MARTIN Chapter 34 | 12:00 PM, December 2, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
CLEANING OUT THE OLD DETECTIVE’S office had taken the entire morning. An hour into the project, Martin was furious, cursing the detective for leaving so much shit behind and the captain for making him clean it up. He was already behind on the case, and several hours of his twenty-four-hour time were spent in a dark, musty room, cleaning up another man’s trash. He couldn’t afford to lose a morning to a housekeeping assignment, but he didn’t have a choice.
While his body stretched and worked, Martin surrendered to the task, and his brain slid into a resting state. With each box identified and moved, his thoughts began to slide into place, too. He trusted Eddie more than he wanted to, he realized, especially after convincing him to remain at the precinct of his own free will proved far easier than the task of readying the old office for Eddie’s stay.
Martin left Eddie, swallowed the remainder of his lunch—a Pop-Tart from the vending machine—and walked into incident room two. He found Captain staring at an empty whiteboard. Eddie’s jacket had been resealed in its plastic bag and now sat neatly on the far side of the rectangular table. Manila envelopes were stacked to the left of it. Captain had another one in his hands.
“Did Eddie give you any trouble?” Captain asked.
“I think the trouble would’ve been asking him to leave. He said he isn’t going anywhere until we find out what happened to Hazel. I told him we’d be working in here and to knock loud on his door if he needs anything.” Martin nodded at the files, spying the names labeled on the tabs. “Let’s get started. I want to go interview Ama as soon as I get a feel for how big this might be.”
“Now hold on a second. I’ll walk you through what I remember from these old cases, but there’s something you need to keep in the front of that mind of yours: sometimes people die and didn’t nobody do anything to them. Accidents happen. So does bad luck. A kid tries to run away or gets lost in thirty square miles of untouched terrain like Tarson Woods, and those odds go up a lot. Then there’s Cold River. It’s a monster when it’s full. I remember one boy fell in my first year with the department. Looked like he’d tried to cross a fallen tree and slipped. We took his backpack to his mother. She didn’t even get off the couch. Barely looked at us. Just stared at the TV set, laying there in a tank top and underwear. There was a little girl toddling around the living room, kind of whimpering, and it’s like she didn’t even hear her.
“The mother passed not long after. Was diagnosed with leukemia and died within a week, daughter wound up in the system. Maybe that’s why, when people go missing, others don’t look too hard. We just hope they made it where they were trying to go.”
Martin stared at nothing, his mind adrift, his memory traveling on the captain’s words, racing thousands of miles northwest to the small, frigid Alaskan village he’d grown up in, to the kids who walked away from that cluster of squat, cold homes, and the mix of emotions it stirred inside his fifteen-year-old chest when a week passed without them being found. They got out… he would think to himself, and in his slumber he would dream of hot, noisy, fast, crowded places.
“Tarson Woods wasn’t always a state park,” Captain continued. “About thirty years ago it was the site of a nuclear plant. Owned by an outfit called Evansbrite. Most people in Tarson and the surrounding areas worked there somehow—janitors, receptionists, assistants, secretaries, mechanics. They had to get security clearances, but those came with a little bonus. Made people in this town feel like we were a part of something, that good things were coming—growth, money, the future. Families could buy cars they never would’ve dreamed of before. A man could take his family out to dinner on a Friday night—and there was actually a place or two to go.”
“What happened?”
“The plant started having trouble. There was a small explosion, contained in one section, and they said it was taken care of. Then there was a bigger one, which caused a major mechanical failure, and a few people died. People started getting bad sick. Women lost pregnancies, or babies were born not… right…” He cleared his throat. “People weren’t just angry anymore. The mayor called for a town hall meeting with the plant higher-ups. They didn’t show. When employees went to work the next day, the gates were locked, razor wire curled all around the fences, and there was a letter on the main gate telling employees that Evansbrite had gone under and would be sending them all a two months’ severance in the mail.”
“Did anyone ever pursue Evansbrite for damages?” Martin asked.
“Plenty of people have tried, but it’s like the company was everywhere and nowhere. They had friends in DC—lobbyists, congressmen—but no brick-and-mortar address. Ownership had changed a dozen times and was split into so many fractions and offshoots you couldn’t tell where it all started. The buck was passed from hand to hand to hand. It was always ‘under investigation’ or ‘in review.’ Honestly, I think it still is. Companies with money in pursuit of even more money take advantage of towns like this. Desperate, hungry, hardworking towns. You look at us, and you think we’re less than. I can see it in your eyes.” His gaze fell to the manila folder in his hands.
“I don’t think you or anyone else here is less than,” Martin said quietly. “I think your resources are less than. Your infrastructure. I know what that does to a town. To its people. The morale. In many ways, the simple life is a hell of a lot more complicated.”
Captain looked up, a wisp of a smile lifting one corner of his mouth. “That’s a good way to put it,” he said. “Suffice it to say, Tarson Woods has become as close to a ghost story as this town has. I don’t have to tell you what kind of draw that can have on a bored teenager.”
“But it’s not just bored teenagers disappearing,” Martin pressed, refocusing the conversation. In his opinion, a pattern there would actually point more to the captain’s theory, but he kept the thought to himself.
“They range from fifteen to seventy years old, male and female, low risk, high risk. Less than half of them were local at the time they vanished. One had never been here before in his life that we could find.” Captain began plucking snapshots from each folder and taped them in a line across the top of the whiteboard.
“First vic, Timmy Roberts, 1989. That’s the boy I just told you about, who looks to have drowned. Second, homeless girl, 1992. People knew her for playing the fiddle on street corners and shoplifting cosmetics and snack food from the general store. She called herself Sabrina but was never formally IDed. She was last seen leaving the square and was known to frequent the woods. Michael Walton was reported missing a couple months later. In 2004, Thomas Eads, a bartender from Chattanooga. Told his girlfriend he was going on a run in a state park, and his credit card puts him at the Shell station at our exit off State Route 411. He’s got a record, and we don’t have proof he was in Tarson long, but the girlfriend never heard from him again, and that gas station charge was the last activity on his card.”
Captain paused for a moment, staring at the next picture, an old man. “Bill Blassing, 2005,” he started again. “He’s a local. Born and raised here. Missing for a little more than a year. We searched all over for that man. We found his car in the parking lot at the cemetery where his wife was buried, and there was a note inside saying he was leaving his future up to fate. Then we found out he had terminal cancer and had kept the diagnosis secret, and that seemed to make enough sense at the time. Maybe he’d wanted to go off the grid or travel with what time he had left. It was something he would’ve done.”