The year She Fell (55 page)

“Okay.” He looked around us, at the trash heaped up against the neighbor’s brick retaining wall, and added, “Let’s get out of here.”

We retraced our steps back to the bridge, and when we got there, I said awkwardly, “Thanks for coming.”

He shrugged. “Just don’t like coming down here. Up mountain’s . . . easier.”

“Well, you’re here now.” I looked away, over the river at my house. One or both of my sisters must be home, because the kitchen window was a square of yellow light. “I’m sorry about the phone call earlier. You must have thought I was crazy.”

“Yeah, well. You really think Mrs. Wakefield was your mother?”

“It—it seems plausible. Laura—my sister—I guess has always suspected that, that Mother waited until her husband died to adopt me because I was the, uh, the product of an affair. And I guess she left town that spring and summer before I was born, supposedly judging at horse shows.”

Slowly he replied, “The one thing that was hardest was Mom giving her child away. It never made sense to me that she could do that. And Ronnie— he couldn’t get past it, kept thinking it meant something. Don’t know, like she was trying to protect you from us. But if you were really a
Wakefield
— what could Mom do? Even if she didn’t want to, she’d have to let you go.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. “I suppose it is better. I don’t have to feel so . . . so abandoned. Or rejected. But it worries me too. You know, that it’s what I want. To feel wanted.”‘

“Yeah. So automatically you’re suspicious you’re making it up.” He regarded me with a half-grin. “Maybe you should spin it positively. Two families wanted you. Only one could have you. Lucky for you it was the rich one.”

I had to smile back. “That’s not really the way I look at things. Positively, I mean.”

We started across the bridge, and he said, “Course if you’re right, that means . . . weird. That we’re not related.”

This silenced me. This made him feel better, that somehow it was better for his family if I wasn’t really theirs. And maybe he was right. But still—

 
Finally he prompted, “You’re not still thinking that my dad—”

“No! No.” I sighed, letting go of the memories of that first family of mine. “I was just trying to make it make sense. But my sister told me something—she said that my mother had been trying to get some DNA tested, and we figured out it must be the father’s. And your father died a long time ago. So it can’t be his DNA.”

He regarded me quizzically. “But why wouldn’t she know?”

“What?”

“Why would she need to check DNA? I mean, unless she was really getting around, she’d know who the father of her own child was, wouldn’t she?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. He was right. Mother wouldn’t need a DNA test to identify the father. “But why then? Unless I was hers, why would she go to so much trouble to keep me close and get me back?”

Mitch considered this for a moment. He didn’t seem shocked at all of these scandalous doings. I guessed where he came from, he learned to be tolerant. “Maybe you’re still family. Like her sister’s kid. Or her husband’s kid by another woman. Or—”

I thought of what Laura said about that time I was born. She and Ellen were left home with their father all spring and most of the summer, a halcyon period, from Laura’s perspective. But Cathy—

I took off at a run towards home, hardly hearing his startled yell. When I got back, breathless, to the porch, he was right behind me. And he was with me when I went in to tell my sisters who I was.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

JACKSON

 
Small-town policing is all about discrimination. I don’t mean racial discrimination. I mean the discrimination that lets a cop decide not to arrest the kid smoking dope behind the stadium, or the old guy shoplifting lipstick from the Walgreens. You learn quick what will deter and what will aggravate. So while I’m for sure hauling a drunk driver down to the city lockup and charging him, that town drunk staggering down the street, I’ll just take him to his house and shove him through his doorway. First do no harm—the cop’s motto.

It’s all about outcome. And that takes guesswork. Clairvoyance even. Got to predict if reform school will destroy this kid, or actually reform him. Tougher than it sounds. I was one saved by reform school, or at least by the cop who sent me there. So I’m mindful of the possibility that what hurts most now might help most in the future.

The truth is, for most small-town criminals, getting caught is deterrence enough. It’s humiliating to get caught drunk and disorderly by your former geometry student. And it’s scary for a married banker doing a late-night audit with a teller to look out his windshield and hear a cop, hand on a gun, say, “Heard someone yelling. That you, Mr. Peterson? You all right?”

So when I was cruising one night over by the college, I didn’t arrest the town matriarch when I caught her rummaging through the trash bags just inside the college gates.

It was a moonless night in late May. The streets were deserted—our town is full of working-class people who have to be up for the
seven a.m.
whistle—and the air was damp with mist. We’re in a valley, but still twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, so the nights are usually chilly well into spring. I wasn’t enough of a wuss to turn the car heater on, but I admit I considered the idea long enough to dismiss it.

When I got to
River Road
, I rolled down my window, and it was all so quiet I could hear the water rushing by thirty feet below the guardrail. Tug Lewis was reporting in on the radio that Gemtown was secure, and he was stopping at the minimart for some coffee. The dispatcher told him to bring some Oreos back.

I noticed the trash bags and barrels dotting the sidewalks and driveways, and remembered it was Tuesday, and tomorrow, way too early, the Roemer Refuse truck would be coming around to do the weekly pickup. I was just thinking I had to stop by my house and get the garbage out when I came around the corner onto
College Ave
and saw something moving behind a heap of three trash bags.

Too big for a raccoon. Dog probably. I was a cop, not a dog-catcher, and besides, this was along the maple-lined row of brick faculty houses. I was still annoyed at the president’s refusal to compensate the department for the nine man-hours of traffic direction during graduation last week. If a dog ripped up and scattered professorial trash all over
College Ave
, served him right.

But then someone stood up. Wasn’t a dog then. I cruised down the road, thinking it might be some fraternity prankster. But the college was out of session.

I flipped on the beacon lamp mounted over the side view and angled it to illuminate the trash bags. There was the perp, spotlighted a couple dozen feet away.

Okay, even for me, trained as I am to expect the unexpected, this was . . . unexpected.

And I decided this was the time for discrimination, not to mention discretion.

Couple reasons. First, well, if I remember my criminal justice class lectures, it’s not actually a crime to steal someone’s trash, as long as it’s out on public property. And these trash bags were sitting out there on the city sidewalk. Second, the trash thief was none other than Mrs. Margaret Wakefield, town matriarch, city councilwoman, and, for a few minutes twenty years ago, my mother-in-law.

Now I didn’t know what the hell she was doing, but I knew I wasn’t dealing with an unregenerate criminal here. And so I pulled up at the curb right beside her and said in a casual tone, “You lose something there, Mrs. Wakefield?”

She’d been so intent on her task, whatever it was, she hadn’t noticed me before that. Now she looked up, and I was struck by her complete lack of panic. I mean, she should have been panicked. She was caught. But she just said, “Chief McCain,” in that lofty tone of hers, like I was standing at the podium in the City Council room, requesting more money for Kevlar vests.

“Mrs. Wakefield.” I got out of the car and stood there, arm on the frame of the door, waiting to see if she had some good explanation for her actions.

She didn’t even bother. She opened the last trash bag and started rummaging through it.

I closed my door and came round the front. “Mrs. Wakefield,” I said again, this time shining my flashlight on her.

She looked up at me, frowning. I’ve never figured out if she actually forgot I was once briefly married to her daughter, or if she was just too proud to acknowledge it. Rich people really are different, as some author said. Or maybe Laura had said that, back in the days when she used to try to explain her family to me. Things rich people don’t want to have happened just didn’t happen.

I came from a family where no one ever forgot anything. And we kind of defined “dysfunctional”, so there was a lot to remember. I never see my brother Luke without reminding him about how he flushed my gerbil down the toilet. He was always killing animals, accidentally on purpose. (Far as I know, he hasn’t grown up to be a serial murderer. Not that I’d ever let him take care of my
Labrador
.) My family never forgets.

But Mrs. Wakefield was gazing at me with no more than mild disapproval. “I am in no danger, Chief McCain. You may resume your patrol.”

I wanted to say, “Yes, your highness,” just to see if that would get a reaction. But I didn’t. She’d brought the resolution to hire me for this job, and I guessed she could get me fired too.

And what she was doing wasn’t actually illegal. A sign of insanity, sure. She’d always struck me as on the edge, as a matter of fact. No one else around here would agree with me, because she was always so controlled and calm. But that was just her breeding, her training. Never show emotion, that’s what she’d been taught. Didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.

Good cops have to have intuition. And my intuition always told me this was one angry woman. Not necessarily all that in touch with her inner rage, but acting on it anyway. And unacknowledged rage, that was more dangerous than the overt kind.

I’d seen it in that “stay away from my daughter” speech of hers, the one that implied otherwise my parents’ house would be fire-bombed and Laura locked away in a padded cell.

The trouble with control is you have to keep it. And to do that, you have to keep it all in. Never tell. And that’s what I thought was going on with Mrs. Wakefield here. Something had snapped in her, and she was never going to tell. There was some reason that made sense to her, something that impelled her to root through the trash here, and no one else needed to know. And no one should question it either.

The rage was because she couldn’t keep it all under control.

“Where’s your car, Mrs. Wakefield?”

“I walked,” she said serenely, jamming her hand into the last bag. At least she was wearing a rubber glove. She pulled out a handful of envelopes, glanced at the one on top, and shoved them back in.

“Let me drive you home.”

“Oh, that’s very kind of you. Just one moment—oh, yes. Here’s what I need.”

And she pulled out a ragged piece of string that glistened in the light of the streetlamp. With her free hand, she withdrew a plastic bag from her sweater pocket and slid the string inside.

Then she rose, slipped her rubber gloves off and stuck them in the trash bag, tied it back up, and came compliantly over to my car. As stately as a queen, she climbed into the passenger side and buckled her seatbelt. Then, as I started the engine, she held out the baggie. “Analyze this, will you?”

Automatically I took the bag from her and held it under the dashboard light. Dental floss. Used. “Analyze it?”

“For DNA. And report back to me, please.”