“I’m sorry,” he says, seeing me gasp, jerk, pull away from him in bed though he’s ten feet away, not even close to entering my personal space. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay,” I say, telling myself I am okay. I’m in the hospital room with Aunt Courtney and the police. I’m okay. Still, there are burning hot tears in my eyes. Aunt Courtney scooches closer to me on the bed. She squeezes my hand, holds my eye, gives a sad smile.
“Can you tell me where?” the cop asks.
I nod. “There is a cemetery by the resort. In the woods. I was there one day. I saw that lady from the resort there too.”
“What lady?”
“The one who owns it. Ms. Dahl or whatever. She was laying flowers on an unmarked grave. Maybe that’s where their daughter is. Maybe she’s who’s buried there.”
Courtney
I’m allowed to watch. I’m not in an observation room staring through one-way glass, like you see on TV. Instead, the interview room is monitored by cameras and microphones, and I sit in someone’s empty office and watch the interview on a monitor, alone.
Ms. Dahl sits in a chair in the interview room. The room itself is small and bare, with what looks like a card table and four chairs, only two of which get used.
Detective Evans sits across from her. “Tell me what you know about Daniel Clarke.”
Her jaw is set. There’s an edge to her voice as she says, “I thought I already did.”
“Tell me again,” Detective Evans says.
“I knew his mother,” she says. “She was my best friend ever since we were little kids. I helped him out after she died, because I felt sorry for him, because he was one of those kids who got the short end of the stick, and because I didn’t do something more to intervene when she was still alive. I always felt guilty about that. Helping Daniel out was my penance. His dad was a deadbeat and his mom drank herself to death. She choked to death on her own vomit. But you probably already knew that, didn’t you?”
He says nothing to that. He stares back, pensive, and then he asks, “What do you mean when you say you helped him out?”
“I gave him a job. I let him work at my resort, though he wasn’t ever gonna be employee of the month, but it was something, a paycheck at least. I should have fired him more than once.”
“For what?”
“Not doing his job. Stealing things from the guests.”
“What do you know about the night Kylie Matthews disappeared?”
“I remember that night. At the time,” she says, “I didn’t even know the girl was missing. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out who she was.”
“Whowhowas?”
“The girl that Daniel was burying.”
In the other room, I blanch.
Detective Evans says nothing.
“The night it happened, I was out walking in the woods after dark,” she says, going on to explain as she sags back in her chair. “I walk before bed sometimes because I don’t sleep well, and I found that a little activity before bed helps me sleep. When I came to the cemetery, I saw him. Daniel. He had his back to me. I couldn’t make out his face because he was looking the other way and because he had some sweatshirt on, the hood pulled clear up over his head. But the sleeves were pushed up, like this,” she says, pulling up on the sleeves of her own shirt, “and when the moonlight hit it just right, I could make out his tattoo.”
“And that’s how you knew it was him?”
“Yes. I didn’t tell anyone what I saw that night.”
“What exactly did you see?”
“The girl. Her body. She was lying on the ground behind him. I couldn’t see her face either, but I could tell it was a body.She wasn’t moving. I assumed she was dead. Daniel had a shovel and he was digging. I watched him dig. It went on for hours until he was short of breath and spent, but he went on digging with an energy and a determination I’ve never seen before or since from Daniel. And then, when he was done, he threw his shovel down and he went to the girl. He hoisted her limp body up onto his shoulder, and then he laid her down in the grave.”
There is a sour tang in my mouth, a burning in my throat. I eye the garbage can in the corner of the room, wondering if I might be sick, thinking of that poor girl and of Joanna Matthews sitting at home, feeling aggrieved that Kylie wasn’t back from her friend’s house yet, and of Sam, waiting in his car for the train to pass. They had no idea what was happening to their daughter in that moment.
Ms. Dahl’s gaze wanders around the room, locking eyes with the camera so that it feels like we make eye contact. “The next morning I went back, hoping I’d imagined it. The place where he buried her was as plain as the nose on your face, the only saving grace that no one but me ever visited that cemetery. No one ever said Daniel was smart. He didn’t leave the place very tidy.”
