Down the Darkest Road (24 page)

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Authors: Tami Hoag

BOOK: Down the Darkest Road
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“Yes.”
“Nice place.”
Leah said nothing. She sighed the sigh of the bored teenager, letting him know she wasn’t impressed with his phony charm.
“Do you ride, Leah?”
“Yes.”
“Is this your horse?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a handsome animal.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you been boarding here very long?”
“Do you need something?” she asked.
The phony smile faltered. He moved his jaw left, then right. He didn’t like it that she wasn’t buying his nice-guy act.
“I’m looking for the trainer.”
“She’s not here,” Leah said. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable now as she realized she was still alone in the barn. Umberto and the other grooms and ranch hands would be dealing with the feed delivery.
She thought of Leslie. She had always wondered what had happened, how it had happened. Had it been like this? Had the guy just started asking her questions like this, like he needed her help?
Leslie talked to everybody. She wasn’t afraid of people. She liked to be helpful. She would have talked to the guy who took her because she had seen him around. She knew who he was. Leah knew that the police thought he must have pulled up alongside Leslie on her bike, maybe asked her to help him with something or offered her a ride home. When they found her bike, one of the tires was flat. He might have done something to the tire at the ball field and followed her as she tried to get home afterward.
Whatever the case had been, he had grabbed her and thrown her and her bike into the van and that was that.
Leah glanced down the barn aisle now to see the stranger’s car parked at the end of the barn, away from the actual parking area. He could drag her down the aisle and throw her in the trunk and be gone down the driveway before anyone knew anything had happened.
“Do you know when she might be back?” the man asked.
“Soon,” Leah said. “Any minute.”
“I’ll just wait, then.”
“You should go,” Leah said bluntly. “You should go talk to Umberto.”
She wanted to come out of the stall and run to the feed room, which was located in a separate building between the two barns. But she would have to get past the stranger. He looked strong—stronger than she was, for sure.
“Where is he?” the man asked.
With a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, Leah realized her mistake. Now she would have to admit to him that the ranch manager wasn’t in the barn or even near the barn. He was in another building in the opposite direction from the stranger’s car.
She wanted to go to the window and start screaming, but she felt stupid. What if she was wrong? What if he was just somebody here to see Maria? She would make a fool of herself and embarrass the man, and embarrass Maria.
The pressure was coming back now with a vengeance. Her pulse began to roar in her ears. She felt both hot and cold as she began to sweat. Tears filled her eyes. She thought she might throw up.
“Hi. Can I help you?”
Relief poured through her at the sound of Maria Gracida’s voice. The stranger turned away and went to speak to Maria.
Leah felt light-headed, her legs like slender icicles melting into water. She pressed a hand to her stomach, still feeling like she might be sick. But as she touched herself, she pulled her hand away at the feeling of wetness, and she realized with horror that the cut had bled through the fabric of her tan breeches.
Mortified, she pulled the front of her polo shirt down over the stain, slipped out of the stall, and, head down, hurried past the stranger and Maria, making a beeline for the bathroom. She was too flushed with embarrassment to feel the stranger’s eyes follow her until she closed the door behind her.
28
 
It should have been my husband’s job to go after the man who took our daughter away from us. In another time—before lawyers, when the law was of the land and not a game—he would have had the right . . . No. He would have had a father’s
obligation
to defend his daughter, and a husband’s obligation to protect his family, to pronounce sentence and carry out punishment.
I could have lived in that time. When the night is long and the drink is strong, I can close my eyes and fantasize about a time when justice was swift and terrible, and left men like Roland Ballencoa nothing to hide behind.
Many people would argue that we live in more civilized times now, that we have elevated ourselves above base violence.
Those people have never had a child taken from them.
Lance could have lived in that darker time too. He was a man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and the belief that the shortest distance from A to B was always a straight line.
It had killed him that, even though suspicion had fallen on Roland Ballencoa, no one had been able to touch the man. The police had not been able to compel him to give them an interview, let alone take a polygraph exam. He hadn’t had to account for his time the day Leslie went missing. He hadn’t had to answer yes or no as to whether or not he had spoken to her that day.
Roland Ballencoa knew his rights as well as any man who had ever had to hide behind the shield of them. And he was absolutely without apology or remorse in exercising those rights.
Lance had grown up on television police dramas and movies where bad guys were hauled in and beat down and made to confess their sins like acolytes of Satan in the days of the Inquisition. It had been inconceivable to him that so much time had gone by—more than a year—by the time the Santa Barbara police had been granted a search warrant for Ballencoa’s home and vehicle. So much time that any evidence that may ever have been present was gone.
All but one tiny blood sample, too small to test.
That reality was my husband’s purgatory.
From the day that Leslie went missing, he never lived a day without the weight of guilt beating down on him like a war hammer. He blamed himself for losing his temper with Leslie that night at the restaurant. If he had handled that better . . . if he had damned his pride and let her stay home that night . . . if he had been firmer with her earlier on . . . if he had been more understanding . . .
He had damned himself from every possible angle, and punished himself with the brutality of an Old Testament God. And in the end he had pronounced sentence on himself, absent the power to do so to the man who had taken his child.
The most terrible burden that had been put on him, aside from what he had put on himself, had been the spotlight of suspicion that had been cast on him by the public, the press, and the police. He would have gladly lain down and died for either of his daughters. To have people think otherwise had been like pouring acid on his soul.
And the police—completely impotent to deal with Roland Ballencoa—had gone after Lance with the zeal of hunters shooting fish in a barrel. Because he wanted to cooperate, he sat through hours and hours of interviews and interrogations. He took polygraph after polygraph. He had weathered every indignity and accusation leveled at him.
He had fought with his daughter in public. He was known to have a temper. There were holes in the time line of his day that day, time unaccounted for. He wouldn’t have been the first father to lose his temper with a teenage daughter.
What if he had seen her on the road that day, riding her bike home from a softball game she had been forbidden to attend? Maybe he had stopped his car and grabbed her. Maybe in his anger he had shaken her or pushed her. Maybe she had struck her head and died. Maybe he had panicked. Maybe he had panicked and killed her, and yet had the presence of mind to dispose of her body so thoroughly it was never found.
Not once, not for one heartbeat had I ever believed Lance could have hurt Leslie. Not even after the detectives had done their best to drive a wedge of doubt between us. Not even after people who should have known Lance had begun to doubt. I would sooner have stopped breathing than stop believing in his innocence.
My husband’s death was ruled an accident, just another sad statistic against drinking and driving. Half the people who had suspected him of murder believed his death was karma. The other half turned on a dime and mourned him as the poor tormented father, unable to go on without his firstborn child.
His death was ruled an accident. I knew better. Everyone knew better. It was the truth hidden in plain view. He had driven willingly to his death with a police escort, metaphorically speaking. He simply had not been able to take it any longer—the grief, the guilt, the suspicion, the not knowing, the terrible imagining of what had happened to Leslie.
I have never and will never forgive him for what he did that night on the Cold Spring Canyon bridge. I understand better than anyone why he did it. Many nights I have envied him the peace of death and cursed him for leaving the burden of life and living on me.
And yet I loved him so, and still do. His absence punched a hole in my heart that aches every single day and all night long. We were supposed to walk this road hand in hand, side by side. Without him, I have no balance and no anchor.
I miss him with a longing that goes so deep I will never see the bottom of it.
As I look into my future I can’t envision the day that another man will make me feel the way he did. The friend who introduced us always said that Lance and I picked up a conversation where we had left off in another lifetime. I know it will be another lifetime before I feel that again.
 
Lauren saved her work and got up from the desk. She felt as empty as a ghost, as if anyone could pass a hand right through her and touch nothing. She had nothing left, not even emotion. What a blessing that was. She didn’t have to feel the hopelessness of a lonely future that stretched out in front of her like a deserted road.
She thanked God she had driven away most of the former friends who would have made it their mission to fix her up and marry her off. And her general disposition had served to ward off most of the men who might have taken a shot.
Only once in the last two years had she let her guard down enough to allow a man near her, and then only for mercenary reasons—or so she told herself. She didn’t want to think of herself as a woman with a woman’s sexual needs. Better to believe she had slept with Greg Hewitt as a means to a practical end. She felt like a whore either way.
She put it out of her head now as if it had meant nothing at all.
It wasn’t late—just nine thirty—but the house was quiet. Leah hadn’t been feeling well when Lauren picked her up at the ranch. She had barely eaten dinner and had gone to bed not long after.
Anne Leone had told Lauren her daughter had done fine at her sleepover, but in practically the next breath had expressed her concern that Leah was possibly wound too tight, masking feelings that would have to find an outlet somewhere. And it was true. Leah was very good at masking her feelings. She didn’t like calling attention to herself. Where Leslie had always felt the need to challenge and push boundaries, Leah had always contained herself and meticulously followed every rule. She had always been the perfect child.
Lauren had to admit she had too often been willing to take advantage of that in these years since Leslie’s abduction. The burden of it all was exhausting. If her remaining child chose not to come to her with problems or fears or feelings too difficult to deal with, it was so much easier for her to accept relief than question that illusion of peace. Don’t borrow trouble, her own mother always said. Don’t borrow trouble when you can just ignore it.
She went to her daughter’s room now. A light was still glowing through the crack of the barely open door. Lauren knocked softly and pushed the door open another couple of inches.
Leah hastily swiped tears off her cheeks and pulled the covers up around her. She sat tucked up against the headboard, hugging a pillow. In that instant she looked eight instead of nearly sixteen. A little girl lost in sadness.

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