Then one night, her son returned
His mind ruined by secrets and lies.
He started digging beneath the earth
Where the truth so often hides.
There was a slew of articles about Cooper’s first case as a private investigator, a cold case. A woman named Marla Holt had gone missing back in the eighties, and she was never found. There was always some suspicion surrounding the husband, but ultimately, because she had been having an affair, the police concluded that she’d run off on her family.
Last year, after the husband died, her son returned to The Hollows hoping to find out exactly what had happened to his mother. He discovered her body buried deep in The Hollows Wood next to an abandoned barn. And in finding her, he discovered the real truth of her death.
As I read the articles, my whole body started to shiver. Though it wasn’t quite the same set of circumstances, the similarities between that story and my own cut a deep valley of dread through me. The details, like the details of Harvey Greenwald’s suicide, just grazed the boundaries of my truth. Did he know me? Did Luke know who I was? The panic of the discovered liar was a drum beating in the back of my head. I wanted to race out the door, and go straight to that abandoned barn in The Hollows Wood. I needed to find out what he knew about me; it was a desperate and terrified drive. But I looked out my window and saw Cooper’s SUV idling in front of my building.
Like his pal Detective Chuck Ferrigno, the lead on Beck’s disappearance, Jones Cooper seemed like a nice guy. He was big and beefy, ruddy-faced and clean. He was the kind of guy who could wear a barn jacket and still look tough. He got out of the car to open the door for me. He waited until I climbed inside, then closed it carefully after me. His handshake had been warm and firm, but not too firm, the way some men use it to show how strong they are.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to take a ride with strange men?” he joked as he got into the driver’s seat. He had a scent, not cologne but something soapy, and crisp.
“Well, since Dr. Cooper seems to think you’re all right,” I said, “I figured you were a safe bet.”
“She is an excellent judge of character,” he said.
He started the engine and the big SUV rumbled to life. He pulled slowly onto the drive that led out of the school.
We passed by the crowd of volunteers still gathered in the parking lot. The gym was lit up brightly and milling with people. I knew it was where the police and Beck’s parents were running the command center. There were more news vans than there had been this morning. The story was heating up. Beck hadn’t used her phone or any of her credit cards since the day she went missing. I knew this from my last check on the Facebook page. I hadn’t heard from the police or from Beck’s parents. It seemed like I was being purposely kept out of the inner circle. But again, maybe that was just paranoia talking. Not everything is about me.
“Must be a hard time for you,” Cooper said.
I nodded, still staring out the window. I found I couldn’t use my voice, didn’t trust it not to betray me. I drew and released a deep breath.
“She’s my friend,” I said. “I hope she’s just pulling another one of her stunts. I really do.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Three-time runaway, right?”
I nodded.
“But never like this?” he said. “Causing so much worry?”
“No,” I admitted. “Usually she was in touch with someone after a day or so.”
As we pulled past the gym, I saw flashlight beams bouncing in the woods. They were still out there looking.
“Do you remember me?” he asked after a minute.
“Yes,” I said. “You worked Elizabeth’s case. You were there when they found her.”
He’d had a lot of questions for me back then. Someone said that they overheard Elizabeth and me arguing. Someone had heard me say: You can’t tell anyone, Liz. It’s not true. I didn’t have any memory of that event, just the floaty, foggy images that came back in my dreams. But there was no evidence of any foul play in Elizabeth’s death. So eventually, they dropped it.
“That’s right,” he said.
He’d been involved in a number of missing-persons cases over the course of his career, according to the Web. Though, of course, it was a small town with a small police department. So naturally, as the lead detective, he worked most of the big cases.
“Did you find anything today?” I asked. “I wanted to be out there. But-I just couldn’t go through it again.”
“I understand,” he said. “No one should have to go through a thing like that twice.”
Three times, I thought, but naturally didn’t say.
“We didn’t find anything,” he said. “Not a trace. The Hollows Wood knows how to keep a secret.”
I looked over at him to see if he was making some kind of an insinuation, but he didn’t look at me, just kept his eyes on the road. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. He was right. It did keep secrets.
By the time I’d gotten to the lookout point that night, Beck had trailed so far behind me that I figured she had turned around. I felt the unloading sensation I always felt there, as if I could drop all the bullshit of my life, put it down like a backpack filled with stone. I was glad she was gone. Part of me kept waiting for her to come through the trees, but she didn’t. And after a while I relaxed. There was a patch of icy, crunchy grass, and even though it was cold, I lay down on it, flat on my back, looking up at the stars. I could hear the breath of the wind and nothing else, not a hooting owl or critters moving over the leaves on the ground. I was bundled up tight in my wool coat, hat, hood, scarf, and gloves. So only the skin on my face was bitten by the cold.
How I craved solitude. All my life, even before the worst thing happened, even as a child, I just wanted to be alone. Out in the world, I had to hold it all in, all my dark thoughts, my anxieties, my twisted thoughts and fears. All the things that made me a misery to my mother, that caused me trouble in school, with other children. All the things that were quieted now with medication, I had to hold it all in as best I could. But alone, I could just let the tension unfurl. No eyes on me, no judgment, no whispers. They mark you, you know, when you’re different. Children can smell a freak and seek to ostracize him, eject the diseased member from the group-and rightly so. I’d be rid of myself if I could.
You might wonder why I wasn’t afraid to be alone in the haunted woods in the night. What went on inside my head was infinitely scarier. I was the monster hiding in the woods. I wasn’t afraid of anything out there.
Finally, after I lay there awhile and calmed myself down, I heard Beck moving through the trees.
“Goddammit,” she said breathlessly as she moved into the clearing. “You really like to make people work for it, don’t you?”
I was aggravated and relieved all at the same time, a familiar response to Beck’s arrival anywhere.
“I didn’t ask you to follow me, did I?” I said. I didn’t like the sound of my voice, sharp, deep, and angry.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean what I said.”
She sat herself heavily down beside me.
“I know you’re not fucking Langdon,” she went on. I still didn’t say anything. Her nearness was making me uncomfortable. She didn’t seem to notice, as usual, or care. She lay down beside me so that our faces were side by side, both of us looking up at the night sky. She reached out for my hand and I didn’t pull it away. She turned to look at me, but I kept my gaze up at the sky. It was safe and her eyes were not.
“Sometimes anger is the only emotion I can tease out of you,” she said softly. Her breath came out in white puffs.