The Girl from Widow Hills, page 12
Looking back after so much time, Arden Maynor felt like a role I’d played once. A character I’d read about—her backstory in a book. Describe her in three words: brave; capable; survivor. Play the role until you believe it. Until you become it.
But I was no longer that girl. I’d shaken her off, piece by piece.
In high school, I’d found my own skill: running. One that required mental strength more than physical skill, though no one seemed to believe me when I said that. I wasn’t built like a runner. My legs were shorter than the average runner’s, but I could cut through the air, and if I went out fast, no one could catch me. It defied logic, because I couldn’t catch someone else. Never seemed to gain on them. But I knew something no one else did. I’d learned long ago that endurance was a feat of the mind and not the body, so I gave over to that someone else. A brief disconnect. The switch flipped. Another voice in my head, and all it ever said was Hold on—as if my life depended on it.
But for years after, my mother wore that bracelet. It didn’t matter that I was no longer that girl. She held on to that image with a fierceness I’d never understood.
I’d stopped noticing it only after the ten-year anniversary, when things started disappearing from the house: things she sold, things she lost. By the time I left home, I thought it had long been traded for something else.
And now it was here. Here, out of the box, in my living room. Had I been wearing it—had I lost it—before the body of Sean Coleman was discovered outside my house?
Finally, I was alone. No Bennett, no Elyse, no Detective Rigby, no Rick stopping by. Just this house and its secrets—waiting for me to uncover them.
TRANSCRIPT OF LIVE INTERVIEW WITH EMMA LYONS AND SEAN COLEMAN
OCTOBER 22, 2000
EMMA LYONS: Mr. Coleman, will you walk us through how you found her? How it happened?
SEAN COLEMAN: It was luck, I found her. That’s all. I was walking home from the search, a shortcut back to where I’d parked my truck. The streets in Widow Hills have been lined with cars for days, you know? So I was just walking back. And that’s when I saw.
EL: What did you see?
SC: I saw her hand, and I knew. I knew it was her.
EMMA: What did you do?
SEAN: I called for help. I grabbed her wrist and I called for help but no one heard me. So I took my belt and secured it around her waist, to hold her closer. And I called for help over and over until someone came. I didn’t want to leave her there. It felt like forever before someone finally heard me and showed up.
EMMA: Did you say anything to her?
SEAN: Yeah, I just kept repeating myself. I told her: I’ve got you. I’ve got you. It’s okay now, Arden. Open your eyes.
CHAPTER 13
Sunday, 6:30 a.m.
THE PROBLEM WITH SLEEPING all day, I learned, was that I would be up all night. The events of the last few days and nights had recalibrated my circadian rhythm, and it was doing something to my head.
The first thing I’d done after Bennett left yesterday was check my mother’s things. I’d gone to the closet to find the box that I’d left on a shelf in the upper corner, bringing the stepstool from the kitchen to reach. But the box was on the floor—in a back corner, on the bare wooden floor.
Everything else was as I’d left it inside: the sweater, the canvas tote bag, the phone. Even the plastic bag that had contained the bracelet.
No box cutter, though.
The bracelet sat on my bedside table, and I brushed it into the drawer below—a compulsion to keep it close and hidden at the same time.
The rest of the house seemed both strange and familiar. Signs of Bennett’s organizing or Elyse’s curiosity. Things that had been used or moved, but not by me. The further I searched, the more I wondered: Had someone been through my desk drawers? My bedroom closet? For what purpose? But on second glance, I couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t tell whether everything was exactly the same as I’d left it, after all. If I was remembering some other time.
It could get like this at the hospital, too, with the same daily routines, the same visitors in the gift shop and faces in the cafeteria. Until a month had passed and a new group had cycled through, but I couldn’t tell when the shift had happened.
I’d thought about taking one of the remaining few pills in that vial from Dr. Britton to reset my internal clock, but I didn’t like the thought of being in such a deep state when I was alone over here. Not now. Not when someone had been watching and I hadn’t realized it. Not when Rick had a past I hadn’t understood. Not when someone had ended up dead.
As the sun was rising, things appeared to be getting back to normal outside. The police had finished processing the scene, and the cars had left sometime in the night. All that remained from the scene of the crime was a flutter of yellow tape in the distance.
My kitchen still smelled like yesterday’s dinner, and I took the trash bag to the outside bin, tucked against the side of the house, facing away from Rick’s place. It was the first time I’d stepped outside that I hadn’t felt like I was being watched.
Outside, I tipped the large bin to the side so I could swing the bag over the edge, but something clattered at the bottom first. I stood on my toes, peering in—and saw the remnants of a glass light bulb.
Bennett? I was pretty sure he’d brought it in yesterday wrapped inside a bag, dropped it in the kitchen trash.
The only place missing a bulb was upstairs, in the attic space.
A chill ran up my spine, across my neck, down my arms. That opened window, that sliver of glass between my toes—
I dumped the trash and headed back inside, down the hall, behind the door that looked like a coat closet. I was glad for the daylight when I climbed the stairs. The attic space felt too warm, too enclosed, but the light slanted through the beveled glass windows, casting shadows across the exposed hardwood.
Standing in the spot beneath the empty bulb socket, I bent down, looking closer at the hardwood. The sunlight caught on a tiny piece of glass between the floorboards. My eyes scanned the surrounding area: another piece to the right, catching the light—both so small they had become wedged between the wood beams.
Behind me, closer to the steps: a droplet of blood that I hadn’t noticed in the dark.
I looked up at the empty socket, realizing what must’ve happened. Somehow, before Rick found me outside that first night, I’d been up here. I’d broken a light bulb. I’d stepped in it. I’d cleaned it up.
The disorientation felt nauseating. Or maybe it was being in this room—the inability to take a deep breath, to imagine the open air, a way out.
I backed to the stairwell, unable to imagine what had drawn me up here in the first place.
Had I opened the window that night?
At least now I knew why I’d been outside that evening. I’d cleaned up the broken glass, brought it outside, dumped it in the bin. Maybe I’d tried to get back inside before realizing I’d locked myself out.
The details were slippery, impossible to get a firm grip on. I felt like I was creating a story from scratch. It was a story that made sense, based on the pieces left behind.
But Thursday night felt like an entirely different lifetime.
It was getting harder and harder to pull the events surrounding Friday night into focus, even. Like, as with twenty years ago, something too large to process had happened, and the connection in my memory had snapped and twisted, and nothing looked the same anymore.
I was living clearly in the after, now. After Sean’s body had been found at the edge of my property. After the past had found me again.
These were the facts: Bennett had bought enough food for two but left abruptly the previous afternoon; and Elyse had never stopped at my house on her way in to work, like she’d told Bennett she would.
This was how it started.
Ten years ago, when the old interviews aired, there were the classmates and teachers who got closer, who wanted me to confide; who wanted to be part of the story, always willing to spin a new piece of gossip after. People who saw me as a conquest. Like something to be dissected and studied.
There was the other side, too. People who didn’t like that they’d missed something, who wanted to be the center of their own story; people who left, either abruptly or slowly. But the result was the same, and I could see the signs coming this time.
The facts made things bad enough; media attention would make it worse.
I blamed the media attention of ten years earlier for pushing my mother into a perilous descent. During the first handful of years after the accident, she was able to feign normalcy. Even though she wasn’t sleeping, not when she was supposed to. The lingering effects of trauma, in hindsight: how she’d check in on me every hour, every thirty minutes, every ten. Overinvolved in every activity, every interaction. Unable to still her mind from the worry of whether it might happen again.
The case made all of us, and then it unmade us.
My mother was tragic until she was neglectful. Tossed to the media with no training. Given money for her story and then torn apart for the very same tale years later. She was dissected, piece by piece, in articles and interviews and think pieces. And she dulled it with the most readily available remedy.
The only people who showed up for her were the ones who wanted something from her in return: a piece of the story or the money. An old boyfriend named Nick Valdene, who’d been in and out of our life since before the accident, and who, from the way they talked, may or may not have been my father. I hoped not, but it didn’t matter. He was gone again by the time she’d written a check to pay off his debts. And then new boyfriends, new friends, the wrong type; the very wrong type.
After the ten-year anniversary, and her talk-show appearance, the renewed attention, people started making contact of every kind. The calls began. The letters started coming. Every single kind, and you didn’t know which until you opened it. Messages on the answering machine, wanting to know how we’d put the money to use. The real question, implied underneath, was of course this: How had we put my miraculous survival to use? Was I worth it?
They wanted to see it, the physical manifestations of their generosity and hope.
They came from far away and close to home. High school was a minefield.
Around that time, I became something else: the girl who got attention. Who wouldn’t give interviews. Who wasn’t grateful enough. Who forgot where she had come from.
Who was still, years later, trying to escape.
We had to leave. My mother didn’t like it, either. Didn’t like the version of her reflected in their questions. In the things they would see in her answers. It was happening to both of us, this dismantling of our lives.
When we moved to Ohio and I registered at the new school, I started going by my middle name. Some people knew, but few people cared. It was a thing my new classmates couldn’t really remember, either. By the time I enrolled in college, I’d made it official, changing my last name as well. Believing that the only way to escape was to become someone new.
By this point, Arden Maynor was as much a mystery to me as she was to anyone else.
Luckily, most of the original donated funds were tied up in a trust to be accessed for college. Though my mother bled through the money from her appearances and book advance, she couldn’t touch that. The fund paid for my education, including my master’s, and supported me while I was in school. And the fund financed a big chunk of this very house.
I didn’t know whether it was an act of supreme cruelty or bravery that I turned her down when the trust transferred to my possession. It was the last I saw of my mother, the last I heard of her. And I hated that this was the image that remained: that too-skinny person, fidgeting, biting the side of her thumb, looking nervously over her shoulder. Another possible version of me.
Maybe I did feel like I needed to earn it, for all the people who helped us.
I thought I had made good choices with the money: anonymity and a fresh start, and that wasn’t nothing.
But now that was in danger. I could see it coming, that slide, threatening to bring me back to the start.
* * *
I CALLED ELYSE. I had made a mistake in keeping this from Bennett. I might not have known her as well, or for as long, but she had made herself a part of my daily life; she had confided in me about her accident, what had brought her to this field. I had to be the one to share the news, not let her find out like Bennett had, tainted with the feeling of betrayal. I wanted her to understand, and to understand the need to keep it quiet.
I hoped Bennett hadn’t called her to warn her, in a sudden shifting of allegiance.
That was the problem with the start of any story. You had to get ahead of it.
Her phone kept ringing until voicemail picked up, with her trademark perky tone: You’ve reached Elyse! Leave a message! Every statement Elyse made seemed to be punctuated by an exclamation point, or a comma, or an ellipsis as she left her thoughts midsentence, drifting, waiting for you to pick them up and continue.
“Hey, it’s Liv. Please give me a call when you get a chance.”
I checked the time. I could catch her in person before she left the hospital if I hurried.
* * *
I HEARD SOMEONE COMING before I reached my car, and I gripped my keys in my hand—how I used to prepare myself in college, the first time away from home, the points jutting out between the fingers of my fist, like there was danger lurking around every potential corner.
People following, people watching and waiting until I was alone.
But when I spun, it was just Rick, hands in the air, fingers faintly trembling. “It’s me. It’s just me.” He didn’t move any closer. My eyes drifted to the yellow tape caught in the bushes between our yards.
“Sorry,” I said, lowering my hand.
“Well, I was just coming to catch up, to talk about… You’ve had company, and then I figured you were sleeping, so I didn’t want to call and wake you.”
He was watching for me, though. How easily could he see what went on here from his house? There were trees and bushes between us, but I could see the glow of a window when he was awake. Rick fidgeted on his feet. And I wasn’t sure whether the thing that was stressing him was the body in his yard or what the detective might’ve told me. What he might’ve done.
“I have to run out. Do you need anything?” I asked. I often brought him what he needed. Like he’d told Detective Rigby, we looked out for each other.
“No, Liv. I’m all set. I’m just worried about you. About what they were saying…”
I flinched. “What were they saying?”
He frowned. “That you needed stitches. That you’d gotten hurt. And I didn’t know, I didn’t ask you then…” His throat moved before he continued. “I didn’t ask if you’d been hurt out there.”
I shook my head. “I tripped. Running to your house.” I heard the flutter of tape caught in the wind. I tried to reconcile the Rick I knew with the one Detective Rigby knew. Yes, he had a key. He knew where the spare had been. His light was on when I ran to his house that night.
I gritted my teeth. This was the detective, this was how it worked—the story planted by someone else, growing into its own thing, its own mess.
And I had to get ahead of it. “Listen, Rick, did they say anything about the man’s car? Was it nearby?”
“No. They showed me his picture, that’s all. No one’s telling me anything. Not who he is, not what he was doing here. Not how he got here. Though I’d imagine it’d be pretty hard to tell, what with all the animals, to know which way he came from. Whether he came in from the front road or somewhere in the back.”
The back. Our houses backed to trees, but the property eventually sloped down to a creek. I’d been that far only once. After the creek, the land crept upward toward someone else’s property, someone else’s home.
“I’m fine, Rick,” I said. “Call if you need anything, okay? I’ll be out for a bit.”
“The man who was here last night,” he said, stepping closer. “That your boyfriend?”
“Just a friend.” I unlocked the car, not needing to get into the specifics.
“Well, he was arguing with that other girl. Out front. I could hear it all the way from my house. I was working in the yard, cleaning up the mess from the police.”
Suddenly, I pictured Rick in my backyard when Elyse was here, just beyond the tree line. How close he had been. And how he’d noticed me walking to my car just now. Detective Rigby’s words about his relationship with his own son—that his attention was stifling. There could be an element of truth in that.
I opened the car door. “They’re very different personalities,” I said. I could picture it, Bennett telling Elyse she had to get home, get some sleep. Work protocol, and he was the one in charge. “But they’re both good people. Good friends.” God, how I needed that to be true.
* * *
I KNEW, AS SOON as I pulled into the hospital lot, that I’d missed her. She always parked her white car near the lot exit when she was working—for a fast escape, she joked. This was something else I had liked about her—this feeling that maybe she was always tallying the steps to her escape as well, but she had the confidence to joke about it. I wondered if I’d ever reach that point, if I weren’t so busy trying to hide it.
After circling the lot twice to be sure, I idled in an empty spot, called her cell once more, but hung up as soon as I got her voicemail again. Chances were, she went straight home after the night shift and fell asleep. She usually had Sunday off, and she probably needed the day to catch up. At least I hoped that was why she hadn’t gotten back to me yet.
* * *
THE G&M ON A Sunday morning looked about the same as any other morning. A scattering of cars, a vague sense of déjà vu, so I could almost picture the blue car, Sean Coleman’s forearms leaning on the hood, the rustle of the wrapper of his breakfast sandwich.
