The Deepest Secret (14 page)

Eve raps on the doorframe and opens the door. The foyer is warm with early morning sun, the wood golden, dust motes dancing in the air. “Hello?” she calls out, and Charlotte’s mother, Gloria, appears around the corner.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Gloria says, hugging her. “That detective’s on her way over. She might have some news.”

Gloria sounds strangely hopeful. “What kind of news?”

“They’ve gotten a call of suspicious activity in Metro-Dade Park.”

Metro-Dade is miles away, north of Columbus. Why would Amy be there? “What does that mean?” Eve asks, following Gloria down the hall to the kitchen.

“Well, I don’t know. It could be anything, I suppose. A homeless guy sleeping it off, teenagers building a bonfire.”

Charlotte looks up from where she sits at the kitchen table, writing on a pad of paper. “Or Amy. They could have found Amy.” Her hair is damp, combed back from her face, her lips chapped. Shadows
circle her eyes and Eve realizes this is the very first time she’s ever seen her friend without a touch of makeup. It makes Charlotte look vulnerable, and old.

Eve feels old, too. She feels slow-moving and numb.

Robbie’s beside Charlotte, leaning back in his chair. He’s in jeans and a wrinkled gray T-shirt, a red OSU ball cap slanted on his head. She’s never seen him without one, a holdover from when he used to play semi-pro ball. A yellow SpongeBob Band-Aid is wrapped around his thumb. Eve guesses he had opened Charlotte’s medicine cabinet and helped himself—this is how comfortably he’s shoe-horned himself into Charlotte’s life. He straightens and gives her a sober nod. “Hey.”

It’s so easy being with him
, Charlotte had confessed when she told Eve she was falling for him.
What you see is what you get
. But was that ever true of anyone?

Charlotte’s sister, Felicia, is at the kitchen sink. She comes over to hug Eve. She and Charlotte look alike, the same narrow faces and wide-set eyes, but Felicia’s the cooler-headed sister, the one who thinks first, who doesn’t give her heart so carelessly away. “Did the reporters give you any trouble?”

Eve shakes her head. “There’s no one out there.”

“They’ll be back,” Felicia predicts grimly. She pours a glass of orange juice and sets it before Charlotte. “Drink.”

Eve glances at the paper Charlotte has been writing on.
The guy at the bank who gives out lollipops. Hank. The purple-haired woman at Starbucks. Daisy???

“Remember when Detective Watkins told us that most abductions are by people the child knows?” Charlotte says. “I looked it up, Eve. It’s worse than most. It’s
ninety-nine
percent. So I figure that if I make a list of every single person that Amy knows, the person who took her has to be on it. Right? I mean, what do we really know about those people who have the haunted house every Halloween?
Or that crossing guard who knows every single kid’s name? Is that normal?”

Eve would be on that list. She would be at the very top.

“The police want Charlotte to take a lie detector test,” Felicia says.

“What?” They can’t suspect Charlotte.

“They say it’s standard procedure,” Felicia answers.

“They aren’t asking Owen to take one,” Robbie says.

“You should do it, honey,” Gloria says. “Prove that you have nothing to do with this.”

“What if she gets a false positive?” Robbie says.

“She won’t,” Felicia says. “Eve, could you help me bring in my suitcase?”

Eve follows Felicia out to the garage. As soon as the door shuts behind them, Felicia whirls around. Her eyes are narrowed. “Robbie says he was at work, but the bartenders can’t swear he was there the whole time,” Felicia says. “So where was he?”

“His place is a zoo on Fridays.” Charlotte’s told her this.
Do you know how much money Robbie makes in a single night?
“They were probably too busy to notice.”

“She tell you he wants to move in together? Did she tell you he hacked into her email account, stole her Facebook password?”

Charlotte had been so excited getting ready for her first date with Robbie. She’d bought her first thong, a lacy lavender wisp that she’d pulled with a flourish out of the shiny pink bag.
I’m already dealing with stretch marks. I can’t throw panty lines at him, too
.

“He’s completely snowed her. He wants to open a joint account, the works. He got here last night and hasn’t left, not for one minute. He’s not worried about Amy. He’s watching Charlotte like a hawk. Why? What’s he afraid she’s going to do—or say?”

The back door opens. “The police are here,” Gloria says, and for a moment Eve’s frozen in place. But the police aren’t here for her. So
she follows Felicia and Gloria back into the house, where Detective Watkins is standing with Charlotte. The detective looks at Eve, unsmiling, her brown eyes flat.

“Was it Amy?” Felicia’s voice wobbles, and Charlotte shakes her head. “It was another little girl on a school field trip.” She speaks in a monotone. Robbie pulls her toward him, and Charlotte rests her head on his shoulder. It’s disconcerting. Owen should be here. Charlotte and Owen, together.

“We’re fielding dozens of false alarms,” Detective Watkins tells them. “I told your husband that’s what would happen if he offered a reward.”

“I don’t care,” Charlotte says. “Whatever it takes. I’m with Owen on this.”

“What do we do now?” Gloria asks.

“Now we go over that last day again, minute by minute,” Detective Watkins says. “There’s got to be something we overlooked, or someone who’s not telling us everything they know.”

Minute by minute. It doesn’t take even that long, Eve knows, for someone’s life to change forever.

DAVID

T
he way he remembers it, Eve had always just sort of been there, part of the larger group he hung out with at college. The six or sometimes seven of them would head downtown and eat Chinese, or at least what passed for Chinese in small-town northern Ohio. They’d bike to the reservoir and stretch out on the grass, fall asleep with the sun full on their faces; spread their books across the library tables and take turns fetching cups of coffee; stay up late and debate things that seemed essential at the time: Did altruism exist? Were people born evil or did circumstance make them that way?

Occasionally, he and Eve would find themselves alone together. They’d start out in a group, but then people would separate and she’d be walking beside him, her elbow bumping his. Or the group would make plans and some would show up late or leave early, and it would be just the two of them at the table. He’s not sure when
things changed, when he began to look forward to seeing her, when his heart beat a little faster when he did. This has always frustrated Eve, who could recite every detail of their first meeting—what she was wearing, what he was wearing, who else was there, what he said, what she said—but it was all just a blank for him. Eve couldn’t understand.
How can you forget the first time you met your wife?
she’d demand, and David would reply,
I would’ve paid more attention if I’d known we were going to get married
.

David knocks on Tyler’s bedroom door. “Hey, buddy,” he calls. “You up?”

“Uh huh,” comes Tyler’s muffled reply.

“I’m headed out to join the search teams. Your mom’s at Charlotte’s. She’ll probably be there all afternoon. Your sister’s still asleep.”

“…  ’kay.”

“The reporters are back, so don’t worry if you hear a commotion outside.” Tyler can’t look out a window to see. David had hated boarding up his son’s bedroom windows. It had felt like a punishment, denying his son the simple joy of watching the world. The only alternative would have been to fix up the basement, and Tyler would still have been without windows. “Need anything before I leave?”

“Could you pick me up some photo paper?”

“No problem.” As a boy, David had accompanied his father everywhere—to the post office, hardware store, barber, bank.
Shake a person’s hand
, his father had instructed.
Look them straight in the eye
. All the small ways his father had shaped and guided him. But David has never had these moments with Tyler. How will his son learn to be a man? Not that that was likely, anyway.

Today’s search group includes a number of college students. They call to one another as they straggle along the grassy verge lining the highway. Deeper in the woods are other teams, armed with sticks to
push things aside, cell phones, water bottles. The community’s rallying around. Surely with all this help someone will turn up some small clue that will lead to Amy.

There’s a flurry of excitement when word filters through that Amy’s been found in Metro-Dade Park. David finds himself grinning at the man working beside him, a stranger. But on the heels of that good news rushes the bad: it wasn’t Amy, but another child who’d strayed away from her mother. Amy’s still gone.

It’s mid-afternoon before he climbs back into the car. He’s tired, and yesterday’s sunburn prickles. He starts up the car and pulls out of the parking lot. The streets look normal, just as they always do on sunny weekend afternoons: sprinklers lazily rotating, the air filled with the buzz of lawn mowers and the distant sounds of children playing in the park. It’s a disjointed feeling, seeing how normal everything can appear. He pulls off the road and into the small parking lot outside Owen’s hardware store.

Paper garlands of American flags droop overhead; the sale tags are bold red stars. Old yellowed linoleum, long rows of shelving. The smell of metal is heavy in the air. There are maybe a couple dozen shoppers, more than David’s ever seen before in the place at one time. It’s the drama of fear, of the terrible unknown, luring them in.

“Howdy,” the man in the front of the store says. His name tag hangs from his smock.
Bud
. “You looking for a grill? We got a great deal going.”

“No, but maybe you can help me. My yard’s covered with holes.” David had noticed them that morning—small depressions dug into the grass too irregularly placed to be from tent poles or soccer cleats. An infestation of some sort.

“Shallow, big as a half-dollar?”

“Exactly.”

The man nods. “You got grubs. Those holes are where the skunk’s digging them up.”

“So we have skunks, too?”

“They’ll be gone the first hard frost. What you want is grub bait. Aisle five.”

There’s someone stocking the shelves in aisle five, a lanky kid in a polyester smock who moves aside to let him pass, and David realizes he knows this particular boy. He’s Charlotte and Owen’s son, Amy’s older brother. “Scott?”

Scott looks up, and recognition dawns. “Oh, hey.”

Scott had been the kind of teenager who got into stuff, who skated on the edge. He ran around with a pack of boys armed with air guns, covering the neighborhood with tiny plastic pellets and scaring the crap out of Rosemary when one of them shot her wind chimes into a frenzy. Then it had been potato guns, which packed a hell of a wallop, and then it had been Melissa discovering him smoking weed at the playground. “How are you doing?” David asks.

Scott shrugs. He stares down at the box in his hand. “Do people even use moth balls?”

“Probably not many.”

“I didn’t think so. I don’t know why we have half this stuff in here, anyway.” Scott drops the package into the carton at his feet. “I don’t even know why we’re open today, but Dad says people are counting on us.” He looks around. “What people?”

True, the customers don’t look like they’re buying anything. They’re standing around in small groups, eyeing one another and whispering.

“They bothering you?” David asks, and Scott shrugs.

“They don’t know who I am. They’re not regulars. They’re just creepers. There was a reporter here earlier, but Bud wouldn’t let him in.”

“It’s good to have some media attention.”

“I guess. My mom posted Amy’s picture on some websites. The foundation people told her it was a good idea, but I think it’s stupid. I mean, who looks at those things?”

Did putting faces on milk cartons work, or printing them on
those cheap, flimsy postcards that occasionally came in the mail? Every one of those represented someone’s heartbreak, someone’s terrible desperation, but David can’t recall ever once actually focusing on the childish features looking out at him. Eve would have. She would have looked long and hard and committed those faces to memory.

“You never know,” David says. “It can’t hurt, right? Anything to get the word out. Someone will have seen something.”

“Then how come they haven’t reported it?”

“The police are getting lots of calls.”

“You always hear when kids go missing. But you never hear about them coming home.”

Two women are looking over at them curiously. David meets their gaze, and they move on.

“Why Amy?” Scott says. “She’s just a little kid.”

David knows about terrible odds, about random bolts of lightning that skewer a person in place. “Sometimes things happen for no reason.”

“Sure.” Scott’s twenty, barely a man himself. Amy’s only eleven. It feels like a particularly vulnerable age, old enough to comprehend but too young to withstand.

“It’s going to be all right.” David reaches out to pat Scott on the shoulder, but the boy lurches away. Too late, he remembers Scott doesn’t like to be touched. It’s one of his many phobias. Eve had tried to persuade Charlotte to get her son some help, but Charlotte hadn’t wanted to force Scott to do anything.

“So, you looking for something?”

“Apparently we have grubs.” David can’t believe he’s dealing with holes in his yard when a child is missing. But things still needed to be taken care of. Bills had to be paid, home repairs made. The whole world couldn’t just roll to a stop. “I need something organic.”

“I don’t know if this is organic, but it’s what people are using.” Scott pulls down a box. As he hands it over, his sleeve rides up, exposing
a line of oozing red bumps along the boy’s forearm. “Whoa,” David says. “That looks painful.”

Scott yanks down his sleeve. “Poison ivy. It’s everywhere.”

David turns onto his street and brakes at the unexpected sight of dozens of vehicles choking the narrow cul-de-sac. Reporters’ vans, call letters emblazoned on their sides and antennas protruding from their roofs. The reporters themselves stand in the street, turning in a wave as he edges his own car past. Their shouts punch through the glass.