The Darkest Night Page 5

Chapter Four

  It had been a week since Tom had stopped by the Gardener home, and three days since the resulting story had run in the Review. The story had gone over a few of the facts of the case, such as the location and time of Jessica Gardener’s disappearance; a picture of the girl, pulled from the first story written by Jim Grady had been included, and a plea for people to call the Cedar Falls Police Department if they had any information that could help with the case. Frankie Gardener’s story of living shadows had been omitted. Printing the confused fantasies of a scared young boy wouldn’t do anybody any good.

  The day after the piece ran in the paper Tom got an e-mail from a woman identifying herself as Patricia Gomez. She wanted to meet with him, she wrote. She said it had something to do with the disappearance of the Gardener girl, but she didn’t elaborate. Tom replied to her e-mail, telling her that--as stated in the story--anyone with information about the case should get in touch with the police. A half-hour later he received another e-mail, telling him that whatever it is that she wanted to talk about was related to the Gardener case, but was really about another case that had been covered in the Review two years previous, the disappearance of a man by the name of James Gomez. James Gomez was her husband.

  Confused but intrigued, Tom agreed to meet her at a café on the north side of town, a place called Pauly’s. After sending off his reply Tom logged into the Review’s archives, and looked up the story of James Gomez, a name he was unfamiliar with. He did a name search, and silently cursed the system’s broken search function as he waded through a page of false positives, stories that contained either the names James or Gomez, but not James Gomez. He found what he was looking for when he clicked through to the second page of results. The link read:

  Local man James Gomez goes missing.

  He clicked the link to read the story that was attached to the headline:

  James Gomez, 32, of Cedar Falls, went missing on Saturday. Mr. Gomez, who worked for Juniper County Consolidated School District 212, had spent the day reviewing a vacant building on Pinegrove Road that the District is considering as the site of a new high school.

  Tom stopped reading, minimized the window and searched the folder where he kept his recently published stories on his computer. He found the file for the Gardener girl and double-clicked it, and the story opened up in Word. He scanned through it until he found what he was looking for. The location of the vacant building where Jessica had gone missing--the place people called the Home--was on Pinegrove Road. He closed the file, maximized the previous window and continued to read.

  Mr. Gomez’s last known contact was a phone call placed to his wife at 4:12 PM. Mrs. Patricia Gomez reported that her husband called to tell her that he would soon be heading home. Mr. Gomez never arrived, and at approximately midnight, after hours of fruitless attempts to get in touch with her husband, Mrs. Gomez placed a call to the Cedar Falls Police to report her husband missing.

  The story was only vaguely familiar to Tom. He checked the byline and saw that the story had been written by Greg Watson. Greg was one of those who hadn’t survived Black Friday at the Review.

  He searched for related stories and found one, published three months after the original story. It was a recap of the details of James Gomez’s disappearance, and included a quote from Detective Ryan Sterling of the CFPD saying that the Department was following up on several promising leads, though he failed to elaborate on the nature of those leads. Given the fact that Mr. Gomez was still missing, the leads must not have been so promising after all.

  Tom logged out of the system and set his computer to sleep mode. He checked his watch; it was 12:14, and he was supposed to meet Patricia Sanchez at 12:30. He was going to be a little late. He left his canvas bag behind this time, not expecting a story to come from this, and headed north.

  Traffic was light and he made better time than he thought he would, arriving at Pauly’s only four minutes late. When he walked into the café he stood near the door for a minute, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim interior after the brightness of being outdoors.

  He looked around the place, searching for Patricia Gomez, and found her. She was the only woman in the place not wearing a waitress uniform; she sat alone in a corner booth, eating a salad. She hadn’t seen him come in, and he watched her for a moment. She looked to be around thirty. She had tan skin, dark hair, and a slender, athletic frame. She stared out the window as she ate, watching the traffic passing by on Eighth Street. As she brushed an errant lock of hair away from her face, depositing it behind her ear, Tom couldn’t help but think of Michelle, who had completed that same maneuver countless times when she didn’t know he was watching her.

  The image dissipated before his eyes, and all that he could see was this woman whom he didn’t know sitting at a table, watching the traffic as she ate a salad. Tom walked over to her booth, and as she reached for her cup to take a drink she saw him approach from the corner of her eye. She turned to him and started to stand.

  “Please, keep your seat,” Tom said.

  He slid into the booth so that he was facing her.

  “It might be a little rude to order before the other party has arrived,” Patricia said, gesturing to her salad, “but I was starving. I hope you don’t mind?”

  Her voice rose a bit at the end, making it into a question.

  “Not at all,” Tom said,

  “Are you hungry?” She asked.

  “No. I rarely eat lunch. I just eat a big dinner.”

  He laughed, and Patricia looked at him like she was trying to figure out what the joke was. Tom looked down at her cup.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “Grapefruit juice,” she corrected. “You look just like the photo I found on the paper’s website.”

  “Oh God, that picture was taken, oh, at least seven years ago.”

  “Could have fooled me. You look the same.”

  Tom spread his hands wide on top of the table, a questioning look on his face.

  “So,” he said, “What was it that you wanted to discuss?”

  Her demeanor changed then, becoming more serious. Her coffee-colored eyes clouded over for a moment, and then she reached down beside her, grabbing a copy of the Cedar Falls Review and laying it on the table. Tom slid it over to him and took a look at it. It was a copy of the paper from the day his story ran about the plight of the Gardener family. There were notes scribbled in the margins in blue ink, but he couldn’t read the script.

  “What’s all this?” Tom asked, tapping the blue pen markings with his finger.

  “Oh, that’s nothing; just some thoughts I jotted down. I have terrible handwriting, I know.”

  “You wrote in your e-mail that you think the disappearance of the Gardener girl is somehow linked with your own husband’s disappearance.”

  “Yes. My husband worked for the school district.”

  “Yeah, I looked into it. The day he went missing he had gone to the same vacant building where Jessica Gardener went missing. Something about a new high school.”

  A waitress came up to the table.

  “Can I get you anything, sir?” she asked.

  “No, thank you; nothing right now,” Tom said.

  “Do you need anything?” she asked Patricia.

  “No, I’m good.”

  The waitress left them alone.

  “They district wanted to convert the building into a new high school,” Patricia continued. “Cedar Falls High was dealing with serious overcrowding at the time. In the end they decided to build a brand new building out near Straub Park. I heard their decision had something to do with a problem with sorting out ownership of the Home. It was an orphanage up until nineteen forty-three, when it was shut down by the state. It stood empty so long you would have thought that whoever owned the place would have forfeited their ownership. Is that even possible?”

  “I’m afraid that I don’t know much about property rights. And your husband--what exactly was he doing there that day?”


  “He was supposed to take another guy along with him, somebody who worked for the contractor the city had hired to renovate the building. The guy who worked for the contractor was supposed to look the building over from top to bottom and come up with a preliminary figure on how much the job was going to cost. The guy had some kind of emergency that day and had to reschedule. For some reason James went on alone. Maybe he thought he could come up with his own ballpark figure. Who knows?”

  She shrugged her shoulders to show that she certainly had no idea.

  “The last time I heard from him he was still in the old orphanage,” she continued. “He said that he would be home by quarter-to-five. He also mentioned something about the place giving him the creeps. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I’ve thought a lot about it since that day. And now…”

  She tapped the newspaper on the table. Tom shook his head.

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” he said. “Do you think there’s a killer using that building as a…I don’t know…hunting ground?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “So what are you saying then?”

  “Listen. Shortly after James went missing I started having these nightmares. The nightmares were never exactly the same, but in them I always found myself trapped inside a building. Sometimes I would be stuck in a room and trying to get out. Sometimes I would find myself trying to navigate a maze of hallways, looking for something. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I always had the feeling that there was something that I was supposed to find; I don’t think I ever found it.”

  She coughed, and took a sip of grapefruit juice.

  “Anyway, in one of the dreams I found myself standing outside of the building. And I recognized it. It was the Home, the old orphanage.”

  She looked at him expectantly, as if she had given him all of the pieces of the puzzle and was now waiting for him to put them together and see the whole picture.

  “Okay, so you had nightmares about the place,” Tom said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s when I started doing research on the building. I mean, I’ve lived here in Cedar Falls for twenty years, and I’d passed by that building at least a thousand times without taking much notice of it. It was like background scenery, something that was always there but that you never really thought about. The only reason I even knew that it used to be an orphanage was because James mentioned it to me when he was talking about the building a few days before he disappeared.”

  “You said that you did some research,” Tom said. “What did your research turn up?”

  He was still confused about where she was taking this.

  “The first thing that I learned is that information on the orphanage’s past is surprisingly scant. There are a lot of gaps in available info. Hold on.”

  She reached down again and brought up a purse, which she laid on top of the newspaper. She opened the zipper and took out a small notepad.

  “I wrote some stuff down this morning so I wouldn’t forget anything when I talked to you,” Patricia said.

  She opened the notepad to the first page.

  “The orphanage was built in 1908. It was called the Mercy Home for Orphans until 1916, when it was renamed the Cedar Falls Home for Orphaned Children. The state ordered the orphanage to shut its doors in 1943 amidst allegations of abuse and maltreatment of children in its care.”

  Tom waited for her to go on reading from her notes, but instead she closed the notepad, laid it down on the table and looked at him.

  “And?” he said.

  “And nothing. In two years that’s all I’ve been able to find out about the place.”

  Tom was dumbstruck.

  “Come one, that can’t be all.”

  “Well, there are some small things that don’t seem all that important. There was a small fire at the Home in the spring of 1938, but nobody was hurt and the fire was put out before it could cause much damage. I came across a story from 1933 about Henry Horner paying a visit to the Home. He praised it as a model of what orphanages should aspire to be. Funny, huh?”

  “And who is Henry Horner?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, sorry. In 1933 Henry Horner was the newly minted Governor of Illinois.”

  “How could I not have known that?”

  Patricia smiled at that, a quick flash that was like the sun peeking out for a brief moment on a cloudy day.

  “I don’t get it, though,” Tom said. “If the place was bad enough to get shut down surely the press must have been interested in the story.”

  “There was a war on then; I guess they had more important things to focus their attention on,” Patricia said.

  “I don’t know; it seems funny to me. And anyway, what does all of this have to do with your husband and Jessica Gardner?”

  Patricia sighed. She looked down at her salad, made a face and pushed her plate to aside. She picked up her cup and drank the last bit of grapefruit juice, and set the cup down next to the plate. She sat quietly for a second, and to Tom it looked like she was thinking carefully on how to proceed.

  “Here’s what we know,” she said. “One: the Home has an unpleasant history, and it was shut down some seventy years ago due to allegations of abuse. Two: the last time I heard from my husband, he was inside the building, and he said that the place gave him the creeps. I never heard from or saw him again. Three: the Gardener girl was last seen by her brother crawling through a window into the Home. If I have it right, she told him that she heard someone calling out to her?”

  “That’s right,” Tom said. “But her brother didn’t hear anything.”

  She nodded her head.

  “Four,” she continued. “After James went missing I started having strange dreams--nightmares--in which I was trapped inside the Home. When you talked to them, did anyone in the girl’s family mention having nightmares?”

  “I didn’t get to talk with her mother, but I did talk with her father and her brother, and neither one of them mentioned nightmares.”

  He thought about that other thing that Frankie had told him, the part he had left out of the story he had written in the Review, but decided that she didn’t need to know that.

  “So no nightmares that we know of,” Patricia said. “Still, there are a lot of coincidences.”

  “Coincidences?”

  “You know, a lot of bad stuff that seems to be connected to that place.”

  Tom shook his head doubtfully.

  “I’m not so sure about that. I mean, okay, the place got shut down because they were mistreating kids, but that was seventy years ago. Your husband did pay a visit to the Home on the day he disappeared, but whatever…um…happened could have happened after he left there and headed home. As for the girl, I guess she just had bad luck. For all we know someone was squatting in that building, some pervert, and along comes a little girl that catches his eye. Just bad timing on her part, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Did her brother see this alleged squatting pervert?” Patricia asked.

  Again Tom thought of what the boy had told him, the thing about the shadows.

  “No. Actually he has trouble remembering what he did see. So I guess it’s possible that he did in fact see the guy who snatched his sister, but that he can’t remember it.”

  Patricia thought about this for a minute, and then shook her head.

  “No, that’s not it. I don’t believe that some random perv just happened to be hanging out in that building and snatched the girl.”

  “So what is it that you believe happened?”

  “Do you believe a place can be haunted?”

  Tom sat back in his seat; this was an unexpected turn.

  “Haunted? You mean, like, by ghosts?”

  “Or spirits, or entities--whatever you want to call it. But do you believe that a place can be haunted?’

  “No, I don’t,” he said frankly.

  “Haven’t you ever seen anything, or exper
ienced something, that you couldn’t explain?”

  “There are a lot of things I can’t explain. I can’t explain why people could hurt children. I can’t explain how people could send their fellow human beings into a gas chamber and tell them that it was just a shower. I can’t explain how some asshole could get plastered, go for a drive and get in a car accident, killing a woman he never even met.”

  His voice broke, and he cleared his throat.

  “Yes, there a lot of things that I can’t explain,” he continued. “But that doesn’t prove the existence of ghosts.”

  Patricia knew that she had touched a nerve, so she proceeded with caution.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” she said. “But those aren’t the sort of things I’m talking about. If you look for it, you will find a lot of things that can’t be explained, and that can’t just be put down to human depravity or indifference. There are stories of strange disappearances, and a whole host of other events that defy rational explanation. These things happen, and we say, ‘well, wasn’t that strange?’, and then we move on as if the world we live in still make sense to us. But maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to move on. Maybe we should stop and ask ourselves, ‘wait, what really happened here?’”

  “And you think that what happened here is that ghosts took your husband and the girl?”

  “Don’t be so derisive,” she said; there was a flash of anger in her voice.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that this is all sort of crazy.”

  “They both disappeared inside that building.”

  “I’m not convinced of that. Your husband…excuse me if this is too personal a question, but were you and your husband having any problems around the time he went missing? Where there any fights?”

  “My husband did not leave me,” she said flatly.

  “I’m just saying--”

  “He did not leave me. The cops thought that was a possibility too, at first, but after they talked to me, and to our families, they agreed that he did not leave by his choice. Somebody took him. Something took him.”

  “Do they agree with your haunted building theory?”

  “Fuck you,” she said with some venom.

  She placed her notepad back in her purse.

  “Check, please,” she called to the waitress, who was setting down a platter at another table.

  The waitress put up a finger, a “give me just one moment” gesture.

  “Wait, don’t leave like this,” Tom said. “I’m sorry, but how did you expect me to react to all of this?”

  “Thanks for the help. For the record, I never told the police this, because I knew that they would think I was crazy. I just thought that maybe…I don’t know what I thought. Just forget that any of this happened.”

  The waitress came over and handed Patricia the check, then walked away. Patricia stood, her purse in her hands.

  “You can keep the newspaper,” she said.

  She walked off before Tom had a chance to say anything else. She paid the check at the counter and left the café. Tom watched through the window as she got into a blue Nissan and drove away.

  “Shit,” he said under his breath. “This has been a productive use of my day.”

  He pulled the copy of the Review closer to him and started to read the story he had written about the missing Gardener girl. The things that Frankie Gardener had told him in confidence, the things that had sounded so unbelievable that he had written them off as the fantasies of a boy who was trying to explain something that was unexplainable, kept ringing through his head. Living shadows. The boy said that he saw living shadows.