Arrowood (8 page)

“Why are you so concerned with proving Singer didn't do it?” I asked.

“It's not so much about him,” Josh said. “I want to figure out what really happened. If he's innocent, we need to clear his name and move on. As long as everyone thinks Singer's responsible, the case might as well be closed. It'll never be solved.”

“And what does it matter to you, if my sisters' case is solved?”

“It's like a riddle,” he said, his long fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel at precisely ten and two. “I hate not knowing the answer. That's what gets me with cold cases. Nobody has the time or money to pay attention to them anymore, so they just sit there, getting colder. It's not that they're unsolvable—they all have solutions, and I can't stand not knowing what they are. It's like leaving a Rubik's Cube with the colors all mixed up.”

I'd bought a Rubik's Cube at a yard sale when I was a kid. I'd never been able to solve it, though I eventually peeled off the colored stickers and rearranged them to make it look like I had.

“You said you had a picture of the twins,” I said. “Can I see it?”

“Of course,” he said. “I wasn't sure if you'd want to. If that would be too hard for you. I have the rest of the pictures at my office if you want to stop by there on the way back.” He slowed the van and steered onto the shoulder as we neared a gravel turnoff. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” I said. I wasn't sure I wanted to, but I felt like I needed to. If I didn't do it now, I never would.

Josh drove down the lane until we reached the end. A decrepit motor home sat amid a cluster of trees, a sagging lean-to tacked onto the side. Out front, a scrawny black dog trotted back and forth, tethered to a stake. The yard was cluttered with stacks of tires and scrap metal and hubcaps. We got out of the van, and the dog wagged its tail, parsing out strangled barks as it pulled against the chain. Panic numbed my limbs as realization set in—what I was about to do, the man I was about to see. It was too late to tell Josh that I wanted to go back, that I had changed my mind.

He knocked on the door and Singer opened it. Or, at least, I assumed it was Singer. I had never seen him in person. My memory of his appearance was based entirely on old newspaper clippings, and I barely recognized him. He was squat and balding, his puffy face splotched with rosacea and an assortment of flesh-colored moles. A cat with a shredded ear wove itself around his ankles in a figure eight, purring heartily.

Singer held the door open and we walked in, a current of fear buzzing through me as I brushed past him. The air in the motor home was stale and bitterly perfumed, air freshener trying and failing to mask the stench of cigarettes and cat piss.

“You want a beer, Mr. Kyle?” Singer asked, not looking at me. Josh said no thanks and Singer grabbed himself a Milwaukee's Best from a half-empty case on the floor.

The three of us squeezed into the built-in dinette, Josh and me on one side with Singer facing us. Junk mail and grocery store circulars were piled on the tabletop, and tacked to the wall next to us was a crinkled certificate congratulating Singer for completing one hundred hours of community service at the River City Animal Rescue. It was difficult to comprehend that I was sitting two feet away from the man long believed to have kidnapped my sisters. Singer took a draw on his beer and smacked the can down on the table.

“You want to talk to me, huh?” he asked me, baring his teeth in a fake smile. “I want to talk to you, too. You fucked up a lot of things for me when you falsely accused me of shit I didn't do.”

Josh jumped in before I could respond. “Hold on, Mr. Singer. You know she didn't accuse you of anything. She never identified you as a suspect. She saw a car, is all. A gold car. Which you happened to have. So let's not go blaming anything on Miss Arrowood.” Josh stared Singer down, and he backed off and took a swig of beer.

“All right, all right.” He held his hands up. “She didn't say my name. Fuck me for having a gold car, I guess. Look”—he pointed at Josh—“I need a minute alone with her. That's all. There's something I gotta tell her in private.”

It was obvious that Singer wasn't on his first beer of the day, maybe not even his third or fourth. I could smell his breath from across the table.

“I don't think that's necessary,” Josh said. “If you don't want me to hear what you're going to say, I'll cover my ears.”

I poked Josh's leg under the table, hard, and he frowned at me, shaking his head almost imperceptibly.

“It's fine,” I said. “I'll be fine.”

“This is a terrible idea,” he muttered, pulling himself up from the table. “I'll be right outside the door.” He locked eyes with Singer. “
Right
outside. Arden, yell if you need me.”

Neither Singer nor I responded. My hands gripped the edge of the vinyl seat, while Singer spread his fingers out on the table between us. Grime lined his nails and the cracks of his knuckles.

“You have a watch on that day?” he asked, as soon as the door clicked shut.

I stared at him, not answering.

“Because I don't know one goddamned kid that can tell time. I know good and well they only took your word because of who you are, and how that stacked up against who I am. Old Granddaddy Arrowood was calling in favors, throwing his weight around from all the way down in Florida. I got fired from my job and couldn't get another one after everybody started saying I took those kids. I had cops up my ass for months, years. Nobody believed me. But I wasn't there when you said I was.”

“Did
you
have a watch on that day?”

He sneered at me, his lips curling up over his teeth. “I know it was lunchtime because I was eating my fucking lunch.”

“You took them,” I said, my voice wavering. Something brushed against my leg under the table, and I jerked away, choking back the cry that rose in my throat. It was just the cat. “Your car was there, and when it left, they were gone. That's the only thing that makes any sense.”

“Really?” he said. “I'm not that smart, and even I can see there's plenty of holes in that story. You're not saying it's the
only
thing that could've happened, you're saying it's the easiest thing to believe. Doesn't make it true. Maybe somebody had my car. Maybe it was a different car altogether. You didn't have a license plate number. You got zero evidence on me, that's all anybody ever had.”

“What about the pictures?” I said. “He showed me.”

“Oh, right.” Laughter rasped in his throat. “You think you got me all figured out. I'm one of
those,
a registered sex offender, a guy that likes taking pictures of kids.” He tipped his beer can back, emptied it. “You have no idea. You don't know anything about me. I had a kid of my own, did you know that? Never laid a hand on him. I would've killed anybody who did.”

He leaned forward, his face inches from mine, and I shrank back involuntarily. His voice lowered to a rough whisper. “I took pictures of some kids. That was it. I never touched a one. Not a single one, ever. Doesn't make me a saint, but it's something. You even know how I got labeled an offender? Huh?” His words had begun to slur together. “Taking a piss in public. I was drunk. Waiting around my kid's school to try and catch sight of him, because my ex got full custody and moved away after everything that happened. Didn't matter there was no proof, everybody knew what you accused me of.”

I sat very still, tensing every muscle to keep from shaking. “I saw them. Through the window as you drove away.”

Singer squinted at me. “You couldn't see something that wasn't there.”

“I know they were in your car.”

He put his elbows on the table, spreading his hands wide. “How big's that yard of yours, huh? Big fancy yard, isn't it? You couldn't see shit from that far away. I had to zoom in on my camera just to get a decent shot.”

The footage of that day ran through my head. The door slamming. The car pulling away, my sisters in the window.

“Their hair,” I said. “I saw their hair.”

Singer stared at me, blinking. And then he started to laugh. His hand slapped the table, and I jumped, banging my knee. “The dog,” he said, shaking his head. “That goddamn fucking dog. Had me one of them little white fluffy things, what do you call it, a Maltese? With all that soft hair? I was thinking it might work pretty good, lure a little girl over to the car. Never quite got up my nerve. Couldn't do it.”

Frost crept through my veins, tingled across my chest. I couldn't hold myself together any longer, and I began to shiver, my jaw threatening to chatter.

“I'll be damned,” Singer continued, looking dazed. “So all this time you thought you saw them, all this time I'm on the hook, and what you saw was a goddamn dog. Don't that beat all.”

“Swear on your life it wasn't you,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Darlin', I'll swear on whatever the hell you want, but my life's not worth much, thanks to you.”

“Please.”

“I didn't take your sisters. They were practically babies. I couldn't have cared less about them.” His mouth curved into a twisted grin. “You're the one I was looking at.”

I got up and shoved the door open, nearly knocking Josh to the ground. I pushed past him and he made no move to stop me.

“Thanks for agreeing to talk to us today, Mr. Singer,” he said.

“I'll be waiting for my check,” Singer called after us.

Josh didn't say anything until we were back on the main road, heading toward Fort Madison. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I didn't answer him at first, afraid of what I might say. I kept my eyes on the corn that walled us in on either side of the road, the stalks six feet high and beginning to wither. My hands lay clenched in my lap, my nails cutting into my palms. “You're paying Singer to talk to me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That's the only way he'd agree to do it. I had to pay to interview him for the book, too.”

“He tried to put all the blame on me. He thinks it's my fault his son was taken away from him.”

“I'm sorry, I know. I shouldn't have left you in there alone with him, but you didn't give me much choice.”

Up ahead of us, a railroad crossing signal began to flash red, and the striped bar came down to block the road. Josh coasted to a stop, and we sat watching the train cars flick by.

“Did Singer have a little white dog?” I asked. “Back then?”

“Not that I know of,” Josh said. “He never said anything about a dog when I interviewed him. But I can look into it. Why?”

“He said he had a dog with him, to lure kids over to his car. He thinks that's what I saw, the dog—not the twins.”

“I'll see what I can find out.”

The end of the train zipped past and was gone, leaving a humming in my ears. I wasn't sure Singer was telling the truth—about the dog or about my sisters. He seemed to have an answer for everything, and it was difficult for me to question the one thing I had always known to be true, that he had taken Violet and Tabitha. Was it possible that I was wrong about what I saw, that I had mistaken the white flash in the car for my sisters and saved that altered image as the truth? The implications were unsettling; Singer's life had been all but destroyed and the case left unsolved. If I was wrong, and Harold Singer hadn't taken the twins, where had they gone?

On the way into Fort Madison, we passed the state penitentiary, a massive stone building with turrets like an ancient castle. It was older than Arrowood, the oldest prison west of the Mississippi to still be in use, beautiful in a way modern prisons never are. I had often imagined Singer locked up behind the crumbling stone wall and the loops of razor wire.

“Are you still up for looking at the rest of the pictures?” Josh asked. “I understand if you've had enough for today.”

“I'm fine,” I said. “I need to see them.” Up ahead, past the riverfront park and the old depot museum, a familiar sign caught my eye. “Is the A&W still here?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Are you hungry?”

I didn't know if I was hungry or not, I just wanted to eat. And while I knew, logically, that comfort food didn't fix anything, I hadn't wanted anything else since I'd returned to Iowa. I wondered what Dr. Endicott would say if I added nostalgic eating to my thesis.
The irrational belief that consuming the foods of one's childhood will take you back in time.

After ordering Coney Dogs, onion rings, and root beers to go, Josh drove through a neighborhood of run-down Victorians and parked on the street in front of a two-story with peeling yellow paint. I had already finished my root beer and regretted not ordering the ridiculously oversize one that Josh had gotten.

“I don't know if I mentioned that my office is also my apartment,” he said as we climbed the steps to the porch.

“That's all right.”

“Come on in,” he said. “I'm on the second floor.”

The front hall of the house still had what appeared to be its original staircase, though the woodwork had been painted over multiple times and paint was chipping off the banister in layers. Rubber treads had been nailed onto the steps. Entryways that had once led to parlors and sitting rooms had been sealed up to form apartments. I hated to see grand old homes chopped up into awkward living spaces with just enough of their old charm intact to remind you of what had been lost, but it was a matter of practicality. No one had live-in help anymore, or enough kids to warrant so many bedrooms, and few people could afford to heat or cool such a big, drafty house or keep it in good repair.

I followed Josh into his apartment and set the food down on the kitchen counter while he rummaged in a cabinet for plates. If the avocado-and-gold linoleum was any indication, the kitchen had been added sometime in the 1960s.

“We can eat at the coffee table,” he said, gesturing toward the adjoining room, where a large bay window jutted out from the front of the house. “I don't have a real table.”

I carried my plate to the living room and moved some books off the couch so I could sit down.
Cold Case Homicides: Practical Investigative Techniques. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.
Gray Hat Hacking: The Ethical Hacker's Handbook
. An L-shaped desk took up the opposite wall, its surface hidden beneath papers and file folders and coffee mugs. A map of Iowa hung on the wall above the desk, dotted with red thumbtacks, and next to the map was a framed movie poster for Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
. Piled in the corner were the ravaged carcasses of a dozen desktop computers. I tried to imagine the room as it had once been, before the wood floors were obscured beneath lumpy brown carpeting and decades of grime had built up on the molding and the windowpanes. Someone's bright, airy bedroom.

Josh rattled the empty cup that I had left on the counter. “You need something else to drink? I have some Coke. And milk, I think.” He stuck his head in the fridge. “Wait, no, the milk's bad.”

“Water's fine.”

He joined me in the living room and removed his hat and jacket for the first time all day. I was fully prepared to see signs of cutting or cigarette burns, deformed limbs, birthmarks—something he wanted to conceal badly enough to wear a jacket in the heat—but his arms were normal, unmarked, his chest and shoulders unexpectedly well defined beneath a slim black T-shirt. I reminded myself that not everyone had something to hide.

We ate in silence, and when we finished, Josh set our plates on the floor. “Ready?” he asked.

I nodded, wiping my hands clean with a napkin, and he brought me a stack of photos from a folder on his desk. I started flipping through them, stopping when I came to one of me, out of focus. I must have moved as the shutter snapped. Pins and needles spread outward from the cold spot in my chest. Off to the side were Violet and Tabitha, their little faces and their matching shirts, the ones with the buttons shaped like ducks, stained with grape juice. They were wearing the clover crowns I had made for them that day. No one else had seen the crowns. No one but me could be sure that this picture had been taken just before the twins disappeared. My sisters and I were laughing, smiling. I dropped the photos onto the table.

“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked. “Like a real drink?”

He nodded solemnly and crossed the room to the kitchen, returning a minute later with a bottle of Kraken black rum, the saucer-eyed sea monster on the label looping its tentacles around an unsuspecting ship. I poured an inch of the molasses-colored liquor into my water glass and choked half of it down.

“They're from that day,” I said. “From right before.”

“Hardly any shadows. Early afternoon.”

I nodded. “He still could have taken the girls. He could have done it earlier than I thought.” I wasn't sure of the words as I said them. I had been wrong about the time. What else had I been wrong about?

“Or it could have been someone else,” Josh said.

I sipped my rum, not wanting to think about the pictures anymore. It was spicy, slightly medicinal.

“So this is your office?” I said, gesturing at his messy desk.

“Yeah. The headquarters of Midwest Mysteries. I know, it's impressive.” He smiled drily.

“How did you get started with all this cold case stuff in the first place?” I asked. “What made you want to spend all your time thinking about murders and kidnappings?”

“My older brother ran away when I was eleven,” he said.

I didn't know what to say. It wasn't the answer I had expected.

“Everyone's pretty sure that's what happened, anyway,” he continued, adjusting his glasses. “He was seventeen, almost eighteen, and he'd been fighting with our parents. He'd gotten in with a group of guys who were selling pills at the high school. Mom and Dad wanted to send him to rehab, or to one of those tough-love lockdown schools. Then he was gone before they could follow through with it. The things he took with him—his pocketknife, tent, sleeping bag—it was pretty obvious he'd made the choice to leave. But he didn't come back, and we'd all thought he would.

“My mom got it into her head he'd been kidnapped like those paperboys in Des Moines, even though there was no reason to think that. Those kids were a lot younger, in a bigger city. My brother was pretty good at fending for himself. We all knew something bad might've happened to him after he left, but maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to be out there living on his own, and that's what he was doing. My mom couldn't take that. She was calling the police all the time, trying to get them to do something, but what could they do? It's not easy to find someone when you have no clue where they might have gone. And a teenage runaway isn't exactly a high priority when they have actual crimes to investigate.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Fifteen years.”

“Did they ever…?”

He shook his head. “No. They haven't found him and he hasn't come back on his own. I've tried looking, of course. My cousin Randy works for the police department, and I have a few other contacts who feed me information when they can, mostly people I've met through the website. Retired cops, private investigators. Sometimes unidentified remains come up that might be a match. That's hard, though, without knowing where Paul was living or how old he would have been when he died.
If
he died. If he's still alive after all this time, he'd have a new identity, maybe a family of his own. No reason for him to come back, and no way for me to find him.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

He shrugged. “I've always had an interest in unsolved crimes, especially the cases everybody else has given up on and forgotten about. Like I was saying earlier, it's like a puzzle with missing pieces, and I can't leave it alone. I want to keep rearranging it until it makes sense. You know how it is, though, don't you? That's partly why I wanted to talk to you.” He paused, fixing his gaze on me. “You've been through the same thing. I was thinking, if someone could give me a clue, help me find out what really happened to my brother, I'd jump at it. I figured you'd feel the same way.”

I did want to know. There was nothing I wanted more. But at the same time, it was hard for me to let go of Harold Singer.

“The time thing,” I said. “It proves I was wrong, but it doesn't prove he's innocent. I wasn't the only one who saw the gold car. There was another witness.”

“You're right,” he said. “Ben Ferris. Your friend. Supposedly he saw the car from his bedroom window. I asked him for an interview and he refused. I hate to put this out there, but it's true, Arden, and you need to consider it…you and Ben, you were eight years old. You were
kids.
And memory's a strange thing. It's malleable. A crowd of people could all witness the same thing and each have a different recollection of what happened. Eyewitness accounts aren't reliable without evidence to back them up, because memory isn't fact—it's our interpretation of what happened, and it can change over time. Maybe you should talk to Ben about it. He'd obviously be more open to talking to you than to me. But I don't think it matters, since you already know you were wrong.”

His words were harsh, unvarnished. I swirled the rum around in my glass. I didn't need Josh Kyle to explain to me how memory worked. “What's your theory?” I asked. “If Singer's innocent, then what happened?”

Josh grabbed a thick stack of folders from his desk and thumped them down in front of me. “I'm not sure yet. Since I started looking into it, I've considered everything I've come across, no matter how far-fetched. Are you familiar with a case from back in the eighties, a girl named Heather Campbell who vanished from Burlington while a traveling carnival was in town?”

“No.”

“She was eleven years old. They never found her, never found a body. There was a string of unsolved disappearances along the Mississippi River Valley in the eighties and nineties that had investigators wondering if it was the work of a serial killer. They were having trouble, though, figuring out a connection. I talked to a retired detective who'd spent some time on the case, and he said each of the disappearances roughly coincided with a visit from a traveling carnival, but that nothing concrete was ever found to tie them together. It wasn't always the same carnival company, and some of the girls who went missing hadn't even gone to the carnival that day. A few of them disappeared fifteen or twenty miles away from where it was set up. And they couldn't rule out the possibility that the carnival was a coincidence. All kinds of other things happen during carnival season, too. Could have been a schoolteacher who traveled around in an RV over summer break, or somebody who worked on barges going up and down the river, or a transient riding the rails in the warm weather.”

“So they never figured it out?”

“No. There weren't any new cases coming up that seemed related, and after a while they figured whoever was responsible had died or moved on or gone to prison for something else. But I thought your sisters' case might be connected. There was a carnival at the fairgrounds in Quincy that Labor Day weekend when the twins disappeared. Quincy's only about an hour away.”

“You're assuming they're dead.”

“What?”

“If a serial killer took them.”

He shook his head, apologetic. “I spent a lot of time on it. Too much. It made for a great story, but I couldn't make the pieces fit. All the victims were older than your sisters, and all of the girls were taken at night, within a much closer range of the carnival. What I'm trying to say is, I know what it's like to be fixated on the wrong answer, like you with Singer, convincing yourself that you're right, despite all the evidence telling you otherwise. I can't rule out stranger abduction, but it's rare, and the truth is probably much simpler. I think your sisters were taken by someone who knew your family, someone who could have gone unnoticed in your neighborhood that day.”

“Everyone in town knew my family. By that logic, Singer still fits.”

“Except for the complete lack of evidence against him. And he didn't have any direct connection to the Arrowoods that I'm aware of.” Josh leaned forward, his elbows on the coffee table, his dark eyes searching mine. “Have you ever been in Ben Ferris's bedroom?”

Heat spread across my cheeks. “Why are you asking?”

“Have you looked out his bedroom window? I haven't, but I'm wondering if he could have even seen the car from there, or if his view would have been blocked by the carriage house.”

“Can you drive me back, please?” I asked. “I'd like to go home.” The air in the apartment had grown unbearably close. I felt unbalanced, like I would get sometimes after a day of boating on the
Ruby Slipper,
my head unable to stop compensating for the bob and roll of the water even with my feet on dry land.

“I'm sorry,” he said, reaching out his hand but stopping short of touching me, as though he suddenly remembered that we were practically strangers, that a comforting gesture might overstep certain bounds. “I get a little carried away. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“It's okay. I'm just not feeling well. It's hot in here, and the greasy food…”