The Forgotten Girl (18 page)

“Are you at work?”

Jason was. He’d been there all morning, and when his office phone rang shortly before lunch, he picked it up without even wondering who might be on the other end. He recognized the voice right away.

“Regan?”

A long pause. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Of course I’m at work. Is something wrong?”

“Have you heard the news?” she asked.

“No. Did something happen?” Jason’s heart dropped. What had he missed? “Is this about Hayden? Did they find her?”

“I wanted to try to catch you now. It’s already been on the radio. That’s where I heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“That body they found up on the Bluff. Jason, it’s Logan’s body. They identified it this morning.”

“Logan?”

Jason’s mind couldn’t catch up to the words he was hearing. Regan wasn’t making any sense. Logan? His body on the Bluff? It couldn’t be. Logan was gone. Long gone. But he wasn’t dead. He
wasn’t a body. He wasn’t a bunch of bones scattered in the woods, left there to be found by a cadaver dog years and years later.

“I have to go, Jason. I have work, and it’s just too much right now.”

“Regan? I think this is a mistake. You must have misunderstood what they said.”

“It’s not a mistake, Jason. I have to go.”

She hung up.

*   *   *

Jason called Detective Olsen, who picked up after the first ring. Jason skipped the formalities and asked the question. “What is going on, Detective? I got a call from a high school friend.”

“Are you at home or work?” Olsen asked.

“Work.”

“I’ll meet you there in about ten minutes. I’m in that area.”

“My friend says this body or skeleton or whatever is Logan Shaw. Is it?”

“We should talk in person,” Olsen said. “I know things are coming out on the news already.”

“Is it Logan Shaw?” Jason asked.

There was a pause. Then Olsen said, “Yes, it is.”

*   *   *

Jason met Olsen in front of his office building. The detective pulled up in a dark blue sedan, a Chevy Impala, and when he stepped out of the car, he wore a suit and sunglasses. He came toward Jason as the breeze picked up, blowing his tie askew. Jason met Olsen halfway and guided the detective toward a picnic table that sat in the grass under a shade tree. People ate their lunches out there and took their cigarette breaks. It would be a quiet place to talk.

“Tell me about this,” Jason said as they sat. He felt hollow, like the husk of a person.

Jason positioned himself with his back against the table, and Olsen straddled the bench. “I wanted to see you so I could tell you in person about this,” Olsen said. “Obviously, that didn’t work out. But I’m sorry to report that the skeletal remains we found on Thompson Bluff are those of Logan Shaw. They were positively identified by the medical examiner’s office.”

“How?” Jason asked.

“How were they identified? We used dental records. You played a role in the whole thing. After you mentioned it to me, I looked into the case a little more. There isn’t much on it since no one
really
considered Mr. Shaw a missing person, not after the first few days. But I did find some information in our old case files. I located Mr. Shaw’s mother, and she gave me the right name. The dentist is retired but still has his records in storage. It was pretty easy from there.”

“But Logan can’t be dead,” Jason said. “He left town. He went out west. He sent letters to his parents.”

“I’m aware of all that,” Olsen said. “As far as the medical examiner can tell, that body’s been in the woods a long time. Maybe twenty-five years or so. Isn’t that how long ago you graduated from high school?”

“Twenty-seven,” Jason said.

“That’s what I thought. And that’s the last time anyone saw Mr. Shaw. It makes sense. He was on the Bluff that night, and he was never seen again.”

“It doesn’t make sense. The letters . . .”

“I haven’t seen these letters. I understand they’re in the possession of Mr. Shaw’s father, and his health isn’t that great. We’ll get up there and take a look at them when we can, but chances
are those letters are a misunderstanding. Or an attempt by someone to cover something up.”

“You mean to say that someone killed Logan? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Do you know of anyone who would want to?” Olsen asked. “You and he were close friends, right? Wouldn’t you know the things that were going on in his life? Did anyone threaten him? Was he having a fight with anybody?”

Jason couldn’t answer. He tried to focus his mind. How long had he known this news? Fifteen minutes? It hadn’t sunk in. It couldn’t sink in.

But there was Olsen before him. So certain. So sure. They’d used dental records. What else did Jason need to know? And as he sat there, just a few feet away from the detective, he admitted to himself that it made sense in a way. Was it possible to believe that Logan left all those years ago and never made contact with anyone again? Jason assumed Logan would come back someday. When he and Nora moved back to town after Jason lost his job, he felt defeated. Wiped out. And his marriage needed serious attention. But when adding up the pluses and minuses of taking that step backward to Ednaville, Jason put the possibility of seeing Logan again into the plus category. If he lived here long enough, and Logan’s parents aged and died, wouldn’t he see his friend again then? At the very least, wouldn’t there be some occasion when he could see him again?

And, instead, he’d been lying in the woods all those years, his body decaying back to dust while the rest of the world went on with their lives.

It couldn’t be.

“Would you like to talk another time?” Olsen asked. “I can drive you home.”

“He was my best friend. For years.”

“I know.”

Above their heads birds chirped. People came and went from the office, leaving or returning from lunch in small packs. Young secretaries. Older executives. It all went on and on.

“How did nobody find his body all those years?” Jason asked.

“It was in a remote area. Off the beaten path a little. Unless you were looking for something, as we were when your sister’s car was found, you wouldn’t see it. We only found it because of the dogs. And the search for your sister.”

“Thanks, Hayden,” Jason said.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. This wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Hayden showing up and getting into whatever clusterfuck she got herself into.” Jason shook his head. He recognized that his anger toward Hayden was misdirected as he said, “She can’t help but stir the pot wherever she goes. Disasters just seem to stream along behind her. I love her so much, but she really . . . sometimes she drives me to the brink.”

“Do you think your sister being missing has something to do with Mr. Shaw’s death?” Olsen asked.

“Do you?”

“I don’t know anything right now.”

“Neither do I.” Jason looked down at his shaking hands. He brought them together, folded them one into the other in an effort at steadiness. “I was thinking about Hayden and Logan, ever since you mentioned that body being found up there. I tried to make a link between the two of them.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Hayden was flirtatious with everyone. I don’t know if she and Logan ever did anything or not. If Hayden were here, you could ask her. . . .”

“I’d very much like to ask her that,” Olsen said.

Jason straightened up. Something clicked in his mind, something that seemed important. “How do you even know what killed him after all this time? I mean, how do you know he didn’t just trip and fall? Or have an aneurysm in the woods? There’d be nothing left to examine.”

“We know the cause of death,” Olsen said.

“What is it?”

“Bones can tell a story,” Olsen said. “Now, didn’t you and Mr. Shaw have some kind of altercation that night?”

“Yeah, we did.”

“What about?”

“A girl. We fought over a girl.”

“You fought? With fists or just with words?”

Olsen’s face and voice had taken on a slightly harder cast. To that point, the detective had seemed almost casual as they sat at the picnic table discussing the discovery of Jason’s best friend’s body. But Olsen suddenly seemed to be on the hunt for something, as though the entire conversation had been an elaborate warm-up for the questions he really wanted to ask.

“I talked about this with the police back then,” Jason said. “They treated me like a suspect.”

“
I
didn’t say suspect.”

“What are you doing to find Hayden?” Jason asked. “She’s still missing.”

“Have you heard anything from her?”

“No, I haven’t. But maybe if you found Jesse Dean Pratt, you could figure it out. Maybe you could figure it all out.”

“Have you seen him?” Olsen pointed at Jason’s neck. “It looks like someone grabbed hold of you.”

“I did see him. He’s mad that I told the police about him. In fact, he threatened me. He said if I involved the police anymore . . .”

“We need to know everything that’s happened,” Olsen said. “We can protect you. And your family.”

Jason sighed. “Okay.”

Olsen took out a notebook and listened while Jason recounted his run-in with Jesse Dean. He asked Jason what kind of car Jesse Dean was driving and which direction he drove off in. Jason told the detective everything he could remember. When he was finished, Olsen closed the notebook and slipped it back into his coat pocket.

“Would you like me to drive you home?” Olsen asked. “Can I do anything else for you before I go?”

“Find my sister,” Jason said. “Find out who killed Logan.”

“We’re working on it. The girl the two of you fought over back then? Who was she?”

“A friend of ours. Regan Maines. Now her name is Regan Kreider. She lives here in town. She’s the one who called and told me you all had identified Logan’s body this morning. She heard it on the news before I did. She wanted me to hear from a friendly voice, I guess.”

“She lives here in Ednaville?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re still in touch?”

“We’re friends,” Jason said, his voice sharp.

Olsen nodded, apparently noting the hint of defensiveness that had crept into Jason’s voice.

“Let me ask you something else,” Olsen said. “You fought with Mr. Shaw that night, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you say you fought over a girl. This Regan Kreider. So both of you wanted to date her? Is that it? You both had feelings for her?”

“We were all friends. Good friends. We became very close, the three of us, during our last couple of years of high school.”

“Were either of you actually dating her?” Olsen asked.

“No.” Then Jason hesitated. “Well, I know I wasn’t. I guess I can’t say for certain what anyone else was doing.”

“So Ms. Maines and Mr. Shaw might have been an item?” Olsen asked.

“I doubt it. I don’t know. I thought it was more likely she and I would have been. I thought we were closer back then. We seemed to have a real connection.”

But Jason had to admit—at least to himself—that Regan had been evasive and guarded whenever Logan’s name came up. If there was more to the story, she wasn’t sharing it with him.

“So what precipitated this fight?” Olsen asked.

Jason looked at the bright blue sky. There were no clouds. Somewhere in the distance a plane sailed past, far overhead. Jason couldn’t hear it. He just saw the faint silver streak against the sky, burnished by the sun.

“I told the police this back then. On that night, graduation night, we were all out at the Bluff. We’d been at one party. We were going to another later on. I was with Regan for a while, and then she and I split up. Apparently when we did, Logan found Regan and told her how he felt. She let him down. She said she was interested in me. He was drunk that night. He liked to drink, and when he drank, he could get mouthy. He came and found me and told me that I needed to stay away from Regan, that he wanted to be with her. We argued. We both said some things to each other.”

“What did he say?” Olsen asked. “You said he could get mouthy. What kinds of things did he say?”

“Does it matter?”

“We can talk about it another time if you need to collect your thoughts.” Olsen was saying the right things, but Jason could tell he didn’t mean it. He showed no inclination to stand up or back off. “It’s just that Mr. Shaw’s death is going to be classified as a homicide, and anything we can learn about what we presume to be his last moments alive will help.”

“You think you can solve it?”

“That’s the idea,” Olsen said. “So what happened that night?”

“I don’t like to think about it.”

“Because he was your friend? And you fought?”

“Yes. It was ugly.” But Jason told the detective the whole story of the words and blows they exchanged. Even to his own ears, Jason’s voice sounded distant and hollow. He didn’t like the tone, but he felt powerless to change it. “In the end, he said that the sky was the limit for what he could do in life because his father had money, and that I was probably just going to end up working a middle-class job in Ednaville.” Jason shrugged. “And here I am.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being middle-class in Ednaville,” Olsen said. “Was that all he said?”

“It was enough.”

“And what did you say to him?” Olsen asked.

Jason winced. He attacked Logan as hard as Logan attacked him. He fought dirty—verbally. “I told him that at least my parents stayed together. That his father and mother hated each other so much his mother left and didn’t give a shit about either one of them. We’d never talked about their divorce before. He always seemed a little ashamed of it, I guess. His mother left the house, and Jason was mostly raised by his dad. It was unusual. Most divorced kids stayed with their mothers.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I figured it was because the old man had so much money. He wouldn’t lose if they fought about it in court.”

“No way to know. Courts tend to favor the mother, that’s true. Especially back then. So that set him off? The stuff about his parents?”

“I don’t even remember who threw the first punch. I just know that all of a sudden we were swinging at each other. I’d never been in a fight before, and there I was fighting with my best friend. Over a girl. It seemed almost . . . surreal, I guess. I didn’t feel any of the punches he landed. It must have been adrenaline. It was like I was outside of myself watching the fight happen.”