Dark Road Home Read online

  “Some hikers discovered the body out by the water tower. I don’t know any details yet. Lawrence came by. He couldn’t tell us much, but he promised that he’d inform us of any developments as soon as he could. And he’s going to work with us to deal with the media, of course.” Her mother’s voice went quieter. “Thank God for Lawrence.”

  “Mom—how did they ID her?”

  “Oh, honey.” Madeleine sighed, and Gin detected a note of exhaustion in her tone. “They still had the dental records from the original investigation. And the clothes she was wearing. Lawrence described them to me and your father.”

  “Right. Okay.” Gin cut her off abruptly, because she knew exactly what Lily had been wearing that day, and she couldn’t bear to hear her mother describe the Third Eye Blind T-shirt and the hand-me-down jeans from Gin that Lily had embroidered with daisies on the pockets.

  Given the condition of the body, there was no reason they would have to do the autopsy right away; a few more days would make little difference, and considering the high-profile nature of the case, Gin knew the ME’s office might well take the precaution of trying to find a pathologist with expertise in advanced decomposition. Grateful for procedural details to focus on, Gin shifted seamlessly into her professional mode, thinking through the process that lay ahead.

  Several years earlier, Gin had taken a leave of absence to join a Red Cross team that traveled to the mass graves in Srebrenica where victims of Bosnian ethnic violence were buried. There, she had helped exhume hundreds of bodies and learned more about decomposition than she ever would have in an entire career at Cook County.

  She had volunteered for the task at a time when her life had seemed especially devoid of meaning, when a mild, chronic depression had sapped her of vitality. Certainly, the work had given Gin a sense of purpose, but she had never imagined that the skills she’d acquired overseas would come into play in such a personal way. But part of her mind was already reviewing the special considerations for bodies that had been buried for extended periods of time.

  “I’ll leave tomorrow morning,” she said. “I can be there by dinnertime.”

  “Oh honey, there’s no rush. Dad and I are going to have our hands full planning the service. Unless you . . . would you want to help?” There was the faintest note of hope buried in Madeleine’s cool competence, but they both knew that Gin and Madeleine collaborating on anything was a bad idea, even with Richard there to referee. Gin’s own emotional state would not be soothed by helping pick out a casket, ordering flowers, or talking to caterers, whereas Madeleine excelled at that sort of thing and might find it a comfort. Long before she ran for city council, she had developed formidable organizational skills as a PTA member, Girl Scout leader, and a volunteer for a variety of charities.

  “No, Mom, you go ahead without me. I’d just be in the way. I’ll call when I’m close, okay?”

  “All right, sweetheart. Drive safe. And . . . Virginia?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  “Me, too,” Gin said, wincing as she hung up the phone.

  For a moment she sat very still, staring at the darkened screen of the large monitor on Clay’s desk.

  Lily’s disappearance all those years ago had turned Gin’s world upside-down. Before, she had been planning to be an environmentalist and work to clean up the threatened upstate watersheds where she’d attended summer camp as a child. Jake was going to be a mechanical engineer, studying robotics so he could help make American manufacturing competitive again.

  How idealistic they’d both been.

  And how terribly naïve.

  ***

  There were eleven pathologists on staff at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, not counting the chief and the deputy chief, and in any given year, they conducted nearly 2,500 autopsies. So in theory, a month-long leave of absence would, if the workload was evenly distributed among her colleagues, mean an average of two extra cases per person.

  Gin did this calculation in her head as she drove east past the Portage exit on I-80 the next morning, the sun glinting prettily through the passenger window of her navy-blue Touareg. Gin had been awake early, tossing and turning until she gave up and got out of bed at dawn.

  She’d never managed to tell Clay about the discovery of her sister’s body. After helping with the dishes, she’d claimed a migraine and begged off the rest of the evening. That was lie number two. Lie number three was when Clay had asked if everything was all right at home, and Gin had said that her mother was calling to let her know she was planning a birthday party for her father.

  Gin was dismayed at how easily these lies tumbled out of her. She knew that Clay would do everything he could to support her, that he would do his best to give comfort, maybe even offer to make the trip home with her. But after the unsettling call with Jake, her head was full of too many disturbing memories and emotions. It was simply better to keep it all to herself. And it had been easy—she was sure Clay didn’t suspect a thing. Maybe she should have given in to the lure of dishonesty years ago.

  She needed to work on her prevarication skills, though. It would have been smarter to invent a medical emergency—claiming Richard had a minor stroke, for instance—so she would have an obvious reason to leave town. Eventually she was going to have to come clean with Clay, perhaps as early as this afternoon, when he would call to politely inquire if she was feeling well enough to go to the film they’d been planning to see.

  The call to her boss had been easier. Reginald “Ducky” Osnos, Cook County’s chief medical examiner, was nothing like his lighthearted nickname: a lugubrious, somber man with a hidden but deep vein of kindness, Ducky was starchily correct even with his closest colleagues. “It’s—it’s a family thing,” Gin had told him, after apologizing for calling him at nearly ten o’clock on a Friday evening to say she needed some time off.

  “Of course, of course,” Ducky had said, accepting her excuse without demanding any further explanation. “Is there anything I can do?”

  She’d assured him that there wasn’t, promised to update him in a day or so, and said she hoped it wouldn’t be more than a week or two until she returned.

  Gin stopped for gas and coffee at the Sandusky exit several hours later. As an afterthought, she bought a Hostess cherry pie and ate it in the parking lot with her windows rolled down and the radio picking up WLEC. An old Suzanne Vega song came on, something she’d listened to in high school. She hadn’t heard it in years, but she knew every line; she could envision her friend Christine dancing in the clearing by the water tower, barefoot, her Indian-print skirt swirling around her ankles, her twin brother Tom playing air guitar in a cloud of weed smoke. Night is the cathedral / Where we recognized the sign.

  When she had finished the pastry, she licked the gooey red filling from her fingers and got out of the car to throw away the trash. A thickset old man in a stained T-shirt and suspenders tipped his greasy cap at her as he got into the cab of an ancient pickup.

  The music, the junk food—there were more chemicals in that pie than Gin had probably ingested in the entire past month—the flat Ohio accent. So many memories. As Gin threw her wrapper and Styrofoam cup in the trash can next to the gas pumps, she thought guiltily of Clay, with whom she’d shared so little of her history. She pulled out her phone, fully intending to call and catch him up on everything that had happened, but with her thumb hovering over his name in her favorites, she couldn’t quite bring herself to dial.

  What did that mean about their relationship? If Gin couldn’t tell him about the worst thing that had ever happened to her, how close were they, really?

  Typing quickly before she changed her mind, she texted an excuse that would buy her a little more time.

  I think this migraine’s turning out to be something else. Summer cold? So sorry but I think I’d better stay home tonight.

  She dropped the phone back into her purse and got back in her car. As she eased back onto the interstate, she resisted the
urge to glance in the rearview, back toward Chicago. It felt as though the life she’d built with such care and determination was shattering, and the past was circling around her, like a fog that seeped through invisible cracks.

  3

  Gin made the Pennsylvania state line by late afternoon. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d returned to Trumbull since leaving for college. It had been easier to invite her parents to visit her, planning rushed, busy tourist weekends so the three of them never had to sit too long together, forced into conversations none of them knew how to have.

  But this time was different. This time, there was Lily.

  Half an hour outside of Trumbull, Gin noticed something new. A massive Wal-Mart suddenly loomed large where there had once been a roadhouse whose bartenders didn’t card, especially if you slid a folded five across the bar. Tom had talked them all into going to the roadhouse a few times. He’d worn them down one by one, first Christine and then Jake and then, finally, Gin. No one ever needed to talk Lily into anything—Lily was always game. The riskier the adventure, the better.

  Gin dialed her mother’s number. Madeleine picked up before the second ring.

  “Hi, sweetheart, are you close?”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “Wonderful!” The joy in her mother’s voice sounded real—but then again, sincerity was a skill her mother had worked on as hard as Richard Sullivan had worked to introduce regenerative medicine to the Trumbull Surgery Center. “I’ve got cold cuts.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And your room’s ready.”

  “Oh, you didn’t have to—I hope you didn’t go to any trouble.” Gin steeled herself, gripping the steering wheel tightly. “I was thinking I’d check into a motel tomorrow. So I don’t get underfoot, with all the planning and everything.”

  “Virginia.” Her mother sounded genuinely aggrieved. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not having people back to the house, anyway. I mean, we’re not going to have a wake, especially since the investigation’s still going on. It’ll be a memorial. Dad was thinking maybe we could use the Grange.”

  “Oh.” In the anxious hours since Jake’s call, Gin had simply assumed that her parents would wait until her sister’s remains were released to hold a traditional service. But Madeleine was on the city council now, with connections all over town. Even their large home wouldn’t hold all the people she’d want to invite. “All right. See you in a bit.”

  Gin hung up and forced herself to take a deep breath and exhale slowly, consciously relaxing her body. To Madeleine, the line between public and personal matters wasn’t just blurred; it had become practically nonexistent. It was one of the profound differences between a mother and daughter who had always had to work hard to find common ground, ever since Gin had been a little girl.

  Gin was grateful for the darkness as she drove through the outskirts of town and turned down Hyacinth Lane. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, when the founders of Trumbull planned for a brighter future for the town than it would go on to enjoy, Hyacinth Lane was to be the grandest address of all, with views of the Monongahela River half a mile away. A handful of stately homes had been built for the men who ran the steel and coke processing plants, the largest of which belonged to Theodore Gault, the founder of Gault Steel. Gin pulled into the circular drive, noticing some subtle changes in the blocky Indiana limestone mansion.

  The bars on the basement windows had obviously been selected to be as unobtrusive as possible. The steady decline of the town had swept in a tide of low-income residents who brought with them the drug trade that had caused the local crime rate to skyrocket, something Gin’s parents had been loath to acknowledge until Madeleine got into politics.

  Madeleine and Richard were standing at the front door, her father’s hand resting protectively on her mother’s back. Her father’s neatly trimmed beard had more silver in it than Gin remembered, though maybe it was just the light from the porch fixture. Her mother was wearing a wraparound dress and heels, and her hair was styled into a smooth, chic blonde bob. In their late fifties, the Sullivans were the picture of health and vitality.

  Gin fixed a smile on her face and got out of the car, taking a deep breath. Then she walked into their embrace.

  Everyone had loved her parents when she and Lily were kids. Richard worked long hours as a surgeon, but on his days off, he was always ready to drive a carful of kids out to Brandywine Lake or down to Tastee-Kone for ice cream. Madeleine had been a devoted mother. She cut grilled-cheese sandwiches into four perfect triangles; she made the girls’ beds every morning after they left for school; she patiently braided their hair and bought them umbrellas that matched their lunchboxes.

  Her parents folded her into their embrace. Gin inhaled White Linen and her father’s pipe tobacco, felt her mother’s spray-stiffened hair brushing her cheek and the tight weave of her father’s plaid sport shirt. Classical music drifted from the living room, something light, maybe Vivaldi. A faint buzz signaled doom for the moth that had flown into the bug zapper bolted to the porch roof.

  “Thank God you’re home,” her mother whispered, and that very un-Madeleine-like comment was Gin’s first clue that things were not as she had expected.

  ***

  “Trumbull Police Department. How may I direct your call?”

  Gin didn’t recognize the voice when she called the police department the next morning, but then again, Lois Szabo, who’d answered the phones back when Lily disappeared, would be around eighty now.

  “May I speak to Chief Crosby? This is Virginia Sullivan.”

  A few seconds later, Lawrence himself came on the line. “Ginny-girl!”

  That was Lawrence—she’d always been Ginny-girl to him, just like Lily had been Lily-girl. The memory lodged like wet tissue in her throat. “Lawrence, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Oh darlin’, don’t I wish it was under different circumstances. It’s a hell of a thing.”

  “I was wondering if I could come by, if you had a few minutes—”

  “Tell you what,” Lawrence said, turning brisk. “I promised your mom I’d come by this afternoon. Can we talk then? I should have a little more information for you.”

  He was giving her the brush-off, and Gin understood. But she was operating on a tight timeline. As soon as the cause of her sister’s death was determined to be suspicious—and since she’d been found buried in a cooler, that would be a foregone conclusion—the Allegheny County Police would take over. The mobile crime unit would have been dispatched from Pittsburgh within hours. The Trumbull officers would be relegated to the sidelines. Lawrence might remain involved in the ongoing investigation, but he wouldn’t be in charge, unlike when Lily was assumed to have run away all those years ago.

  When Gin had been growing up, the Trumbull police department had consisted of Lawrence and a half dozen other officers. Now, after Trumbull’s precipitous fall from grace, the department had doubled in size, making Lawrence’s tenure there somewhat surprising. An old cowboy cop who’d spent most of his career rounding up check forgers and town drunks didn’t seem like the ideal candidate to battle the bloody gang rivalries being played out on the streets of Trumbull.

  “Listen,” she said, trying to keep her tone as light as possible. “I thought I’d give Harvey Chozick a call.”

  “You know him?” Lawrence sounded surprised that Gin would know the chief Allegheny County medical examiner.

  “Not in person,” Gin hedged. “Professionally, I’ve heard of him, and I’m familiar with some of his published work. But I thought—they’re bound to want to talk to me anyway.”

  Getting anywhere near the investigation would be difficult, except for one thing: there was unlikely to be anyone on staff whose expertise with decomp cases rivaled her own. And in a case that was likely to draw a huge amount of media attention, the ME would be doing everything he could to ensure the integrity of the investigation.

  “Yeah, probab
ly. You kids . . . that was a heck of a summer. All of you thick as thieves.”

  “Yes.” For a moment, Gin let the silence stretch. The investigation had the potential to unearth all kinds of forgotten things. She made a snap decision. “Look, Lawrence, I just thought maybe—I mean, later, with Mom there, I don’t know . . . It’s just, the cooler.”

  “Ah.”

  “I mean—was it ours? Could you tell?”

  She could hear his breathing—heavy, just this side of labored—in the silence. “Look, honey, let’s just wait until this afternoon, okay? I’ve got another call, I’ve got to take it.”

  Another man might have hung up then, but Lawrence was old school. Polite, even in the face of everything.

  “Of course,” Gin said. “I’ll see you then.”

  But really—who else’s could it have been?

  Gin pressed the phone thoughtfully to her hip. She had walked out to the backyard to make the call, and she stood now surrounded by the dew-heavy hostas lining the brick patio and the bud-laden camellias that would soon burst into glorious bloom.

  By the time she’d woken that morning, her parents were both already gone for the day. She knew her father would have insisted on keeping to his surgical schedule; her mother was probably in her office downtown. They both found solace in their work, a trait Gin shared.

  She had the house to herself, but she’d already begun to feel suffocated by it. The two smaller bedrooms upstairs shared a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, and while the doors from the bath and hall to the other bedroom were both closed, Gin knew what lay behind them: her sister’s room, exactly as it had been left the day she disappeared.

  Not so Gin’s room, which Madeleine had redecorated while Gin was in her residency. The heavy drapes and the quilted coverlet and mounds of pillows were tasteful but anonymous, and still Gin couldn’t stand to be in the room.

  Next door, Lily’s room still held the echo of joyful chaos. The white-painted bed with its Dotted Swiss canopy was still unmade, the quilt kicked to the bottom of the mattress the way Lily always used to do when she had one of her frequent stomach aches. The matching bookcase held her Beanie Baby collection; her bulletin board was covered with photos and notes she’d passed with her friends.