Tell No One (32 page)

That was when I saw it. And my world, already off kilter, lurched again.

I wasn’t actually reading the article. My eyes were just wandering down the page. But I saw the names. For the first time. The names of the men who’d been found dead at the lake. One was familiar.

Melvin Bartola.

It couldn’t be.

I dropped the paper and ran, opening those sliding doors until I found a conductor two cars away. “Where’s the next stop?” I asked him.

“Ridgemont, New Jersey.”

“Is there a library near the station?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

I got off there anyway.

*    *    *

Eric Wu flexed his fingers. With a small, tight push, he forced the door.

It hadn’t taken him long to track down the two black men who’d helped Dr. Beck escape. Larry Gandle had friends in the police department. Wu had described the men to them, and then he went through the proper mug books. Several hours later, Wu spotted the image of a thug named Brutus Cornwall. They made a few calls and learned that Brutus worked for a drug dealer named Tyrese Barton.

Simple.

The chain lock snapped. The door flew open, the knob banging against the wall. Latisha looked up, startled. She was about to scream, but Wu moved fast. He clamped his hand over her mouth and lowered his lips to her ear. Another man, someone Gandle had hired, came in behind him.

“Shh,” Wu said almost gently.

On the floor, TJ played with his Hot Wheels. He tilted his head at the noise and said, “Mama?”

Eric Wu smiled down at him. He let Latisha go and knelt to the floor. Latisha tried to stop him, but the other man held her back. Wu rested his enormous hand on the boy’s head. He stroked TJ’s hair as he turned to Latisha.

“Do you know how I can find Tyrese?” he asked her.

Once off the train, I took a taxi to the rent-a-car place. The green-jacketed agent behind the counter gave me directions to the library. It took maybe three minutes to get there. The Ridgemont library was a modern facility, nouveau colonial brick, picture windows, beech-wood shelves, balconies, turrets,
coffee bar. At the reference desk on the second floor, I found a librarian and asked if I could use the Internet.

“Do you have ID?” she asked.

I did. She looked at it. “You have to be a county resident.”

“Please,” I said. “It’s very important.”

I expected to see a no-yield, but she softened. “How long do you think you’ll be?”

“No more than a few minutes.”

“That computer over there”—she pointed to a terminal behind me—“it’s our express terminal. Anyone can use it for ten minutes.”

I thanked her and hurried over. Yahoo! found me the site for the
New Jersey Journal
, the major newspaper of Bergen and Passaic counties. I knew the exact date I needed. Twelve years ago on January twelfth. I found the search archive and typed in the information.

The Web site went back only six years.

Damn.

I hurried back over to the librarian. “I need to find a twelve-year-old article from the
New Jersey Journal
,” I said.

“It wasn’t in their Web archive?”

I shook my head.

“Microfiche,” she said, slapping the sides of her chair to rise. “What month?”

“January.”

She was a large woman and her walk was labored. She found the roll in a file drawer and then helped me thread the tape through the machine. I sat down. “Good luck,” she said.

I fiddled with the knob, as if it were a throttle on
a new motorcycle. The microfiche shrieked through the mechanism. I stopped every few seconds to see where I was. It took me less than two minutes to find the right date. The article was on page three.

As soon as I saw the headline, I felt the lump in my throat.

Sometimes I swear that I actually heard the screech of tires, though I was asleep in my bed many miles away from where it happened. It still hurt—maybe not as much as the night I lost Elizabeth, but this was my first experience with mortality and tragedy and you never really get over that. Twelve years later, I still remember every detail of that night, though it comes back to me in a tornado blur—the predawn doorbell, the solemn-faced police officers at the door, Hoyt standing with them, their soft, careful words, our denials, the slow realization, Linda’s drawn face, my own steady tears, my mother still not accepting, hushing me, telling me to stop crying, her already frayed sanity giving way, her telling me to stop acting like a baby, insisting that everything was fine, then suddenly, coming close to me, marveling at how big my tears were, too big, she said, tears that big belonged on the face of a child, not a grown-up, touching one, rubbing it between her forefinger and her thumb, stop crying David! growing angrier because I couldn’t stop, her screams then, screaming at me to stop crying, until Linda and Hoyt stepped in and shushed her and someone gave her a sedative, not for the first or last time. It all came back to me in an awful gush. And then I read the article and felt the impact jar me in a whole new direction:

CAR DRIVES OVER RAVINE

One Dead, Cause Unknown

I stopped reading. Suicide or accident. People had wondered which. Now I knew it was neither.

Brutus said, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, man.” Then, thinking about it, Tyrese added, “I don’t want to go back.”

Brutus didn’t reply. Tyrese sneaked a glance at his old friend. They had started hanging out together in third grade. Brutus hadn’t been much of a talker back then either. Probably too busy getting his ass whipped twice a day—home and school—until Brutus figured out the only way he was going to survive was to become the meanest son of a bitch on the block. He started taking a gun to school when he was eleven. He killed for the first time when he was fourteen.

“Ain’t you tired of it, Brutus?”

Brutus shrugged. “All we know.”

The truth sat there, heavy, unmoving, unblinking.

Tyrese’s cell phone trilled. He picked it up and said, “Yo.”

“Hello, Tyrese.”

Tyrese didn’t recognize the strange voice. “Who is this?”

“We met yesterday. In a white van.”

His blood turned to ice. Bruce Lee, Tyrese thought. Oh, damn … “What do you want?”

“I have somebody here who wants to say hi.”

There was a brief silence and then TJ said, “Daddy?”

Tyrese whipped off his sunglasses. His body went rigid. “TJ? You okay?”

But Eric Wu was back on the line. “I’m looking for Dr. Beck, Tyrese. TJ and I were hoping you could help me find him.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Oh, that’s a shame.”

“Swear to God, I don’t know.”

“I see,” Wu said. Then: “Hold on a moment, Tyrese, would you? I’d like you to hear something.”

T
he wind blew, the trees danced, the purple-orange of sunset was starting to give way to a polished pewter. It frightened me how much the night air felt exactly the same as it had eight years ago, the last time I’d ventured near these hallowed grounds.

I wondered if Griffin Scope’s people would think to keep an eye on Lake Charmaine. It didn’t matter really. Elizabeth was too clever for that. I mentioned earlier that there used to be a summer camp here before Grandpa purchased the property. Elizabeth’s clue—Dolphin—was the name of a cabin, the one where the oldest kids had slept, the one deepest in the woods, the one we rarely dared to visit.

The rental car climbed what had once been the camp’s service entrance, though it barely existed anymore. From the main road you couldn’t make it out, the high grass hiding it like the entrance to the
Batcave. We still kept a chain across it, just in case, with a sign that read No Trespassing. The chain and sign were both still there, but the years of neglect showed. I stopped the car, unhooked the chain, wrapped it around the tree.

I slid back into the driver’s seat and headed up to the old camp mess hall. Little of it remained. You could still see the rusted, overturned remnants of what had once been ovens and stoves. Some pots and pans littered the ground, but most had been buried over the years. I got out and smelled the sweet of the green. I tried not to think about my father, but in the clearing, when I was able to look down at the lake, at the way the moon’s silver sparkled on the crisp surface, I heard the old ghost again and wondered, this time, if it wasn’t crying out for revenge.

I hiked up the path, though that, too, was pretty much nonexistent. Odd that Elizabeth would pick here to meet. I mentioned before that she never liked to play in the ruins of the old summer camp. Linda and I, on the other hand, would marvel when we stumbled over sleeping bags or freshly emptied tin cans, wondering what sort of drifter had left them behind and if, maybe, the drifter was still nearby. Elizabeth, far smarter than either of us, didn’t care for that game. Strange places and uncertainty scared her.

It took ten minutes to get there. The cabin was in remarkably good shape. The ceiling and walls were all still standing, though the wooden steps leading to the door were little more than splinters. The Dolphin sign was still there, hanging vertically on one nail. Vines and moss and a mélange of vegetation I couldn’t name had not been dissuaded by the structure; they burrowed in, surrounded it, slithered through holes and
windows, consumed the cabin so that it now looked like a natural part of the landscape.

“You’re back,” a voice said, startling me.

A male voice.

I reacted without thought. I jumped to the side, fell on the ground, rolled, pulled out the Glock, and took aim. The man merely put his hands up in the air. I looked at him, keeping the Glock on him. He was not what I expected. His thick beard looked like a robin’s nest after a crow attack. His hair was long and matted. His clothes were tattered camouflage. For a moment, I thought I was back in the city, faced with another homeless panhandler. But the bearings weren’t right. The man stood straight and steady. He looked me dead in the eye.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“It’s been a long time, David.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Not really, no. But I know you.” He gestured with his head toward the bunk behind me. “You and your sister. I used to watch you play up here.”

“I don’t understand.”

He smiled. His teeth, all there, were blindingly white against the beard. “I’m the Boogeyman.”

In the distance, I heard a family of geese squawk as they glided to a landing on the lake’s surface. “What do you want?” I asked.

“Not a damn thing,” he said, still smiling. “Can I put my hands down?”

I nodded. He dropped his hands. I lowered my weapon but kept it at the ready. I thought about what he’d said and asked, “How long have you been hiding up here?”

“On and off for”—he seemed to be doing some kind
of calculation with his fingers—“thirty years.” He grinned at the dumbstruck expression on my face. “Yeah, I’ve watched you since you were this high.” He put his hand at knee level. “Saw you grow up and—” He paused. “Been a long time since you been up here, David.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Jeremiah Renway,” he said.

I couldn’t place the name.

“I’ve been hiding from the law.”

“So why are you showing yourself now?”

He shrugged. “Guess I’m glad to see you.”

“How do you know I won’t tell the authorities on you?”

“I figure you owe me one.”

“How’s that?”

“I saved your life.”

I felt the ground beneath me shift. “What?”

“Who do you think pulled you out of the water?” he asked.

I was dumbstruck.

“Who do you think dragged you into the house? Who do you think called the ambulance?”

My mouth opened, but no words came out.

“And”—his smile spread—“who do you think dug up those bodies so someone would find them?”

It took me a while to find my voice. “Why?” I managed to ask.

“Can’t say for sure,” he said. “See, I did something bad a long time ago. Guess I thought this was a chance at redemption or something.”

“You mean you saw …?”

“Everything,” Renway finished for me. “I saw them grab your missus. I saw them hit you with the bat. I
saw them promise to pull you out if she told them where something was. I saw your missus hand them a key. I saw them laugh and force her into the car while you stayed underwater.”

I swallowed. “Did you see them get shot?”

Renway smiled again. “We’ve chatted long enough, son. She’s waiting for you now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She’s waiting for you,” he repeated, turning away from me. “By the tree.” Without warning, he sprinted into the woods, darting through the brush like a deer. I stood there and watched him vanish in the thicket.

The tree.

I ran then. Branches whipped my face. I didn’t care. My legs begged me to let up. I paid them no heed. My lungs protested. I told them to toughen up. When I finally made the right at the semi-phallic rock and rounded the path’s corner, the tree was still there. I moved closer and felt my eyes start to well up.

Our carved initials—E.P. + D.B.—had darkened with age. So, too, had the thirteen lines we had carved out. I stared for a moment, and then I reached out and tentatively touched the grooves. Not of the initials. Not of the thirteen lines. My fingers traced down the eight fresh lines, still white and still sticky from sap.

Then I heard her say, “I know you think it’s goofy.”

My heart exploded. I turned behind me. And there she was.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I just stared at her face. That beautiful face. And those eyes. I felt as though I were falling, plummeting down a dark shaft. Her face was thinner, her Yankee cheekbones more pronounced, and I don’t think I had ever seen anything so perfect in all my life.