“Making a phone call?”
“I was calling my dad. To tell him about the test.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t pick up.”
“I thought I heard you saying thank you to someone.”
“I—It was his secretary.” The lie is so blatant and absurd that Miss Hamilton is caught off guard. Something you’ve cribbed from TV.
“Here,” she says finally, holding out the steaming cup. You follow her to the car and a few times you can feel her deciding to say something and then changing her mind. The quiet has a choked air about it. Kate Bush sings about her broken heart. But as you sip your drink, the sugar and milk oversweet, then chalky on your tongue, you feel a thrill of hope. You don’t need Miss Hamilton. You don’t need Sabrina. Help has come just in time and you found it all on your own. Monday. You hold the word close in your mind, a mantra. Everything will be right again after Monday. And what had sounded so false moments ago now feels true: You’ll take the test again. You’ll fix your mistakes. You’ll get everything right the next time around. Everything will go according to plan.
CALLIE
As Thanksgiving approaches, she finds herself in a low mood, worse this year after Healy’s revelation. Mid-November is always hard for her, the descent into the darkest part of the year. Every radio commercial, every supermarket display, every conversation she overhears about family gatherings and dinner plans feels mocking, cruel.
Solve the Baby Doe case and she solves the mystery of who she is. But, she’s running out of road on the Riley girls. She feels a heaviness in her body and she thinks it must be because Jenna is really gone this time. Jenna, who could unlock so many answers. Who took the truth with her, wherever she went.
Callie can’t say she’s not angry. It hits her out of nowhere, little frustrations—a hasty incident report, the heat in her Jeep acting up—tipping her into a teeth-clenching fury. She overhears Keegan joke to Deveraux that Chief must be raging with PMS.
Still, despite this roiling anger she stops by her mother’s house once a week, sometimes more. She opens drawers and flicks on the lights. She waters the flowers on the step until the first frost kills them off. And most of all, Callie chastises herself. She’s been in this work long enough to know that people can hide whole universes of secrets inside their daily lives. Drug habits, trafficking rings, escort work. She mistook proximity for closeness, but Jenna had been right, the night Callie brought her into the station. When was the last time Callie asked Jenna a question about her life? She thought that she saw all of the woman who raised her. But there were so many questions thatshe hadn’t asked, so many avenues unexplored. And now she will probably never get the chance.
She’s angry at herself, too. No way around that.
Fauver had been with Sabrina Riley. Fauver had been her mother’s last phone call before she disappeared. He’s the one person that links the two of them. She feels nauseated whenever she considers the possibility of Fauver’s DNA making up half of who she is. He had claimed he never slept with Sabrina but he’s not exactly a man she takes at his word. Maybe there’s a reason Jenna kept the secret of her father’s identity from her: The truth was too ugly, too hard, to reveal. Callie considers a new side to her mother—protective—and realizes that she was wrong about who her father was, but also wrong about who Jenna was. And if she ever gets the chance, it’s the first thing she’ll say to her. That she’s sorry about everything she didn’t, couldn’t, see.
Aside from theBaby Doe case her work at the station churns on. Meetings with local administrators, more grant applications, calls to the local lab to rush the testing on the drugs she’s confiscated, paperwork paperwork paperwork. The guys seem to have settled into a grudging kind of respect for her, or so she thinks until she pulls into her driveway after the end of a long day to find a tail hanging out of her mailbox. Dark, with a white stripe down it.
Fucking bastards.She pounds her fist against the steering wheel.A skunk?
She has half a mind to drive straight to the tavern, toss the animal remains in the middle of the table where she knows she’ll find Collins and Latour and Reynolds three drinks deep, red-faced, Miller Lite on their breath.
She can’t bear the thought of dealing with it anymore. She stomps out of her car, shaking, and her eyes catch on her neighbor’s wood pile. The axe rested against the side.
“I’m borrowing this!” she shouts, not waiting for an answer. Herfirst swing is wild, misses, so that the weight of the axe pulls on her arm, aches.
She connects on the second attempt, lets out a grunt, furious and satisfied. Two more swings and the mailbox is severed from its post. She’s sweating all over, her nostrils sting, her eyes water, but she wishes she had thought of this weeks ago. She picks up the splintered post and carries the whole thing to the end of her driveway, tosses it in her empty trash can.
She can feel it on her body, the smell in her hair, all over her skin. The skunk, the sweat from the effort of taking out the mailbox, the staleness of the station, all of it combines to feel like the smell of failure, of something ruined that can’t be saved. In the bathroom she scrubs herself head to toe, working a loofah over her skin until it is raw. She thinks of Jane’s shower chair and scrubs harder, eyes watering.
After she showers she makes herself a pot of pasta that she eats standing up, pours a glass of wine. She hasn’t really eaten all day and the food and the shower return her to herself. She flips through Annabelle’s yearbook again, looking for any kind of notes, the scrim of a teenage girl with a secret to hide, with a grudge, a boy whose eyes she blacked out in pen. Nothing but Lynne Hamilton’s inscription in the back.
She scans again, looking for a boy with features like her own, lingers over a senior whose left canine tooth that is pointed like hers, before scoffing at herself, this foolish line of thinking. Mostly she takes after Jenna, or did before Jenna’s drinking warped her looks, with the same red hair and upturned nose that makes her look younger than she is. She flips past Jenna’s page quickly. It hurts to see her, those round eyes and tidy pearls of white teeth.
In the faculty pages, Lynne Hamilton has a canny smile, a short, sporty haircut, and the set of her narrow shoulders telegraphs an easygoing confidence. She looks like the kind of woman who is all movement, all metabolism, and as soon as the shutter snapped she bolted off to do something else. In addition to being a faculty yearbook adviser, the yearbook mentions she was also an assistant field hockey coach.
She googles Lynne Hamilton.Lynne Hamilton New Jersey teacheryields a faculty profile page at a private day school in Princeton. The school has a motto in Latin, a crest featuring some kind of bird of prey. Lynne Hamilton is the head field hockey coach and has won several state awards for her distinguished teaching. The school tuition is $60,000 a year.
There is an email address listed on the page, so Callie takes another swig of wine and writes her a note, asking if she might have some time to talk. After that she buys three security cameras online and springs for express shipping. She can mount one in the corner of the porch, another to one of the trees on the drive, and a third out back. Between the dead animals and Fauver’s late-night visit, she wants a little insurance. Anyone who steps foot on her property, she’ll know, and from now on, she’ll have proof.
Adrian texts heron the last day of his conference out West and they make plans to kayak again.I swear I do other things, he says,but it’s just really good to get out there before the weather turns. She tells him she’s looking forward to it, seeing him and being out on the water, and finds she’s telling the truth about both. It was good to use her body that way, to do something slow and meditative. She hadn’t realized she needed the release. And of course she feels it too, the creep of winter. Frost silvering the ground more mornings than not. Even the woods seem stiller, austere, with the animals starting to go into hiding, hoarding their sustenance away.
She has driven by Luke’s nursery three times in the past week, nothing suspicious that she can make out from her car, just a woman loading an armful of potted mini cedars into her back seat and a man tenderly carrying a wooden birdfeeder across the lot. There’s a shop in what used to be an old barn and the farmhouse where Luke lives behind it, but she doesn’t want him to know she’s watching him—not yet. Then, the day before she meets Adrian, she stops by again, but this time she decides to park, gets out of her car, and paces the perimeter of the property. She pauses in front of two greenhouses,padlocks on the doors. She’s not there for more than a minute before she hears footsteps behind her.
“Chief Hauser. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Shit.She knew this was a possibility. That he’d find her here, and she’d be forced to come up with a convincing lie.
