The Night Swim Page 8

  Police Chief Moore seemed larger than life, a powerful presence that overshadowed the gray-haired mayor standing alongside him in the photo. In another photo, Rachel recognized a young Dan Moore, his arm in a sling, with his dad.

  Rachel toggled through the news clippings faster and faster, aware that she was running out of time. She was disappointed there was no more information on Jenny Stills beyond those two small articles.

  The archivist was making a big performance of shutting down the office, noisily turning off the other machines and packing his briefcase. Rachel was not so obtuse that she didn’t realize it was his way of telling her to hurry up. She ignored him and kept toggling through articles, determined to eke out every second that she had left until the archive closed. She was glad that she did when she found an article in a newspaper later that year.

  CASE CLOSED ON NEAPOLIS DROWNING

  A teenage girl who was found dead in the water at Morrison’s Point last summer died from accidental drowning after jumping off the jetty and hitting rocks, said the medical examiner’s office, which officially closed the case yesterday.

  The girl’s mother, who is since deceased, had demanded police launch a homicide investigation into the circumstances of her daughter’s death. But the medical examiner’s office said no further investigation was warranted as the girl tragically drowned while swimming in rough waters at night.

  City officials say they have long warned teenagers against jumping from the jetty and promised that warning signs would be erected to prevent future tragedies.

  “You’ll have to finish now.”

  Rachel looked up. The archivist was standing by the door with his hand on the light switch. She was out of time.

  As Rachel left the building and jogged back to the library, where she’d left her car, she was more curious than ever and frustrated that she wouldn’t have much time to look for answers. Not with the trial about to start.

  The paltry information and sparse newspaper coverage about Jenny Stills’s death had raised more questions for Rachel than it answered. There was a marked difference between the way the newspaper had covered Jenny’s death compared to those of the two boys. Maybe it was because of how Jenny had died in an accidental drowning, rather than a fiery multi-casualty car crash. Or because Jenny and her family, Rachel had surmised from Hannah’s letters, ranked low in the town’s social hierarchy and the boys killed in the car accident were from influential families.

  It wasn’t only the lack of public interest in Jenny’s death that bothered Rachel. She couldn’t stop wondering what had troubled Jenny’s mother enough to muster whatever remained of her strength in her dying days to demand her daughter’s death be investigated as a possible homicide. What made Hope Stills think that Jenny might have been murdered when the authorities were certain that she had died in a tragic drowning?

  Rachel had enough time for a quick stop at the nearby police station to see if she could find some answers. It was a flat-roofed seventies-style building two blocks from the library. Rachel handed her reporter’s accreditation card to the duty officer and explained that she wanted to speak to a veteran policeman who might have investigated a drowning case from several decades before. Failing that, she wanted to access copies of the police and autopsy reports.

  “Do you have a case number? Or a name of the victim?” the police officer asked.

  “Jenny Stills,” she answered.

  He typed the name into the system.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That name doesn’t appear in our files.”

  16

  Rachel

  Detective Nick Cooper was on his hands and knees prepping the deck of his two-master schooner with an electric sanding machine when Rachel climbed onto his boat. Realizing there was no chance he’d ever notice she was standing there over the deafening roar of the machine, Rachel pulled the sander plug out of the socket and cut the power.

  The high-pitched screech ended abruptly, leaving the tranquil sound of water lapping against the boat in its wake. Detective Cooper removed his noise blockers and protective eye mask as he stood up to find out why his sander had abruptly stopped working.

  He saw Rachel and wiped his sweaty palms on his khaki work pants before reaching out to shake her hand. His light hair and stubble contrasted with his deep tan and black T-shirt.

  “Was it hard to find my boat?” he asked, putting the sander aside.

  “I followed the cloud of dust just like you told me,” Rachel said. “Looks like you have a big paint job ahead of you.”

  “It’s the price I pay for having a timber sailing boat. More maintenance, but there’s nothing like sailing this baby when the wind is up,” he said, taking two sodas covered in condensation out of a cooler box. He tossed one to Rachel before opening his own with a hiss.

  “What is it you want to talk about?” he asked, moving aside a two-gallon can of paint so there was space for Rachel to sit on a bench.

  “Everything you know about the Scott Blair case,” Rachel replied.

  Detective Cooper sat on the edge of the boat and took a long sip of his drink. “Nice try,” he said once he’d swallowed. “You know I can’t talk about the case before it gets to trial. Anyway, the case wasn’t handled by me. It was handled by our sex crimes unit. All I did was make initial inquiries in the hours after Kelly Moore went missing. Like I told your producer, I’m willing to talk about that if it helps. As long as I’m not quoted.”

  “Go ahead,” said Rachel. “Tell me whatever you’re able to tell me.”

  “I’d planned to sail out to Ocracoke that Sunday morning when I got a call from the duty officer down at the station. A teenage girl had been reported missing. Her dad called it in. They asked me to make some inquiries.”

  “Her dad being Dan Moore,” said Rachel. “The son of the former police chief, Russ Moore?”

  “I see you’ve brushed up on your local history.”

  “As best as I could,” said Rachel, thinking that there was a fair chunk of local history she hadn’t been able to piece together yet. Such as how Jenny Stills had died. “I am betting the investigation was fast-tracked out of respect for Russ Moore.”

  “No comment,” Detective Cooper said, taking another sip of his soda.

  “What steps did you take once they asked you to find out what happened to Kelly?”

  “In these cases, you really want to speak to the last person to have seen the missing person. In this instance, it was a kid called Harris Wilson. My first stop was his house.”

  * * *

  Harris’s dad, Bill Wilson, was in the driveway polishing his car when Detective Cooper arrived. The detective was dressed in canvas shorts and a T-shirt. He’d been on his way to his boat when he’d received the call about Kelly Moore and didn’t have time to go home and get changed.

  “Harris around?” he called out to Bill as he walked down the driveway.

  “Who’s asking?” asked Bill.

  Detective Cooper flashed his police badge. “I’m looking for a girl who went missing last night. Harris’s friends say he might have seen her before she disappeared.”

  “Harris is asleep,” Bill said, furiously polishing the hood of his car.

  “Can you wake him up?” Detective Cooper asked. “It’s kind of important.”

  “With pleasure. ’Bout time he woke up.” Bill tossed the rag onto the car hood as he led the way into the house.

  He left Detective Cooper sitting at the pine kitchen table, flipping through the sports section of the newspaper while he went upstairs to wake his son. A few minutes later, Harris shuffled into the kitchen in bare feet. His hair was a mess. His clothes were creased, like he’d literally thrown them on. He couldn’t meet Detective Cooper’s eyes at all as he pulled out a chair and sat alongside his dad at the kitchen table. Detective Cooper took one look at him and tossed the newspaper aside.

  He had dealt with scores of missing-persons cases during his years on the force. The scenario was almost a
lways the same: A teenager runs away and the parents immediately expect a missing-persons file to be opened and no stone to be left unturned in the search for their kid. The kid inevitably turns up hours or days later. It’s discovered he, or she, was staying with friends after a fight at home. Sometimes the pattern repeated itself when the kid ran off again after another argument.

  He’d assumed this would be one of those cases. That is, until he set eyes on Harris. His eyes were bloodshot and he was showing an inordinate amount of interest in the floor. More troubling, Harris reeked of alcohol and weed. Detective Cooper smelled it even before Harris reached the kitchen table.

  Rightly or wrongly, in the unofficial barometer of guilt by which detectives measured potential suspects Harris was in the red zone.

  Harris took a green apple from the fruit bowl on the table. He looked for a moment as if he was about to take a bite, then changed his mind and threw it from one hand to the other like he was preparing to pitch a ball. It didn’t look good. A girl was missing and he was messing around, fidgeting and looking like he wished he were anywhere else.

  Harris’s father gently kicked Harris in the calf to get him to cut it out. Harris looked at his dad and shrugged. He must have known that he stank of marijuana and cheap liquor. Not exactly the way to impress a cop who’d heard that he was the last person to see a missing girl before she disappeared.

  Harris tossed the apple around again and then took a bite with a pronounced crunch. Detective Cooper watched him closely, pushing back his chair so he could get a better view of the teenage boy sitting across the table from him.

  One thing was certain in his mind: Harris Wilson had gone from a possible witness to a key suspect before he had answered a single question.

  “Thanks for talking to me, Harris,” Detective Cooper said, deliberately sounding casual. “I only have a few questions. It won’t take long.” The teen shrugged as if it made no difference to him.

  “Are you aware that Kelly Moore is missing?”

  “My dad told me. When he woke me up. That’s the first I heard of it,” he said, his eyes downcast. He shifted the apple from one hand to the other. “What do you mean by ‘missing’?” He looked up. Detective Cooper noticed an uncertain catch in his voice. Harris was afraid of something.

  “Missing as in nobody knows where she is,” said Detective Cooper, watching him closely. “Some people say they saw you leaving a party with her. Did you leave a party with Kelly last night?”

  “Kind of.” Harris squirmed at the question.

  “What do you mean by ‘kind of’?”

  “Kelly left the party after Lexi locked her out of the house. I saw her walking off down the street in the dark. A lot of us did. I followed her from the house.”

  “You followed her?”

  Bill Wilson sat up so abruptly that his chair squeaked. He seemed to register for the first time that Detective Cooper’s sudden interest in his son was not as innocent as he had presumed.

  “I didn’t think it was right that she was walking alone at night. Lexi was being an outright bitch to her. So I went after Kelly and walked back to town with her. I was leaving anyway. The party was lame.”

  Harris told Detective Cooper how they went to the playground and sat on the swings for a while until he left Kelly there to go to his house to get something. He was gone for only a few minutes.

  “What exactly did you get from your room that was so important that you had to leave a teenage girl alone at a park in the middle of the night?”

  Harris examined his nails with the utmost fascination before raising his head. “I got something to smoke,” he said eventually.

  “A cigarette? Or something stronger? Like marijuana? Don’t worry. I’m not here on a drug bust. I’m only here to find Kelly.”

  “The other thing,” muttered Harris.

  “I have a feeling there’s more,” said Detective Cooper, who had no such feeling but knew how to keep a suspect talking. “What else did you take?”

  “I refilled my flask,” Harris said, looking at his dad guiltily.

  “And?” Detective Cooper asked, fishing for more.

  “I got a condom.” Harris exhaled loudly as he stared at his bare feet.

  “So you thought you’d get lucky with Kelly?”

  “I figured it was worth having. In case.”

  “And did you get lucky?”

  “No,” said Harris. “She wasn’t there when I got back. Like I told you before.”

  Detective Cooper sighed. He would have loved to pursue that line of questioning further, but he had to restrain himself. Harris was still technically a witness, not a suspect, and Detective Cooper hadn’t read him his rights.

  “What happened when you saw that Kelly wasn’t at the park?”

  “I sat on the swing and smoked my joint.”

  “You got high? You didn’t look for her?”

  “Sure, I looked for her. I called her name. No answer. I figured that she’d gone home. That she’d stood me up. I stayed for a bit, smoked, and went home.”

  “That’s right,” his father interrupted. “Harris knocked over a pile of recycling when he came in at around two thirty A.M. I went to check on him not long after. He was in bed. Asleep.”

  “It would be helpful if you’d come down to the police station, Harris,” said Detective Cooper, treading carefully. “So we can talk some more. There might be other things you saw that could lead us to Kelly.”

  “Is that really necessary?” Bill Wilson said. “You said you only had a few questions.”

  “I did. But a girl is missing. Based on what Harris has told me, there are more questions that need to be asked. That’s best done at a police station rather than here.”

  Harris’s dad picked up a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “Do we need a lawyer?” he asked once he exhaled.

  “It’s up to you.”

  “Are you saying that my son is a suspect?”

  “Until we find Kelly Moore, everyone is a suspect. Especially the last person to have seen her alive. Right now that appears to be your son.”

  * * *

  Detective Cooper squashed his empty soda can and tossed it into the trash. Rachel’s time was up. He needed to get back to his work.

  “Do you think that Harris was involved? That he and Scott did this together?” Rachel asked, reluctant to budge until she’d squeezed as much information as she could get out of him.

  “Harris was charged with aiding and abetting. That’s a serious offense. I guess you heard on the local news that he cut himself a deal. Now he won’t stand trial.”

  “Harris must have been involved. Otherwise, why would he take a plea deal?” Rachel pressed.

  “There are lots of reasons why a suspect takes a plea deal. Maybe he’s guilty. Or he’s innocent but doesn’t think he can prove it to a jury. Or, third option, his family can’t afford to pay the going rate of a good trial lawyer,” he said, inserting a fresh piece of sandpaper into the sander as he prepared to resume his work.

  “Even then, it’s hard to believe that a person would admit to doing something if he didn’t do it,” said Rachel.

  “Justice is expensive. You’ve got to have serious money if you want to put up a halfway decent defense. Maybe his family and lawyers did the math and figured they didn’t want to risk a long prison sentence for Harris,” he said. “That sort of horse trading happens all the time. Otherwise the court system would be clogged to paralysis. I’ve seen more plea deals than trials in the twenty years I was a detective in Rhode Island, and then the past two years here in Neapolis.”

  “You’re a recent arrival!” said Rachel in surprise. She’d intended to ask him about Jenny Stills in case he knew what had happened to her, but didn’t bother in light of his revelation that he was a relative newcomer to the town. “What made you move here?”

  He hesitated. “My marriage broke up. I figured I’d leave the force, set up a business taking tourists on diving trips. I’m a master diver. E
nded up getting offered a detective job. Now I’m a working cop again. Believe me, there’s nobody more surprised than me,” he said, plugging in the sanding machine.

  Detective Cooper put on his earplugs as Rachel climbed off the boat onto the jetty to the sound of the high-pitched whine of the sander scraping the deck.

  She walked down the jetty, passing a line of moored cruisers until she reached the marina complex, where there were several seafood restaurants with tables that spilled out onto a waterside deck. Rachel hadn’t tried any of them even though they were across the road from her hotel. They were always crowded and she didn’t have the luxury of time to wait for a table.

  As Rachel passed the Blue Sea Cafe, she spotted a small table overlooking the water. She decided that for once she’d have a proper lunch instead of eating takeout on the go. Rachel chose the seat facing the sea and put on her sunglasses to block the glare of the sun.

  When the waitress came around, Rachel ordered the crab burger from the specials chalkboard. It came with chips, a side of salad, and an artfully presented sliced avocado with a squeeze of lime. Rachel ate it all. She opted not to order dessert or coffee. She’d dawdled enough. When the waitress came around with an American Express folder containing the check, Rachel slipped her credit card inside without looking at the bill.

  “Oh, I don’t need your card,” said the waitress. “Your bill has been paid in full.”

  “By who?” Rachel opened the folder to find out. Inside was a cash register receipt stapled to an envelope with her name scrawled on it.

  “Don’t know,” the waitress answered as she stacked Rachel’s dishes into a neat pile. “It was paid for at the counter.”

  17

  Hannah

  Rachel, have you ever done something you regretted so badly that you’d sell your soul to go back in time and reverse it?

  Maybe for you it was getting married to your college boyfriend and then divorcing him six months later when you realized that you’d married your best friend, but not the love of your life. You mentioned that in an interview you gave to some magazine. I forget which one.