In her rented car, with the air conditioning on, Amelia drove back into Wichita, where she spent the rest of the morning in the main library. She found out that years of a depressed economy had emptied Spale. Between the lines, she intuited that the incomprehensible murder of their brightest girl by their brightest boy had wounded Spale to its heart, perhaps dealing the final blow. What an interesting town it once had been, she thought, with its amazing system of tunnels and underground shops.
While she was at the computer, she researched the status of imported wild animal species. When she located no condemnatory information about Jim Kopecki's farm, she didn't know whether to feel disappointed or relieved. She settled on relieved, but only for the sake of the animals, she told herself.
She avoided the local newspaper, acting on a competitive instinct she didn't know she had. Maybe they'd be helpful, but maybe they'd want to keep the story for themselves.
She did, however, place a call to the federal penitentiary where Thomas Rogers was incarcerated to find out exactly when he was due to arrive back in Spale.
"Should be there by now," was the clipped reply.
She attempted to hold the prison officer on the phone by asking, "What kind of prisoner was he?"
"Model," was the answer, followed by a string of accolades that made Rogers sound more like the honor student he used to be than the murderer he was. "Perfect record. Early release. Earned three college degrees. BA, MFA, PhD. Created convict tutoring program. Taught prison classes in reading and math, plus led a creative writing class. Started a prayer/meditation group. Anything else you want to know?" Amelia said no, but she was thinking,
Yeah, where's the eagle scout badge?
Feeling as cynical as a veteran, world-weary journalist, she got back into her rental car and drove to Spale. All the way, she felt fueled by righteous fury aimed at the man she was planning to interview.
"Don't you
dare
try to give me any of that born-again crap," she fumed aloud, as if speaking to Thomas Rogers himself. "I've met the daughter you betrayed so horribly!"
* * *
Amelia had not realized how many other journalists might also consider the return of a murderer to a ghost town to be a juicy story. When she got within sight of Spale, she saw that it was, in one of the clichés she was trained to avoid, a media circus.
As it turned out, there was only one thing missing among the television vans and the other rental cars: Tom Rogers, the ex-convict himself.
"He arrived," a writer from
Newsweek
told her, leaning against her car. "That we know, because we saw him dropped off at that building." He pointed to a falling-down storefront on the former Main Street. "But he must have sneaked out the back. Maybe he had another car waiting. I don't know. We've been in there, and there's nobody there. We're packing up and going home. He'll surface again someplace. But who the hell cares now? It's not a story now. Killers walking the streets of cities are a dime a dozen. But one of them living alone in his own private town full of ghosts? That was going to be good, damn it. You find any decent place to eat around here?"
She didn't tell him about the Serengeti Bed and Breakfast.
And she didn't tell him where Thomas Rogers probably was, either, although Amelia was pretty sure she knew: in the old forgotten tunnels, beneath the town. Where he had dumped his young wife's body. And where he now had a perfect place to hide for the rest of his life, if that's what he wanted to do.
Amelia was regretfully willing to give him what he wanted, because there was no way she was going into the darkness underneath the ground in order to search for a man who had already killed at least one woman.
No way.
"No," she said to her boss, back at the pay phone in the Serengeti office. "I'm sorry, Dan, but I won't do it. It would be stupid and dangerous for me to go down there alone."
She was surprised at how calm she felt saying that, almost as if she was relieved that she was about to be fired. Finally, she could admit to herself and to the rest of the world that she had never been meant to be a journalist. She didn't have a clue what she
was
going to be once she was out of a job and a salary, but now she knew that reporting wasn't it.
"Why the hell do you think I want you to do anything that idiotic?" Dan Hale demanded, to her surprise. "I only ask war correspondents to do stupid things that could get them killed. For God's sake, this story isn't as important as Bosnia. But I still like it, so here's what I'm going to do—" He was going to fly a more experienced reporter down to join her, he informed Amelia, and she was going to meet him at ten in the morning in the town of Spale.
Although she still wanted very much to help Thomas Rogers's daughter, Amelia found herself wishing that Dan Hale had just gone ahead and fired her. The only good thing about the exchange, from her point of view, was that Dr. Jim Kopecki hadn't walked in during the middle of it. She hadn't, in fact, seen him or his niece all that day.
* * *
She couldn't do any more that day, so she spent the remainder of it typing up her notes and observations, then wandering around the farm, communing with the animals. And composing, in her head, the right questions to ask a killer.
* * *
Friday, September 19
Amelia awoke suddenly that night and stumbled to a window, pulled by the sound of an engine running. The bedside clock displayed the time: one-thirty.
The headlights of a white truck dimly illuminated a scene: the veterinarian and his niece outside at the edge of a pasture, pulling something dark and heavy from the truck bed, dumping the object into a depression in the ground, then shoveling— dirt? —on top.
"Oh, God," Amelia whispered. "What are you doing?"
What were they burying? Should she try to call local law enforcement? But how? From Kopecki's office, where she might get caught? And if she ran to her car, he'd hear her leave…
Amelia had a terrible feeling that she would not find Thomas Rogers in the tunnels. If she didn't, she would advise the local police to dig up the fresh hole— grave? —in the pasture.
And then what would happen to the girl?
"Oh, God," Amelia whispered again, but this time it was a prayer.
For a second night, she hardly slept. By the time the sun rose, she was exhausted and badly frightened by her own vivid imagination. The hours alone in the bedroom, surrounded by the darkness outside, took a heavy toll on her heart.
"I can't do this," she told her image in the mirror.
It didn't try to argue the point with her.
When she walked out after breakfast, pretending to take a casual stroll, she saw dirt covering what appeared to be a fresh hole in the ground. Amelia ran back to her room, grabbed her packed bags, and got quickly into her car. Let New York take care of paying her bill, she thought,
I just want out of here
. Her brain said it never wanted her to return to the Serengeti, but her heart felt bereft at the sight of the zebras fading from view in her car mirrors.
It was still early when she arrived in Spale.
Amelia parked at the edge of town to wait for her reinforcement to arrive. She wasn't quite so terrified anymore about going down into the tunnels, because she no longer expected to find anybody alive down there.
* * *
When the backup reporter's rental car pulled up next to hers and the driver got out, Amelia reacted with shock.
It was the man himself, Dan Hale.
His mouth wore its characteristic one-sided smile when she hurried out to greet him.
"Surprised, Amelia? You shouldn't be. Don't you remember where I'm from?"
"Kansas, but—"
"Spale, Kansas." His tone implied that she ought to have known, and Amelia felt instantly humiliated. She also felt resentful, because how was she supposed to have known something that she had never heard or seen mentioned before? In fact, she specifically recalled hearing that he was from Kansas City. She was rebelliously tempted to answer his contempt with her own sarcastic,
So?
"I didn't know," she said instead. "But still, why—"
"Because I knew them. Brenda and Tom. We were best friends."
Her eyes widened. "Oh, Dan! Gosh, I'm—"
"Sorry? So will he be, when we're finished with him. He's going to wish he'd stayed in prison."
"But Dan, Thomas Rogers may not be here," she said, and felt a petty satisfaction that this time she had managed to shock him. "He may not even be alive." Amelia told her boss what she had witnessed from her window.
Hale looked confused, disturbed. He said, "That's impossible."
Amelia didn't see why. It seemed horribly possible, even probable, to her.
"Stay here," he commanded her. "I'm going down into the tunnels to find him."
He left Amelia standing by herself at the edge of town, sweating in the warm prairie wind that was blowing dust from one side of the abandoned town to the other and then back again. She waited for more than half an hour, coughing now and then and thinking,
Well, at least there's one good thing about Dan showing up. He knows how to get in and out of the tunnels
. But when forty-five minutes had passed, she began to worry about him and to fear that she was going to have to go down to look for him.
Still, she waited, hot, exhausted, frightened of many things.
What if something fell on him?
she thought.
What if he's been injured?
But he emerged from a decrepit storefront— different from the one he had entered— and walked toward her. For once, Dan Hale was smiling fully.
"He's down there, all right," he told her.
"He
is?
"
"Go on down and interview him, Amelia. He's waiting for you. Don't worry. He's harmless now. You don't have anything to fear from Tom Rogers."
When she hesitated, he grasped her elbow and pulled her along, saying reassuringly, "Don't worry! I'll be right behind you."
"But the dark—"
"It's not dark. He's got an old generator up and running, so there's even electric light."
Amelia thought that if Dan told her one more time, "Don't worry," she would hit him. Reluctantly, unhappily, she let herself be led into one of the old buildings, through a door in the floor, and down a wooden ladder into a cool, earthen chamber. He had told the truth; it was lighted, if dimly.
Amelia relaxed a little.
She could stand anything, she thought, if there was light.
"Dan?" she asked in a low voice. "How'd you ever get out of Spale?"
Behind her, he answered in a normal voice, as if he didn't care what Thomas Rogers heard them saying. "I got her scholarship. Brenda's. They couldn't very well give it to Tom." His chuckle was a warm breath on her neck. "I never looked back."
They reached an open door with a sign still visible beside it: "Barber Shop."
"Go on," he urged her. "Tom's in the last chair. He'll tell you the whole story." Hale thrust something warm into her hands: a trim black gun. "Here. If it helps you feel safer."
Amelia stepped inside the barber shop.
* * *
Amelia recognized the dead man in the chair from his recent photograph in the local newspaper: Thomas Rogers.
Feeling overwhelmed by the tragedy of all of their lives, she had turned and also recognized the face of the man in the doorway: Dan Hale. He broke the light chain, slammed the bar across the door, and left her there in the utter darkness with a corpse. Before the light went out, she saw that Tom Rogers had been shot several times. As she screamed and screamed, the warm gun in Amelia's hands slid to the floor.
* * *
The darkness felt eternal.
She knew she would lose her mind before she died.
Amelia's brain played those two messages over and over, and it seemed an eternity, indeed, before another thought could fight its way past the terror: Dan had gone in one store and come out another.
Two tunnel exits. At least two, maybe more.
In the nightmare that had become her life, Amelia found the slimy walls and felt her way entirely around her burial chamber. There was no other exit, no other way out. By feel, she located one of the other old barber chairs and sank into it. She thought about the endless time that lay ahead of her. And then she remembered the gun, and she realized that she could kill herself now and foreshorten her own suffering. Frantically, she found her way to the floor and felt around until metal touched her fingers.
The end of the gun barrel was resting inside her right ear when she changed her mind.
Slowly, in the dark, Amelia brought the gun down and placed it gently, lovingly, in her lap.
In case there was even the slightest chance that she would be found, she must stay alive to clear the innocent name of Sandy's father, to give the girl the final peace of knowing that her father had not killed her mother. It seemed clear to Amelia that Dan Hale had killed them both. The one for a scholarship that was his exit to a grander world. The other for his silence. She couldn't imagine why Tom Rogers had never told the truth, if that was it.
