by Laurel Dewey
“Hello,” the woman said, obviously having trouble breathing. Bailey turned to face her. “Wheel me out there,” she instructed. Bailey quickly obliged. She held out her hand to Jane. A well-used linen hankie was wedged in the arm of the cream cardigan. “I’m Louise Van Gorden. Bailey’s mother. You must be Detective Perry.”
Jane gently shook her hand. “Yes, ma’am.”
Louise may have been on death’s door, but there was a hard resistance in her eyes that gave Jane the impression that this ol’ lady wasn’t going down without a fight. “You need to excuse my son, detective,” she said in a tone that was dry and flinty. “He’s forgotten what he was taught. Do you need to leave immediately?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good,” Louise declared with an officious tenor. “We’ve finally got some goddamned sun outside. Wheel me out onto the terrace so we can visit.”
Jane wasted no time pushing Louise through the kitchen and out onto the spacious tree-lined terrace that Jane was already intimately familiar with—thanks to Bailey’s YouTube video. To her left was the three-tiered Italian fountain that Bailey misspelled on his video tag, and to her right was the covered and probably still unused Webber grill.
Carol handed Jane a heavy blanket to drape across Louise’s lap before closing the French doors and giving them privacy. Jane took a seat on the stone edge of a large planter box, replete with frozen offerings from last fall’s final growth. Louise held her wrinkled face to the sun, squinting but seemingly finding some relief in the late afternoon rays.
“Tiring flight?” Jane asked.
“Everything’s tiring these days.”
“Which airport did you fly out of?” Louise turned away from the sun and looked at Jane. “Bailey said he grew up in Wentworth, New Jersey. I’ve never heard of Wentworth. Is that where you still live?”
“I flew out of Newark. I live in Princeton. I moved there years ago.” She reached into her cardigan pocket and brought out a pack of Parliament cigarettes and matches. Jane watched in stunned silence as the woman lit a cigarette with her thin bony fingers, let out a gagging hack and inhaled a hard drag with her thin, cracked lips. “You smoke?” Louise asked, handing the pack to Jane.
“No. I just quit.”
Louise smiled and turned to the side. “Yeah, sure. I quit too.” She took another hearty puff. “I understand Carol told you about my predicament.” Jane nodded. “So, you must be wondering why I’m smoking?”
“That’s your business,” Jane said matter-of-factly.
“Yes. That’s right. It is my business.” There was a harsh, unforgiving quality in Louise’s voice. “I suppose others in my condition would be searching the world for cures or maybe securing their relationship with God. But I’m more the type who just accepts my lot in life. What’s cooked at home is eaten at home. That’s an old saying but it fits. You take what you get and you deal with it.” Louise inhaled another drag. “So, Jordan Copeland…” The shift in the conversation was purposeful. “It seems we have the likely suspect in our midst.” She titled her head toward the sun again. “Copeland? Isn’t that a Jewish name? Do you find a lot of child killers who are Jews or do Jews steer clear of that particular twisted desire?”
Jane felt her back stiffen. “Copeland’s not Jewish.”
“Are you certain?” Louise returned her gaze to Jane.
“Yes.”
“Hmmm. Aaron Copland was a Jew, right?”
“It’s spelled differently.”
“Really? Well, well, well…” Louise seemed to drift for a second. “How unfortunate to have a last name that has such an undesirable association.”
“You have your prejudice?” Jane asked as gently as humanly possible.
Louise smiled. “Only in the morning. By the evening, I’ve worked it completely out of my system.” She shifted in the wheelchair, having a difficult time finding a comfortable position. “I think it’s obvious that Jordan Copeland is involved with Jake’s disappearance.”
“What makes it obvious?”
“His record, for God’s sake!” Louise snapped. “His personality…”
“How do you know his personality?”
“My son has informed me.” Louise started to take another drag on the cigarette but began coughing so violently that Jane wondered if she was going to pop a lung.
“Wasn’t it precarious for you to travel, given your illness?”
Louise wiped her mouth with the linen hankie tucked under her cardigan. “You can say it… terminal liver cancer. Yes. But I told my doctors in Newark to fuck off.” She chuckled a low laugh. “Forty years ago, I’d never have said such a thing. I might have thought it, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have said it. But ever since the cancer took hold of my liver, I find myself more impulsive, more direct, more bile. Cancer seems to extract the bitch in me that’s been buried for years.” Her tired eyes, lids heavy, gazed off to the side. “You know what cancer has taught me, detective? It’s taught me that life is a shit hole into which you sink deeper and deeper until the excrement smothers you and chokes the life from your throat.”
“That’s visual.”
“That’s real, sweetheart! You come into this world and you have such fantasies that life is fair and you’ll marry the man of your dreams and you’ll have the house and the kids and holidays on the coast. And then you find out that life is about duty and obligations to those around you who you can’t stand but you put up with. Pretty soon, you’ve forgotten who you are and what you wanted because you’re drowning in other’s people’s nightmares. But who gives a shit, right? You do what you have to do to keep up…”
“The status quo,” Jane interjected.
Louise’s weary face studied Jane. “Yes. You understand, don’t you?”
“I understand that people do it. But I don’t understand why.”
She chuckled again but it was edged with scorn. “How lucky you are, dear. You have the luxury of integrity.”
“Kind of goes with my job description.”
“Oh, Christ, give me a break. As if there aren’t dirty cops out there. You still believe in honesty because you still believe that people are good. Once you learn that people are inherently evil and that goodness is just an illusion to draw others into one’s scheme, then you’ll release the shackles of your integrity and join the rest of us.”
Jane considered what Louise said. Wasn’t she already there in many ways? Wasn’t she knee deep in that shit hole and waiting for more crap to get dumped on her? Good God, she thought, was she staring at that moment into the bleak eyes of her near future? A future rife with bitterness and misery where every breath and thought revolves around how fucking miserable life is as you wait to die? The more Jane looked at Louise, the more she hated her. She hated her because she was looking at part of herself—the part that was old before her time and resentful that any happiness in her life had been subjugated to serve a greater need. Here was a woman who had willingly given up her opinions, her options and her voice in favor of whatever she was told to do. And now, with the specter of death enveloping her, she was finally speaking up with the hard carpet of anger underneath each word.
What’s to say that all those years of suffocating her feelings didn’t invite the cancer into her body that was chewing on her liver? What’s to say that if Louise had had the guts to speak up years ago that she wouldn’t be destroyed right now, waiting for the death rattle? Jane couldn’t help but wonder if the simple act of speaking up and seeking one’s truth was the liberating factor in this equation? She’d never had a problem speaking her mind, but facing the truth of her life and her past was still difficult to process. It required forgiveness and vulnerability—two attributes that felt so damn dangerous to her. Forgiveness required releasing the engine of hate; vulnerability could leave her wide open for an attack. It was easier to continue in the way she’d always operated. It was safer. “Illusions die hard and the status quo dies even harder,” she remembered Jordan telling her. “Who
wants to face their shadowed truth when it’s so much easier to keep the ball rolling that feeds the machine and makes one’s life a false existence?” he’d stressed.
Jane scrutinized Louise seated in her wheelchair, the fading ember of her cigarette pointed toward the cold concrete. The woman seemed to be growing tired quickly. Her body appeared crumpled under her crisp, starched shirt. Her advice to Jane to “release the shackles” of her integrity and “join the rest of us” carried the echo of every malevolent proposition ever uttered on this earth. It held the same oily tenor of the pornographer when he lures an ignorant girl into his trap; it seized the same devious intention of the meth dealer who promises a sweet escape to those who want to disappear. Without even realizing it, Jane was already on the highway, going full throttle, unconsciously “joining the rest of us,” and she felt sick. This was not a club she had any conscious intention of joining. For a moment, she forgot the reason she came to the Van Gorden’s house. She forgot that Jake was somewhere out there at the mercy of God knows who. This case had suddenly become personal and the players in it had become nauseating reflections of her own inadequacies. A fire of indignation erupted in Jane’s belly. “You know, I kind of like the illusion of integrity, Louise. It tends to create an environment where the reality of subversion can be revealed.”
Louise’s thin lips pursed into an indiscernible line. Clearly, she wasn’t amused that Jane had the nerve to think for herself. This withered woman, who looked twenty years older than she was, had played the game her entire life, and she was damned if some bitch with a badge and a brain was going to jump the invisible barriers and not play along. “Aren’t you a silly child,” Louise muttered with an elitist rise of her brow.
Jane leaned forward. “Is that how you’d describe Jake?”
Louise thought about it. “No,” she said offhandedly after a few seconds. “He was ignorant of the way the world works.”
“Was?” Jane asked.
“Isn’t it a foregone conclusion, detective?”
“That he’s dead?” Jane’s tone was a blend of incredulity and rage.
“Yes.”
“No, it’s not.” Jane’s ire was spiking. “I was brought in from Denver to bring him back alive.”
“No, you weren’t. You were brought in to investigate and arrest the most likely suspect who is clearly unbalanced, has a disgusting criminal record and is guilty.”
“What if all trails don’t lead to Jordan Copeland’s door?”
“Then he’s working with someone. The sooner we get him back into a prison cell, the sooner we can put this to bed.”
Put this to bed, Jane thought. For fuck’s sake, what in the hell was going on in that bony head of hers? “So, we collar Jordan and we throw him in the box. But what if he doesn’t cop to your grandson’s kidnapping? What if he doesn’t admit that he’s aligned with anyone else who might have Jake? What if it’s a dead end? Where does that leave Jake?”
“How many mysteries don’t get solved, detective? How many bodies are never found? I’m afraid that resignation has become a familiar bedfellow for me…especially now.” Her voice was off in the distance, dangling far away from her body.
Jane stood up. She wasn’t going to be dismissed this time. This time she was walking out on her own volition. “Well, Mrs. Van Gorden, I haven’t rolled over yet on this case. And I’m sure as hell not planning to do so in the near future. You see, I actually feel that whoever took Jake wants to be found.” Jane detected a stiffening of Louise’s gaunt face. “And it’s my intention to give him exactly what he wants.” She nodded toward Louise who returned the gesture with a stern glare of disapproval. But before Jane opened the French doors, she turned around. “I would think you’d want some resolution regarding your grandson before you die.”
Louise fiddled with the hem of her sweater sleeve. “Resolution is a myth. The book is never closed. We just play out the same scene in different clothes and different settings.”
“That’s absolutely true. Until someone speaks up and blows the fucking lid off the lies.” Jane would never have couched a statement that way to the grandmother of any missing child. But this grandmother seemed to be seriously lacking both grief and compassion.
Instead of the statement eliciting fury, Louise simply smiled and shook her head. “Since no one has the balls or sufficient gunpowder to blow a feather in the air, it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever find out what happened to Jake.” She gazed out into the yard. “And then all we’ll be left to say is…so sad…too bad.”
CHAPTER 19
Jane felt like she needed a shower as she descended the Van Gorden’s driveway and returned to her Mustang. She left Louise in the back courtyard where she asked to be left alone. Carol solemnly walked Jane to the door while Bailey, ever the gentleman, stayed behind his office doors talking on the phone.
Popping the Mustang into gear, Jane maneuvered slowly down the winding road and left Blackfeather Estates. As she drove, she recalled the haunting admission that her friend Kit Clark told her the previous year. Dying of lung cancer, Kit was convinced that she’d given herself the disease as a result of unresolved anger and grief over the death of her beloved granddaughter. When the subject of liver cancer surfaced, Jane remembered Kit referencing “unresolved anger and guilt.” During one episode when Jane fell off the wagon, Kit was relentless, warning Jane that her vengeance would “swell up and eat away” at her body one day if she didn’t find the middle ground and a more peaceful approach.
In the fifteen months since that fateful encounter, Jane read numerous books that Kit left her, all featuring mystical, philosophic and mind/body themes. The central thesis throughout was that whatever the mind believes, the body responds to in kind. If you think the world is an evil, hateful place, you will attract that reality along with the people who mirror that belief. Eventually, your body will shut down because hatred grows in the soil of discontent and then a myriad of ailments can surface—some aggravating, others deadly.
Suppression, Jane learned, was the first nail in the coffin—suppression of a dream, a love, an emotion…a secret. Whatever is suppressed or hidden, she learned, ironically becomes the eight-hundred-pound gorilla inside the body screaming to be acknowledged. The more it’s ignored, the more it growls and tears at the fabric of the body. Keep ignoring it and as one’s anger grows—built on a foundation of guilt, resentment and sense of being trapped—the disease takes hold. Once that happens, the gorilla cannot be ignored any longer because the damage he’s done is made manifest in a way one can physically see.
But, from what Jane was able to fathom from the pages of Kit’s books, if you understand this cycle and release yourself from the choke hold of suppression, anger and all the other emotions that pull you down into the pit of hell instead of lift you up, you can find that elusive freedom everybody talks about. The point was to feel; to experience life with an open heart and mind; to shed the fear that feeling was dangerous. The point was also to speak up and not deny what you’ve seen or what you’ve felt and shun the lies when they are sold erroneously as the truth. If a person could do this, they could move through life with greater ease and a sense of purpose, unlocking the manacles with the key they’ve held all along.
It all sounded so ridiculously simple on the page. But putting it into practice and remembering it when life served another bitter plate, was quite another. Jane’s thoughts turned to Louise Van Gorden and she pondered what secrets the old, bitter woman had suppressed. There was that callous What’s the use? mentality Louise favored, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Jake was dead or would be killed. And that statement that “What’s cooked at home is eaten at home”? That spoke volumes to Jane—keep everything under the roof and don’t expose it while you continue life as normal. What a twisted, fucked-up attitude. If this was the world that Jake inhabited, it’s no wonder he didn’t fit and rankled against his surroundings. It’s no wonder the boy may have been drawn into the disreputable grasp of someone
else who he might have thought was a friend but who turned out to be his doom.
Jane continued driving down the two-lane highway but she couldn’t get Louise’s sickly vibe off her. It was like watching death personified. The dark shadows perched around the old lady were palpable, like vultures waiting to feast on her corpse. Fear rose up in Jane’s throat as she drove down the highway; fear that all the changes she consciously made over the last fifteen months were falling short and that she was speeding toward the same end as Louise. She’d always gone through life with a sense of duty, first to her younger brother and then to every victim she encountered. When Louise grumbled that “you find out that life is about duty and obligations to those around you who you can’t stand but you put up with” and then “you forgot who you are and what you wanted because you’re drowning in other’s people’s nightmares,” Jane related to every word. As cold-hearted as the ol’ broad was, Jane understood her. At the age of thirty-seven, was it already too late to turn it around? Had the die been cast and was her fate to have the word terminal stamped on her medical sheet and cancer cited as the cause of her premature death?
Jane pulled quickly to the side of the two-lane highway and turned right into a secluded stand of trees. Overwhelmed, she fell across the steering wheel, sobbing. Every bit of control she’d fine tuned over the years was gone. Every judgment she’d professed was coming back to kick her in the teeth. She was at the mercy of an invisible hand that she couldn’t see but that seemed bent on destroying her. For ten minutes, she cried like she’d never cried before. She cried harder than after any of the beatings she’d been dealt as a child. Within the sobs, the misery and pain were more profound than when she lay bloodied and battered on her father’s workshop floor at the age of fourteen. And she felt more alone than any of the countless times she drank herself unconscious, begging God to take her.
