The Girl in the Woods (32 page)

I
t had been eight days since his wife went missing. Erwin Thomas took down all of Janie’s photos and loaded her things in large plastic totes that he’d purchased en masse from the Gig Harbor Target store three days after she vanished. The first day, he could barely breathe and he certainly didn’t believe anything that the authorities had told him. Janie would never, ever do
that
. Janie, he told himself over and over, loved him.

That same day, the news vans with their ten-foot-high satellite antennas planted themselves like a high-tech forest along the roadside in front of the Thomases’ South Kitsap County home. One reporter, a woman from CNN, complained that she had bladder issues and asked to use his bathroom. He let her do that only one time.

That evening he watched the news and the reporter showed video that she’d taken of the inside of his house—an “exclusive” that she’d bragged about.

The second day, Erwin, jittery from too much coffee and an overdose of worry, slumped on the gray leather sofa that had been clawed by their beloved cat, Luanne. He could barely look Kitsap County sheriff detective Kendall Stark in the eye as she offered proof that Janie had done what she did on her own volition.

“She couldn’t, she wouldn’t,” he said, his tone just a little too insistent to be genuine. “She would never have fallen in love with that monster.”

Kendall nodded.
Monster
was a good name for Brenda Nevins, a serial killer who cajoled, seduced, and blackmailed a trail of bodies all over Washington State.

Dealing with strangers in situations like the one occupying the detective and the shell-shocked husband was so much easier. Emotions were always part of the process, but with a stranger they simply didn’t carry the same pain as with people you actually know.

Kendall leaned forward. “We have proof, Mr. Thomas,” she said.

Erwin blinked, then slumped deeper into the sofa. “What kind of proof?” His dark eyes flashed a little anger, a little resentment. He turned away and watched Luanne as she rubbed tortoise shell fur on the raw edges of a cat scratching post. The distraction was like an extra breath of air. He needed it. Though he’d known Kendall since she was a student at South Kitsap High, he just couldn’t believe her right then.

“A video,” she answered.

Erwin looked right at Kendall, a kind of penetrating look that challenged her.

“What kind of video?” he asked.

Kendall thought about her words very carefully. The man across from her had the bottom fall out of his world and he didn’t need to know specifically what were held on the less-than-high-def images on the flash drive. The drive had been recovered from his wife’s bottom desk drawer at the prison where she’d served as superintendent for a year. Someday, in a courtroom, she knew others would see the clip. Erwin, she had no doubt, would beg her to view it. He’d say it was his right to watch it . . . and ultimately that would be true.

But not right then.

“An intimate video,” she said.

Janie Thomas’s husband looked in the direction of the console behind the detective. A row of family photos played out like a tribute to their lives with their son Joseph, a student at Boise State, who was now on his way home.

Erwin stayed mute for a very long time.

“Mr. Thomas,” Kendall said. “I’m so sorry about all of this.”

Erwin made a face, the kind that telegraphs one of those ambivalent emotions, but is really much more than that. Hurt pride? Embarrassment? Worry?

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, detective,” he said, “but sorry isn’t going to help me much right now. So let’s not be sorry. Let’s find Janie.”

Kendall stood to leave. “We’re on it,” she said. “I promise you, Mr. Thomas, we’ll do everything to bring her home.”

Erwin riveted his gaze to hers. But he didn’t get up. He stayed planted on the sofa.

“She’s not coming back here, detective,” he said, his tone very firm. Very final. “I hope you find her and put her where she belongs and that isn’t here with me.”

And that was it. Silence filled the room and Erwin Thomas indicated the door with a quick nod. Kendall started for the door—along with Janie’s laptop and iPad. She hoped that when and if they found Janie she’d plead guilty for what she’d done. She hoped that when Janie and Brenda were captured justice would be swift.

That Brenda would go back to prison right away.

That Janie would join her.

Kendall Stark didn’t want Erwin Thomas to ever see the contents of that video.

Indeed, she wished
she
hadn’t seen it. It was one of those images that was unforgettable for all of the wrong reasons. It was like stumbling onto some site on the Internet and having it start playing vile images from which the click of a mouse cannot seem to escape.

 

 

When he first started the process of erasing Janie from his life after the detective left that afternoon, Erwin did so with a sad tenderness. He packed her clothes neatly. He carefully folded a lace top that she’d worn on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary two months before. The high school guidance counselor who’d devoted his life to trying to help kids at South Kitsap had been utterly clueless that his wife had become involved with one of the inmates at the prison. He’d been trained to see when people were covering up, lying, trying to hide something. That she’d committed this terrible crime, facilitated a prison break for a serial killer, was almost beside the point.

She’d made him into a fool. A laughing stock.

Over the next few hours, his tenderness turned to rage. Clothes, jewelry, papers—anything that belonged clearly to Janie—was dumped into those clear tubs. When he ran out of the containers, he started to pour Janie’s belongings into black garden leaf bags. He was going to erase every trace of her from that house. She would never, ever worm her way back inside.
No!

Just after 9 p.m., Joe Thomas, twenty, pulled into the driveway in front of the Thomas home on Long Lake and he hurried inside.

“Dad!” he called out, stepping past the tubs and bags of his mother’s belongings. “What’s going on here? What’s happened to Mom?”

Erwin emerged from the bedroom, embraced his son. He did something that Joe had seen his father do only one other time—when his own father had died after lingering for days following a car accident on the interstate near Seattle.

Erwin Thomas started to cry.

 

 

Madison King thought the half-dead coffee-roasting machine that her cheap-ass boss insisted was still “good enough” had finally given up the ghost when she arrived for work at 4:30 a.m. at the waterfront restaurant in downtown Port Orchard. She’d worked there since graduating from college. Madison had wanted to get a job as a teacher, but her student-teaching experience that previous year had taught her a lesson of her own.

She could deal with the fourth graders at East Port Orchard Elementary just fine. Their parents, however, were another matter. They were either absent or so pushy that Madison was all but certain bruises would appear on her body like mini storm clouds the day after any encounter. When she dreamed of being a teacher she never considered the other half of the job—the dads who hit on her, the moms who wedged themselves into every activity, the social workers who could barely remember the names of the kids for whom they were responsible.

Opening up the Bay Street Café was easy enough. She started her day early, which meant she’d end it while there was enough time in the day to chase another dream. There was a problem with that, however. Madison just wasn’t sure
which
dream to pursue.

The whiff of what she thought was a burned-out coffee roaster assaulted her when she parked her car behind the charming little restaurant. She’d been fighting a cold and sniffed a little deeper.

It wasn’t burned coffee beans and motor oil. It smelled worse than that. It reminded her of the smell of burned hair and maybe something else.

Madison pinched her nose and went toward the café’s back door. Movement filled her peripheral vision.

“Get!” she called, as she turned toward a bunch of water rats that were swarming over something by the receptacle where several businesses along that waterfront hid their Dumpsters from customers’ views.

Madison hated rats. When she was making her list of career options, she was sure that she had never wanted to be a vet.

As the large-enough-to-be-completely-gross rats dispersed, Madison let out a scream. It was dark and she was alone, but it only took a few seconds for Tim Boyle to join her. Tim operated Lunchbox Express, a food truck that catered to the foot ferry crowd of workers crossing Sinclair Inlet on their way to the shipyard in Bremerton.

“Maddie, you all right?” he called over.

Madison stood still; she kept her eyes on Tim, a big guy with a red beard and two gold earrings.

“What is it?”

“Over there,” she said. “Look!”

The light was dim that time of morning, but Tim had no problem seeing what the young woman had discovered.

He didn’t know who it was, of course. But Janie Thomas had been found.