Presumed Dead Read online

  I went inside and bought a bottle of water, and asked the best way to the cabins. The guy at the counter was in his sixties, with a mane of untidy gray hair and a beard. He wore glasses with circular frameless lenses, like John Lennon’s. He regarded my charcoal suit and white shirt and raised an eyebrow. Perhaps I was a little more formal than the tourists he was accustomed to. He didn’t remark on it, though, and greeted me warmly. He took the cash for the water, and then came out from behind the counter and led me back to the door.

  “Keep on for about a mile, then take the south road as if you’re headed back toward the highway, and you’ll see a sign on your right-hand side in about another half-mile. Can’t miss it.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “You hit the lake, you’ve gone too far.”

  As we finished speaking, another car pulled in. A green Chevy Impala.

  “Here’s trouble,” the guy said in an amused tone.

  The door opened and a woman got out. She was tall, maybe five-eleven, and had shoulder-length strawberry blond hair. A pair of oversize sunglasses was pushed back above her forehead. She wore a turquoise summer dress under a jean jacket. Definitely a local. She didn’t look as though she had been behind the wheel for a long drive.

  She smiled at the old guy and her blue eyes scanned me in a quick appraisal.

  “Afternoon, Rick,” she said.

  “Afternoon, and a mighty fine one it is too,” Rick replied.

  She glanced at me and raised an eyebrow just as Rick had.

  “Afternoon,” I said.

  She replied with a smile, then she passed between the two of us on her way into the store.

  Rick repeated the directions, before going back inside to serve the woman for milk or instant coffee or cigarettes or whatever she was buying. I got back behind the wheel. I followed his directions, taking the road out of town. Before I got to the sign, a lone house up the hill from the road caught my eye. It was hulking and dark against the blue sky. It didn’t exactly look like the Bates house from Psycho, but it had the same vibe. A little ramshackle, and definitively not inviting. I recognized it from when I had looked up David Connor’s address for directions. I would be coming back this way later.

  I found the turnoff from Benson’s Cabins just as easily as Rick had promised, and a quarter of a mile later I was pulling into a grove in the trees where there was a horseshoe of eight identical wood buildings. Coarse gravel crunched beneath my tires. Through the trees, I could see the lake glinting in the sun. A thin black man, maybe in his sixties, maybe older, was already on his way out to greet me.

  I got out of the car and caught a firm handshake before I could close the door. He was of medium height, a little hunched over, with a smoothly shaved head and a gray mustache. He wore a charcoal cardigan over a shirt and tie, and suit pants with a sharp crease in them.

  “Mr. Blake?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Joseph Benson. Call me Joe. Thanks for choosing Benson’s,” he said with genuine warmth, as though my choice had been made after careful deliberation over several dozen promising options. “You’re staying a whole week, huh?”

  I nodded, and realized he probably didn’t get too many customers who stayed that long at the end of the season. “Kind of open-ended,” I said. “I could be staying longer, if that isn’t a problem?”

  “No problem at all, Mr. Blake. You just let me know what you need. Give you a hand with your bags?” he added, turning his gaze to the trunk.

  “Thanks, but I’m fine,” I said, opening the rear door and taking out a small suitcase.

  “Traveling light,” he observed.

  “That’s the way I like to do it,” I agreed.

  “Hiking, hunting, or nervous breakdown?”

  I paused and looked at his stony face, which creased into a grin after a second.

  “I’m just kidding with you. Though that’s the reasons most folks come all the way out here.” He stopped and gave me an appraising look. “You don’t look like any of the three, though.”

  “Thanks, I think. I’m actually here to meet someone.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “A guy named David Connor, lives at the big house back that way?”

  His features took on a serious cast for the first time, and I wondered if I had made a mistake.

  “You know you’re the second fella to stay here and tell me that.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Best I don’t say too much more,” he said turning away, before thinking of something and turning back. “Word of advice though, be careful who you tell you’re a friend of Connor’s, okay?”

  I wondered why that might be, but decided not to probe any further. After all, I would be able to make my own judgment of Mr. Connor in a short time.

  “Let’s get you set up with keys. I picked you out cabin eight. Best view of the lake. Same one your friend Wheeler stayed in, matter of fact.”

  “Wheeler?”

  He let my question hang in the cool air. The look in his eyes told me I’d satisfied a question.

  “Wheeler,” he repeated finally. “The last guy who was here to meet David Connor.”

  10

  Carter Blake

  Cabin eight was modest, but cozy. A small bedroom, bathroom, and a spacious living area and kitchen. There were French doors that led out to a covered deck with a view of the lake. There was no wind, so the surface of the water was perfectly still. Like a mirror laid flat on the ground in front of the hills on the other side.

  I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and Benson recommended the food at Jimmy’s Bar, but I wanted to check in with David Connor first.

  By the time I drove back along the road to where I had passed his house, the sky had clouded over a little. I turned off the road and drove up a steep tree-lined path. The house towered above me, hulking and black. It looked even less inviting up close. I wondered if Connor was home. I hadn’t been sure when I would arrive in Lake Bethany, so hadn’t given him an ETA, only that it would be sometime today.

  Connor had been suspicious at first, on the phone, as though he expected me to be a prank caller. I dropped Lauren Day’s name before I said anything else, and he was immediately reassured. He told me his sister was alive, he was certain of it.

  The house was an old Victorian, with siding painted a dull blue, and a steep gable roof. The windows were all shuttered. Two covered decks outside, one north-facing, the other east. A tall oak tree loomed over the building. There was a bright orange Ford Ranger pickup truck parked outside. I climbed the three steps to the east-facing deck and pushed the doorbell. An ancient, muffled chime sounded from inside. Now that I was closer, I could hear something else as well – music. Something with guitars. An interior door creaked and the music got louder. Rock music. The front door opened and David Connor was there.

  Connor looked out of place, like he had been matched with the wrong house. The wrong town, too. Maybe even the wrong state.

  Knocking on the door of a house like this, you expected the door to be answered by an old widow who had owned the property for six decades. Connor looked in his early thirties. He had scruffy black hair that came down almost to his shoulders, and wore jeans and a black T-shirt with the words “Little Nikita” printed on it in white capitals. He was barefoot. There was a chain around his neck and a ring on the middle finger of his left hand. He had a dazed, hung-over look to his eyes. Maybe I had woken him up.

  “Campbell Blake, right?”

  I held out a hand. “Carter. I prefer just Blake, though. Good to meet you.”

  “Likewise. Thanks for coming out here. You fly into Atlanta?”

  “I drove down from New York. Seems like a nice town.”

  He snorted and started to say something, and then changed his mind. He turned and walked back inside. I assumed he wanted me to foll
ow.

  The door opened onto a spacious hallway with a wood floor and a wide staircase with intricately carved banisters. The air smelled faintly of pot and dirty laundry. We passed a room with an architect’s desk and a big bay window. Pencil sketches and watercolor paintings adorned the wall. Mostly landscapes, but sketches of people, too. I saw a familiar face over and over. Adeline Connor, seventeen years old.

  He led the way to the living room. The song finished playing and a new one started up. It sounded familiar, a rock band whose name was just on the tip of my tongue.

  The living room was bare of furniture apart from a battered leather couch in front of a big screen television. The carpet was beige and stained, and there was a big rug with a Mexican design, on top of which an Xbox and a PlayStation were lined up in front of the television. There was one of those Amazon Alexa speakers, which was the source of the music.

  Connor indicated the couch and I took a seat. I looked up and saw there were more paintings and sketches on the walls, some of them framed, others just pinned up. I saw Adeline’s face a few more times, a sketch of Main Street, some cityscapes, and one arresting piece in the corner. It was in charcoal, most of the space taken up with a hulking silhouette of a man, just the outline of his bulk, and wild, tousled hair. The only features David had sketched in were two bright, almost demonic eyes. It reminded me a little of an Incredible Hulk cover from the seventies.

  “I hope that one wasn’t a life drawing,” I said. “Who is it?”

  David glanced over his shoulder and shrugged. “It’s no one. It’s abstract.” He turned around, and before I could say anything else, moved us on to business. “Lauren said you could help me. I’ve uh …” he scratched his stubble and smiled wryly, as though at a private joke. “I’ve had some trouble getting anywhere with this.”

  “It sounded like I might be able to help,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Uh, Lauren wasn’t sure how much you charge.”

  I thought about Lauren Day, about how she had devoted the last two decades of her life to helping people. I thought about the nice big payment into my account from my previous job.

  “I’m here to see if I can help,” I said. “No charge. Maybe I can help, maybe I can’t.”

  He seemed to consider this. “The other guy was two hundred a day, which sounds like a lot, but he knew his stuff. I think he was really getting somewhere.”

  I remembered what Benson had said earlier, about how I wasn’t the first.

  “‘The other guy,’” I repeated. “Wheeler, right?”

  “Right. Did you work with him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Real shame, man,” Connor said, looking into space.

  “What happened? Lauren didn’t mention anything about it.”

  “I didn’t tell her. What was the use, right?”

  He leaned back and told his fancy speaker to decrease the volume. The band faded to only just audible.

  “I love this record, man. You heard it?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Queens of the Stone Age, Songs For the Deaf. Nobody listens to albums anymore, right? It’s just songs all out of context. Nobody cares about the big picture.”

  “I know what you mean.” He seemed to have forgotten all about what we were talking about. “You were going to tell me about Wheeler.”

  “Right. Yeah, damn, sorry about what happened.”

  “What happened?”

  He looked confused, as though he expected me to know. “He died.”

  I could tell it was going to be a long conversation. “How did he die?”

  “Carjacking. Down in Atlanta.”

  I took another drink and put the bottle down on the rug. “Why don’t you tell me everything from the start?”

  He sighed. “I was working down there. That’s where I go in the summer. I work April to September, then I come back here.”

  “What do you do when you’re here?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. The house is paid for, it was my parents’. And I live cheap. Working the summer gives me enough to get by until next year.”

  I cleared my throat. “Your sister is legally dead,” I said. Ten minutes before, I would have broached the subject more gently, but I wanted to keep him on track. “She died in 2003.”

  “I guess I thought that too,” he said. “Until I saw her.”

  I waited for him to continue. He was staring out of the window, out at the trees.

  “Couple of months ago. Middle of September. It was about eight o’clock in the morning. I was headed back to the apartment I was staying at in Lakewood Heights, after my shift. I was on the bus. There was construction outside of Turner Field. We stopped at the lights. I was listening to music, just looking out of the window. Lot of people on the sidewalk, going to work. All of a sudden, I see her.”

  “You saw your sister in the crowd?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t just someone who looked like her?”

  He shook his head, as though frustrated I wasn’t getting it. “Not her face. I saw her talking to somebody. A guy with tattoos. She had her back to me. She was carrying a red bag, like dark red. Her hair was shorter, but somehow … I knew it was her, right away, before she even turned around.”

  “You recognized her from behind, after fifteen years?” I knew I wasn’t doing a good job of hiding my skepticism.

  He turned his head from the window and fixed me with a glare, daring me to disagree. “That’s right. I knew it was her, like that. I knew it was Adeline. Then she turned around, and that was when I knew for sure. She recognized me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it in her eyes. She caught my eye and just … just flinched. She opened her mouth as if she was going to say something, but then she turned away again quickly, and the lights changed and the bus moved off.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I got up and told the driver to let me out. He told me no way, next stop. I got in an argument with him and eventually he opened the door and told me to get the fuck off his bus.”

  I knew what was coming next, but I let Connor tell me it.

  “We had gone a couple of blocks down the street. I ran back along the sidewalk. By the time I got to the place we had stopped, she was gone, and so was the man with the tattoos.”

  There was no proof, no tangible evidence that this was anything other than a hallucination or a case of mistaken identity. And yet, listening to him tell it, I could see why Lauren Day had believed his story.

  “What did he look like? The guy with the tattoos.”

  Connor smiled, as though he had expected me to ask. He got up and picked up a large cardboard portfolio from the table. He opened it up and leafed through. I saw more pencil sketches. He stopped at one, considered, flicked forward a few sheets and held it to me. It showed a woman with shoulder length dark hair and dark eyes. It was a great likeness, assuming the person it showed existed.

  “This is what Adeline looks like now.”

  He leafed through another couple of sheets and then handed me another sketch. This one showed a serious-looking guy with a shaved head and tattoos on his forearms. One of them was a heart tangled in barbed wire.

  “This is the guy.”

  I examined the two pictures. “You’ve always been an artist?”

  He glanced down at them, as though he hadn’t given the matter much thought. “I like to draw.”

  I put them down and looked up at him. “So what did you do next? After you realized they’d gone?”

  “I hung around that neighborhood for hours, looking for her. I waited until it got dark but didn’t see her again. Then the next day I went to the same place and waited. I did that every day for a week.”

  “Did you talk to the police?”

 
“I talked to a lady on the phone at the FBI. Missing Persons. She said Adeline can’t be considered a missing person because she’s legally dead. I told her about how they never actually found a body, but …”

  “What about the cops around here?” They were next on my list to visit, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask what – if anything – Connor had told them already.

  He smiled again. The same little smile he had given me at the door when I had said it was a nice town. “Believe me, man. I’m the last person they’re interested in talking to. They don’t want to hear it. They weren’t happy when Mr. Wheeler went talking to them either.”

  I wasn’t exactly surprised.

  “How did you find Wheeler? He was a PI?”

  He nodded. “I talked to him on the phone. Then he came to see me. I told him what I told you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he would look into it. He talked to Sheriff McGregor, like I said. Even though I told him not to bother. Next day, he called me from Atlanta. He said he had a …” he paused and thought of the exact words Wheeler had used. “A promising lead.”

  “He say anything specific?”

  “Just that it was about the guy with the ink. Apparently it was a gang thing, and he was going to talk to somebody who might be able to point him in the right direction. I guess that’s what put him in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was stopped at lights and somebody jacked him. He was shot.”

  “They get the shooter?”

  He shook his head. “I felt bad for him, you know? Like, he wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t hired him.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said.

  He shrugged, like he didn’t feel like arguing either way.

  “How old were you? When Adeline was … when she disappeared.”

  “I was eighteen.”