The Hiding Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

you think this guy might be getting ready to leave town? Not paying rent, not hanging around. Do you think he heard someone was asking about him?” Kevin asked, his voice low. “Maybe the people you asked at his old job told him.”
    “What was I supposed to do? Ignore it?”
    “No, no.” He held out his hands. He was placating her, which always made her even more angry. “I’m just saying, this guy—if he really knows something—doesn’t want to spill it yet.”
    “He showed up at our door.”
    Kevin raised an index finger. “In the middle of the night.”
    “He said he’d come back.”
    “But he hasn’t yet. He could be in trouble with the police. He could be scared. Think about how you would feel if someone came around asking questions about you. You’d freak out. He doesn’t know who you are, does he? Or what you want.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “Ash, come on—”
    “You heard me. Fuck you.”
    The old woman at the front of the bus turned, her lips pursed. Ashleigh swallowed hard, felt her anger rise.
    “Don’t be like that,” Kevin said. “But if we’d told the police or an adult, maybe they could have…I don’t know…handled it better.”
    Ashleigh pulled the bell. “This is your stop,” she said.
    The motion of the bus stopping rocked Ashleigh in her seat. She heard Kevin stand up and take two steps up the aisle.
    “Hey,” he said. “You coming?”
    “You know where I’m going,” she said.
    “You want me to come with you?” he asked.
    She didn’t respond. Kevin was keeping the bus waiting, but he said one more thing.
    “I’m just worried that this guy might be trouble. What if he’s dangerous? What if he wants to hurt you or your mom for some reason?”
    Ashleigh heard him. His words registered within her, but she didn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing any response. She stared straight ahead and froze him out until he turned and pushed through the side door of the bus, leaving her alone.
    Ashleigh knew where her uncle had died. She’d been there many times. The Norbert Rovin Memorial Park sat two blocks north of their house, the house Ashleigh shared with her mother and grandfather, the house her mother had grown up in. Adjacent to the park stood a thick cluster of trees—several acres’ worth. The land for the park had been set aside not long after the town’s founding, and over the years houses and neighborhoods sprung up around its border. Kevin lived with his family on the opposite side of the park from Ashleigh, which made it a convenient meeting place.
    Ashleigh walked the two blocks from the bus stop to the park. She knew—seemingly since her birth—that her uncle had been murdered in the woods near their house. Over the years, a process of eavesdropping on adult conversations combined with her own investigations at the local library had allowed Ashleigh to know the facts of her uncle’s death as well as anybody else. Her uncle Justin had gone to the park with her mom ona hot summer day. Eyewitnesses—both adults and children—remembered seeing a young black man in the park talking to some of the children, including Justin. When her uncle disappeared, the police made a sketch of the man and searched for him. Volunteers and professionals combed the woods near the park, then expanded their search to remote areas around town—ponds and culverts and abandoned houses. While the search for the boy—or his body—went on, police began to learn more about the man in the sketch. A woman came forward four weeks after the disappearance and told police her nephew—seventeen-year-old Dante Rogers—liked to go to the park Justin had disappeared from. She also said he had been acting strangely since the boy’s disappearance, and had even started collecting newspaper articles about the case. When the police investigated Rogers further, they found he had once been arrested—as a juvenile—for improper contact with a child. They took him into custody, where he denied his