What We Lost in the Dark (2 page)

We owned Iron Harbor, Minnesota.

It was ours.

Really, though, Iron Harbor, and our place in it, in its night landscape, was mostly Juliet’s. Juliet was always at the wheel, no matter who was really driving. Rob and I rode shotgun to her desire.

Her chief desire?

That was to be free—not free of us, her closest friends on earth, but of this place and of her life in it.

Now she was free, forever, of the former and the latter.

Wearing the poncho like a flag, I reached the end of the street. Then I stopped and burst into tears. It was a warm night, sixty-eight degrees at nine o’clock. It’s never this warm, this late in the year, so far north.

Corona had joined me at the corner. He was a tall old guy, thin to the point of gauntness, with a face I now noticed was lined not with the wrinkles of care, but with decades of quiet amusement. His eyes brimmed with a surpassing kindness.
Why had we ever tried to burgle his little place? As we gazed at each other, I saw that he knew that we had tried, and it was already forgiven.

“It’s okay, little dude,” he said.

Corona took the phone out of my hand and scrolled down until he found the favorite labeled
Mom
.

She was there within five minutes, jumping out of the minivan, leaving the driver’s side door hanging open in the middle of the intersection. I might as well have been a toddler, for the way my mother held up my arms and slipped the poncho over my head. Then, she stroked my hair. “Oh, Allie … oh, Allie.”

“I stole this from him,” I confessed. My teeth started to chatter.

Corona just shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t care if she keeps it, even.”

Everyone knew about Juliet. Everyone knew I was crazy.

“I
stole
this!” I repeated, raising my voice.

Corona gave my mother a level look.

Mom sighed. “Allie,” she said. “Honey. Time to go home.”

“Why don’t you call the cops?” I glared at her, and then at Corona. “Call Tommy. Call Mr. Sirocco. No, don’t call him. But call someone.” Juliet’s father, Tommy Sirocco, was the chief of the Iron County Sheriff’s Department, and deeply in mourning for his only child. “Doesn’t anybody around here ever do anything? Doesn’t anyone care when someone does something wrong?”

“You aren’t a bad person. You didn’t do anything wrong, tonight or ever. You couldn’t have helped her, Allie,” Mom said, pulling me close. I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut and struggling against my mother, now really acting like a toddler, literally kicking at her shins with the toes
of my ballet flats.
That’s a lie
, I thought.
I knew, I knew, I knew
.

“Allie, no,” Jackie said, pulling me closer. Both of us were sweating. “It’s not your fault.”

I might as well have spoken aloud. I never had to speak for Jackie Kim to know exactly what I was thinking. Maybe it was because I was chronically ill, with something that would probably kill me sooner rather than later, so she paid ultra-close attention. Maybe Jackie was born with an extraordinarily vigilant nature—no way of knowing if she became an ER nurse because she was that way or if her nature evolved from her profession, like natural selection. Whatever the reason, Jackie is so over-protective of her family that she makes the Secret Service look like stoners. She’s also very optimistic. That could have been a foul combination for a sick kid, a mother who thought I would outlive my genetic destiny, and so didn’t spoil me with all the other things kids like me got, but also insisted on monitoring me like a rare orchid. My interior life was exterior to my mother: my mind seemed to provide her with an onscreen display of my every emotion. If Jackie hadn’t been a strong believer in civil liberties (even mine) I’d have had a miserable youth. Fortunately, holding anyone back from free choice was against Jackie Kim’s nature. Fortunately or unfortunately. If I hadn’t been so much my mother’s daughter, I’d have been wilder than the winds that blew off Superior.

Jackie handed the poncho to Corona.

I let her guide me to the front seat, pulling the belt across me. She turned the AC on to Arctic blast. I glanced in the rear-view mirror. My nine-year-old sister, Angela, was curled in the backseat, bony arms wrapped around her knees, thick black hair a fringe hiding her face, trying hard not to look at me.

I opened my mouth wide and screamed as loudly as I could.

Angela flinched. “Allie?” she croaked. “Are you … sick?”

I couldn’t answer. I was breathless, my throat an open wound.

My mother concentrated, backing the car out into Harbor Street.

“Allie, we all loved her,” she said.

“But nobody knows the truth! Nobody who’s alive, anyway. I should do community service. Not for what that freak said I did. For being a goddamn fool.”

“Don’t talk about it like that. It’s just a job,” said my mother. “Think of it as an opportunity. You would have wanted a job like this anyhow.”

I glanced at Angie from the edge of my eye.

Angie’s face glowed pale, stretched tight. This was not the capable, strong big sister she knew. She expected grief but she didn’t expect this moaning, fragile thing that her Allie had become.

We left poor Corona standing there on the corner, holding his green poncho. He waved slightly.

“Remember, Allie, when we talked about this?” my mother said. “You start school in January at John Jay. This counts for credit. This is a mini semester. Like winter break, as far as the world is concerned. I explained to Angie how this would help you at college.” I was about to start college at John Jay, the first college in the world to grant a major in criminal justice, but had already earned AP credits. John Jay had never before offered an online degree: I was part of the first class. I already had a confiding relationship with my academic advisor, Dr. Barry Yashida, a former FBI agent. I was willing to bet that I was the first incoming freshman who also asked her advisor to find someone who could connect her
with someone who could provide forensic voiceprints. But Dr. Yashida believed me. I might seem like a crazy to the Iron County cops, but I had good reasons for someone outside this strange protectorate to believe me.

I tried to think of all the good now that would come from my soon-to-begin future.

I tried to think of having a future. All I could think of was Juliet, and how she had lain, exposed and broken, in the very building where I would be working. I knew from reading that the pursuit of criminals is always personal.

It shouldn’t be that personal.

Mom said, “We went over this. The hands-on work will be invaluable. It’s a good résumé item.” One hand still on my arm, my mother piloted the car around the corner to our street. “The days will go past so quickly. This time will always be a terrible memory. But it’s almost over now. Allie? Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” I said.

“Okay, then,” said my mother.

“What if he’s there?”

“You know he’s not there! No one in that family is there. Every one of them except Dr. Andrew’s son Tim is in Bolivia. You
know
that, Allie. You saw that on the news. You saw them leaving.” My mother stopped the car in our driveway. “You got a letter from the night supervisor about your volunteer service …”

I snorted. In my mind, Garrett Tabor could be anywhere he wanted to be. My fear had assumed the proportions of reverence, invested him with the superpowers.

“Well, you did. You saw them leave. On that note, Dr. Stephen said he regretted that he wouldn’t be around to help you, and that he hoped you had a good experience.”

This was also true. Even though the general belief was that I’d tried to boil his boy alive, Dr. Stephen Tabor seemed genuinely concerned for me—and even enthused.

“Do you believe that?” my mother said.

“I believe you.”

At least one of us should relax. I didn’t believe her, at all.

“I believe you,” Angie said. Then, I had to smile.

“No one will punish you anymore. It’s over,” Mom added.

On both counts, she was wrong.

A week later, when I showed up for my community service, the first person I saw was Garrett Tabor, the man who murdered Juliet, and who knows how many other girls, and who also would murder me.

The night I arrived at the lab, I pulled into the parking lot, then nearly jerked the wheel of the car around and went home.

There was the little red Italian sports car—the car that had twice almost run me down, the car that Garrett Tabor drove.

But that was silly.

What had Mom said? None of the Tabors was around. I breathed out, as a therapist taught me after my best friend’s strange death. “Breathe out, breathe out,” she said. “The body would always breathe in on its own.” I listened for my heartbeat to obey, following the meter of my breathing down and down.

It wasn’t Garrett Tabor. The car belonged to his pathologist father, Dr. Stephen.

Why it was parked here, instead of in Steve’s garage? I had no idea. He could park his car anywhere he wanted.

I stood up straighter and pressed the button on the
steel door. A buzz prompted me to enter the one-story concrete-block building that housed the Iron County Medical Examiner’s Office. When I got inside, though, there was no one in the short hall that separated the lab and morgue from the offices.

“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”

The interim night supervisor would be a medical doctor, or a nurse practitioner like my mother. There would also be an evidence technician to train me.

From behind me, I heard a sudden clicking and slithering, like a snake wearing cleats.

“Good evening, Allie,” said Garrett Tabor. “How are you?”

I whirled like a child’s top. A whimper escaped my throat. I saw the pleasure rippling across his face. Not in Bolivia, he stood two feet from me.
Blondie
. It was the streak of platinum that ran down the wavy dark pelt of his hair. The first time I saw that streak, Tabor was hunched over a half-naked girl in an empty apartment.

Garrett Tabor: trusted ski coach, privileged son, genetic researcher, and serial killer.

Does that surprise you?

Does it surprise you that a serial killer was walking around?

The great majority of them are walking around. The great majority look like everyone else. My criminology books call them “unsubs,” meaning that they’re unknown. Some even look a little better than most—unless you catch the unguarded flat gaze of the predator, sympathetic as a grizzly. They present a front that’s civil, even charming. That’s how they get people.

I put my hand behind me on the door handle. It didn’t budge.

Tabor shrugged. “It’s a government office. It has to be locked at night. There’s a code you punch in on that pad.”

A code.

“That’s illegal,” I said. “What if there was a fire?”

Or a murder?

“Of course there are emergency exits.”

I wouldn’t be able to find them. The over-breathing rose like floodwater. You can have one panic attack or you can have fifty; and they all feel like you’re dying. I rummaged in my front pack for my keys, tethered to my phone case.

“Let me out,” I said finally, gasping.

“You can leave whenever you want,” Garrett Tabor said.

“Where’s the supervisor?”

Garrett Tabor shrugged again. “Nobody’s here but us.”

Shit. Shit. Shit
. A panic attack … incoming, incoming. I punched in button two, the one that led to my boyfriend, Rob Dorn. Answer, I prayed. Answer.

“I’m organizing my data from Bolivia,” he said. “I came back early.”

“I’ll call the police.”

I could hear Rob, distantly saying, “Allie? Hello? Allie?” I pressed the speaker. “I’m right here,” I said. “I’m in the lab with Garrett Tabor. So you know.” To Tabor, I said again, “I’m going to call the police.”

“To say what?” Tabor said. As always, he was right. “I just want a chance to tell you I feel badly about this, Allie.”

“Badly?”

“This is all so sad. First Juliet. Then this thing with you. So much hurt could have been avoided. I realize how impaired your judgment was. I’ll give you that much.” He smiled, a dog’s grin, avid and yet patient. “I’m trying to move past this.”

“Move past it …? You’re crazy,” I said. “Let me out.” I almost added
please
. I was sweating and lunging like a runner who’d left everything on the track. Tabor looked as at ease in this house of the dead as he would have looked in his own bedroom. Of course he did. Just as Dr. Stephen ran this office, and Dr. Andrew Tabor ran the Tabor Clinic, they owned the condominiums, the ski and dive rentals, the motor lodges, and two of the restaurants. Iron Harbor was the name of this place only by virtue of geography. It should be called Tabor-ville.

I stared now at the scion of that great family of healers.

That I was even here was because Garrett Tabor’s lies were better than my truth. After Juliet’s death, he said I had scaled the balconies to his apartment—a place, of course, called the Tabor Oaks Condominiums. He said I’d broken in wearing a ski mask and poured boiling water on him as he lay innocently in bed.

How could adults believe pure shit? I … poured boiling water on him? I found the stove in a place I’d never been, and put a teakettle on, with Tabor one wall away? If I’d gone to the trouble to catch him vulnerable, why didn’t I just bring a big hammer and hit him with it? Still, Tabor had the surveillance tapes of Rob and Juliet and I climbing the outside walls that long-ago night. He had second-degree burns rippling along his neck and a ski mask I’d once owned.

WHAT WAS TRUE was that I was a gifted climber.

Rob and Juliet and I had practiced the urban discipline called Parkour, and there was almost no place that we could not boulder up or leap down from. We had indeed traced the Tabor Oaks, and had seen Tabor there. Those tapes had no time stamp. We were high with the triumph when I saw
him with that still, colorless, half-naked young woman whose name no one would probably ever know, helpless, her clothing and her dignity torn away, by those same immaculate hands.

I called the police back then.