David Bell - The Hiding Place

Stynes closed the notebook but didn’t get up. “Yeah, I kind of agree with you, Mr. Bower.” Stynes hooked his pen back onto his shirt pocket. He didn’t look at Ray Bower when he said, “How do you feel about Reverend Fred hiring Dante Rogers to work at his church?”

“He did what?”

“Don’t you read the paper?” Stynes asked.

“You mean those articles about the murder?” Bower said. “I didn’t read them. I try not to relive that stuff. I have a lot of bad memories from that time.”

“Dante works at the Reverend Fred’s church,” Stynes said. “I saw him there just yesterday.”

Bower’s lips pressed together. His face darkened. “I didn’t know that. As far as I’m concerned, they shouldn’t allow that bastard back into society at all. He killed a kid. And he’s a pervert.”

“He did his time.”

“Not enough. Not enough at all.”

“You seem pretty angry about it still,” Stynes said, although Bower’s anger possessed a practiced, almost scripted quality that Stynes had seen before. People often felt they had to display their anger in a predictable fashion, the way they saw people on TV do it to reporters and news anchors. They worried if they didn’t express anger and outrage in its proper, acceptable forms, others would feel they were heartless and unfeeling. Stynes filed the response away in the back of his mind. “You know the Mannings pretty well, right?”

“Sure.”

“Still see them?”

“Not really.” Bower seemed to want to stop his answer right there, but Stynes just kept watching him, waiting. After a few moments, Bower gave in to the stare down and continued. “Our kids played together when they were little. The kids grew up. The parents drifted apart. That murder took a big toll on Ginny Manning.”

“That’s Justin and Janet’s mother?”

“Yes. Virginia. People called her Ginny if they knew her well.” The tension around Bower’s jaw eased a little. His eyes lost their focus for just a second as he appeared to think about something. Then he said, “That boy’s death killed her. It really did.”

“That’s what people say.”

“After the murder, things weren’t the same. How could they be?”

“Indeed. It must have been scary for you. Michael was there that day.”

“I feel like we dodged a bullet.”

“What is Michael doing these days?” Stynes asked.

“He’s back in Dove Point.”

“He is?”

“He’s been back about six weeks.” Something else took over Ray Bower’s face as he talked about his son. It wasn’t the look of a proud father, someone who glowed because the prodigal son had returned to the fold. He looked confused more than anything else, like he had things he wanted to say about Michael, but couldn’t be sure if they were the correct or appropriate things to say to a stranger about one’s child. “He lost his job apparently, over in Columbus. He’s back here figuring out his next move. To be honest, I’m not really sure what his plans are.”

“It must be nice to have him here.”

“Sure, yeah, it’s great.” Again the words seemed forced. So did the smile. “He’s staying at his mom’s house.”

“Well,” Stynes said, “I’ve taken up a lot of your time.”

“It’s not a problem,” Bower said. “I’ll call Reverend Fred later today and smooth his feathers. Although that Rogers thing…”

He let his voice trail off.

Stynes pushed himself up from the chair and reached across the desk to shake Ray Bower’s hand. “I guess you don’t see much of Bill Manning either?” he asked.

Bower looked surprised by the question. He let go of Stynes’s hand.

“No, I don’t. Like I said, we’re not close anymore.”

“You think Justin’s death affected him as much as Virginia?” Stynes asked.

Ray Bower seemed to think his answer over carefully. “Bill is a tough nut to crack. I’m not sure he ever let on how he felt about anything.”

“Strong, silent type?”

“Well, you know him. If you can figure that man out, Detective, you’re a smarter man than me.”

“How do you mean that?”

Bower rubbed his chin. “I’m not sure he ever felt anything for anybody. If he did, he kept it hidden. His wife, his kids, his friends. I don’t know what goes on inside him.”

“Thanks,” Stynes said. He stopped at the door to Bower’s office. “By the way, congratulations.”

“What’s that?”

Stynes pointed to his own-empty-ring finger and then pointed behind him in Cindy’s general direction.

Ray Bower’s face flushed even more than it did at the mention of Dante Rogers. He ducked his head a little in an aw-shucks, you-got-me kind of way.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to be a small wedding.”

“You could do it while your son’s in town,” Stynes said.

Bower looked as though that notion had never occurred to him. “Yeah, we’ll see.”

On the way out, Stynes congratulated Cindy. She insisted on showing him the ring, which he complimented appropriately. He excused himself and left the building before she launched too deeply into a rundown of her plans for the wedding, which seemed more elaborate than what Ray Bower was considering.

Ashleigh slept poorly, her dreams populated by weird, shifting images of Dante Rogers and the man from the porch. She felt unrested and anxious when she opened her eyes just before nine o’clock, knowing that today she would go back to the apartment complex to find Steven Kollman. The kids she went to school with talked about feeling the same way whenever a test approached. Some of them took pills for it. Antianxiety. Antidepressants. Tests and school never ruffled Ashleigh. She carried an unspoken contempt for the kids who relied on pills to get through their days.

But she suddenly felt different about that. If a pill had been within her reach, she thought she might have taken it.

She checked her phone and saw a text from Kevin.

Meet at Macs at noon. Have 2 wk brkfst.

Noon?

Ashleigh almost screamed. They were supposed to go at ten, and now he couldn’t go until noon. She shut the phone without responding, flopped back onto the bed, and stared at the ceiling.

Waiting. Why was she always waiting?

She walked to McDonald’s around eleven, after spending the morning trying to distract herself by drawing out every task she performed. Slow breakfast. Slow shower. She even sat and listened while her grandpa lectured her for fifteen uninterrupted minutes on why the Reds would never win the World Series with their current manager.

As she walked along the hot road, she thought about what lay ahead, and her nerves jangled even more. She remembered everything Kevin had said at the park and on the bus the other day.

What if the guy was dangerous? What if he was crazy?

Ashleigh read the news on the Internet. She loved the “News of the Weird” feature, the bizarre stories compiled from around the country and around the world. Construction workers with nails through their heads, enormous chain reaction car accidents in the fog, babies switched at birth who end up marrying each other.

But some of the stories disturbed her, even with her appetite for strangeness. Serial killers, young girls held hostage in basements, doctors who raped their patients.

What if she ended up in one of those stories? The girl killed by a creep who claimed to know something about her uncle’s murder.

She took a few deep breaths, told herself she couldn’t let those thoughts take over her mind. She didn’t need pills. She wouldn’t let her mind twist her into knots.

She decided to eat while waiting for Kevin. At eleven fifteen, the restaurant remained relatively calm. A few of the old men who gathered for their morning coffee and biscuit still remained. Ashleigh took some sort of comfort from their presence. They seemed like part of the order of the town, like the monument to President Grant on the courthouse lawn or the Fall Festival in October. Their number never decreased. Even when one of them died, another old guy showed up, keeping the number of the group about the same. A part of her wished that her grandpa would come and join them, that he would leave the house a little more and talk to somebody. But he didn’t seem to be the type of man who could even stand to talk to other men. Ashleigh just didn’t know if he’d always been so closed down, or if her uncle’s death sealed her grandpa off from the rest of the world.