At four o’clock, a silver Chevy the size of a teacup pulled into the driveway of the house Shaw and North were watching. Shaw resisted the urge to sit up for a closer look; that was the kind of thing—sudden movement, in this case—that got you noticed. Instead, he said, “She’s here.”
As he spoke the words, a Black woman in a pencil skirt and a lightweight cardigan emerged from the Chevy. She went up the steps, unlocked the door of the duplex on the right, and went inside.
So far, so good.
They’d been watching the two-unit brick building for a little over an hour. Emery and John-Henry had been preoccupied with moving forward with the investigation into Gideon. North and Shaw, meanwhile, had spent the day tracking down the missing deputy. Trying to, anyway. If Adam Ezell was still alive, he was doing a damn good job of hiding. Tean and Jem hadn’t been lying about the dead-ends. North and Shaw tried to locate his family, but the closest they got was the same brother Tean and Jem had already told them about—Kingston Ezell. His phone number went straight to voicemail, and his address left them at a run-down apartment building on the outskirts of Wahredua. An online search for assets didn’t turn up anything interesting either—neither Adam nor his brother owned a conveniently out-of-the-way cabin or hunting lodge or, for that matter, so much as an RV. Adam Ezell didn’t have outrageous debts, and there was no sign that he’d been anything but what Deputy Weiss had originally told them: a mediocre deputy who had, somehow, vanished during his shift. By then, it had been time to start the drive to Auburn, and now, true to her word, Maleah Donaldson had arrived home right on time.
“Here we go,” North said as he got out of the car.
When they knocked on the porch, Maleah opened the door on a chain. She looked out at them from the narrow opening, scanning first North, then Shaw.
“I like it because it makes me feel like a cosmonaut.” He plucked at the silver silk. “Plus it’s super comfy when it’s hot.”
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“North McKinney. This is Shaw Aldrich. We’re private investigators working with the Wahredua Police Department.” When Maleah didn’t say anything, he continued, “We’d like to talk to you about Philip Welch.”
“What do you mean, private investigators?”
“Ms. Donaldson, this is important.”
Her breathing changed. She let out a taut, scornful little laugh. “There’s no money.”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“How do I know you are who you say you are? Do you have badges?”
North showed her his ID and his private investigator license.
“I’m going to call the police and ask them.”
“The Wahredua PD,” North said. “That’s who you’ve got to call.”
She nodded and shut the door. The bolt went home.
“Does that seem a little…excessive?” Shaw asked.
“I don’t know. If I were a single woman living alone and someone dressed like a silver scrotum showed up on my doorstep, I’d probably call the police too.”
Shaw considered that. “It does kind of look like a scrote, doesn’t it? Right here where it’s all wrinkly?”
North glared at him.
“What?”
“You know perfectly fucking well.” He was silent for a second and then, because he was North, he burst out, “You can’t let me have one fucking thing, can you?”
Shaw kept his smile on the inside.
Almost ten minutes passed before Maleah opened the door, this time without the chain. She handed back North’s ID and license, and then she said, “I’m sorry about that.”
“Let me guess,” North said. “Somebody remembered him?”
A tiny smile appeared on Maleah’s face. “I think there was a comment about the Tin Man.”
“I didn’t even think about the Tin Man,” Shaw said.
This time, Maleah laughed. “Come on in.”
The living room was furnished with what Shaw guessed was secondhand furniture—a chintz sofa, its upholstery once fine but baggy and growing dingy; wicker armchairs that looked like they’d moved households one too many times; a coffee table with a few scars. A faux-fur throw was folded over the back of the sofa, and cheery cushions padded the chairs. The candle on the coffee table was the big, fat kind that Shaw loved and that North had a disturbing tendency to try to light, even though Shaw had explained a dozen times they were only for decoration. An opening at the back connected with a kitchen, and two closed doors suggested a bedroom and bathroom.
“I’ve never talked to private detectives before. Do you want to sit down?”
They sat. She smiled at North, but her gaze kept coming back to Shaw.
“You’re the one I talked to on the phone.”
“Sorry about that,” Shaw said. “You wouldn’t believe it, but sometimes people lie to us.”
That made her laugh. “I was…worked up when we talked. I’m not usually like that, but I was so mad. I feel bad—the police have come by twice, and I won’t answer the door because I don’t want to talk about Phil. But I called you back for the money. What does that say about me?”
Shaw nodded. “It says you’re mad. That’s ok; sometimes it’s good to be mad.”
“It doesn’t feel good. It feels like I’m sick.”
She was pretty, Shaw decided. Not beautiful, but put together and healthy and intelligent. She was wearing something light, a floral body spray. She swallowed and looked like she was about to cry.
“How do you know Philip Welch?” North asked.
A tear slid free, and she wiped it away. “We met at a party.”
“He was nice,” Shaw said.
She looked startled and nodded. “He was. He was really sweet, actually. Not like a lot of guys I meet. Especially not a lot of guys around here. He wanted to talk. A lot of guys, they pretend they’re listening, but Phil actually listened. When the party started going, he said maybe we should go somewhere quieter, but I didn’t want to do that, and he said I was smart.” More tears began to run. When she ran her hands over her cheeks, she left a glistening smear of drying salt. “God, I was such an idiot.”
“What happened?” North asked.
“Nothing out of the ordinary, even though I knew, right from the beginning, he was trouble. He was cute, and he was funny, but I was pretty sure he was using. It was the way he acted. He’d seem…manic sometimes. And then he’d crash. Other times, he smelled like weed, and then he’d be totally different. You know how it is. He always needed money, and at first, I said yes. I didn’t like it; I’m not stupid, and I know a lot of girls who get themselves into situations like that. Their boyfriends never work, their boyfriends always need a loan, their boyfriends get kicked out of their apartment, and the next thing you know, their boyfriends are moving in, the girl gets pregnant, and that’s that. If she’s lucky, maybe they get married. I guess I should say if she’s lucky, the jerk stays. Usually he stays unless he finds an even bigger sucker. I’ve got a lady I work with—sweet, smart, can whip a room full of kindergartners into shape in thirty seconds—and her boyfriend hasn’t worked since he ‘hurt his back’ in the ’90s.”
When she paused for a breath, Shaw said, “You have IOUs?”
Nodding, Maleah rose. She went into the bedroom and came back with a manila folder, which she passed over to Shaw. It held only a few pieces of paper. Several were handwritten, with Welch’s name signed in tiny, schoolboy letters. Two were typed but had the same signature at the bottom. The individual amounts weren’t substantial, but all together, the total came to just over two thousand dollars.
“What happened when you asked him to pay you back?” North asked.
“He made excuses. I knew where this was going, but—but it’s different when it’s you, right? Because I’d make excuses for him too, in my head. I’d say I was jumping to conclusions. I’d say he was having a rough patch. He was so sweet, and you don’t know how hard it is…” Her small smile looked too old for her face, full of self-mockery. “I know what you’re thinking. The drugs. The fact that he didn’t work. How desperate could she be for a man?”
“My husband screwed everything that moved,” North said, his voice rough. “And he beat the shit out of me. For years. You want to talk about twisting yourself into a pretzel to explain things away? I’m your guy.”
Maleah looked at him—not with surprise, not exactly, but with a kind of new, more intense interest. Then she nodded. “He paid me back, eventually. The first note. And I thought, ok, things are starting to turn around. But then it got even worse. He always needed money. And I’m not—I’m a teacher, for heaven’s sake. I have a tight budget.”
“What happened when you started saying no?”
“He got angry. He shouted. We fought. And then he came back, a day later, and apologized. But it happened again. And then again.”
Shaw could hear it in her voice: the turning point, the sharp curve on a dark road, and they were all going too fast to stop now.
“And then,” Maleah said, “One night, I invited him over for dinner, and he put something in my drink.”
Shaw shook his head and looked down. Blood whooshed in his ears, and he was distantly aware of the springs in the sofa creaking as Maleah shifted position, of the rasp of fabric as she smoothed her skirt with both hands. Then, because she was a person and deserved that much, he looked up again and forced himself to meet her eyes.
“I woke up the next day, and he was gone. I wasn’t sure what had happened. I thought maybe I’d had too much to drink, but…but part of me knew that was wrong. Knew something was wrong. I had bruises. I…” Her hand hovered above her midsection. “I hurt. I had some bleeding. And I couldn’t even think about it, couldn’t even ask the question, even though part of me was already asking it, I suppose. There was this gap in the night, and that was fine. I wanted to fall into that gap, forget about all of it, pretend it hadn’t happened. Then—” Her voice broke. Her chest hitched, and the hand that had been hovering turned into a fist, and she pressed it between her breasts. “He texted me that afternoon. A picture.”
North nodded. Shaw nodded too, but he was only distantly aware of the movement. Inside, he could feel the labyrinth opening. The forking paths. His mind took him through his imagination’s most vivid reconstruction of what that awful day must have been like. Unregulated empathy, Dr. Farr called it. He could feel what it must have been like for her, waking up, head aching, a part of you hurting in a way that you knew wasn’t right. No, go back. The blurry minutes of drugged semiconsciousness, hands on you, hands, your legs being forced apart. No, go back. A stumbling, assisted walk to the bedroom, your fumbling attempt at resistance, pain as your hair was pulled and whatever was fogging your brain made it easier to surrender than keep fighting. No, go back—
North’s hand bit into Shaw’s thigh. Shaw drew in a sharp breath; the pain was a lifeline, and Shaw followed it, swimming up from that place inside his head.
“—wanted money again,” Maleah said. “I said no. I was going to the police. Then he said fine, he’d put those pictures everywhere. Online. At my school.” She glanced at a bag leaning against the coffee table, worksheets covered in children’s handwriting that were poking out of the top.
North squeezed Shaw’s leg again—digging his fingers into sensitive flesh, the grip brutal and unyielding. It made Shaw open his mouth as he fought a cry of pain. Then North relented, and Shaw forced himself to form words: “What—what grade do you teach?”
“Third.” She smiled reflexively. “Fourth; I’ve got to stop saying third. We had a teacher quit, and—” Another on-off smile like someone was running it from a switchboard. “You don’t care about that.”
“My fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Willows,” Shaw said. “She smelled like lavender, and she taught us all the state capitals, and she loved to say, ‘Ten-four’. That was the first time I ever heard someone say that.”
Maleah began to cry in earnest, hands covering her face. Shaw moved to sit next to her. He didn’t touch her; he wasn’t sure she wanted that, not after whatever she’d been through.
“It was one dumb decision,” she finally managed to say through the tears. “Why should I have to pay for it the rest of my life?”
“It wasn’t a dumb decision,” North said. “He took advantage of your trust; you didn’t do anything wrong. What happened to you was terrible and evil, and I’m sorry.”
Maleah excused herself and came back with a wad of tissues. She sat next to Shaw again, wiping her face, staring into a place where she was alone. “I don’t know if you understand what it’s like. Being a teacher. Being a teacher in a small town. Being a teacher who’s young and Black and a woman in a small town where ninety-five percent of the population is white. If I had gone to the police, they might have found him. They might have arrested him. I kept telling myself I had to do it so that this didn’t happen to some other girl. But I didn’t do it, because I knew once he posted those pictures, it wouldn’t matter that I was the victim. I’d lose my job. And I’d never work again, not as a teacher.” She was still staring off into that alone place, her face dead, as she said, “They’re not just nudes. He tied me up. There were…toys.”
North met Shaw’s eyes. His jaw tightened; his cheeks looked hectic, and his eyes were hooded with rage as he shook his head and looked away again.
“Do you still have the picture?” Shaw asked.
Maleah shredded a tissue on her lap. “I want him to leave me alone.”
Shaw took a deep breath. “How long did it go on? After that night, I mean.”
“A few months. Then he got arrested. I guess he wasn’t dumb enough to try anything from there; they record your calls, don’t they? Or something like that? I knew he wasn’t going to be gone forever, but it felt like—it felt like magic. Like someone had swooped in and touched everything with a magic wand and given me my life back. It was a few weeks after he got picked up that I had my first real night’s sleep.”
“And then?” North asked.
She stared down at the strips of tissue. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Shaw had spent enough time at this point watching anime together with North—you could technically call it together if you were hiding behind the couch and he was sitting on the couch and everything was fine because North didn’t need to know you were watching anime together, but then the puppy bit your ankle—that some of the visual language had become a reference point for him. And what he was seeing on Maleah right then was what he thought of as dead eyes, blank circles where the eyes should have been. When a character shut down. When a character couldn’t take it anymore—and it meant everything, anything, the experience of being alive in a bad world.
“Why did you call Philip?” Shaw asked.
A tear escaped, and Maleah blotted it with the tissue. She held her hand there. She was trembling, and the confetti-strip ends of the torn tissue trembled with her. “I heard him.”
“Philip—” North began.
She shook her head, and North stopped. Her breathing came faster and faster. “I was at Walmart. And I heard him, in the next aisle over. His laugh. I recognized his laugh, and all of a sudden, it was like flashbulbs going off: these pictures, these moments. Oh my God.”
It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two that she cried again, and this time, when she leaned against Shaw, he put his arm around her. He concentrated on the feeling of bone and muscle jarred by sobs, of the solidity of her body, like a kind of thunder against him. He anchored himself there, and when he looked up, when he saw the worry in North’s eyes, he nodded. The worry stayed, though, and North’s lips parted like he might say what he couldn’t help himself from saying, over and over again: maybe you should step outside or I can handle this. But he couldn’t, of course. Not without Shaw.
Before North could speak, though, Maleah dried her eyes and sat up. She smiled a watery thank-you to Shaw, mopped her face with the tissues, and blew her nose. “I’m sorry. It’s—it’s still a lot, and I try not to think about it.”
“You remembered something from the night Philip drugged you.”
She nodded. “It was so strange; I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before. But I heard that laugh, and I knew I’d heard it before, and then it was like all these other fragments of memories surfaced. Things they did.” She stopped and shook her head.
“That’s a common trauma response,” Shaw said. “Even drugged, your body was locking those memories in place. It’s not unusual for a stimulus to trigger you to recall the episode—that’s pretty much textbook, actually.”
Maleah had those dead eyes again, and Shaw wasn’t sure she’d heard him. “I thought I was going to pee myself. I was standing there in Walmart, holding a jar of bread-and-butter pickles, and I honestly thought I was going to mess myself. As soon as I saw him, I knew who he was.”
“Who?” North asked.
But Shaw already knew. It had been swimming in that dark place inside him, and now, as she spoke, the answer rose to meet her words.
“He’s a state representative.” She gave a disbelieving laugh. “I didn’t vote for him, thank God.”
“Eric Brey,” Shaw said.
She gave him a startled look. “You know him?”
“Did you approach Brey?” Shaw asked, but he already knew the answer.
Maleah shook her head. “Wait, how did you know?”
“We’ve heard a similar story,” North said. He looked at Shaw, and he didn’t have to say what he was thinking: that Brey must have gotten scared after his intern left, must have worried she’d talk, and so he’d escalated. He’d started looking for girls who wouldn’t tell. Who couldn’t tell.
“Oh God. He did it to someone else?”
North nodded. “Maleah, what did you say when you called Philip?”
“I had to leave a message, you know; you can’t call them direct. I told him to leave me alone. I told him I knew who his friend was, the one he’d brought to my house, and if he ever bothered me again, I’d tell everyone.” She looked from North to Shaw. “What? Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” Shaw said, “but you might be in danger. Do you have somewhere you can go for a while?”
“I can’t leave; school just started. What do you mean in danger?”
“Philip Welch escaped from jail,” North said. “I’m going to call John-Henry.”
“He can’t do anything for her in Auburn,” Shaw said.
“What do you mean he escaped?” Then she moaned, wrapping her arms around herself. “Oh God, what do you mean he escaped?”
“I know he can’t do anything here,” North said. “But he still needs to know, and I don’t want him snapping my balls off because we didn’t tell him as soon as we heard.”
“Oh my God,” Maleah said. “Oh my God, oh my God.”
Shaw waved for North to go, and North let himself out onto the stoop, and the door clicked shut behind him. Catching Maleah’s shoulders, Shaw said, “Maleah, listen to me: everything’s going to be fine. But right now, you need to pack a bag, and then you need to go stay with a family member or a friend. Somewhere away from Auburn. Just for a few days.”
Maleah moaned again, the sound long and wordless and vibrating through her body, but then, with what must have taken an immense effort, she dragged herself upright. She wet her lips. Her eyes shone like she might start crying again, and she wiped the tears before they could fall, and then she nodded.
“Don’t worry about school,” Shaw said, “and don’t worry about anything else. Where are you going?”
“I—I have an aunt in St. Louis.”
“Great. We live in St. Louis. We’ve got some friends who can check on you, and if you need anything you can give them a call.”
She nodded, but Shaw wasn’t sure she’d heard him. “I have to pack. I have to—he could come here. He could come here right now.”
“He’s not coming here right now. He’s got bigger things to worry about. He’s on the run, and there are a lot of people looking for him, people who are good at their jobs and who are going to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else. But right now, I need you to help us. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure, you can. You’re going to take a deep breath, and then another, and then another. And then you can do anything.”
She took a few breaths. They weren’t all that deep, but some color came back into her lips and cheeks, and the glassiness left her eyes.
“I need you to think of anywhere Philip might be, or anyone who might know where he is.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where he could be. I mean, we only ever went here or back to his place, and I liked here better.”
“The police have already checked his grandmother’s house; he’s not staying there.” An idea occurred to Shaw. “Did you have any kind of relationship with his grandmother? Would she talk to you?”
“His grandmother? I never met his grandmother.”
Shaw opened his mouth to ask, and then he stopped.
Maleah must have heard the question anyway; confusion was scrawled over the fear in her face. “We never went to his grandmother’s.”
He chose his words carefully. “That’s the address on his license. That’s the address on all the records—the police, the jail.”
Maleah shook her head. “Maybe he put her address on official paperwork, but when I knew him, Philip never lived with his grandma. He lived out at the park-and-store.”