Page 58 of Listen to Me

“You had no idea when you moved in?” said Frost.

“No, and I think the agent should have told my husband, don’t you? It doesn’t bother Noah so much, but he’s not the one who’s home alone all day with a kid. I know it happened a long time ago, but still.” She hugged herself, as if a cold wind had suddenly swept in. “That kind of history never really leaves a place.”

“I’m going to walk them through the house, Annie,” Thibodeau said. “Okay to show them the bedrooms?”

“Yes, go ahead.” She looked at her son, who was sitting on the floor, babbling happily to his zoo of stuffed animals. “I’ll just stay down here with Nolan. Feel free to poke around wherever you want.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Frost, but Annie had already sat down on the floor beside her son and she wasn’t looking at them. Perhaps she didn’t want to be reminded of why they were here in her house.

Thibodeau led the way upstairs to a second-floor loft. Janelooked down over the railing, at Annie huddled with her son in the great room below. From this high perch, she could see over the trees to mist-cloaked mountains beyond the panoramic windows. The sky had grown even darker now, the clouds moving in like a black curtain. In the distance, thunder boomed.

“The victim’s bedroom is this way,” said Thibodeau.

They followed him along the open gallery and into the main bedroom where the encroaching woods and thickening storm clouds cast an ominous gloom. As soon as they stepped inside he closed the door, and Jane understood why. Annie was already unnerved by the visit, and what he was about to tell them would only disturb her more.

“Nineteen years ago, the lead detective on this case was Dan Tremblay,” said Thibodeau. “Smart guy, very thorough. Unfortunately, he died last year of lung cancer. I’ve made copies of the relevant files for you—they’re out in the car—but I can sum up everything you need to know about the case. I was just a lowly patrol officer when it happened, but I was the first one on the scene. And I remember every awful detail.” He looked around the bedroom, his gaze distant, as if he were looking backward in time to the day he first visited this house, although the room had surely changed since then. The Lutzes had furnished it in Scandinavian modern and it now had a sleek maple bed and a crisply geometric area rug. On the blond wood dresser was a photo of the smiling Lutz family: Annie, her husband, Noah, and their pink-cheeked son. With his trim beard and glasses, Noah Lutz looked every bit the part of a college chemistry professor, a man of science who probably didn’t believe in haunted places. While standing in this room, did he ever feel just the slightest chill, knowing what happened here? Did he look out the bedroom windows at the ever-advancing woods and wonder what else might be closing in on their house? Jane did not believe in ghosts,but even she sensed darkness hovering over this space, echoes that would never completely fade.

Or maybe it was just the thunderstorm moving in.

“It was a Tuesday morning,” said Thibodeau. “The victim hadn’t shown up for two classes she was supposed to teach the day before, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I got tasked with coming to her house to do a welfare check.”

“What did she teach at Colby?” asked Frost.

“English lit. She was an associate professor, thirty-six years old, recently divorced. She’d been living in this house for about a year. That day I came to check on her, I figured she was just ill and forgot to inform the college that she wasn’t coming in. Murder isn’t the first thing that crosses your mind around here. This is a safe area. Families, college kids. None of the crime you folks probably see down in Boston. You just don’t expect…” He let out a breath. “Anyway, I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

“I got here about elevena.m.It was mid-October, beautiful day, fall leaves at their peak. At first I didn’t notice anything wrong. The front door was locked. I rang the bell but no one answered. Her vehicle was in the carport, so I figured she must be home. I started to get that feeling you get, in the pit of your stomach, when you know something’s not right. Maybe she wasreallysick, or she’d fallen down the stairs. Or there was a problem with the furnace and she was dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. I walked around to the backyard, where those big windows face the woods, and that’s when I saw the door to the deck was open. It didn’t look like it’d been forced, so either she forgot to lock it, or someone used a key.”

“Who else had a key?” asked Jane.

“We know the ex-husband did, but folks up here don’t always lock their doors at night. It’s that kind of place. And she alwayskept a spare key under a rock on the back deck. We found it there, still under the rock.”

“Who knew about that key?”

“Lots of folks. Babysitter. House cleaner. The work crew who renovated her kitchen.”

“In other words, half the town.”

“Just about.” He went to the window and looked out at the darkening sky. “It was clean and crisp that day. No rain in weeks, no mud to track into the house. Just lots of leaves blown in through the open back door. I came inside and started to climb the stairs. That’s when I noticed the flies. And I got my first whiff of—well, you folks know the smell. It’s something you never forget. I came up the stairs, reached the landing, and that’s where I found her, lying in the hallway right outside this bedroom. She was wearing a nightgown, and her bedroom door was wide open. It looked like she’d climbed out of bed, walked out into the hallway, and came face-to-face with the intruder.” He looked at Jane and Frost. “There were strangulation marks on her neck, bruises clearly left by fingers. Whoever did it was strong enough to choke a woman with his bare hands. And based on the smell, and the flies, it happened at least a few days earlier. I didn’t touch anything, move anything. I left her just the way I found her and was about to call it in when I noticed the rabbit.”

“What rabbit?” said Jane.

“This stuffed pink rabbit. It was lying on the floor, in the hallway. And I started to get a really sick feeling. No one had told me there was a child in the house. I went down the hall, looked in the next bedroom, and it was clearly a kid’s. Pink curtains, princess comforter on the bed. I looked everywhere. The bedrooms, the cellar, the area outside the house, but I didn’t find her. Neither did the search team, who combed all those woods.” He shook his head. “That little girl was gone.”

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