Fragile

by Lisa Unger

  “What led them to confess, so many years later? That poor girl’s parents. How awful to have it resurrected like that.”

  “I think everyone associated with the victim is dead.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  In the background, Charlie could hear the sound of the television. He could visualize his mother in the kitchen, still living in the house where he grew up. There would be a paperback novel spine up on the kitchen table, a half-finished cup of coffee beside that. Everything would be neat, in its place, the kitchen sink wiped clean, pot holders clean and hanging on little plastic hooks by the stove. In her retirement, his mother was a much better housekeeper than she’d once been.

  “Where’s Dad?” As if he had to ask.

  “Playing golf with Frank.” He wondered how she stood it. If Charlie’s father had ever paid half as much attention to them as he had that stupid game… Well, Charlie didn’t know what. He hadn’t. And that was that.

  “Did you tell him that I quit my job to finish my novel?” He hated the way he felt a kind of inner cowering, a dread at his father’s disapproval, even though when it came to the old man he knew little else.

  “No, Charlie. Of course not. Anyway, it wouldn’t kill you to call when you knew he was here. You could make an effort.”

  “What would we talk about? I don’t play golf.”

  She let a moment pass; he heard her filing her nails. “You know, once upon a time your father used to write. Poetry. Short stories. He was pretty good. Over the years, he just sort of stopped.”

  Now, that was new information. “Really? Wow.”

  “You should ask him about it sometime.”

  “Maybe I will.” Then, “I better get back to the writing.”

  “I love you.”

  “Me, too.”

  He hung up the phone but didn’t rise from the bed. The sun was streaming in through the opening between the drapes, and he heard the voices and intermittent hammer bursts of the workers remodeling the old house across the street. Outside his window, he knew the air had grown cold and the branches of the trees were a line drawing against the sky. While he was lying there, he thought about Lily and how childish was the love he had for her, compared with what he was just starting to feel for Wanda. He thought about Charlene Murray, and wished for the hundredth time that he’d just called out to her that night; he might have saved her from a world of pain-or maybe not. He thought about the story he’d been following on the local news-another lost girl, killed years ago, the truth of her death finally revealed, far too late to do anyone any good. There was something there-a story. He could sense how all those individual souls were connected by the gossamer strands of love and history, secrets and regrets. He could sense the mingling of the past and the present, how one couldn’t exist without the other. He wanted to find his way there, to a place where he could understand it all, make sense of those connections that were too fragile to be easily defined. He knew of only one way. He got up from his bed, sat down at his computer, and started to write.

  31

  There were no news vans when Jones pulled into the driveway. It was the first time in days that there hadn’t been at least one reporter hoping for a statement, an ugly candid, maybe flinging insults to get a rise. It didn’t bother him as much as he would have predicted. He’d ignored them mostly, offering not even a glance in their general direction. As he put Maggie’s SUV in park and killed the engine, he thought that they’d missed out on a good day to be there, with the contents of his office in three boxes in the backseat. He hadn’t been fired from his job; he’d offered his resignation, which had been reluctantly accepted by the Hollows PD chief, Marion Butler, a woman he’d come up with from the academy.

  “I don’t think this incident requires your resignation, Jones,” she’d said. She’d looked down at the blotter on her desk when she said it. She had eyes that could freeze you dead, and when she’d turned them back on him, he saw her sadness.

  “We both know it does,” he’d said.

  She’d run a thin hand through silver-gray curls. She’d been gray since the day he met her.

  “The incident was an accident,” she’d said. She had sat down behind her desk and picked up the letter he’d handed her. “And you were just a kid. You know it’s likely that charges won’t be filed.”

  He knew all this, and he was grateful that she still believed in him. But it didn’t matter.

  “I was in a position of trust. And I kept a horrible secret from this town.”

  She’d given a careful nod and pointed to the chair in front of her desk. He’d sat. Outside her glass-walled office, the floor had been quiet, as if everyone had frozen in their cubicles to listen to their conversation.

  “You were vested in your pension last year.” Her tone had taken on the practical edge he so admired in her. Marion Butler was a straight line, no artifice, no veil.

  “That’s a good thing. And, you know, maybe it’s time for a fresh start.”

  “Are you sure about this? I’ll fight for your job, if it comes to that. So many years of faithful service to this town counts for a lot, you know.”

  But, no. He was sure. In fact, he was sure that he should have quit years ago. He’d wanted to many times; the reasons he hadn’t were myriad. Now the future lay before him, an unwritten page.

  He grabbed one of the boxes from the backseat and walked inside. He found Charlene sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee and reading People in her pajamas, like she lived there. Which, annoyingly, she did-for the time being.

  “Hi, Mr. Cooper,” she said. She looked up from her magazine, seemed to register the expression on his face. “How did it go?”

  “How do you think it went, Charlene?” he said.

  “Um… bad?”

  He poured a cup of coffee from the pot and came to sit across from her.

  “How are your college applications coming?”

  “Just taking a little break.”

  With Melody awaiting charges in the death of her husband, Charlene had needed a place to stay. When Ricky and Maggie had approached him with the request to board her until Melody was released or, in the worst case, until Charlene went to school in September, he’d surprised himself by agreeing.

  They were connected, all of them, weren’t they? The night that Sarah had died, and during everything that had followed, the separate passages of their lives had conjoined in ways none of them could have predicted, or even imagined. It had set even their unborn children on a collision course with each other. He felt like he owed it to all of them to take Charlene in, to right some of the things that had been wrong for so long.

  Charlene had decent grades, respectable SAT scores, and a desire to get away from The Hollows for good. She’d finally figured out that an education was the way to do that. There was money left by Charlene’s father and the sale of Melody’s childhood home, which Melody had invested wisely in a trust for her daughter. The conditions of the trust were that the money was available to her only for school and after she had completed her degree, not to traipse around New York City trying to get a record deal. Jones felt a bit guilty for being glad that she had already decided to look at schools in New York City-Fordham, Hunter, and, in a long shot, NYU. Ricky would be going to Georgetown alone.

  Ricky and Charlene both claimed that there was nothing more to their relationship now than friendship. But Jones saw the way his son still looked at Charlene. She was a pit of need into which Jones hoped fiercely that his son wouldn’t fall.

  “How’s your mom doing?”

  A little bit of the wild sadness he’d been seeing in Charlene’s face since the night he lifted her off the boat was fading. But mostly when he looked at her, he just saw this lost, small thing. And in a way he felt responsible for that.

  “She’s okay. It was self-defense, you know. I saw him go for her, and she swung to defend herself.” She looked down at the magazine. “She didn’t mean to kill him. Her lawyer thinks t
he prosecution will be amenable to a deal, because, you know, of the things he did to me. Mitigating circumstances or whatever.”

  Jones didn’t know what to say to this girl. So many awful things had happened to her, so many people had hurt and used her. He wanted to put a comforting hand on her, but he hesitated to touch her. She seemed skittish and delicate.

  “I better get back to the computer,” said Charlene. “I’m going to school on Monday, and I want to have everything done by then.”

  “Sounds like a plan, kid.”

  “Hey, Mr. Cooper? Thanks for asking.” She didn’t wait around for him to answer.

  He nodded to himself, looked out into the backyard. The pool had been covered for the winter that had closed in on them, and the maple trees had shed their leaves. He really had to get out there and clean up. Of course, now there was plenty of time.

  No sooner had he settled into a silent zone of peace, preparing to contemplate his future, than he heard the shuffle-shuffle-thump that heralded the approach of his mother-in-law, another unwanted semi-permanent guest.

  “Stripped of his badge and his gun, the retired cop has to contemplate what lies ahead,” she said, putting a pot on the stove.

  “Hello, Elizabeth.”

  They’d fought out the worst of it. But her recriminations and his were on the table, ready to leap up at any given moment. The truth of it was that they were both guilty of keeping quiet when they should have been raising alarms. The only reason you’re both so angry at each other is because you’re guilty of the same failure to act. Forgive yourselves and maybe you’ll be able to forgive each other. Elizabeth didn’t like to be “shrinked” any more than he did, so when Maggie was around, they both put on happy faces. But Maggie was in session.

  “So when do you think you’ll be leaving?”

  “Not soon enough, Detective. Oh, that’s right. It’s just Jones now. Mr. Cooper.”

  She came to sit across from him, shuffle-shuffle-thump. She looked frail and tired; she didn’t have the same vigor since her last accident. Her weakened state did take a little of the fun out of fighting with her.

  “What’s it going to take to bury the hatchet, Elizabeth?”

  She leaned back in her chair and looked at him. “I just can’t get over that those things were in my attic. That you hid them there.”

  Jones, on Maggie’s insistence, was seeing a therapist a few towns away. He drove there weekly with a brew of dread and resentment in his belly, returning exhausted in a way he’d never experienced before. He’d grab a big cup of coffee at a drive-through Starbucks, blast some classic rock like Led Zeppelin or Van Morrison to try to shake off that bone-deep fatigue. But it lived in him for at least a day after each session, lashing him to the couch. His therapist was a man about his age, a soft-spoken guy with a thick head of ink black hair, always in crisply pressed chinos and a colorful shirt. Dr. Black. They talked a lot about the items Jones had kept, why he’d kept them, what they meant, why he’d chosen Elizabeth’s attic to hide them in recent years.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was a violation of our trust. It felt like a safe place to hide that part of myself.”

  She looked down at her hands, twisted the gold wedding band on the finger of her left hand.

  “A few days after I went to see Tommy Delano in prison, I went to see the chief,” she said. “He was such a weasel, that man. Not a kind or compassionate thought ever entered his tiny, little mind.”

  She hadn’t told him this before. He took a sip of his coffee, waited for her to go on. But she didn’t.

  “What did he tell you?” he asked, finally. He looked out at the backyard, a view he’d gazed upon for almost twenty years. But everything out there-the covered pool, the patio furniture, the ivy-covered pergola-looked different, brighter somehow, more solid.

  “He told me something I’ve never told anyone. It was part of the reason that psychic had such an impact on me.”

  “I’m listening.” And he was; he felt the palms of his hands start to tingle.

  “They found other pictures in his room-yearbook pictures, some snapshots-of other girls at the school. One of those girls was Maggie.”

  Jones let the information sink in, taking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly, trying not to imagine Tommy Delano with a picture of a young and innocent Maggie in his grease-stained hands.

  “I was wrong about Tommy Delano,” Elizabeth said. “And the chief? He didn’t lie. What he said Tommy Delano had done, he’d done. He probably would have done worse to another girl somewhere down the line. Maybe…” She let the thought go unfinished.

  “‘I was wrong,’” he said, as if testing the words on the air. He had the urge to make light, to not focus on the horror of what she was saying. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you utter that statement.”

  She gave him a wan smile. “I’ve never had to.”

  “Hmm,” he said. He offered a deferential nod.

  “After I saw the chief, I was angry and unsatisfied-and frightened. Still not convinced I had the whole story from Crosby-which, of course, I didn’t. So I went to see that woman, that psychic, Eloise Montgomery. I went there to blast her, to force her to tell me that she was a fraud.”

  They hadn’t talked like this before, not really. The words they’d exchanged over the last couple of weeks had been loud and angry, designed to deflect blame and hurt each other. But sitting with her now, Jones found that Maggie was right, as usual. He wasn’t mad at Elizabeth. She’d acted out of fear, just as he had.

  “But there in her kitchen, she made me a cup of tea and told me what she saw. And I believed her. Something about her voice, her eyes, filled me with horror and awe. I’ll never forget what she said. She told me, ‘If you don’t stop asking questions, if you don’t let this rest, you’ll lose your daughter.’ I can’t describe the way her words made me feel. They cut me to the bone.”

  He reached for her hand, and she didn’t pull away. Her skin was soft and papery in his grasp. “I asked her what she meant, and she said she didn’t know. But, of course, I just kept seeing Sarah lying there, stiff and unnatural, those horrible gashes filled with putty. Thinking of Maggie’s pictures in his room. And the thought of losing my daughter like that was enough to bind and gag me for good.”

  A single tear trailed down her face, and she withdrew her hand from his to remove a tissue from her pocket and angrily dab her cheek dry.

  “But now I think that maybe it was about you,” Elizabeth went on. That maybe she meant you wouldn’t be here to bring her back to The Hollows. It would have changed your life if the truth had been revealed about that night. Maybe for the better. Maybe you would have left this place. But I don’t know.”

  “We don’t know,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter. All that matters is how things are right now.”

  “My husband used to say, ‘The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.’”

  “He was a wise man.”

  “I miss him every day.”

  “I know you do.”

  She reached out to touch his face. “You always were a good boy, Jones Cooper.”

  He didn’t know if his mother-in-law was being sarcastic or not, but he supposed it didn’t much matter.

  Maggie slipped back through the door that led to her office and closed it quietly. She’d been headed to the kitchen to see if Jones was back from picking up his things, and overheard him talking to her mother. She decided to give them some space to finish their conversation.

  She’d stayed out of sight and eavesdropped like a kid. She was feeling bad about it when she looked up to the top landing to see Ricky and Charlene listening, too. They all exchanged guilty glances, but none of them moved. Maggie and Ricky locked eyes as Elizabeth told Jones what she’d been keeping to herself for decades.

  Now she sank into the leather chair behind her desk and looked at the flock of unopened e-mail messages on her screen-Angie Crosby checking on Marshall�
��s progress; Henry Ivy wanting to get coffee; a referral from a friend who practiced in the next town. But she found she couldn’t really focus. Her mother’s conversation with Jones had triggered a flash flood of memory. And suddenly, she was remembering the thing that had been nagging at her since the night Charlene disappeared. The thing she couldn’t quite remember.

  A few days before Sarah disappeared, Maggie had stayed late after school to work on the yearbook. A senior girl on the project, Crystal James, someone her mother approved of, was supposed to give her a ride home. But as Maggie waited by the entrance to the building, the dusk deepened and Crystal was nowhere to be seen. Maggie walked around the back of the school to the parking lot, wondering if Crystal was waiting for her there. She came around the building to hear raised voices. Some boys had gathered around the bus yard where Tommy Delano was working.

  She’d seen it too many times. It angered her, and she walked over to the group. Even now she couldn’t remember who it was-maybe Dennis and Larry, possibly Greg.

  “Stop it, you guys. Just cut it out.” Her voice sounded weak and insubstantial, not at all strong and commanding like her mother’s voice.

  The boys turned, ready to fling insults in her direction by the looks on their faces. But when they saw it was her, they all went quiet. There were some benefits to being the principal’s daughter.

  “We’re just playing around, Maggie.”

  “It’s not funny,” she said. She felt embarrassed suddenly, with so many eyes on her. “Go home.”

  She remembered the look on Tommy Delano’s face, a kind of sheepish gratitude, and something else. After the boys had walked off, she stood awkwardly, looking into the distance for Crystal’s car, a yellow Volkswagen Bug.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot. You’re a really nice girl. A lot like your mom.”