Her look softened only slightly. “No. It’s not. Now just stay away from me and leave me alone.”
22
Kenzie was at the apartment went he got there, as they had agreed. Zachary had forgotten between the time that they talked and the time that he got home that she was coming. He brushed it off irritably as ADHD distraction. He’d just had his mind on the case. Of course she was there.
Kenzie greeted him with a brief hug and kiss, then studied his face. “What is it?”
“What? Nothing.”
She touched the worry lines between his eyes. “Something is bothering you.”
“Just thinking about the case.”
“What is it? You sounded happy on the phone with the way things were progressing.”
“I am. I’m glad that we might have a way to find the guy who hurt Heather. Really glad.” He didn’t want to tell her about running into Bridget at the gas station, and about his concerns with her health. What if Bridget were lying and the cancer was back? Or she didn’t know that it was back yet? He knew Kenzie wouldn’t like him worrying about it, but how could he not be upset when his ex-wife was in danger of her life? “No, I’m just worried about her.”
“About Heather?”
Zachary brought his thoughts back to the conversation. “Heather. Yes.”
“What are you worried about?”
They wandered together into the living room and sat down. Zachary looked around. Kenzie had ordered in, but he wasn’t hungry. His insides were still twisting around as he worried about Bridget.
“Just… I don’t know. Heather is dealing with something really traumatic… but she doesn’t have a support system. Her husband doesn’t even know about it. When she came to the door… it took a really long time and I was worried that she might have done something. And then, it was obvious she had been crying, but she didn’t show any emotion. The whole time I was there… she was keeping so much bottled up. I kept waiting for her to start crying, but she just withdrew. Put up a wall.”
Kenzie nodded, a hint of a smile on her face.
“I know I’m a hypocrite for thinking she’d be better off if she would talk about it and get some support,” Zachary admitted. “She told me that.”
“Yeah. You see what it’s like now to deal with someone who is holding so much inside, and you just can’t… reach them.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sorry for being that way, but… it’s just… when we were kids, the attitude was just to forget it and go on. It was best to just put bad experiences behind you.”
“Are you talking about the fire,” she asked carefully, “or something else?”
He wasn’t going to talk about Teddy.
“About everything. As a foster kid, they know you’re damaged. They know you’re not going to like things about the home they put you in. That you’re going to have trouble adjusting to a new school. That there are going to be personality clashes, especially with other foster kids or ‘troubled’ youth. And the attitude is—or at least, was—just shut up and deal with it. They don’t want to hear the complaints. The family is doing the best they can to deal with your physical needs, and they know it’s never going to be perfect. If you’re going through a rocky patch… you just push through. Whatever kind of crap you might have to deal with… you just try to survive.”
“I can understand that for little things. You’re not going to have all the toys and clothes other kids have, and you’re going to have to get used to new foods and rules and bedtimes. But for the more serious stuff… they wouldn’t tell you to just shut up, would they?”
“If they don’t listen to you about the little stuff, why would you talk to them about the big stuff? You don’t have…” Zachary searched for a way to put it into words, “you don’t have any trust. They haven’t given you any reason to think that they would fix it. If they can’t fix little things, and they don’t believe you or they blame you for things when you complain… you know they’d just do the same about other stuff. Look at the way Heather was treated when she was attacked. The cops told her it was her fault. Her parents and social worker told her that she had to give the baby up and never think about him again. They all knew she’d been raped. But it was inconvenient for them. They told her to just forget about it and move on. So that’s what we learned to do.”
Kenzie stroked his arm with the tip of her finger as she thought about it. “That makes me so sad, Zachary. For her and for all of you. You know, you see these movies on TV about foster care… about those inspiring cases where they took in a foster child and made him part of the family and everything worked out so wonderfully. Like Anne of Green Gables or The Blind Side. But what you’ve told me about your experiences, and what I’ve gathered from what Tyrrell and Heather have said… it’s far from a fairy-tale ending.”
Zachary nodded. He caught her hand and held it for a minute against his face, so warm and strong. She wanted to be there for him. And he didn’t want to shut her out. Not really.
“Everybody has stuff happen in foster care. People know they can get away with abuse because you’ve been trained not to complain.”
She looked at him and he tried not to look away. “You want to talk about it?”
“No. But maybe I do need to.”
It was three long days before Heather called. Zachary worked hard on other jobs to try to forget about her case, and to forget about the rest of the mess broiling in the back of his brain. He slept a lot, sometimes even in the middle of the day, and was irritable when anyone woke him up, though he refused to tell them that he’d been sleeping. He didn’t want anyone to know how much of his day he was spending just avoiding life.
He’d been dozing in front of his computer, trying to decide whether to lie down on the couch and actually get an hour of sleep, when the phone vibrating jolted him back into consciousness. He pulled it out, already scowling about whoever was waking him up, when he saw by the caller ID that it was Heather.
“Hey, Feathers.”
There was a sharp intake of breath and then she laughed. “Do you know how long it’s been since I heard that name, Zachy? Oh, my. I forgot!”
He smiled at the real pleasure in her voice. They’d had good times together. He wanted her to remember that. She had been a fun big sister. He wished he could still see some of that carefree bluster in her.
She gave another laugh and continued. “So I called to say… go ahead and set something up with the cop. I’ll give him the baby’s binky to test.”
“Great. I’ll give him a call. Is there a specific time that you want to meet? Or a time that doesn’t work for you?”
“No, I can do it pretty much any time. There’s no one here to tell me when I can or can’t do anything.”
“Okay. I’ll let you know when I’ve got it set up. And don’t worry, it’s going to be okay. It’s not going to be like it was back then.”
“I’m tough,” she said breezily, as if she had no concerns about it. Apparently, it was easier for her to mask her feelings over the phone. “Whatever. I don’t care what he says.”
23
Zachary had a meeting set up with Able and was on his way to meet the two of them within half an hour. The highway driving didn’t bother him. He always found it meditative, easy to get into a zen state. He’d had several therapists who had suggested meditation as a way to deal with his PTSD and ADHD, but none of them had ever suggested highway driving as a way to get into that mindset.
He met with Heather in the foyer of the police station. She was noticeably jittery, her eyes flicking around, trying to take everything in, hands tapping at the sides of her legs and worry lines between her eyebrows. He tried to be supportive and reassuring without treating her like a child or making promises he couldn’t keep.
“It shouldn’t take too long. Able is an old hand at this. He wants to solve the case, he just hasn’t had any evidence to go on. He’ll be happy to get DNA to test.”
Heather nodded. Her eyes were so wide that he c
ould see the whites all around her iris. He tapped the thumb and fingertips of one hand together, trying not to get wound up by her anxiety.
“It’s lucky that you kept those things from the baby. Not lucky, I mean. Smart. You couldn’t have known back then that they would ever be useful in the assault case, but you kept them, and you made sure they were safe, and that’s why we can move this case forward.”
“I just… wanted something to remember him by. I didn’t want to be forced by the social worker and everybody else. I wanted to make the decision myself.”
“Would you still have given him up if you’d had the choice? If it had been all up to you and you knew that you could have supports?”
She looked at him for a minute, the frown lines getting deeper, then they smoothed out. “No, probably not. I was just a kid myself. I wasn’t ready to be a mom. I was trying to keep myself alive. Being in charge of another person would have been too much for me. I was just trying to make it from one day to the next.”
“Yeah. But it still would have been nice if they had let you make that decision.”
Heather grunted in agreement.
Zachary saw Able approaching. Able looked around the lobby and gave Zachary a wave. “This way, folks.”
He led them again to a meeting room. A different one from where he had met Zachary before, he thought. Smaller. But maybe that was just Zachary’s anxiety and having more people in the room than when they had met the first time.
“This is Heather Goldman, my sister,” Zachary introduced. “Heather, this is Detective Able.”
Heather nodded. She folded her arms, not putting her hand out to shake. She looked thin and cold and Zachary could almost see her as she had been back then, a gawky adolescent, hurt and scared to death by what had happened to her and what was going to happen next. She probably hadn’t known the ordeal she was going to go through, but she knew enough to recognize that it wasn’t going to be good.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” Able suggested. He pulled out one of the chairs and sat down himself, not waiting to see if they would. Heather paused for a moment, then pulled out the next chair and sat down. Zachary pulled out the chair around the corner on her right and sat down with her. He gave her leg a reassuring pat and looked at her face to see if she wanted to say anything.
“We’ve come across some evidence that the police didn’t have at the time of the original investigation,” he told Able.
Able raised his eyebrows. He scratched the back of his neck and waited for more information. He hadn’t brought the file with him. Zachary had said that they had something to show him, not that they wanted to look at the file again.
“What they didn’t know at the time of the investigation was that Heather got pregnant by her attacker,” Zachary said, enunciating the words quickly and getting them out of the way. Like ripping off a bandage. “She had the baby and gave him up for adoption.”
Able tapped on the table with the end of a pen. “That’s very interesting. Even if they’d known it at the time, though, there wouldn’t have been anything they could do with it. Paternity tests wouldn’t be available for a number of years, and even then, they would need a sample to compare it against.”
“But now they can.”
“Do you know the location and identity of the baby you gave up?” Able directed his question at Heather.
But Zachary had promised her that she wouldn’t have to talk, and he jumped in to make good on his word. “She doesn’t know where he is and was never told who adopted him. But when I asked her if she had kept anything from when she was in hospital with the baby, she did.”
Zachary nodded to Heather, and she carefully put the baby pacifier in the plastic bag down on the table. Able stared at it, fascinated.
“A soother. The baby used this?”
“Yes,” Zachary agreed. “He used it for several days and it wasn’t washed. She put it into the plastic bag and she kept it hidden until now. It hasn’t been taken out of the bag.”
Able looked at Heather. “If we match it to something, you might have to testify in court. Could you testify to that? That the baby was the only one who used it and that you kept it protected from the time you took it out of his mouth until now?”
Heather nodded. “I never took it out of the bag. And no one else has ever touched it. Just me and the baby.”
“Well, there’s no telling how much the DNA might have degraded and if it will still be usable, but we can try.”
Zachary breathed out a long sigh of relief. “You’ll have the lab test it and run it through CODIS and any other databases the police department has access to? You’ll find out if the father has ever been convicted of a crime?”
Able nodded. “Best if I have a swab of the mother too. Will you give a sample?”
Heather nodded without the hesitation Zachary had seen in her previously.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Don’t thank me. You’re the one who is doing this. It never even occurred to me that there might be a baby or DNA that hadn’t been destroyed. I’m going to ask you some questions. This is for the record, it’s just procedure. Don’t take them personally, okay?”
Heather nodded. She looked at Zachary with dread in her eyes. Under the table, he caught her hand and held it tightly.
“Are you one hundred percent sure that your attacker was the baby’s father?”
She breathed out. “Yes.”
“Was there anyone else that you had sexual contact with?”
“No.”
“Before or after the assault. Anyone at all.”
“No.”
“Did you have a boyfriend at school?”
“No.”
“Anyone that you messed around with? Kissed under the bleachers or in a lonely hallway?”
“No.”
“What about in your foster home? Did Mr. Astor ever molest you?”
She shook her head. Zachary could see her withdrawing, shriveling up into herself. He squeezed her hand again.
“Never? He didn’t come into your room at night? He didn’t touch you? Ever?”
“No.”
He studied her, looking for the truth. “There were other boys in the home. Two older boys.”
“Yes.”
“What about them? Did you go out with either of them? Experiment? Did either one of them show you unwanted attention?”
“No.” She held tightly to Zachary’s hand. He could see her breathing, rapid and shallow. The little freckles stood out on a sheet-white face.
“And there was no one else who you were intimate with? No one at all?”
She shook her head.
“So you’re one hundred percent sure that this baby was conceived in the assault.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“What day was he born?”
Heather gave his date of birth. Able’s lips moved as he calculated the weeks between the two dates.
“A couple of weeks preterm.”
“Yes.”
“And his weight?”
“Six pounds.”
Able was checking all of the boxes. If the baby were weeks premature and weighed ten pounds, that would be a problem.
“Whose names were on the birth certificate?”
“Mine. And unknown.”
“If I tracked down the Astors or your social worker, they would tell me that you didn’t have any boyfriends?”
Heather looked terrified. “You’re not going to call them?”
“If we end up prosecuting the case, these questions are going to come up. They’re going to want to question your foster family and the social worker. And anyone else they deem appropriate. They’ll want as many first-hand witnesses as possible.”
“I didn’t have a boyfriend.”
“They would corroborate that?”
Heather nodded. “I haven’t seen them in years, though,” she said. “I don’t know where they are.”
“You leave that to me. I
f necessary, we can track them down. First, we’ll see if we can get a hit on this sample.”
She blinked, looking at it. “I just want to be able to move on.”
“Have you had counseling? We have victim services. I can give you some numbers.”
“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it.”
“But you have now. You’re stronger than you think.”
Heather looked up at him in surprise.
He met her gaze. “You are strong. You look at what you went through. If you want, I can bring the file in here and show you the pictures. The little girl that went through that hell was tougher than any of the cops who questioned her. Tougher than the foster mom or the social worker. Strong enough to stand up for herself and tell what happened to her. And to carry a baby and bring it into the world.”
Heather swallowed. “And to give him away.”
He nodded. “And to give him away. You have carried a heavy burden for decades. By yourself, without telling anyone about it. And you’re strong enough to share that burden with someone now and lighten the load a little.”
24
Heather’s step seemed a little lighter when they left the police station. Zachary didn’t know if she was going to call any of the numbers that Able had given her, but she had accepted them, folding them carefully and putting them into her purse. She was quiet as Zachary walked her to her car, a dark blue four-door. She stopped with her door open before getting in.
“Thanks.”
“He’s right, you know. You’re strong.”
“Strong enough to let it go?”
“I think so.”
“What about you?”
Zachary didn’t answer. His hand was on her car door, and she stroked the scar on one of his wrists that showed with his sleeve riding up a couple of inches.
“You’re strong too.”
Zachary didn’t believe it. He was a train wreck. Bridget had taunted him for being a coward, for running away from conflict, for having a panic attack when faced with his worst fears. Group home leaders and professionals who had been tasked with caring for him had bullied him relentlessly for his dysfunctional ADHD and PTSD behaviors.
He Was Not There Page 14
