Missing Piece, page 4
‘You said he didn’t talk about it much with you and your sisters,’ Cass asked, ‘but did he ever give you, or did you ever get, any sense of how he felt about Alex’s visit to the shop that day? Whether he had a conversation with him, whether he remembered anything in particular that in hindsight might have seemed unusual or telling?’
Lisa stared at the pen in her hands and considered that. ‘I guess he’d gone over it so many times with the police it became imprinted in his mind. Any other day, he’d have shot the breeze with dozens of customers, taken deliveries, stocked up, cashed up, all the rest of it, and wouldn’t have remembered much about his interactions with one particular kid. But on this occasion he was forced to remember it, forced to re-examine it repeatedly, until it developed into this huge thing that was right up there in his memory banks with things like his children’s weddings, my grandparents’ passing.’
She blew out a sigh, either for her father’s sake or because this event, which was otherwise unconnected to them, had held such a bearing on their lives.
‘I think if he could have found something in that last encounter he had with Alex, something that would have made a difference and helped them find him, he would have shouted it from the rooftops. What bothered him was that he couldn’t. School was out for the summer and Dad had seen maybe half a dozen or more kids before Alex, as well as all the regulars, so he wouldn’t have paid him too much attention. I mean, Dad was wonderful with the kids, especially the ones he liked, the ones who knew their manners and didn’t give him grief or try to pocket anything without paying. And he liked Alex, so he’d have been decent to him. He said once that he had teased the boy about the pack of football cards he’d bought, hoped they’d be the ones he wanted. But that was about it. Alex went on his way and Dad went on to the next customer.’ She shook her head, flipped her hands on the table, dropping the pen onto a stack of paperwork. ‘Knowing Dad, he spent the next twenty-four years of his life wishing he’d grabbed the kid by the shoulders and held onto him with everything he had. Or at the very least, locked up the store and walked him back home to his mother. It would have taken him less than half an hour and saved everyone a lifetime of hurt and grief.’
‘It must have been tough for your dad,’ Cass said, thinking how Jackie O’Sullivan sounded a lot like her own father. It would be just like Robert Fletcher to be laden with guilt for something that wasn’t his fault. He had been. On the day of the crash, he was supposed to pick her up from a friend’s house where she’d stayed overnight, but was called to an emergency staff meeting at the college. Brett drove across town to get her instead. When she opened her eyes in the hospital bed, her dad was the first person she saw. He didn’t return to work for another three months.
Across the desk from them, Lisa’s smile was sad. ‘When he passed, we found two boxes filled with newspaper clippings, articles of interviews with Alex’s family, friends, just all this memorabilia he’d kept, as if it was his own son who had gone missing. But that was Dad for you. Everyone always said it. The joke went that for a short guy, he was ninety percent heart and ten percent gullible. He was a terrible businessman. He gave too much away. By the time he’d paid the rent and dished out the household money to keep us fed and clothed, he hardly had a dime left to put in his own back pocket. When I took the place over, turned out he was barely breaking even half the time.’
‘Doing all right now though?’ Hoss asked, with a nod toward the store outside the cubicle.
‘Thank goodness one of us had some business sense,’ Lisa answered with a smile, following Hoss’s gaze to the window. ‘Course, he’ll be spinning in his grave with what I’ve done with the place.’
‘I’m sure he’d understand why.’
‘I like to think so,’ she said, turning back. ‘Oh, hey, have you spoken to Mr Tilman yet?’
‘Tilman…’ Cass scrolled through the names listed on her phone. ‘School teacher, right?’
‘At Greenrose Elementary, right. In his seventies now and retired, but he taught most of us of a certain age around here, Alex included. He used to come into the store regularly when Dad was alive, but he’s something of a recluse these days, so I don’t know how willing he’d be to talk or even let you in over the doorstep. But the story goes he was pretty torn up about what happened back then.’
‘Why a recluse?’ Cass asked, tapping Lisa’s description of the man into her phone beside his name. She looked up when the answer was a moment coming.
‘Well, I guess if you don’t know, you’ll hear about it one way or another.’ Lisa leaned her forearms on the desk and lowered her voice. ‘His wasn’t exactly a planned retirement. About ten years ago, while he was still working, a kid’s parents took him to court. Claimed Tilman had been touching their son inappropriately. It was a long and messy trial that ended with him being cleared of any wrongdoing. But those kinds of things, they stick, you know? He was shunned by just about everyone. Going back to work after that wasn’t ever going to be an option. Barely leaves his house now.’
‘And what do you think?’ Hoss asked, sitting upright in his seat. ‘You implied he taught you too. What did you think of him?’
Lisa nudged her glasses up her nose and puffed a sigh. ‘Ten million dollar question. As a teacher? A lovely guy. Kind, caring, patient. Affectionate, yes. A toucher, a hugger, yes. But in my day, physical contact between a child and teacher wasn’t against school policy and wasn’t unusual. So did he ever creep me out? Did I feel unsafe around him? No. He was just a teacher, same as any other, an adult like any other. But would I have been too young to know any different? It’s possible. I was only seven when I was in his class. Not an age when I would have thought of adults as anything other than those to be trusted.’
‘What do you make of the allegations this child’s parents made about him?’ Cass asked, and watched Lisa pin her lips together to consider this before she answered.
‘I think we live in a different world now. I’m not saying they lied, or that it was some kind of vendetta. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But Tilman was old-school. Excuse the pun. An affectionate guy. Define touching inappropriately. I mean, these days they can’t even help a child buckle up his pants when he’s struggling, so where does that leave someone like Tilman? He’s either a poor old guy whose compassion for kids was cruelly misconstrued as something more perverse, or he’s hidden a secret all these years that betrayed every single one of us who passed through his classroom door.’
Chapter 5
Tears spilled down Graham Tilman’s cheeks and dropped to his tan corduroy pants. Cass pulled a tissue from the box on the cabinet beside where she sat in an armchair and passed it over to him on the sofa. He thanked her politely and dabbed at his eyes and nose.
He had been reluctant to let them in at first, just as Lisa had suggested he might be. But once he’d seen their PI cards, and they’d clarified what they had come to talk with him about, his mood had quickly changed and he’d opened the door to usher them inside. Now, as they sat in his living room at the front of the house, the blinds all but closed in the middle of the day and the air alive with dust motes, Lisa’s description that her former teacher had been torn up by Alex’s disappearance was proving accurate. Only moments into their conversation and that old torment was once again brought to the surface.
Tilman had spread the contents of a battered shoe box over the narrow coffee table before them, his fingers landing tenderly on the papers as if simply by touching them he might cause irreparable damage if he wasn’t careful. For a man in his early seventies, Cass noted his hands were unusually smooth and fingernails neatly trimmed. Though gray and receding, his hair was close cut and eyebrows thick and dark. He had the soft features and gentle voice of someone’s grandad, but there were no photographs on the walls or on the mantelpiece, and nothing to suggest there was anyone else living in the single-story modest home just three blocks away from the store. Aside from the furniture and a flatscreen TV fixed to the wall above an electric fireplace, the only other things in the room were two floor-to-ceiling bookcases, rows of books and stacks of magazines doubled up on each shelf, every space filled.
‘This one,’ Tilman said, with a brief laugh that was part sob. He tapped his finger at the large piece of paper he’d unfolded, on which all Cass could see from the armchair were dabs of colored paint. ‘This one was always my favorite.’
Hoss, who was sitting beside him on the sofa, leaned over to take a closer look. ‘How old would he have been when he did this?’
‘Oh, I’d say about seven.’ He slipped on a pair of glasses that he took from his shirt pocket and turned a corner of the sheet. ‘Yes. Grade one. So he would have been six or seven. Can you see what it is? Greenrose Park in the fall. Nothing extraordinary about that, you might think, but it’s the colors he uses. You see? Not just reds and browns and oranges like all the other kids would, but he’s mixed them, so that we have degrees of brass and russet, rich copper, and it gives a much more authentic impression. Six or seven years old, that’s all. He had an artistic eye, no doubt about it. Not only that, he was marvelous across the board. Math. English. His composition was outstanding; he was grades above the other children. Just look at some of these. A’s, B’s. I don’t think I ever gave him a C in the whole three years I taught him.’
‘Three years?’ Cass asked. ‘Was that normal to be with the same class for that long?’
Tilman pocketed the glasses, softly sighing as he stared at the boy’s work in front of him. Cass sensed he’d spent many hours over the years doing the exact same thing, and that in some way he garnered some satisfaction in sharing with them what he usually mulled over alone.
‘There was a re-ordering of staff one year, meaning that I moved up from kindergarten to first grade at the same time the children did. So that accounted for one extra year. But then…’ He paused, a pained expression tensing his features, but for now the tissue remained balled in his palm. ‘Alex began going through a difficult period, toward the end of first grade.’
‘Difficult?’ Cass asked. ‘In what way?’
‘Perhaps difficult is not the right word. There was a change in him. He had always been a stable and contented boy, but now and again he was acting out of character. Answering back in class, digging his heels in, mood swings, that kind of thing. You get that from some children, and even children as well-behaved as Alex test the boundaries once they hit middle school, but this was too soon for that. Plus, it didn’t feel like that. It wasn’t that he was growing a mind of his own and wanted to try it out.’ Tilman paused, tapped his fist softly against his lips until he found the right words. ‘He was angry. Yes, that’s what he was. And I didn’t like it. This sudden change didn’t sit well with me at all. So I talked it over with the principal. Of course, by then I’d been his teacher for the previous two years. I knew him well and I felt he knew and trusted me too. So between the principal, Alex’s mom and me, we agreed it would be best for Alex to remain in my class, but that I would ensure he received the appropriate work for second grade.’
‘And how did Alex feel about that, Mr Tilman?’ Hoss asked.
The man shrugged. ‘He didn’t complain about it.’
‘He wasn’t concerned about being kept behind? Not staying with his friends?’
‘We made sure he knew this was not about holding him back. We were very honest with him about that. We said we felt he needed the stability of remaining under my tutelage, that it was in his best interests, and he didn’t argue with that. He wasn’t the only child I ever made such concessions for. Teaching is not as straightforward as everyone thinks. At least not to me, it’s not. For me, it’s never been about ship them in and ship them out again. It’s about what’s best for the child, always. And in this case that was no different. As for his friends, Alex was a quiet boy who came from a wealthy family, and perhaps it was because of this wealth that he kept his head down most of the time; but I like to think it was more part of his nature that he only had a small group of trusted friends. He kept these friends even when he remained in my class. He still saw them at breaks and lunchtime, nothing changed there.’
Cass edged forward in the armchair. ‘Mr Tilman, why do you think Alex was angry?’
He inhaled deeply before he answered. ‘Hard to say now with any certainty.’
‘But you had your suspicions?’
‘I had my instincts,’ he said, turning gentle brown eyes her way. ‘A lot is said about the teenage years. Particularly boys, how sensitive they become, to their environment, the people around them, how the wrong thing at the wrong time can alter the path of their whole lives. But in my experience, it begins long before then. Now, I’m not suggesting Alex would have taken the wrong path; he was a good boy at heart with a strong moral compass and a lot of support, many people who loved him. His mother doted on him. Still dotes on him, of course. An incredible woman. Truly incredible woman who’s suffered far too much…’ He trailed off, eyes glazing with tears that he once again brushed away with the tissue.
‘Then, what was it, Mr Tilman?’ Cass asked, drawing him back to his point. ‘If Alex had a comfortable home and good friends and a bright future ahead of him, what could have caused the change in him at such a young age?’
‘Eight years old, God love him,’ Tilman said, lowering the hand with the tissue to his lap. ‘For a while I’d considered whether he was being bullied. That his mother and grandfather had money was no secret, and he was, dare I say, a pampered kid, in the sense he had more than his peers could afford – the newest bike, biggest TV, latest toy fad, best vacations. He would have been a prime target. But I observed him carefully, watched how others were around him, and it just didn’t quite fit. There were none of the usual signs. No absences or tardiness getting to class, no reluctance to leave at the end of the day, no shyness or withdrawing into himself, no bruises or unexplained marks on him. But then it suddenly came to me one time in class. Clear as anything. It wasn’t what he had that was the problem. It was what he didn’t have.’
He raised his eyes to Cass, and in them she saw the conflict between triumph that he had persisted and got to the root of the problem, and overwhelming sadness at what that missing piece was.
‘His father,’ she guessed, and saw immediately in the thin line drawing across Tilman’s lips that she was right.
‘A boy needs his dad,’ he said, with a strangled voice that he coughed to clear. ‘It was going to happen sooner or later. A mother’s love will only go so far. He had his grandad, of course, and he was a more than suitable replacement. But Eugene Meredith was no stay-at-home dad. He was a fourteen-hour-a-day businessman. It was his whole life, always had been, just ask Amelia. Besides, he wasn’t the one responsible for giving life to Alex – it wasn’t his attention the poor kid craved.’
‘And so you think Alex was angry that his dad wasn’t around?’ Hoss asked.
‘He must have been. No, he was, he really was. I saw it right there in his face. It was the Friday before Father’s Day, soon after Alex had turned seven and a couple of days before we finished for the summer. We were making gifts in class, same as we always did for special occasions. I can’t remember precisely what, it would have been a card or a poem or whatever, I forget now. I made sure to include not just fathers, but grandfathers, stepfathers, uncles, whoever the kids wanted to reach out to on that day. We had plenty of other children without a dad, for one reason or another. Alex would have been making something for his grandad, same as he always did, and the class slipped into a discussion, some kids sharing anecdotes of their fathers – good things they’d done, or habits that drove them crazy, that kind of thing, all light-hearted of course. And I saw it in Alex’s face, plain as day. Maybe it was because I’d been watching him closely and so I was more open to recognizing it.’
He paused, staring at the painting on the table as if he was seeing once again the boy back there in the classroom.
‘Hurt. I saw hurt. No other way to describe it. I can still see it now, in the way he watched his friends as they conversed about their fathers. It was heartbreaking to watch. Truly heartbreaking. Like he was on the outside of a club he couldn’t join.’ Tilman sucked in a sharp inhale and brought his gaze up. ‘That’s when I went to the principal and said I wanted to keep him with me.’
Out of the corner of her eye Cass saw Hoss shoot her a glance, but refrained from meeting it. ‘Did you ever talk to Alex about his father, or did he ever bring the topic up?’
‘He never raised the subject, no. I tried once or twice, but he shut down and I didn’t want to push him. Besides…’ He dropped his gaze to where he unfolded and re-folded the tissue between his hands. ‘I thought I had plenty of time. I hoped, I guess, that he would open up when he was ready. Sometimes these conversations are better occurring naturally, rather than forcing it out of them.’
‘And do you think you had Alex’s trust?’ Hoss asked, at which Tilman’s body jumped as if he’d been prodded in the side.
‘I like to think so,’ he said, voice rising to challenge where Hoss intended to go with that. But Hoss only nodded and Cass drew the teacher’s attention with another question.
‘When was the last time you saw Alex, Mr Tilman?’
His tongue ran over his lips. He looked at the boy’s painting on the table instead of her. ‘I actually saw him about three weeks before he…’ He coughed softly and started again. ‘I had a dog back then, an American Eskimo. Beautiful little thing she was, and sharp as anything. Tilly, she was called. Not my idea, the children’s. When I got her as a puppy, I took her into class and let them choose the name. The kids loved her. She was all white fluff and full of bounce, you know? I used to walk her down past Jackie’s and over to the fields where the retail park is now. I would do that twice a day when there was no school.’
