The Girl from Widow Hills, page 10
I sighed, leaning back. “He drunk-texted me a couple of nights ago. I may have texted him back last night in a bad moment. When you were all…” I moved my hands around uselessly. “He wanted to see if we could make it work, but I don’t want that, and I told him that.” Or at least I thought I did. I couldn’t remember. He had called when Detective Rigby and I were in the house, and I’d been too shocked to see his name; to realize he wasn’t dead in my yard.
“I see,” he said. Short, to the point. Bennett flipped the channel from the local news to a baseball game, and I could almost pretend this was normal. Like we were drinking beers and watching a game, instead.
“Your ex is very pretty,” I said.
“She is,” he said, staring at the television.
“Sorry it didn’t work out.”
He shook his head. “I’m not. The whole time we were together, I got the feeling she was always looking around for something else. That I was a way to pass the time until something better came along. I called her on it, and she balked.” He shifted so he was facing me. “But sure looks like it was true, that she found what she was looking for pretty damn quick after that. Then of course it became a chicken-or-egg argument—that I had pushed her away with my lack of confidence in our relationship and not the other way around.”
I sighed, head resting on the back of the couch. “Jonah didn’t want anyone to know about us until I broke it off.” I raised my glass of orange juice toward him in a mock toast to our own relationship shortcomings.
“If it makes you feel any better, it was obvious anyway. I knew the second I met you. To watch the two of you together, well. You don’t have the best poker face, kid.”
“It’s embarrassing, in hindsight.” I’d fallen for Jonah because he took an interest in me, because he didn’t know anything about me other than what he’d learned in his classroom. It was a thrill when he smiled at a comment I’d made, his face lighting up, surprised. It was a thrill when he’d sent me a text that night, telling me, I’ve been thinking about what you said in class all day. It was thrilling to imagine myself as that person.
“Well, we learn, I guess. I learned I don’t want to get involved with anyone hung up on anyone else, even if it’s just the idea of someone,” Bennett said. “Also made me think twice about ever dating a colleague again.”
He was holding his breath, and I knew he was saying something more.
“To be perfectly honest, I thought you weren’t interested in women, maybe.”
He laughed, surprisingly loud. “Do you think anyone who doesn’t hit on you is gay?”
“Yes,” I said, and he laughed again. “That’s the medicine talking.” It wasn’t just anyone. It was someone who spent as much time with me as he did. But who still kept his distance, kept a part of him closed off. Or maybe we were just too alike.
“Am I a colleague?” I asked, because the rules on this were fuzzy.
“Ish,” he said, grinning. “To be clear, I have not been waiting around for you to get over yourself. I like this.” He gestured to the space between us on the couch. The distance. Or the comfort.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be having this conversation when there’s a crime scene outside my house and I’m hopped up on painkillers.”
“No, this is exactly the right time to do it, so that if it turns out I’ve read the whole thing wrong, we can both chalk it up to a medicine haze, and you’ll forget about it in the chaos of everything else happening.”
Even now, I was comfortable, and I didn’t know whether it was the buzz of the pills or him. I wasn’t good at this, at knowing how to build a long-term connection. But he leaned closer, like he was going to tell me a secret, and then he did: “I was fucking terrified,” he said, his hand shaking in the space between us. I grabbed it, just to get it to stop—because it scared me, the intensity of the reaction. But I understood how a trauma could alter your frame of reference. How, when tragedy was averted, the reaction might swing to the other extreme.
“I’m okay,” I said.
He squeezed my hand once, let it drop between us. “I’m really glad.”
My phone chimed again.
Bennett pulled away, rolled his eyes. “You better get back to him so we don’t have to listen to this all day.”
I picked the phone up, scrolled through Jonah’s string of messages, feeling nothing. Bennett stood, and I caught him staring out the window. I wrote back to Jonah: This is a really bad time. Please stop calling.
“What do you think happened out there?” I asked. Elyse had provided a safe theory, but I knew Bennett’s would cut closer to the truth.
“I think we’re about to find out,” he said.
I craned my neck, even though of course I knew. Detective Rigby was on her way.
TRANSCRIPT—WPBC CHANNEL 9
OCTOBER 19, 2000, 7:17 P.M.
We interrupt the scheduled programming with some breaking news. Arden Maynor, the little girl who was swept away during a storm in Widow Hills, Kentucky, has been found. We repeat, Arden Maynor has been located.
Early reports indicate that she is alive but trapped. After nearly three days of searching, a cheer erupted outside the volunteer headquarters.
We’re trying to get to the scene, and as soon as we do, we will bring you right there. Until then, stay tuned.
CHAPTER 11
Saturday, 4:30 p.m.
BENNETT LET DETECTIVE RIGBY inside. He introduced himself, shaking her hand.
Her gaze slid from Bennett to me, sitting on the couch, leg elevated on the coffee table. “I’m glad you’ve got people checking in on you, Olivia,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” I said, and it was true. It was a terrible thing that had happened, but terrible things happened everywhere—I saw them come in every day at work.
My friends had come to help. It didn’t have to be how it was in the past.
She sat in the armchair beside the couch, and Bennett took our empty glasses to the kitchen, giving us the illusion of privacy.
“Did you take my advice and write down your memories of yesterday evening? I’d like to revisit a few points.”
I shook my head. “No, sorry, the medicine made me fall asleep pretty much as soon as we got back. I just got up.” I gestured to my wet hair as evidence.
“May I, then?” she asked, motioning to the notebook on her lap, the folder underneath.
“Sure.”
“I want to start here. I was wondering, did you run to Mr. Aimes’s house because you saw him awake in the house somehow?”
I blinked twice, trying to find my bearings. This was a trait I generally liked in people, when they were no-nonsense, straight to the point—telling me what they wanted of me, so there was no confusion. But I felt caught on my heels, and I was careful not to say something before I’d had a second to think things through.
“No, it was just instinct.” I hoped she didn’t ask why. It was the same question I’d been asking myself. Why there instead of my own home, where my phone had been left behind? Whether I thought there was still something out there; whether the thing I feared was myself.
“And what was he doing when you arrived?” she asked.
I couldn’t remember. There were parts that stood out in my mind: the phone, the body, the running, the bathroom, the gun. But there were already gaps forming, mundane details that I’d failed to hold on to.
Anyway, she was asking the wrong questions, focusing on the wrong element. I’d been prepared for questions about the sound I’d heard, the body I’d found. My own actions. Not about Rick.
I stopped talking, didn’t want to say something to incriminate him when he’d done so much to cover for me.
“Rick is a friend,” I said. “I went there because it’s where I felt safest.”
She continued staring, clicked her pen once. “Walk me through what he did after you arrived.”
I closed my eyes, trying to see. “He went to check outside. I don’t know. I was in the bathroom.”
“He checked before calling 911. Any reason why?”
Yes: for me. To make sure we knew what he was calling in.
“Neither of us thought to call 911. I wasn’t thinking at all. It’s not like we’ve dealt with dead bodies before.”
“That’s not entirely true,” she said, her calm face belying the subtle accusation.
“I work in hospital administration. I don’t deal with patients,” I snapped back.
I heard dishes in the sink, and her eyes cut to the side before sliding back my way. “You know about Mr. Aimes’s wife, right?”
“I know she died, that he lives all alone.” Had he seen her body back then, too? Had he needed to call it in himself? Had she taken her last breath at their home and not at the hospital?
“Do you know how his wife died?”
I shook my head, not wanting to say: I never asked. I didn’t want to pry. Neither of us dug too far in the other’s life, and it was there that I found comfort and safety.
She took a slow breath, dropped her voice. “I was just a kid. A senior in high school. Gunshot.” She punctuated the word with her hand, thumb and pointer finger in the shape of a gun. “One of those guns he keeps in his house. I’m sure you’ve seen them, just sitting there in a case in their hall. Officially ruled suicide, but I’ve heard things.”
“What sort of things?”
She shrugged. “Like I said, I knew his son, Jared. I was a couple of years younger, but my brother was friends with him, used to hang out up here a bunch. Mr. Aimes built this house for him, to keep him here. Expected his son to stay right here, can you imagine? My brother said it was oppressive. Mr. Aimes liked to control things, it seems.”
She kept talking, but I was picturing the gun under the sink. The cabinet down the hall full of shotguns. The one he tried to give me for protection. Maybe Elyse was wrong; maybe it was a gunshot and not a box cutter. Maybe that was the sound that drew me outside to begin with—
“His son took off soon after. I think, until then, it was his mother that kept him here. But after?” She shook her head. “I think it’s telling that he couldn’t look at his father after. That he couldn’t live here anymore. Mr. Aimes held on to this place for years, hoping he’d come back. Jared got married, has a kid. Tell me, Olivia, have you seen his son visit in all the time you’ve been here?” She let that sink in as she made herself more comfortable, settling back in the chair. She didn’t even need me to answer.
I used to believe most people were good, or at least had good intentions. They mobilized to save you. They rallied in a crisis. The people of Widow Hills demanded more action, and they got it.
I believed that firmly until the ten-year anniversary, when I realized that some of those same good people felt they were owed something. That there was a scorecard, always, being kept. And I had not reciprocated what had been owed. By then I was firmly in the negative.
“How long ago?” I asked, because I was living in his house. A house I’d once thought was a happy place, a place built with two hands and good intentions.
“Would be about a decade now,” she said. And the place had sat empty all this time. “No one wanted to live so close to a man who was a suspect in his wife’s death, unofficial or not.” She shook her head. “He shouldn’t be keeping all those guns there. Not at his age.”
I didn’t know what to say, because I agreed. But I also wondered if I’d run there last night because I knew he had them. Because there was safety in that illusion.
“Just be careful here,” she continued. “Be careful who you trust. You’re walking into something with history, and you don’t know the whole story.”
I thought of Rick in my backyard early this morning. Rick asking me about my conversation with the detective. Had he been concerned that she’d already told me and was there to do damage control?
But. He’d covered for me. He could’ve easily said: I found Liv asleep outside the night before. And as far as I knew, he hadn’t.
Detective Rigby pulled the folder from under her notebook. “Okay, I’ve got something to show you.” Like she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. A part one to guide the story, shake something loose in me. Change the framework of the context. “He’s not from here, the man you found.” I could feel Bennett standing just on the other side of the kitchen entrance. Detective Rigby’s story had worked its way inside, changing my perspective.
Maybe it was an intruder.
Maybe Rick had seen him first.
It would explain why he was awake when I showed up, why he didn’t take out the gun for protection—because he already knew what had happened.
The detective had a photo in her hand, and she laid it on the coffee table. I held my breath, thinking it would be a photo from the scene. Eyes closed, life drained from him.
But it wasn’t. In the photo, the man was alive. He had salt-and-pepper close-cropped hair, deep-set eyes, and a completely neutral expression. The white of the background made me think license or passport.
“Oh,” I said. Those eyes. Under the ball cap. A tip of the head. The way his mouth moved when he said my name. Olivia, right?
“Do you know this man?” Detective Rigby asked, leaning closer, like she could read something in my expression.
“No,” I said. “Yes. I don’t know him, but I saw him once. I don’t know who it is.”
“Where did you see him?”
“Outside the G and M yesterday morning. He said my name like he knew me.” I’d thought he was a journalist, watching me, waiting for me. Maybe he was. But then this was about me. Still, maybe Rick saw him, watching me.
A little overprotective.
A little fast with the trigger.
“Was he following you?” the detective asked, her voice growing faster, tighter. Giving away her excitement. “What did he want?”
How desperately I wanted to keep the past where it belonged. I could feel the stirring of panic—if he was a journalist, they’d want to know why. The sinking of my stomach, the numbness in my limbs, the room too hot, muscles suddenly wound tight with the urge to move—my body fighting back.
“I don’t know. I only saw him the once. I didn’t like the way he was watching me, so I left. He said he knew me, I said he didn’t. That was pretty much it.” It was instinct, how I answered with the bare minimum required to craft a scene. Giving the necessary facts while leaving out the context. “Who is he?” I asked. There were other possibilities. A man asking for directions. Someone who liked what he saw and followed me home.
“Name’s Sean Coleman. His license says he’s from Kentucky. We’re still in the process of tracking down his next of kin, so we need to keep this between us for the moment.”
The porch light flickered in my peripheral vision, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“What?” I said, though I wasn’t sure if any noise escaped at all. My throat felt dry, and the air turned cold and empty.
The detective’s eyes latched on to mine.
“His name,” I said. “What did you say?” I had to make sure I was hearing it right. That I was exactly where I thought I was, in the present. That the dream or the nightmare wasn’t rising up and overlapping.
“Sean Coleman. Fifty-two years old. You know the name?”
My ears started ringing. It was a name forever tied to mine. In every article, every news story. Too common a name to turn up on its own in a search, but add Sean Coleman and Arden Maynor, and there he would be. His hand reaching into the grate. Circling my wrist. I’d heard the story a thousand times.
His photo beside mine in the news broadcast. The hero, looking off to the side. He looked so young then.
The moment I’d been found was played over and over again. That woman reporter, interviewing my mother as the news came in.
In that moment, she was every mother, and I was every child. It aired again on the five-year anniversary in every special broadcast, and again on the ten-year. It played to emotions; it was the video that people remembered the most.
But there was another clip, one that hadn’t endured quite as long. It was a little grainy, a little disorganized; you couldn’t see our faces. But it was the moment that counted.
Sean Coleman, the man who had found me.
Bennett was there now, standing just inside the living room, listening.
Four walls closing in, and nowhere to go, no way to escape.
The past had found me. It was here. It was time.
“Yes,” I said. “I know the name.”
TRANSCRIPT OF LIVE REPORT—WTKY CHANNEL 3
OCTOBER 19, 2000, 7:43 P.M.
DON MULLER: Welcome to the viewers who are just tuning in. We’ve got Emma Lyons on the scene, and what you’re about to see is some pretty dramatic imagery. Emma, can you tell us what we’re looking at?
EMMA LYONS: Don, right now we’re just beyond the perimeter set up by the rescue operation. We’ve got a pretty clear shot through the trees to that clearing, where the activity is happening. Fred, if you zoom in there… Don, let me know if you can see that all right? Can you see the man near the ground?
DM: Yes, we can see him.
EL: The man in the green shirt, with his back to us—he’s the one, we believe, who found Arden Maynor. Look closely. Over his shoulder, there’s a hand holding on to the fabric of his shirt. That, we believe, is the hand of six-year-old Arden Maynor, trapped under the grate. Her hand is gripping the back of his shirt. She’s alive. And not only that—it seems she’s conscious.
DM: Incredible. Absolutely incredible.
EL: I almost can’t believe it myself, Don. It’s miraculous.
DM: What’s the scene like there, Emma?
EL: You can absolutely feel the excitement in the air. There’s an energy in the crowd. But they still have to find a way to get her out.
DM: Can you fill us in a little on anything you’ve heard about the ongoing rescue operation?
EL: Of course. They’re being very careful. They don’t want to do anything to disturb her. The lid to the drainage pipe there is sealed pretty good. We hear the man who found her fastened a belt around her to hold her close. They’re reinforcing those safety measures right now, so that she remains safe, first of all. They’re going to have to stay like this for a while, until they figure it out—the best way forward. This access point is actually not one that’s mapped on the city system, but something older, from the original system, back when this area was a mining community. So there’s a bit of confusion over how best to reach her. They’re about to begin drilling through the surrounding earth, to see what they’re dealing with.
