Until last winter, when Kate O’Neill disappeared from church. My synapses crackled with alarm when I saw her photograph on television. At first it was just a vague, unsettling feeling that I couldn’t quite understand. My parents didn’t watch the news much, and they went out of their way to avoid reports about Kate. But Noah’s mom was obsessed with the story; I got all my updates from watching the news with Noah at his house.
We watched Kate’s parents as they pleaded for their daughter’s safe return. They shared a slew of details designed to make Kate’s abductor realize that she was a real human being with feelings and thoughts—she was somebody’s child, not an object to be destroyed and discarded.
Kate is counting the days until our church carnival this spring. She can’t wait to eat funnel cake. It’s her favorite treat.
Someone was paying attention to those details. He made sure Kate got her funnel cake. Then he killed her.
Who could do something so awful? Was he the same kind of person who would have made sure Turtle got the Space Barbie she wanted so badly because he felt sorry for everything he was about to take away from her?
It was a special kind of cruelty. It had been only a few weeks since the photograph of Turtle had shown up in our mailbox on Christmas morning, and it was as if her image on the glossy paper had sounded a single, sustained note of despair in my mind; now here was another one beside it. A few more and they’d make a melody.
“I went all the way to New Jersey this March to find Davis Gordon. Noah Taylor took me in his mom’s car. Did you know I disappeared for two days like that?” I ask Gretchen. “Mom and Dad don’t know the real reason. They don’t know I saw Davis. They think I ran off with Noah to have sex at a hotel. Did they ever mention it?”
“No. We hardly ever talk about things like that.”
“Davis told me to ask you about Frank Yarrow.”
“I know,” she says. She pauses. “I talk to Davis sometimes.”
“Gretchen, I did ask you about Frank. Remember? I showed you the picture from the birthday party, and you told me to forget about it, and about him. You said he was nobody.”
“I remember.”
“But he wasn’t nobody.” I look at Abby. “He helped your dad build the playhouse, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” she says flatly. “Frank was Amish, so he knew all about woodworking and construction. My dad said he felt sorry for him. He gave him a job at the store, but only for things that didn’t require him to interact with the public. He was too strange for that kind of thing. My dad said he would have made the customers uncomfortable.”
“You told me he died a long time ago,” I say to Gretchen. “Is that true?”
Abby picks up Boris and holds him against her chest. “Tell Sam where Frank lived, Gretchen.”
She’s silent for a moment before saying, “He lived in the house that caught on fire.” My sister thinks I don’t know what house she means. How could I possibly misunderstand? “The fire in the woods that Steven’s dad and his friends got called to fight on New Year’s.”
“A few people on the jury said I didn’t seem as if I took it seriously. They said it seemed like I didn’t care. I cared. But I guess I wasn’t taking it too seriously at first. I couldn’t get over it happening at all, so I guess I thought everything would work out okay. I never killed anything on purpose in my whole life. Ask Gretchen—she’ll tell you I was always gentle around those kids. Gretchen knows I couldn’t do that, not ever, no matter what. She’s lying if she says something different.”
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 16
Chapter Thirty-Two
Summer 1996
“I thought I was having a heart attack,” Gretchen tells us. “My chest hurt. It felt like someone was stabbing me with needles. My hands went numb … I was screaming, all by myself in the room. I thought I was going to die. I even thought about how I should just let it happen instead of going to the emergency room, because I’d probably end up showing them the letter and telling them the whole story. And I felt more afraid of that happening than I was of dying.” She pauses to pass me the envelope.
The postmark is from October of last year. Inside is a letter from Davis Gordon explaining his new theory that Frank Yarrow was Turtle’s killer. Davis is working on a sequel to Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt that he hopes will lead to Steven’s exoneration, and he believes Gretchen can help. He also suspects she might want to help.
His argument is convincing: Frank was born and raised Amish, but he was what they called a deserter. He’d been shunned by his family since choosing to leave the faith and its disciplined ways of life after he turned eighteen. He was in his midtwenties when Ed hired him to help build the playhouse. The two men grew close over the next few years. Frank was a little slow intellectually, especially when it came to social interactions. His life had been a struggle in the years since he left his family. When Ed met him, one day when Frank showed up at the hardware store to apply for a job, he was living without electricity in a one-room motor home in the middle of the woods. He didn’t even own the thing; he’d found it abandoned one day and figured nobody would notice or care if he stayed for a while.
Frank never stayed in Shelocta for more than a few months at a time. He’d disappear—for days or weeks at a time, once for almost eighteen months—and resurface eventually at the hardware store, usually without any explanation. He lived on the outskirts of the real world: he didn’t have a telephone or driver’s license. Ed was his only friend.
Police hadn’t investigated him because there’d been nothing to investigate. Frank had never been arrested. He didn’t have a bank account; his address wasn’t registered at the post office. Davis hadn’t even known about him until after Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt was on the shelves.
When Davis did finally start looking into Frank Yarrow, he didn’t find much to go on. Not at first. Ed told Davis he believed Frank died in the fire that night, although he might not have been in the motor home at all when it burned down. He hadn’t seen Frank since Christmas, but he defended his friend. He said Frank had been eccentric and maybe a little slower than most people, but he wasn’t a killer. Frank was simple. He was as gentle as a kitten, according to Ed. But Ed didn’t have a good explanation for why he’d never fully allowed Frank into his life. For example: Ed admitted he didn’t want Frank spending time at the Tickle house, but he claimed there was no particular reason—he just hadn’t thought it was a very good idea.
When Davis finally tracked down Frank’s Amish relatives from his previous life—he’d come to Shelocta from a farm in Lancaster County, nearly two hundred miles away—they described him differently. With enough coaxing, Davis got them to admit that Frank had shamed his family somehow in the months before he decided to abandon them. There had been some kind of accusation—or maybe even accusations, plural—of inappropriate behavior. They wouldn’t say what kind of inappropriate behavior it had been or give Davis any additional details; they didn’t want any more trouble in their lives because of Frank. They didn’t say that explicitly to Davis, but he got the sense anyway. It was enough to convince him that he was on the right track about Frank.
He believed Ed was, at best, in denial; at worst, Ed knew Frank was guilty but wouldn’t admit it, even to help Steven get out of prison. Davis had already tried approaching Abby for more information, but she wouldn’t speak to him; now he was appealing to Gretchen.
“At first I wouldn’t help him. I pretended his theory was ridiculous, even though I had to admit that he made a pretty compelling argument.”
“There was a pretty compelling argument for Steven, too,” Abby points out.
“I know.” She looks at her friend with such heartbroken compassion in her eyes. “But then somebody left the picture of Turtle in our mailbox on Christmas. That’s when I knew Davis was telling the truth. Steven couldn’t have sent the picture, not from prison. I thought it must have been Frank, and that he’d been involved somehow after all. Maybe he’d see
n Steven dressed up like Santa Claus that night. Maybe Steven left his door unlocked while he was at Abby’s, and Frank stole one of the costumes.” She pauses. “Mike and I flew back to Texas after the holidays, and I was on my way here the next day. I needed to see Abby.”
“But I thought you hadn’t come back until after Ed had a stroke.”
“I lied. I was here when it happened.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not getting divorced, Sam. I made up the whole story. Michael comes to visit me sometimes. He knows everything. I’m going home soon—back to Texas.”
“But why did you have to keep it a secret?” Remy asks. “Why does it matter if anybody knows that your husband is in town, or that your marriage is fine?”
“Because I love Michael, and I want to protect him. I’m doing this on my own.” She looks at Abby and quickly corrects herself. “We’re doing this alone.”
“But what are you doing, exactly? What are you protecting him from?”
“From me,” she says simply. “I’m not here to help Abby take care of Ed, Samantha. I’m here to help her kill him.”
Letter from Steven Handley to Gretchen Myers
Dear Gretchen,
I don’t know if you’re reading these letters. You probably aren’t. They’re going to kill me soon, and I don’t know how to stop them. I bet you wish you’d never met me. I wish I’d never met you, either. I know you don’t love me, and I don’t think I love anyone now. This place has a way of making people shrivel up and die way before they get around to actually killing us. If I ever get out of here, I’m going to spend as much time outside as I possibly can. I don’t see much sunlight here. I think I miss the sunshine more than anything else.
I guess you hate me for what you think I did, but I hope you know deep down that I didn’t hurt Turtle. I think about her every day. There isn’t much else to do here but think about stuff. I didn’t do it. I know I could say it a million times a day and it wouldn’t matter, but it’s true. Did you know the truth doesn’t matter? All that matters is what people want to believe.
Forty-Eight Minutes of Doubt, p. 312
Chapter Thirty-Three
Summer 1996
I knew something wasn’t right. The night it happened, my dad went out after midnight. Gretchen didn’t see him, but I did. I heard his truck starting up in the driveway and I looked out my window, but I could barely see him because he didn’t turn his headlights on until he got all the way to the end of the street. I didn’t think much about it at the time. People forget to turn their lights on, you know? But later on, I realized why he’d done it. He didn’t want anybody to notice him leaving.
“I don’t know how long he stayed out. We fell asleep, and I didn’t wake up until Susan came to my door in the middle of the night to take Gretchen home. It was such pandemonium after that. My father wasn’t the way he seemed to everyone else—he wasn’t the kind of person I could just ask ‘Why did you sneak out on New Year’s, Dad?’ He never would have told me anything anyway. He was a private person. He had a lot of secrets, and he didn’t like anybody trying to figure them out, not even Darla. Frank was the only person he seemed close with, but he wouldn’t let the rest of us get to know Frank at all. I mean, I knew him a little bit—he came into the house to use the bathroom a few times when they were building the playhouse, and I’d see him at the store every once in a while—but I didn’t know anything about him. He never talked. My dad said he was slow, and there was no reason for me to think otherwise.
“He was creepy.” Abby shudders at the memory. “I never understood what my dad liked so much about Frank, or why he even cared about him at all. He’d dropped by our house a few days before Christmas that year to give us an ornament he made for our tree. It was his present for us. He’d made a little replica of the playhouse, carved out of wood. It must have taken forever. I remember thinking, How could someone so dumb make something so beautiful?
“But even then, with it being so close to Christmas and everything, I don’t think he stayed at our house for more than three minutes that day. I don’t think he said more than two sentences to any of us. Frank gave my dad the ornament, and my dad put it on the tree. Even though she didn’t really know him, Darla tried to get him to stay after that—it was Christmas, after all. I remember how she offered him some food and everything—but he obviously didn’t want to stick around.
“After Frank left the house that day, things got really awkward between my dad and Darla for a while. It was obvious that she thought there was something weird about Frank. I don’t think he’d ever done anything specific to offend her—she’d barely ever seen him, even though he’d known my dad for years—but it was the idea of him that bugged her so much. She was jealous in a way, I guess, because my dad had this way of controlling everyone around him, of letting only certain people know certain things, and Darla felt like he never showed her enough of himself.” Abby pauses. “Darla had her own problems. She always talked about how my father was so private, but there were things she could have known about if she’d wanted to know them. That was the thing about Darla: she was the kind of person who ignored whatever she didn’t want to see. She was good at lying to herself. She had to be that kind of person, though—otherwise my dad wouldn’t have kept her around for very long.
“Anyway, I knew something was off about that whole night, and I knew it had something to do with Turtle. There was my dad leaving so quietly, without his lights on, and then Frank’s motor home burned down the same night. I knew it couldn’t have been just a big coincidence. I think Darla knew, too, because she was different after that. She stayed with us for only a few more years, and I could feel her pulling away from me the whole time, as if she knew she was going to leave me eventually. Or as if she knew she was going to leave us, I guess I should say.
“We were drinking together one night, just the two of us. She was drunk as hell, and somehow I got up the courage to ask her about Frank and the night Turtle disappeared. She told me she thought that Frank had kidnapped Turtle, and that my dad knew about it. She thought my father had killed Frank so he wouldn’t be able to hurt anybody else.
“I was at school the next day when Darla disappeared. I was taking some classes at the community college. I was going to transfer after one more semester and go to nursing school. I always wanted to be a nurse. Did you know that?” she asks Remy and me.
We shake our heads.
“That was a dumb question. Of course you didn’t know. I didn’t talk about it much, not even with Gretchen. I thought if I told too many people or got my hopes up, it would definitely never happen. I used to do okay in school, you know, but my dad didn’t want me going away to college. He wouldn’t even let me move out after I graduated from high school. He liked to be in control. All the time.”
Abby lights a cigarette and starts pacing back and forth across the living room, smoking while she talks. “I came home from class—I’d been in a biology lab all morning—and she was gone. She didn’t even take all her stuff—just a few suitcases. She left a whole lot more behind than she took with her: all her Mary Kay supplies, most of her jewelry … It was as though she’d left in a big hurry.”
“How do you know she actually left on her own?” Remy asks. “Maybe something happened to her.”
“Maybe,” Abby says. She doesn’t elaborate. “My dad was a mess, though. So was I, if I’m being honest. Darla was the closest thing I ever had to a mother, you know. She’d been around since I was four, and she was always nice to me, even when I didn’t deserve it.”
Abby starts to cry. “I don’t know if I ever deserved it, to be honest with you. I was a horrible kid. You can’t even imagine the things I used to do. It’s a miracle I’m still alive. My teenage years must have been hell for her. My dad sure as heck never paid much attention to me, not once I started getting older, but I always had Darla, even if she wasn’t Mother of the Year. She wasn’t perfect, but she was all I had, and it was better than nothing. Som
e of us have to take what we can get, wherever we can get it. Not every girl has parents who love her the way parents are supposed to love their kids. I miss her every day. I wish she’d call or write me a letter—anything at all. I’d just like to know that she’s okay, wherever she is.
“So after she left,” Abby continues, “my dad told me to box up the rest of her stuff and either throw it away or take it to Goodwill. He didn’t care which, he said; he just told me to get rid of it. But I couldn’t do it. Not with everything. I put some of her things in a box and took it up to the attic. I’d never even been up there before; I’d never had any reason. It’s just a bunch of beams and insulation. But my father used to go up sometimes, and I didn’t want him to know that I’d kept any of her stuff. He would have been furious with me. So I was walking around on the beams, trying to find someplace to tuck the box away where he wouldn’t see it, and I saw this little rectangle cut into the drywall. I can’t believe I even noticed it. I could barely make out the lines; they were almost impossible to see, and they really just looked like part of the drywall more than anything else—like a seam or something.
“I kind of tapped it a few times to see if it was loose, and it was. Once I’d pried it away, I looked through the hole, and I could see into the Souzas’ attic.
“The holes went all the way across. There was another one on the opposite wall, leading to your attic”—she nods at Remy—“and one more going to yours,” she says, looking at me and Gretchen.
My sister has obviously heard the whole story before. She listens quietly, her face stony and blank.