David Bell - The Hiding Place

Janet started to walk away, knowing she’d been dismissed. But she stopped immediately. She wasn’t ready to walk away.

Janet came back and took the remote again. She turned the TV off and stood over her dad’s chair.

“Dad, I need to ask you something.”

He reached for the remote. “Give me that.”

Janet took a step back but held on to the remote.

“I need to know why you don’t care about our family’s past,” she said. “What’s going on?”

Her dad looked puzzled. What she said wasn’t registering.

“You never want to talk about the past. You never want to talk about Mom or Justin or about what happened. Why is that, Dad? You couldn’t even come out of your room and talk to that newspaper reporter who came here. You couldn’t even make that much of an effort about your family. Why?”

“I’m not a woman,” he said. “I don’t live in the past.”

“Oh, no.” Janet raised her finger and wagged it in the air between them. “You’re not going to pull that one on me.” She took a step closer and studied his face. Janet understood something then, something she’d thought about many times but had never given clear voice to: she really didn’t know her father. Or, to be more accurate, she’d never been allowed to know her father. He never opened up, never revealed anything of himself. Even standing over her mother’s grave, he never shed a tear, never gave voice to what he felt or lost.

What else could there be inside the man? What didn’t she know?

“Dad, can you look at me and tell me what your problem with the past is? What is it that you really don’t want me to know?”

Janet tried to put her father’s reticence together with the events of recent days-the man on the porch, the anniversary of the murder, Dante’s maintaining of his innocence, the newspaper stories. Michael’s return and questions.

What didn’t she know?

“Dad, just tell me. Is it something about Justin? Do you know something? Because I’ve been starting to think-some things have been happening…”

Her dad looked over and they locked eyes. For a brief moment, an understanding passed between them, something that placed them on the same wavelength for a split second. Together, they had moved closer to something, closed the gap that had previously existed.

But her dad didn’t say anything.

And before Janet could say more, the doorbell rang.

“I don’t care about the door,” she said. “I’ll ignore it. This is important-”

“No, get it,” he said. “Just go get it. I told you, I’m done with talking about all of this.”

Ashleigh ran until her heart nearly burst. She always ran well in gym class, even better than the girls who played on the school’s sports teams. She was light and fast and never tired.

But she finally ran out of gas two miles down Hamilton Avenue. She stopped running and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, her hands on her knees, her breaths coming in great huffing bursts. She looked at her shoes and wouldn’t have been surprised to see the rubber of the tread smoking, she’d been going so fast. She straightened up, placed her hands on her hips, and started walking, hoping to cool down and breathe like a normal person again. Spots swam before her eyes. She hoped she wouldn’t faint.

The fucking creep. He touched me. My breasts-

No. Wait. That didn’t matter.

It really didn’t matter.

The name-the name on that ticket or whatever it was-

Justin Manning.

Her uncle, who was supposed to be dead for twenty-five years. He was alive? He was alive!

Her mind raced faster than her heart. She couldn’t make any sense of it.

Ashleigh looked behind her. She really didn’t think the creep from the apartment complex would be following her. He was probably scared, probably still doubled over from her elbow and her kick. She’d never hit anybody, never even been close to a fight. Hell, she’d never had a guy touch her like that, either a creep or a guy she liked. But as she thought back over the scene in the apartment, she felt less scared and more exhilarated. A smile grew across her face, and she wanted to laugh.

Had she really just kicked that guy’s ass?

The return bus came along Hamilton. Ashleigh waited until traffic cleared, then managed to jog across the street. Her muscles burned from the exertion and her legs felt rubbery. She’d never been so glad to see a bus. If it hadn’t come, she wasn’t sure she could walk all that way, several miles. She needed to sit, to ride. To think.

She took a seat near the back. The air-conditioning was almost too cool, too intense. But she welcomed it. She fanned her face with someone’s discarded newspaper. The bus was mostly empty in midafternoon, just a few old ladies and their rolling shopping baskets, a mother with a baby near the front.

Ashleigh thought about what she’d seen on that paper-

Her uncle’s name. Did she really see it? Or did she want to find something so much she imagined the name?

No, no, she said. She saw it. She knew she saw it. He’d come to their house in the middle of the night. He’d told her mom he knew the truth about what really happened to Justin.

And he was Justin?

Who else could he be?

Ashleigh reached up and rang the bell when they were just half a block from the stop. She was so distracted she almost forgot, and the bus lurched as the air brakes whined. The bus driver, a middle-aged guy with greasy hair, looked in the giant rearview mirror at the front and shook his head at her. She didn’t care. She needed to get off the bus. She had cooled off; her breathing was normal again.

She had things to do.

She had to talk to Kevin first.

“You did what?” Kevin said.

His manager had let him out of work early, Kevin told her. He’d walked to the library looking for Ashleigh and didn’t see her. So he texted her-at least three times. Getting no response, he returned to McDonald’s, where Ashleigh found him waiting in a booth, two hamburger wrappers and the remnants of an order of fries scattered before him. He looked up in anticipation, but then Ashleigh sat down and told him where she’d been.

“I had to know,” Ashleigh said. “I couldn’t wait.”

“You went there alone? To that strange dude’s apartment? Jesus, Ash.” He looked to the ceiling, as if he wanted divine intervention. “Did you do that because you were mad at me about what I said earlier?”

“I told you-I just couldn’t wait. I’ve been looking forward to this a long time. I couldn’t just sit in the library and pretend to read a book.”

Kevin almost smiled. “You’ve got balls, girl. I’ll say that for you. Damn.”

Ashleigh took Kevin’s drink, shook it, and when she heard liquid slosh in the bottom of the cup, drew from the straw. She swallowed, then said, “If you think that was ballsy, let me tell you what happened while I was there.”

Kevin listened while Ashleigh told the story. When she told him she went into the vacated apartment, his mouth fell open a little. Ashleigh didn’t pause. She didn’t want him to be able to interject. And it wasn’t the most important part of the story.

She watched him carefully as she told him about the letter with her uncle’s name on it. As she said that, his mouth fell open even more. Something lit up in his eyes, something between joy and fear-she couldn’t tell which.

“Holy shit,” he said. He looked around the restaurant, which was fairly empty. He said it again. “Holy shit. Ash, you were right. You found something.”

“I know.”

Ashleigh tried to contain her own joy and enthusiasm, but her heart raced, and this time not from the adrenaline of the run and the close call with the creep, but instead from the pure joy of accomplishing something she’d set out to do. She felt like a little kid. If she’d let herself, she could’ve screamed and squealed with joy.