Leaving Time(29)

I had to go home and tell my client that her husband wasn’t two-timing her with another woman but that he had a whole life she had not known about.

Was it any wonder that night I dreamed of finding Alice Metcalf’s unconscious body, and of the vow I’d made that elephant, which I never did keep: I promise, she’ll be okay.

And that was when my run of sobriety ended.


I can’t remember all the details about the eight hours or so after I found Alice Metcalf, because so much happened in such a short amount of time. She was brought by ambulance to the local hospital, still unconscious. I gave instructions to the paramedics who accompanied her to call us the minute she came to. We asked cops from neighboring towns to help complete a sweep of the elephant sanctuary, because we didn’t know if Alice Metcalf’s daughter was still out there. At about 9:00 P.M., we swung by the hospital, only to be told that Alice Metcalf was still out cold.

I thought we should arrest Thomas as a person of interest. Donny said that wasn’t possible, since we didn’t know if any crime had been committed. He said that we’d have to wait for Alice to wake up and tell us herself what had happened, and if Thomas had anything to do with her head injury or the kid’s disappearance or Nevvie’s death.

We were still at the hospital waiting for her to regain consciousness when Gideon called, panicked. Twenty minutes later, we accompanied him to the sanctuary enclosure, shining flashlights into the dark, where Thomas Metcalf was standing in his bare feet and bathrobe, trying to secure chains around the front legs of an elephant. She kept trying to rip away from her restraints; a dog was barking and nipping at him, attempting to stop him. Metcalf kicked the dog in the ribs, and it whimpered away on its belly. “It’ll only take a few minutes to get the U0126 into her system—”

“I don’t know what the hell he’s doing,” Gideon said, “but we do not chain elephants here.”

The elephants were rumbling, an unholy earthquake that shuddered across the ground and up my legs.

“You’ve got to get him out of there,” Gideon muttered, “before the elephant gets hurt.”

Or vice versa, I thought.

It took an hour to talk Thomas out of the enclosure. It took another thirty minutes for Gideon to get close enough to the terrified animal to remove the shackles. We handcuffed Metcalf, which seemed awfully fitting, and brought him to a psychiatric hospital sixty miles south of Boone. For a while, during the drive, we were out of the range of cell phone coverage, which is why it wasn’t until an hour later I got the message that Alice Metcalf was awake.

By then, we had been on the job for sixteen hours.

“Tomorrow,” Donny pronounced. “We’ll interview her first thing. Neither one of us is going to be any good right now.”

And so began the biggest mistake of my life.

Sometime between midnight and 6:00 A.M., Alice signed herself out of Mercy hospital and disappeared off the face of the earth.

? ? ?

“Mr. Stanhope,” she says. “Virgil Stanhope?”

When I open the door, the kid speaks the word like an accusation, as if being named Virgil is equivalent to having an STD. Immediately all my defenses kick in. I’m not Virgil and haven’t been for a long time. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to Alice Metcalf?”

I peer more closely at her face, which is still kind of blurry, thanks to the amount I’ve drunk. Then I squint. This must be another hallucination. “Go away,” I slur.

“Not until you admit that you’re the guy who dropped my mother off, unconscious, at a hospital ten years ago.”

Just like that, I’m stone-cold sober, and I know who this is standing before me. Not Alice, and not just a hallucination. “Jenna. You’re her daughter.”

The light that washes over that girl’s face looks like the kind of thing you see in paintings in cathedrals, the sort of art that breaks your heart even as you stare at it. “She told you about me?”

Alice Metcalf had not told me anything, of course. She wasn’t at the hospital when I went back there the morning after the trampling to take her statement. All the nurse could tell me was that she’d signed her own paperwork for discharge, and that she mentioned someone named Jenna.

Donny took that as proof that Gideon’s story had been the legitimate one, that Alice Metcalf had run off with her daughter as she’d been hoping to. Given the fact that her husband was a whack job, that seemed like a happy ending. At the time, Donny had been two weeks shy of retirement, and I knew he wanted to clear out the paperwork on his desk—including the caregiver’s death at the New England Elephant Sanctuary. It was an accident, Virgil, he said emphatically, when I pushed him to dig deeper. Alice Metcalf is not a suspect. She’s not even a missing person, until someone reports it.

But nobody ever did. And when I tried to, I was stonewalled by Donny, who told me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d just let this one go. When I argued that he was making the wrong call here, Donny lowered his voice. “I’m not the one making it,” he said cryptically.

For a decade, there were things about that case that didn’t sit right with me.

Yet now, ten years later, here is the proof that Donny Boylan was right all along.

“Holy shit,” I say, rubbing my temples. “I can’t believe this.” I let the door fall back so that Jenna walks in, wrinkling her nose at the crumpled fast-food wrappers on the floor and the smell of stale smoke. With a shaking hand, I pull a cigarette from my shirt pocket and light up.