The Tenderness of Thieves

by Donna Freitas

  “Okay,” I said when I’d caught up to him. “Okay,” I said a second time, more to myself than to Officer Connolly.

  My mind was on my dad.

  I could see him so clearly, standing near the coffee machine, laughing with the other police. He was like a ghost within these walls, haunting me.

  Once again, Officer Connolly held the door so I could pass through to his office, and I did.

  He sat down in his big metal chair with the cracked red pleather upholstery, eyeing me, waiting for me to talk. He rolled it around his desk so we would be on the same side, the wheels squeaking and creaking in protest. His office was tiny and cluttered, too small for a man of his size and stature, his desk pushed against the left wall and littered with papers and pens and carbon copy forms that most places stopped using twenty years ago. The tall plastic shelves that went from floor to ceiling along the right wall were no different. Except for a few filing boxes, they were piled with paper that didn’t seem organized in any particular way, giving me the urge to start fixing up the place.

  Just like I used to for my father.

  I pulled my eyes away from the mess.

  His chair squeaked as he leaned forward. The freckles of youth had faded into tired lines on his face. “Can I get you anything? Water? A Coke?”

  “No, I’m okay,” I said, but I wasn’t. Michaela got her mother’s genes, except for her nose—she had her father’s nose. I could see it on him now. I had my father’s mouth. Could Officer Connolly see it on me, too?

  He took a sip of his coffee. The big mug in his hand was white with black lettering that said SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE. He leaned backward, and the chair shrieked in protest from the shift in weight. “Jane,” he began. “As I’m sure you know, we haven’t had any more breaks in this case.”

  I nodded. My eyes darted to the wall above his desk, where he had a series of tiny, framed pictures of Michaela. Her formal school photos going back to what looked to be second grade. One of her in a swan ballerina outfit.

  “Jane?”

  I forced myself to look at him. “Sorry.”

  “We’re sure the previous robberies are related to the one at the O’Connors’, even though things happened differently there. The only difference was—”

  “Me,” I finished for him.

  He let out a big breath, like he’d been holding it. “That’s correct.” His badge glinted in the harsh fluorescent light. “It’s well known that when someone experiences a trauma, it can take a long time for memories to get straightened out. Details sometimes return months, even years later. I know this is hard on you, but I wanted to see if you’d remembered anything else. Any little detail, even one that doesn’t seem relevant. You never know, it might be the thing that breaks open this whole investigation.”

  I closed my eyes. Told myself to breathe. In. Out.

  Was I going to do it? Was I going to say something about Patrick? Or about his boots?

  “Jane, you’re like a daughter to me, you know that. I hate doing this to you. I hate that this happened to you. To your family. Your mom. Geez.”

  I opened my eyes again. Officer Connolly was shaking his head with sadness. His hand was red from gripping his mug so tightly. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to tell you much,” I said. “I really am. I was in the dark, and a lot of the time I was blindfolded.”

  “I know, Jane, I know. But like I said, even the smallest detail could be important.”

  I stared into his round face, his kind eyes, all classic Irish features and classic red hair. My father and Officer Connolly had been friends. Ridden alongside each other one year in a squad car. “There is one thing,” I said. The words tiptoed from my mouth. Tested the air. “It’s probably nothing.”

  Everything about Officer Connolly lifted right then. Head, eyebrows, chin, shoulders. He nodded. “Go on.” Even his voice had more altitude.

  “Before they”—I swallowed. My throat was sandy. The beach after the tide has pulled away—“before they tied the blindfold, there was this flash of metal near the floor. It was a boot. One of them had metal-toed boots.”

  Officer Connolly was nodding so hard he was bouncing. The chair squeaked with it. “Good, good.” He grabbed a pen and wrote something on a yellow legal pad. The edges of the paper curled upward in the humidity. He smiled at me, all encouragement and approval. “You never know.” He flicked the top of the pen once, then twice, the ballpoint disappearing, then reappearing. “That could be the missing piece that solves this.”

  “Okay.”

  Officer Connolly held the pen poised and ready for more. Black ink had stained his index finger. “Anything else, Jane?”

  My lips parted. Patrick McCallen. Possible owner of the boots. His name was right there, heavy on my tongue. But he’d been so nice to me last night—or he’d tried to be. It didn’t make sense. I needed to be sure before I gave him up. So I shook my head. “Nothing else,” I told Officer Connolly.

  “All righty, all righty,” he said, still nodding, though less forcefully than before. “You done good today. You done real good, Janie.” That name from his mouth, Janie, the nickname from my childhood, before I’d grown up to be just Jane. Officer Connolly stood, and the chair creaked with relief.

  “Sorry I’m not more helpful.”

  “Nah, you’ve been helpful. Don’t you worry. Thanks for coming down here today. I’ll show you out now.”

  “That’s okay. I know my way.”

  He sighed long and heavy, like the world was pressing him down. Looked at me with more sadness in his tired green eyes. “That you do now. That you do. If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure, but thanks.”

  Just before I left his office, he stopped me one last time. “Remember, if there’s anything else that comes back to you, anything at all . . .” He trailed off.

  “I know. Anything.” My hand was already on the doorknob, turning it. “I wish I wasn’t your only witness.” I said this in a small voice, so small I don’t even know if he heard me. “I wish with all my heart that the only other witness wasn’t dead,” I added in an even smaller one, before I was through the door and pushing my way outside into the gray of the cloudy day.

  February 19

  That night, I’d fallen asleep by accident. Head resting against the wall of the reading nook, face turned away from the lamplight. It was only a nap, but it was long enough that when my eyes blinked open, the short hand of the big antique clock on the wall was pushing ten p.m.

  “Shit,” I said to no one, my voice carrying through the grand, empty house, the shelves of books all around me eventually swallowing the sound.

  The snow outside was coming down heavy now, thick and fast around the streetlights. There were two lonely cars parallel parked on the road out front, already buried in white. It was so quiet, as though the snow silenced the world, a mother’s great long shhhh to her sleeping child as it fell toward the ground.

  My phone blinked with a message. Was I so out of it that I hadn’t heard it ring? I pushed the button for voice mail and listened.

  “Hi, sweetheart, guess who?” said the voice of my mother. “I’ve tried your cell several times, but the ringer must be off. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we are getting a surprise storm, and I’m worried about you being out so late. And before you hem and haw and even though I am still youthful enough for people to mistake me as your older sister, I am your mother and it’s my duty to worry. Can you please call me and let me know you’re all right? Love you!” There was a click, and the voice-mail system offered me a slew of options—save the message, erase the message, forward the message, followed by three more possibilities that I stopped listening to.

  I called home. It barely rang once before my mother picked up.

  “Sweetie! I’m so glad to hear your voice.”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” I said in a tone that told her to sto
p being crazy. “Don’t worry about me. I’m here late all the time, remember? I love this house.”

  “Yes, but not in a snowstorm.”

  “They didn’t predict snow.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t piling up outside,” my mother said. “And how do you plan on getting home in this? Hmmm?”

  “I’ll walk, like always.”

  “Oh, no, you won’t.” She was doing her best I’m your mother impersonation. “Not in this mess.”

  “Ma—”

  “I’m calling your father. He will come pick you up.”

  “Don’t bother Dad! He’s working.”

  “Exactly. Which means he’s already out and about and you’ll get picked up in a big safe police car that can handle this blizzard. My little Jeep is a death trap in snow like this, and I don’t want to risk it.”

  I stood by the window, taking in the scene outside again. It was piling up fast. If I tried to walk, I would be shin deep in snow the whole way, with all the watery slush freezing at the bottom. “Fine. Call Dad.”

  “Good. Though, let the record show that I was going to call your father either way, even if you did not acquiesce.”

  I laughed. “That sounded very TV-lawyer-ish.”

  “That’s excellent since I’ve been practicing,” she said, though the worry was still clear underneath the humor.

  “Ma, I’m going to go now.”

  “All right,” she sighed. “Just promise me you won’t go out in this until your father shows up. I don’t know how long it will take him to come get you, but you stay put until his car pulls up. Inside the house.”

  “Yesss,” I agreed.

  “I love you, Jane.”

  “I love you, too.”

  We both hung up.

  The clock said it was five past ten. Everything was lit by a ghostly bright glow from the snow. As the minute hand made its way toward ten fifteen and onward to ten thirty and ten forty-five, I returned to my reading, occasionally glancing outside to see if my father had arrived. The hands of the clock passed eleven. A few more minutes went by, but not enough that the big hand reached a quarter after.

  Then something strange happened.

  The lights at the front of the house went out.

  It must be the storm, I thought as I looked into the darkness of the snow and the night, trying to make out something, anything at all, now that the O’Connors’ front lawn had disappeared into blackness. A power outage. A tree fallen across wires, the weight of the ice just too much. But then I remembered the glow of my desk lamp—no, I saw it—falling across the stack of books. My coffee mug. The skin of my own hands. Illuminating the reading nook where I sat. A new thought, a question really, came to me:

  Why had the lights in the front yard gone out, but not the house ones?

  Why the outside, but not the inside?

  Could they be on different electric grids?

  That must be it, was the next thought to cross my mind. I considered calling my mother, calling my dad, too, but then decided that would be overreacting. It was just a couple of lights. The clock on the wall said it was well after eleven. My father’s police car would be pulling up any minute.

  I decided to get back to my reading while I waited. I’d only turned a single page when something else happened to pull me away again, something that frightened me for real this time.

  The light on the desk went out.

  The darkness around me was complete.

  I reached for my phone.

  Quickly, I texted my father.

  Daddy, are you close?

  EIGHT

  HANDEL DISAPPEARED FROM my life as suddenly as he’d appeared. Completely and totally. A week went by with no word from him and, in the summertime, that felt like a month. Signs for the upcoming Fourth of July festivities were being posted around town. Somehow I’d thought Handel and I would run into each other again, accidentally, which was when we would decide to go out a second time.

  But this didn’t happen.

  It wasn’t like we’d exchanged numbers, or that it even crossed our minds to do so. Handel was still on the list of people I needed to run into coincidentally, and without coincidence to bring us together, I was left to wonder if our date had been something imagined. Twice I’d gone down to the wharf hoping to catch a glimpse of him, and once to Levinson’s to get another roast chicken, as if this was a magical combination that might produce Handel Davies walking through the door of the deli. In the end, all my efforts amounted to nothing.

  My friends were split in their opinions about the situation.

  “Stop thinking about him, Jane.” Michaela stared at me hard before she turned over onto her stomach, flicking a few grains of sand from her beach towel. “It just means it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about him,” I protested, far too forcefully to be believed by anyone. Not even Bridget. But then, Bridget wasn’t having any of this Handel and I aren’t happening business. She was too romantic to let it go.

  “It’s okay if you were, Jane,” she said, all consolation and understanding. “In fact, if I were you, I’d go find him. He’s probably down at the docks, working.”

  Tammy snorted. Looked at Bridget. “What are you, the lame-boy-excuse police?”

  Bridget ignored her. “Or he’s probably just busy.”

  This made Tammy snort a second time.

  “Or he’s probably just hanging around with a cross section of the town delinquents,” Michaela offered, her voice muffled by the towel.

  “Point taken, M.” I hugged my knees. Rested my chin on them. Squinted my eyes against the sun. “The short reprieve you gave Handel is now over, and you’re back to disliking him.”

  “You got it,” Michaela said, lifting her chin just long enough to get these three words out.

  Tammy’s face got serious. “J, how do you feel? Are you disappointed?”

  Bridget watched me. Michaela made a show of shifting onto her side so she faced away from us.

  I turned to Tammy. “I am, kind of. No, not kind of, definitely. There was something special about that night we hung out.”

  “You were so excited about it,” Bridget reminded me. “I hate to think that the bad boy isn’t going to turn out to be a prince.”

  Tammy was about to snort again—I could see she wanted to—but she held off. Bridget was just being Bridget—sweet and romantic and meaning well. She always wanted a happy ending for everyone, and Tammy knew when to stop riding her.

  “Well, just because he’s of the boy species doesn’t mean he doesn’t get nervous like we do,” Tammy said, surprising all of us, I think. Michaela shifted. This time she turned toward us and sat up on her towel. “Maybe you intimidated him, Jane,” Tammy went on.

  “What?” I shot her a look. “Me, intimidate Handel Davies? I don’t think so.”

  “She might be right,” Bridget said. “You are, like, perfect, and all that. Totally hot with good grades and going to college”—this comment made me roll my eyes, but Bridget went on, uninterrupted—“and here comes Handel Davies, townie, fisher-boy from a notorious family, who’s going nowhere else.”

  “You mean, nowhere but jail,” Michaela said in a huff.

  Bridget and Tammy both shot her a look that said shut up.

  I was about to respond when a tennis ball, ratty and torn, landed next to Tammy, just missing her leg, which made her shriek in disgust. It was followed by a big golden retriever running up, well, to retrieve it, its owner close behind, trailed by two friends. Two of the three were African American: the first one, the dog owner, light-skinned; the other darker; and the third one had the same coloring as Bridget. All of them were male, and all of them were obviously from out of town—far enough out that they were rich. You could see it written all over them. Plus, they carried lacrosse sticks. No one around here played lacrosse.

  “Oh Lord,” Tammy said as they headed our
way. The dog panted next to her leg, and she patted its head absently.

  The problem with out-of-town boys is that they always think they’re better than us, better than everyone who’s grown up around here. They go to their fancy schools and do their fancy activities and drive their fancy cars, and this makes them feel like it’s okay to treat us like we’re lesser somehow—less educated, less sophisticated, less valuable as people. More gullible about everything, especially when it comes to why they are paying us attention. It never seems to occur to them we might be as intelligent as they are. That we might be going places they’d never dreamed about, even with all their fancy money. And when they come to our beach, trying to mix with girls like us, it generally means trouble and broken hearts. We might be townies, but we still deserved respect.

  Before they reached our beach setup, Michaela rolled her eyes. “Do boys actually think they’re not being obvious when they use the Whoops, can you give me back my tennis ball/Wiffle ball/baseball? approach at the beach? I mean, it’s as bad as the Do you have a light?/Do you know what time it is? winter-season approach.”

  “Shhhh.” Bridget’s eyes locked on the boys. “They’re cu-ute.”

  “Don’t forget,” I whispered to Michaela. I held the tennis ball to the dog’s mouth, then dropped it to the sand, where it immediately picked it up. “There was a time, not long ago, when we would have cut off an arm for any attention whatsoever from even a single boy, regardless of the lameness of the approach.”

  “Yeah.” Tammy adopted a bored look on her face, sunglasses on. “That was then, this is now, and this sort of attention is getting old,” she finished under her breath.