What We Lost in the Dark (19 page)

“We don’t know anything from this,” I said to Rob. “And I have to leave. I have to go get something.”

“Go get what?”

“Honey, if I was going to be in any danger, I would tell you. It’s just something I left in the woods the other night when I had the camera out there.”

“Don’t go near him without me, Allie,” he warned.

“I promise.” Most of what I was telling Rob was true. Technically, Lake Superior was in the woods—or at least part of it was. “What should we do with this film?” I asked.

“We’re going to give this to your FBI agent,” Rob said. “I’m emailing it to you right now.”

“He’s my professor. He just used to be an FBI agent.”

“But he’s connected. He knew about the voiceprints of the phone calls from Juliet. He knows about this, too. Someone he knows is an expert in this stuff.”

I shook my head. “We couldn’t get lucky enough that they’re talking about anything real in a restaurant. Maybe he’s just mad at Tabor for some ordinary thing.”

“Why would the father of an adult get that mad? It’s not like he took the car without permission.”

I almost laughed again. “That’s probably exactly what he did. He took that Lamborghini without permission.”

“No. Look how upset Dr. Stephen is. He’s furious. If Garrett Tabor really is who he says he is, Dr. Stephen wouldn’t
have anything to be that upset about. His son is successful and has respect and a nice girlfriend. A bunch of them. So what’s wrong?”

I sighed, even though I was secretly reveling in the fact that Rob was just as committed as I was now. “It could be anything. Maybe he thinks it’s cheesy that Tabor sleeps around so much. When you open up people’s personal lives, it’s not like their public lives.”

“That’s exactly what I’m hoping,” Rob said.

“If I was going to say something about a crime, I wouldn’t do it in front of who knows who.”

“It’s just like you said, Allie. The restaurant could be camouflage. No one’s listening to them. I bet this conversation wasn’t planned.”

We watched as Dr. Stephen gripped his temples with both hands and looked out into the restaurant. If he had been able to think straight, he might have seen us. Rob was right. Dr. Stephen didn’t look angry in an ordinary way. He looked personally aggrieved. He looked as though he’d been assaulted. I thought again of the photos that had come while Rob was away.

I called them up.

“This is sick. He was watching you,” Rob said, staring at the screen. His already pale skin turned a shade whiter. “We don’t know how many times.”

“That’s what scared me. Not even my mom knows what was down there when we dived. I’m too afraid that if I tell her, he’ll find out. Then, before I can do anything … he’ll get them. He’ll get my mother or Angela.”

“But be reasonable, Allie. How could he get hold of them or hurt either of them without anyone suspecting …?”

“You know that. Remember Nicola? Remember my
friend? No one even knew there was another car on the road the night she went off the bridge. And her only crime was seeing me see
him
with Juliet at the Fire Festival.”

Rob gave me a cold glare. “Why didn’t you tell me about these pictures he sent?”

“I would have! It was while you weren’t speaking to me, dummy! I tried to call you eight times one day.”

Rob shrugged. He pulled me close to him, his mouth tasting of rum and cinnamon. For the next hour or so, we even managed to forget about Garrett Tabor.

WHEN I SAT up, it was after eleven. Wesley might still be out west with his “lady,” but I was responsible for that boat. “Drive me to my house,” I said to Rob. “Come on. Hurry.”

When we got downstairs, we were puzzled about why it was so difficult to open the door to the driveway from the stairs. It was as though someone had wedged a weight against it. Finally, using our combined strength we pushed it open and saw that a foot of snow had already fallen. From the way it was coming down, we were in for the kind of epic Minnesota blizzard that makes people believe in vengeful deities. I wouldn’t be getting any boat tonight.

Fretting, I called Gideon at the restaurant.

He chuckled. “Oh, you mean the little rubber inflatable. I already brought the rubber dinghy up to shore. I put it in a circle of rocks and covered it with a tarp. I saw your fins washed up, and there was a plastic box in it with your phone in it.” He paused, and I heard the tinkling of ice in a glass. “Allie, the fins are okay but I think your phone has had it.”

“Gid, how did you even know I was going after a boat?”

“What else would you be going out on a lake for? And why would you need a boat as big as mine?”

“Gid, thank you.” I thought of him patiently hauling up the anchors and putting the Odyssey back to shore, probably having to pole through a crust of ice at the edges of the beach to bring it up, then standing in the freezing cold, hatless, winching his own boat out of the water. “You saw my fins? On the rocks?”

“I saw your buddy, on the rocks.” The spark went out of his voice. There was another tinkle. “I yelled for him, but he was looking for something. When I got over there, I saw one of those extra long blue fins, and the other was already washed up on the beach.”

“My buddy,” I spat. “Well, he lives there, in that penthouse.”

“It’s for sale.”

“Gideon?” I said. I walked back up to Rob’s door, as he struggled to shovel out his Jeep, and closed it lightly behind me. “Could I still use your truck?”

“I’ll leave it in your driveway,” he said. “Be careful. Driving, I mean.”

“I will.”

Months ago, Rob and I had speculated: Was it remotely possible that Dr. Stephen knew about Garrett Tabor? How could you know such things and protect the person, even if he was your child? I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering my best friend. How could you protect that person if he was your lover? Juliet was afraid he would hurt me or Angela if she didn’t do what he said. Yet until the very end, that night at the bridge, I know that a part of Juliet had still trusted Garrett Tabor, despite everything.

People could believe any version they wanted to, if they wanted to badly enough.

DESPITE ROB’S DILIGENCE at trying to get the car out, no one was going anywhere in snow that was now two feet deep. Snow always stops everything—even the bad stuff of life—and it’s like a small psychological vacation. I couldn’t leave Rob’s. This made us feel entirely adult. Rob’s parents left us scrupulously alone when we were in his garage-top quarters. But we’d never been as truly alone as we were tonight. So we snuggled in to watch the Arctic blast through the huge glass panel Rob’s dad had installed across one whole peak of the roof. Letting nature have sway was fun. However, I’d forgotten, until I glanced at the clock on the TV, that Rob had obligations. It was after midnight. His parents were supposed be in Minneapolis at 6
A.M
. He would need to gear up and let his father take over once he got there, because the roads were going to be slow.

“Maybe I’m missing something. Do you think your parents know about this storm?” I asked him.

“You’re kidding, right?” Rob said. “All my dad does is travel. He has a chip in his head.”

“What?”

“My dad checks the weather like it was his heartbeat. My parents already called. And they have no idea when the airport out there will open, and the airport here sure isn’t going to be open tomorrow. Everything’s shut down.”

I said, “I love you.”

He said, “Well, Allie. I love you, too.”

It was two days before the semester began, and he was certainly harried, but Dr. Yashida not only answered my email promptly, he answered with a phone call.

“I have been thinking about you and your welfare,” he said. “You are an original student already.”

I didn’t know whether to thank him or be embarrassed. But I told him that there was another favor I needed to ask of him.

“Can someone tell what someone is saying by just seeing him talk instead of hearing him?”

“Most of the time, the machine really is hearing the person. You can enhance it.”

“Is there any way you could try with a file I have? It’s very important, and I’m sorry to intrude.”

“That’s okay. Is this urgent?” he asked.

I said it was, extremely.

Curiously, Dr. Yashida didn’t seem surprised, almost as if he’d been waiting for me to enlist his services. It was one of those moments I once had when I was stoned with Juliet,
when you think you’re part of the steering column of some BMW driven by Venusians, when it seems possible that everything is a mirror and everything is a replica of a replica.

HALF AN HOUR later, Dr. Yashida wrote to ask if he had permission to pass along our video to two analysts. One of them would enhance the quality of the recording and take out any accidental noise. Another could glean what Dr. Stephen was saying by reading his lips, a criminal forensic specialist—like the kind I would be one day. The analyst was deaf. Lip-reading was both her job skill and her life skill. It was the worst sort of reverse prejudice, but her disability made me feel more confident in her.

It was helpful, Dr. Yashida wrote, that our subject was a clear speaker. It was possible for the analyst to see most of what he said. He asked for a name. I said it was Dr. Stephen. No last name.

Later that day, a message came in, with the transcript.

A note from Dr. Yashida arrived after I thanked him.

He asked me to let him know if there was more news about this incident or my friend, and he urged me to take these messages and the report of the voice analysis immediately to the nearest office of the Minnesota Bureau of Investigation. He was a close friend of an agent named Molly Eldredge whose specialty was serious crime.

Fear can’t be your motivation here, Allie
, he wrote.
As you’re learning, fear among individuals is what the bad guys count on
.

If I would give him permission, he would share everything with her now, and someone would have a conversation with Tabor.

Rob and I read the transcript again and again. We were stunned.

We watched the video.

“He’s talking about Juliet, isn’t he?” Rob finally said. “Could he be?”

“He has to be. He’s saying he covered up that she died from drowning.”

“I’m not sure he’s saying that.”

“He seems to be.”

Rob shook his head. “I don’t think I can make myself believe that he would do that. Does it mean he knows about Garrett Tabor and Juliet?”

I thought of what Tommy had once said to me and Juliet: if you can think of it, someone has already done it.

“This town is their empire, Rob. It’s like they are the barons who live on the hill and we are the serfs. I can’t believe someone would cover up anything like that. But what if she was already dead and he didn’t want his son implicated in her death?”

We thought back to the night that Juliet jumped from the bridge, how urgent she was and how unprepared. I remembered how Rob and I, in the center of the bridge, both believed we had heard her land on the bank of the creek bed. Only then did we hear a scream and a splash. A few days after her funeral—for reasons we now recognized more as needing proof than needing closure—we had done the jump ourselves. Even though it was long, and diagonal, both of us had landed with room to spare.

“Juliet wouldn’t have drowned,” Rob said.

“If she was hurt, she would have.”