“I think people wanted to put it behind them. The idea that someone here, one of us, did it? No one wanted to sit with that.” Keegan rubs his chin. “But there was a name, for a little while. A high school girl.”
“That would track.” Can’t tell her parents, no access to medical care.
Keegan springs another trap. The muskrat scampers off.
“Help me with these last few traps and we can call it a day, yeah?”
Keegan lifts a trap from the stack, sets it on the ground, slides a bar from a latch to spring the door open. A brown ball of fur slips out, disappears into the underbrush.
She releases the next one, the mechanism snapping open fast and hard, nearly catching her finger. She gasps louder than she means to, louder than the moment warrants, her nerves sizzling, her exhaustion getting the better of her.
The muskrat doesn’t move for a moment, not until she taps the bars, and then it skuttles out, nose twitching.
“Will they be okay? This close to the road?”
“Oh, Christ, we’d be doing everyone a favor if we let them get hit. Mean little bastards. They’ll find water soon enough, that’s how they’re made.”
“Keegan, what was the name of the girl?” she asks him. “The one people talked about back then?”
He rubs his knuckles into his eyes. “Shit. I forget. Back at thestation we’ll ask one of the others during shift change. I don’t exactly remember that much about a teenage girl from all those years ago.”
Of course not, she thinks. Teenage girls, so similar as to be interchangeable. Paper doll cutouts. Forgotten, disposed of, left behind.
At the stationKeegan holds the door for Callie, then cups his hands around his mouth and yells to McIntyre, who is at reception talking to Della. “Hey, Mac, what was the name of that girl who lived out in the big colonial off of 206? By the paper mill? She was your brother’s age I think.”
“Her? He used to say she’d blow people behind the school for weed.”
Callie tries to catch Della’s eye, but Della only stares at her computer monitor.
“Shawna something?” McIntyre offers. “She was real cute. Blond, little.”
“No that’s not it. Susannah?” Keegan says.
“Maybe that. Riley! That was the last name.”
“Susannah Riley?” Callie says. “We’re sure that’s it?”
“Yeah, yeah that sounds right,” Keegan says.
“Why do people think it was her?”
“Because she was a slut,” McIntyre says. “Odds were pretty good someone knocked her up and she didn’t know who the dad was.” The wordsluthits Callie like a slap. He looks at her as he says it, a satisfied gleam to his eye that tells her he relishes the chance to aim this word her way.
“She went AWOL right after the baby was found. She had dropped out of school before so it was hard to tell when she went missing, but no one ever saw her around here again. Innocent people—they don’t run.”
Something about that timing doesn’t sit right with Callie. A teenager, vulnerable, had just given birth, somehow finds the resources and the wherewithal to start a new life somewhere else? But she humors Mac. “I’ll look into that.”
“Look into it? You actually trying to solve the case?” McIntyre shakes his head, fixes her with a pitying look.
“Asking questions. Sometimes with cold cases time shakes things loose a little bit.” She bites her tongue about the bracelet, about the sense she has that there’s a bigger story here.
“Sometimes some high-horse detectives think they can show some Pineys a thing or two about good old-fashioned police work. Like one of those HBO shows. Keegan, you going to the Tavern?”
“I was going to have one, yeah.”
Keegan gives her a look—sheepish—but his loyalties are his loyalties. The guys all drink together in the one-room bar up the road. She sees their cars parked in the sandy lot every time she leaves a shift. Frank used to go—he’s told her as much—but no one has ever asked her along.
Back in heroffice Callie searches Susannah Riley in the system. No records. Nothing online, no social media—or rather, too many Susannah Rileys that social media is of no immediate use. Girls twisting their torsos to pout at a camera. A Susannah Riley in England who posts pictures of her garden. Gnarled wisteria vines heavy with flowers. Tulips so purple they are nearly black.
