In the Dark (25 page)

 

“Leave me alone,” Finn said. His yellowing skin burned crimson. He covered his eyes.

 

“I think Rikke lied for you because she thinks you killed Laura.”

 

“No.” His voice was muffled. Sweat dripped down his face like tears and spilled off his chin.

 

“How can you be sure?”

 

Finn clutched his fingers into fists and beat against his forehead. “I’m not sure! Does that make you happy? I don’t know! I don’t remember! For all I know, I took that fucking bat and beat her into a pulp. Okay? You try living with that. You try
not knowing
if you murdered a girl. See what that does to your life.”

 

He shoved his way past Stride and ran for his car.

 

As Stride watched Finn climb into his vehicle, he remembered talking to Rikke about geometry and realized he was seeing the parallel postulate at work again. He was watching two lines intersect.

 

Two lines he would have preferred remain parallel, never touching, so that the past didn’t infect the present.

 

Finn drove a silver RAV.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24
___________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was no escape from the heat.

 

Even on the Point, which usually enjoyed a cool breeze off the lake, the evening air was stifling. Stride parked in the mud near his cottage. Heat radiated off the dirt, and the leaves drooped in the trees around him. Serena wasn’t home. He didn’t bother going inside but instead climbed the shallow dune in order to watch the dusk descend on the lake. He and Serena kept two chairs in the sand at the crest of the hill, where they often sat to drink coffee in the mornings.

 

One of the chairs was occupied. It was Tish.

 

She didn’t look at him as he took a seat next to her. Her eyes were locked in the distance, watching sailboats on the water. She had a plastic bag in her lap, which she protected with both hands, as if it were a child that might squirm away and fall. They didn’t say anything. The lake was still, like pale blue china, and the line where the sky and the water met was lost in a sticky haze.

 

“I went to the wrong house,” she said finally.

 

Stride didn’t reply.

 

“It was the house where you and Cindy used to live. The people there told me how to find you.”

 

“I haven’t lived there in a long time.”

 

“I know,” Tish said, turning to study his face. “Cindy showed me a photograph of your house once. I never forgot it. I recognized it as soon as I saw it. I guess I never really thought about all the time that had passed. Somehow I thought you’d still be there. Cindy, too. I suppose that sounds crazy.”

 

“No, it happens to me, too,” Stride said. “But Cindy’s gone. So is Laura. So are their parents. It’s almost as if the whole family never existed.”

 

“Don’t say that.”

 

“It’s just the way it is.”

 

“I understand how you feel,” Tish said. “I lost my mother. I lost Laura. In a strange way, when Cindy died, I felt orphaned again. Like she was the last link to my past and my family. But I’m not comparing my loss to yours.”

 

Stride said nothing.

 

“There’s something I need to tell you about my book,” Tish said. “I’ve written the early chapters in Cindy’s voice. I tell the story through her eyes.”

 

Stride’s face tensed with dismay. “Why did you do that?”

 

“She was there. She was the witness.”

 

“You don’t have a free pass into her life,” he snapped, his voice getting louder. “Or mine.”

 

Tish looked flustered. “I’m sorry. She’s part of the story. So are you.”

 

“That doesn’t give you the right to walk on her grave.”

 

“I’m not doing that at all. I swear.”

 

Stride shrugged. There was a weight on his chest.

 

“I didn’t realize this would make you so uncomfortable,” she said.

 

“It’s not just that.”

 

“Then what is it?” she asked.

 

“Nothing. Forget it. This isn’t about you or your book.”

 

He wanted to say something more, but he didn’t. He wanted to tell her how angry he was that his grief came alive every time he saw her. He wanted to confess to someone that he felt guilty, because he had allowed Cindy to slip back into the daily beating of his heart, where Serena belonged
now. Instead, he pushed away his emotions and changed the subject.

 

“After what happened to your car, I’d like to keep an officer outside your condo overnight,” he told her.

 

Tish blinked. He knew she could hear the sudden coolness in his voice. “So this time you don’t think it’s just kids.”

 

“I don’t know, but I’d rather not take any chances.”

 

“Okay, sure, whatever you want.”

 

Tish took the bag on her lap and passed it across to him silently. Stride looked inside and saw a white dress, neatly folded. “This is for you,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ll understand what I did. Or why I did it.”

 

He grew concerned. “What is this?”

 

“You’ll find a sample of Peter Stanhope’s DNA in a bloodstain on the dress,” Tish said.

 

Stride closed the bag and stared at the sky. “What the hell did you do?”

 

“What I had to.”

 

“Son of a bitch, Tish, are you out of your mind?”

 

“Look, Peter is
guilty
, and you told me flat out that there’s no way the courts can force him to give us a sample. So I took it. I hope I left a scar, too.”

 

“You just confessed to battery.”

 

“He started it when he tried to kiss me, the bastard. I know what you think, but I got us something we never had before. A way to confirm whether Peter was stalking Laura.”

 

Stride shook his head. “It’s not that simple. There’s a reason why a court wouldn’t compel a DNA sample. We don’t have any probable cause. Even if we run the test and find out that Stanhope
was
sending Laura those notes, that doesn’t change anything. It’s not like Pat Burns is going to put him in front of a jury. It’s not going to happen.”

 

“Are you saying you won’t run the sample?”

 

“Do you think I just snap my fingers and get these things done? There’s a backlog. There are other priorities. It’s one thing to compare DNA in a stalker note against a database to try to break a cold case open. It’s another to test one specific individual just because you’ve got it in your head that he’s guilty.”

 

“Don’t make it worthless, Jon. Tell me I didn’t do this for nothing.”

 

“I’ll talk to Pat Burns. That’s all I can do.”

 

“I can’t believe you’d ignore this,” Tish insisted. “I can’t believe you’d walk away from the one chance we have to find out what really happened. You heard Finn’s story. Peter assaulted Laura that night. He was in the field with the bat after Dada rescued her.”

 

“Finn has no credibility. If there’s one person whose DNA I’d like to run, it’s Finn.”

 

“What are you talking about? You think Finn killed Laura?”

 

“I think it’s a damn strong possibility. Finn is deranged, Tish. It’s not a big leap to think he was capable of murder.”

 

“You’re giving Peter Stanhope a free pass. Is it because of his money? Did you learn your lessons from Ray Wallace?” She stopped. Her eyes widened as she realized what she had said. “God, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”

 

“No one gets a free pass from me,” Stride said.

 

“I know. I’m sorry.”

 

“You’re the one who can’t see past Peter Stanhope,” Stride said. “There are plenty of other people who are hiding things about Laura. Including you.”

 

“Me?”

 

“Rikke said you were jealous of Laura’s relationship with Peter.”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

 

“It looks to me like you’re obsessed with him,” Stride said.

 

“This isn’t about Peter. No one else was standing up for Laura, so I decided it was up to me.”

 

“Why?”

 

“She was my best friend.”

 

“So why were the two of you fighting that spring?”

 

“We weren’t. We were past it.”

 

“What was the fight about?”

 

“I told you that I don’t remember. It was thirty years ago.”

 

“You’re lying, Tish. Don’t lie to a cop and think I won’t know. Were you fighting about Peter Stanhope? Is that why you’re so focused on Peter? It makes me wonder whether
you
had a motive to kill Laura.”

 

“That’s crazy. You don’t honestly think I would go through all this trouble if I had anything to do with her murder, do you?”

 

“Where were you that night?” Stride asked.

 

“I already told you. I was living in St. Paul.”

 

“No, what
specifically
were you doing that night? Where were you? Who were you with?”

 

Tish shrugged. “I have no idea.”

 

“That’s strange. I’d think you’d remember what you were doing the night your best friend was brutally murdered.”

 

“You’re making too much of this,” Tish said. She stood up, and the chair toppled backward into the sand behind her. “Laura was killed by a stalker. You’ve got Peter’s DNA. It’s up to you now.”

 

“I have one more question,” Stride told her. “And you’d better answer this one.”

 

Tish folded her arms in annoyance. “What?”

 

“When did Cindy show you a photo of our house?”

 

Tish’s mouth fell open. Stride thought she had slipped, that she had said something she never intended to share. “I don’t know. It was probably something she included with a Christmas card.”

 

“Stop lying to me. You said Cindy showed you a photograph. She didn’t send it to you. She was
with
you. When was this?”

 

“A few months before she died,” Tish admitted.

 

“Where?”

 

“She visited me in Atlanta.”

 

Stride searched his memory. In those last terrible months, Cindy had begun to wrap her mind around the fact that she was dying, that the treatment options had finally run out. The only time he could remember her being gone was a weekend where she went off by herself, vanishing from his side for three long days. To make peace with the past, she said. She never told him where she went or anything about her trip. Back then, he had been afraid that she might commit suicide to spare him and herself the agony of a slow death. He now knew that she had gone to see Tish.

 

Someone she had never mentioned to him in her entire life.

 

Why?

 

“You owe me the truth,” Stride said.

 

Tish picked up the fallen chair and steadied it in the sand. She sat down again but didn’t look at Stride.

 

“Cindy first wrote to me about fifteen years ago,” Tish said. “It was shortly after her father died.”

 

“Did you know William Starr?”

 

“Enough to despise him.”

 

Stride nodded. He remembered the long weeks in which Cindy had sat at her father’s bedside while he waged a losing battle with cancer. William Starr had always been a hard man to like. Judgmental. Rigid. Obsessed with righteousness and punishment and all the while terrified of going to hell for his own sins. Death has a way of softening even the toughest of men. Stride remembered Cindy holding her father’s hand, listening to him weep, giving him absolution in a way that no priest ever could.

 

“Cindy had no illusions about her father,” he said.

 

“Neither did Laura. She loved him despite everything he did to her, but I knew he was a gutless piece of shit. He cheated on their mother, did you know that? Multiple times. Laura heard them arguing about it.”

 

“Why did Cindy contact you when he died?”

 

Tish hesitated. “I guess when she lost him, it brought up all her old emotions about Laura. It’s that aloneness you feel when your family is gone. So she thought of me. She knew how close Laura and I were, and she decided to rekindle a friendship with me.”

 

“Then what?”

 

“We wrote back and forth for years. Not often, but enough that we became close.”

 

“She never told me about you,” Stride said.

 

“Well, we had a bond because of Laura. Cindy and I both lost someone we loved. Neither one of us ever put it behind us.”

 

“Why the visit in Atlanta?” Stride asked.

 

Tish’s voice was soft. “Cindy knew she was dying. She wanted to see me. To say good-bye. And to tell me things. She told me everything that happened to her that night in 1977. With Laura. With you. In the lake. Everything. Things she had never told anyone else before. That’s why I chose to put so much of the book in her voice.”

 

Stride shook his head. He felt as if he were falling, fast and hard. “Why would she do that?”

 

Tish took his hand.

 

“Because she didn’t want me to let it go. She wanted me to do something. That’s why I’m obsessed. That’s why I have to see this out and do whatever it takes to get to the truth. Don’t you see, Jon? That’s why I’m here. I’ve resisted it ever since Cindy came to me, but I couldn’t resist it anymore. Coming back after all these years wasn’t my idea. Writing a book about Laura’s murder wasn’t my idea. It was Cindy’s.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

25
___________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Serena arrived home after midnight, she found the door to their attic hanging open. The unfinished space had an Alice in Wonderland feel to it, like crossing over into a different dimension. The stairway was built right into the cottage’s great room, with five dark walnut steps leading up to two narrow locked doors. Behind the doors, a single lonely bulb gave light, and the old wooden beams climbed to a high ceiling. Several more steps ended in another set of doors, where century-old paint flecked off the finish. Tonight the upper doors were open, too. She continued to the attic level.