“Angie—you look like shit.”
She paused, hand on the doorknob. “Yeah. I know. Thanks.”
“What are you going to do?”
“While I wait to see if I’m going to be fired?”
He said nothing.
“I don’t know—I have a ... cold case, something personal that I want to look into. Night, Vedder.”
She exited, shut the door, took a deep breath, and made her way down the row of bullpens, mostly empty at this hour. As she neared the station entrance, a woman got up off the chairs near the door.
“Detective Pallorino?”
Lorna Drummond.A box in her hands.
Angie stopped dead in her tracks and tensed, bracing for another assault—verbal or otherwise.
Drummond came forward. “Gracie left me a Christmas gift. I found it under her bed.” The woman paused, overtly struggling to marshal her emotions. Clearing her throat, she held the box out to Angie.
“I want you to have it. Gracie would want you to have it. For everything you did for her. And for Faith. And all those other girls.”
Angie stared at her.
“Please, take it.”
Carefully, Angie took the box from Lorna Drummond. She opened it. Inside was what looked like an ornately carved cream-colored jewelry box. Angie looked up.
“Open it,” Lorna Drummond said, her eyes swimming with moisture.
Angie lifted the box lid. A tiny dancer in a pink tutu popped up and started to wobble in a pirouette as lullaby music tinkled—made by a revolving cylinder with a set of pins that plinked at a comb of metal tines to create the sound.
“It’s an antique,” Drummond said. “I used to have a similar one when I was a little girl. My father gave it to me. He died that year, and not long after, the jewelry box was lost in a house fire. I often spoke to Gracie about that box and how it was the last thing I had of my dad. I was with Gracie when I saw this one in the antique store on Government Street a few months ago. I ... I was moved by it, and she saw. She must have returned and bought it—” Her voice choked. She fiddled in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose. “She’d ... hidden it ... under her bed. Waiting for Christmas.”
Which would never come for Gracie Drummond.
We all lie.
We all guard secrets—sometimes terrible ones—a side to us so dark, so shameful, that we quickly avert our own eyes from the shadow we might glimpse in the mirror.
Instead we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls. And on the surface of our lives, we work industriously to shape the public story of our selves ...
Angie stared at the halting dancer. The music slowed to a plink then a plunk, then died. She swallowed, unable at that moment to look up and meet Lorna Drummond’s eyes for fear of what she’d reveal in her own.
“I can’t take it, Mrs.Drummond.” Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper. “I just can’t.”
Lorna Drummond touched Angie’s hand. “Please. I can’t keep it, either. I want ... I want you to have it. To remember her, and all girls like her.” She fell silent. Angie glanced up.
Tears sheened down the woman’s face. “Keep doing what you do, Detective,” she whispered. “People like you ... it’s all we have between what is good and right, and what is wrong.” A pause as she struggled to go on. “Thank you for finding him, for stopping him before he could hurt anyone else.”
And she turned and was gone. Out the doors into the rainy dark.
Angie stared after her, unable to move, the box with the little dancer in her hands.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER22
“Angie? Is that you?”
