The Stranger Inside

by Unger, Lisa

  She could feel Gillian seize on this.

  “Wow,” said her friend. She was queen of the controlled gush—not over the top, sounding totally sincere. “That’s really amazing. That you all took time from your life to watch him, to protect your town.”

  Predictably, he swelled a little. “The job doesn’t end when you go home. You never stop being a cop, even when you retire.”

  “Was anyone watching him the night he was murdered?” she asked.

  Rain caught just the flicker of a smile on Harper’s face.

  “No, not that night. Unfortunately, there was a gap in our surveillance. My grandson was graduating from high school, one of the other guys had date night with his wife. Kreskey had, in fact, been kind of straight-arrow since his release. To be honest we were less worried than when he’d just been released. I mean, the guy was so pumped full of meds, he was like the walking dead.”

  “You investigated the murder,” said Rain.

  He sat forward in his chair. “Yeah, if you can call it an investigation.”

  “Meaning.”

  “I mean there was no evidence, no witnesses. Whoever did it planned it, executed with precision and left no trace of himself behind. We did everything by the book—interviewed neighbors, a couple of the more dangerous guys at the facility where he resided. We watched the house for a while. We never had a single lead or suspect. The case is cold.”

  He nodded toward the kitchen. “I’ve got my old files back there. I still go through them sometimes. Your case, Tess, Hank, Kreskey. It’s still with me, as I can see it’s still with you. Some of them, you can just never let go.”

  “Can you tell us how he was killed?” asked Gillian.

  He gave Rain a look, like—You really want to know? Rain already knew the answer. She just wanted him to say it for the story.

  “It didn’t look like he put up much of a fight, which I didn’t get. Kreskey was a big guy.” He lifted his hand, fist clenched as if he were holding a weapon. “A knife through the heart.”

  Rain was surprised at a sudden rush of nausea, a sheen of sweat popping up on her brow.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, maybe catching her expression. “When you know what people can do, it changes you, doesn’t it?”

  It does, thought Rain. Of course it does.

  “Did you have any theories about who might have killed him?” asked Gillian.

  Something came down over Harper’s face, a kind of veil, a shield.

  “No,” he said flatly. “I don’t have the first idea. Like I said, we did everything by the book. Sometimes you just don’t get the answers you want.”

  “We were able to get some of the transcripts of the people you interviewed. There was one missing. Greta Miller, the Kreskeys’ neighbor.”

  Detective Harper chuckled. “Greta,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to the transcript, but that was a short interview, as I remember it. I can look in my file, but I didn’t have many notes from that talk. She didn’t want to see us in the first place, finally answered the door, then claimed to have seen nothing, basically threw us out. Said no one ever came when she called about kids partying and making a mess at the Kreskey house, and why should she help us?”

  “So, she could hear people out at Kreskey’s from her house?” asked Gillian.

  “Doubtful,” he said. “Sound carries sometimes, foggy nights. But she was always out on those trails, taking pictures of birds. She’s a bit of nut, if you ask me.”

  He circled a finger around his temple.

  “Won some awards, though, kind of a big deal in her field, I think.”

  Rain’s phone pinged again. She took it from her pocket.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  She won’t take the breast milk you pumped, and she’s really fussy. When will you be back??

  Rain felt a flash of annoyance. They hadn’t even been gone two hours. Could he not manage a couple of hours?

  The retired detective took advantage of her distraction and got up to leave the room. “Can I get you girls some coffee?” he tossed behind him.

  Gillian raised her eyebrows at Rain. “Everything okay?”

  She showed the phone to Gillian, who rolled her eyes. There was that brutal tug-of-war between the two parts of herself, again.

  “Let me help,” Gillian called after the detective, following him into the kitchen. She could record on her smartphone—which was no doubt on Do Not Disturb.

  I need another hour, she typed back to Greg. We’re in the middle of an interview.

  She watched the dots pulse. Oh. Okay.

  There was attitude in that text. Just two simple words and, somehow, he’d managed to communicate that he was overwhelmed, wanted her to come back. What happened to I’ll do anything I can to help? Man up, honey.

  She turned down the notification volume at least and followed Gillian and Harper into the kitchen. Pushing through the doors, she felt like she’d passed through a time machine into the seventies—old linoleum floors and ancient avocado appliances in need of replacing. On the counter, a battalion of pill bottles.

  “I’ve talked to a lot of cops,” Gillian was saying. She sat on a green swivel chair, leaning on a Knoll-style glass-top tulip table. “And I’ve never met one who didn’t have a theory on the cases still keeping them up nights.”

  “Not this one,” he said. “And don’t misunderstand. It’s the kids, what happened to you all, that still bothers me. Not Kreskey.”

  He turned to face them both, Gillian and Rain now seated at the kitchen table. “I know it’s not very PC or whatever. These days the liberals run the show, it’s all about prisoners’ rights and what makes us tick. Rehabilitation. Education. Job training. But there’s something that cops, soldiers, some doctors know that other people don’t seem to get—or don’t want to get.”

  “And what’s that?” asked Rain, inching Gillian’s recording phone closer.

  There was a coldness to Detective Harper that she’d seen in him before.

  “That some people are better off dead.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “It’s there,” she says. “I swear it is.”

  “I believe you.”

  I do. I do believe her. Or, anyway, I believe that she believes it. But my search of the property revealed nothing. Just the house, where I’ve never seen anyone come or go. There was no other structure. I was out there late looking, and I’m exhausted having barely clocked three hours of sleep. She doesn’t know any of that, of course.

  This girl, she’s so thin and so tense, I just want to cover her with a blanket. Her foster mother, Jen, younger than most, loving and concerned, sits out in the waiting area. This is an emergency session because Angel has been having nightmares—night terrors really, where she wakes screaming and inconsolable.

  Angel claims that her former foster family abused her, and that other children in their care were also abused. Her new foster mother reported Angel’s claims to the police a while back, and no one’s done a thing. There was a cursory scan of the property, an investigation into the family that housed her before the couple she’s with now. But no evidence has been unearthed to corroborate her story.

  “There was still someone else there when I ran away. A boy.”

  “What was his name?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know. He was younger than me, I think. He didn’t talk much. He had a birthmark on his shoulder that looked just like a heart. So, I called him Val, short for Valentine.”

  She’s very creative. That’s what makes her a good liar.

  “He’s in my dreams—alone and scared, Dr. Reams,” she says. “Someone has to save him.”

  She leans forward, her eyes wide and desperate. There’s an off note; I just can’t place it. It might be that she’s used to being disbelieved, discounted. It might be that she’s
lying, making up stories for attention. I have an open mind.

  “I’ll make some calls,” I say. “I’ll push for a closer look.”

  “What if it’s too late?”

  We both know how it feels when help shows up too late, don’t we, Lara?

  “All we can do is try.”

  She leans back, pulls her legs up onto the couch and hugs herself into a ball. She stares out the window and I’m aware that the fall color show has faded, leaves brown and falling. Soon the trees will be bare. Winter. The Winter girl, isn’t that what they kept calling you in the media?

  “We’re not just throwaways, you know,” says Angel, suddenly angry. “Because our parents didn’t want us, or they were too fucked up to raise us. We’re people.”

  “Yes,” I say gently. “Of course.”

  “But, like, you see that, right? How people just don’t care. If no one finds him, and a year from now someone stumbles on his bones—there’ll be tears and flowers and all of that. But no one cares enough right now to look for him.”

  “People do care—I do. Your foster mother, Jen, she said they’ve started the proceedings for your permanent adoption. She cares about you. I think you know that. It’s the institutional processes that can make the system seem inhumane. But, trust me, plenty of people care.”

  She shakes her head, eyes going hard. I didn’t love the blank look of anger on her face. She’s too young to be so jaded, so worn down.

  “Do you think she’s telling the truth?” her foster mother, Jen, asks me, after Angel is hypnotized by her new iPad in the waiting room. If I could tell parents one thing it would be to get rid of those devices, or at least strictly limit them. They’re turning our kids into a generation of addicts.

  I’m careful about how I answer, because I do believe something happened to Angel at that foster home. I’m just not sure what. “I know that she believes it,” I say. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think she’s lying.”

  “She’s so fragile,” Jen says, a tear escaping and trailing down her face before she can wipe it away. “I just want to help her get whole and look to the future—with us.”

  I hand her the tissue box; I go through a case a month.

  “We’ll get there,” I promise. “She’s strong.”

  Jen and her husband, William, are dream fosters, affluent people who couldn’t have children of their own and looked to the system of abandoned older children rather than to private or overseas adoption for a baby. It’s a hard road they’ve chosen, one that may lead to heartbreak.

  “I was in the system,” Jen tells me. “Did I ever mention that?”

  “You didn’t,” I say. “But I guess it explains your desire to bring Angel into your home, into your life. Most people wouldn’t have the strength or the patience to manage a troubled girl.”

  She nods, dabs at her eyes.

  “I bounced from foster to foster,” she says, clutching her leather bag to her middle. You wouldn’t know it to look at her. She looks like a woman who came from privilege, who doesn’t know anything else—fine features, expensively coiffed and dressed. “Finally, I aged out, worked my way through college, where I met William. We built a life, a family, just the two of us. His family have more or less adopted me—I have sisters and cousins, parents. I want to give that to someone else. I was Angel. Inside maybe I still am.”

  “She can learn a lot from your strength and resilience,” I say. “Talk to her. Tell her about your experiences, even the painful ones. Sometimes it helps more than anything else to see someone thriving and well on the other side.”

  She smiles gratefully.

  “You’re a nice man, Dr. Reams,” she says. “Are you married?”

  I am taken aback by the question. It’s not about me. It never is. That’s one of the things I like so much about my profession, I can disappear in the helping of others. I am trained to observe my feelings, distance myself from them, to focus on the people in my care. And people in pain, especially children and adolescents, are not prone to worrying about others. I am a sounding board, a strong and comforting voice, a well of advice and instruction. I am not a person with needs and feelings.

  “I’m not,” I say, feeling myself flush. There’s some shame to this fact. I have closed myself to that kind of life—the life of husband and father, of lover, even friend. I have given myself over to other things—my work mainly, my darker activities. Plus, there’s my old friend, the one who even now I can feel tugging on my consciousness. He is not comfortable with intimacy; strong emotion makes him harder to ignore and control.

  Hank, my mother laments. You’re such a handsome man, financially comfortable, kind. Why can’t you meet someone?

  She wants that, for me to love and be loved. I have stopped wanting that for myself.

  “I hope this is not inappropriate,” Jen says. “We’re having a party for Angel, kind of a welcome thing where she can meet friends and family. We’d like you to come.”

  She slips a card across the small end table between the couch where she sits and the chair that I’m in.

  “I’ll try to make it,” I say. “Thank you.”

  I look at the invitation, pink and printed. “Join us to welcome Angel into our home and our life.”

  “This is a nice thing,” I say. “Important for her.”

  “She seems tense about it. She’s worried people won’t like her. I told her that they will, of course. But it’s not really about them and what they think—it’s about her getting to know the people who are going to be a part of her new life.”

  I understand Angel’s fear. Those marked by trauma always feel apart.

  “Someone who hasn’t had a lot of love or attention might feel uncomfortable with it at first,” I offer. “I think she’ll grow into it.”

  I know how Angel feels. Intimacy can be painful, the closeness, the comfort of it. If you’re always waiting for it to go away, you almost can’t stand to have it in the first place. That’s how I felt with you, Lara. Our pleasure, those deep moments we shared, the union of our bodies, it was as much agony as it was ecstasy. I think I always knew he’d hurt you, that I couldn’t stop him. Now I just try to keep him from hurting anyone else who doesn’t deserve it.

  “I’m not pushing her? Trying too hard? William thinks I’m hovering too much.”

  “Pushing is okay, as long as you comfort her if she falters, and help her keep trying after that.”

  “It might help if you were there?” she says. Shyly, a question.

  “I’ll be there,” I say.

  I look at my planner, an old-school leather-and-paper behemoth that sits on the desk. The weekdays are packed, every single section filled with scrawl. The weekends, on the other hand, are totally blank into infinity, page after page of nothing. Live your life, Hank. Love, laugh, find someone, start a family. Jesus, get a dog. That’s how you honor Tess. Not like this. That was your sage advice the last time we communicated. A long time ago now.

  I pencil the party in, the time, the address. It’s not really a personal invitation, I tell myself. It’s more about helping Angel through a transition that might be uncomfortable.

  “Are you going to keep looking into it? Angel’s story.”

  “I have one more person I can call.”

  She’d stopped hugging her bag, put it on the ground and leaned forward.

  “I was wondering if we should just let it go?” Worry etched into her brow.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want her to move on. If something did happen there, and she was a witness, doesn’t that just hook her into the past, keep her reliving trauma and abuse?”

  I get it. She wants to speed Angel on the road to wellness, to a kind of normal. But here’s the thing—you can’t just take the intact pieces forward and try to glue them into a person. You have to bring all the broken, shattered bits, a
s well. If something happened to Angel there and no one ever deals with it, and worse, no one believes her, that’s a wound that might not heal. I tell her as much.

  She listens, nods slowly. I can tell by the way her eyes dart to the left, she’s accessing memories. By the drain of blood from her face, I can tell they’re not good ones. Then, “But we don’t always get justice, do we? Wrongs aren’t always made right. And bad people get away with the worst things—all the time. Do we cling to that, use it as a reason to not move forward into whatever life we may have ahead? Do we stay broken because the people who broke us didn’t get what they deserved?”

  The heat comes up to my cheeks and I find I can’t meet her gaze, drop my eyes to a faceted paperweight on my desk. When the light strikes it just right, it casts rainbow shards on the wall behind me.

  Yes, I thought, not without a twist of shame. Yes, in fact, some of us do just that.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Really?

  Her husband’s hair was a crazed tousle, shirt dotted with mashed avocado, and the kitchen—the aftermath of a kid hurricane, a colorful muddle of Lily’s plastic dishes, sippy cups, utensils, Greg’s coffee cup and lunch plate. The floor, an obstacle course of toys.

  “Wow,” said Rain, putting down her bag. “Four hours?”

  “I think I’ll head upstairs and pack,” said Gillian diplomatically.

  Greg handed Lily over and collapsed on the couch with a great sigh.

  It would have been funny if it wasn’t also kind of annoying. Was the hardwiring just different? The whole caregiving thing just not in the male DNA?

  Rain wiped the baby’s face, then set about cleaning up the kitchen with Lily balanced on her hip. It took about a minute to clean up, wipe up, even with Lily grabbing for everything.

  “It’s not like it’s hard,” he was saying, arm over his eyes. “Not in a bad way, it’s just that it’s so totally consuming.” He was incredulous.

  “I didn’t even take a shower,” he went on, as Rain picked up the scattered toys, tossed them in the wicker bin. “I mean—I couldn’t.”