The Summer Children (The Collector Series Book 3)

by Dot Hutchison

  “I’m not that naïve!” she protests, but I shake my head.

  “You want to be. You’re not, and you know you’re not, but you want a world that simple, and you lash out at the people who remind you that it isn’t.”

  Her hands are trembling. I watch her fingers tighten around the cup to try and stop it, and then she puts the cup down and hides her hands in her lap. “This sounds a lot like you breaking up with me.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Really?”

  “I should have stopped pretending a long time ago. But you have to understand this, Siobhan: I’m not doing it anymore. You need to decide if you can be in a relationship with someone with a painful personal history, someone who needs to be able to talk about difficulties or triumphs with a job you hate. If you can, or think you can, wonderful. I really hope you do, and that we can figure out how to make this work going forward. If you can’t, I can understand that, but that’s your choice to end it.”

  “You’re putting that on me.”

  “Yes.” I drain the last of my coffee and stuff the trash into the cup. “Will you let me tell you something else about the children?”

  Her expression says, hell no, but after a moment, she nods.

  “They were hurt by their parents, and when this woman took them from their homes, she brought them to my house and told them they’d be safe. I would keep them safe. And yes, it’s terrifying that she knows where I live and what I do, but she’s also trusting me to keep these children safe. The history I have with my job, the reputation I’ve made with it, means these children aren’t being left in the house with their dead parents. It’s a small mercy, but a mercy nonetheless. She isn’t hurting the kids, and she knows I won’t either.”

  “I’m not sure I have anything to say to that,” she replies shakily.

  “That’s okay. Just think on it while you’re making your decision.”

  My phone buzzes with another text, this one from Detective Mignone. Wong took pictures of his stepdaughter. In the photos, she doesn’t seem to be aware of it. Social worker wants you there when they tell her.

  It might be close to an hour before I can get there, I reply.

  That’s fine. I’ll let her know.

  “I have to head to Manassas,” I announce.

  “You’re going home? The day just started.”

  “My yesterday hasn’t ended yet, and I’m going to the hospital to talk to one of the kids. Do you want to walk back with me or do you need some time?”

  She looks at me for a long minute, and her shoulders slump. “I’ll stay for a bit. I guess . . . I guess I’ll talk to you . . . when?”

  “Whenever you decide. You’re at bat.”

  “At bat?”

  “With a brother like Eddison, is it really so shocking baseball has crept into my vocabulary?” I stand and toss my trash, including the crumbled mess of her cannoli when she nods. I’m not sure she ate any of it, honestly. “I won’t show up at your apartment or your desk, won’t send you anything, won’t text or call or email. I’m not going to pass notes like in grade school. This is up to you.”

  I hesitate, then decide what the hell and lean down to kiss her. However pissed at me she is, our bodies know each other, and she leans into me, her hand curling around my elbow. She tastes like raspberry and white chocolate and peppermint from that silly drink. There’s a catcall from a passing driver, but I ignore that, focused on the feel of her lips on mine, the small sigh when my finger strokes along her jawline. This may be the last time we kiss, and it’s frightening to realize that I’ve given up any say in that decision. Frightening, but right. When I pull away, it isn’t far, our breaths mingling as my forehead rests against hers. “Te amo y te extraño y espero que sea suficiente.”

  Walking away feels like leaving a piece of me behind, but I don’t look back. I head into the store instead, ordering drinks for Eddison, Sterling, and Vic, and a second one for myself. When I start back to the office, cups carefully slotted into a carrier, Siobhan isn’t at the table anymore.

  10

  Sarah’s sheer fury at learning her stepfather had cameras hidden around her room takes up pretty much the rest of the day. She’s so angry and so hurt, but she also hasn’t told her sister what happened, so all that rage spirals inward until we take her outside and let her scream. Nancy, a social worker with over thirty years of experience, expertly intercepts the running security guards to let them know what’s going on, and I stay with the shrieking, sobbing preteen in the little garden space that’s probably seen a lot of such things. She calms slowly, more a symptom of exhaustion than any actual calm, I think, and asks if she can see the pictures.

  “Do you think it will help you?” Nancy asks evenly.

  “They’re pictures of me. How many other people are seeing them?”

  “Detective Mignone found them when he was going through your stepfather’s closet, and he immediately put them into an envelope and sealed them,” I explain. “There will be one person who will have the job of cataloguing the pictures into evidence, along with a basic description of the contents, and then the new envelope will be sealed. Given that Mr. Wong is dead and cannot be brought up for trial, there’s no reason for the pictures to ever see the inside of a courtroom. There’s no reason for lawyers to request to review the evidence.”

  “What if Samuel showed them to someone else? Like to his friends or something, or shared them online?”

  “Detective Holmes is asking her department to let her partner with the FBI cybercrimes division,” I tell her. “We have people who specialize in tracking files and photos online. If he sent them to anyone using his computer, they’ll find out. The police will also be talking to his coworkers and friends.”

  “So even if they didn’t get pictures, they’ll know there are pictures?”

  “No. They won’t mention the pictures specifically unless they’re pretty sure they’ve got someone. They’ll be very careful, Sarah. No one wants to see you hurt more.”

  “And if they do have pictures?”

  “They’ll be arrested and tried for possession of child pornography. Sarah, you are twelve years old. No one, and I mean no one, wants those photos out for anyone to see.”

  “But I have to know,” she whispers, dropping to the bench like a puppet with severed strings.

  “I can understand that.” Nancy leans forward, not crowding Sarah but engaging a little more now that the yelling has stopped. “But they’re trying to protect you. Those photographs are evidence of a crime, Sarah, and they’re not simply going to give them to you, even if you are the one in them. They’re not going to give back child pornography. Do I believe seeing them could help you? Possibly. Do I believe seeing them could hurt you? Probably. Sarah . . .”

  Sarah, scratching at her wrist where the plastic hospital band is scraping her skin, waits for her to finish the thought, which is a good sign, I think.

  “What your stepfather did to you, what he took from you, was extreme. Do you really want to see how much else he took?”

  “I don’t . . .” The girl blows out a frustrated breath. “I don’t like other people seeing a piece of me I don’t know. Samuel hurt me in private, but now these pieces of it are public.”

  “They’re not public.”

  “But other people are seeing them, other people know they exist and why and how, and I don’t get to see them.”

  Nancy considers her for a long moment, and I can almost see her running through options in her mind. “The only thing I can promise you is that we’ll talk to the advocate about it once the court appoints someone. Beyond that it is completely out of my hands. I will promise that one piece, though. We’ll see if there’s any legal basis to request it. What I need from you in return is to prepare yourself for disappointment. If, and that’s a big if, you’re granted permission to see them, that has to be the unexpected outcome.” She reaches out slowly, just two fingers extended, and touches Sarah’s cheek lightly with the backs of he
r fingers. It’s nonthreatening, a way to touch and reassure without implying the possibility of harm. “You cannot let those pictures be the thing you count on to heal you. You have to find your way without them. Can you work with me on that?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not a good one.”

  Sarah huffs out a laugh and looks surprised by it, and I think that’s probably a good sign too.

  When I leave them, they’re still in the garden, talking over how best to tell Ashley what their stepfather did. From what Sarah says, Ashley liked Samuel, because he gave her pretty things. She’s going to have a hard time understanding.

  I head to Vic’s, because that’s what this team does when we don’t know what to do, and Eddison and Sterling pull up a few minutes behind me. Marlene comes out to meet us, even though we all have keys, and wraps me in a tight hug, her slender arms digging into my back in a way that should be painful but is actually comforting. “How are you doing?” she asks softly.

  I give her a crooked smile. “I’m doing.”

  “Well, that’s something then, isn’t it? And that poor girl?”

  “Angry.”

  “Good.”

  It makes me laugh, and I hug her back, letting go only when Eddison and Sterling get within her hugging range.

  Vic’s daughters are all out for the evening, either working or catching up with friends, so there’s only six of us sprawled across the back patio around the grill. Jenny put together what she calls hobo dinners, where you toss a bunch of things onto a square of aluminum foil, crunch it into a pouch, and throw it onto a covered grill or into an oven. She’s got an entire book of handwritten recipes for them, and they are always delicious, provided Vic does his part and gets them off the grill before catastrophe happens.

  “Priya sent me a thing today,” Sterling tells me as we watch Marlene and Jenny play tug-of-war with Eddison’s curls. Jenny’s trying to convince him to cut them, or at least get a trim for God’s sake, and Marlene is dramatically proclaiming he’s allowed to do no such thing. Between them, Eddison is blushing and stammering and throwing us increasingly desperate looks for help. We stay a safe distance away with our beers.

  “She does that sometimes. What did she send?”

  She hands me her phone, which has a link in the message bubble. When I touch it, it takes me to a collection of De-Celebration photosets, where women celebrate a divorce or the end of an engagement with photoshoots of them destroying their wedding dresses in various ways. One woman and her collection of bridesmaids joyously shove their poufy dresses into a woodchipper. Another group is wearing their gowns and playing paintball. One woman, who looks to have torn her dress into strips and tied them together, is climbing down from a hotel window painted BRIDAL SUITE—JUST MARRIED.

  “¡¿Qué chingada?!”

  “Right? Look at . . . oh, which one was it . . . ah, this one.”

  I giggle, staring at the screen and its zombie bride and bridesmaid brigade. “That is definitely a creative use for a nonrefundable dress.”

  “She asked if I had any ideas.”

  “Do you?”

  “Not yet.” She takes a long sip of beer, then raises the bottle to Eddison in a salute when he yields his pride enough to run away from Marlene and Jenny. “But it’s got me thinking.”

  God bless Priya.

  After an amazing dinner of chicken and zucchini and marinara sauce, and mushrooms for those of us who like them, we talk for a while about the Hanoverian girls, and how strange it will be next year when Janey goes off to college like her sisters. When Marlene starts yawning, we clean up to head out, even though she calls us silly for it.

  “You coming home with me?” Eddison asks.

  Sterling answers before I can. “No, with me. You can have an estrogen-free evening for once.”

  “Y puede que la luna vaya a caer del cielo,” he mutters.

  “What was that?”

  “Thank you, I appreciate it.”

  “Smooth,” I whisper, and elbow him in the side. He rubs at his ribs with a scowl, but doesn’t reply.

  I text Holmes so she knows we’re ready to install the cameras Sterling picked up on the way to Vic’s, and by the time we reach the house, a uniformed officer is there to let us past the police tape. He greets us affably and watches us work. The cameras are small, mostly discreet and easy to hide, and Sterling’s worked with them before. Which is good, because when I say we install it, I mean Sterling does, and I hand her things as she asks for them. It only takes her an hour to get them both up and properly networked, the video dumping to both an external hard drive and an online data cache. She’s our tech guru whenever Yvonne is unavailable.

  We thank the officer and hit the road to Sterling’s apartment. She lives only a few streets down from Eddison, in a complex owned by the same company and which looks almost identical save for the buildings being pale orange rather than fawn-brown. She sorts through her mail at the box, dumping three-quarters of it straight into the trash can in the corner of the mail room. “Do companies actually bring in enough business from junk mail ads to be worth the money and waste?”

  “Probably not, but why should that stop them?”

  Her apartment is up on the second floor, and she pauses with her key in the lock. “It might be a little messy right now,” she says apologetically. “I’ve been going through everything to pull donations.”

  “Is there a clear path?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there bugs?”

  “No,” she says more slowly, giving me a sideways stink-eye.

  “Is anything growing?”

  “No!”

  “Then we’re good.”

  “You have depressingly low standards,” she sighs, and pushes the door open to flick on the entry light.

  I follow her in, closing and locking the door behind me, and get my first-ever look at her place. “Holy fucking God, Eliza.”

  Startled, she drops her keys instead of hanging them on the hook she’d been reaching for. “You never call me Eliza.”

  “That’s because I’ve never seen this before. I may never be able to call you Sterling again.”

  She blushes deeply and retrieves her keys, hanging them neatly on the small claw on the coatrack. “I’m never letting Eddison come here, am I?”

  “Oh hell no, he will run screaming for the parking lot.” I laugh, taking a few steps into the apartment. The walls are painted a delicate, icy sort of pink, with one wall a bolder pink for accent. The sliding glass door leading out to the tiny balcony is covered not only by vertical blinds to block the sun, but also by a sheer pink drape and bracketed by lavender and baby blue curtains, with one of those . . . what is it, a dust ruffle? A valance? The shorter thing that goes over the tops of the curtains, anyway, and like the curtains, it’s trimmed in two lines of pink ribbon with tiny bows at intervals. Every single thing in the room looks perfectly coordinated, like a spread in Martha Stewart Living, possibly like Blessed Saint Martha of the Cupcakes came down herself and anointed it. The same is true in the kitchen, which has coordinating towel sets hanging from the drawer and oven handles.

  The only mess I can see is around the dining room table with its pale yellow and mint green layers of tablecloths. Two of the chairs have masses of clothing draped over them, one has a half-full box open on the seat, and the other a mostly full trash bag.

  “Holy fucking God, Eliza Sterling. I . . . I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw so many ruffles. Or are those flounces?”

  Her face is burning now, and she busies herself with hanging her purse just so next to her keys. “Please don’t tell Eddison.”

  “I couldn’t possibly spoil the surprise.” I can’t stop laughing, and the poor girl looks more embarrassed by the minute, so I drape myself over her shoulder in a kind of koala hug. “Why didn’t you ever say you were so freaking girly outside of work?”

  That at least gets me a crooked smile. “It’s hard enough to get taken s
eriously. Can you imagine the guys finding out about this?”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  I slump into her, digging my chin into her shoulder. “I’m trying to remember the last time you sparred with a man and it didn’t end with him getting slammed repeatedly into the mats. You always kick their asses. It’s why Eddison won’t spar with you. When they can beat you sparring, then they can give you shit about the pink and frills.”

  She laughs and pushes me away. “Let me go change and I’ll help you get the couch set up.”

  I change in the living room, into a T-shirt and boxers freshly liberated from Eddison’s dresser because my other ones really need to be washed, and discover that the drawer of one of the end tables is actually a tiny gun safe. “Oh-two-one-four-two-nine,” she announces when she comes back out and sees me looking at it. “I know it’s stupid but I wanted something I didn’t have to think about.”

  “Oh-two-one-four, that’s what, Valentine’s Day? Two-nine?”

  “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, 1929.”

  I digest that for a moment, looking around at all the ruffles and pastels and perfectly coordinated decorations. “You are a complicated person, Eliza Sterling.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “Oh, hell yes.”

  With her coffee table moved up against the entertainment center, there’s enough room for the couch to pull out into a bed, which we finish off with a complete bedding set she grabs from the linen closet. She just rolls her eyes at my intermittent snickering.

  “I can’t help it,” I insist. “It’s just . . . you’re so severe at work, you only wear black and white, you always have your hair back, you’re so damn careful with your makeup, and then here it’s this absolute fairy tale. I love it.”

  “You do?”

  “Absolutely! It’s just going to take my brain some time to reconcile the two. Anyway, you should have seen how long it took me to stop laughing the first time I saw Eddison’s apartment.”