Marigold sobbed against his chest for a while. He didn’t rush her, just kept patting her on the back and offering vague words of comfort. After about a minute, Tina twirled a finger in a wrap-it-up signal. After two minutes, she tapped her wrist watch. They had a boat to catch. He knew that. But he also knew that Marigold needed this, so he ignored Tina.
Finally Marigold drew away and wiped her face with the sleeve of her thermal work shirt. “You’re a kind man. Wish there were more like you.” Then she turned to Tina. “I just thought of something, while Jack was hugging me. Adam has a big burn scar on his left torso, it goes all the way from his lower rib to a few inches below the nipple. That won’t help identify him if you see him on the street, but maybe it’s a clue.”
“Did he say how he got it?”
“He said it was from boiling water getting splashed on him. That’s it. No other details. That sounds like abuse, doesn’t it?”
On the ferry boat to Harbortown, Jack studied the photos of Adam Johnson that Tina forwarded to him. The man with Marigold had brown hair with a cut Jack recognized as expensive, a tanned face, and a smile that didn’t quite touch his eyes.
Had Jessie fallen for this man too? He didn’t seem like her type. Her last boyfriend had been a spoken-word poet with ear gauges, and before that she’d dated an oboe player in a chamber music group. How had a “financial consultant” smooth-talker wormed his way into her heart?
On the other hand, Jessie had a soft spot for trauma victims, possibly because of her own history. When Marigold had mentioned the burn scar, a little warning bell had gone off in his head.
Seth/Adam could have easily appealed to Jessie’s soft heart by revealing his painful past, especially if he too had cut off contact with his family, as Marigold had mentioned.
“There’s something else,” he told Tina over the drone of the ferry engine. She sat next to him on one of the slatted benches that lined the walls of the ferry’s lower deck. Her legs were crossed, one foot jiggling up and down. The lumbering pace of the ferry could drive some people crazy, but as a kid he’d always loved it. “Jessie cut off contact with our parents for a few years. That might be one reason she connected with Adam. It sounds like he did the same thing.”
“Huh. Why?” She spoke in a clipped tone, as if uttering words was a chore.
“Why?”
“Why did she? Cut off your parents?”
He drew back, startled by her brusque tone. Tina was always pretty direct, but now she sounded downright rude. “Is that relevant now?”
“Could be.”
Was she okay? She didn’t even sound like herself. “I already told you why.”
She looked blank…and also a bit pale and clammy. “More details, please?”
He sighed, made sure no one else was close enough to hear over the engine noise, then explained. “Like I said before, Jessie was abused by a longtime friend of our dad’s. When she first spoke about it, after high school, my parents didn’t believe her. They thought she was being her usual imaginative self. I kept telling them kids have imaginary playmates, not imaginary abusers. Jessie cut off contact with them because she was so hurt. Even today, there’s some tension, but at least they finally cut that man out of their lives. You can see why I don’t talk about this. It’s Jessie’s business. But if it helps find her…”
He didn’t see how it would. But he realized that he trusted Tina Chen and wanted her to be completely in the Finnegan loop.
But was she listening? She wasn’t even looking his way. She seemed to be staring off into the distance.
“I’m sorry,” Tina said after a moment, during which she seemed to struggle with something, maybe emotion? “It makes it worse, not being believed. At least she had you.”
He dropped his chin to his chest. “I wasn’t around enough. I was deployed then.”
“But you believed her.”
“Of course. I was pissed my parents believed that prick over Jessie. They get it now, but it was rough going for a while. They never really understood her the way I do.” The engine noise dropped a few decibels as the ferry boat downshifted to pull into the terminal in Harbortown. The other passengers gathered up their things and lined up to disembark. He clamped his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to talk about any of this when someone could overhear.
Tina asked no more questions as she bolted to her feet and grabbed her overnight bag. They’d each brought one in case they got stuck in Vermont for the night. She hurried down the ramp; he barely managed to keep up with her.
“Are you okay?” he asked her once they’d reached the glass-walled terminal building. She was bent over, hands on her knees, heaving in gulps of air.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” he said mildly. Apparently he was supposed to ignore how strange she was acting. “My car’s in the parking garage. Want to wait here while I get it?”
She agreed with a quick nod.
By the time he rolled up at the curb in his Audi, she was standing upright again, some color back in her face.
She slung her bag into the back seat and slid into the bucket passenger seat, seemingly oblivious to the buttery leather. “I get seasick,” she explained brusquely. “Very seasick. The ferry’s marginally better than those water taxis, but it’s all bad.”
