Харлан Кобен - Run Away

Simon said, “I’m here for the memorial service.”

The woman gave him suspicious, if not stink, eye. “May I ask your name?”

“Simon Greene.”

“I don’t know you, Mr. Greene.”

He nodded. “I knew Aaron.”

“You knew Aaron,” she said, her voice tinged with disbelief, “and you’re here to pay your respects?”

Simon didn’t bother to reply. The woman took out a pamphlet and opened it carefully. Her reading glasses were dangling from a chain. She put them on the end of her nose. “You head back behind the barn. Turn right here. You’ll see the corn maze. Don’t go in it. Twice this week we’ve had to send in employees to get people out. Walk around here.”

She pointed on the map.

“There’s a path into the woods. Head down it. You’ll see a green arrow on a tree pointing right. That’s for the hikers. You instead turn left.”

“Complicated,” Simon said.

She handed him the pamphlet and frowned at him. “This lobby is only for guests staying at the inn.”

“And subtle.”

He thanked her and headed back outside. The hayride was getting under way, a tractor pulling a bunch of people at much too slow a pace. Everyone was smiling, though they looked pretty uncomfortable. A family — man, woman, daughter, son — waved at him in unison. He waved back, and boom, he dropped back in time to taking the kids apple picking in Chester, just north of the New Jersey border. It had been a glorious autumn day, and yes, he remembered putting Paige on his shoulders so that she could reach a higher branch, but what he remembered most, right now, as he stood there and tried not to stare at this happy, innocent, blissfully ignorant family, was the way Ingrid looked in her dark flannel shirt tucked into thin-legged blue jeans and high boots. He had just turned toward her, Paige giggling on his shoulders, and Ingrid had smiled back at him, tucking her hair behind her ear, and even now, just thinking about how their eyes met on that day, Simon could feel his knees give way just a little bit.

He grabbed his phone and stared at the screen for a few seconds, willing it to give him good news. It didn’t.

He followed the route past the petting zoo barn. The chickens were loose. One ran up to him, stopped, looked up at him. Simon was tempted to try to pet it. A man dressed in farmer overalls was giving a demonstration involving eggs and an incubator. The corn stalks at the maze were ten feet high. There was a line to get in and a sign telling visitors that the maze’s theme for this year was THE FIFTY STATES — FIND THEM ALL.

He spotted the walking path, took it as told to the green arrow, turned left when the arrow wanted him to turn right. The woods grew thicker. He looked back to where he’d started, but he couldn’t see the clearing anymore.

Simon kept going, the path sloping down now, steeper and steeper. He heard what sounded like running water in the distance. A brook maybe. The path veered right. The trees in front of him thinned until Simon found himself in a clearing. It was a perfect square, the clearing made by man rather than natural design. A low wooden picket fence, a foot high, no more, formed the perimeter around small tombstones.

A family plot.

Simon stopped.

Behind the clearing was indeed a roaring brook and a faded teakwood bench. Simon didn’t think the dead cared much, but for the living, this would be a Zen place to grieve and meditate on those you lost.

A man Simon recognized as Wiley Corval, Aaron’s father, stood alone, staring down at a newer tombstone. Simon waited. Wiley Corval eventually lifted his head toward him.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Simon Greene.”

Wiley Corval looked a question at him.

“I’m Paige’s father.”

“Did she do it?”

Simon said nothing.

“Did she kill my son?”

“No.”

“How do you know for sure?”

“I don’t.” The man was about to bury his son. It wasn’t the time to lie. “I could tell you my daughter is not a killer, but that’s not going to offer you much comfort, is it?”

Wiley Corval just stared at him.

“But I don’t think it was Paige. The death... it was violent. Do you know the details?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think she could do that.”

“But you don’t know, do you?”

“I don’t, no.”

He turned away. “Leave.”

“Paige is missing.”

“I don’t care.”

In the distance, Simon could hear the scream-laughter of children, probably coming from the corn maze. Aaron Corval had grown up here, in this Norman Rockwell painting come to life, and look how it ended up. Then again, in all fairness, hadn’t Paige been raised in a slightly altered version of an idyllic childhood? And not just on paper. We all see the picket fences or the pretty facades, the two smiling parents, the healthy siblings, all that, and part of us gets that we have zero idea what’s going on behind closed doors, that there is anger and abuse, shattered dreams and blown expectations.

But that hadn’t been the case with Paige.

Were their lives perfect?

Of course not.

Were their lives pretty close to perfect?

As close, Simon imagined, as you get.

And yet their daughter had succumbed to the worst out there. Simon had asked himself a million questions, pondered every decision — had he shown enough interest, paid attention to her friends and studies, supported her hobbies? Were they too strict or too lax? There was that time Simon had exploded in anger and actually thrown a glass on the floor during dinner. Just once. Years ago. He remembered how Paige, only eight at the time, had started to shiver.

Was that to blame?

You go through every damn moment like that because even though his mother had warned him, “Kids don’t come with instruction manuals,” and you quickly learn that your child comes to you hardwired, that in the battle of nature vs nurture, nature kicks complete and total ass — still, when things go wrong, when something this dark invades your child’s soul, you can only wonder where the hell you went wrong.

From behind him, a woman asked, “Who’s this?”

Simon spun toward the voice. Again he recognized her from the picture in the foyer — Aaron’s mother, Enid. There were people traipsing down the path with her, ten or twelve, Simon estimated, including a man with a clergy collar carrying a Bible.

“Just a nice gentleman who walked down the wrong path,” Wiley Corval said.

Simon considered countering that with the truth — full-on confrontation, to hell with niceties — but he concluded that it would probably backfire. He muttered an apology and started past the family and friends and back up toward the farm. There was no one close to Aaron’s age here, and Simon remembered Paige telling him something about Aaron being an only child. That meant there’d be no sibling to question — and none of these people looked the right age to be a close friend, if indeed a junkie like Aaron had any close friends.

So now what?

Let them have their service, he thought. Whatever their son had turned into, Wiley and Enid had lost him now — brutally, suddenly, unnaturally, permanently. Give them this moment.

When he got back to the clearing, a group of kids Simon estimated were around ten or eleven years old emerged from the maze breathless. They all started high-fiving each other. Simon pulled out his phone. There were a lot of messages. He went to his favorites. Ingrid was listed first. Yvonne was second, and then Paige (whose number no longer worked but he still kept it in Favorites), Sam, Anya. Age order with the kids. Only fair.

He hit Yvonne’s number.