David Bell - The Hiding Place

“I have to go,” Janet said. “But come to the interview. Really. You must be thinking about this a lot. We can talk about it.”

“You must think about it a lot, too,” Michael said. He stared at her, studying her face. “What do you remember from that day, Janet?”

For a long moment, Janet stared at him. Her mouth was dry, and the sounds of the passing cars amplified, like rushing wind. Before she could say anything else, Madeline stuck her head out the door and called her name again.

“You’ll come today, right?” Janet asked. “Two o’clock.”

“We’ll talk,” Michael said.

Janet looked back once before she entered the building, but he was already gone.

As the nearly empty bus brought the two of them back near their homes, Ashleigh thought about the size of Dove Point, Ohio. Not really big enough to be called a city, and yet not really small enough to be called a town. According to her ninth-grade civics class, about fifty thousand people lived there. Most of them worked at the university or the medical center complex or the handful of factories that dotted the perimeter of Dove Point like beads on a bracelet.

Had she really come that close to the guy from the porch? Had she almost found the needle in the haystack?

Kevin stretched across from her. His long legs spilled off the end of the seat, partially blocking the aisle, and she could tell by the way he chewed his thumbnail that he was anxious.

“They won’t fire you for being late once,” she said.

“I know. I really wasn’t thinking about that.” He straightened up and scooted over to the seat on the aisle, making sure he wouldn’t have to raise his voice to be heard. One old woman rode at the front, her little rolling grocery cart close by her side as if it contained gold. “What are you going to do now?” he asked. “I mean, you didn’t really prove that’s the dude who came to your house in the middle of the night.”

She didn’t hesitate. “It’s him,” she said.

“Really?”

“Really. It’s him.”

They stopped at a light, the engine rumbling in idle. The air-conditioning worked hard to keep them cool, and Ashleigh pinched the fabric of her T-shirt between two fingers and tugged it back and forth, adding to the breeze.

“Do you think this guy might be getting ready to leave town? Not paying rent, not hanging around. Do you think he heard someone was asking about him?” Kevin asked, his voice low. “Maybe the people you asked at his old job told him.”

“What was I supposed to do? Ignore it?”

“No, no.” He held out his hands. He was placating her, which always made her even more angry. “I’m just saying, this guy-if he really knows something-doesn’t want to spill it yet.”

“He showed up at our door.”

Kevin raised an index finger. “In the middle of the night.”

“He said he’d come back.”

“But he hasn’t yet. He could be in trouble with the police. He could be scared. Think about how you would feel if someone came around asking questions about you. You’d freak out. He doesn’t know who you are, does he? Or what you want.”

“Fuck you.”

“Ash, come on-”

“You heard me. Fuck you.”

The old woman at the front of the bus turned, her lips pursed. Ashleigh swallowed hard, felt her anger rise.

“Don’t be like that,” Kevin said. “But if we’d told the police or an adult, maybe they could have…I don’t know…handled it better.”

Ashleigh pulled the bell. “This is your stop,” she said.

The motion of the bus stopping rocked Ashleigh in her seat. She heard Kevin stand up and take two steps up the aisle.

“Hey,” he said. “You coming?”

“You know where I’m going,” she said.

“You want me to come with you?” he asked.

She didn’t respond. Kevin was keeping the bus waiting, but he said one more thing.

“I’m just worried that this guy might be trouble. What if he’s dangerous? What if he wants to hurt you or your mom for some reason?”

Ashleigh heard him. His words registered within her, but she didn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing any response. She stared straight ahead and froze him out until he turned and pushed through the side door of the bus, leaving her alone.

Ashleigh knew where her uncle had died. She’d been there many times. The Norbert Rovin Memorial Park sat two blocks north of their house, the house Ashleigh shared with her mother and grandfather, the house her mother had grown up in. Adjacent to the park stood a thick cluster of trees-several acres’ worth. The land for the park had been set aside not long after the town’s founding, and over the years houses and neighborhoods sprung up around its border. Kevin lived with his family on the opposite side of the park from Ashleigh, which made it a convenient meeting place.

Ashleigh walked the two blocks from the bus stop to the park. She knew-seemingly since her birth-that her uncle had been murdered in the woods near their house. Over the years, a process of eavesdropping on adult conversations combined with her own investigations at the local library had allowed Ashleigh to know the facts of her uncle’s death as well as anybody else. Her uncle Justin had gone to the park with her mom on a hot summer day. Eyewitnesses-both adults and children-remembered seeing a young black man in the park talking to some of the children, including Justin. When her uncle disappeared, the police made a sketch of the man and searched for him. Volunteers and professionals combed the woods near the park, then expanded their search to remote areas around town-ponds and culverts and abandoned houses. While the search for the boy-or his body-went on, police began to learn more about the man in the sketch. A woman came forward four weeks after the disappearance and told police her nephew-seventeen-year-old Dante Rogers-liked to go to the park Justin had disappeared from. She also said he had been acting strangely since the boy’s disappearance, and had even started collecting newspaper articles about the case. When the police investigated Rogers further, they found he had once been arrested-as a juvenile-for improper contact with a child. They took him into custody, where he denied his guilt.

That summer had remained hot. For the six weeks after her uncle’s disappearance, the Midwest baked under record heat. The search parties tailed off. Then the weather broke. The temperatures cooled and the area was soaked with several days of heavy rain. Hoping the weather change might aid the search, the volunteers looked again, starting in the woods near the park. Apparently, the recent rain had disturbed the earth enough to reveal the skeletal remains of her uncle, who had been buried in a shallow grave in the woods near the park, not far from a walking path. Police charged Dante Rogers with the second-degree murder of Justin Manning.

As long as Ashleigh could remember, she had asked her mother to show her the place where the crime had occurred. As a child, Ashleigh couldn’t articulate why she wanted to see that spot. She just knew she felt curiosity about it. Only as she grew older did she feel she fully understood the fascination that place held for her.

It was simple, really: everything for her family had changed that day in the park. If her uncle hadn’t been killed, if her mother hadn’t been there…who knows how things would be different? Would her grandfather be less distant and cold? Would her mother be stronger and have a more fulfilling life?

Her mom took her to the crime scene once and once only. Ashleigh was nine and had been bugging her mother to take her there. Her mother always refused. She didn’t give Ashleigh good reasons for not doing it-she just flat out refused. But one day Ashleigh asked, and her mother-somewhat reluctantly-agreed.