River Bodies (Northampton County #1)(59)
What she’d found had been two tackle boxes overflowing with hooks and lures along with dozens and dozens of containers of all different sizes containing pesticides for killing weeds, insects, a variety of plant diseases. They’d been stacked along the floor and lined up along the shelves against the wall. She may have been young, but she’d been old enough to know not to touch the sharp points of a hook or open containers carrying chemicals, whether the image of Mr. Yuk’s face had been stuck to them or not.
Besides, she’d been more interested in the box of magazines she’d spied underneath her father’s workbench. She’d dragged the box out and removed a magazine from the pile only to find a picture of a topless woman. She’d looked over her shoulder, straining to listen for any sounds coming from upstairs. When she hadn’t heard anything, she’d opened the magazine to the centerfold of a woman with her legs spread, displaying her most private part.
Becca had thrown the magazine and kicked the box back under the desk, wiping her hands on her jeans—but only after she’d paged through the entire issue, seeing the women’s curves, comparing her own body to the women’s on the smooth, glossy pages and feeling desperately inadequate. She’d wished she could’ve stopped herself from looking, mostly because it had felt wrong to look, and she’d been embarrassed not only for herself but for the naked women too. But she’d looked. She’d been young and curious about her body, about sex.
What she hadn’t been able to articulate at the time was how it had made her feel cheap and worthless. And wrapped with all the other emotions she’d felt toward her father, she’d had to contend with these feelings too.
Now, she made her way down the steep stairs for the second time in her life. The air was damp and filled with the scent of mold and earth and something else she remembered from her childhood, the scent of her father, a mixture of the outdoors, the soap he’d used, tinged with the smoke from his rolled cigarettes, the way his skin had smelled when he’d returned home after one of his shifts.
She continued to the bottom step and hesitated, her hand covering her mouth to keep from gasping. Everywhere she looked, in every conceivable space, there were containers and more containers, bags and tubes and pumps. All of which contained chemicals, some kind of poison or another, all meant for lawn care.
Had he really thought he could’ve kept them together with a perfect yard like her mother had said? The idea was so absurd, pathetic even. You did this to yourself, Dad. Although she was beginning to wonder if it had really been of his own making, or rather if it had been the result of a man who had been so burdened with guilt, plagued with remorse from what he’d done.
She wove around several of the large plastic buckets, finding a path to the workbench at the far end of the room. She wasn’t sure what her intentions were as she started rummaging through his tools and fishing lures, removing cobwebs from the desk. The dust and dirt made her sneeze. She didn’t find anything of interest on top of the workbench or inside any of the drawers other than a pile of the rolling papers for his cigarettes, the ones that had led to his cancer. She supposed what she really was after was whether he’d gotten rid of the box of magazines.
Slowly, she pushed the metal stool aside. The cardboard box was in the same spot on the floor underneath the bench. She yanked it out, opened it up. The same magazine was on top, but now it was faded and yellow. She bet if she dug through the stack, she’d find some issues that could be worth money, collector’s editions. She pushed them aside. At least he hadn’t added to his collection.
In the corner next to the table leg, she saw another box, one she hadn’t noticed before. It had a lock. She got down on her hands and knees, pulled it out. A spider darted across the floor. She jumped, nearly banging her head.
She took a deep breath and tried again, grabbing the lockbox and putting it on top of the desk. The key was in the lock. All she had to do was turn it. Whatever was inside might not be important. Otherwise, why would her father leave the key in the lock? But she’d come this far, so she might as well check. She paused. This was a violation of his privacy, a blatant violation. She turned the key.
Inside, she found her father’s copy of the divorce agreement, his birth certificate, and buried farther down was her parents’ marriage certificate. There was the title to his truck and the deed to the house. The last item she pulled from the bottom of the box was a manila folder. Her palms were clammy. Upstairs, she could hear Jackie talking on the phone amid the hum of the lawn mower outside. She opened the folder and found a single sheet of paper with the Portland Police Department’s letterhead.
She searched behind her for the metal stool she’d pushed away and plopped down on it. The date at the top of the page was October 14, 1994. It was written in her father’s sloppy handwriting. It appeared he’d interviewed someone and jotted everything down so he wouldn’t forget. The one sentence that stood out, the one her father had put an asterisk by: “The victim was last seen by the witness wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt and jeans.” The witness’s name was blacked out. Scrawled next to it was another note. “Witness does not want to be identified.” There were other notes on the page in the same sloppy handwriting, but Becca had read all she needed to. Her body quaked. The tremors reached as far as her core.
The person her father had interviewed hadn’t wanted to be identified, and maybe that had been the reason why her father had buried the interview. But Becca believed there had been another reason, a more threatening concern that had been much closer to home. The shadows that had been lurking, swirling around in the dark corners of her memory, became crisper, clearer, in the form of a blood-stained blue hooded sweatshirt in a barn at the killer’s feet.