Page 49 of Nowhere Good

Seth gestured to his car. “Lead the way.”

FIFTEEN

“He was my childhood best friend,” Chief Wells explained. “Norm had a hard life at home, spent most of his days at my family’s growing up. When we talked to him about the Ellen Harrison assault years ago, all we had was the white van tip, and I thought to myself it could never be Norm.”

As Seth listened, he maneuvered around a street corner. All over Fairview, banners dangled between street lights and over buildings, advertising the Fourth of July fair this Friday—the annual chili and corn cookoff. Seth had been pushing for the town to cancel it, but there’d been resistance at every corner. Apparently, it was their “only shot at a tourist season.”

“I mean, back then, Norm was just on a list of names of people who had a white van,” Wells went on. “Plus, Ellen Harrison, the poor thing, couldn’t definitively tell us if a white van did kidnap her. Just that she’d noticed one near her in the days leading up to the attack. There was no evidence against Norm, no evidence against anyone who lived in town.”

If Seth had to guess, the drifter theory had won back then. Ellen Harrison made the problem disappear by moving away. No other woman was assaulted, so the police could keep living their lives, pretending that the only evil in Fairview was in some street crime and hard drugs.

“So what’s different now?” Seth asked. “You’re not defending Norm.”

Wells was quiet. Her lips pursed, dark skin crinkled with regret. “Sometime last year, my littlest granddaughter, Alessa—and that girl is smart, let me tell you—said something that made my heart sink. She said Uncle Norm stared at her ‘funny.’ Which, coming from a little girl, that’s the kind of thing you should listen to. Plus, with what I know about Norm’s upbringing… sometimes history likes to repeat itself, if you catch my drift.”

“People can become their abusers. The cycle of trauma continues.”

“That’s right. I’ve always thought Norm was the sweetest soul, but he never married. Never made friends outside from myself and his own sisters. He dedicated his life to that... place, Mr. Giggles, surrounded by kids and teenagers. At a certain point, you have to be objective.”

Push comes to shove, he recalled. He respected Chief Wells for working with him, not against him on this. But they weren’t just looking for a person with deviant behavior; they were looking for a person with a fixation on women who matched the profile of the victims.

“What about the writing? Does that seem like something he’d do?”

“Maybe. He used to express frustration at the world, like he deserved more than what he had.”

“’It should have been me’ who received something someone else did. Maybe a blonde woman from his past. Did he know Celine Dyer?”

Wells shot him a look. “You’re still thinking about that phone call? Norm barely knew Celine, but who knows what secrets a man keeps. I remember he helped with the search. Everyone did.”

Speaking of secrets. “I saw an old camcorder in Norm’s office. Seemed odd. You know anything about that?”

Chief Wells’s expression turned grim. “Now that you mention it, yeah, he used to film birthday parties to give VHS tapes to the parents, even long after VHS was out of style. One of the mothers complained.”

“Complained about what?”

Wells was touching her necklace again. “Just that the whole thing made her uncomfortable. I never got the specifics. Wasn’t really formal, but Norm stopped doing the videos. That would’ve been two years before the Ellen Harrison case.”

“Interesting timing,” Seth muttered.

Wells pointed to the right, but Seth already knew which house it was—the one with the white work van. “It’s up here, Detective. Number 43.”

Seth pulled outside of the house. A nice suburban street, sprinklers on, hopscotch drawn on the sidewalk, a basketball net on the cul-de-sac at the end.

“Family neighborhood,” Seth noted as he parked outside. He went to get out, but Wells hesitated.

“There is one thing. Norm moved to this house twenty years ago, and I’ve only ever been in his basement once, when my late husband and I helped him move in. He’s secretive about it.”

“Sounds like something I should check out.”

Wells nodded. Her brown eyes fell on him, dire. “He’ll welcome us inside the house if I ask.”

“And then?”

“Then you do whatever it is you need to do.”

Without another word, Chief Wells got out. Seth followed suit, stepping into the summer heat. Norm’s house looked like any other on the street—two stories, a mix of red brick and siding—but with each step up the concrete porch, Seth became increasingly aware of the gun on his belt. There was no telling how Norm might react.

Chief Wells rang the doorbell, and a long bing reverberated through the house. Moments later, the door opened, sending a breath of near-polar air from the air conditioning out. Norman Stanfield wore a smile on his face. He had flushed white skin and a mustache, wearing jeans and a white knitted sweater. A strange smell wafted from inside, like gas station hand soap or some sort of disinfectant.