The Summer Children

by Dot Hutchison

  Eddison drives me to his place, and we bicker the entire time in order to keep me awake. We’re frequently short on sleep, especially during a case, and we’ve learned tricks to keep ourselves going. Still, it’s a relief to pull up to his building.

  Eddison’s apartment is mostly bland, even a little sterile. You have to hunt for the things that make it look lived-in: the worn patches on the black leather couch, the small divot in the coffee table where he kicked too hard while watching a baseball game. Honestly, the things that make it look almost like a home are all gifts. Priya gave him the dining room table, after she made him help her rescue it from a closing Mexican restaurant. The brightly, chaotically painted tiles on top give the space its only burst of color. She also took the pictures that surround the large television, portraits of Special Agent Ken in his travels.

  And by Special Agent Ken, I mean a Ken doll in a tiny FBI windbreaker. The photos are excellent in and of themselves, black-and-white compositions with beautiful attention to detail and light, but it’s definitely a Ken doll, and I love it.

  We met Priya Sravasti eight years ago, when her older sister was murdered by a serial killer whose victim count ultimately hit sixteen girls. Three years ago, Priya was nearly the seventeenth. She lives in Paris now, attending university, but somewhere over the years our team simply adopted her, and she became family. She also became Eddison’s best friend; despite their age difference, they bonded over being prickly and angry and missing their sisters.

  No matter how long it’s been since Faith got kidnapped, Eddison will never stop missing his little sister. There are no photos of her displayed, but there aren’t photos of anyone except Special Agent Ken out where people can see them. Eddison protects the people he loves by hiding their pictures away, where he can look at them when he wants but no one else is likely to find them. Only at work does he keep a picture of Faith, right next to a picture of Priya, and they’re his reminder of why he does this job, why it means so much to him.

  Vic has his daughters; Eddison has his sisters, even if he still struggles with naming Priya that way.

  I change for sleep, boxers and a T-shirt I accidentally stole from Eddison during a case and declined to return, while he digs through his linen closet. Together, we put sheets and a blanket on the couch. He waves a yawning goodbye and disappears into his room, where I can hear him moving about for a few more minutes as I brush my teeth and scrub off two days of makeup at the kitchen sink.

  I’m bone-deep tired, the kind of exhausted where my eyes hurt even when they’re closed, but despite the comfort of the couch I’ve slept on countless times, I can’t seem to fall asleep. I keep seeing Ronnie, his eyes so shattered and wounded within a mask of blood. I shift positions, hugging one of the pillows to my chest, and try to settle.

  Eddison’s snores rumble through the silence, courtesy of a long-ago broken nose that he couldn’t be bothered to get set properly. They’re not loud, his snores, it’s never been a problem to share a hotel room with him, but they’re reassuringly familiar. I can feel my bones getting heavier, the stress gathering and slipping away in rhythm with the soft sounds.

  Then one of my phones rings.

  Groaning and cursing, I roll over and grab it, squinting at the overly bright display. Oh mierda, it’s my tía. I know exactly why she’s calling. Fuck. I don’t want to talk to her right now.

  Ever, really, but especially not now.

  But if I don’t, she’ll keep calling, and the voice mails will get increasingly shrill. Snarling a little, I accept the call. “You already knew I wasn’t going to call,” I say instead of hello, keeping my voice down so I don’t bother my partner.

  “Mercedes, niña—”

  “You already knew I wasn’t going to call. If you pass over the phone or put it on speaker, I’m going to hang up, and if you keep calling after what has really been a hell of a day, I’m going to change my number. Again.”

  “But it’s her birthday.”

  “Sí, I know.” I close my eyes and burrow back into the pillows, wishing the conversation was just a part of a nightmare. “It changes nothing. I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to talk to you either, Tía. You’re just more aggressively stubborn than she is.”

  “Someone has to be stubborn as you,” she retorts. Her voice is surrounded by chaos, the kind of noise you can only get at a birthday party where “immediate family” still means some hundred or so people. The bits of speech I can make out are mostly in Spanish, because the madres and tías and abuelas have rules about using English at home if it’s not for schoolwork. “We never hear from you!”

  “Well, it’s hard to be estranged from people if you give them regular updates.”

  “Tu pobre mamá—”

  “Mi pobre mamá should know better, and so should you.”

  “Your nieces and nephews want to know you.”

  “My nieces and nephews should be grateful their abuelo is still in prison, and if they’re very lucky, none of the other men will take after him. Stop stealing my contact info from Esperanza, and stop calling. I am not interested in forgiving the family, and I am sure as fuck not interested in the family forgiving me. Just. Stop.”

  I hang up, and spend the next several minutes declining her repeated calls.

  “You know,” rumbles a sleepy voice from the bedroom doorway. I look up to see Eddison leaning against the frame, his boxers and hair both sleep rumpled. “That’s your personal phone. You can shut that off as long as you keep your work one on. She, uh . . . she doesn’t have your work number, does she?”

  “No.” And if I weren’t so fucking tired, I’d have thought of that myself. I always remember that there’s a difference between my two phones; I just tend to forget why that difference is important. After double-checking that it’s my personal phone—identical to my work phone, except for the Hufflepuff case—I turn it off and feel a palpable sense of relief. “Sorry for waking you.”

  “Was it anything specific?”

  “It’s my mother’s birthday.”

  He winces. “How did she even get your number? You just changed it a year ago.”

  “Esperanza. She keeps my number under a different name, but I’m the only person she knows with an East Coast area code, so her mother always snoops and finds it. She just can’t make up her mind whether she should be haranguing me to come back to the family, or haranguing me for leaving it in the first place.”

  “Your dad’s still locked up, right?”

  “Yes, my great sin as a daughter.” I shake my head, hair falling in my face. “Sorry.”

  “I forgive you,” he says sententiously.

  I throw a pillow at him, and immediately regret it despite his goofy, confused blinking. Now I have to get up and retrieve it unless I want it thwacked back in my face.

  Instead, he picks it up and offers his free hand. “Come on.”

  “¿Qué?”

  “You’re never going to get any sleep now. You’re just going to lie there and brood.”

  “You’re going to accuse me of brooding?”

  “Yes. Come on.”

  I take his hand and let him pull me up, and he uses it to tow me into the bedroom. He steers me to the left side of the bed, because he doesn’t really care which side he’s on as long as it’s the one farther from the door. A minute later, he returns with my gun, which I’d put under the couch where I could easily reach it, and puts it into the holster nailed to the side of the left nightstand. He gets under the covers first, sliding over rather than walking because he’s tired and lazy and I really can’t blame him, and for a moment it’s all shuffling linens as we settle in comfortably.

  “You don’t have to feel guilty for it,” he says suddenly.

  “For what, Ronnie showing up?”

  “For not forgiving them.” He reaches out in the darkness, finds a handful of my hair, and uses it to find my face so he can tap the parallel scars that run down my left cheek from just below my eye. “You don’
t owe them that.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not right for them to ask it of you.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay.”

  A few minutes later, he’s fast asleep and snoring again, his hand still splayed across my face.

  I honestly can’t imagine how half the Bureau thinks Eddison and I are hot for each other.

  5

  Saturday is spent back at the office, catching up on what was supposed to be yesterday’s work. After several months of so many back-to-back cases that we were barely home long enough to change go bags before being sent out again, Vic put us on desk rotation for a few weeks so we could catch our breath. Basically that means paperwork, and a lot of it.

  I spend Sunday on Eddison’s couch with a stack of logic puzzles to get my brain off worrying about Ronnie, while Eddison has the Nationals game up on his insanely large television. His laptop is open on the coffee table, Skype running to show Priya stretched out on the bed at Inara and Victoria-Bliss’s New York apartment. She’s got the game streaming on another computer at her side, so they can watch the game together across two hundred fifty or so miles. She set up in the bedroom so as not to disturb her summer hosts, neither of whom give two shits about baseball, but they both drifted in anyway, sprawling over her, each other, and the bed in equal measure with their own projects.

  Inara and Victoria-Bliss we met during what may be our most infamous case. Certainly it was one of the most bizarre. They were among the many girls kidnapped by a man over three decades and kept in the Garden, a massive greenhouse on his private land, some of whom he killed to preserve their beauty. Tattooed with intricate butterfly wings, the Butterflies were his prized collection, in both life and death. After the Garden, with the wounds still fresh and the trials looming, Vic connected them to Priya. The three became fast friends, and whenever Priya was back in the States, she managed to spend at least a few days in New York in the warehouse apartment they had shared with half a dozen other girls.

  They have their own place now, the massive bed covered in a quilt made of Shakespeare lithographs. Neither of them are in black, the color the Gardener gave them, neither of them have their backs bared the way he insisted was necessary. Victoria-Bliss is, in fact, in an eye-smarting shade of orange even brighter than a traffic cone, both front and back emblazoned with the name of the animal shelter she volunteers at. It’s healthy, and it’s good, and it’s wonderful to see the three of them so close. And possibly a little terrifying; they’re indomitable young women, and could probably take over the world if they were so inclined.

  “How are the pictures going?” Eddison asks during a commercial break.

  “Going well,” Priya answers. “Next week or two, I’ll head down to Baltimore to talk to Keely’s parents. They want to see some of the finished photos before they and Keely decide whether or not to participate in the project.”

  “Think they will?”

  Priya’s knee gently nudges Inara’s hip, and the other girl looks up from her tablet, pen bouncing against the pad beside it. Inara shrugs at the webcam. “I think they will,” she says. Keely is the youngest of the Garden survivors, brought in only in the Garden’s last days, and Inara has always watched out for her very closely. “We’ve talked to them about it several times since Priya and I came up with it, making sure they know it’s not prurient or sensational, that it really is about healing. I don’t blame them for wanting reassurance.”

  “Speaking of others.” Victoria-Bliss frowns down at her fingers, streaked with cranberry-colored castoff from her clay. “It’s been a few weeks since any of us have heard from Ravenna. Pretty much since we did the photo session with her. She and her mother got in a huge fight about it and now no one knows where she is.”

  Her mother, Senator Kingsley, can’t understand why her daughter still struggles to separate Ravenna, the Butterfly in the Garden, from Patrice, the politician’s perfect daughter. It’s precisely because of the senator that the young woman is having such difficulty. As public and newsworthy as the discovery of the Garden and the subsequent trials were, the senator’s position means her daughter’s attempts at recovery have been scrutinized. How is anyone supposed to heal like that?

  “She came to see me,” I tell them, and Victoria-Bliss’s frown clears. Except for Inara and Victoria-Bliss, who got adopted by the team in general, I’m the one still in touch with most of the Butterflies. I was the one in the hospital with them, the one who initiated most of the contact for interviews. “She stayed with me a couple nights and then continued on to a family friend while she gets her head on straight from the fight with her mother. I don’t have a name or location, but if you send an email and tell her you’re concerned, I’m sure she’ll respond eventually.”

  Inara nods absently, probably already composing the message in her head.

  “She said it helped,” I add. “Whatever you guys are doing, she said it really helped.”

  All three girls smile.

  “So when do we get to see the photos?” asks Eddison.

  “When I decide to let you,” Priya tells him dryly. Behind her, Victoria-Bliss snickers into a handful of polymer clay she’s softening. Priya scowls suddenly, brows crinkling in toward the blue crystal and silver bindi. “The fuck was that, Fouquette? The ball decides to float majestically into your glove and you drop it?”

  “He needs to be traded to an American League team,” Eddison says. “Let him be a designated hitter for some idiot pitcher, and get him the hell out of the outfield.”

  “Or send him back to the minors to get some basic skills.”

  “I don’t know,” Victoria-Bliss drawls, and Eddison braces himself. “I kind of like the chants of ‘fuck-it, fuck-it’ because of all the dumb asses who can’t manage his name. I mean, the networks have to blur the sound of the crowd, that’s kind of amazing.”

  Eddison grimaces, but doesn’t argue.

  I’m not sure what it says about us that this is our normal.

  On Monday, I text Siobhan an invite for coffee before work—even if that means dragging my sorry ass to Quantico much earlier than usual—and get back a frankly snippy instruction to let her decide when she’s ready to talk to me again. When the mothers said relationships take effort, I don’t think they intended me to run straight at brick walls. Tuesday afternoon I leave work early, driving my car for the first time in nearly a week, to meet Detective Holmes at my house. She’s sitting on the front step waiting for me when I get there. All the crime scene tape is gone, and someone even went to the trouble to clean the blood off the porch swing.

  “We’re nowhere,” she greets me grumpily. I drop my messenger bag and the go bag desperately in need of replenishment on the swing and sit next to her. “We have nothing to go on.”

  “How is Ronnie doing?”

  “The doctors didn’t find any signs of sexual abuse. Physically, he’ll heal pretty quickly. God bless his grandmother, she’s already got him connected with a therapist. Without going into details, obviously, the therapist says Ronnie doesn’t seem ready to talk yet, but he’s apparently willing to listen. Long road ahead of him.”

  “So he hasn’t said anything about the angel?”

  “Female, taller than him but not as tall as his dad. Dressed all in white. Couldn’t really tell us anything about her voice. He said her hair was blonde and in a long braid. He said he held on to it while she was carrying him.”

  “Police sketch?”

  “A white mask. He couldn’t give particulars.” She sighs and leans against the post that ends the railing. The circles under her eyes are deeper than they were on Thursday. “Have you ever given any thought to putting up cameras?”

  “Sterling’s going to help,” I answer. “One aimed on the porch steps and swing, and one on the mailbox to see the car. Hopefully.”

  “Good.” She hands me the ring of keys I gave the uniformed officer. “There’s been no sign of anyone coming back. Your immediate neighbor was a bit disgr
untled he wasn’t allowed to work on the lawn.”

  “Jason likes green things. I’ll talk to him.”

  “The case we worked two years ago, you gave teddy bears to every kid we talked to. Is that SOP for your team?”

  Nodding, I lean forward to brace my elbows against my knees. “Vic and his first partner Finney started it. I took it over after I joined the team. The bears are pretty cheap, plain, come in huge boxes with an assortment of colors. We give them to victims and young siblings, friends, if we talk to other kids. It’s comforting, calming, helps them settle into an interview.”

  “And your collection?”

  “Started when I was ten. I’d do odd jobs to earn money for them, and as long as they could all fit in a bag with my clothes, I could keep them with me when I was moved to a new foster home.”

  She gives me a sidelong look. “Were you ever adopted?”

  “No. I was in the last home for a little over four years, and I’m still in touch with the mothers. They offered, but . . .” I shake my head. “I wasn’t ready to have family again.”

  “Well, there’s no reason not to let you come home. We’ve got a patrol coming through a couple times a night. If you get a case out of town, will you let me know?”

  “Absolutely. For right now, we’ve got a conference out in California that we’re leaving for Thursday morning. We’ll be back sometime on Sunday.” Crap. Sunday. It was supposed to be a very big day for Sterling, but will likely be a painful one instead. Eddison and I need to think of something good to do for her. “It’ll be next week before we get the cameras up.”

  “All right.” Putting a hand on my shoulder, Holmes levers herself to standing. “I’ll let you know if we learn anything.”