Land of Careful Shadows

by Suzanne Chazin

  He backed his truck out of the parking lot and tried to clear his mind for the forty-five-minute drive north to his house. At the first stoplight, his cell phone rang. Adele. He pulled over to the curb and took the call.

  “I’m beat, Adele—can it wait ’til tomorrow?”

  “She wants to know if you’ve spoken to the family.”

  “What?”

  “She called me, Jimmy.” Adele’s voice was soft and husky. “She wants to know if Maria has family.”

  That woke him up. “Linda called you? When?”

  “A little while ago.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s her number?” If he had the number, he could triangulate the call and bring her in.

  “Can you stop being a cop for just a moment and listen? She wants to do what’s best for Olivia.”

  “Then she needs to turn herself in.”

  “She wants to. She’s just afraid the police will take Olivia away and put her into foster care.”

  “I can’t guarantee that won’t happen.”

  “But Linda’s innocent, Jimmy. Scott told me she didn’t know about any of this before this evening.”

  “Just because Porter says it doesn’t make it true.”

  “I would think you of all people would care what happens to her.”

  He did care. He would always care. But this wasn’t ultimately about Linda. It was about Olivia. His duty was to the child. He had failed Desiree Soto. He did not want to fail Olivia Porter.

  “Linda’s got to hand Olivia over, Adele. I’ll do my best if she’s innocent. But we need the child returned safely. Give me her number and I’ll call her.”

  “No.”

  “No? You’re telling a police officer no?”

  “Why are you being such a hard-ass?”

  “Why are you letting Linda turn you into an accessory after the fact?”

  “Because like it or not, I’m involved. 214 Pine Road. That’s my address. Linda will be here in about an hour to surrender to you. Come alone. And don’t you dare turn this into some sort of SWAT operation. My eight-year-old is asleep upstairs.” Adele hung up.

  Chapter 29

  Adele’s house was a small, blue, wood-frame Victorian on a street of similar-looking houses set apart from each other by the width of their driveways. It was a house that looked comfortably lived in. The driveway dipped and buckled like the surface of a home-baked cake. The garage behind the house had moss growing on the roof. A basket of pink flowers hung from a well-worn porch, along with several wind chimes, one made of forks and spoons and pieces of broken pottery that appeared to have been strung together by a child.

  There were no parking spots on the street so Vega parked in the driveway behind Adele’s Prius and lumbered up the front steps. His boots sounded hollow on the planks. The carpenter in him wondered if the boards beneath were beginning to rot. He peeked in the living-room window to see if there was anything he should be aware of before he rang her doorbell. Lights glowed behind gauzy curtains but he saw nothing else so he rang and waited.

  Adele opened the door with a broom in her hand.

  “You normally clean house at this hour?”

  “I’m not cleaning.” Her eyes scoured the floor. “Oh my God!” She flattened herself against the door. “He’s in the living room. He’s going to go upstairs if I don’t stop him. My daughter’s upstairs!”

  “Who?” Vega pushed past her and snapped back the restraining hood on his holster. He automatically shifted his weight to a crouch. It took him a minute to place the shadows and contours of the living room. Someone had pulled the sofa away from the wall and stacked a pile of books helter-skelter on a coffee table. But otherwise, Vega saw nothing out of place, no sign of a struggle, no movement.

  “Who’s in the house?”

  “A mouse.”

  “A mouse?” He took his hand off his holster and straightened. “That’s what all this hysteria’s about? A little mouse?”

  “He’s a big mouse.” She squinted into her living room.

  “There he goes!”

  A flash of dark gray scuttled from beneath the sofa to an umbrella stand. It was the size of a child’s fist. Adele ducked behind Vega like she thought it was going to attack her.

  Vega laughed. “You can’t be frightened of a little mouse. A fencing champ like you? You could probably impale the sucker if you wanted to.”

  “Foil fencing’s a sport, Jimmy. Not a form of rodent control.”

  “You got a trap? I’ll bait it for you.”

  Something pained crossed her features. “I don’t know. Maybe in the garage?” Vega wondered if this was her first year alone since the divorce. If there were any mousetraps at all, it was probably because her ex-husband had bought them when he was still her husband, when this house was part of a bigger dream and not just a remnant of its failures.

  “Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s go see if we can find one.”

  They crossed the driveway to the garage and went inside. One of the bays was completely filled with lawn mowers, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, and canisters of gasoline.

  “Is this a second career you’ve got going here? Moonlighting as a landscape contractor?”

  “The equipment’s not mine,” said Adele. “It belongs to Cesar Cardenas. He’s trying to start his own landscaping business to help pay for Kenny’s college. I let him use one bay of my garage in exchange for him and Kenny doing my yard work.”

  Vega started pawing through boxes on a shelf. “Are you such a soft touch with all your clients?”

  “Once an immigrant’s daughter, always an immigrant’s daughter, I suppose.”

  In the boxes, Vega found half-empty cans of paint thinner, rusted wrenches, and old tennis balls. He wondered how much of this had been her ex’s. At least he and Wendy had been able to make a fresh start after their divorce.

  “Here we go.” Vega held up an unopened package of three wooden mousetraps. They’d been stashed in a box between cans of Raid. “You got peanut butter?”

  “I thought you’re supposed to use cheese.”

  “Trust me, peanut butter gets them every time.”

  In the kitchen, Adele found a jar of peanut butter. Vega began smearing it on the bait portion of one of the traps. He looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. No sign of Linda.

  “What time did she tell you she’d be here?”

  “She said it would take her about an hour.”

  Vega retracted the catch on the first trap. Then he slid it between the refrigerator and stove. “How about you call her and ask how much progress she’s made?”

  “She said she’ll be here,” Adele told him stiffly.

  Vega fumed silently. Since when did suspects dictate the terms of their surrender? When Adele went upstairs to check on her daughter, Vega walked over to a row of hooks by the back door. On one of the hooks, he found Adele’s shoulder bag and located her cell phone. The last call she’d received was at ten fifty-five this evening. Caller unknown read the display. Linda? There were no other calls after six-thirty p.m. He copied down the number and tossed the bag back on the hook. Then he walked out to the driveway, called Greco, and gave him the cell number to see if he could triangulate the call. When he walked back in, Adele was holding her bag open and glaring at him. He must have forgotten to do up the zipper. He probably didn’t hang up the bag exactly the same way, either. Women were such sticklers for details.

  “Did you just get Linda’s number off my cell?”

  “C’mon, Adele. It’s not like I stole anything.”

  “Only my trust.”

  He walked over to the counter and began baiting the second trap. He could feel her eyes burning a hole in his back.

  “I’m not the bad guy here.” But all of a sudden, he wasn’t so sure. It had never occurred to Vega until that moment how much of her life she’d invested in La Casa. It had probably cost her everything: a high-paying c
areer, her personal life, most likely, her marriage. And tonight, it was all in ruins.

  He began to set the spring on the second trap. “Look, it’s gonna be okay—”

  He lifted his hand too quickly. Snap! The spring closed on the tip of his left middle finger. Vega flung the trap to the floor and tore through a stream of Spanish invectives. The noise must have scared the mouse because a flash of dark fur suddenly darted across the vinyl tiles.

  Adele yelped and stepped back against Vega. Instinctively, he wrapped his good hand around her.

  “It’s okay,” he murmured. “You’re gonna be okay.”

  They stayed that way, neither relinquishing the moment. Then she turned to him and reached for his hurt hand. A purple welt was already beginning to form across the nail bed.

  “Serves me right, huh?” asked Vega.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you thought it.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  Her mascara had smeared, giving her eyes a smoky look. Vega could see the glassy sheen in them, the uncertainty that this night had brought her. He lifted her chin and looked at her squarely. She was so small in stocking feet. Almost like a child.

  “Listen to me, Adele. The center isn’t going to go under. Not if you don’t let it. I saw those people the other night, how much they need you. They believe in you.” He swallowed. “I believe in you.”

  He brought his lips down on hers. He’d been fantasizing about the moment so much that the mere press of her flesh, the warm exhale of her breath, brought goose bumps to his skin. She leaned in to welcome him, her fingernails running in tandem down his back. He forgot about the pain in his finger and allowed his hands to drift down the seams of her jeans, to feel the way they hugged her curves like a second skin. She stilled a nervousness inside of him, a note that had been reverberating off-pitch for far too long. It was like they were back on that dance floor again. Only now the music came from within and they didn’t need any accompaniment at all.

  He flicked off the kitchen light. The room plunged into darkness with only the blue glow of numbers on the stove to guide them.

  “Come.” She took his hand, her fingertips soft as rose petals, and led him to the living room. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet. Upstairs he could hear the heartbeat drip of a water faucet and the ticking of a clock.

  His eyes gradually adjusted to the hint of streetlight seeping in through the gauzy curtains. Adele lit a candle on the fireplace mantel. It flickered across her features. She was such a beautiful woman, her body a generous roadmap of peaks and valleys all waiting to be explored. Vega pulled her close and snaked an arm around her backside. He gently untucked her shirt from her jeans. His body thrummed with anticipation as he brushed her silky black hair away from her neck and ran his lips down its contours. Her muscles quickened beneath the firm assurance of his fingertips. It was crazy, this hunger that had come over both of them. Linda could be at the front door at any moment. Adele’s daughter was upstairs. But all that did was make everything feel more urgent.

  And then a snap came from the kitchen, sharp as a firecracker. Adele jumped out of his embrace.

  “Oh my God.”

  Vega wasn’t sure if the exclamation referred to the mouse or to him. He dropped his hands and stepped back. He felt light-headed and dizzy, certain that if Adele blew out the candle this minute, he’d see white arcs of current flowing between their bodies. They stared at each other for a long moment, neither saying anything. Finally, Vega spoke.

  “Maybe I should get rid of the mouse.” His voice felt foreign and stilted, like he was trying out a new language. He walked into the kitchen and switched on the light. Its brightness jarred his senses.

  The mouse was spread across the snapped trap, its tail dangling over the end like some rubber toy. Adele walked up behind him. She covered her eyes when he fished the trap from its hiding spot.

  “Oh, the poor thing.”

  “Now you’re feeling sorry for it?”

  “I can’t help it. I feel bad.”

  “That’s a liberal for you.” Vega rolled his eyes. “You want someone else to make the nasty stuff disappear, then you act all guilt-ridden when it’s accomplished.”

  “Don’t turn a mouse into politics, Jimmy.” They were back on solid ground again. It felt reassuring.

  It felt disappointing.

  “Do you have a garbage bag?” he asked her.

  “Can’t you just—I don’t know—bury it? I don’t want it in my garbage for a whole week. It will freak me out.”

  He let out a long, slow exhale. “I’ll get one of Cesar’s shovels from the garage.”

  Vega dug a shallow grave right behind the garage, thankful to have a physical outlet for his energies. When he was done, he covered the spot with a smooth fieldstone just in case Adele wanted to point out the grave to Sophia. Joy had always been sentimental about animals that way. Vega had buried more than a few squirrels in his time.

  He returned Cesar’s shovel to the garage. He was trying to rehang it on its proper hook when he accidentally hit a cardboard carton on the shelf above. The carton tumbled to the floor. Out spilled a rusty penknife and a plastic bag full of muddy rags and pieces of nylon landscaping rope. Vega started tossing the contents back into the carton. Then he noticed a faint green line running through the center of the rope.

  He opened the plastic bag and examined the contents more closely. There was something hasty and haphazard about this stuff that didn’t match the rest of Cesar Cardenas’s neat and orderly arrangement of equipment. The way the rope had been cut into fraying bits and pieces, the way the blade of the penknife had been allowed to develop rust, the balled-up rags caked with mud. No. On closer inspection, they weren’t rags at all. They were a T-shirt and jeans. And the mud—it wasn’t just mud. Vega could distinguish that reddish-brown tinge from mud.

  Something like distant thunder began a low, steady rumble through his chest cavity. Vega shoved the clothes and rope back into the plastic bag and returned the carton to the shelf as if simply restoring things to their original place could halt the unease he was feeling. None of the items was out of the ordinary. Mud, grease, blood—it came with the territory whenever you worked around tools. Vega’s unease came, not from the items themselves, but from the careless way they’d been stashed. Which made Vega wonder: Did these things belong to Cesar? They couldn’t be Adele’s since she seemed to have no idea what she did and didn’t have in here.

  That left only one other person who could have put those things in that box. His father probably wouldn’t have noticed. Neither would Adele.

  Vega’s cell phone rang, interrupting his thoughts. Greco.

  “We found them.”

  “Linda and Olivia?”

  “Yeah.”

  Vega heard the sound of a siren in the background. “Something wrong?”

  “They’re hurt, man. I’m out on Route 170 now. Bobby Rowland’s kid was driving the other way and slammed into their minivan.”

  Dios mío. “How bad is it?”

  A pause. Vega felt his heart drop to his shoes.

  “I think you’d better get over here right away.”

  Chapter 30

  There are almost no straight roads in the counties north of New York City. Everything curves and kinks, wandering beside streambeds, cutting paths between hills that blot out the sun too early in winter. Even the highways look like they were drawn onto the landscape by a cartographer with Tourette’s. It doesn’t take much to become an accident statistic here. A patch of slick pavement, a deer in the headlights, a truck in low gear on a bend and it’s over.

  Vega didn’t handle accidents anymore. Before he became a detective, however, he’d probably done hundreds. They always caught him by surprise. The sudden alteration of the landscape. The stark before and after of the lives involved. They weren’t like homicides, which usually had some buildup to them, or other sorts of accidents where an ounce of common sense might have made a
ll the difference. No. Car accidents had the hand of God about them. The way they shredded any sense of power or control people thought they exerted over their lives.

  The local police had blocked off part of Route 170 to civilian traffic. Vega saw the flares and emergency lights first, the way they made a spectacle of the darkness. At the checkpoint, he powered down his window and flashed his badge. Beyond, he could see the smashed remains of car carcasses sandwiched between police cruisers and fire trucks. The ambulances were gone but not the van from the medical examiner’s office. Vega’s chest tightened. Somebody was dead. He tried to get his emotions under control enough to ask the cop at the checkpoint who.

  “The nineteen-year-old driver of the red Mazda hatchback.”

  “Bobby Rowland’s son? Matt?”

  “Yeah,” said the cop, nodding grimly. “He was DOA by the time the first unit arrived.” Vega felt the breath leave his lungs. Rowland had already lost one son. It seemed inconceivable he’d lose the other.

  Vega drove slowly past the accident and parked farther east before heading back on foot. Torn metal and pebbled glass littered the asphalt. Rowland was sitting in his fire department SUV with Greco, who was taking down his statement. Every part of Rowland seemed to sag from the weight of what was happening. His shoulders melted into his chest. His jowls hung slack. His head looked too heavy for his neck. Every now and then, he would let it rest on the steering wheel of his car. His body would start to quake and Greco would wordlessly lay a patient hand on his back until he could straighten and begin again. Vega wanted to go over to his old friend but he knew this wasn’t a condolence call. It was a police investigation. The accident was on a local road, not a highway. He had no jurisdiction here.