Somebody I Used to Know (27 page)

He turned down the last row of storage units, moving slowly. The tires crunched over gravel and bits of debris, the engine making a low hum in the quiet night.

“There’s number two,” I said, pointing to the right.

Troy nodded and eased us to a stop. He turned the engine off but didn’t get out of the cab. He took a deep breath but didn’t say anything.

“Are we there?” I asked.

“This is a county facility. Maintenance vehicles mostly. Sometimes it gets used as an impound lot. The police store vehicles here when they run out of room in other places.”

It was quiet around us, the wind calm. Far too early in the year for the chirping of bugs and the croaking of frogs.

“Are you going to tell me now what we came to see?” I asked.

“I’m about to.” He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “About a year ago, a county crew went to do some maintenance on a little pond out in the sticks. Maybe six or seven miles from here. This is mostly a rural county, and there are a lot of those kinds of ponds and creeks. Sometimes they have names. Sometimes not. Sometimes you can tell no one’s been near the thing for years. But they were putting in a new gas line, and it just happened to run right along this pond. A new subdivision was going in out there, all in the name of progress. Some farmer sold his land to an asshole developer. You know the drill. Land that had been in the family for generations sold to some asshat who wants to build more houses.”

“Sure.”

“It was dry last spring, and lo and behold, the water in the pond had come down a foot or so. And what do they see? The top of a car sticking out of the water.”

My anxiety grew. My hand, which had been resting on the door handle, tightened into a fist.

“Naturally those boys knew they had something unusual there. Why else would a car end up in a pond like that? And it looked like it had been there for a long time. A long, long time. I’m going to take you in there and show you that car.”

I started to open the door. “Okay.”

“Now, wait.” He held his hand out. It hovered a foot in front of my chest. “Remember what I told you back in the bar. I could get in trouble for this. I’m not on the force anymore.”

“But you still have a key?”

“I borrowed the key. For tonight. From someone who owed me a favor. Neither one of us needs any headaches over this. You hear me?”

“You’re saying I can’t tell anyone what I see inside there.”

“No, you can’t. The truth is I don’t even know what it means. I think it might mean more to you than to just about anyone else.”

I started to ask another question, but he lowered his hand and pushed his own door open. The dome light came on, causing me to squint.

I slipped out my door, following him.

He used the keys again, this time to undo the lock on storage unit number two. I stepped up beside him, the night air getting steadily colder till we could see our breath. I rubbed my hands together. The door was beat-up and dented, the paint chipped and peeling. When the lock was undone, Troy bent down with a grunt and threw the door open.

The unit was dark. I couldn’t make out anything on the inside. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a large, vague shape. A car. Troy fumbled for a switch on the wall. He hit it, and the room filled with light from a single bulb.

Troy watched me, waiting for my reaction.

“What do you think?” he asked.

I had no doubts about what I was looking at. Despite the grime and scum from the pond, the flattened tires, the rust, I knew immediately what it was.

“That’s Marissa’s,” I said. “That’s her car.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

I
stepped toward the vehicle, standing a few feet away. I held my right hand out but didn’t touch it, as though I expected to feel some tangible emanation from the car that would pass into me.

Troy moved behind me and closed the door to the unit, presumably to prevent the light from leaking out into the night and possibly calling unwanted attention to us. Then he was standing next to me.

“If you found this in a pond, submerged . . . did you find a body inside?” I asked.

“Nope. That’s what those gas crew boys were worried about when they found it. They started thinking up all sorts of juicy scenarios, like some Mafia guy put out a hit and hid the body in a Robeson County pond. The Mafia stuff is far-fetched, but people do drown in ponds and creeks like that a good deal. They drive off the road, maybe they’re drunk or tired, and they end up in a body of water they can’t get out of. The family reports them missing, and it can take years to find the vehicle, if ever. Like I said, there are a lot of remote little bodies of water in a rural county in Ohio. If the water doesn’t recede and give up its secrets, we may never see what’s in there.”

“Right,” I said, my mind distracted. If there was no body in the car, why had it ended up in a pond one county away?

“Are you sure it’s her car?” Troy asked. “It’s been a long time.”

“I’m sure.”

I remembered it well. She drove it the whole time I knew her. When she graduated from high school, her father had bought her a brand-new 1991 GMC Jimmy. Black. He told her the SUV would be safer in an accident than a small car. We drove the thing all over: road trips to Columbus, trips home for the holidays, late-night runs to White Castle or Taco Bell. And we parked in it a lot. The backseat was spacious. Marissa kept a couple of blankets and a pillow in the car at all times, removing them only when she knew she would see her parents, and we made liberal use of them during our nocturnal visits to local parks or the football stadium, any place we could find a little bit of privacy.

Some nights we fell asleep in the back of the SUV, our heads together, our bodies intertwined. We’d come awake at one or two in the morning, meet each other’s eyes in the darkness, and laugh at the absurdity of ending up passed out in a postsex coma in the middle of a Tuesday night. And then we’d drive back to the dorm, exchanging sleepy good nights, our clothes and hair rumpled.

Believe it, I knew the car.

“Same color, same make,” I said. “I recognize that dent in the rear bumper. Marissa backed into a fire hydrant once. Her dad was furious. She always had a frame around the license plate that said
Hanfort High, Class of ’91
. I don’t see that, but I’m sure it’s hers.” I started walking around the car, moving toward the passenger side and examining it from another angle. “She loved this car. She really did. She even named it. ‘Betty,’ after the salesperson at the dealership. Her parents probably sold it after she died.”

“I don’t know who,” Troy said, “but somebody ran this vehicle into the pond up here.”

“Is that all you know about it?” I asked.

“When the police find a car like this, they figure one of a few things. One is what I told you before: Someone’s been in a wreck and might be dead in the car. But we figured out quickly that wasn’t the case. No body. There’s also the possibility of insurance fraud. Someone runs their car into a remote pond, claims it was stolen, and then they get a new car out of the deal. Risky, of course. Insurance companies don’t look too kindly on fraud.”

“Those aren’t the only two options, are they?”

“The third and most likely option is that the car really was stolen. You know, kids take it joyriding, realize they might be in the soup with the cops, so they ditch it somewhere. Or someone’s stolen it and tried to sell it or use it for parts. Those cars come back stripped of anything valuable.” Troy patted the back of the car. “This car was worth a lot back in 1994 or so. Not everybody had an SUV in those days. They could have sold it, or they could have used it for parts.”

“Was it stolen?” I asked.

“We looked into that. Whoever put it in the pond emptied the thing of any personal effects. No papers, no CDs. No license plates. Like you said, not even the license plate frame. They wanted it hidden, and then they hoped if it did get found, no one would be able to identify it. Of course, they couldn’t remove the VIN number. And that’s how we traced the car back to the Minor family. That didn’t take long at all.”

“And what happened?”

“We found out they weren’t in the area anymore. And no one had ever filed a stolen-car report. It was strange. A car that was probably pretty nice and relatively new when it went missing was just allowed to go without anyone filing a report? You’d think they’d want the insurance money no matter how rich they were, right?”

“They had some money, but they weren’t super-wealthy. Upper middle class.”

“And those people want the money more than anyone else, right? They’re still hungry for more. But if they didn’t file a report, there wasn’t much we could do. We couldn’t locate them, and it’s not really a crime to leave a car in a pond out in the middle of nowhere. Illegal dumping, I guess. Unless . . .”

I looked over the side of the car. I saw something near the front right bumper.

“Unless?” I said, the wheels turning in my mind. “Unless you were covering up a crime?”

“Exactly.”

I moved up to the front of the car and bent down for a closer look. The right front bumper had a small dent, a slight inward crumpling, and the headlight was shattered. I thought hard, and felt certain the damage hadn’t been there when Marissa drove the car at Eastland.

“This dent,” I said. “I don’t think it was here before.”

Troy came over and studied it, standing behind me and looking over my shoulder.

“Who knows?” he said. “The car went headfirst into the pond. It’s possible it hit a rock or something on the bottom. Or those boys who dragged it out could have banged it up. They’re not exactly brain surgeons with that wrecker.”

“Was there anything else inside? Anything that might make you think a crime had been committed?”

Troy laughed. “After all that time? Nothing. Mother Nature has wiped it all away. If anything had ever been there in the first place.” He patted the car again. “What we have here is a mystery. A family suffers the loss of their daughter, they move away, but they leave the car behind in a pond in another county. And they don’t report it stolen or make an insurance claim on the vehicle. It seems suspicious as shit, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe they junked the car because it was too painful to see.”

“You can give a car to charity,” Troy said. “And they moved away. They could have left it here. They’d never have to see it again.”

“I still don’t understand something,” I said.

“What?”

“What is your interest in all of this?” I asked. “You talk to Nate, and Marissa’s death comes up. But you don’t tell him you’re coming here. Apparently you didn’t tell him about the car. You didn’t want me to tell anyone, even though I had to guess that on my own. And you borrowed these keys for one night only. We’re doing all this cloak-and-dagger stuff out here on government property. Why? Why do you care about Marissa or this car?”

Troy walked past me just then. He bent down and looked at the dent in the fender, the one I had been examining. As he stared at it, I tried to place something in my mind, something Laurel had said when we were in Hanfort. But it didn’t come back to me.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something isn’t right here. And I guess I feel like I should have seen it when we found the car. But that was just as I was retiring, and I didn’t press it. I was a little burned out, I guess. One foot out the door. When Nate told me about you, I thought it was an invitation from the universe to hand this off to someone who might really pursue it and find out what happened. I figured that guy might be you.” He turned back to me. “Some cops retire, and they never think twice about cases they worked. They never think again about the job. Other cops stay up at night worrying about things they might have missed. I guess I’m a stay-up-at-night kind of old cop. This stuck in my brain for some reason. Something’s not right about it.”

“But you said I couldn’t tell anyone about it.”

“I said you can’t mention my involvement. You can’t tell anyone I brought you here. But since you were already looking, I thought this might connect some dots for you.”

“Maybe. But why is it still here?” I asked. “Why hasn’t it been disposed of or auctioned?”

“They keep them for a year or so. They’ll be getting rid of it soon. They’ll junk it since it’s so trashed. I doubt it would run or do anybody any good.”

“They’ll just get rid of it, huh?” I said, staring at the car.

“That’s the way it goes. But we need to get out of here now. We’ve been here too long.”

“Wait,” I said. “Can I just have a minute? Just one minute?”

“No, we need to—”

“Just one minute.”

Troy looked at me like I was nuts. And then he looked at his watch.

“One minute,” he said.

I expected him to leave me alone, but he didn’t. He stood over by the garage door and waited, his hand resting on the handle.

I walked away from him toward the driver’s side of the car. Over the previous two weeks, I’d realized I didn’t possess many tangible things that tied me directly to Marissa. Some letters and cards. A few gifts she’d given me that I’d carried with me from place to place. But that was about it. No clothes. No lock of hair. Nothing I could hold in my hand and say, “This is a piece of her.” The car was the closest thing, an object I closely, intensely associated with her. A physical place we occupied together when we were happiest and most in love.

I tugged on the door handle, but it didn’t budge. I wished I could take the whole car with me. Possess it. Have it. But I knew there was no way.

I heard Troy tapping his foot.

I reached out and touched the car one more time, and then we left.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

T
he noise woke me just after midnight.

I’d fallen asleep with the newspaper articles from Hanfort scattered across the bed. I’d pored over them and stared at them again, expecting something to jump out and tell me what I needed to know. I felt the same way I’d felt in high school, studying for a math exam. Symbols and numbers danced before my eyes then, a messy jumble refusing to cohere.