Hiding Place (9781101606759) (17 page)

“It must be nice to have him here.”

“Sure, yeah, it’s great.” Again the words seemed forced. So did the smile. “He’s staying at his mom’s house.”

“Well,” Stynes said, “I’ve taken up a lot of your time.”

“It’s not a problem,” Bower said. “I’ll call Reverend Fred later today and smooth his feathers. Although that Rogers thing…”

He let his voice trail off.

Stynes pushed himself up from the chair and reached across the desk to shake Ray Bower’s hand. “I guess you don’t see much of Bill Manning either?” he asked.

Bower looked surprised by the question. He let go of Stynes’s hand.

“No, I don’t. Like I said, we’re not close anymore.”

“You think Justin’s death affected him as much as Virginia?” Stynes asked.

Ray Bower seemed to think his answer over carefully. “Bill is a tough nut to crack. I’m not sure he ever let on how he felt about anything.”

“Strong, silent type?”

“Well, you know him. If you can figure that man out, Detective, you’re a smarter man than me.”

“How do you mean that?”

Bower rubbed his chin. “I’m not sure he ever felt anything for anybody. If he did, he kept it hidden. His wife, his kids, his friends. I don’t know what goes on inside him.”

“Thanks,” Stynes said. He stopped at the door to Bower’s office. “By the way, congratulations.”

“What’s that?”

Stynes pointed to his own—empty—ring finger and then pointed behind him in Cindy’s general direction.

Ray Bower’s face flushed even more than it did at the mention of Dante Rogers. He ducked his head a little in an aw-shucks, you-got-me kind of way.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to be a small wedding.”

“You could do it while your son’s in town,” Stynes said.

Bower looked as though that notion had never occurred to him. “Yeah, we’ll see.”

On the way out, Stynes congratulated Cindy. She insisted on showing him the ring, which he complimented appropriately. He excused himself and left the building before she launched too deeply into a rundown of her plans for the wedding, which seemed more elaborate than what Ray Bower was considering.

Ashleigh slept poorly, her dreams populated by weird, shifting images of Dante Rogers and the man from the porch. She felt unrested and anxious when she opened her eyes just before nine o’clock, knowing that today she would go back to the apartment complex to find Steven Kollman. The kids she went to school with talked about feeling the same way whenever a test approached. Some of them took pills for it. Antianxiety. Antidepressants. Tests and school never ruffled Ashleigh. She carried an unspoken contempt for the kids who relied on pills to get through their days.

But she suddenly felt different about that. If a pill had been within her reach, she thought she might have taken it.

She checked her phone and saw a text from Kevin.

Meet at Macs at noon. Have 2 wk brkfst.

Noon?

Ashleigh almost screamed. They were supposed to go at ten, and now he couldn’t go until noon. She shut the phone without responding, flopped back onto the bed, and stared at the ceiling.

Waiting. Why was she always waiting?

She walked to McDonald’s around eleven, after spending the morning trying to distract herself by drawing out every task
she performed. Slow breakfast. Slow shower. She even sat and listened while her grandpa lectured her for fifteen uninterrupted minutes on why the Reds would never win the World Series with their current manager.

As she walked along the hot road, she thought about what lay ahead, and her nerves jangled even more. She remembered everything Kevin had said at the park and on the bus the other day.

What if the guy was dangerous? What if he was crazy?

Ashleigh read the news on the Internet. She loved the “News of the Weird” feature, the bizarre stories compiled from around the country and around the world. Construction workers with nails through their heads, enormous chain reaction car accidents in the fog, babies switched at birth who end up marrying each other.

But some of the stories disturbed her, even with her appetite for strangeness. Serial killers, young girls held hostage in basements, doctors who raped their patients.

What if she ended up in one of those stories? The girl killed by a creep who claimed to know something about her uncle’s murder.

She took a few deep breaths, told herself she couldn’t let those thoughts take over her mind. She didn’t need pills. She wouldn’t let her mind twist her into knots.

She decided to eat while waiting for Kevin. At eleven fifteen, the restaurant remained relatively calm. A few of the old men who gathered for their morning coffee and biscuit still remained. Ashleigh took some sort of comfort from their presence. They seemed like part of the order of the town, like the monument to President Grant on the courthouse lawn or the Fall Festival in October. Their number never decreased. Even when one of them died, another old guy showed up, keeping the number of the group about the same. A part of her wished that her grandpa
would come and join them, that he would leave the house a little more and talk to somebody. But he didn’t seem to be the type of man who could even stand to talk to other men. Ashleigh just didn’t know if he’d always been so closed down, or if her uncle’s death sealed her grandpa off from the rest of the world.

Kevin worked in the back, so Ashleigh didn’t see him. She ordered Chicken McNuggets, fries, and a Coke and took her tray to a table in the corner. The lunchtime crowd would arrive soon, goofy-looking businessmen in their starched white shirts, mothers pulling a train of kids behind them. She wanted to stay out of everyone’s way and eat in peace. She wanted to think about and prepare for seeing Steven Kollman.

What would she say to him?

She decided to be direct, to just ask him what he knew. Just say it straight out.

Listen, dude, I don’t mean to freak you out or anything, but I’ve got to know what you know. And if you don’t know anything, leave my mom alone…

She had a mouthful of McNugget and her eyes on the parking lot when Kevin slid into the booth across from her. Ashleigh jumped a little, lost in imagining the scenario at the apartment complex.

“Easy, Ash. It’s just me.”

He smiled wide. Ashleigh had to admit she was happy to see him, even if he did make her jump.

“Are you the fry guy today?” she asked. “These McNuggets are a little dry.”

“I’ll tell the chef.”

“I was just thinking about Kollman, and what I’m going to say to him.”

“About that…”

Ashleigh understood what his words meant.

“About that?” she said. “What are you doing?”

Kevin held his hands out. Placating. Ashleigh hated being placated.

“It’s just a delay,” Kevin said.

“A delay?”

“Two people called off,” he said. “They need me to stay through lunch.”

“We made these plans.” She didn’t want to sound whiny, but she was pissed, and her voice rose beyond her control. “You know how important this is.”

“I know, I know. But the other day when we went to see this guy, I showed up late and got written up.”

“So?”

“So my dad knows the manager. They’re friends from the Optimists Club or something, and my dad gave me this big bullshit talk about not being late again.”

“You won’t be late,” Ashleigh said. “You’re already here.”

“I feel like I can’t say no,” Kevin said. “And my dad said I need to save money for a car in the fall. It’s just until three. Then we can go.”

“Three?”

“Hell, the guy probably isn’t even home. We went in the morning last time and he wasn’t there. He probably works somewhere, so if we go later we’ll catch him. Makes sense, right?”

Ashleigh looked back out the window. A minivan and an SUV pulled in. Any minute and they’d start spilling kids out their sides, the parents irritable, the kids little eating machines. What Kevin said made sense, but she didn’t want to wait.

We made plans.

“Fine,” she said. “Work until three.”

Kevin didn’t say anything. He looked around the restaurant.

“What?” Ashleigh asked.

“You know, other people have things going on in their lives. I’m offering to go with you. It will just be later.”

“Fine.” She took a long drink.

“I know what that means,” he said. “You’re pissed. I get it. I get how much this means to you. But we have to compromise sometimes, you know? Like you going to football or basketball games when I know you don’t want to. Now I’m asking you to wait for me. Jesus, just once could you give somebody a break? Could you? Like Kelcey in the park. Why lash out at people who mean well?”

Ashleigh didn’t meet his eye. He’d never spoken to her like this, and it brought an unnatural burning to her eyes, something that made her feel like a little kid.

But she wasn’t going to cry.

She wasn’t going to show it.

“It’s fine,” she said. “Just work.”

But Kevin didn’t leave. He reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Come on, Ash. I’m sorry—”

She pulled her hand away. “It’s fine. Go.”

He leaned back. “We can do it at three. You can hang out at the library or back home, and we can leave right at three.”

“Okay,” she said. “Really.”

She offered nothing else, so Kevin went back to work. She finished eating alone.

The bus dropped Ashleigh at the same stop as the other day—Hamilton Avenue, a few blocks’ walk from Steven Kollman’s apartment complex. She stepped out into the heat, the crappy food
from McDonald’s heavy in her stomach. She’d left the restaurant without talking to Kevin. She’d handed the woman at the cash register a note, written on a thin paper napkin.

Going to library. See you at 3.

By three, Ashleigh expected—
hoped
—to have everything with Steven Kollman wrapped up. She could go back and meet Kevin and tell him what had happened. She could do it on her own.

But as she walked down the sidewalk toward the street where the apartment complex sat, she started to doubt the wisdom of what she was doing. What was she going to do—a skinny fifteen-year-old girl armed with scraps of information? What would she do if the guy was a rapist or a killer?

But she wouldn’t turn back. Couldn’t and wouldn’t.

It meant too much and she’d waited too long.

Ashleigh remembered the building. The cooking smells in the hallway were worse than what she ate at McDonald’s. Everyone seemed to have their TVs blaring. She didn’t want to think about what went on behind all those doors, the empty, boring lives led by people with nothing better to do than watch TV all day.

But was her grandpa any different? And what right did she have to come down on these people so hard? Maybe they were like her grandpa and had lost their jobs or had someone close to them die, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Ashleigh stopped on the first landing. She knew she judged others harshly, even went so far as to look down on anyone she considered stupid or ignorant—and as far as Ashleigh was concerned, that meant a lot of people.

But what if Kevin was right? What if she never gave anybody a break? Her mom, her grandpa, Kevin, Kelcey, the kids at school. People she didn’t even know as she walked through her
life. Maybe this guy, Steven Kollman, was one of those people. Someone who had been dealt a bad hand, never given a chance by the world, and so he ended up living in a dumpy apartment building in Dove Point, Ohio.

Ashleigh hoped to find out soon enough, so she resumed her climb up the stairs.

She had taken just a few steps when she heard the whooshing sound. It repeated itself rhythmically—
whoosh whoosh whoosh
. Ashleigh couldn’t place it, but it sounded like it was coming from the top floor, where Steven Kollman lived. She moved past the second landing, and the noise increased. When the third floor came into sight, Ashleigh had a pretty good guess as to what the noise was.

Steven Kollman’s apartment door was wide-open. Three large dark garbage bags sat just outside of it. They looked to be filled to bursting. Every time the
whoosh
sound came again, a puff of dust and dirt came out the door of the apartment like a little cloud. Someone was cleaning Steven’s apartment. Really cleaning it.

Was it Steven?

Or…

The sweeping stopped, and the familiar head of the building manager popped out of the apartment door. For a short moment, it looked like he didn’t know who Ashleigh was and wanted to ask her what she needed. But then recognition spread across his face. His eyes brightened and his eyebrows raised behind the loose-fitting glasses.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Steven’s…what? Are you his cousin or something? I forget.”

“Something like that,” Ashleigh said.

“Where’s your friend?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s at work.”

She regretted telling the truth as soon as the words came out of her mouth. She should have thought on her feet and told a lie. She could have said he was in the car or waiting outside or on his way to meet her. But the man now knew she was alone. She was halfway up the staircase, between the third and second floor, so the manager and his blandly happy face loomed above her. He came all the way out and set the broom down, leaning it against the wall. He wore a red T-shirt and great blotches of sweat encircled the area of his armpits.

“Is Steven home?” Ashleigh asked.

The man wiped his hands together, trying to clean the dust or dirt off. “You’re too late,” he said. “Or he’s too late really. He never paid me the back rent he owed, so I left him an eviction notice. Late last night, I see him carrying some stuff out to his car. You know, a suitcase, a couple of boxes. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was moving out, but he had the back rent for me. Next thing I know, he’s driving off.” The guy shrugged. “He never came back, the bum.”

“You don’t know where he went?”

“Sweetie, if I knew that, I’d find him and send the marshals after him. I see this all the time. There are a lot of crummy people in the world.”

Ashleigh didn’t know what to think. She felt relief, yes. All the fears and anxieties she carried with her, all the worries about what might have gone wrong if she did end up talking to Steven Kollman eased and allowed her to breathe more freely than she had all day. On the other hand, a crushing disappointment lurked beneath everything. What was she going to do if Steven was gone? Everything—
everything
—she’d hoped for about finding this man and helping her family was gone. She had fallen back to zero.