Death Falls (29 page)

“What do you think?”

Unlike his companion, Bill Mason seemed immune to the sadness of the situation. Still, it was there. Nick saw it in his deep-set eyes, in the way he lifted his shoulders in a listless shrug.

“I thought what the police thought,” he said. “They made a huge fuss when both boys disappeared. Search parties and spotlights and bloodhounds running around everywhere. We gave them one of Bucky’s shirts to sniff. Marcy and her husband used a pair of sneakers. Both times, the dogs took off and followed the scent to the same place.”

Nick knew what that place was. “A sinkhole.”

“That’s right.” Bill said. “So I think they fell in. Marcy, she’s not so sure.”

“What does she think happened to them?”

“That they were taken. It’s why we’re still here.”

He told Nick that almost everyone in Centralia had moved out by the mid-eighties. Those few who stayed behind watched their neighbors’ empty homes get demolished. When Marcy’s house was condemned, she moved into the other half of Bill’s duplex. When that half was condemned and torn down, she moved in with him, which explained why Vinnie Russo hadn’t been able to locate her. Nothing remained in her name.

“Why isn’t this half condemned?” Nick asked.

“The state tried to kick us out. The first time, we told them we weren’t going. The second time, I made it clear we weren’t going.” Bill pointed to a Winchester rifle hanging above the fireplace mantel. “After that, they left us alone.”

Nick admired their tenacity, even if he couldn’t understand it. “Why do you want to stay so bad?”

“What if Marcy is right and the boys were taken? And what if one of them ever tried to come home? If we left Centralia, they wouldn’t know where to find us. So we stay. Marcy wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Do you know why she thinks the boys were taken?”

“Only that she says Frankie was too smart to fall into a sinkhole,” Bill said. “Bucky was, too. But I’d bet on an accident over a kidnapping any day. Accidents happen all the time. Kidnappings don’t.”

But they do happen, in places far nicer than Centralia. Perry Hollow, for example. And Fairmount and state parks and camps for disadvantaged youth.

“This was a good town,” Bill went on, “filled with good people. Neighbors looked out for one another. There’s no way someone could come in here and start taking kids.”

“Well,” Nick said, “there’s a chance it could have been someone who was already here.”

“One of the neighbors? Never.”

“How do you know?” Nick countered. “Who lived in the other half of this duplex?”

“A bunch of people. I rented it out. Most just leased it for a year or so. Newlyweds. Single dads. Young couples. People like that.”

In other words, the same type of people who could have been living in a row house on a side street in Fairmount. Nick opened up his mental file and retrieved Kat’s initial reaction about the hometowns of the missing boy. She had thought the perp lived both in Fairmount and Centralia, the areas in which there were two consecutive victims. He was inclined to agree. Next, he dug deeper into the mental file, pulling out the years of each case. The Fairmount boys—Dennis Kepner and Noah Pierce—went missing in 1969 and 1971. Frankie and Bucky both vanished in 1972. It was completely within the realm of possibility that whoever did this moved from Fairmount to Centralia during the time in between.

“Where did Marcy and her husband live?”

“Two houses down,” Bill answered. “On the same side of the street.”

“Was that also a duplex?”

“No, sir. This was the only one on the block.”

Nick normally didn’t jump to conclusions, but listening to Bill Mason practically made him leap at one.

“Do you remember who was living on the other side of you when Bucky vanished?”

“Vaguely,” Bill said. “I remember he was real supportive. Took part in the search party. Helped make up flyers. Was real nice to both me and my wife.”

“And was he the same tenant months earlier, when Frankie disappeared?”

Bill Mason, God love him, didn’t even take a moment to think about it. “Yes. Yes, he was.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“I think it was Brewster,” Bill said. “Craig Brewster.”

Holding his coffee mug with both hands, Eric’s father took a sip and swished the liquid around before swallowing. Next, he stuffed a doughnut into his mouth, the crumbs sticking to the gray stubble that he called a beard. Once the doughnut was gulped down, it was back to the coffee and the swishing and the swallowing.

“Dad.” Eric grabbed the plate of doughnuts before his dad could reach for another one. “Quit stalling.”

“I’m not stalling. I’m hungry.”

In truth, Ken Olmstead looked frighteningly thin with his jeans and Henley shirt hanging off his frame like the clothes of a scarecrow. When he tried in vain to snatch another doughnut, the wrist that poked out of his sleeve was broomstick-thin.

His dad’s appearance worried Eric. So did his silence when Eric asked how things were going with Lorraine, his girlfriend. Then there was his smell—a nostril-stinging odor that didn’t go away even after he had showered. If Eric had to guess, he’d say his father was homeless and living out of his rig.

Such a guilt-inducing prospect made Eric push the doughnuts back across the dining-room table. His father grabbed two of them, and Eric waited for him to inhale both before asking, “Last night you told me not to try to find Charlie. Why?”

“Because it’s a waste of your time.”

“Mom didn’t think so.”

Ken’s face took on a pinched look, as if a bolt of pain had just flashed through his body. It might have been the usual hangover headache, but Eric suspected it was something else. Like an unwanted memory.

“Your mother wasn’t well,” he said. “She was a strong woman who endured a lot, but deep down she was sick.”

That was the same word Becky Santangelo had used, too. After crazy, of course. Eric assumed
sick
and
crazy
actually meant the same thing and that his neighbor had merely softened her tone the second go-round.

“What was wrong with her?”

“Maggie was a good woman. Smart. Feisty. Pretty as a spring morning. But she wasn’t well. Not after you were born. The doctor called it the baby blues, whatever that meant.”

The noontime sun, spilling through the dining-room window, spread across the table between them. Listening to his father, Eric focused on the way the blinds sliced through the sunlight, creating a pattern reminiscent of a prison cell. His father’s recollections only bolstered that thought. From the way Ken talked, it sounded as if his entire family had been taken prisoner by his mother’s illness.

“She was sad all the time,” his father said. “Sometimes she showed no interest in you kids. She had trouble feeding you and bathing you. Sometimes she’d just give up and I’d come home to find you screaming in your crib. Your mother would be asleep on the couch or upstairs in bed. Charlie would be at the neighbors, mostly, or playing outside. He could get out of the house. You couldn’t. And it worried me. Especially after that day in May.”

“What happened then?”

“Your mother almost killed you.”

Eric would have appreciated a warning. Of all the things his father could have said, that was the one he didn’t see coming. He had been taking a sip of coffee at the time and the shock made him gulp, the piping hot coffee scalding the back of his throat.

“She didn’t mean to do it,” his father said. “I know it wasn’t her fault. It was the sickness that did it.”

He pushed away from the table and wandered to the front door. Eric followed, not understanding what was happening until his father turned and faced the stairs. Then it became clear—his father was reenacting that long-ago May day.

“As soon as I walked through the door, I heard water running.” He pointed to the ceiling. “It was the bathtub upstairs.”

Ken edged toward the steps, climbing them slowly. Eric did the same while trying to imagine what his father heard that day. A quiet house. The steady rush of water into the tub. The squeak of the stairs as he ascended to the second floor.

Once they were in the upstairs hallway, his father stopped at Charlie’s old room. The door was open, revealing a space so dust-choked even the midday sunlight couldn’t brighten it. Ken stood in the doorway, gaze sliding over the entire room. From the sad flicker in his eyes, Eric guessed his father had never expected to see it again.

“Charlie was outside playing. I passed him in the driveway when I came home.” Ken continued down the hall, glancing first at Eric’s childhood—and current—bedroom. “You were supposed to be in the nursery. But your crib was empty.”

The next stop, in both his father’s recollection and in present day, was the bedroom Ken and Maggie had once shared.

“The door was open, just like it is now. And I saw your mother, fast asleep in bed.”

“Where was I?” Eric asked.

His father backtracked, pausing at the door to the bathroom. “In there. The door was closed, but I knew you were inside.”

He crept into the bathroom on unsteady legs, like a man approaching the gallows. Looking to the bathtub, his voice bounced off the tiled wall behind it as he said, “The tub was half full. You were in it. Underwater. I don’t know for how long, but you were already starting to turn blue.”

Eric felt like he was still underwater. The details of the story—Ken yanking him from the tub and flipping him over as water drained from his mouth, the bumbling attempts at CPR, the sirenlike wail Eric emitted once he could breathe again—created a numb, floating sensation. By the time his father finished, Eric found himself leaning against the bathroom sink for support and gasping for air.

“Your mom cried for two days straight,” Ken said. “She felt awful about it all. She swore to me that she would never, ever willingly hurt you. I knew it was the truth. But I also knew that, somewhere deep in her brain, was a feeling she couldn’t control. Like a small part of her wanted to get rid of you.”

Eric needed to get out of that bathroom. He couldn’t stand looking at the bathtub where he had almost died or seeing the light blue wallpaper that only enhanced his feelings of being underwater. Shaking the numbness from his limbs, he started back downstairs.

“I’m sorry if this is upsetting you,” his father said once they returned to the dining room. “That’s why we never told you about it.”

Eric lied and told him he was fine. In reality, he was anything but. If this didn’t send him sprinting into therapy, nothing would.

“Your mother loved you more than anything in the world,” Ken said. “I want you to know that. She wasn’t well when that happened. But she got better. She changed the night Charlie vanished. As soon as she found out he was gone, she grabbed you and refused to let you go. Those baby blues suddenly went away. Losing Charlie made her afraid of losing you, too.”

“I understand postpartum depression,” Eric said. “But why did it happen only after I was born? Didn’t Mom feel the same way after she had Charlie?”

His father shook his head, although Eric wasn’t sure if he was answering the question or refusing to. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s upsetting you.”

“If there’s something you’re not telling me, I want to know about it. Why wasn’t Mom depressed after giving birth to Charlie?”

“Because she’s not the one who gave birth to him.”

Eric froze when he heard the news. Yet another numbing surprise in a day that had been filled with them. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” his father replied, “that Charlie wasn’t our son.”

Kat sat in the basement of the Perry Hollow Public Library, surrounded by a hundred years’ worth of old newspapers. The back issues of the
Perry Hollow Gazette
had been unfolded and pressed into bound volumes so heavy it strained her arms when she lifted them. Luckily, each behemoth contained three months of papers, and Kat only had to pull four of them off the shelf—January through December, 1959.

Since Norm Harper told her the Olmsteads had returned to town in July, Kat pushed winter aside and headed straight for spring. When she opened the volume, her nose was tickled by the musty smell of age and neglect. Motes of dust sprang from the pages as she flipped through the issue for April 1, 1959.

She found the obituaries halfway through the section. It was a single column of print, bearing only two names. Neither of them was Jennifer Clark.

The search continued, with Kat flipping rapidly through April and then into May. The names and faces of the dead flashed before her—men in crewcuts and women with cat’s-eye glasses, most of them now long-forgotten beneath weathered headstones in Oak Knoll Cemetery. She slowed down once she reached Memorial Day. Turning the pages carefully lest she miss an obituary, she worked up to the middle of June without success. Then, on the front page of the June 20 edition, she found something.

Instead of an obituary, it was an article about Jennifer’s drowning. The story mentioned how the Perry Hollow native had been living with friends in the Florida Keys. It talked about a hurricane that had blown through two days before, causing rough waves and widespread damage. And it talked about how young Jennifer Clark had stepped out into the ocean and wasn’t seen again until her body washed ashore.

A picture accompanied the article—a yearbook shot that showed a pretty young woman with straight hair, a pale, open face, and a slightly sad smile.

A woman who looked very much like Charlie Olmstead.

Kat inhaled sharply, stunned at the resemblance. They had the same eyes. The same ears. The same mouth. Finally, the realization hit her. Maggie Olmstead wasn’t Charlie’s biological mother.

Jennifer Clark was.

Breathlessly, Kat rifled through the next few pages of the newspaper. She stopped once she reached the obituary page. Jennifer Clark’s was at the top. It was short and sweet, as far as obits went, simply listing her date of birth, the date of death, and the names of her parents. There was no mention of a memorial service, just a sentence saying that she had already been cremated.