Abe closed his eyes.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Which knocks one from your coincidences.”
“Still leaving far too many to call them coincidences. Connections, not coincidences. I have to look at them that way.”
“But I still don’t get why they’d lie. Why call the second baby Spencer and change the first baby’s name to Ben? That deception travels back twenty years. The girls have been disappearing for four.”
Abe took a piece of paper and drew a line down the center. He wrote Spencer’s name on one side and Ben’s on the other, detailing in bullet points what they knew about each man, which was far less on Ben’s side.
“I’m not concerned about whether Virginia Crow and Byron Crow were involved. I wonder if we have two deeply disturbed men, because of whatever mischief Virginia and Byron were up to twenty years ago.”
“You think their neglect created murderers?”
He leveled his gaze at her.
“What do you think a murderer is, Hazel? A monster who crawls out of the sewer? He’s a man with a family, sometimes with a wife and a white picket fence. Let me tell you what I’ve learned about studying murderers. They don’t grow up in families like the Brady Bunch.
“A weird, blended family where everyone is smiling and there’s too many kids to keep track of?”
He didn’t smile.
“In a happy, balanced, healthy household. They’re often beaten, sometimes sexually abused. Those things might not create killers, but they tip the scales. This backstory on Ben and Spencer reads like the biography of a killer. Their mom is cheating with her husband’s brother who lives on the other side of the woods, and their father dies mysteriously. The kids are neglected, possibly abused.”
“How do you know the kids were neglected and abused?” Hazel thought of the woman from 311 Sapphire, likely Spencer’s mother. Had she seemed negligent? No, the opposite, actually. She came across as protective, even possessive. She hadn’t mentioned her little trip to Abe, fearing his response.
“A retired cop and a midwife both told me the older child looked neglected. No one can read people like a cop, and I know less about midwives, but I’m guessing they’re even better judges of character, especially when it concerns mothers and children. They both mentioned a cold mother and a sick, strange child. The midwife called Social Services.”
Hazel sighed. She didn’t want to feel sympathy for the man or men who abducted Orla, but as she studied the two mens’ names, she imagined babies, small children raised in a home of fear and lies. Did their mother hug them? Tell them she loved them? Hazel’s own mother had doted on her, adored her. Hazel knew nothing except love and safety in the presence of her mother. Who would she have become if her mother was cruel and withheld affection?
“Where do we go from here?” Hazel asked.
Abe tugged on his beard and tapped his foot beneath the table.
“It’s time to talk to Spencer.”
Chapter 40
Abe
“Spencer? Hey, wait up,” Abe called, hurrying to catch up with Spencer as he left his job at Dr. Marlou’s office, blazer slung over one shoulder and smiling as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
He faltered when he spotted Abe and stopped, covering his momentary disquiet with indifference.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“Not in the flesh, but you might have seen me in the paper. I write for Up North News.” Abe stuck out his hand.
Spencer eyed it for several seconds before offering his in return.
Abe shook Spencer’s hand, squeezing harder than necessary. The man pulled his hand away and fished in his pocket for his keys.
“Did you need something?” Spencer asked when Abe followed him to his car.
“Just following up on a tip about a gold sports car.”
Spencer halted, glancing at his gold Corvette but not walking over to it.
“What kind of tip?” he asked.
“Well, to give you some context, I’ve been investigating a series of disappearances in northern Michigan. Six young women have vanished in the last four years.”
Spencer gazed at him, face hard, eyes expressionless.
“Have you heard about them?”
Spencer shook his head.
“Nope, but I make it a point only to read The Detroit Free Press. Most of these northern papers are a bunch of stories about farm disputes and prized heifers.”
Abe grinned and nodded.
“Prefer your news a little edgier? Violent, even?”
Spencer’s face darkened.
“I’ve gotta jet. Was that all, or…?”
“Oh sure, sure. I just wondered if the police had talked to you yet? What with your driving that beauty over there, and multiple sightings of a gold sports car in the vicinity where the women disappeared.”
Spencer’s eyes flicked a second time to his car.
“No, they haven’t. And I’m sure they’d be wasting their time.”
Spencer didn’t wait to see more. He walked briskly away and climbed into his car.
Abe shifted in bed, kicking the covers off, squirming in the heat. The fan whirred lazily overhead, doing little to circulate the muggy air. He flipped onto his belly, and then his side. He needed to sleep. Gazing between and beyond his legs, he squinted toward the clock over the microwave but couldn’t make out the neon green numbers. Near the foot of the bed, his comforter shifted as if someone had brushed it aside.
Abe stared at the crumpled blanket and the white sheet beneath it. As he watched, something slid over the edge of the bed. It moved toward his foot, and as he puzzled at the thing, it came into focus: a hand. A hand streaked with mud, fingernails torn and bloody, reached toward his leg.
Abe sat up abruptly, kicking out his legs and scrambling off the bed. He stood next to the mattress, heaving for breath, awake now. It had been a dream: the insomnia, the hand - a nightmare too real, except the heat of the dream had been replaced by bitter cold. He shivered, standing naked, gooseflesh covering his body.
Across the room, the clock blinked 3:11 a.m.
Bleary-eyed, he lurched into the kitchenette, filled a glass of water, and gulped it down. He drank a second before pulling on a sweatshirt and pants and brewing a pot of coffee. He filled a mug, slipped on sandals, and left the apartment.
Traverse City slept. In the halo of streetlights, he walked. The veil of fog gradually lifted from his mind, chased away by the coffee, his breath, and the starry sky overhead. Far off, an ambulance siren wailed. Abe listened to it and wondered at the source. A homicide, a fight outside a bar, an old man falling from a bed. Every second, another tragedy befell someone. No one escaped the ravenous clutches of death.
He thought of Dawn with her boisterous laugh, despite her soft, feminine voice. He remembered the first time he’d heard her laugh as she sat on the edge of her desk in high school English, gazing at her friend’s caricature of the devil in Dante’s Inferno. The friend had depicted the beast with long, stringy hair filled with bows and Christmas ornaments before scrawling above her drawing: Hell is Christmas in July. The laugh had caught Abe off guard, such a deep, soul-shaking sound, and when she’d noticed him staring at her, she winked and smiled. In the months after her disappearance, he dreamed of her laughter, and woke sick and filled with dread every morning when he faced another sunrise without Dawn.
He swallowed the last of his coffee, dumped the dredges in the grass, and made his way to the lake. Hands planted on the iron railing that flanked the water edge of Grand Traverse Bay, he stared into the shifting waters. The metallic dark of sky and lake varied only by the spray of stars overhead.