Run Away(42)

“Visiting someone else Henry Thorpe contacted.”

“Who?”

“Don’t have a name,” Elena said. “Only a location.”

“Where?”

“A tattoo parlor in New Jersey.”





Chapter

Fifteen



The Corval Inn and Family Tree Farm was located in far east Connecticut, near the Rhode Island border. Simon arrived at eight thirty a.m. The memorial service for Aaron, according to Elena Ramirez, was to start at nine.

The inn was a white Federal-style farmhouse with tasteful additions on both sides. Green wicker rocking chairs lined the wraparound porch. A sign read FAMILY OWNED SINCE 1893. Pure New England postcard. On the right, a bus let out tourists for hayrides. The barn in the back was a “Rootin’ Tootin’ Petting Zoo” promising “petting interactions” with goats, sheep, alpacas, and chickens, though Simon wondered how specifically you went about petting a chicken.

At Christmastime, visitors chopped down their own Christmas trees. In October, they set up the place as the “Haunted Farm,” complete with the “Haunted Maze,” the “Haunted Silo,” the “Haunted Hayride” (key word: Haunted) driven by the “Haunted Headless Horseman.” There was also seasonal pumpkin and apple picking. You could make your own cider in the small cabin on the right.

Simon parked the car and headed toward the inn’s front door. An ornate sign by the door said, INN GUESTS ONLY. Simon ignored it and entered the foyer. The decor was of the period and more formal than Simon would have expected. Cherrywood chairs with fanned Windsor backs sat on either side of mahogany settees with winged paw feet. The grandfather clock stood next to the oversized fireplace like a sentinel. One mahogany breakfront displayed fine china, the other leather-bound books. There were old oil portraits of stern-looking, hearty men—past patriarchs of the Corval family.

“May I help you?”

The woman behind the desk smiled at him. She wore a blouse checkered in the same design as those Italian restaurants that were trying too hard to be authentic. He wondered whether this woman was Aaron’s mother, but then he followed the old oil portraits until he reached a framed photograph of a smiling couple circling sixty behind her head. A plaque under the photograph read:





THE CORVALS


Wiley and Enid



Simon said, “I’m here for the memorial service.”

The woman gave him suspicious, if not stink, eye. “May I ask your name?”

“Simon Greene.”

“I don’t know you, Mr. Greene.”

He nodded. “I knew Aaron.”

“You knew Aaron,” she said, her voice tinged with disbelief, “and you’re here to pay your respects?”

Simon didn’t bother to reply. The woman took out a pamphlet and opened it carefully. Her reading glasses were dangling from a chain. She put them on the end of her nose. “You head back behind the barn. Turn right here. You’ll see the corn maze. Don’t go in it. Twice this week we’ve had to send in employees to get people out. Walk around here.”

She pointed on the map.

“There’s a path into the woods. Head down it. You’ll see a green arrow on a tree pointing right. That’s for the hikers. You instead turn left.”

“Complicated,” Simon said.

She handed him the pamphlet and frowned at him. “This lobby is only for guests staying at the inn.”

“And subtle.”

He thanked her and headed back outside. The hayride was getting under way, a tractor pulling a bunch of people at much too slow a pace. Everyone was smiling, though they looked pretty uncomfortable. A family—man, woman, daughter, son—waved at him in unison. He waved back, and boom, he dropped back in time to taking the kids apple picking in Chester, just north of the New Jersey border. It had been a glorious autumn day, and yes, he remembered putting Paige on his shoulders so that she could reach a higher branch, but what he remembered most, right now, as he stood there and tried not to stare at this happy, innocent, blissfully ignorant family, was the way Ingrid looked in her dark flannel shirt tucked into thin-legged blue jeans and high boots. He had just turned toward her, Paige giggling on his shoulders, and Ingrid had smiled back at him, tucking her hair behind her ear, and even now, just thinking about how their eyes met on that day, Simon could feel his knees give way just a little bit.

He grabbed his phone and stared at the screen for a few seconds, willing it to give him good news. It didn’t.

He followed the route past the petting zoo barn. The chickens were loose. One ran up to him, stopped, looked up at him. Simon was tempted to try to pet it. A man dressed in farmer overalls was giving a demonstration involving eggs and an incubator. The corn stalks at the maze were ten feet high. There was a line to get in and a sign telling visitors that the maze’s theme for this year was THE FIFTY STATES—FIND THEM ALL.

He spotted the walking path, took it as told to the green arrow, turned left when the arrow wanted him to turn right. The woods grew thicker. He looked back to where he’d started, but he couldn’t see the clearing anymore.

Simon kept going, the path sloping down now, steeper and steeper. He heard what sounded like running water in the distance. A brook maybe. The path veered right. The trees in front of him thinned until Simon found himself in a clearing. It was a perfect square, the clearing made by man rather than natural design. A low wooden picket fence, a foot high, no more, formed the perimeter around small tombstones.