What We Lost in the Dark (15 page)

For I would derive Garrett Tabor, just as he had me.

I would find his weakness.

I would find him and bring those poor girls home.

ON MY TABLE at the medical examiner’s office, I found a letter from Dr. Stephen Tabor, thanking me for all my help, praising me for my thorough work and my interest in forensic science. Behind the letter was a card. Inside the card was a new hundred-dollar bill, from “Dr. Steve.”

I had been thorough, and I was meticulous, although the paper-pushing work he’d given me could have been performed by a smart chimp with a few lessons. Why was Dr. Steve being so nice to me? After all, the reason I’d fetched up at the medical examiner’s office in the first place was supposedly because I’d broken into his son’s house and attacked him.

As Garrett Tabor’s father, I would have expected Dr. Stephen to hate me.

Unless. Maybe he thought there was something off about Garrett Tabor’s story. Stephen Tabor had two other sons and a daughter besides Garrett. His daughter was someone I knew slightly, a nurse practitioner, involved in XP research. Dr. Stephen was a widower, and, according to my mother, if he dated, nobody knew about it. It wasn’t in Iron Harbor, although Dr. Stephen traveled, quite a lot. Around here, he was a lone wolf. Or was he?

I decided to find out more about the boss I never saw. Although I’d known the Tabors as the face of the Tabor Clinics all my life, I didn’t really know them at all. I was a kid, and how much did you really know about people who looked after your health but were not your friends or family?

Later that night, I asked my mother how Dr. Stephen’s wife had died.

“It was way before my time here,” my mother said. We were taking down the tree, packing each of the ornaments away in a tall box of drawers, each nested with cardboard cups. “But I know it was a car wreck. I know that it was terrible.”

AT WORK, I began looking for old obituaries on newspaper databases.

There was a front-page item in the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
, dated more than twenty years earlier. The headline read
TABOR CLINIC FOUNDER FAMILY DEAD IN CHRISTMAS CRASH
.

Inside, I turned to the obituary for the child who would have been Garrett Tabor’s youngest sister.

Rachel Whitcomb Green Tabor, born December 24, died exactly three years later, on December 24. She was the daughter and third-born child of Merry Whitcomb Green and Stephen Tabor. The other children were Garrett, Gavin, and Rebecca.

Merry Whitcomb Green (the name made me sad) also died in the accident—in which an eighteen-wheeler hit black ice and crushed the passenger side of the family’s station wagon. She would have celebrated her thirtieth birthday the next day. She was born on Christmas.

The mother’s and the little girl’s birthdays were just one day apart. Both at Christmastime.

No wonder the poor man didn’t date.

Briefly, I scanned newspaper articles about a subsequent lawsuit against the company that owned the truck, a drunk driver, and a colossal settlement. Unwillingly, I felt awful for Dr. Stephen’s family.

The youngest of the children, Gavin Tabor, was physically disabled. He was a baby, not even one year old. The accounts of the trial reported that he would need years of physical rehabilitation. He would be twenty-something now, and … that was where I was forced to give up the thread.

Bonnie called me and asked if I’d finished my filing.

“I was daydreaming,” I told Bonnie.

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with daydreaming. But I have a job for you. A real job. I just want you to do it. It will be a challenge for you.”

I almost laughed. “What if I mess it up?”

“I don’t know anything about the forensic side of it, but I do know that he has more of the materials that you’d be working on. Dr. Steve did say to tell you that your work would be part of the permanent file, however.”

Again, random niceness. What gives? I thought.

What Dr. Stephen had left was an actual piece of evidence from a “situation,” with instructions on how to examine it for possible use. There was no further information. Nothing that told me where the evidence had come from or what kind of death scene, or crime scene, was involved.

Dr. Stephen wrote that I should use ordinary care in following the steps and go as far as I could without the need for another tier of chemical analysis. He left me a paper cloth lab cap to prevent my hair from contaminating the evidence, and several pairs of disposable gloves, pointing out in his note that most people cut theirs up accidentally, because they were
trying so hard not to. I was to use the instruments I thought would be most useful.

The evidence was a torn piece of blue fabric.

With surgical scissors, I cut off a small square and, from comparing it with other samples, determined that it was the kind of denim used in less expensive blue jeans. It was bloodstained and dirty, as though it had been pulled from the ground. Using tweezers, I placed the cloth on a light table. For an hour, I picked off particles.

I found three different kinds of plant matter—broken needles I identified as coming from a black pine, tufts of fescue, both green and brownish, and some kind of ground cover. I also found sand, soil, and two kinds of hair, one coarse and dark reddish-brown, one shorter and very pale.

Laying the cloth on a light box, I immediately saw a series of small rips, irregular, but each similar to the one next to it.

I photographed everything with one of the lab’s Polaroids.

Then, my hands sweating, I scraped a bit of the dark matter staining the cloth into a glass dish and added a bit of Luminol.

It wasn’t blood.

Leaning close, I followed human instinct and sniffed. The smell was familiar, and recently familiar.

What could have the consistency of blood and smell so sweet?

It was syrup! It was some kind of syrup, from something like the blueberry ice cream that Angela and I had made a few weeks back.

But, could I assume it was all blueberry syrup? Hesitantly, I scraped another particle from the other side of the ripped cloth. This immediately reacted. Blood. I didn’t know if it was human blood, but it was blood.

The small light pieces of hair appeared to be human.

The thick brownish tufts were not. They were hair from an animal.

I glanced up at the clock and saw that it was after 2
A.M
. My shoulder was barking with pain. But this was too interesting to quit, even though my shift was over. I gulped down Advil. After I’d catalogued my findings and separately bagged and labeled them, I filled out the sheets Dr. Stephen had left. Then I wrote him a note, thanking him for the gift and his complimentary words, which I left in his inbox with the forms from John Jay that would give me my internship credit. I also filled out my time card.

Bonnie and I got ready to leave.

“So are you going to tell me?”

“Sure,” she said. “What did you figure out?”

I explained my findings, and as our cars warmed up, Bonnie and I shared a cup of tea in the little break room. She told me what I had been studying.

“That was a case of a little child mauled by a bear,” she said. “It was up near the Boundary Waters, just last week, a family having Christmas at their year-round vacation cabin.”

“Was the child killed?” I asked. I didn’t understand why people were stupid enough to take really little kids, who would think grizzly bears were cute and cuddly, up into the wilderness. The Boundary Waters is fifteen hundred square miles of pristine lakes and camping areas, part of it in Canada and part of it in Minnesota. The cabin must have been just outside the park area because no one lived there year-round, or at all, except the rangers.

Bonnie shook her head. “No, but the child’s grandfather died.”

She went on to say that the decision was made not to
find and kill the bear, because, well, the bear wasn’t hunting. It didn’t eat the person’s body. The man had left scraps of a pancake breakfast out to lure the animal so the child could see it. They had a big truck, but it wouldn’t start. The grandmother was afraid to move her husband, because he was so badly hurt, so she drove the child to the hospital in a little VW Beetle they kept up there. “By the time the ambulance got there, he had bled out,” Bonnie said. “People make animals look like geniuses.”

It was then that I learned about Bonnie’s husband, who died young from complications of flu. He had been a newspaper reporter, a fly fisherman who had loved the Boundary Waters. The chance to go camping up there with her sons, to help them remember their dad, which she would do again at spring break, had been part of the reason she’d moved up here. She smiled and gave me a hug as we parted.

“The other reason was you,” she said.

“You didn’t even know I existed,” I said. She was such a good person.

“I knew I’d meet you,” she said.

Breathless, I asked about Dr. Stephen’s family tragedy.

“I don’t know everything, but I know he never got over it. He has some photos in there. He and his wife apparently competed as dancers, like jive dancers. Can you imagine that? I don’t think he ever got over her, or the little girl.” Bonnie paused. “I read that obituary, too, when I came here. And it was weird.”

“How?”

“I looked up the inquest, I’m afraid. I was curious.”

“Why?” I pushed Bonnie for more. She was reluctant, I could tell.

“Well, the little girl didn’t die in the crash. I guess Stephen
could tell his wife was dead, and he went in the ambulance with his baby. I gather she was bleeding from a head wound. It was no more than five minutes. The little girl was restrained in her car seat on the driver’s side and she was crying, and apparently, Stephen testified that he gave her a superficial once-over and she seemed unharmed. He could hear the other ambulance and the fire trucks coming, so he left her there with Garrett, who would have been, what? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

My very blood slowed down. “What happened?”

“She stopped breathing. A kid that little, in the cold? They should have been able to save her. It was a long time ago, but still …”

“How do they know she just stopped breathing?”

“That was what Garrett Tabor told them,” Bonnie said.

That little girl was his sister.

For a week after Juliet disappeared—and again, after her body was found in the river—I had sessions on the phone with a counselor, a psychologist. The next morning, I woke up from what psychologist described as an ordinary anxiety dream: someone I couldn’t see was chasing me, and my legs were so tired that I couldn’t go on. I kept glancing back over my shoulder and begging my feet to move, as the fog behind me resolved itself into a solid shape, a human form. I couldn’t take another step. Lightning stabbed the ground around me: lightning with form, a man’s shape.

How is this ordinary?

My right shoulder blade felt three times the size of my left. I could barely raise my arm to the level of my chest. If I hadn’t had the good sense (and the good mantras-for-life from Jackie) I’d probably have it in a sling by now.

I wanted to call the police.

Garrett Tabor had hurt me, and he’d hurt me badly. Whenever I thought of just going ahead and calling, of explaining
everything, I thought of those photos of my family blooming on my phone, one after another.

What could I tell the police about what Tabor had done to me, without risking some kind of retribution from him? How could I prove he’d smacked my shoulder black and blue with an oar? I already knew the answers. I wouldn’t be able to prove it. My mother would find out I’d been diving, alone, and that I put myself at his mercy. Down would come the hammer. It was suspended over me by the slenderest of threads since the consequences of our first (and last) free dive.

I sat up and decided, no matter what, I would call.

Then I remembered that my phone was still in that boat, and, as such, was probably now a cube of frozen circuits. Of course, Jackie was a nurse manager for a hospital emergency room. We had a landline. We had two.

I stared at the house phone, and imagined telling Tommy Sirocco, Juliet’s dad, about Garrett Tabor chasing me in his boat … injuring me with an oar. I pictured telling him that this happened after I dived to discover he moved skeletonized bodies he’d chained to ruins of a boathouse in a cliff thirty feet under the surface of the lake.

Bodies that were no longer there.

Bodies I couldn’t prove had ever been there.

Tommy was protective of me. Tommy would believe me.

But if I were a detective assigned to this case, I would wonder why there was so much bun and no burger. I had bruises, but I’d been climbing on icy rocks. The Odyssey was out there … I still had to figure out how to recover Wesley’s Odyssey—which didn’t even
belong
to him but to the dive shop where he worked—and which had probably drifted to Michigan by now. Put this all together and it spelled nothing.

Peeking out of my door to make sure the shades in the
living room and kitchen were all pulled tight, I nipped into the bathroom.

When I came out, I noticed my mom. My mother was awake, sitting at the kitchen table, gazing into space. Strange. She would have been home for a long time, since midnight. “Did you pull a double?” I asked. She was about to earn her PhD, and it had been years since she worked a double shift. She only switched to PMs, from three to eleven, after Juliet died, to be with me more often. Although it could get her spinning biorhythmically, the change had worked in Jackie’s favor: she worked two weeks straight, including weekends at the ER, and then had ten full days off. And as it turned out, she loved it. But I had no idea what she was doing at the kitchen table at nine in the morning. If I hadn’t awakened unexpectedly, I would never have seen her. So when I came out, I sat down with her. She didn’t seem to see me.

“Did you hear me, Mom?”

Jackie looked at me then, but not as though she really saw me.

“What are you doing up?” she said.

“Well, I had a nightmare. But I could ask you the same.”