Never Look Away: A Thriller Page 8

  “It was just for a second. I really didn’t get a close look at him.”

  “And you think this man was running away from your child’s stroller.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you see this man take the stroller?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see him pushing it away?”

  “No.”

  “How about when you found the stroller, was he holding on to it, standing by it, anything?”

  “No, I told you, I just caught a glimpse of him running through the crowd when I found Ethan,” I said.

  “So he could have just been a man running through the crowd,” the detective said.

  I hesitated a moment, then nodded. “I just had a feeling.”

  “Mr. Harwood,” Duckworth said, then stopped himself. “Your name. David Harwood. It seems familiar to me.”

  “Maybe you’ve seen the byline. I’m a reporter for the Standard. But I don’t cover the police, so I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “Yeah,” Duckworth said. “I knew I knew it from someplace. We get the Standard delivered.”

  Suddenly something occurred to me. “Maybe she went home. Could she have gone home? Maybe she took a taxi or something?”

  I expected Duckworth to leap up and have someone check, but he said, “We’ve already had someone go by your house, and it looks like no one’s home. We knocked on the door, phoned, looked in the windows. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.”

  I looked down at the floor, shook my head. Then, “Let me call my parents, see if she might have gone there.”

  Duckworth waited for me to fish out my cell and place the call.

  “Hello?” My mother.

  “Mom, it’s me. Listen, is Jan there?”

  “What? No. Why would she be here?”

  “I’m just—we kind of lost contact with each other. If she shows up, would you call me right away?”

  “Of course. But what do you mean, you lost—”

  “I have to go, Mom. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I flipped the phone shut and put it back into my pocket. Duckworth studied me with sad, knowing eyes.

  “What about her own family?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “There isn’t anyone. I mean, not anyone she’d go see. She’s an only child and she’s estranged from her family. Hasn’t seen them in years. For all I know, her parents are dead.”

  “Friends?”

  Again, I shook my head. “Not really. No one she spends time with.”

  “Work friends?”

  “There’s one other woman in the office, Leanne Kowalski, at Bertram’s Heating and Cooling. But they aren’t close. Leanne and Jan don’t really connect.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Leanne’s a bit rough around the edges. I mean, they get along, but they don’t have girls’ nights out or anything.”

  The detective wrote down Leanne’s name just the same.

  “Now, some of these questions may seem insensitive,” Duckworth said, “but I need to ask them.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Has your wife ever had episodes where she wandered off, behaved strangely, anything like that?”

  I took probably one second longer to answer than I should have. “No.”

  Duckworth caught that. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How about—and my apologies for asking this—an affair? Could she be seeing anyone else?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Have the two of you had any arguments lately? Cross words between you?”

  “No,” I said. “Look, we should be out looking for her, not sitting around here.”

  “There are people looking, Mr. Harwood. You sure you don’t have a picture of her on you? A wallet shot? On your cell phone?”

  I rarely used my phone for pictures. “I have some at home.”

  “By the time you get home, maybe we’ll have found her,” he said reassuringly. “If not, you have some you could email me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so, in the meantime, let’s put our heads together to see whether there’s a way to narrow down this search.”

  I nodded.

  Duckworth said, “Let’s go back to my earlier question. The one about whether your wife has had any episodes lately.”

  “Yes?”

  “What weren’t you telling me there? I could see it in your eyes, you were holding something back.”

  “Okay, I was telling you the truth, she’s never wandered off or done anything like that. But there is something … this is very hard for me to even think about, let alone talk about it.”

  Duckworth waited.

  “Are there any bridges around here?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Not big ones, like on the interstate, but smaller ones, over creeks or anything?”

  “I’m sure there are, Mr. Harwood. Why would you be asking that?”

  “The last couple of weeks, my wife … she hasn’t totally been herself.”

  “Okay,” he said patiently.

  “She’s been feeling … depressed. She’s said some things….”

  I felt myself starting to get overwhelmed.

  “Mr. Harwood?”

  “I just need … a second.” I held my hand tightly over my mouth. I had to hold it together. I took a moment to focus. “The last couple of weeks, she’s been having these thoughts.”

  “Thoughts?”

  “About … harming herself. Suicidal thoughts. I mean, I don’t think she’s actually tried to do it. Well, she had this bandage on her wrist, but she swears that was just an accident when she was peeling vegetables, and she did go out to this bridge, but—”

  “She tried to jump off a bridge?” Duckworth asked straightforwardly.

  “She drove out to one, but she didn’t jump. A truck came along.” I felt I was rambling. “Jan’s been feeling like … like everything was too much. She told me the other night she thought Ethan and I would be better off without her.”

  “Why do you think she would say something like that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like her brain just short-circuited these last few days. It was yesterday she told me about driving out to that bridge, standing on the railing until the truck showed up.”

  “That must have been very hard to hear.”

  I nodded. “It was.” I was holding back tears. “Very.”

  “Did you suggest that she go talk to someone?”

  “I already had. I’d been to see our doctor, Dr. Samuels.” Duckworth seemed to recognize the name and nodded. “I told him about the changes in Jan’s behavior, and he said she should see him. So I talked her into it, and she saw him the other day, but this was before the bridge incident. She says she did that after she went to see the doctor.”

  “Was she on any kind of medication?”

  “No. In fact, I asked her about that. I was hoping he might prescribe something for her, but she said she didn’t want drugs changing who she was. She said she could deal with this without taking anything.”

  “Would you excuse me a moment?” Duckworth said, reaching into his jacket for his cell phone. He slipped outside the door before placing a call. I couldn’t hear everything he said, but I made out the words “creek” and “suicide.”

  I just sat there, rubbing my hands together, wanting to get up and leave that room, do something besides wasting my time while—

  Duckworth came back in, sat back down.

  “Do you think it’s possible that’s what she did?” he asked. “That she may have taken her own life?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope to God not.”

  “We’re doing an extensive search of the grounds, of the park itself,” he said. “As well, we’re searching beyond the park, looking at the other cars out there, talking to people.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I’m confused about one thing.” I shook my head. “I’m confused abou
t a lot of things.”

  “What is it?”

  “My son. Why did someone run off with my son?”

  “I can’t say,” Duckworth said. “It’s a good thing he’s okay.”

  I felt a minor wave of relief. It was true. At least Ethan was safe. There was no indication anyone had done anything to him.

  “Isn’t it a hell of a coincidence that someone would take off with Ethan at the same time as my wife goes missing?” I asked.

  The detective nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said.

  Fenwick, the park manager, had reappeared. “Detective?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “We have something you might want to see.”

  “What?” I said. I was on my feet. “You’ve found her?” But she wouldn’t look at me, only Duckworth.

  “What?” I asked again.

  She led Duckworth, with me following, to a cubicle with fabric-covered partitions. The young publicist was sitting at a computer with some grainy black-and-white images on the screen.

  She said, “Our people in security were reviewing some images from the gate around the time the Harwoods arrived.”

  I looked at the screen. The camera must have been mounted just inside the park, looking at the gate. I recalled that there were half a dozen booths, lined up in a row, where guests bought tickets, or showed the ones they’d bought online. The image on the screen showed one booth, and there, in the crush of people arriving for a day of fun, were Ethan and I.

  “It was actually not that tricky,” the young woman at the keyboard said. “They entered the name ‘Harwood’ into the system, which brought up the ticket info, and that showed the time of entry into Five Mountains.”

  “Yeah, that’s us,” I said, pointing.

  “Where’s your wife?” Duckworth asked me.

  I started to point, then said, “She wasn’t with us then. Ethan and I entered the park on our own.”

  Duckworth’s eyes seemed to narrow. “Why was that, Mr. Harwood?”

  “She forgot the backpack. We were almost to the gate, and then she remembered, and she told us to go on ahead, we’d meet up later by the ice-cream place.”

  “And that’s what you did? You and your son came in on your own?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s not the last time you saw your wife.”

  “No, she came in later and joined us.”

  Duckworth nodded, then said to the publicist, “Can your people get some pics from the area of the ice-cream stand?”

  She half-turned in her chair. “No,” she said. “We don’t have any cameras there at this point. Just on the gates and the rides. Our plan is to put in more cameras, in more locations, but we’re still relatively new, you understand, and we’ve been prioritizing where CCTV is concerned.”

  Duckworth didn’t say anything. He studied me for a moment before saying he wanted to check in with his people. He was moving for the door.

  “I want to get Ethan,” I said.

  “Absolutely.” he said, nodding his head in agreement. Then he went into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  EIGHT

  Barry Duckworth walked down the hall and turned into a room gridded with cubicles. The Promise Falls police detective guessed that on a weekday, these desks would be filled with people conducting the business end of things for Five Mountains park, but unlike the workers who actually ran the rides and sold the tickets and emptied the trash, they got Saturday and Sunday off.

  The park manager didn’t have to be called in. Five Mountains was still a new attraction in the upper New York State area, and Saturdays were always the busiest. Fenwick had called in her publicist the moment she suspected this could turn into a public relations nightmare for the park. If Jan Harwood had somehow wandered into the mechanism of a roller coaster, or drowned in one of the shallow waterways that ran through the grounds, or choked on a Five Mountains hot dog, they needed to be on top of that.

  As if that weren’t enough, there was this business of a kid in a stroller being wheeled away from his parents. Once that news started getting out there, hold on to your hat, buster. Before you knew it, parents would be hearing that some tot had been carved up for body parts at the face-painting booth.

  There were only two people in this other office. Didi Campion, a uniformed officer in her mid-thirties, and Ethan Harwood. They were sitting across from each other on office chairs, Campion leaning over, her arms on her knees, Ethan sitting on the edge of his chair, legs dangling.

  “Hey,” Duckworth said.

  All that remained of an ice-cream treat Ethan had been eating was an inch of cone. His tired eyes found Duckworth. The child looked bewildered and very small. He said nothing.

  “Ethan and I were just talking about trains,” Didi Campion said.

  “You like trains, Ethan?” Duckworth asked.

  Ethan nodded. He drew his lips in, like he was doing everything he could not to say anything.

  “We’re going to get you back with your dad in just a minute,” Duckworth said. “That okay with you?”

  Another nod.

  “Would you mind if I talked with Officer Campion over here for just a second? We’re not going anyplace.”

  Ethan looked from Duckworth to Campion and his eyes flashed with worry. Duckworth could see that the boy had already formed an attachment to the policewoman.

  “I’ll be right back,” Campion assured him and touched his knee.

  She got out of the chair and joined Duckworth a few feet away.

  “Well?” he asked her.

  “He wants to see his parents. Both of them. He’s asking where they are.”

  “What else did he tell you? What about the person who took him away in his stroller?”

  “He doesn’t know anything about it. I think he slept through the whole thing. And he said he and his father were waiting and waiting for his mother to come but she didn’t.”

  Duckworth leaned in. “Did he say when he last saw her?”

  Campion sighed. “I don’t know if he quite got what I was trying to ask him. He just keeps saying he wants to go home, that he doesn’t want to go on any of the roller coasters, not even the small rides. And he wants his mom and dad.”

  Duckworth nodded. “Okay, I’ll take the kid back to his father in just a second.” Campion took that as a sign that they were done, and she went back to sit with Ethan.

  The door edged open. It was Fenwick. “Detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know you have your own people out combing the grounds, but Five Mountains personnel have searched every square inch of the grounds and they’re reporting back that they haven’t found any sign of this woman. I mean, in any kind of distress. No woman passed out in any restrooms, not in any of the areas that are off-limits to guests, no indication that she fell or came to any kind of harm anywhere at all. I really think, at this point, it would be best if the police presence in the park were scaled back. It’s making people nervous.”

  “Which people?” Duckworth asked.

  “Our guests,” Fenwick said defensively. “They can’t help but think something’s wrong, with all these police around. They’ll start thinking terrorists have put bombs on the roller coasters or something like that.”

  “How about the parking lot?” Duckworth asked.

  “It’s been searched,” Fenwick said confidently.

  Duckworth held up a finger and got out his cell, punched in a number. “Yeah, Smithy, how ya doin’. I want someone at the exit scoping out every car as it leaves. See if there’s anyone in any of them matches the description of this missing woman. You see someone like that, if she’s acting funny, you hang on to that car till I get there.”

  Fenwick looked like she’d bitten into a lemon. “Tell me you’re not going to search every car that leaves here.”

  “No,” he said, but he wished he could. He wished he had the authority to make everyone pop their trunk as they left for home. Duckworth ha
d a feeling that anything he did about cars in the lot amounted to doing too little too late. If Jan Harwood had run into trouble, if someone had stuffed her into a trunk, they could have left the lot a couple of hours ago. But you did what you could.

  “This is terrible, just terrible,” Fenwick said. “We don’t need this kind of publicity. If this woman wandered off because she has mental problems or something, that’s hardly our fault. Is that man planning to sue us? Is this some setup to get money out of us?”

  “Would you like me to convey your concerns to Mr. Harwood?” Duckworth asked. “I’m sure, as a writer for the Standard, he’d love to do a piece on your outpouring of sympathy for his situation.”

  She blanched. “He works for the paper?”

  Duckworth nodded.

  Fenwick moved around the detective and dropped to her knees in front of Ethan. “How are you doing there? I bet you’d love another ice cream cone.”

  Duckworth’s cell, which was still in his hand, rang. He put it to his ear. “Yeah.”

  “It’s Gunner here, Detective. I’m down in the security area. We patched that video of the guy and his kid going through the gates a few minutes ago up to the main office.”

  “I just saw it.”

  “They couldn’t pick out the wife in those, right?”

  “That’s right. Mr. Harwood says his wife had gone back to the car to get something and told him to go on ahead.”

  “Yeah, okay, so she would have come into the park a few minutes later then, right?”

  “Yeah,” Duckworth said.

  “So what we did before was, because the Harwoods ordered their tickets online, and printed them out, we were able to pinpoint at what time those tickets got scanned and processed at the gate.”

  “I got that.”

  “So then we thought, we’ll look for when the third ticket, the wife’s, got processed at the gate, and then when we had that we could find the closed-circuit image for that time.”

  “What’s the problem?” Duckworth asked.

  “Nothing’s coming up.”

  “What do you mean? You saying she never came into the park?”

  “I don’t know. Here’s the thing. I’ve got them checking their ticket sales records, all the stuff that gets bought in advance online, and they only show two tickets being purchased on the Harwoods’ Visa. One adult and one kid.”