Before He Finds Her (11 page)

She found the woods comforting, she reminded herself, not spooky. Whatever hormones had turned her favorite smells putrid were playing games with her brain’s fear center. Or something. Her pace quickened, and she tried to move quieter, and then she started thinking about killers and rapists on the loose, behind every tree.

Her breathing quickened.
I’m losing the woods
, she thought.
They were mine, and now they won’t be anymore.

Before her semester began, her aunt and uncle had given her a cell phone with prepaid minutes, but she’d used up all the minutes long ago, talking to Phillip. Still—if she’d had minutes left, would she have called him now? She hoped not. These were her woods. She willed herself to slow down, relax—
no one is here; no one is here
. Yet by the time she saw the abandoned tractor, the landmark telling her she was just a few hundred yards from Notress Pass, her sweat had turned cold and her pulse throbbed in her neck. The air was still. The only sounds were her quiet footfalls and her heavy breaths. As she passed the tractor, she could swear she saw a shadow glide across it, and she let out a gasp and started sprinting. She squeezed through the tight gap in the hedges, discovered long ago, onto her own property. Her aunt and uncle must not see her leaving or returning, or else there would go her freedom. Still, she half hoped that one of them would spot her darting across the lawn. At this moment she yearned for their safety, yearned for them to take away her freedom. It didn’t matter that the woods had been hers. They were gone now. She climbed through her bedroom window, closed and locked it, and slipped soundlessly into bed, not even removing her shoes.

She fell asleep but was awakened by images of hundreds of snapping turtles crawling over one another to get at her—a recurring nightmare since childhood. She awoke several more times, sweating, then freezing, then sweating again. During one of the sweating spells, she removed her shoes and clothes. During the next freezing spell, she found her pajamas in the dark and put them on.

The next time she awakened was to the hard wrap of knuckles on her bedroom door.

“Yeah?” she groaned.

“Get up.” Her uncle’s voice, uncharacteristically stern.

The room was getting light. She looked at the clock: 7 a.m. Her alarm would go off in fifteen minutes. So why the urgency? She sat up in bed a moment, trying to shake off sleep, and left her room wearing her pajamas and slippers. Her aunt was seated at the kitchen table. Her uncle stood beside her, leaning over the morning paper.

“Come over here,” he said without looking up.

She knew without having to look. But she looked anyway.

“He promised not to use it,” Melanie said. “I made him promise.”

The photographer must have had a powerful zoom lens. She could see individual freckles, each petal on the dandelion.

“People can’t be trusted, Melanie,” her aunt said.

There were three photographs in a row. Hers was in the middle. To her left, two small children with wide grins, attacking a tall cone of cotton candy. To her right, an older man wearing a gold-and-blue West Virginia T-shirt, giving the camera a thumbs-up. Behind him, the Zipper ride in motion, a blur of purple and green.

A single caption described all three pictures:
Local Fredonia residents enjoying the First Baptist Church’s Carnival for Christ.

Her uncle shut the paper and began to pace the small kitchen.

“I never gave him my name,” Melanie said. Still. There was her photo, large and clear, placing her right in Fredonia. And the
Mason City Democrat
published an online version. Did her aunt and uncle know? Probably not, but
she
knew. Her image was now online. Permanently.

“So is this your definition of being careful?” Uncle Wayne put his hands up to his head and massaged his temples. He sighed. “I want you to come to work with me. Learn the trade.”

“What—you mean fixing cars?”

“It’s been good for this family. You’re left alone to do your work—”

“Uncle Wayne, I’m in college.”

“Well, your aunt and I don’t think you should be. It’s causing a lot of problems.”

“College has nothing to do with it.”

He glanced over at his wife. “We’ll talk about it tonight, Mel. You have class today, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then go to class. But I want you to consider something. You’re seventeen and still alive. That isn’t luck.”

“I know, Uncle Wayne,” she said.

Her uncle made the coffee. She endured the smell and poured the juice. They sat together at the table.

Thank you, Lord, for providing us with this food that will nourish and sustain us
, said Aunt Kendra
.

Amen
, they all said.

After Wayne left for work, Kendra walked out of the kitchen and, a minute later, returned again carrying a manila folder.

“You’re right, you know,” she said to Melanie, who remained at the table. “You aren’t a kid any longer.” She placed the folder on the table in front of Melanie. “I’m going to take a shower. I think you should take a look at these.” She squeezed Melanie once on the shoulder and walked toward the bedroom.

When Melanie heard the water come on, she opened the folder. The newest letter was right on top of the small stack, dated just a little over a month earlier.

It was worse than she’d imagined.

VIA NEXT-DAY EXPRESS MAIL

August 18, 2006

Wayne Denison

P.O. Box 31

Fredonia, WV 26844

Mr. Denison:

Pursuant to our phone conversation of this afternoon: Ramsey Miller is confirmed to have been in Morgantown, West Virginia, on the afternoon of August 14.

His fingerprints were taken off the handle of a switchblade after an incident near the University of West Virginia campus. By the time police arrived, Mr. Miller had fled the scene, and his whereabouts at this time are once again unknown. The fingerprint match, which came through this morning, was conclusive.

Be assured that we have no reason to believe that Mr. Miller knows of your location. Still, Morgantown’s proximity to Fredonia is obviously troubling. We are in touch with law enforcement in Fredonia as well as with W.V. Highway Patrol and the Marshal in Charleston, but we are also asking your family to be especially alert and vigilant. Vary your routines, including your routes to and from your home. Report anything unusual to local law enforcement and do not hesitate to contact my office at any time.

We will be in touch as soon as we know more.

Sincerely,

Avery Lewis

U.S. Marshal

U.S. Courthouse

50 Walnut Street

Newark, NJ 07102

201-555-1108

She reread the letter, which must have arrived the same week that Melanie had started classes at Mountain Community College. Yet her aunt and uncle had said nothing, nor had they done anything to stop her from starting school. So she’d been wrong about them. They could actually show remarkable restraint.

She scanned the rest of the letters, which were stacked in reverse chronological order. There were eight total, most of which she’d read before.

…to your recent inquiry as to the present status of the case that pertains to your ward of court: We continue to receive tips as to the whereabouts of Ramsey Miller. We are actively pursuing these tips and will inform you right away of...

…will be retiring from the U.S. Marshals Service at the end of this calendar year. Going forward, U.S. Marshal Avery Lewis will be the lead investigator...

…but has again eluded local law enforcement. Fingerprint evidence corroborates the eyewitness account, which placed Mr. Miller outside his former home early in the morning. Unfortunately, the eyewitness did not report the information for several hours because...

…hope to have positive news for you before long. In the meantime, I trust that you are all adjusting to your new environment. If you ever...

Eight letters in fifteen years. Together, they told a sad story of botched opportunities and administrative detachment, and it seemed pretty clear that within the walls of the U.S. courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, the successful capture of Ramsey Miller had never been anyone’s top priority.

“We do the best we can, Mel,” her aunt said when she came back into the kitchen dressed for work, her hair blown dry. By then Melanie had returned the letters to the folder and was staring across the kitchen at the clock above the sink. “I hope you know that.” Kendra took the folder back and left the kitchen with it.

When she came through the kitchen again to leave for work, Melanie said, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry, honey.” Her aunt came over and knelt down to Melanie’s level. “Just be careful.”

Melanie didn’t get up until her aunt had left the house. Then she began to straighten up the kitchen. She was about to throw away the newspaper, but instead folded it into quarters so that her photograph remained visible. She returned to her bedroom and looked at it some more. Her mother had died at twenty-eight. In the photo that many of the papers ran when covering the murder, her mother might only have been a few years older than Melanie was now. She was standing on a beach, wearing a gray sweatshirt and squinting a little in the sunlight. Behind her was the ocean. One hand was on her head, trying to keep her hair from blowing everywhere. Only one in a hundred women, maybe one in a thousand, could look that glamorous trying simply to keep her hair from knotting up.

From this and other photographs of her mother that she’d found online, Melanie concluded that although she resembled her mother, the resemblance was limited to component parts—-angular chins, brown eyes, small noses—rather than cumulative effect. Her mother’s beauty, alas, had not been passed down, though on the best of days, with the humidity low and her acne in remission, Melanie sometimes felt a little pretty.

She got dressed, and removed her textbooks and notebooks from her backpack and stowed them in the closet. Then, rethinking, she retrieved one of the notebooks—a journalist should always have paper handy—and put it into her backpack again, along with the newspaper and some clothes: bras, underwear, a couple of shirts and skirts, and another pair of jeans. She got her toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, and hairbrush from the bathroom and put them in, and carried the backpack, purse, and laptop computer from her bedroom into the kitchen. She returned to her bedroom for another pair of shoes.

After getting her driver’s license, she’d briefly driven a loner from Uncle Wayne’s garage, a boat-sized Chevy Caprice, until her uncle had bought her a Ford Escort with nearly 200,000 miles on it. But the radio wasn’t bad and Wayne made sure the engine and tires were in perfect working order. Before leaving town, Melanie would stop at the gas station to buy a road atlas and to top off the tank and get a hot cup of tea for the long drive north, to the one place where she was forbidden.

I’m breaking every rule
.

The thought should have brought her no thrill. It did, though. It brought a small thrill. Though she’d never driven farther than the college, she always enjoyed being behind the wheel, her body settled into the seat, her mind drifting, imagining.

This was no field trip, though. No adventure. She reminded herself that she was about to visit a terrible place where her father committed murder and her mother burned.

But Arthur Goodale was alive—for now—and she needed to see him while there was still time to find out everything he knew about her mother’s murder. And then she would do what everyone else had failed to—find her father before he found her. Then she and her baby would live without fear.

Before going to the car, she tore a blank page from the notebook and found a pen in her bag.

She wrote: