No way out

Chapter Forty-four

When I came back in the house, Ellen and Kate were still at the kitchen table, Kate holding her hand, their heads bent close together, Ellen apologizing, Kate granting absolution.

“Mrs. Koch,” I said, “do you mind if I look around Adam’s room?”

She raised her head, red, puffy eyes popping with panic. “Why?”

“The police will want to talk with Adam. It will help if we can tell them we didn’t find anything to connect him with Evan and Cara disappearing.”

She hesitated, looking at Kate for reassurance. Kate nodded. Ellen surrendered with a weak shrug and quiet consent. “Top of the stairs.”

“Thanks. This will only take a minute. Kate will stay with you.”

Adam’s room looked like any other teenager’s, moguls built of dirty clothes, muddy jeans on top on one of them, rose from the center of the floor, his bed unmade, his closet a tangle. I sifted through his clothes and dresser drawers, flipped his mattress and looked under his bed without finding a thing.

The hallway outside his room led to a bathroom, which revealed nothing more incriminating than a brown bathtub ring. The other bedroom was Ellen’s. Unlikely as it was to yield anything, I did a quick search, coming up empty. I headed for the stairs until I noticed a pull-down panel in the hallway ceiling. When I opened it, a rickety wooden cross between a stairway and a ladder unfolded to the floor.

The stairs led to the attic, pink insulation stuffed between two-by-fours, plywood laid over floor joists, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I turned on the light, scanning the dim empty space. Straddling the joists, I lifted one of the plywood panels, finding a laptop computer half-buried in insulation.

There was enough juice in the battery to boot it up. I clicked on the Internet browser, not surprised that it wasn’t password protected, teenager logic dictating that a good hiding place beat a password every time.

I knew what I’d find even before I opened the hard drive, flashing back to a time too many years ago when Joy, Kevin, Wendy, and I were living in Dallas. A neighbor had offered to give Kevin a ride home from school. When Kevin didn’t come home, Joy went to the neighbor’s house to look for him. The door was unlocked, a treasure trove of child pornography spread on a table. He killed Kevin and himself as the police and I closed in on him.

Adam’s computer was loaded with hundreds of the same kind of images. I pulled up the other plywood panels. Lodged deep in the insulation beneath one of them was a soft package bound with yellowed newspaper. I unwrapped it, confirming what I felt in my bones. It was a child’s bloodstained Harry Potter T-shirt.

I set the T-shirt next to the laptop and called Adrienne Nardelli, told her where I was and what I’d found.

“I’m on my way. Put my evidence back where you found it and don’t touch another thing.”

Kate and Ellen had moved to a small sofa in a den cluttered with half-finished knitting projects, a crucifix on the wall above the television. Ellen was leafing through a family album, Kate oohing and aahing at Adam’s baby pictures, shielding Ellen a while longer from the storm about to rain down on her. They looked up as I walked in the room.

“Mrs. Koch, the police will be here in a few minutes. Do you have any idea where Adam is?”

She went pale, cradling the photo album to her breast. “Why are the police coming? What did you find?”

“Did Adam know a boy from your church named Timmy Montgomery who disappeared a couple of years ago?”

She melted into the sofa, the photo album sliding from her limp arms onto the floor, muttering. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.”

Kate looked at me, eyebrows raised, her question obvious. I answered it with a quick nod. She turned toward Ellen, gently rubbing her shoulder with one hand, holding Ellen’s with the other.

Parents’ worst fear is that something horrible will happen to their child. They cannot imagine the flip side of the nightmare, how much worse it would be if their child committed a terrible crime, especially against another child. Ellen’s response spoke to the suspicion, guilt, and fear she harbored about her son, worries she had spent years tamping down with denial, unable to face them and her own failings as a mother. Her world, built on thin reeds of self-deception, was collapsing.

I understood now why she had led the neighborhood search efforts for Evan and Cara and raised the money to hire Lucy. Knowing that Adam was sleeping with their mother, suspecting him in Timmy Montgomery’s disappearance, she had to find them, if only to hold on to her sanity. Hating Peggy Martin was her last lifeline, giving her someone else to blame for the child she could face only in her darkest moments.

“Adam hid something in the attic that might have belonged to Timmy. What do you know about that?”

She folded forward, rocking slowly back and forth, shaking her head without answering.

“Ellen,” Kate said. “Adam is in trouble, and he needs our help. It will be easier for him if Jack finds him before the police do.”

She sobbed and shuddered, forcing deep breaths into her lungs until she could speak.

“He was out all night and wouldn’t tell me where he’d been and wouldn’t tell me where he was going when he left again.”

“There’s a pair of muddy jeans on top of a clothes pile in his room. Is that what he was wearing last night?”

“He tracked mud all over the house. I cleaned it up this morning, but I told him I wasn’t going to wash his clothes.”

If Adam had spent the night digging in the dirt I had a good idea what he was doing and where he was doing it.

“Kate, I need the car keys.”

“Where are you going?”

“To find Adam. I need you to stay here with Ellen until the police come. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She straightened, ready to argue, but let the moment pass and handed me her keys.

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“I get lucky every now and then.”