Nic stared at him, mesmerized by his despair.
“That’s why you kept looking for her?” she asked.
Booth sat down on the bed. The sobs slowed as he took deeper breaths. It seemed that he had been here before, to this place of anguish over his lost love. His lost child. And he also knew how to make it recede.
“It was mine,” he answered after a long moment. “I couldn’t tell anyone. I promised her—her family would have been furious. They were strict, you know? Their father used to whip them with a belt over a kitchen chair—and he would wait to do it, sometimes days, to make them suffer from the fear. He’d whip them over nothing, over taking food from the cupboard or being too loud. There’s more—so many things. It was brutal, the way they lived.”
Nic remembered what Daisy’s sister had said about the locked cupboards and how Daisy found a way to get to the crackers—and how she did it in spite of the punishment that followed.
She leaned against the door. She did not move closer to Booth, but she felt safe somehow. And she wanted answers.
“Do you think Chief Watkins helped her leave?”
Booth seemed surprised that she knew to ask this question.
“They were very close. He got her that scholarship to summer camp. When she came back, things were different between us. She had met kids from all over the country. Gifted kids. Kids on their way to college. Kids who didn’t get bent over a chair in the kitchen and whipped for stealing food.”
“Kids who drank fancy tea?” she asked.
Booth smiled, sadly. “Yes. She thought it made her more likethem, if she took on their likes, mimicked their behavior. There was a desperation about it, the way she wanted what they had. It still reminds me of her—the tea.”
Yes, Nic thought.The tea—it was here, but also at Veronica’s house.
“Where would he have taken her?” Nic asked. “A pregnant teenager with no money…”
Booth got up then and walked to a small dresser in the corner of the room. He opened a drawer and took something out. When he turned around, Nic stepped farther into the hallway, but then she saw it was a letter in his hand.
He held it out for her.
“I got this about a year after she left. I’d been a maniac—people are right about that. I went to Boston, tortured her poor sister there. I went to Woodstock, posted flyers with her picture. I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t believe that she just left with our baby without saying a word.”
Nic took the letter. It was folded into a small pink envelope that had yellowed around the edges. She pulled it out carefully. The paper was old, fragile.
It was a woman’s handwriting.
Nic read it to herself as Booth continued to tell the story.
Dear Roger,
I am sorry for what I’ve put you through. It has taken me all this time to find the courage to write. I feel ashamed for not facing you before I left, but I wanted a different life. I couldn’t be a mother. Please don’t look for me. I hope you can forgive me.
Daisy
“She doesn’t say where she went or who helped her get rid of the baby. I’ll never understand it. We were in love. And I could havegiven her things—my family had resources. We could have moved from here. I told her I would work and take care of the baby so she could go to college. I promised to take care of her and our child. And she believed me. I know she did.”
Nic finished the letter. It was short, and lacked any trace of the sentiments Booth claimed existed between them.
“There’s no postage or return address,” Nic said.
“It was left in my mailbox. Whoever helped her leave must have helped her get it to me. She didn’t want me to see where it was mailed from.”
“Her sister said she went to New York. Did you know that?” Nic asked then.
Booth waved her off. “She told me. But she didn’t know about the baby and I never told anyone. Until now.”
“But you don’t think she went to New York?”
He shook his head then. “She hated the city. She wanted to go north—to a place like Woodstock, a quiet place. People think I didn’t know her. But I did. You can’t hide love. Not the love we had.”
