AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The light is dim, and there’s another door at the bottom of the stairs, a finished room in the unfinished basement. I push it open and turn on the light.
Every wall is covered with photos, newspaper articles, sticky notes with my dad’s scrawling hand, crime scene photos. There’s an architectural drawing of the Handy house and a plot survey. Boxes of files stand against the walls labeled: False leads; Suspects; Tip Line Call Logs; Fliers. This room is the heart of my father’s ten-year investigation. It is a heart that has slowly stopped beating, ending abruptly with my father’s stroke.
The room is musty and dank, still smelling of my dad’s cigarette smoke though he quit years ago. How many times did I come home to find him down here, head bent over his desk—looking, searching, thinking, theorizing. Part of me wanted to scream at him:I’m here! I survived! Look at me, not them!
But how could I do that? It was my fault. All of it. He told me to stay away from Evan Handy and I just couldn’t.
Badger lets out a sigh from behind me.
“I never wanted to go back there, you know? I tried to forget,” he says, voice soft.
“We can’t,” I answer. “We’re still there—in so many ways. Maybe finally admitting that is the way forward.”
The furnace kicks on and starts humming in the far corner.
“That’s deep.”
“Shut up.”
He moves past me with the beers and the Doritos. “So, let’s start digging.”
17
Madeline Martin’s seventeen-year-old voice fills the cab of Harley’s Mustang.
“It was December Twenty-Third. My dad was working late. So, I knew I could sneak out to Evan’s party without my father ever knowing. I told him I was spending the night at Steph’s, and he didn’t question it. He trusted me.”
She doesn’t sound much different now, Harley thinks, with the same soft, halting way of speaking, as if she’s choosing her words very carefully.
He takes the road out of town, following the same route she and Steph did that night, Madeline driving her dad’s Scout. She still drove that old rattler. Still lived in this same nowhere town, same house she grew up in. Why didn’t she ever leave?
“Your father didn’t want you seeing Evan, right?”
The woman’s voice is warm, coaxing. Detective Samantha Barnes, now retired, did Madeline’s interview after she had recovered enough to give a statement. So far, the detective who was Sheriff James Martin’s second on the investigation has declined to be interviewed by Harley. She wrote him a terse email, telling him that as far as she was concerned, they’d done their job and the case was closed. Evan Handy needed to tell them where the bodies of Ainsley and Sam Wallace were buried and maybe Harley should focus on him. She was clear that she considered him a troublemaker and a hack writer. Nothing he hadn’t heard before.
“No,” young Maddie says on the recording. Her voice wobbled a little. “He didn’t like Evan.”
“Why not?”
“There were rumors that Evan had hurt another girl. My father believed that there was—something wrong with him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. I-I—loved him, I think. I thought I did. I was wrong.”
Young Maddie starts to softly cry here.
“Let’s take a minute,” said Detective Barnes. There’s a click in the recording.
Then, “Are you ready to go on?”
Maddie clears her throat. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me what happened the night of December Twenty-Third, Maddie?”
There’s some rustling, movement on the recording. Then: “School had let out for the Christmas break. Evan’s mother was gone and wouldn’t be back until Christmas, so he wanted to have a big party.”
“What did you think about that?”
