“My uncle said I should shadow you,” Stevens tells her.“Instead of…well…”
Green.Neither of them needs to say it.
“He says you’re the best,” Stevens continues, “and that I should just watch what you do.”
Rachel smiles with a bittersweet pang in her gut.She misses Tom Stevens, and his opinion still means a lot to her.
“All right,” she says.“If you want, you can come to CFS with me.I’m heading out first thing tomorrow.”
“Ah, I can’t,” Stevens says regretfully.“Sorry.Green’s got me on patrol with Garrison.But I’ll check in with you when you’re back.”
“Sounds good.”Rachel nods to him to signal the end of the conversation.She needs to look over these docs before tomorrow.But Stevens stays put, running a hand over the guest chair in front of her desk as he examines the corkboards on the wall behind her, stalling.
“Out with it, Stevens,” she says, not unkindly.“I’ve got work to do.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How do you do murders?Investigate them, I mean,” he quickly adds, stuttering.“Doesn’t it…I don’t know.I’ll be honest, I’ve wondered since my uncle told me about you.”
Rachel’s nervous system gives an unpleasant lurch.
“With respect,” Stevens continues, his face reddening.“It seems strange that you’re a detective, after…you know.”
Rachel clears her throat.“What did your uncle tell you?”
He looks a little sheepish, shrugs.“Just your name, and like I said, that I should shadow you.But then I realized I knew your name from—”
“Yeah, got it,” Rachel says, unable to soften the barbs in her voice.“Also, we don’t know if the Jane Doe is a murder yet.OrStacy Cooper, despite what Green says.So watch your presumptions.”
He drops his gaze, clearly embarrassed.As he should be.But at the same time, she can’t entirely blame him for his curiosity.She’s used to the infamy, the judgment.
That’s what happens to a family when a daughter pushes her own mother off a cliff.
BAYFIELD, ONTARIO—JULY, 1981
“Who was that woman with you at Two Scoops last Saturday?”Kimberly asked, squinting at Rachel in the baking overhead sun.They were down at the beach along with two other girls from their class, Lori and Tammy.
Rachel had gotten a part-time summer job scooping ice cream for four bucks an hour.She left each shift smelling like vanilla and sweat and had more pocket money than she’d ever been given by Dora for doing chores around the house.But Dora hadn’t objected in the least, saying it was never too early to learn the value of a dollar and hard, honest work.She’d been a nurse when she was younger, but hadn’t worked as long as Rachel had lived with her.Rachel supposed there must be income from her grandfather Walter’s war pension and life insurance that allowed Dora to keep the house and buy groceries.
But Mary had dropped in during her shift on Saturday night.Rachel was scrubbing hot fudge off the counter that opened onto the Main Street sidewalk when Mary appeared in the window, shocking Rachel so much that her mouth fell open.She stared at her mother and waited, a series of questions racing through her mind as the cash register dinged and shut with a crash behind her.
With a couple of exceptions, Mary always came back to Bayfield during the summer months, and Rachel wondered whether it was something about the heat that drove her home, longing for the cool darkness of the old house and the breeze that blew in over the cliff edge from the peacock-blue lake beyond.It was serene enough to calm almost anyone—even a cyclone like her mother.
“Hey there,” Mary had said with a half-smile.“Dora said I’d find you here.”
“She told you to come?”Rachel asked, her incredulity tinged with a sense of betrayal.
Mary had swallowed, and in the neon lights above their heads, Rachel spied dark spots, bruises, along one side of her mother’s face and beneath her eye.Some teenage boys a bit older than Rachel laughed raucously at a picnic table to the right, something about someone’s dick.“No.But I asked where you were, and she said you got a job.”
Mary had waited another fifteen minutes for the store to close up for the night, then walked with Rachel back to the house as crickets and spring peepers filled the humid evening air with their song.Rachel could hardly believe Mary had been willing to wait for her shift to end.She couldn’t seem to live in one place for very long, let alone stand still for any length of time.Rachel longed to ask what had happened to her face, but she was a little afraid of her, too, and the fear was silencing.
Since Mary had been home, she hadn’t done much besides lurk around the house drinking Cokes and smoking, and going to Millgate Methodist nearly every day.She was always talking about a conversation she’d just had with Reverend Holland, who Rachel thought must be one of the dullest people on the planet.
So Rachel didn’t know, now, how to answer Kimberly’s question.She didn’t know Kim had even spotted her and Mary together, but she wasn’t really surprised.It was a small town.Everyone knew Rachel lived with her grandmother because her mother was—as she’d heard Tammy’s mom whisper once when the girls were twelve—“unfit.”She’d looked up the word in the dictionary that time, and found it to be true.
Rachel was too embarrassed by Mary to want her around in any way.She seemed crazy sometimes, or at least what Rachel assumed a crazy person must be like, with emotional outbursts and mood swings that could range from despair to elation to rage in the course of an hour.It wasn’t normal.There weren’t many crazy people in their small town, as far as Rachel knew.Which made it even worse to be the daughter of one.Every time Mary came back, all it did was remind Rachel that she wasn’t truly like her girlfriends, and never could be.Because of Mary.Of all that she was and all that she wasn’t.
