The Night Swim Read online

“What was Alkins’s reputation like at school?” Rachel asked.

  “Even at school, Mitch was intimidating. He was smart as a whip with a gilded tongue to boot. That is a lethal combination. He will get a guilty verdict,” he assured Rachel. “Strange how life brings old friends back together. Before this trial, we hadn’t been in touch since school. That’s a good twenty-five years ago. I graduated in ’92.”

  Rachel thought back to Jenny Stills’s gravestone in the cemetery. The summer of ’92 was the summer that Jenny Stills had died. It was a small enough town in those days that her death was surely ingrained in the memories of her schoolmates. Or maybe not? Rachel figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  “When you were at school, did you know a girl called Jenny Stills? She was probably a sophomore when you graduated.”

  “Jenny Stills?” He paused, deep in thought. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “School was a long time ago. I don’t remember a lot of people. Why are you asking?”

  “She died the summer you would have graduated. I thought maybe you know what happened.”

  “I wasn’t around that summer. Left for vacation not long after graduation. By August, I was in the navy. Boot camp. They ran us so hard I don’t remember anything other than the pain.”

  By the time they were finished talking, it was well after midnight. Dan offered to walk Rachel to the car, but she refused. Rachel wouldn’t be cowed. It was a promise that she’d made to herself years earlier when the cops told all the girls in the neighborhood not to walk around at night after Cat Girl had been viciously raped and strangled near her apartment.

  Rachel had decided then that she would not be intimidated. Not by anything. Or anyone. Certainly not by the dark.

  Dan let her out through the front door, turning on the porch light as he watched her navigate down the garden pathway. As she reached the street, she heard the door close and the metallic click of a bolt. Leaves scraped against the asphalt in the light breeze as Rachel walked into a cloak of darkness, down the deserted street toward her car.

  After she turned the corner, she heard footsteps behind her. It sounded as if she was being followed. When she turned around, she saw nothing but shadows. She walked faster. More footsteps. She wondered if they were her own and she was scaring herself.

  She crossed the road on a diagonal and clicked her keys to unlock her car. It beeped and the lights turned on. Rachel jumped inside and drove back to the hotel.

  14

  Rachel

  Rachel didn’t so much as twitch when her cell phone first rang. Eventually, the familiar ring tone registered somewhere in her exhausted brain. She reached out her hand from under the covers and turned off the phone without waking. She buried her head under a white pillow and sank back into a heavy sleep.

  The old-fashioned peal of her hotel room phone rudely woke her a few minutes later. Rachel jerked the phone console toward her. It toppled onto the bed as she randomly pressed buttons with her eyes closed. All she wanted to do was shut the thing up and go back to sleep. When nothing worked and the insistent ringing continued, she pulled the phone under the covers.

  “Who’s this?” she croaked.

  “It’s Pete.”

  “Pete? Why’re you calling me in the middle of the night?” she asked, her eyes still closed.

  “It’s morning, Rach,” said Pete. “You asked me to wake you early so you could go for a run. Remember?”

  Rachel opened her eyes and peeped out of the covers. Bands of bright sunlight at the edges of the drapes indicated it was well into morning.

  “So it is,” she said. “I’m so exhausted. I fell asleep at three A.M.”

  Rachel sat up and rested her head on a pile of pillows. The green fluorescent numbers of the clock radio told her it was three minutes before seven in the morning. She’d slept for four hours.

  “How did it go with Dan Moore?” Pete asked.

  “Not sure.” She yawned. “He was reluctant to talk about anything that might come up in court. He mostly told me what happened when he and his wife found out that Kelly was missing.”

  “Why make you meet with him in the middle of the night if he wasn’t going to dish dirt?”

  “Don’t know. What I do know is that he made me park a block away and sneak into his house after his wife had gone to sleep. He said he didn’t want her or the prosecutors to find out that he was talking to me. I don’t know why anyone would care. It’s not like he told me that much. In fact, he was very—” She heard a murmur of voices over the phone line.

  “Rach, my surgeon just arrived for ward rounds. I’ll call you back as soon as he leaves.”

  Rachel stifled a yawn and the overwhelming desire to return to sleep. Instead, she rolled out of bed and had a hot shower to wake up while she waited for Pete to call back. She dressed and was pulling open the drapes when her cell phone rang.

  “What did the surgeon say?” Rachel asked.

  “I need to stay until the end of the week. Between you and me, I’m thinking of staging a prison break. I am so over it,” he said, his lighthearted tone not quite hiding his despondence. “Tell me what Dan Moore said.”

  “I’ll do one better. I’ll read you his quotes. Verbatim,” said Rachel, taking out her notebook and sitting cross-legged on her unmade bed as she turned to the first page.

  * * *

  “‘We were driving up to Norfolk to see John, my son. He’s an ensign in the navy. His base was open for family visits that Sunday. We stopped at Lexi’s house to get Kelly. Since Kelly wasn’t answering her phone, I went inside to get her.

  “‘It was obvious there had been a party. There were yellow trash bags overflowing with beer cans piled up by the garage doors. Someone had thrown up in a garden bed. I was surprised Lexi’s parents allowed a party, because they’d only moved into that house a few months earlier. No adult in their right mind would knowingly let their kid throw a party in a brand-new house. It made me immediately suspicious.’”

  Rachel climbed off the bed and turned on the kettle. She tore a coffee packet with her teeth and poured the freeze-dried granules into her mug while she read.

  “‘The front door was off the latch. I pushed it open. Two teenagers were sleeping in the living room. One was lying on a sofa, fully clothed in jeans and boots. Another was curled under a coffee table with a jacket thrown over his, or her, head. Popcorn and chip crumbs were ground into the carpet.

  “‘I followed the sound of vacuuming to the dining room, where I found Lexi. Her makeup was smeared and she was wearing lounge pants and an oversized gray T-shirt. Her feet were bare. There was a wine stain on the carpet near the dinner table. I glanced at it. She blushed like she’d been caught red-handed.

  “‘She said it wasn’t her fault. That they’d come uninvited and she couldn’t get rid of them. It sounded to me as if she’d been practicing her excuse for most of the night. I asked her to tell Kelly to come downstairs. She looked at me as if I was crazy. She said something like, “Kelly?” And I said, sort of sarcastically, “Yeah, Kelly, my daughter. Don’t tell me she’s still asleep?” Lexi looked confused. She told me that Kelly wasn’t there. That she’d gone home the night before.’”

  Rachel paused to pour boiling water into her mug. She added creamer and sugar and stirred as she remembered the pain in Dan Moore’s voice as he struggled to find words to explain what had happened on the morning his family’s charmed life changed for good.

  “‘I panicked,’” Rachel continued reading to Pete. “‘We hadn’t seen any sign of Kelly coming home. Usually she leaves lights on, or dishes in the kitchen. She always leaves her keys on the hall table. Her keys weren’t there. The house had been exactly as we’d left it when we went to sleep the night before. I asked Lexi how Kelly got home. That’s when she got real weird. Swallowed. Went pale. I could tell that she felt guilty about something.

  “‘Lexi rambled about how she’d heard from other people that Kelly and some kid from school, Harris, left the party on foot. I
asked Lexi which direction they’d walked. At first she shrugged and then she said she guessed they took the shortcut through the field. She said that’s the way Kelly had arrived. Lexi opened the hall closet and gave me Kelly’s bag.

  “‘When I saw that Kelly had left behind her backpack with her things and her phone, I knew that Lexi had thrown her out. Kelly would have called me to pick her up if she’d had her phone. I never liked Lexi much. That girl has a vicious streak a mile wide.’”

  Rachel turned to the next page and took a sip of coffee. She remembered how Dan had stood up abruptly and paced across his study when he’d told her the next part.

  “‘We had to retrace Kelly’s footsteps as quickly as possible. Time was working against us. I drove the car down to the field. I saw muddy footprints at the start of the path. There were more than one set of footprints in the mud. If Kelly had been there, then other people had been there, too. I panicked. That isn’t at all like me. I’ve seen combat. I don’t panic. But when it’s your little girl gone missing, well, that’s a whole other story.

  “‘I threw the car keys to Christine and told her to drive home to look for Kelly while I retraced her footsteps through the field. A person could disappear in that long grass. I didn’t see any sign of Kelly. But I saw things that scared me: a row of beer cans nailed into a log, with holes in them from air rifle pellets. That told me more than I wanted to know about the sort of people that hung out there. The thought that my little girl had walked through there at night made me physically sick. By the time I got home, Christine was sitting on the porch steps crying. Kelly’s bed hadn’t been slept in. We searched the house from the basement to the attic. The backyard, the garage, the shed. Christine even checked the alarm system computer logs. Nobody had come into the house during the night. That told us for sure that Kelly never arrived home.

  “‘I sat down next to Christine. We held hands and put our heads down in prayer. Our daughter was gone and we had no idea what had happened to her.’”

  Rachel tossed her notebook on the bed. “That’s more or less everything Dan told me,” she told Pete, eyeing the alarm clock next to her bed. “I better get going. I have so much to do today. If there’s time, I want to find out more about Hannah’s sister’s death. Somebody must remember something.”

  “You know that I don’t like this one bit,” said Pete. “The way she’s been leaving those letters for you crosses a line. You don’t know anything about her.”

  “That’s exactly why I want to talk to Hannah.”

  “Look, Rachel,” said Pete carefully. “The trial starts in, what, four days? Put this Hannah thing aside and focus on the podcast. We can always look into it later.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Rachel. “The podcast is my first priority. I wrote the script when I returned from meeting Dan Moore last night and I’ve booked the studio to record this afternoon. It would really help if you would keep digging for information on Jenny Stills. Anything you can find.”

  “I’m digging, believe me,” said Pete. “In fact, that reminds me of something interesting. Hannah Stills has no digital footprint. No birth certificate. No social media accounts. It’s almost as if she doesn’t exist.”

  “She probably uses her adoptive parents’ name. I’m betting those records are sealed,” said Rachel. “What about the local newspapers? I ran a few searches but didn’t find anything. Were you able to check the regional newspaper databases? Did the local papers print any articles on Jenny’s death?”

  “I couldn’t find a single thing online.”

  “I’ll stop at the Neapolis library this morning. See if I can find old newspaper editions in the reference section.”

  “Rach, I still don’t get why you’re so obsessed about this thing. Because Hannah stood you up at the jetty?”

  “No,” said Rachel. “Because I let her down. She wrote to me, desperate for help, and I ignored her. Just like people ignored Kelly Moore when she stood outside that party waiting for help. I won’t be indifferent, Pete. I can tell Hannah is desperate. Otherwise she wouldn’t be trying so hard to get my attention.”

  “You can’t save the world, Rachel,” said Pete quietly.

  “Maybe not. But I can save one person at a time.”

  15

  Rachel

  Neapolis’s central library was a light brick building with enormous windows overlooking a brick-paved plaza of cafes and specialty stores.

  Rachel took her place fourth in line at the information counter. The librarian on duty was showing an elderly lady how to use the automatic book-borrowing machine. Eventually, the librarian gave up and scanned the books for the lady before returning to the counter to assist with the next query.

  “Where can I find your newspaper archives?” Rachel asked.

  “We’re now a lending library only. Not a research library,” the librarian explained. “All our archives and research materials have been moved to the City Hall archive. It’s open two mornings a week. Today until noon and Friday morning.” She looked at her watch. “If you want to go there now then you’d better hurry. It closes in an hour. Otherwise you’ll need to wait until Friday.”

  Friday morning was out of the question for Rachel. The trial would have begun by then. Rachel hurried out of the library, determined to get to the archive before it closed for the day. The fastest way to get there was to run through the city park. It separated the new section of town from the graceful heritage area, where the nineteenth-century City Hall building, courthouse, and other administrative buildings were situated along a tree-lined boulevard. Rachel crossed the road and ran across the green lawns, past an ornamental pond filled with ducks and lily pads in the heart of the city park, and up a cycling track that came out at the top of the boulevard.

  Rachel was sweating by the time she jogged up the stairs into the air-conditioned coolness of the white, classical City Hall building. It was the first real exercise she’d had since arriving in Neapolis. She saw an information map on the wall by the entrance and followed the directions down to the basement, where the archive office was located at the end of a long windowless corridor.

  A slender man with gray hair looked up from his computer screen as Rachel entered the austere office. Beyond him were tables with old-fashioned equipment for viewing microfilm.

  “I’m looking for old newspaper clippings from the Neapolis Gazette,” Rachel told him, still standing even though he motioned to her to sit down. She was in a rush and standing would give some urgency to her request.

  “We have newspaper records going back over a century,” he said. “You need to make an application to access the original copies in the archive. It takes a week to get permission. Or if you like, you can look at microfilm copies without an appointment. What period are you looking for?”

  “Summer of ’92,” she said.

  “In that case, you’ll have to go through the microfilm. Those records haven’t been scanned yet into our digital system.”

  “How do I access the microfilm?” Rachel asked.

  “We’re closing soon. It would be better if you come on Friday when we’re next open. That way you’ll have time to go through them properly,” he said, making no effort to hide his irritation at her last-minute arrival.

  “Today’s the only day I have,” said Rachel, glancing at the wall clock. There were forty minutes left until the archive closed. “There’s still time for me to find what I’m looking for,” Rachel insisted.

  “All right,” he said reluctantly. “What dates do you want?”

  “June to December of ’92.”

  The archivist turned on an old-fashioned microfilm machine and went through a catalog of slides with a slowness that Rachel found excruciating as she kept an eye on the wall clock. Eventually, he found the slides in question and loaded them into the machine.

  Rachel used the toggles of the machine to skim read the daily editions of the Neapolis Gazette. She found a number of articles about two local boys who’d been killed
in a car accident that summer. There were no articles about Jenny Stills’s death until Rachel stumbled across a brief paragraph on an inside page in a local news summary section. It was so small she almost missed it:

  NEAPOLIS TEENAGER DROWNS NEAR JETTY

  A 16-year-old girl drowned at the Morrison’s Point beach yesterday. She was taken to Neapolis General Hospital, where doctors pronounced her dead on arrival. The victim’s name has not yet been released. The beach was closed following the incident. It has since reopened. Police are urging swimmers to show caution in the water.

  Rachel’s suspicion that the drowned girl was Jenny Stills was confirmed in a newspaper article published a few days later. It too was buried in an inside page in the newspaper:

  A local teenage girl who drowned at the Morrison’s Point beach has been identified as Jenny Eliza Stills. Police say the girl hit her head on rocks when she jumped off the jetty while swimming at night. Funeral details have not been released by the family. Police and city officials are urging teenagers not to swim near the jetty at Morrison’s Point.

  Rachel could find nothing else on Jenny’s death. There were several more updates on the two boys involved in the fatal car crash. Both boys were from obviously prominent families and the coverage, eulogies, and obituary notices on their deaths were extensive. There were also several updates on the condition of an unnamed third boy, believed to be the driver, who was fighting for his life in intensive care. There was nothing more on the drowned girl.

  Rachel’s attention was briefly caught by a photograph from a candlelit memorial service, held a week after the fatal car accident. It was on the front page of the newspaper under a headline that said: NEAPOLIS MOURNS. Rachel squinted at a hazy black-and-white photo of the police chief, Russ Moore, standing on a podium beside the mayor. The police chief held his arms ramrod straight and stuck out his chest during what the photo caption described as a moment of silence for the two dead boys. One of the boys was the mayor’s nephew. The other was the only son of a prominent businessman in the town.