Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “I believe you. But Tess made one good point back there. You never told me where you came from and who might be waiting for you back home.”

  Sadie stilled. Her ribs tightened. She cast about for some half-truth that would satisfy Riley’s curiosity. Half-truths were always better, and a lot easier to remember, but her mind kept stumbling over what she couldn’t reveal. No, she couldn’t tell Riley that. She just…couldn’t. But she’d risked so much already—stealing books from her hometown library, using Nana’s ATM card, traveling five hours away from home, telling so many half-truths to this one, kind stranger.

  “I think you owe me this, Sadie.”

  Sadie closed her eyes against the kick of guilt. Then she whispered what she knew she shouldn’t.

  “I lived with my grandmother.” She crouched down and plucked at a pinecone with a fingernail. Stupid tears prickled at the backs of her eyes. She blinked fast to keep them there. She wasn’t supposed to talk about this. She’d kept all this inside of her for so long, clamping her teeth together when she was tempted, and now she felt her throat close so tightly she could barely breathe.

  Riley asked, “Is your grandmother missing you now?”

  She curled her hand around the sticky pinecone. If she just hadn’t been in such a hurry that day. She’d had an algebra test and she hadn’t been able to think of anything else. She knew she had to eat a good breakfast that morning, but that meant making more dishes to wash, less time to do it in. So she didn’t have time to comb Nana’s hair, make sure she was dressed properly. She remembered thinking what difference did it make anyway? What was one day wearing slippers and a bathrobe? It wasn’t like they were going to have visitors or anything, and she could always take care of Nana once she got back home.

  Sadie whispered, “I forgot to bolt the door.”

  One stupid mistake. All her fault. One stupid mistake and the whole world turned upside-down again.

  “Sadie?” Riley stood close beside her, watching her, all gentle brown eyes.

  “The police found her before I did,” Sadie said. “Nana was wandering in the middle of Skillman Avenue. All she was wearing was a bathrobe and one shoe.”

  Chapter Eight

  It felt odd to be approaching the Pine Lake police station in broad daylight. Without wearing handcuffs, that is.

  Tess dropped into her strut like fifteen years hadn’t passed since she’d rolled over these sidewalks. She knew the exact distance between trees boasting little wooden signs admonishing people to curb their dogs. She knew the angle of the summer light, the air that smelled like maple syrup, the temptation of freedom provided by the thin alleyway between the yarn shop and the station. With her hands in her back pockets, she braced herself to enter the booking room of the police station without Officer Rodriguez nudging her ahead of him, pushed beyond all levels of tolerance, his overdeveloped neck muscles twitching.

  No, this time she was heading into the belly of the beast on her own. This time she was acting like a good citizen, an upstanding, taxpaying member of decent society. Though if she thought about it for more than a minute, she knew she was riding a thin moral line between getting a runaway back to her family and ratting out Riley, a woman to whose family she owed a great debt. Just the thought of it made her twitchy for nicotine.

  She pushed through the revolving door nonetheless. Her nostrils flared as she entered the old room. It smelled of mold and humidity, tinged with testosterone with a top note of dirty socks. The place was locked into the mid-twentieth century, with the same linoleum floors, the same old oak information desk, the same Plexiglas shield with the circular cutout, and maybe even the same female cop behind it.

  The cop didn’t turn away from her computer screen as Tess approached.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah, I was driving over on River Road just off I-90 a couple of days ago, and I saw this kid wandering on the side of the road.” Tess pushed away the memory of Riley demanding Tess respect her wishes and not report Sadie to the police. Technically Tess wasn’t reporting her at all. “She was a young girl, fourteen or so, skinny, alone in the rain with a backpack.”

  “Yeah?”

  The policewoman jiggled her mouse and kept reading something on her monitor. Tess wondered what kind of hot crime wave was going on in Pine Lake that the report of a runaway elicited such a dull response. Was the town secretary skimming from the city budget? Had someone set up a meth lab in the woods? Back when she was raising hell, the toughest thing the cops did in any given year was to bust a bunch of pot-smoking kids spray-painting the inside walls of the old cannery.

  “She was a runaway,” Tess said. “I’m here to see if there are any alerts.”

  “We haven’t gotten any reports lately.” The woman stretched back to pull some flyers from a pile. “The NCMEC keeps an updated list of runaways you can search online state by state.” She slid the flyers through the slot in the Plexiglas. “You can also try the Polly Klaas Foundation—”

  “Done both of those.” Tess ignored the flyers. “I’ve also checked the FBI list of missing persons. I’m here to see if you’ve got a better, more up-to-date database.”

  The policewoman lifted her head. Tess felt the woman’s gaze pass over her butch-cut hair, her shoulder tat, and her black ribbed tank. Tess didn’t recognize the cop, but Tess could see the officer’s mind working, flipping through some mental Rolodex. Somewhere in the basement storage of this very building there was probably a nice fat file on Theresa Hendrick, the edges of the pages yellowing, the paper spotted black with mildew.

  The policewoman picked up a phone. “Have a seat. I’ll send someone out to write up a report.”

  Her butt remembered the wooden bench sitting like a pew against the front wall. She slipped right into place. She ran her hand over the finish, worn in places where many a soul had languished. She wondered if she ran her fingers just underneath the edge she would find layers of ossified gum stuck there in youthful protest. All she needed to make this picture complete was that hard-nosed cop, Officer Rodriguez, walking through the door.

  Then the far door swung open and a cop rolled out.

  Sweet Jesus, no.

  Rodriguez still had the same musculature that got him mocked as “Rod the Bod” by the late-night cannery crowd. The years had filled him in so he looked less like an obsessive gym rat and more like a fitness acolyte who liked to play tag football on the weekends. Or like one of those militant, angry fathers who beat the spine out of their kids.

  Instinct kicked in. She rolled up out of her seat and slipped her hands in her back pockets. What the hell was he doing in Podunk Pine Lake? He should have blown this small-town police station a long time ago. He should have climbed his way up the ladder to Albany, where he’d have something better to do than harass teenagers. Or he should be living off a city pension somewhere, fishing and hunting his way through his forties. He’d certainly put in his twenty years. She hadn’t even considered he’d still be kicking around, an ugly reminder of everything she’d left Pine Lake to forget.

  He stopped square in front of her and gave her a hard-eyed glare. “Well, if it isn’t Theresa Hendrick.”

  “Rodriguez.”

  “I called Gloria a liar when she told me you were sitting out here. You just cost me twenty bucks.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time she’d cost him money. He’d once thrown ten bucks on a shopkeeper’s desk to pay for the tampons she’d stolen by stuffing them in her coat.

  “You shouldn’t be gambling, Rod.” She tried to raise her gaze above his chest, but it got caught on the regalia. “A guy with that much brass should know gambling is illegal in Pine Lake.”

  Rodriguez shoved his hands under his biceps so they bulged even more. “Blond suits you.”

  “I’ll take the compliment.” She squinted at his salt-and-pepper head. “But I’m just not feeling the gray, Rod.”

  “Blond is better than that goth thing you once had going. You know how many tim
es I wanted to take a scrub brush to your face?”

  “A scrub brush? And I pinned you for a whips-and-handcuffs man.”

  “You always did pin me wrong.” He gestured to the tat covering her left arm. “I see you’re still committing ritual, socially sanctioned self-abuse.”

  “That’s a lot of big words.”

  “Still the smart mouth.”

  “You’re looking pretty smart, too.” She nodded to his uniform, crisp and blue as always. “You’ve earned a few more patches for your sash, Girl Scout.”

  “That’s Captain Girl Scout to you.” A muscle flickered in his cheek. “So what the hell brought you back to Pine Lake?”

  “I’m visiting friends.”

  “And I thought I’d put all of them in jail.”

  She tried to straighten up like the adult she was, but all she managed to do was swivel from one hip to the other, regressing from thirty-something to a teenager in one minute flat. She seemed to be having no effect on him, as usual. He glared down from his six-foot-three-or-so, sporting the cop stone face, his lips pressed in a slashing line like an Old Testament god.

  Well, she didn’t owe anyone an explanation for why she was back in Pine Lake, least of all this cop who’d all but driven her out with his harassment. She was tempted to ask him if he was still throwing hungry teenagers in jail for shoplifting at the Food Mart. She wanted to ask him if he still did nightly drive-bys to harass the good folks of the Cannery. She was tempted to ask him if he was still working that battered wife case, the one when he helped the father retain custody of his biological children.

  But if she gave in to the powerful urge to turn on a heel and leave the station, she’d only trigger Rodriguez’s cop intuition. The last thing she wanted him to do was dig into the archives and investigate.

  She steeled herself for the inevitable mockery. “Believe it or not, Rodriguez, I’ve come to ask for your help.”

  He turned his head. “Come again?”

  “I saw a kid on the side of the road a couple of days ago.”

  “Did you just ask for my help?”

  “Don’t be a prick.”

  “For a decade of your young wasted life, I tried to give you help.” He rocked back on his heels. “And here you show up fifteen years later asking for it.”

  “It’s not for me. I need to see the most recent list of missing children and runaways.”

  “Gloria said you mentioned something about a girl walking alone on a county road.”

  “A runaway.”

  “Or a local kid coming back from some pickup soccer game—”

  “I know a runaway when I see one. You think I’d drag my ass into this police station because I’ve got nothing better to do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you came here to get fingerprinted again, just for old-time’s sake. Or to check on outstanding warrants.”

  “You told me that you buried all of those.”

  “The juvenile delinquent I remember never believed anyone’s word.”

  “Are you going to help me with this runaway? Or are you going to harass me for old-times’ sake?”

  “You could have looked up this stuff online yourself.”

  “Sorry, I left my tricked-up laptop back in my eighteen-wheeler, and, geez, I must have misplaced my library card.”

  “So it didn’t work out so well for you then.”

  “What?”

  “Running away.”

  Tess’s jaw hardened. She wished she could excise that terrible year from her brain and stitch the edges back together so it didn’t include the cold, the damp, the sick, the lonely realization that no one in the whole wide world gave a shit about Tess Hendrick, least of all herself.

  Her jaw had turned to stone so she just looked at him from beneath the swoop of her bangs, looked at him with all their conflicted history rolling between them, and waited for him to make the next move. She could see his cop mind working overtime. She could see him wondering what game she was playing. But she wasn’t playing a game—not this time—so she didn’t have to school her face. She’d come here for one reason alone: To ferret out some kind of proof that Sadie was lying to Riley—that Sadie’s relatives did care that Sadie was gone. By now Sadie’s Nana or aunt must have sent out an APB for a missing child. Finding that proof was the only way Tess could think of to shake Riley’s all too trusting nature and get Sadie back where she belonged.

  He unknotted his arms and said, “Freddie Taylor’s got an autistic boy who wanders off sometimes, but we always find him splashing around at Bay Roberts. We haven’t gotten any other local notices of runaways or missing children.” He walked toward the door to the inner station, talking all the way. “You’ll want a statewide database. If that doesn’t work, I can get you access to the Canadian records. If the kid was that close to the highway, she could have hitched, she could have come from anywhere, and you know that, right?”

  “I’ve ridden a few circuits.”

  “How good a look did you get of her?”

  Tess thought of Sadie’s bright red hair, the dimple in the lobe of her left ear, the alfalfa green eyes.

  “Good enough.”

  Rodriguez led her into the main room of the precinct. He wove through the desks, past a few officers in uniform and a few without. The room had the kind of hush that came when everyone had just stopped whispering. She forced herself not to dodge eye contact. She wasn’t being dragged in in handcuffs now. She wasn’t being put in a holding cell until the cops could rouse her mother out of a drunken stupor long enough to sign her out. And a quick scan of the room didn’t register any recognizable cop faces, although that husky guy in the corner with the thinning hair could be Officer Casey.

  Rodriguez led her all the way to the back office, the one with his name stenciled on it, Captain Jorge E. Rodriguez.

  “All the years of working here,” she said, as she entered the one-windowed office, “and now you’re den mother.”

  “It’s almost as shocking as finding you alive.”

  “I’d imagined you’d be in Albany or New York City, capturing the real bad guys, instead of here harassing the stoners.”

  “I did five years in Albany.”

  She snorted. “You make that sound like a prison sentence.”

  “I worked homicide.”

  He didn’t elaborate. He leaned over his desk, flattened his palm on a pile of papers, and with the blue glow of the computer screen lighting his face, he tapped the keyboard one-fingered. A diploma from the police academy was the only thing hanging on the walls. On top of a file cabinet stood a picture of two young boys and a dog frolicking in autumn leaves. No pictures of a wife, she noted. Next to the picture was some sort of blocky plastic award whose brass placard she couldn’t read.

  “Come around here,” he said, “and I’ll show you what’s what.”

  She rounded the desk and saw a screen full of computer files. He hesitated for a moment, his finger hovering on the mouse, before he finally clicked a window and a database popped up. It was set on the most recent missing child report, only a day old. The missing kid was a six-year-old Vietnamese boy from Riverdale.

  “It’s set up by descending date,” he explained, “so this listing is the latest. Clearly he’s not your runaway. Click here and then you can go and see the main list and choose only the reports for female minors. Be patient. I’m fighting with city hall to approve an upgrade to the wi-fi so it’s going to take a while to load each listing.”

  She glanced around the small office. “You want me to do this right here?”

  “You wanted access.” He nudged a coffee cup that said World’s Best Dad. “There’s a coffee maker in the break room. It’s pure industrial sludge, but you know what they say about beggars and choosers.”

  “So you’re going to let an ex-delinquent rifle through all those files of yours.”

  “All my files are password protected.”

  “I don’t want to tie up your computer.” Or have you watc
h what I’m doing. “I could be hours at this.”

  “You’ve got one hour. I’m going to lunch with Gloria.”

  “All right then.” An hour would do it. “You girls take your time.”

  “There’s hot chocolate in the break room, too,” he said as he paused at the door, patting the frame. “I remember how much you loved hot chocolate.”

  Heat rose to the roots of her hair. The first time she’d been dragged into the police station, barely fourteen, when she’d been caught smoking pot with her new friends at the Cannery, Rodriguez had separated her from the others. He’d taken her into the break room and offered her hot chocolate. It was instant, watery, and served in a Styrofoam cup. It was the best thing she’d tasted since her father had dumped her and her mother gave up parenting.

  She sank deeper into the Rodriguez-size hollow in the seat, determined to get this done and then get as far away from Rodriguez as possible. In the search box she typed Sadie’s full name.

  She watched the little hourglass spin as the search commenced. Sadie had been gone from the Queens house for two weeks, according to Tess’s best estimate. It was long past time for someone to notice the girl’s absence. Tess knew Sadie’s Nana hadn’t died—she’d searched all the local funeral homes and the newspapers for obituaries, but that search had come up empty. Tess could only conclude that Sadie had conned her Nana somehow, given her some kind of elaborate story to explain why she wasn’t around. Like she was going away on vacation with a friend or she got a scholarship to some upstate camp. Sadie probably had an accomplice or two. Maybe that Izzy girl who posted on her social media all the time.

  Then the hourglass stopped, the screen refreshed, and Tess frowned.

  No matches.

  Tess leaned back, worried. She’d received no hits from the other databases when she’d searched, either. She wondered if the authorities had screwed up the name. Tischler was one of those names that people always misspelled. She would search again using just Sadie’s first name; it was unusual enough that she shouldn’t get too many hits. And if that didn’t work, she’d search for age, gender, and county.