In the Shadow of Revenge

by Patricia Hale

  The police had finally decided that it was a drifter moving through and that he was probably long gone. My mother said they couldn’t go around town asking every man to pull down his pants so they could check for a tattoo. But I didn’t think they’d tried hard enough and wondered if it was because the Wainwrights were about the poorest people in town and also the meanest. Nobody wanted to deal with them, even the police, unless it was to lock one of them up, which they did on occasion when Duane was too drunk to drive and crashed his pick-up into a tree or someone’s front porch. Or when his sister Rita and her boyfriend got into one of their knock-down-drag-outs and a bottle or plate or whatever else they’d aimed at each other’s heads sailed through a window and landed in the neighbor’s driveway. Mostly I think the whole ordeal got pushed aside because Duane Wainwright just didn’t care about the wellbeing of his nine-year-old daughter. If he was home at all, he was passed out on his bed. Most of the time he stayed in the back room of the service station he owned in town except for when Child Services came around with the Social Security check Hilary got after her mother died. So I understood why the police just let it die, but I never believed what they said about little girls being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d always wondered if that man had been waiting for us.

  At eleven o’clock I grabbed my bag and took the elevator to the parking garage. Marquette’s office was in Bath, a thirty-minute drive depending on traffic. When I turned left toward the downtown area just before the Bath Bridge and the Kennebec River, my stomach started its dance. I’d spent the past eighteen years erecting a snow globe around my life. The reappearance of Dobbs had cracked it. I was pretty sure that reconnecting with Marquette would shatter it for good.

  “Long time,” he said when I walked into his office. “You look well.” Officer, now Mr. Marquette, stood and reached his hand toward me.

  I’d thought he was handsome when I was nine and he was a twenty-year-old rookie fresh out of the academy. Eighteen years later, my taste hadn’t changed. His shirt strained slightly at the shoulders hinting that he was probably one of the regulars at Gold’s Gym. Gold’s attracted the body builders and those who seriously liked to sweat. I preferred Planet Fitness, where the non-committed still felt welcome when the occasional urge hit.

  “Nice to see you.” I took his hand.

  “Nick,” he said.

  His grip was strong and comforting, the same way I remembered it the night he’d sat beside me at the kitchen table. That mischievous look he’d shot me when he stuffed the Oreo into his mouth still played around his eyes, and I thought how unfair it is that men got to keep their boyishness while women mature. But I guess someone has to.

  He gestured to the chair facing a mahogany desk that took up three quarters of the room and was covered with stacks of papers and files. Three windows flanked the desk draped with grayed, gauzy half curtains that had probably been white when first hung. Two framed diplomas decorated the wall, but unless I was packing a bottle of Windex, I had no idea of his alma mater.

  “Maid’s day off,” he said following my gaze. “Have a seat.” He waited until I’d settled in and then said, “So you think he’s back?”

  “I know he is.”

  “And he didn’t know it was you?”

  “I don’t think so.” I related the night’s events to Marquette—everything except my encounter with the Ouija board. I’m not stupid.

  He sighed when I’d finished and scratched the stubble on his cheek. It was too early for a five o’clock shadow so I assumed he’d been here all night, passionate about his work, another plus.

  “We scoured that railcar,” he said, “and came up empty. Now you think this guy Dobbs is the perp and he’s back in town and makes contact with you. It’s all too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “That’s what I told Amelia, but she disagreed. She said he just wanted to get laid. But if he did approach us on purpose, I haven’t a clue as to why.”

  Marquette took a legal pad from his top drawer and wrote down a few things then he looked up. “What about Hilary? What does she think?”

  “These days, not much. Booze, drugs, spin dry, you know the cycle. She’s stuck in the railcar using whatever she can get her hands on to forget she’s there. She never saw what he looked like. Told me she wouldn’t let herself look at his face, but the smell of a Camel filter still sends her on a weeklong bender. Needless to say, I didn’t tell her he’s back.”

  “I always wondered what was wrong with her old man,” Marquette said. “How could a father just let that go? If it was my daughter I’d still be looking for the guy.”

  “Duane Wainwright isn’t exactly Ward Cleaver.”

  He nodded. “And it didn’t help that he shipped out to Thomaston shortly after.”

  “The robbery at The Cave?”

  Marquette nodded.

  “It happened at the same time, right?”

  “The week before,” he said.

  The Cave was Millers Falls’ watering hole for locals at least until Wainwright robbed it and cracked open the owner’s head with a baseball bat. The charges bought him fifteen years at the state prison in Thomaston and another three in a halfway house in Portland. They never did find Big Jim’s life savings, two hundred thousand that he kept in his safe due to his anti-government, anti-establishment, militia loyalty. “What do you remember about the robbery?” I asked Marquette.

  “Patrolman driving through the back parking lot around 3:00 a.m. noticed the door jacked open. Found Big Jim unconscious. He called it in. We had Big Jim in an ambulance within five or ten minutes and a crime scene team from Portland on site shortly after that. They retrieved a baseball bat covered with Wainwright’s fingerprints and the dent in Big Jim’s head nicely matched the curve of the bat, not to mention the blood spatter in the wood grain. Slam dunk.”

  He pushed away from his desk and locked his hands behind his head. Out of habit, I checked for a wedding ring. There wasn’t one, indicating he’d let go of the past. I hid a smile.

  “It always bothered me that the same family was involved in two crimes one week apart,” he said.

  “No connection?”

  “Nothing we could find.”

  “And Wainwright was the only guy you looked at for the robbery?”

  “Didn’t need to look any further. He might as well have put himself in a taxi and driven straight to Thomaston the night he did it for all the evidence he left behind.”

  “Except the money.”

  He nodded. “Except the money.”

  “Did you ever consider that he might not have been alone?”

  “’Course we did, even offered him a deal, but he never changed his plea of innocence. We had all the evidence of his guilt that we needed so we called it good and sent him up.”

  “It never made sense to me that Wainwright robbed and beat the owner of his favorite bar.”

  “In those days, after a bottle of Jack Daniels it didn’t matter to Duane who he hit, as long as his fists connected with something, though I think he spared his daughter. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, but a quick slap would have hurt a lot less than some of the things he’s said.”

  Nick raised his eyebrows.

  “Like how she forced her mother to commit suicide when she was two. We never could figure out how she’d shoved her mother’s head inside the oven while sitting in her high chair. She’d nearly been asphyxiated herself. I think that was her mother’s intent,
but Hilary lived. According to Duane, if she hadn’t been such a difficult toddler, her mother never would have sucked on the gas line.”

  “Jesus.” Marquette shook his head. “With a childhood like that it’s not hard to understand her lifestyle. At least she’s open to rehab.”

  “For now,” I said. “So did you keep looking for the money?”

  “For a while, but we didn’t have any luck, and with Big Jim in the condition he was in...”

  “Which was?”

  “Not right. Most people recover from a whack to the head, but Wainwright caught him just right, or dead wrong, depending on how you look at it. Jim was never right again. He didn’t even know he’d had any money. His brother took him in, lives somewhere in New Hampshire now. It wasn’t like anyone was pressuring the department to find it, so it kind of slipped to the back seat as far as priorities go. After a time it was relegated to the cold case files.”

  “Can we get the cold files from the police station?”

  “Don’t think I did my job?”

  “I just want to read them over. I’m a lawyer, remember? And you’ve piqued my interest. Two crimes a week apart, same family.”

  “What’re you looking for?”

  “If I knew, I’d ask.”

  “They’re in the archives. They’ll give them to you. You’ve got clout. Law school, huh? I see your name in the paper now and then, ADA, domestic abuse?”

  “I had a calling.”

  “Figured you did.”

  I knew that night at the table when Jarod walked into the kitchen that Marquette had understood my freezing up was due more to my brother’s presence than the questions they were asking about the rape. I also knew that he was referring to that moment now.

  “You got anything else you want to tell me?”

  I considered mentioning that Amelia was acting as the carrot, but he’d just tell me it was too dangerous and to let him do his job. I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  “Just like a woman, draw me in then shut me down.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was flirting or referring to his ex. I decided to go with the former. “I bet you don’t get shut down too often.”

  “Wouldn’t know. Between the demands of work and an ex-wife, I don’t have much time for a social life.”

  “I guess that’s your loss. So? Are you interested?”

  “You never forget the one that got away, you know?” He gave me the same wink he had years ago.

  “So you’ll look into Dobbs?”

  “I’ll call you when I have something.”

  I started to reach for his hand, but when he glanced at my palm, I dropped my arm and we stood for a moment in silence. He’d seen the red scars we’d had on our palms when we were kids performing the ritual. I wasn’t sure how to explain why mine were still there...and fresh.

  “I’m glad you called,” he said, cutting through the awkwardness. “I’m looking forward to working together.”

  I exhaled. “Me too.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I headed for the courthouse devising a reason for wanting to see the old files on Hilary’s rape and The Cave robbery. Like Marquette said, the back-to-back crimes were a definite coincidence. And if I was going to get DeLonge’s attention maybe this was the way to do it. Police never like anybody looking over their past work. If I found something they’d missed the force would look incompetent and I’d be on the cops’ shit list. Not a good place for a lawyer who often needs police testimony, but it was a risk I had to take. If and when the time came to involve the police they’d have the opportunity to redeem themselves.

  I pulled up to the curb in front of Starbucks, went in and ordered a Grande, black, then added four packs of sugar. I wondered what Ben would say if he knew I’d hired Nick. Ben liked things neat, his ducks in a row. I liked things any way I could get them.

  When I got back in the car I sat for a moment and sipped my coffee. I thought about Marquette and wondered if there was such a thing as coincidence or whether everything happened for a reason. There was no mistaking the connection between us. I’d felt it today just as I had that night in my mother’s kitchen and again the day he’d picked me up in the rain.

  It was the morning after the rape, and I hadn’t gone straight to Amelia’s house like I told my mother I would. I’d gone to the one place I was forbidden to set foot, the railcar. There was a strip of yellow tape with the word CAUTION printed on it connected to the side of the car. It stretched straight out and wrapped around a metal stake, then across the grass to another stake and from there back to the other end of the railcar. It looked just like a little plastic fence enclosing a miniature yard. A big X was fastened over the door of the car itself. I ducked underneath and crawled inside. For a minute or so I just lay there feeling the cold metal floor against my stomach. It was dead quiet except for the crows squawking in the trees like they too were warning me that I shouldn’t be in there. The floor was dusty, either from everyday dirt or the stuff they’d used to find fingerprints like on TV. Our metal box had been pushed into the corner. The lid hung back on its hinges.

  “Be there,” I’d whispered, slithering over to it on my belly. I wasn’t sure why I had to have that board. After all, it was rightfully Amelia’s. But I knew she’d never come for it and something inside had been telling me from the moment I’d opened my eyes that morning to go get it. I had a hunch it was Grandma Hattie.

  My heart was thudding in my ears when I’d put my hand on the edge of the box and peeked over the top. It was there, unharmed. The police must have decided that an old Ouija board and a few melted candles had no bearing on a young rape victim and left them behind. I don’t know why, but my whole body went slack with relief when I saw it.

  I’d laid out the board then and lit the candles, setting them on either side of it. I knew this was the place I had to come for truth. Hilary believed I’d brought her to my house that day and my mother believed there was a connection between me and the board and Hilary’s rape. The board would tell me if what they said was true. And if it was, I had to accept responsibility.

  I reached toward the planchette, my hands shaking like a dashboard doll, and as soon as my fingertips touched the wood I’d felt the jolt. The current flowed into me.

  “Can I make things happen?” I whispered.

  The planchette moved to Yes.

  “Did I make this happen?”

  No, it answered.

  I sat back and dropped my hands into my lap, struggling to hold back tears. I wanted to get out of there, as far away as I could, but there was one more question that had to be asked. I hunched over the board, laid the tips of my fingers on the planchette and took a long breath, then I whispered, “Is this the beginning or the end?”

  In the tree outside the crows screeched, splitting the silence wide open. My head had exploded in pain and the disc skittered end over end across the board and came to rest on the metal floor. When I picked it up, a voice froze me to the spot. It was him: the guy in the baseball hat, the guy with the tattoo, the guy who had...

  “I’ll kill her. I swear I’ll kill her.”

  I’d been sure that he was bending over me, his lips inches from my ear. I spun around. There was nothing there. A single crow screamed again outside the car. The board had shown me the beginning, the moment in the railcar when our lives upended. I had my answer. The chaos had only begun.

  I’d grabbed the board and shoved it and the disc into the cardboard box, then tucked it under my arm and jumped from the car, plowing through the yellow caution tape. It stretched across my chest, flowing behind me like a wool scarf in winter. The wind came up just as I reached the path into the woods and the sky grew dark. The pain in my head beg
an to subside as soon as I’d left the car. I picked up my bike just as the first drops of rain hit the ground, my knees rubbery.

  “Do it,” I’d ordered my legs as though they were a separate entity and slowly the pedals had begun to turn. I’d barely started moving when I saw a police car ahead, sitting at the end of the road. I skidded to a stop and rolled off the dirt path into the trees, hoping whoever was in the car hadn’t been looking in the rearview mirror. I leaned against the damp trunk of an oak, trying to breathe, my heart pounding. The back-up lights came on and I knew I was in for it.

  The cruiser had come toward me like a movie on rewind and stopped beside my bike. The window went down and Officer Marquette smiled. He nodded to the cardboard box under my arm. “What do you have there?”

  “A game,” I’d said.

  He looked at me for a long minute. “I know where you got that.” His voice was even and slow, bordering on kind. “But you can’t go back there anymore. No matter what,” he’d added.

  I nodded.

  “If you need something, you let me know. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I nodded again.

  He opened the door and for a minute I thought he was gonna take it from me and I’d started to push my pedals down as hard and fast as I could.

  “Hang on,” he said and grabbed the handlebars. “I’m just gonna give you a ride home.”

  For the first time I realized the rain was pouring down. My shirt was soaked and drops fell from the end of my nose.

  He put my bike in the trunk and then slid onto the front seat beside me.

  “Am I in trouble?” I’d asked as the car ambled over the dirt and rocks.