Catch up on the previous chapters here
Sometimes fate smiled on you, even if you didn’t believe in fate. Ben was driving slowly along Hillier’s street, checking house numbers, when he noticed someone in front of the right number—Hillier’s number—working on the flower beds.
An older gentleman type of someone. The man didn’t have his back entirely to the road, although he could have, and he straightened up and shaded his eyes with one gloved hand. It wasn’t the best defensive position—Hillier still knelt on some sort of pad—and he wasn’t going to do anything too rash out here, but he stopped the van all the same, parking it by the curb across from the amateur gardener, and got out with a rueful grin. “Hey, sorry to bother you, but maybe you can help?” he asked, tucking the keys in his jeans pocket as he pulled the small spiral-bound notebook from his breast pocket.
Hillier got up nimbly enough. He had steel-gray hair almost the same color as his eyes, and those were surrounded by wrinkles that said he divided his time between squinting skeptically—which he was doing now—and smiling. “Are you lost?” he asked, not offering a hand, but maybe because it was both gloved and dirty.
Ben nodded. “My phone charger broke. I’m looking for …” He paged through the little notebook, apparently focused on his handwriting and not anything else around them. His peripheral vision showed a quiet street with no one else about. “The 5000 block of Blue Spruce.”
That made Hillier chuckle. “Well, you’re not too far off, son, but that’s as the crow flies. Here, come on in. I don’t think we’ve got a map, but I can print you something.”
He grinned because the other option was letting his mouth drop open in complete shock at how damn easy it was. “Thank you. That would be great. I’m not late yet, but …”
“To be early is to be on time,” Hillier agreed easily, stripping his gloves off and preceding Ben up the porch steps. The door wasn’t locked, and Hillier held the screen door open for him to take before opening the inside door. Hillier stepped to one side and slipped out of his gardening shoes, which weren’t quite crocs but were pretty darn close. “She’ll yell at me if she comes home and there’s a trail,” he explained offhandedly.
So his wife wasn’t home. “Do you want me to take mine off? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Nah. Unless you’re coming from a crime scene,” he added with a smile. “That’s your main thing, right?”
“That’s part of it,” Ben agreed, and this was an argument against using the van and the shirt. “But I’m on my way to deep-clean a house between owners, so … dust, maybe, but nothing extreme.”
Hillier chuckled like that was actually clever. “Come on, this way.”
And—bingo—it was down a hall that held family photos. Old family photos along with recent ones, so maybe … if Ben was quick … There were a lot of people in the recent family photo, so he couldn’t match things up perfectly, but the oldest boy in the older photos, when the children were all still children, had dark hair. It wasn’t much, but it was more than he had before.
“Blue Spruce?” Hillier asked, sitting down in front of an old desktop computer and shaking the mouse to wake it up.
“Yeah, 5000 something. Uh …” Seriously, Hillier had his back to Ben and everything. He pulled out the notebook again, quickly scanning the room instead of the page and absently reading off the number. There was an odd painting on the wall. The sort of thing people put over safes, as though it actually made things less conspicuous.
“All right, let’s see …” Hillier was the kind of man who leaned closer—maybe he needed glasses—and pecked away with both index fingers.
Ben looked around the office more slowly, and this time it was easier. There was a studio shot of a family, parents—yes, that could be a younger Hillier—and five kids, and next to it a likely professional photo of a lot more people spread out on a rolling green lawn. Keeping Hillier in his peripheral vision, he tried counting up the adults. The young adults, in the proper generation, and …
Eight. Enough for four children and their spouses. Or, fine, three married children with spouses and two unmarried, but … with the dispersal of the kids …
“Did you go to school with any of them?” Hillier asked, making Ben jump.
Of course he’d be sheepish if he got caught staring at a stranger’s family. Ben pointed to one of the young men. “He looks familiar.”
“Darrin? He’s my son-in-law. He teaches up at the high school. Do you clean there?”
He shook his head: the honest answer. “They have their own staff. Looks like a nice family.”
“Yeah.” Hillier glanced back, and was there something wistful in his smile? The sort of thing that meant five kids had indeed become four? “You got a family?”
“No. No, I …” Ben waited out a calculated pause. “We were planning on it, but … I lost her.”
“I’m sorry.” And damned if he didn’t look it, too. “That’s rough, at your age.”
Ben tamped down a snort. “I’d guess it’s rough at any age.”
“True, but …” Hillier carefully moved the mouse and deliberately clicked on the print icon. “There we go. Directions to Blue Spruce.”
He half-expected to see a dot matrix printer, but it was a sleek model much newer than the laptop. “Where’s your oldest son these days?” He hadn’t meant to ask it so bluntly, but apparently he couldn’t pass up the chance.
“My …?” Hillier turned in the chair—old, but on wheels—and looked up at him. It was not a position of power.
He stepped closer. “Your oldest son. And his girlfriend. I assume they’re still together?” Another step. “They disappeared at the same time.”
“They …?” But his eyes darted to the photos again.
Ben grabbed the front of Hillier’s t-shirt, twisting the fabric tight and forcing him to stay against the back of the chair so he couldn’t get up. “Where are they?”
Even breathing hard and forced to lean at this angle, Hillier pressed his mouth into a thin line as his eyes flashed. “I’m not telling you.”
That very statement admitted there was indeed something to tell. “Oh, I think you will.”
This was how it went: Ben wanted something, and he ended up getting it. The part in between was … inconsequential. The details of what happened certainly didn’t matter, and maybe it was better for him this way. If he didn’t remember what he did, then perhaps he didn’t do it, after all. If he’d actually done anything.
The important thing was that Hillier’s wife hadn’t come home. That would have been unfortunate. He would have dealt with it in the same nebulous way he dealt with all threats, but things were already complicated enough.
When he got back to his van, he stripped off Hillier’s gardening gloves—now bloodied as well as dirty, and his knuckles were raw and swollen, but at least he hadn’t transferred his own DNA to Hillier—and stuck them in a plastic shopping bag he pulled from the collection he kept in the van. It wasn’t sealable, like a Ziploc, but it would do for now. Then he started the van, checked his mirrors, and pulled away from the curb, carefully following all the traffic laws.
The printed map told Ben to turn left at the stop sign, but he turned right, instead. He was going back home, and packing up, and then heading out as soon as possible. Somewhere in the back of his mind he must have planned for this—or maybe the part of him that took over when the rest of him fogged out planned for it—because there wasn’t much he absolutely had to take from his house. He could even leave the laptop and all his notes, because he’d already burned the things that couldn’t be found. He’d grab the cash, his go-bag, and pause just long enough to change the license plate on his car. A car that looked like so many other cars on the road.
Ben wouldn’t shave at home and leave that evidence, but there was equipment in the go-bag. There wasn’t a list of the kinds of hotels he’d be seeking, but he had some burner phones, and his maps, and his wits.
And an address. He hadn’t memorized it yet, but it gave him a direction to start driving.
Iowa. Ben was going to Iowa.
Interview, Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson with Officer Melissa Jacobson, May 26, 2019
MJ: You can’t tell us anyone else Heidi hung out with?
LD: I can’t tell you anyone else she had over to the apartment, and she rarely left it for anything but class. Check with her advisor, and her classmates, and just … no, she wasn’t a social person. Her study group came over, but she never had, like … there weren’t just friends. Heidi didn’t … she didn’t act like she wanted friends.
MJ: What do you mean by that?
LD: I mean she only invited people over with a specific purpose. They were there to study, or tutor her, and they kind of made a joke of it. How she’d tell them to stop wasting time and just buckle down. That cross-stitch sampler in the living room? Danielle made it for her. As a joke, but I don’t think Heidi knew it was a joke.
MJ: Why did people keep coming over if Heidi was just a joke?
LD: Heidi wasn’t a joke—the sampler was a joke. Heidi knew how to run study groups. She would keep everyone on task, and God, between the senioritis and the classes, we really needed someone to keep us on task. She’d organize it, including snacks, and you actually learned stuff. It made more sense after. But she never just hung out with anyone, except the weekends she spent with her friends from back home. The names I’ve already given you.
MJ: We checked with those people, and none of them were planning on picking Heidi up on Friday night.
LD: But … that doesn’t make any sense.
MJ: None of them had seen her at all this year.
LD: But … no. You can go back through my texts. She didn’t spend a ton of weekends with them, but there were times … she’d be gone, and that’s where she told me she was. With one of them, or all of them, or …
MJ: We have looked at your texts. We’ve also done what we can to track Heidi’s phone. She didn’t go home those weekends.
LD: What?
MJ: Her phone didn’t ping the towers by your apartment, but she stayed in Kalamazoo.
LD: She …?
MJ: So, again: is there anyone else you can think of? Any names she mentioned?
LD: Can …? No, I … you’re saying she lied to me?
MJ: It certainly looks that way.
LD: But … she … fuck.
MJ: What were you going to say?
LD: I was going to say that’s not like her, but … what the fuck do I know? She was a freaking martinet about chores and checked off every single one every single week, and she’s the one who insisted we always tell each other where we were and who we were with and when we were going to be back, and that doesn’t make any freaking sense.
MJ: You weren’t friends before you moved in?
LD: No, I already told you that part. She was supposed to room with Sierra, but Sierra decided to stay in Belize.
MJ: And who were you going to room with?
LD: I was going to be on campus. Maybe Ashley, but then Heidi asked if I’d take the other bedroom because she needed someone, so … I said yeah, sure. I thought … I thought I was helping her out.
MJ: So she knew you well enough to ask you.
LD: I think she was working her way down the list of classics majors, just trying to find someone to float the other half of the rent.
MJ: And you were just the first one to say yes?
LD: I guess so. Or else she wouldn’t have needed to ask me.
This is the end of Part Two.
Chapter Twenty-One – coming January 21
Rebecca Frost 
One thought on “Pending – Chapter Twenty”