Jacqueline MacKenzie, she wanted to give us thousands, as in almost one hundred thousand dollars. My mom worked as a paralegal in a small firm. Daniel had medical bills. One hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money back then.”

  “It still is.”

  She took a deep breath. “Anyway, for that kind of money, she wanted to meet me. See how I was doing. I didn’t want to do it, but we really needed the money so I said okay. She sent a driver to come get me in this enormous burgundy-colored Cadillac. I remember he opened the door for me and gave me a bottle of cold water for the drive. The backseat was the size of my twin bed at home, and the driver kept checking me out in the rearview mirror, like he couldn’t believe he was chauffeuring around this poor kid from Albany Park. My mother wasn’t allowed to come with me; that was part of the deal. Mom didn’t like it, but she didn’t feel like she could question Jackie if we wanted the money.”

  Reed remembered holding the slight weight of the girl in his arms as he had run from Coben’s farm, not knowing for sure whether she was even breathing. How desperate must her mother have been to send that same girl out the door to relive the whole ordeal alone with a total stranger. Surely there must have been another way to pay the bills.

  “So we drove to her huge house in Old Town,” Ellery continued. “It must have had three or four stories—practically as big as my whole apartment building back home. We sat and had tea in her front room. The tea tasted like dirt to me, but I felt like I had to force it down anyway, what with all the money she was going to be giving us. She said, ‘Call me Jackie-Mac, everyone does.’ Then she started with the questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  Ellie bowed her head. “What was it like when Coben took me? What did his farm look like? What did he do to me? That sort of thing. She wanted to know all the details.”

  “Why?”

  Her head jerked up and she gave him a pointed look. “What do you mean why? Why did you write your book? Why did so many people read it? Because of course everyone had to know the gory details. Jackie-Mac just happened to be rich enough to go straight to the source.”

  Reed stiffened from the bitter sting of her barbs. He remembered the shining light in Sarit’s eyes as he’d told her the story. You’ve got an amazing tale here, Reed, she’d told him. Bestseller material! People would eat this right up. He knew she wasn’t wrong, because he’d felt it from the start, the unending public hunger for more of Coben’s story. He’d thought he was informing them, edifying them about the psychology of violent offenders. Sitting now with one of the victims, seeing how she curled protectively in on herself just at the mention of Coben’s crimes, he felt dirty, no better than the old bat who’d dragged a vulnerable teenager from her home and justified the sin with money.

  “I just answered her questions as quickly as I could and prayed like hell the whole thing would be over,” Ellery said wistfully. She leaned back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. “I figured if I could tell the cops about what happened for free, I could tell this lady for a hundred thousand bucks.”

  Reed rubbed his face with one hand as he absorbed the story. “I�
��m sorry,” he told her finally. “I’m sorry she did that to you.”

  “Yeah, well. It wasn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, you know?”

  The night of the rescue, Reed had been surrounded by reporters before he’d even had a chance to change or to think about what he would say. It all happened so fast. Later, he had watched himself on the news stammering, “No comment, no comment,” looking like a hunted fox under the bright TV lights. It was only then he noticed that Abby’s blood had spilled all down the front of his shirt.

  “She summoned me back a few times over the next few years,” Ellie continued. “I went each time and answered more of her questions. By then, Coben was on trial, and she used to videotape the news reports on the proceedings and then want to watch them with me. I pretended to watch but mostly I went inside my head and counted backward from one thousand. I told myself I was counting all the money we would get from her, the crazy old bag.”

  “Jackie-Mac,” Reed repeated, musing on the name for the first time. “You know, her name actually sounds familiar.”

  “Her husband was some real estate mogul in Chicago. In any case, she died while I was still in high school. Left me another fifty grand in the will, so I guess it was all worth it. Her money was my ticket out of there.”

  “Reed?” Danielle poked her head into the hall. “I’ve got good news for you.”

  Reed and Ellie tossed their empty soda cans into the trash and walked back to the entrance to the laboratory area. Danielle had donned a white coat and gloves. “What did you find?” Reed asked her.

  “Two envelopes and the beer bottle all have usable samples, but I only have time to do one today—which one do you want first?”

  “The envelopes,” Ellie said, at the same time Reed said, “The bottle.”

  Danielle spread out her arms. “Pick one.”

  “The envelopes,” Reed said, reluctantly revising his answer. If Ellery was unbalanced enough to be sending herself anonymous birthday cards, he needed to know sooner rather than later. But he’d also seen her house, when he’d been sitting in the truck while she went in to fetch the blasted dog, so he knew how isolated she was out there. The idea of someone camped out in the woods watching her filled him with a creeping sense of dread. It was becoming apparent to him that Ellery had not mapped the Coben history at all—she had no idea there were kooks on the Internet who believed in Coben’s innocence. Women who wanted to marry him. Men who wanted to be like him.

  Reed himself had seen Coben in person only once, when he interviewed him for twenty minutes as fodder for his book. Coben had shaved his head and tattooed eyeliner around his deep-set eyes. His smile had been predatory, and he had just one question: “Where is Abigail?”

  “Okay, the envelopes it is,” Danielle said, breaking into Reed’s thoughts. “I’ll be in touch with the results as soon as I have them. Maybe as soon as tomorrow. The beer bottle is going to have to wait.”

  “Great, thank you.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Ellie echoed.

  They exited the building into the summer heat, which to Reed felt like walking into a wall. Waves shimmered off the parking lot pavement, making him momentarily dizzy. “I forgot my sunglasses,” he said. “Go on and I’ll catch up.”

  He jogged back into the building, where he went to the trash and carefully picked up Ellie’s soda can. Danielle was already back in safety goggles inside the lab, and he knocked to get her attention. “What is it?” she asked when she emerged.

  “The envelope samples,” he said. “Could you please test them against this can?”

  Danielle did not look thrilled to be given another task. “That’ll delay your results,” she said.

  “I understand. Can you test it anyway?” He glanced back to make sure Ellery wasn’t watching.

  Danielle looked concerned for the first time. “Reed, whatever you’ve got going on here, I hope you’re being careful.”

  He wasn’t sure which answer would be worse: that Ellery was sending herself menacing birthday cards, or that someone else was. “Test the can,” he said softly. “As soon as you are able—and thanks.”

  * * *

  On the journey back to Woodbury, the air-conditioning in Ellery’s old truck could hardly keep up with the shimmery heat outside. Reed rolled up his shirtsleeves and let himself be lulled by the hum of the road noise and the banality of the passing scenery. Thick, bushy trees, grasses browned from the summer sun. A blue sky whipped with clouds that looked like cotton candy. “If you want, we could stop and get a drink,” Ellery offered, breaking the silence.

  A drink. The word called up a vision of a tall beer in a frosty glass, cold foam at his lips. But this time, it felt like a reward for a hard day’s work and not the first step toward sweet oblivion. He had to stay straight and sober to figure out what the heck was going on with her, this woman he’d pulled back from the brink. His idle mind had a new beguiling puzzle. So yes, he was thirsty again—but not for booze—and the realization filled him with some relief. The alcohol felt like something he’d been auditioning in the wake of all his losses, something to fill the void. Maybe also it had been a kind of secret test. Reed had no specific knowledge of his genetic background, no idea what he might have been flirting with when he cracked open that first bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Maybe, he’d told himself, bleary-eyed when looking in the mirror, maybe this is who you really are. Now he was far from home, rolling down the Mass Pike with a woman who might be certifiably nuts, but he felt the sanest he’d been in almost a year. “Is there a bookstore around here?” he demanded suddenly.

  “Uh, sure, as part of the mall up here. I think so. Why?”

  “Please, can we stop there? I have something I’d like to check out.”

  Ten minutes later, they were standing together in the True Crime section as he pulled the latest edition of Little Girl Lost off the shelves. Ellie looked on with apparent interest as he started thumbing through the pages. “What, you don’t have it committed to memory by now?” she asked.

  She might even have been teasing him, but Reed felt acutely self-conscious holding the paperback in his hands with the actual lost girl standing two feet away. “I just want to check something,” he said.

  Ellery stretched out her hand. “Can I see it?”

  He drew up short, blinking, and then slowly passed it to her. She took it carefully, as though it were an ancient artifact. She fanned the pages so quickly he knew she couldn’t have caught any of the content; rather, she seemed to be weighing it, feeling the shape in her hands. “My part is really small, when you think of it,” she said finally. “Hardly worth centering the title around. I didn’t come in until the very end.”

  “Neither did I. But you have to admit we made an impact.” He smiled at her gently but she didn’t return the weak humor.

  “You, maybe,” she acknowledged, ducking her head. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yes. Ellery…” He waited until she looked up again. “You lived.” The doctors hadn’t been so sure, the night he took her from the house, whether she would pull through, given everything that had been done to her body. At least she’s still got her hands, one of the physicians had remarked. Reed let his gaze drift to the scars at Ellery’s wrists. Coben had liked to cut them slowly, with a small knife.

  Ellery kept her eyes on the book. “The person who’s sending me the cards—why do you think he’s doing it?”

  Reed shifted uncomfortably, glancing around at the other customers. No one seemed to be listening. “Coben is infamous—probably half of America knows who he is. You notice how we call serial murderers and presidents by all three of their names? There’s a fascination there, a kind of awe. Some people want to feel connected to the story so they learn everything they can about the killer. They write to him in prison. Collect souvenirs. They retell the story with themselves at the center somehow, inexorably linked to the killer.”

  “Hmm,” Ellery mused, tilting her head. “Kind of like you
.”

  His face burned as she held his book out toward him. “No, I…” he stammered as he took it back. “Not like that. I’m referring to mentally disturbed people.”

  “Keep talking,” she advised darkly. “You’re just digging yourself in deeper.”

  There was a glint of amusement in her eyes, and he realized with a start that she was very definitely poking fun at him now. He shook his head, embarrassed at being slow on the uptake. “Funny,” he said lightly. He was running secret DNA tests on her, and yet somehow he still really wanted her to like him.

  “Come on,” she said, walking away. “Let’s go pay for your book. Or maybe if you agree to autograph some copies, they’ll let you have it for free.”

  “Cute,” he called after her. “You’re better than my publicist.”

  “And after you pay for the book, you can buy me dinner,” she said as he caught up to her. “Think of it as my share of the royalties.”

  He had no recourse to object to this. Really, it was the least he could do.

  * * *

  They found a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint, and the ribbing continued over tacos as Ellery decided to read the opening to his book. He sat on the other side of the booth and tried not to care. “You had horses growing up?” she demanded, arching an eyebrow at him as she peered across the table. “Competed in fencing? Here, open wide so I can check your mouth for a silver spoon.”

  “My parents have money,” he said with an agreeable smile. “I was born with nothing.”

  “Hey, I know from nothing, and believe me, this ain’t it. My mother used to send us to school with mashed potato sandwiches because meat was too expensive.” She paged through to another spot in the book. “Princeton, very nice. I’m sure you were top of the class.”

  “Why don’t I just take that.”

  She held it away from his grabby hands. “No way, it’s mine now.”

  What could he say to that? Of course it had always been hers. He sat back in the booth, tugging the tortilla chips toward him with a sigh. He chomped them as she read.