Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  “She mentioned something about taking Jenna somewhere so she’d be safe.”

  “Sounds like she trusts you,” Donny said. “How does that play out with your wife?”

  “My wife is gone,” Gideon answered. “Nevvie is all the family I have—had—left.”

  I stopped walking as we approached the massive barn. Five elephants milled in the enclosure behind it, shifting beside each other like storm clouds, their quiet rumbles shaking the ground beneath our feet. I had the uncanny sense that they understood every single word we’d been saying.

  It made me think of Thomas Metcalf.

  Donny faced Gideon. “Is there anyone you can think of who’d want to hurt Nevvie? Anyone human, that is?”

  “Elephants, they’re wild animals. They’re not our pets. Anything could have happened.” Gideon reached a hand toward the metal bars of the fence as one of the elephants stuck her trunk through it. She sniffed at his fingers, then picked up a rock and chucked it at my head.

  Donny laughed. “Look at that, Virg. She doesn’t like you.”

  “They need to be fed.” Gideon slipped inside, and the elephants began to trumpet, knowing what was coming.

  Donny shrugged and kept walking. I wondered if I was the only one who noticed that Gideon had not really answered his question.

  “Go away, Abby,” I shout; at least I think I’m shouting, because my tongue feels about ten sizes too big for my mouth. “I told you, I’m not drinking.”

  This is, technically, true. I’m not drinking. I’m drunk.

  But my landlady is still knocking, or maybe that’s a jackhammer. At any rate, it won’t stop, so I haul myself up from the floor, where I guess I passed out, and yank open the door of my office.

  I’m having a hard time focusing, but the person in front of me definitely isn’t Abby. She is only five feet tall, and she’s wearing a backpack and a blue scarf around her neck that makes her look like Isadora Duncan or Frosty the Snowman or something. “Mr. Stanhope,” she says. “Virgil Stanhope?”

  Spread across Thomas Metcalf’s desk were reams of paper covered with tiny symbols and numbers, like some kind of code. There was a diagram on it, too, one that looked like an octagonal spider made with jointed arms and legs. I’d practically failed the course in high school, but it looked like chemistry to me. As soon as we entered, Metcalf scrambled to roll the paper up. He was sweating, although it wasn’t really all that hot outside. “They’re missing,” he said, frantic.

  “We’re going to do everything in our power to find them—”

  “No, no. My notes.”

  I may not have been to a lot of crime scenes at that point in my career, but I still thought it was strange that a guy whose wife and kid were missing seemed to care less about them than about some pieces of paper.

  Donny looked at the piles on the desk. “Aren’t they right there?”

  “Obviously not,” Metcalf snapped. “Obviously I’m talking about the pages that aren’t here.”

  The papers were some weird sequence of numbers and letters. It could have been a computer program; it could have been a satanic code. It was the same kind of writing I had seen earlier on the wall. Donny glanced at me and raised his brow. “Most guys would be pretty concerned about their missing family, considering that an elephant killed someone here last night.”

  Metcalf continued to sift through the stacks of paper and books, moving them from left to right as he cataloged them mentally. “Which is why I’ve told her a thousand times not to bring Jenna into the enclosures—”

  “Jenna?” Donny repeated.

  “My daughter.”

  He hesitated. “You and your wife have been fighting a lot, haven’t you?”

  “Who told you that?” he scoffed.

  “Gideon. He said you upset Alice last night.”

  “I upset her?” Thomas replied.

  I stepped forward, as Donny and I had discussed. “Mind if I use the bathroom?”

  Metcalf waved me to a small room down the hall. Inside was a newspaper article, yellowed and curling in a broken frame, about the sanctuary. There was a picture of Thomas and a pregnant woman, smiling at the camera with an elephant lurking behind them.

  I opened the medicine cabinet and sorted through Band-Aids, Neosporin, Bactine, Advil. There were three prescription bottles, all recent refills, with Thomas’s name on them: Prozac, Abilify, Zoloft. Antidepressants.

  If what Gideon said about the mood swings was true, it would make sense for Thomas to be on medication.

  I flushed the toilet for good measure, and by the time I came back into the office, Metcalf was pacing around the perimeter of the room like a caged tiger. “I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, Detective,” he said, “but I’m the injured party, not the one who did the injuring. She ran off with my daughter and my life’s work. Shouldn’t you be looking for her, instead of grilling me?”

  I stepped forward. “Why would she steal your research?”

  He sank down in his desk chair. “Because she’s done it before. Multiple times. She’s broken into my office to get my notes.” He unrolled the long scroll on his desk. “This does not leave this room, gentlemen … but I am on the verge of a major breakthrough in the field of memory. It’s well established that memories are elastic before they’re encoded by the amygdala, but my research proves that each time the memory is recalled, it returns to that mutable state. That suggests memory loss can indeed happen after memory retrieval, if there’s a pharmacological roadblock that disrupts protein synthesis in the amygdala … Imagine if you could erase traumatic memories with chemical agents years after the fact. It would completely change the way we treat post-traumatic stress. And it would make Alice’s behavioral work on grief look like conjecture instead of science.”

  Donny looked over his shoulder at me. Wacko, he mouthed. “And your daughter, Dr. Metcalf? Where was she when you walked in on your wife?”

  “Asleep,” he said, his voice breaking. Turning away from us, Metcalf cleared his throat. “It’s blatantly clear that the one place my wife is not is in this study … which begs the question—why are you still here?”

  “Officer Stanhope,” Donny said pleasantly, “why don’t you go tell MCU to wrap it up, while I ask Dr. Metcalf just a few more questions?”

  I nodded, deciding that Donny Boylan was the unluckiest son-of-a-bitch on the police force. Somehow, we’d come to certify a reported death caused by elephant trampling and instead had uncovered a domestic dispute between a nut job and his wife—one which may or may not have resulted in two missing persons and maybe even a homicide. I started walking toward the area where the crime scene investigators were still cataloging useless crap when suddenly all the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

  When I turned around, the seventh elephant was staring me down from the other side of a very flimsy portable electric fence.

  She was huge, this close. Her ears were pinned back against her head, and her trunk dragged on the ground. Sparse hair sprouted from the bony ridge of her brow. Her eyes, they were soulful and brown. She bellowed, and I fell back, even though there was a fence between us.

  She trumpeted again, louder this time, and moved away. Then she stopped, after a few steps, and turned to look at me. She did the same thing two more times.

  It was almost as if she was waiting for me to follow.

  When I didn’t move, the elephant returned and reached delicately between the electric lines of the fencing. I could feel hot breath huffing from the end of her trunk; I could smell hay and dust. I held my breath, and she touched my cheek, as gently as a whisper.

  This time, when she started to move, I followed, keeping the fence between us, until the elephant made a sharp turn and started to walk away from me. She moved into a valley, and the moment before she disappeared from view, she glanced back at me again.

  In high school, we used to cut across cow pastures as shortcuts. They were protected by electric fences. We’d leap, then grab the w