The One I Trust (5 page)

Then I looked at Emily. “Would you like to go for a ride with me?”

She put her spoon in her bowl and reached for a napkin to wipe her mouth. She nodded. “Sure.”

I picked up the keys from the counter and turned to Emily again. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

“Okay,” she agreed, standing up. “I’ll be right there.”

Emerald Isle is located on the western end of Bogue Banks—a skinny barrier island, some twenty miles long—which is separated from the mainland by Bogue Sound. Highway 58 runs the length of the island and we drove east silently for almost half of an hour, past countless beach shops and restaurants, trailer parks, condominiums, and colorful beachfront homes. Near the end of the island we came to the town of Atlantic Beach, where the highway veers left, taking travelers back to the mainland by one of the two bridges that connect the island with the rest of the world. The road was full of cars, most waiting at the busy intersection to turn left to head to the mainland. We stayed straight.

After we had passed through the intersection, much of the traffic disappeared. We traveled a few miles farther, heading toward the very end of the island, until the road literally ended in a parking lot. We pulled into a space and got out. I walked to the front of the car and waited until Emily joined me.

“That’s Fort Macon,” I said, pointing to the visitor center behind me. She looked over her shoulder and nodded.

The two of us walked across the parking lot and onto a path that cut through sandy dunes, covered with sea oats. After we crested the dune we could see the beach and the wide channel beyond. We walked past a low, yellow wooden sign with red lettering:

HAZARD AREA

NO SWIMMING

NO SURFING

NO WADING

We tromped across the remainder of the dune until we reached the beach, where I turned left. We were now facing the mainland. We walked along the beach until it ended at a large, concrete wall.

“That’s the Coast Guard,” I said, indicating a flag we could see on the other side of the wall. Like she had when I’d pointed out Fort Macon a few minutes earlier, Emily looked and then nodded.

I moved closer to the water’s edge and sat down on the sand. Emily followed my lead. Together we sat, silently staring at the port facilities of Morehead City across the choppy water of the channel as it pushed relentlessly toward the ocean. Emily wrapped her coat tighter around her body.

I should have asked her if she was cold, but I didn’t. We were quiet for a long time.

“Is this where it happened?” Emily finally asked quietly. She turned her face to me.

I didn’t look back at her, but I nodded.

“Exactly one year ago,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Right here is the last place they were seen,” I said, touching the sand we were sitting on. “They were . . . they were having a picnic. Someone actually took a picture from over there and caught the two of them in the background.”

That picture had been enlarged, studied, pored over. It had provided no clues whatsoever—just proof that Tori and Noah had been here just before sunset.

The clues had come from other things: an empty bottle of cough syrup found thrown on the other side of the concrete wall, staggering amounts of blood, and a shoe—one of the same ones he was wearing in the picture—that washed up on shore three miles away.

There had been other clues as well. Clues that were a little too obvious: an old fillet knife that I hadn’t seen since Tori and I’d separated, covered in both Tori’s and Noah’s blood, and an old jacket of mine—something else I hadn’t seen in over a year—found in one of the vaulted brick casements in the fort.

“The four of us were down here,” I said. “Me and Hale and Anneka and Molly.”

I paused before going on.

“I should have known something was up,” I finally said, glancing toward Emily. “I had no custody, no visitation, no nothing. She had a restraining order against me. I wasn’t allowed to talk to either one of them for any reason.”

I hesitated for a few seconds.

“But she called me,” I said. “I knew it was her. I knew I shouldn’t answer, but . . .”

I shook my head and looked away.

“What did she say?” Emily asked softly.

“She said that Noah wanted to see me and she said that she had talked to her mom and . . .” I looked at Emily and sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”

After a moment she said, “I’m listening if you want to try.”

I did.

“People usually pick sides in a divorce, right?” I asked. “If your daughter tells you that her husband’s abusing their child, you’re going to believe her, right?”

Emily nodded.

“So obviously things hadn’t been very good between me and Tori’s mom for a long time. But a week before Thanksgiving, her mom called me out of the blue. She said she wanted to help me get Noah back.”

Emily’s eyes widened in surprise.

“She said she knew Tori had been lying and that she wasn’t going to let her hurt me anymore. She said she’d go to the police . . . testify . . . whatever she needed to do. So when Tori called and said that she’d been talking to her mom and that Noah wanted to see me . . .”

I shrugged.

“I figured she knew the jig was up and that she was finally going to be reasonable.”

Tori . . . reasonable.
I shook my head.

“What happened?”

“She told me to call her back in a little bit so that Noah would think that I’d called him. She said it would mean a lot to him.”

I paused and sighed again.

“That was really stupid of me,” I said. “She had a restraining order against me. I wasn’t allowed to contact either one of them. I never should have called her.”

“But she called you first,” Emily pointed out. “The phone records would have proved that she called you first.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but she could have explained that a million different ways. Plus, she didn’t have a court order against her. She wasn’t breaking any laws.”

Emily nodded in understanding.

“So I called her,” I said. “She acted all surprised to hear from me and said that she was sure Noah would love to talk with me and she gave him the phone and . . .”

It was the last time I ever heard his voice.

“It was really good to talk to him.” I needed to wipe my eyes, but I didn’t. “It had been a really long time and I really missed him.”

After another long moment of silence, Emily quietly asked, “Then what?”

“Then Tori got back on the phone and wanted to know if I wanted to see him. She said he missed me and it was Thanksgiving and everything . . .”

“And you said ‘Okay’?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I said ‘Okay.’”

It was Emily’s turn to sigh.

“I figured she knew her mom was going to help me get Noah back and that she was just trying to play nice so
she
wasn’t the one who wound up losing custody.”

“Damage control?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you think her mom was really planning on helping you?” Emily asked.

“Oh, yeah. After Tori and Noah died, she told investigators that Tori had been lying about everything. I’d probably be in prison for murder right now if it wasn’t for her.”

Emily nodded, obviously taking everything in carefully.

“So, anyway,” I said, “she knew I was down here with Hale and Anneka, so she suggested that we meet at Fort Macon. Noah always loved going there—climbing on the cannons and running through all the rooms and stuff. She said she’d meet me at about four o’clock and for me to call her when I got here.

“So I got here early and I walked around a little bit and then when it was almost four, I called her. She told me to meet her by the main entrance. I walked over there and didn’t see them anywhere so I called her again, and she told me that Noah needed to use the restroom, which is by the visitor’s center, so I headed back that way. I stood around there for a few minutes and then I called her again and she told me that they were in the gift shop so I went in there.”

“They weren’t there?” Emily guessed.

“No.” I shook my head. “I called her again and I asked her where she was and she said Noah wasn’t feeling good. I told her I wanted to talk to him and she said she didn’t think that was a good idea. I asked her why not and she said she thought that was why he wasn’t feeling good . . . that he’d been upset ever since he talked to me the day before and that he’d been acting funny ever since she’d told him he was going to be seeing me.”

Emily looked puzzled.

“That’s when I knew it was a setup,” I said. “I mean . . . I didn’t know exactly what she was doing but that’s when I knew that she’d been lying to me the day before and that she’d never planned on letting me see him and I knew that I’d really screwed up by calling her.”

I paused for a long moment.

“I was so mad,” I finally said.

And suddenly understanding flashed across Emily’s face.

“Everybody saw you walking around, looking for her,” she said. “You were talking to her on the phone and you were asking her where she was and telling her you wanted to talk to Noah and you were getting madder and madder.”

I nodded.

“And the whole time,” Emily said slowly, “she was right here. Having a picnic with Noah.”

“She used my old fillet knife,” I said. “It even still had fingerprints of mine on it. She left it lying here in the sand.

“Once it was time for the park to close, they found her car in the parking lot and started searching. They came down here and found the knife and a trail of blood leading out into the surf.”

“And you were the last one to have contact with them,” said Emily. “And the phone records showed that you were here.”

I nodded again and looked out over the turbulent water, thinking about what Tori had done to my boy.

“She was smart,” I said. “She had it all planned out and I fell for it all exactly like she’d planned. Like I said earlier, if it wasn’t for her mom, I’d probably be behind bars right now. I knew I couldn’t trust her, but I did it anyway.”

I shook my head in disgust and stared out over the water again. Emily gently laid her hand on my shoulder.

I closed my eyes.

“You just wanted to see your son,” I heard her say softly.

I nodded and we sat there like that for a long time—my eyes closed and her hand on my shoulder—until I finally took a deep breath and turned to her.

“I want to go,” I said and she nodded and moved her hand. We both stood up and walked back along the beach to the spot where the path leading to the parking lot cut across the dunes, past the yellow wooden sign with red lettering.

HAZARD AREA

NO SWIMMING

NO SURFING

NO WADING

Emily paused for just a moment and glanced down the beach to where we’d just been.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t look back.

I DIDN’T OFFER to take her into Fort Macon and she didn’t ask. We just got into the car and pulled out of the parking lot, getting back on Highway 58 and heading toward the beach house. She was quiet as we drove along.

“Thank you for going with me,” I said, glancing at her.

She nodded.

“That’s the first time I’ve been back there since he died,” I confessed.

She nodded again.

“I don’t have any place I can go,” I said. “I don’t have a grave I can visit or anything.”

“They never found him?”

I shook my head.

We rode in silence for a moment.

“How do you know he’s dead?” she asked. “I mean, if they never found his body . . .”

“Oh, trust me,” I said with a humorless laugh. “I wanted more than anything to believe that she’d faked the whole thing to try and set me up, but . . .”

Emily looked at me with her eyebrows raised.

“Most of the blood they found was his,” I explained. “The coroner said there was too much. He said someone that age never could have survived losing that much blood.”

She thought on that.

“Plus,” I said, “she gave him an entire bottle of cough syrup before she stabbed him. Just that alone was enough to kill him.”

“How do you know she did that?”

“She stopped at a store near Swansboro on her way down here and bought it. They found the empty bottle.”

“But how do you know he drank it?”

“His DNA was on it,” I said.

“But—”

“And the medicine was in his blood,” I said, cutting her off. “He didn’t live long enough to absorb all of it, but if he had, he would have died from an overdose.”

“Why would she give him cough syrup first?” Emily wondered.

“So he wouldn’t feel anything,” I said. “The coroner said with the amount they found in his blood, he was definitely unconscious.”

At least there was that.

“We should find a place for you to go,” Emily said after a moment of silence.

“Huh?”

“Someplace where you can go to remember Noah,” she said. “Like a marker or something.”

“I remember Noah all the time.”

“Oh, I know,” she said quickly and she put that hand on my shoulder again. “I didn’t mean that, but you said . . .”

“I know.”

“Where’s some place that he liked?” she asked.

“He was happy everywhere.”

“But where’s some place he especially liked to go?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I said, pointing at a sign we were nearing. “There.”

The sign was large and brown with white lettering that read “North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores” and had a picture of a fish on it.

“Turn,” Emily said quickly, so I did.

We parked, got out of the car, and started walking across a footbridge that led to the entrance.

“Look,” Emily said, pointing to the decking. “See?”

Embedded into the decking were dozens of fish, made out of some sort of polished blue stone. Each one had names or messages engraved into them—many “In Honor of” or “In Memory of.”

I looked at Emily and then back down at the fish. I had to admit that it would be nice to be able to come here and to see Noah’s name. Fort Macon probably had something similar, but even though Noah had enjoyed going there, too, it was too closely tied to horrible memories. This aquarium held nothing but happy memories—it was where Noah and Molly had spent hours chasing each other, tapping on aquarium glass and holding starfish.