The detective and Delia squeezed into her small office. The man took up a lot of space. Delia grabbed a pad of paper and rolled her chair several inches away from him when he sat in a manspread posture. “We have to remember two things when we interview Hayley,” she said. “First, her memory is probably impaired by trauma, and if we force her to remember things that are too traumatic for her to tolerate, she is going to reexperience the trauma and retreat even more. Second, she is only five years old, and her understanding of the world is part magical and part real. If we force her to be concrete, you aren’t going to get what you want.”
He tipped his head once. “Understood. And you understand that three people are dead and my job is to find the bad guys?”
She pulled a pencil off her desk. “Understood. Tell me what would be most helpful to find out from Hayley.”
He held up one fist and extended his pointer finger up. “One. Did she see the shooter? Can she tell us anything about what they looked like? And I mean anything. Male. Female. How many? Did she hear anything?”
Delia wrote furiously. “What else?” she said.
He held up his middle finger. “The car. They traveled to South Portland in a car. I know she won’t be able to tell us the kind of car, but anything that she can tell us about the car would help. Did it have a sunroof? What color was it? Was it a van?”
These were all questions that she expected. He held up the next finger.
“What was the other guy’s name? And then these are long shots, but did she know where they were going, or why she was with them?” He opened his hands, palms up. “If we can get answers to any of those questions, it would help us. And hopefully help Hayley.”
She’d worked with him before, but only for short periods, like in a hospital emergency room when a child was brought in with suspected abuse and once when she had to consult with him about the Somali community leaders when a ten-year-old Somali boy was kicked out of his house. But never tucked away in her office, nearly knee to knee.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call the foster mom, Erica, this morning and see what we can set up. I’ll call you.”
He didn’t move. “How about if you call her right now. The longer we wait, the harder all of this gets for everybody.”
Delia stuffed down a sense of irritation. This was her domain, and she knew what she was doing. In the end, she called Erica and set up a time for later that afternoon, after Hayley had a rest from kindergarten.
CHAPTER 27
Delia worked her way through files in her office. She and Moretti were scheduled to meet at Erica’s house at three. She pulled the office shredder next to her desk, and she slid in any scraps of paper that were no longer relevant to a child’s file or only meaningful to Delia, scribbles that the next caseworker wouldn’t be able to decipher. But she was distracted by the shocking return of Tyler. And on the back burner of her attention, the detective simmered.
She didn’t want to pretend not to notice that Tyler was back in Portland. Something about being thirty-two had sheared off the varnish of her skin, revealing what wanted to push through. She called Tyler’s cell, hoping he wasn’t in the midst of a medical intervention.
“Hey,” he said. She heard the welcome in his voice. “I’m here with a Realtor right now. Can I call you back in half an hour?”
“Sure. Are you free for lunch?”
“I think so. I’ll call you back.”
Was he buying a house? Was he settling in Portland permanently? When she first saw him, she assumed Portland was a stopover, a place to work until he moved on.
She was going to help train a new caseworker during her last week of work. But you couldn’t just drop seventy cases on the new person. That would be like teaching someone to swim and forcing them to drag a barge behind them. Delia would have to assign two thirds of her cases to the other four caseworkers in her office, at least temporarily. Right now, she had to figure out which child would go with which worker. And she couldn’t let any of the kids fall through the cracks.
For ten years, she’d lived with the tickling fear that she might just do that, forget a child, that multitasking might start to shrink up the part of her brain that needed to remember every child on her caseload, every parent, every foster parent. Were they working on reunification or adoption? Did the foster parents need more training, more resources, was she on a weekly visiting schedule with the child or twice a month? Her brain felt like an Excel sheet.
But now, she had transferred nearly twenty of her cases, much to the groaning exasperation of her already overburdened coworkers.
She was leaving Foster Services mostly intact. There had been no horrible disasters like the two cases in Massachusetts: a young boy, forgotten by his caseworker, who was killed by a flagrantly abusive stepfather, and another boy who had been starved into a coma. She had escaped the vilification that came with one mistake in this high-stakes world of understaffed workers and overloaded caseloads.
As the eleventh hour of her career chimed, Hayley appeared, the five-year-old without a family whom no one had reported missing. Hayley, who wanted to go home. She’d been working on Hayley’s case for ten days and so far, nothing had budged other than the possible link with Lillian Tiger Library in West Hartford. Every avenue was blocked, every tried and true technique, every inquiry to other agencies all resulted in the same response. No one had reported this child missing.
Delia continued to update and transfer files until her phone rang. Her heart jumped when she saw Tyler’s name on caller ID.
“Can you stop by and meet me for lunch at a house that I’m looking at? I need a second opinion. I’ve never bought a house before,” he said.
She had felt the heat of him since the day he walked into The Daily Grind. His return was like the great seventeen-year cicada cycle, except in this case, it was the thirteen-year cycle. He returned to Portland and whoosh, the old raw burn in her was ignited.
* * *
Hearing him was still disconcerting to her, blending his adult voice with the voice of a teenaged boy. Was there a way to extract her memories of him from before? The first sex, the flood of desire, the open reservoir of trust in him, crying in his arms when she confided all the family’s tightly held secrets about her father, how she and J Bird were so afraid of him at times, embarrassed to invite their friends over, and how much she loved her father when his true self peeked through the mental illness.
Delia locked her office and drove to the address that Tyler gave her, 29 Woodlawn Avenue. The address was in an old residential neighborhood filled with houses built in two waves. The first wave of building had been in the flush of wealth in the 1920s, and the second surge came right after World War II. All the houses were squat and solid Craftsman-style homes, some reputed to have been ordered directly from the Sears catalog. Not unlike the neighborhood where she and Tyler grew up.
She pulled her car to the side of the wide street. Two girls pedaled along the sidewalk, each one helmeted in matching purple headgear, both of them riding on the sidewalk instead of the street because they were eight years old. Ten years in the business of foster care made Delia an expert in assessing the ages of kids. And she knew these two girls weren’t in foster care. They had a home, and the filaments of their home trailed them with their bodily ease and matching helmets.
The front door was wide and welcoming with thick, angled pillars on either side of the steps leading up to the open porch. She liked porches. Her father loved to sit on the porch, writing the first drafts of his food column on a yellow legal pad. He would greet the young Delia as the yellow school bus dropped her off from school. “I’ve spent the day writing about artichokes,” he said. “Please tell me your day was more exciting.” But when he was overcome by the onslaught of delusions, the front porch terrified him. “Get in the house, Delia! We’re being watched.”
The front door to 29 Woodlawn was open. “Anybody home?” she said.
“In here.” Tyler’s voice echoed throug
h the empty house.
Delia felt the weight of the house and Tyler’s ownership as soon as he walked out of the kitchen, the way he touched the thick molding around the door, giving it a rub with his thumb.
His heat was already in the house, the way men can spread their aura around like dark honey. A woman’s voice reverberated from an empty room upstairs.
“The Realtor is making calls while I show you around. Tell me what you think so far,” he said. “No, wait. Let me show you around before the pizza gets here.” He reached for her hand so easily, as if no time had passed.
“Come on, you’ve got to see this sunroom. That’s what sold the house.”
“You already made an offer? Have you been looking at other houses or is this the first one?”
He squeezed her hand and released it.
“I told the Realtor what I wanted and this was the first house she showed me. That’s why I called you back. Well, aside from wanting to see you. I need a reality check. I haven’t signed anything yet. I’m calling her back in an hour.”
A flutter ran through her, a culmination of being with Tyler in this house, his enthusiasm about buying it, his desire for her opinion, and the hand squeeze. Was she so deprived of romance that even a hand squeeze felt dramatic? The erogenous zone of their palms, pressing against each other?
Tyler led the way through the living room, through the French doors, to the sunroom. “The sunroom was an addition back in the nineties. The owners were young, and they decided to add the sunroom instead of flying away to an island every February.”
The floor was lined with terra cotta tile, oversized squares of it, ready to absorb the heat of the sun through the glass walls and roof. Delia pictured the tiles exhaling puffs of heat in the cold afternoons of January and February.
“Look up,” he said. “There’s an awning that covers the ceiling during the hottest days of the summer.” Tyler reached for a remote control device, sitting on the one piece of furniture in the sunroom, a wicker couch with bright blue pillows. He clicked the remote and an interior awning slid across the ceiling. “Shade cloth,” he said, sitting down on the two-person couch. He patted the space next to him.
“What do you think? You’ve hardly said anything,” said Tyler.
Delia hesitated before sitting close to this man who was her first young lover, who had slid his hands along her breasts, fresh from midnight skinny dipping in Sebago Lake. She could still hear the thumping of his heart when she had lain across him, her ear pressed to his chest. Everything about Tyler had been an antidote to the daily tragedy at home as her father’s illness accelerated. He had been everything fresh and healthy when her home was encased with sadness.
She turned in the small space, angling her body so that she could look directly at him. “I haven’t said anything because we are skipping a huge block of our history. I’m not good at pretending. If I ever had that social skill, it incinerated thirteen years ago along with my mother and father.”
Tyler winced, his entire torso trembled as though unprepared to step back in time.
Did she have to be so abrasive? Had she gone too far in the direction of speaking the truth?
She cleared her suddenly dry throat. “I’m glad you’re here. It’s amazing to see you, but I can’t fake it; seeing you brings back a lot of emotional turmoil. Okay, tons of turmoil. I’m completely undone, sort of time-traveling to age nineteen and back to right now in my overwhelming, oh-so-adult life, and it’s giving me whiplash.” She didn’t mean to say so much about being undone.
“Whiplash?” Tyler laughed, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Finally we’re talking about something that I actually know about.” He paused, took a huge breath, and slowly exhaled.
“Did they teach relaxation breathing techniques in med school?” she asked.
“Delia, it was California. Of course they did. Reiki and acupressure were also offered, although they were optional and I couldn’t fit them into my schedule.” He put his hand on her thigh for an instant. “In some strange way, I don’t feel like any time has passed at all. I didn’t plan this, although I seriously hoped that I would run into you in Portland. I wasn’t even sure you were still here.”
Delia took the remote out of his hand to have something to do. A tremor ran through her. She pushed the button to retract the shade cloth. A small motor whirred. “You didn’t plan what, specifically?”
He took the remote from her and set it between them. “That it would matter to me if you liked the house that I bought, that you would look more beautiful, that your eyes would still make me go all goofy, and that I would still sound like I was nineteen. I swear to you that I am a fully functioning adult and I don’t sound like this when I’m fixing broken bodies when they come through the emergency doors.”
Delia stood up. “You’re an emergency doctor? It is almost impossible for me to wrap my head around this. I’m sorry, but you aren’t old enough to drink. You are nineteen. Me too.” She could only address one part of his comment. Not the part about her eyes or any of the rest.
“I’ve embarrassed you. And me. I didn’t mean to say that. It’s the combination of seeing you and having my younger, more impulsive self leap to the foreground. I promise you that I can take care of car accident victims at three a.m., and kids with croup who have freaked out their parents when they started barking like a seal, and everything else without blathering like this.”
The doorbell rang and echoed throughout the house, unmitigated by furniture, drapes, or rugs. Both of them jumped a bit.
“Let me get that. The Realtor said we can’t bring food into the house, but there’s a neighborhood park at the end of the block. We can eat there,” he said. He rushed out of the room to the front door.
When she had been nineteen, after the fire, after he and his family drove away, she longed for Tyler to suddenly appear, to drive back from the West Coast, to answer her e-mails, to offer her salvation from the collapse of her family. After Tyler didn’t respond, after months of hoping, she closed the door on him. She rarely spoke of him, excised him from her life. When she had needed him the most, he left her. The current version of Tyler sliced open the old wound with a scalpel.
The front door closed and Tyler returned, holding a flat cardboard box of pizza.
“Let’s eat,” he said. “I promise not to let the nineteen-year-old out again. I just sent him to his room without supper.” He paused and then went to the bottom of the stairs. “Jessica, we’re going to the park to eat. You can lock it up. I’ll call you later this afternoon.”
A woman trotted down the stairs, cell phone in one hand, large black handbag in the other, blond hair pulled back with clip. “Great. I’m sorry you can’t eat here, but we can’t allow prospective buyers to bring food in the house. Are you sure you’ve seen everything that you need?”
“Don’t worry about us. It will be nice to eat outside.”
Delia followed him through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the patio, and Jessica locked the door behind them. They walked along the side yard to the street and the half block to a small park with one set of swings and a picnic table. They sat across from each other.
“Did you take away the nineteen-year-old’s ability to call or e-mail also? Because that’s what happened once before.” She didn’t want to spare him anything, or pretend, or eat pizza. She was glad that the thick planks of wood separated them.
Tyler’s hand hesitated over the cardboard box. “Time has made you even more direct.” He sat back, hands beside him along the bench. “My family needed me. No sooner had we moved than my father became ill. Lung cancer. He told me not to transfer to the West Coast, told me to live my life, but I couldn’t do it. I wanted all the time I had with him. I didn’t have anything left to give to anyone else.”
Tyler closed his eyes and bent his head down for a moment. “My dad lived for about eighteen months, a good long time for his kind of cancer. When the dust settled, I was too ashamed to contact
you. I mean, you had to take care of everything, I know. You had to take care of your sister.”
When he looked up, his eyes were red, blood vessels bursting.
“We could have helped each other. That’s what people do,” she said.
“How? We were suddenly three thousand miles away. But you’re right; I’ve never regretted anything as much as what I did,” he said. “I should have called you. I should have done a lot of things.”
A sudden breeze rustled the treetops, a harbinger of autumn. They were in the shade of a large sugar maple that was sure to turn orange or red as the days grew shorter. Gooseflesh rose up on Delia’s arms.
“I have to meet a colleague in South Portland,” she said, getting up. “If you like the house, you should buy it. This is a good, solid house.” She swung one leg over the picnic table bench and then the other. “I’m sorry about your father.” She knew she had to say more, but what was enough in the face of so much death? “You don’t ever have to apologize again. We can’t go back to being kids again. Both of us made it through awful times, and I think we’re okay now.”
“Delia, wait. I want to see you again. We can stay right in the present and do something ordinary, like dinner. Could we be ordinary people at dinner? I’m on twelve-hour shifts for the next few days, but after that?”
She did want to see him again. She wanted to see what he had grown into.
“Okay, I’d like that,” she said.
Tyler walked with her back to her car, the pizza box filled with cooling pizza. When she slid into her car, her chin began to itch. Chin and left jawline. Of course, it was the case again. It had to be Hayley.
CHAPTER 28
“Hi again, Hayley,” said Delia. “Where’s my favorite cat, Mr. Louie?” It was midafternoon and Erica had directed them to the back deck of her house.
Hayley looked up from a child-sized plastic Adirondack chair on the deck. Erica picked squash and cucumbers from the raised garden bed. Delia knew she had one ear cocked toward Hayley, ready to intervene if the child became distressed.
The Tiger in the House Page 12
