I passed a bus stop with someone sleeping on the bench, a bike repair shop with a rusty bike wheel propped outside the door. The chill air whispered under my collar and down my neck.Welcome back,it all said.Where did you think you were going?
I reached the Fell police station, located on a dead-end street and surrounded by a flat parking lot. Six police cars were parked in a precise line outside the front door, so maybe it was a quiet day for crime. The station was squat, made of ugly concrete with streaks of pigeon shit on the walls. I pushed through the glass door and walked to the front desk, inhaling the smell of old sweat mixed with janitor closet.
The uniformed policeman at the front desk could have been forty or sixty. It was hard to tell with the serious bags under his eyes. A cheap office divider had been placed behind his desk, so anyone entering couldn’t see the rest of the room. The cop regarded me with weary disinterest as I scraped the last of the Creamsicle from its stick with my teeth. I’d never seen anyone more in need of a nap.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Detective Pine.”
The cop blinked his bagged eyes at me and didn’t move. “There’s no Detective Pine.”
“There was twenty years ago. Did he retire?”
The cop looked back down at his magazine, not bothering to answer.
I spotted a trash can by the door, threw out my Creamsicle stick,and came back to the desk, wiping my hands on my jeans. There was no one else standing at this desk, and no one else behind it. It could have been a library. The Fell police station wasn’t a very busy place. “Look,” I said. “I have information on a case that Detective Pine worked on. The Ben Esmie disappearance.”
The cop showed not a flicker of recognition, but he said, “You’d have to talk to Detective Canner about that one.”
Canner. That was Vail’s banana man, I guessed, if you made the stretch thatCannerrhymed withbanana. “Where can I find him?” I asked.
“He’s dead now,” the bag-eyed cop said. “Have a nice day.”
I shrugged. “No problem. I’ll just go see Detective Pine at home in Evergreen Heights.”
Evergreen Heights was the neighborhood adjacent to Fell High School. I knew the Pines lived there—or used to—because I had seen Bradley enter a house there after school once. It was a coincidence, I swear.
Bag Eyes gave me a second, sharper look, and I knew he was reevaluating me as a local. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t say, because you didn’t ask. My name is Violet Esmie. I’m Ben Esmie’s big sister.”
There was the briefest whisper of hesitation, and I knew that Bag Eyes was familiar with my name. Had he been one of the uniforms crosshatching our property that winter day, looking for my little brother? It was possible, though I didn’t remember him. What I remembered from that day was deep, sickening fear because Ben was gone. Just gone. It was like he’d been switched off, a radio signal cutting out.
It was different from the dull, churning unease I’d felt after Alice McMurtry died, when I didn’t know what had happened to her. The fear I felt after Ben vanished was the kind of fear I wouldn’t feel again until I watched Lisette sleeping in her crib, her sweet face relaxed,her long lashes touching her cheeks. I’d stared at her, and I’d thought of Ben, all the things that might have happened to him, and then I’d gone to the bathroom and been sick with terror.
Bag Eyes pushed his chair back, making it crack. Or maybe that sound was his knees. “Wait here,” he said curtly, then left the desk and disappeared behind the divider.
I waited. What was he doing? Talking to someone back there? Making a call? Shuffling around in silence, hoping I would go away? I pictured him with his back to the divider, arms flattened, eyes wide, holding his breath.
Finally, he came back. He pulled out his chair and sat in it again, giving no indication of where he’d been. “You know the Pop-Top Diner around the corner?” he asked.
I gave him an icy stare without answering, because of course I knew. It was a look that I’d taught both Vail and Dodie from an early age. It said,I will not dignify that with an answer.
“Right. You do.” Bag Eyes nodded. “Go there, get a booth, and wait fifteen minutes. Detective Pine will be along.”
I almost heard it in my mind then, like a real sound—theclickof this town opening to me. Everywhere else I’d been in my life, I was no one, but now I was home.
In Fell, I wasn’t an ex-wife, a bad mother, a mental patient. I was an Esmie kid. I had stolen from the store around the corner and had snuck onto the bus when I wanted to go somewhere and had no fare. I had grown up across from an abandoned house, and my best friend had died next to the railroad tracks. Fell was frightening to the strangers who came here, but it wasn’t frightening to me.
“Fifteen minutes,” I said to Bag Eyes. “If he isn’t there, I leave.”
He nodded, and I saw a glimmer of curiosity in his deadened face. He wanted to know what I had to say, why I’d come back after all this time. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “He’ll be there.”
9
Vail
Dodie took forever to get dressed, and when she finally came downstairs, she was in a terrible mood. She was wearing baggy cotton pants, belted and rolled up at the ankles, a black tank top, and a cardigan she’d buttoned to the neck. She was carrying an ancient pair of brown boots.
I looked her up and down, amused at the tangle of her dark hair tied on top of her head and the scowl of her perfect brows. “Those are my pants,” I said.
