“Petey says go deep or go home,” she said. “She says you’ll know what that means.”
With that, she left us in the basement.
As before, the space was dark save for our small corner. In the stillness, I smelled Finn’s cologne, and old paper, and a musty odor, like the air inside a summer cabin that’s been closed up all winter.
Finn pulled a second chair over from another study carrel. He removed his wallet and cell phone and keys and placed them to the side and then sat down and took a stack of newspaper clippings from the top of the messy pile.
“What did she mean by that? Who’s Petey?”
“Petey is the parrot,” I said. “And I have no idea.”
I joined Finn and reached for one of the heavy, gray three-ring binders on the table. When I opened it, a dead black spider, its desiccated corpse as light as air, fell into my lap. I brushed the bug away and it struck me that the last person who had touched this stuff was Nicky.
Had he really found something here, in these old articles and photos and scraps of a forgotten time, something the rest of us had missed?
The binder was stuffed with newspaper clippings from the spring and summer of 1985. A few of them covered the sad story of Rose Noonan, the young woman whose strangled body was found tangled in the reeds on the banks of the river in August. Her murder, like the Woodsman murders, remained unsolved. The police always figured her killer was a drifter, a highwayman. Rose had lived in town only a few months, and judging from these clippings, her death, while shocking to Cedar Valley, didn’t light a candle to the disappearance earlier in the summer of the two local boys.
I held up a black-and-white Xerox copy of Rose Noonan’s driver’s license. She was pretty, with dark curly hair and laughing eyes. She wore a necklace with a dangling charm, and earrings that kissed her jawbone. “Remember her?”
Finn nodded. “The forgotten one.”
I looked at him. After a moment, he spoke again. “You know what I mean. She’s the forgotten one. When you think of 1985 and Cedar Valley, you think of the McKenzie boys. But there were three victims that summer. Four if you count the mayor’s death. I always figured the stress from everything that happened brought on his heart attack.”
“You think it was the same guy?”
Finn laughed at my expression. “Now hang on, that’s not what I meant. Different M.O. She was assaulted and strangled and thrown in the river like a piece of trash, a month after the boys disappeared. The kids weren’t touched that way. They were kept somewhere, killed, and then buried, properly, in the woods. I just meant that no one ever talks about her. You know they couldn’t even determine a date of death for her? Her body had been in the water too long.”
He was right; no one did talk about the woman.
“Do you think it would have made a difference three years ago, if you and Moriarty had gone through all this stuff?”
Finn shrugged. “I don’t know. Bottom line is that Nicky was gone. I suppose it would have been interesting to know about, but really, the only reason we’re down here now is because Nicky was murdered. Back then ‘all this’ would have been just a quirky footnote to Nicky’s life and tragic accidental death.”
I nodded and again thought he was probably right. Finn stood and leaned over the table and went through a few more of the piles.
“Why do you think he came back?” I asked.
“Who, Nicky?”
“No, Frank Sinatra. Yeah, Nicky. Sounds like they’ve got people drop in and out of the circus all the time. He had to have known what the next stop was-Cedar Valley. Why would he return? He could have checked out for a week or two and joined back up with the circus in Idaho,” I said. “What’s different now?”
Finn sat down and hugged a stack of files and folders against his chest. He played along. “You abandon your family-your parents, your sister, your grandfather, your friends-and run away for three years. You change your appearance. You’re running, or hiding, from someone. What is the one thing that could bring you back?”
I ran through the last few years, looking for some change, some difference, something new. The People magazine article on the Bellingtons from a month or so back came to mind. It was a two-page spread on the Bellingtons that touched on the tragic loss of their only son; Ellen’s former career as an actress; and Terry’s struggle with cancer. “His dad. Nicky came back because of his dad.”
“The cancer?” Finn asked. He thought about it. “I think you might be right. If I thought my dad was dying, that would be enough to bring me home.”
I nodded. “Something to think about. It’s been splashed all over the news, maybe Nicky saw it in an article somewhere.”
Finn was into the files and folders now. “It seems like there’s a good mix here of reporting from ’85 and from 2011.”
He handed me a photocopy, this one the front page of the Valley Voice dated two days after I found the skull. There was a photograph of Chief Angel Chavez and me. Under the image was a headline that read “Missing No More-McKenzie Boys Found in Local Woods.”
I scanned the first paragraph.
In a stunning discovery early this week, the remains of Tommy and Andrew McKenzie were found in shallow graves in the woods a few miles off Highway 50 by backcountry skiers Gemma Monroe and Brody Sutherland. Monroe, an officer with the Cedar Valley Police Department, declined to comment for this article, but Chief Chavez issued a statement, calling the discovery “an opportunity for closure for the families, and for the town.” The disappearance of the two children in 1985 will be reopened as a murder investigation. In town, a new title has already been bestowed upon the case: The Woodsman Murders.
I stopped reading. The byline was Missy Matherson; at the time, she had been a bit reporter for the Voice and had not yet climbed the ranks to television anchor. Even then, she’d irritated the hell out of me and had been the main reason I’d declined to comment.
That, and what would I have said?
That already I felt finding the bodies had altered the course of my life?
That when I closed my eyes, I saw Andrew’s skull grin at me, his eye sockets wan and empty, his teeth even and white?
The dreams hadn’t yet started but they were sure as hell on their way.
Finn muttered, “Shit, these shouldn’t be here.”
He held up a stack of manila file folders, each stuffed with loose-leaf sheets of paper. He angled the cover of the folder on top and I saw the distinct blue-and-green stamp of the police department emblem.
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Ours?”
He nodded. They were classified reports. How long they’d been down here, tucked among these public records, was anyone’s guess.
“What are the dates?”
Flipping the first few folders opened, Finn scanned the contents. “From 1985. They’re from the original missing persons investigation.”
“Well, at least it won’t be our butts that will be in the hot seat,” I said.
If case files from 2011 had been down here, free for any person off the street to find, there would have been hell. But most of the cops from ’85 were retired, dead, or had moved away.
“Uh-oh,” Finn said quietly.
He stopped reading the folder in his hands and put it on the bottom of the stack.
“What?”
He shook his head. “It’s nothing. I just remembered, I had an appointment this afternoon.”
“You’re many things, Finn, but a good liar you aren’t,” I said. “Give me the damn thing.”
“I really don’t want to,” he said, but he handed it to me anyway.
A sticker affixed inside the folder read September 18, 1985. Interview 245-A, Officers Dannon and Cleegmont. Subject Daniel David Moriarty. 4:15pm. Moriarty residence, 1763 Lantern Lane, Cedar Valley.
“Our Moriarty?”