The Storm King(55)
This. This is what life is.
Eleven
Nate hesitated at the sight of his own name, but his hands did not.
They yanked the filing cabinet drawer open hard enough to jostle its contents. Its hanging folders swayed and fell, exposing an 8 × 10 of his teenage self leering sideways at him.
His senior portrait. His hair had been longer then, casual without being careless. Little about that boy had been careless. He was not quite smirking, but there was an undeniably satisfied look on his face.
There were other small cabinets pushed up close against the closet’s wall. Drawers for Tom, Johnny, and Owen were in the same cabinet as his own. Adam Decker and his circle of friends had their own. A third contained Lindsay, Emma, and even the Sarahs. Friends, enemies, predators, prey, and others not so easily categorized.
Nate had been so starved for information and so eager to discover something—anything—about Lucy’s murder that this trove overwhelmed him. He opened one drawer after another, pulling at files and paging through reports, but the first one he studied in depth was Adam’s.
Adam and his accomplices had been expelled from Greystone Lake High after the violent confrontation in the chemistry lab. When their house burned down, the Deckers moved full-time to their farm in Gracefield, where Adam had finished his senior year. Nate wasn’t sure what had happened to his minions, but Adam had been recruited by a solid New England college for lacrosse. His player profile photo was in his file. A Piscean-eyed Nordic giant in shoulder pads.
The material within Adam’s drawer seemed scant compared with what was in Nate’s section. In addition to official reports and photos and photocopies of evidence, Adam’s file contained what looked like pages ripped straight from the chief’s own notes. Written in caps on a piece of yellow legal paper: INCONSISTENT ACCOUNT. ATM CAM FOOTAGE CONFLICTS WITH TIMELINE FROM SWORN STATEMENT. Copies of withdrawal slips and gas pump receipts were stapled to this note.
In the days immediately following Lucy’s disappearance, Nate had coerced Tom into prying, wheedling, and outright spying on the police investigation, but this information about Adam Decker was news to him. Decker had lied to the police, which meant he was hiding something.
Nate felt the thing inside him writhe.
He was supposed to be a man who built things up, not one who ripped them apart. He was supposed to make people better, not bring them pain. Despite the good life he’d constructed around this idea of himself, that wildfire of a teenager still burned inside him.
There was far too much here for Nate to absorb, and the chief was overdue to return. He toyed with the idea of letting himself be discovered inside this forbidden space. This would at least compel the chief to address the roomful of research he’d collected. Because it meant something, this closet and its concealed knowledge.
It meant that the chief never believed Lucy had run away. It meant he knew that her body had been out there, waiting, all this time.
Forcing a confrontation was tempting. Surprising the man could shake loose all kinds of interesting things. But Nate decided that the smarter move was to get Tom on board and access this place after hours. That way, they’d be able to pore through everything at their leisure.
Nate made up his mind to leave the closet just as he’d found it, but he couldn’t resist another look at his own drawer. He couldn’t understand why there was so much more in here than in any of the others he’d opened.
He straightened the hanging folders he’d accidentally dislodged. Among them was one enigmatically titled EVENTS. A quick thumb through its manila subdivisions revealed the damage reports, repair estimates, and newspaper clippings of a number of their Thunder Runs. The chief must have gone through Lucy’s journals and researched each and every episode of vandalism she’d mentioned.
Nate knew he was out of time, but another folder caught his eye: PSYCH. As with the aftermath of his family’s car accident, the weeks that followed Lucy’s disappearance were blurred and nettle-edged. But a bad fight that July had briefly landed Nate back with his old therapist. There’d been talk of charges being filed, but as is often the case in such small towns, the incident was smoothed over in the end.
Copies of his therapist’s notes from those sessions were filed here. The documents weren’t anything approaching an official psych evaluation. They were casual, handwritten pages complete with doodles. This was a clear violation of Nate’s patient privileges, but the chief could have outright stolen them for all he knew. It didn’t matter now. What mattered were the words scrawled across these pages. Phrases like “dissociative tendencies,” “highly manipulative and narcissistic,” and “weak conscience/no conscience?” Boxed and underlined at the bottom of the page was a question: “ASPD?”
Nate knew from his psychiatry rotation that this stood for antisocial personality disorder. It was the umbrella under which psychopaths and sociopaths were placed.
The chief had known Nate as long as anyone in the world. Was this what the man believed he was?
Nate was unsteady when he turned to leave the grim little room. And this was regrettable, because it was then that he most needed his strength.
A last filing cabinet was separated from all the others. It was closest to the door, which is why he hadn’t noticed it at first. This one was Lucy’s. Its contents were the reason Nate had come to Greystone Lake, and he didn’t even need to open its drawers to find what he wanted. The chief must have been studying her files recently because a manila folder lay open on top of the cabinet. Her senior portrait glowed from it. It was startling to see her so youthful after all these years, though it was the only age she’d ever be. Nate pushed aside a pair of pressed uniforms and took an involuntary step toward her files, pulled like a flower to the sun.