Callie’s whirring with feelings: relief, that Annabelle found herself a new life, that it seems to be solid and steady, that she hasn’t been lost, destroyed by the world. Confusion: How did she pull it off? Forged documents? A new birth certificate? Does the husband know that she had spent the first part of her life as someone else? And most importantly: Why? Why would Annabelle rename herself, take on all of the risk and effort?
Unless she couldn’t afford to be who she had been. The girl who abandoned Baby Doe to the elements. The one who had run away, aching and alone and afraid.
Iris Owens doesn’t maintain any kind of social media. Even in the photos Callie’s found online, she looks reluctant, uneasy, her eyes cutting to the left in both images as though she wants to slip out of the frame.
The only thing to do is to go see her. Not on Christmas, not the days after, but in January, when everyone is back in school, when the world starts up again. This woman who not only could unlock the case, but could tell Callie once and for all who she comes from.
On January 3she’s meant to meet with a middle school principal to discuss the D.A.R.E. program schedule for the following year, but she tells him she has the flu and can’t make it. Instead, she leaves at 6:00A.M.and drives to Westchester while it’s still dark out, the firstof the day’s light coming through the trees just as she leaves the Pines behind.
Iris and Ben Owens live on a curved street that slopes toward a little creek. The houses are all tidy, with wide, green lawns and neat bristles of hedges, and a low stone wall runs the length of the block. It’s still early when she arrives, the neighborhood just beginning to stir. Newspapers at the ends of driveways in blue-and-green plastic bags. A jogger making quick progress on the opposite side of the road lifts her hand to Callie in a wave. She parks in front of the house across the street from the Owens’s and slouches low in her seat.
Half an hour passes before there’s a flicker of movement behind the glass. A teenage girl emerges wearing jeans and a gray zip-up hoodie, with a bag slung on one shoulder, a thick blond ponytail swinging between her shoulder blades.
Callie sucks in her breath.
Iris steps onto the porch wearing black tailored pants and a fitted sweater in an icy blue that Callie knows must pick up the blue in her eyes. She reaches up to her daughter and tucks a strand of the daughter’s hair behind an ear. The daughter says something that makes Iris laugh. Two boys tumble out after them, younger, nearly the same height, probably just a year apart, with Ben’s curly brown hair, and they load hockey sticks and black duffel bags into the trunk.
They get into their car, a Volvo hatchback, a few years old, a bumper sticker with the name of the high school on the back. She thinks about the months she’s spent on this case, the time she’s stolen, the way the guys in the room laughed. About her mother and the answers she took with her when she disappeared, Fauver and his hulking shadow. All the time she’s spent feeling frustrated and confused and adrift. And so before she can argue with herself she’s following them. Her compulsion for answers drumming along her veins like a second pulse.
Iris takes hersons to school first. Callie parks and watches from across the street. The boys raise their hockey sticks in a form of goodbyeand walk shoulder to shoulder into the building, one of them waving to a group of girls nearby, the other bending to pick up a shiny food wrapper that the wind blew against his shins.
The daughter is next, at the high school a few minutes away. After she gets out of the car the girl turns to wave to her mother instead of slumping off without a second glance the way some of the other teenagers do. What Callie knows about Iris—Annabelle—she can’t decide which name to call her in her head—makes everything about this routine crackle with intrigue. How often does Iris think about who she used to be? When did she come back to leave the note for Sabrina?
Callie follows Iris again, this time to the town library. The houses along the road still bear holiday wreaths draped with velvet bows, swags of pine along porticos and railings. The library’s sign is traced in tinsel. Iris parks up close while Callie finds a spot in the back of the lot.
The building is quaint, redbrick. Callie waits for Iris to step out of her car and through the vestibule; it shouldn’t be hard to find her inside, the building small, and she’d rather not raise suspicion by tailing her right through the door. She counts to fifty before getting out of her car, kills time by glancing at the app she uses to check her home security cameras. A whole lot of nothing, just the occasional squirrel streaking across the driveway.
Inside the library is quiet, empty. She scans left, right, can’t see Iris anywhere. She studies the spines of a few books on the New and Noteworthy Fiction shelf. Grabs one at random, scans the jacket copy. Something about a plucky female detective solving a string of brutal murders in Wyoming.
She and Jane used to joke about lady detective stories like this. How you had to be damaged to want this job as a woman. Had to drink hard liquor with the boys and have had a shitty childhood to wade through the gore of it. Had to be broken in some essential way. But, underneath the jokes she knew there was some truth to the cliché. That the disorder of her childhood had pointed her to this life, with its laws and rules and uniforms. Where the unpredictable could be managed, solved, contained.
She hears a murmur of voices toward the back of the building, follows them. Stops, grabs another book from the shelf. A cedar shingle house on the cover, a green lawn livid with hydrangea.
She rounds the last shelf in the fiction section to find a small circle of chairs set up near the windows. Each chair is occupied by a senior citizen with a ball of yarn and knitting needles in her lap. One woolly-haired woman looks up, asks what time Robert is going to pick her up.
Iris answers her, “Your son brought you today, Mrs. Clifford. Your son George. He’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”
“Is Robert in the office?”
“I’m not sure what he’s up to. But look at the progress you’ve made.”
Callie catches the neck of a sweater, a sleeve halfway done.
“It is looking good, isn’t it?” the older woman says, sits herself up a little straighter.
Neither of the other two women look up, but their hands work the needles and Callie finds herself soothed by the soft click of them. Lulled. Her grandmother used to knit. Somewhere in her mother’s attic are the baby blankets and little cardigans she made when Jenna was born, stacks of them in sweet, candy-colored pastels.
She is so locked in to the rhythm of the knitting that she is mesmerized. She is surprised to hear a voice at her side.
“Do you knit?”
Iris.
She stands close enough so Callie can make out little flecks of green in her blue eyes. The little lines like commas around her mouth. It’s jarring to see the years on her face, though she is still fairly young. Almost fifty. Just no longer a girl in the woods.
“No,” Callie manages, fighting off a flush. She could not have been more off guard if Iris had walked up to her and shoved her. She had been too lulled by the knitting, too absorbed watching the quick work of the women’s needles that she had lost herself for a moment. Thinking of those baby cardigans knit by her grandmother made herrecall how, at least by Jenna’s account, her drinking seemed to tip from habit to crisis in the years after her own mother died.
“What are they doing?” she asks. She wants to do anything to keep Iris talking. She cuts a quick glance to her arm. Long sleeves, again. She must keep the scar covered. She wonders if she tells people the truth of how she got it. Wonders what the truth is.
