Chapter 23 The Neighbor

Maggie went to Port Alton first, because that was where the story began, and stories, she had learned, are like rivers -- they are easier to follow from their source. The bus dropped her at the courthouse square on a cold Thursday afternoon, and she stood on the stone steps where a young maintenance man had once stood watching a young typist walk home, and she tried to imagine the town as it had been in 1979, before the mall, before the interstate, when a girl who worked at the courthouse could still walk home through streets that were quiet and safe. The courthouse was still there, the same yellow stone, the same tall windows, the same broken letter e on the typewriter that had typed the police report that had called Angela Voss's death a fall. Maggie stood on the steps until the cold got into her bones, and then she went to find the people who were still alive to remember. Angela Voss's sister still lived in Port Alton, in a narrow house three blocks from the courthouse, on a street whose name had nothing to do with trees. Her name was Etta Voss, and she was in her seventies, with the same dark hair as the photograph, gone gray and pinned flat, and the same steady eyes. She opened the door when Maggie said the words true-crime podcast, which was how Maggie had learned that the words opened some doors and sealed others forever. Etta Voss let her in because she had been waiting forty years for someone, anyone, to ask. She did not cry when she talked about her sister. She had done that already, in private, the way people do when they have been carrying a thing a long time and have learned to keep it packed flat. Angela was not clumsy, Etta said. She had never been clumsy. She grew up in that house, she knew every stair in it, she could have walked them in the dark with a book in her arms, and that is what they want you to believe, that she fell. But I know what I know. Two weeks before she died, she started coming home looking over her shoulder. I asked her what was wrong, and she said there was a man at the courthouse who watched her. Not in a friendly way. A way that made her want to walk the long way home, past the gas station, where there were lights. I told her she was imagining it. I have thought about that every day for forty years. I told her she was imagining it, and a week later she was dead at the bottom of the stairs, and they called it a fall, and her mother wrote letters until the day she died, and no one ever answered. Maggie asked her about the man at the courthouse, and Etta Voss looked at her for a long moment and then said his name the way you say a name you have not said aloud in many years, to make sure you still remember it. Emmett Vane. He worked maintenance. He quit two months after Angela died, right after the funeral, and he was gone before anyone thought to ask him anything. I did not know his name then. I learned it later, the way you learn everything about a case -- too late, and from strangers. The other door Maggie needed to open was older and harder, because the person behind it was the widow of the informant -- the man who had claimed, on a missing page of the Harper file, to have seen Susan Harper alive the day after she was reported missing. The informant's name had been Roy Caldwell, and he had died in 1997, which was also the year the Harper file had been stolen from the evidence locker, and Maggie knew from years around police work that when a witness and the file that proves it vanish in the same year, it is rarely a coincidence. Roy Caldwell's widow still lived in the same house on the edge of the city, a tired green house with a porch that leaned a little, and her name was Lenore, and she let Maggie in the way a person lets in weather, because there is no point refusing it. Roy saw her, Lenore said. Saw Susan Harper with his own eyes, the morning after the paper said she was missing, standing at the bus stop at the end of Sycamore Street with her coat on and a bag in her hand. He told the detective. He told the detective twice, and the detective wrote it down, and nothing ever came of it, and Roy carried that for the rest of his life. Then in the spring of ninety-seven he started getting quiet. I mean quieter than quiet. I would find him standing at the kitchen window at night, looking out at nothing. I asked him what was wrong, and he said -- she stopped, and pressed her lips together, and when she spoke again her voice was smaller. He said the man was back. He said the man knew. He said, I saw him, Lenore. He knows I saw him. Six weeks later Roy had a heart attack in his own kitchen, and the doctor said it happened fast, and I have never told anyone this, but Roy had a heart that was fine. His father lived to ninety. I am telling you because you are the first person who has ever come here asking about the man, and I have been waiting forty years for someone to ask. Maggie sat with Lenore Caldwell until the light failed, and then she walked back through the quiet streets of the city she had known for seven years, and she thought about the three women and the two men who had carried them -- a dead informant with a fine heart, a dead detective who had kept the file for twenty-two years, a sister who had told her sister she was imagining it. She thought about what it meant that the man had been watching Susan Harper's street from two doors down for three years before he killed her. He had not been watching to decide. He had been watching because watching was the point. He was a man who needed to be seen, and feared, and finally, remembered. The bus to Harlow left at dawn, and Maggie slept badly on it, and when she woke the land had flattened out around her and the light had the particular gray of a town that keeps its secrets close. Merrick Books sat on the main street of Harlow, Wisconsin, between a hardware store and a café, with a green awning and a window full of used paperbacks arranged in careful stacks. Maggie stood across the street for a long time, watching the door, the way the man in the photograph had once stood watching the door of the Harper residence. The bell over the door rang twice in the time she stood there, letting a woman with a canvas bag in and out. Behind the counter, through the glass, a man moved with the unhurried patience of someone who has spent decades doing the same work in the same room. Maggie crossed the street. She pushed the door open, and the bell rang, and the man looked up from the book he was reading, and she saw his face in the light -- the jaw, the shoulders, the way of standing, the same man from the photograph, forty years older and settled into himself the way houses settle into their foundations. He smiled. It was a friendly smile, warm and open. Welcome, he said. Let me know if you need anything. Maggie smiled back at him, the way she had smiled at killers before, the way she had learned to smile at men who think they are invisible. I am looking for someone, she said. His name is Emmett Vane. The smile did not leave the man's face, but something behind it went very still, like water going quiet before a storm, and the bell over the door rang again as it closed behind her, and the two of them stood alone in the bookshop with forty years of paper between them.