The Girl In The Woods Part 11

Jason c.o.c.ked his head, a look of caution on his face. "What was your reaction?"

Diana stared at the tabletop, letting her eyes fade out of focus. She didn't intend it, but she realized she was shaking her head slightly back and forth.

"Diana?"

"I called her a wh.o.r.e."

Jason made a quick intake of breath, almost inaudible. He didn't say anything.

"I read her the Riot Act. I told her that Mom was sick, and the family was coming apart, and the last thing any of us needed was for her to go running the family name even further down by sleeping around town at parties where everybody would hear about it."

Diana spoke the words quickly, and once they were out, a silence again fell over the table. Diana felt as though she had been exposed, as though something ugly she had previously been able to keep buried deep within her had now been brought out and laid on the table for everyone to see. She wished the lights would go out so Jason couldn't see her.

"Her behavior didn't get any better after that. It got worse. She became wilder and wilder, sleeping around with a lot of different guys, drinking and partying. On the night she disappeared she went to a party. Apparently, she'd been sleeping with an older guy, a nineteen-year-old. Rachel didn't know he had a girlfriend. The girlfriend showed up at the party and went after Rachel. Physically. She punched Rachel in the stomach, doubled her over, and made her cry. People broke it up, but Rachel left the party crying. A different guy gave her a ride home. He dropped her off at the end of our street. He said she was fine when he left, quiet but fine. The police cleared him of any wrongdoing."

"Do you think he's involved?"

"I doubt it. I saw Rachel in the house after that. I was still awake, and I heard her come in. I went out into the hallway outside our bedrooms, and I saw her. She'd been crying. Her makeup was a mess, smeared all over her face. She looked like she'd been through the wringer." Diana paused. She took a deep breath. "I just shook my head at her. I didn't ask how she was doing, or what had happened. I just shook my head at her and went into my room and closed the door. About fifteen minutes later, I heard the front door open again. I looked out my bedroom window and saw Rachel walking up the road in the glow of the streetlights, going away from our house. That was it. That's the last time anybody saw her that we know of."

Diana waited for Jason to say something. Anything. He didn't speak right away. He sat there nodding, tapping his fingernail against the gla.s.s of the beer bottle.

"What are you thinking?" Diana said.

Jason took a moment to answer, then he said, "I think you want to help this Kay Todd woman because you feel guilty about everything that's happened to your family. You see this as your second chance."

"It's not a second chance," Diana said. "There is no second chance. That's gone."

"Then it's another chance to do something right. Any way you look at it, it's atonement. Something like this is never just a simple act."

"It's always tied to the past, to something that went before."

"Such is our fate," Jason said.

"I went to see my mom tonight. At the hospital. Driving back, I stopped and took a little walk in the woods, just like in the old days."

"Find anything?"

"I found myself alone in the middle of the woods. Searching. And I think I'm going to keep finding myself there from time to time unless I do something about this. Unless I try to put it to bed by helping Kay Todd. You never know. It might tie the knot somehow."

"Do you really think you're going to find anything?" Jason said. "The trail's awfully cold."

"I don't think I have any choice. But I really won't know until I look."

"You never know what you're going to find," Jason said. "You might not like it."

"I don't like what I know now, so how much worse can it get?"

"That might not be a question you want to ask. What are you going to do next?"

"Start talking to people around town. See what I can find."

"If you need my help..."

"I know," Diana said. "I know."

It was late, and the thought of going home to her empty apartment made Diana feel a little sick. She didn't know if she could bring herself to ask...

"You want to stay here tonight?" Jason said.

She smiled. "Yeah, that would be nice."

Diana slept better than she had in a while, certainly better than the night she had spent in the chair in her mother's hospital room. And she didn't dream, at least not the kinds of dreams that had come to her during that night at her mother's side, the kinds that were populated by Rachel and Kay Todd. Maybe it had been being with Jason, falling into his arms, stripping each other's clothes, losing herself in someone else for a brief period of time.

Diana slept deeply enough that she didn't hear Jason's phone ring just before six, and she didn't hear him showering and dressing. She didn't know anything was wrong or unusual until he placed his hand on her shoulder and whispered her name, bringing her awake.

"Hey."

"What is it?" Diana asked. "You're dressed already."

"They called me in, but you can stay here. Go back to sleep."

"What's wrong?" Diana asked. She could tell that he knew something that he didn't want to tell her. She thought of Dan. Something might have happened to Dan, but she didn't want to say it. "What is it?"

Jason looked down. He ran his hand over his head. "Okay. You'll find out soon enough. A girl, a student at Fields, went out for a bike ride yesterday. She hasn't come back. That's all I know, but I'll call you if I can."

"No. Wait. Tell me more."

"There is no more. She's probably just hurt or lost. It'll be okay."

But he didn't sound convinced. And Diana didn't believe him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

When Jason was gone, Diana climbed out of bed and turned the radio on. She tuned in during a Wall Street Report, an economics professor from Fields droning on and on about petroleum futures and interest rates, and Diana felt sorry for anyone who had to sit through one of his lectures on a Monday morning. So while he kept talking, she took out the folder of articles from Kay Todd and starting paging through them, hoping something would jump out at her and make some sort of sense.

The articles were brittle and yellowing at the edges. Pieces of the old newspaper crumbled away when she picked them up. They confirmed the basic facts that Kay had already given Diana and added little more. The consensus of the police and the media seemed to be that Margie Todd-dissatisfied with her life and unhappy with living in New Cambridge-ran away.

"It doesn't make sense, though," Diana said out loud.

Runaways made some sort of plans. They prepared in advance. They at least took their identification with them and whatever money they could put their hands on. Margie Todd hadn't done any of these things. Sure, she'd had a fight with her mother and dropped out of school. But that was nothing unusual. It didn't add up.

The voice on the radio changed and announced a special report. Diana put the articles down and turned the volume up.

"Union Towns.h.i.+p and New Cambridge Police continue to search for Fields University freshman Jacqueline Foley who disappeared yesterday evening while on a bike ride."

"Ms. Foley, who is nineteen years old, was supposed to return before an eight o'clock meeting at her sorority house, Alpha Iota Mu, and when she didn't arrive, the police were called. Ms. Foley's parents have arrived in New Cambridge from their home in Columbus and have already established a $50,000 reward for any information that leads to the safe return of their daughter, who was believed to be riding her bike in the area west of town near County Road 600. In other news..."

Diana sat on Jason's couch, absorbing the information. The girl had already been gone overnight, not a good sign. She knew enough of these sorority girls from her time around the campus and the town, and she knew how seriously they took their commitments to their houses. Jacqueline Foley was a freshman, which meant she was newly pledged. No way she'd risk the wrath of her sisters by missing a meeting in September. Jason mentioned the possibility of being lost or hurt, and that seemed likely. There were a lot of lonely county roads around New Cambridge, many of them unmarked. It would be easy to get lost or misjudge a turn.

Or be taken.

For the first time since she'd given up her job on the police force, Diana wished she had it back. She could be in the center of things there and know, at the very least, as much as her fellow officers knew. The information wouldn't necessarily come to her directly. The higher-ups and the detectives liked to h.o.a.rd their information, then dole it out on an as-needed basis in situations that only worked to their advantage. But in a small department, things leaked out, and Diana knew that eventually Jason would have information to pa.s.s on to her. She'd just have to be patient and wait for it.

Diana gathered the articles from the coffee table and started to carefully place them back in the folder, hoping that no more fell apart in her hands. Kay hadn't said so, but Diana imagined that the articles were sacred to the old woman, perhaps one of the few physical connections she still had to her missing daughter. Diana made it to the last of the articles, the bottom of the pile, when one caught her eye that she hadn't noticed before. She checked the date. March of 1985, one year after Margie Todd disappeared. The headline read, Still No Sign of Missing Fields' Student.

Diana scanned it quickly and saw nothing new, just a rehas.h.i.+ng of the facts and a quote from Kay saying that she still held out hope her daughter would come home safely. But at the end of the article, the reporter included a quote from Officer Dan Berding, described as "the first officer on the scene the night Margaret Todd disappeared." And in the article, Dan said, "It looked to me like somebody took her. From the looks of things, there's no way this girl ran away."

What a difference twenty-five years makes, Diana thought.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

Diana went home and showered. She brought a radio with her into the bathroom and turned the volume up high, hoping to catch any of the news about the disappearance. But there was nothing new to report. The newscaster repeated the same facts over and over again, little more than what she had heard from Jason upon awakening earlier that morning.

While she toweled off and pulled clean clothes out of her closet and drawers, she thought about calling Jason on his cell phone, even going so far as to take her own phone out and scroll down to his number. But she couldn't bring herself to press her thumb down and call. He was busy, completely wrapped up in searching the county for any sign of the Foley girl, and he didn't need an overly curious friend-and occasional one-night stand-calling him on the job.

Once she was dressed, Diana considered the long day stretching out before her. It might be hours before she heard from Jason, and it might be days-or even never-before there was any significant news about the Foley girl. She didn't want to sit around and wait. She had waited long enough.

She took out the phone book and looked up an address, then headed out to start her day.

John Bolton lived on Ohio Avenue in what had once been one of New Cambridge's most prominent neighborhoods. Back in the days of the town's founding, Ohio Avenue housed New Cambridge's wealthiest citizens, the mayors and the town councilmen, the business owners and bankers, the educators who put their mark on generations of young people. Some of the houses there retained their grandeur, including the Boltons', and Diana felt out of place parking in front of the three-story Victorian in her dinged-up Honda. But many of the other houses had lost their l.u.s.ter. Most had been purchased by real estate developers who then subdivided the homes into multiple apartments for the Fields' student population to rent. The house next door to the Boltons', another Victorian that clearly had once matched its neighbor in terms of stature and elegance, now had a tattered couch on the porch and beer bottles strewn across the uncut lawn. Diana had to admit she wouldn't have felt at home there either.

She climbed the steps to the front porch and rang the bell. She wasn't sure how this was going to go and wished she still had a police uniform to hide behind rather than the jeans and turtleneck she was wearing. She was trying to check her make-up in the door gla.s.s when it swung open, revealing a face not much younger than her own, the face of a female college student.

"Yes?" the woman said.

"I'm looking for Mr. John Bolton. Is he home?"

The woman paused, glanced toward the back into the house, then turned to Diana. "Um...who's asking?"

She had brown, shoulder-length hair, and while she waited for Diana to respond, she worked on a piece of gum that looked to be too big for her mouth. She wore sweat pants, a faded T-s.h.i.+rt and flip-flops, and since she was dwarfed by the impressive size of the house, Diana thought she looked even younger than she probably was.

"Are you Mr. Bolton's daughter?" Diana said.

"No, I work here." She popped the gum. "Who are you again?"

"My name's Diana Greene. I work for...I used to work for the police department, and I wanted to talk to Mr. Bolton about something. Is he in?"

The young woman again looked behind her before speaking to Diana. "He's in, but he's not doing well today."

"Is he sick?"

"No, he's upset. He gets this way sometimes. You should probably come back another day, when he's doing better."

Diana was about to leave when she heard a voice coming from behind the woman, a male voice, but she couldn't make out what it was saying.

"It's the police," the woman yelled back, and before Diana could correct her, she was stepping aside, swinging the door open for Diana and inviting her in. "Come on in," she said, shrugging. "He might be feeling a little better." Diana stepped into a high-ceilinged foyer and followed the woman down a long hallway toward the back of the house. "He's been listening to the news all morning," the woman said. "I think this kidnapping thing has him all freaked out."

They stopped walking. Diana could see a large, sunlit kitchen at the end of the hall.

"Why is he so bothered by it?"

The woman shrugged. "He likes helping Fields' students. He gives them jobs and things."

"Did he know the Foley girl?"

"I don't think so," she said.

"Do you know her?"

"I know of her," she said. "She's a freshman. I'm a soph.o.m.ore. We traveled in different circles, I guess." She shrugged again. "What year are you?"

"Zero," Diana said.

The young woman nodded. "Cool." She went ahead of Diana into the kitchen. "John? This is...I'm sorry, what's your name again?"

"Diana Greene." She held out her hand and the man at the kitchen table lifted his hand with what appeared to be a great deal of effort. His grip was weak and brief, like sand dribbling through her fingers.

"John Bolton," he said. "Jill...would you..."

"Do you want something to eat or drink?" she said.

The kitchen smelled of coffee and burnt toast, the radio on the table played. Diana shook her head.

"I'm fine," she said. "Thanks."

"You're from the police?" he said.

"Not really," Diana said. "I used to work for the police. I'm here on a private matter now. About one of your former employees."