What We Lost in the Dark (24 page)

“And I’ve done them all, Allie.”

He was telling the truth.

In real life, I knew that my beautiful, hunky big man weighed twenty pounds less than he had last summer. I had
seen that, but I had not wanted to see that. In real life, I saw that he was always tired and paler than the way people like us are pale. I had not wanted to see that, and pretended it was nothing but anxiety. The truth was I had grown stronger, physically and in my deep core.

Rob, instead, had withered. Always game, always ready for the next adventure, the cautious one but never a follower, he had simply run out of steam.

“You kept this to yourself. You kept this from me and I love you. How, Rob?”

“How could I tell you this?” Rob said. “Allie, I should have told you. I tried to break up with you instead. But when I was away, I realized I was just thinking about me. I needed you to stop thinking about Juliet and Tabor and be there with me, while I had the time. But that’s not you, Allie. You couldn’t give up on her. You didn’t give up on either one of us.”

Trying to speak around the sobs that shook me, I said, “How long have you known?”

“Just before Thanksgiving. I knew I didn’t feel right. But I didn’t know it was like this.”

How had I withheld this time from him? How had I let a hundred other preoccupations crowd my mind—from Garrett Tabor’s threat to the identity of the dead girl called Sky? Little girl detective jazzy jump-up, I’d lost track of the dearest thing on earth. My best friend. My first love. The boy I would marry someday.

Should I ask him to marry me now?

“The ring you gave me,” I said. “Would you marry me? I would love to marry you now.”

“It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Why, Rob?”

“I’d just leave you,” he said. I could tell he’d thought about this. I could tell that he wouldn’t be moved. “Anyway, I already feel like I’m married to you.”

“How can you not be afraid?” I whispered.

“I’m very afraid,” Rob said, reaching up to remove the patches over his sightless eyes.

“Should you do that?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can see a little light,” he said, scanning the ceiling. “I’m not a hero, Allie.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No. Not even a little bit.”

They had Rob floating on the big opiate air mattress of drugs, the very best. When they don’t bring you dental floss, he told me, you know that at least they’re not worried about you becoming an addict. I hoped he couldn’t see shapes, or movement, because I flinched when he said that. It was so final, so unbelievable, so not what should happen when you’re eighteen. And it wasn’t lost on me that I’d believed that Rob and I would live our life together remembering Juliet, not Juliet and I remembering Rob—in different ways.

“Does it help for me to be here?”

“Honey, I don’t know. I don’t know how much I want you to see. Things … happen when you die. I’m not like this seventeen-year-old guy. I’m like five, and I have to go to kindergarten alone. I want my Obi-Wan snack sack. I want my mom.” I wanted to hold on to him and cry until I was drained, picturing the little Rob, as I had known him, with that very Obi-Wan lunch sack. “Sometimes I want my parents to be like in those documentaries they made us watch in clinic where the parents are holding their kid and saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. You don’t have to hang on for us. Just hang on
to
us.’ But my mom has nobody. She’s an only child. She
has no friends. My mom is so scared I can’t let go,” Rob said. “Allie, you know my dad. This is killing him. He doesn’t even have a way to let me go.”

“And I am supposed to let you go? I am supposed to know how to do that?” I climbed up beside him, careful not to dislodge all the dressings on his hands and arms. “Make room for me,” I said. “Tell me why you did this.”

“I knew he had some kind of lair,” Rob said, softly, his words slightly slurred by the drip of painkillers. “And he didn’t think I would follow him. And I didn’t think Bonnie Sommers-Olsen would follow
me
. I didn’t see anyone. I never even looked back.” Rob drew a long, rattling breath.

“Did that hurt?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Maybe you should be quiet now,” I said.

I tried to remember him as he had been. Of course, I had hundreds of pictures and videos of all those years—and would I ever be able to look at them.

Rob was asleep.

Quietly, I beckoned Mrs. Dorn to the door. She came. “What are the doctors saying? How many years? How many months?”

“Weeks,” she said. “I don’t believe it. He’s in such amazing physical shape. He worked out four hours a day, Allie. You know. You all did that once. That’s what they say though. His poor organs are shutting down. You can’t see how jaundiced he is. He’s struggling to breathe, but he won’t let them put a breathing tube in.”

“Why?”

“He wants to talk to you. And … he doesn’t want to be held on to …”

What did I want to say to this poor woman, this woman
I’d known my whole life. “I’m not a mother. I don’t know how you feel. But I love Rob as much as I could ever love anyone. I wanted to spend forever proving that to him. I wish you would not blame me. Because none of this is my fault.” I also wished my mother would drop down from the ventilation system, brandishing her sharp tongue, my sword and my shield.

“I don’t blame you, Allie,” she said. “Don’t blame me. This is a day I tried hard not to see coming.”

The days stretched out.

I was probably the only scholarship student in history (or so I believed, then) to miss my first week of school. I turned eighteen in a lounge chair at Divine Savior Hospital, a chair that would have passed anywhere else for a medieval torture device. The time I “got” with Rob was the time his parents went home for showers, an hour of sleep, a desultory meal. I clutched tight to every moment of it.

On the third day, dressed in scrubs—looking eerily, remarkably, like herself—Juliet appeared in the doorway.

“I have to see him,” she said.

Instantly, Rob, who’d been fast asleep, jerked awake. “Juliet?”

“Buddy,” she said. “My amigo. How did you get yourself in this fix?”

“Tanning,” he said, barely a whisper, and Juliet cried, silently, crystalline, long tears that traced the rivulets next to her nose and dripped off her chin.

“Come here,” Rob said. The room was darkened, and Juliet, who’d been in isolation even from me, until doctors could determine that whatever ailed her was only the consequence of hard treatment and neglect—not STDs, no viral infections. Outside a plastic sealed curtain, her parents spoke with her through a microphone, for hours on end.

Later, Juliet, the duchess of impatience, said she wouldn’t have minded if her parents read aloud from the phone book or recited nursery rhymes or recipes. Their voices were like a narcotic, her long dark dreams made serene and secure. That night, her face was clean, and her hair was shorn, its natural dark blonde color. She wore no makeup. So thin, in her hospital tunic and paper pants, she reminded me of old paintings of Joan of Arc.

“I’m here,” Juliet said. “I’m right here, Rob.”

“Juliet, I didn’t believe …”

“Don’t talk. You are my hero. You are all our hero. I would be dead without you. You are Sir Robert of Dorn, my most gentle knight. I hear you’re sick.”

His damaged lips trembled. “You know how much.”

“But you will always be with us, the
tres compadres
. You gave your life to me, and I will give my life to paying you back.”

“Tell me how she looks, Allie.”

Juliet shot me a glance of pure terror: He can’t see?

“Well, all those curves you used to stare at instead of mine are gone. She’s a little matchstick with a blonde faux hawk. But she is beautiful to me.” Juliet reached for my hand and for Rob’s. For a moment, I closed my own eyes, and I whispered, “Tribe,” our old Parkour pledge before every trace. And it was the three of us, together again for the last time.

WHEN THE DORNS were with Rob, Bonnie asked me to make time to come to her office. As it certainly concerned her as well, Juliet came, too.

“This is the first time I’ve ever met you face to face, though I’d seen you, of course,” Bonnie said. “I feel pretty fortunate to see a genuinely reincarnated person.”

“I feel pretty good to be one,” Juliet said humbly.

While we’d had entirely enough to handle, Bonnie wanted us, my mother, and the Siroccos to know what was going on at Garrett Tabor’s chalet. She had already spoken to our parents.

“The whole area is being excavated,” Bonnie said. “After the house is searched and photographed, the contents will be removed. Then it will be dismantled and numbered, piece by piece, as evidence.” I could hear the half-truth under the even tone of her voice.

“Just the house?”

Bonnie said, “No. The grounds, too.”

Whoever was excavating had found things, bad things. People that Garrett Tabor had taken and killed.

“What did you
find
?” I asked.

She said, “I didn’t personally …” then stopped and sighed. “A human femur. A human mandible. Small human phalanges. And, well, a skull. They’re not from the same person. So far. Very recent.”

“Were they buried?” Juliet asked.

“They were just … scattered in the woods. Animals had moved the bones around. There had been no apparent attempt to conceal the bodies beyond a covering of leaves or pine needles. We found those mounds of needles.”

“How many?” I said.

Bonnie examined her hands. “I’m not sure.”

Juliet stared at her hands, nervously twitching in her lap. “I was there. I heard them. Oh, god.”

“But there were others. Samantha Kelly Young.” I gently tugged the necklace from its familiar place on my chest and unclipped it for Bonnie. Into her hand I surrendered the golden pendant that would help bring Sky back to her family—at least that. From my pack, I extracted the copy of the missing girl poster, in case Bonnie had forgotten. “I will give this to my friend Bruce Minty, of the RCMP,” she said. “He will spend time with the Youngs and find out their story and where her story ended.”

“What’s the RCMP?”

“The Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” Bonnie said. “The Youngs knew that Sky died. They were sure of it. But of course, like any family, they want to bring her body home to bury.”

“Is there any sign of any other, any other girls out here?”

Bonnie nodded. “There is what appears to be a new and deep pit, machine dug, in the hill far up behind the house.” Before I could say more, she told me, “They will open that today.”
And they’ll find the vanished brides
, I thought. Balling my fists, I nearly struck them against my forehead. How could I have been so terrified, and so slow?

“It wasn’t your fault,” Bonnie said.

“On the contrary, it was entirely
my
fault,” Juliet told her firmly. “If I hadn’t been so arrogant, and I had outed him when I first felt that there was something wrong …”

“Juliet, you were proven dead. Garrett Tabor’s father, Stephen, could be charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact, and he certainly will be charged with concealing evidence of a homicide and falsifying documents pursuant to a homicide.” She added, “But I honestly don’t believe that
Stephen Tabor understood, until right now, that he was dealing with a homicide.”

“The girl in the apartment …” I said.

“Dr. Stephen never saw the body of any murdered girl from any apartment. At least, he is not aware that he ever saw the body you saw in the apartment.”

To my relief, she did not say, what you
thought
you saw in the apartment. Further, she pointed out, the “silent” video Rob and I had made on the day of the fair had nothing to do with any girl in an apartment, dead by bludgeoning or strangulation. As we had hoped and feared, the (now former) medical examiner and his son were talking about the girl found hung up against the pilings of a pier, a girl Dr. Stephen had apparently confessed to agents he believed died as the result of a sexual encounter with Garrett that had “gotten out of hand.” He admitted to covering up the fact that she had not died of drowning, but that was all that he knew. He admitted submitting Juliet’s tissues, reasoning that Juliet was dead, in any case. A polygraph confirmed that Dr. Stephen had no idea that his son had been involved in anything illegal but had terrible guilt about compromising his professional ethics and claiming that the dead girl was Juliet Sirocco.

Both of us asked what would happen to Dr. Stephen.

“I don’t know,” Bonnie said. “If he can convince a jury that he was trying to save his son from a murder charge, I suppose he could avoid life in prison. There’s no way he can avoid prison altogether. There’s no way he can keep his license to practice.”

“That would be almost sad. Dr. Stephen always seemed so good,” Juliet said. “If what he’d done wasn’t so awful …”

“And somehow understandable,” said Bonnie. “What a parent will do for a child, there are no limits.”

Could my mother do it? My mother wouldn’t. Or would she? My mother … loved me more than God, more than the world.

As I thought this over, Bonnie went on to explain what no one in Iron Harbor except Garrett Tabor and Bonnie knew: his résumé as a killer was elaborate, long, and detailed. The first time he’d killed, from what Bonnie had been able to determine, Garrett Tabor had been very young, sixteen. A young girl drowned while swimming at a northern lake with Andrew and one of his cousins, Dr. Andrew’s son. The cousin had heard a scream and saw the girl struggling. When Garrett Tabor came bobbing to the surface, he told his cousin to swim for help, that the girl’s leg was caught on some lake weeds. Questions were put to Garrett Tabor, about horseplay and unsafe swimming behavior, but Tabor insisted he’d tried to help the girl, finally diving to get her foot free.

There were weeds, but her body was floating freely, face up, when a group of fishermen with a big bass boat finally made it to her.

In college at the University of Wisconsin, Garrett Tabor had a girlfriend, a chemistry prodigy named Dang Song who went by the nickname Sunny D, who jumped to her death from a fifth-story balcony at a dorm. She had bruises around her neck, which a bereft Tabor explained to police were the result of an earlier attempt to take her own life by hanging. There were other deaths, including two at a resort area north of Chicago—both girls under seventeen, both dumped nude in water, neither one dead from drowning.