The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino Book 1)

by Loreth Anne White

  Next came the blood sample—a quick jab with a lancet, and the drop of blood was pressed onto an evidence card. This too went into an approved kit, and the sample was marked. Norton-Wells had already had his prints taken. Eight of his head hairs had also been plucked out and had gone into their own designated DNA Data Bank sample collection kit.

  Kjel stole a look at Boss-Man Maddocks. Fuck, he wanted to high-five the dude right here and do a freaking victory dance around the room with him. He’d gone the whole hog, and he even had the process video recorded for good measure. But the sergeant showed no emotion. He just watched. Like a statue.

  Once the DNA sample kits had headed off to the lab and Law-Boy was back off to campus with a uniform in a squad car, they headed down the stairs to the incident room to grab their coats. As Kjel shrugged into his bomber jacket, he said, “Sos? How’s about a beer or few at the Flying Pig, boss man?”

  “I’ll take a rain check, thanks,” his boss said absently, buttoning his coat, as if deep in troubled thought.

  “Got a date with a yacht boom, then?”

  Those freaky dark-blue eyes snapped sharply to Kjel. For a minute the man looked dangerous, like he could kill. Then a smile cracked the intensity. “Sure. Why not. I might need a few to numb the coming wrath of Fitz.”

  “So, what’s eating you?” Kjel said as they headed out of the station and ducked into the rain for the short walk to the Pig.

  “The fact he gave it to us at all.”

  “He almost bailed—was touch-and-go there for a few hours. Seems he managed to screw his logic jockey back onto his panic horse a bit on the way over to the station.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Her father walked woodenly toward the living room, where he crumpled into his chair and dropped his face into his big hands. Opposite him, on the other side of the hearth, her mother’s chair sat empty. Angie stood there, waiting.

  For a long while he said nothing. The storm lashed at the house, and branches swished and banged against the eaves.

  “Dad, talk to me.”

  “Could you light the fire, please, Angie?”

  She stared at him, dumbfounded, then did it, furiously cracking kindling and stacking wood and crumpling newspaper into balls, feeling as though she was in some kind of alternate universe, an empty pit gnawing away at her stomach. She put a flame to the paper. It whooshed to life, licking and gobbling up the kindling.

  Once the fire was roaring, she poured them both whiskeys. Fat ones. She put a glass into his hands and took her mother’s seat on the other side of the hearth. She sat there, watching him.

  Finally, after a few sips of his drink, he spoke.

  “I love her—your mother.” He looked up and met Angie’s gaze. And what she saw in her dad’s eyes punched a hole right through her chest. It was a look of hollow, haunted emptiness. Of pain. Of love lost. She swallowed.

  “I know you do, Dad, I know.”

  “She was driving that day. In Tuscany. It was a sunny day. A clear sky. Everything so perfect. You were in the backseat—” He wavered, taking a few moments to marshal himself. “Angie was in the backseat.”

  “Angie,” she repeated. “I am Angie. My name is Angela Pallorino.” The sick feeling deepened. “Right?”

  He looked away, at the fire. “Your mother reached for her sunglasses, which she’d left on the passenger seat. She’d just come over a rise, and the sun was directly in her eyes. But she knocked the glasses onto the floor, and when she reached down for them … she was momentarily distracted, her attention not on the road. She hit a curve and lost control, and the car went through the railing. It tumbled down a steep mountainside.” He stared at the fire, his mind going all the way back, as if he were there again, in Italy, all that time ago. He took another deep sip of his drink.

  “She was badly injured in the crash, our little Angie … Oh God, Angie … Oh God … How do I undo this?” He met her eyes again. “I don’t want to do this, say these things—I don’t want to hurt you. You are Angie. You became Angie.”

  She tried to absorb his words, the whispering implications that underlay them. Part of her wanted to turn away, plug her ears, ignore what she was hearing. The other half was desperate for him to make it crystal clear, to tell her all at once, as brutally and honestly as he could.

  “What do you mean, I became Angie?” she said coolly.

  He shook his head and rubbed his brow hard.

  “Dad, talk to me. That newspaper article said Angela Pallorino, aged four, died in a car accident in Tuscany. In eighty-four. You and Mom told me we had a car accident in Tuscany in eighty-six, that I almost died, and that’s where I got this scar. That’s when I was four going on five.” She pointed to her mouth. Her father looked away.

  “Look at me, Dad. This scar.” Slowly, he turned his face back to hers. “Who died?”

  “Our first baby, our first child.”

  She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. Lurching to her feet, she marched to the window, spun back, stared at her father sitting by the fire, next to the Christmas tree. A tree just like the one in the photo of the three of them when they were supposed to have returned from Italy after the accident.

  “Who am I?” she said quietly.

  “I loved your mother. I love her so much. I … it wasn’t wrong, Angie. What we did was not wrong. It just … happened.”

  Her insides shaking, she returned to the fire and reseated herself facing him. “Just tell me,” she said. “Just tell me in simple, chronological order. Bullet points if you must. I need to know. Whatever it is, it’s been making me sick. Because I have … been having memories of things that don’t fit into what I thought was my own childhood.”

  His shoulders rolled inward, and he nodded slowly. “My sabbatical was in eighty-four. The accident happened that year. Our four-year-old little Angie died in the hospital of injuries she sustained in that smash. Your mother suffered badly. Mentally. Terrible clinical depression. Then her hallucinations started. I tried. Everything. We came home to live in Vancouver, where she got good treatment. I took a position teaching at Simon Fraser University. But it was hard to leave her at home during the days. She was numb. Absent. Gone. Like part of her had died with Angie. It was when I took her to church that I began to find hope. She prayed for her lost child at church, and she seemed to liven up slightly, as if she’d found a contact again with her child. And the father there, Lord bless him, he got your mother volunteering and into singing again. She joined the Catholic church choir, and they often sang in the big cathedral in downtown Vancouver. Near the hospital.” He reached for his whiskey and finished it. He sat in silence for a few moments, as if gathering his energy for what he had to say next.

  “It was Christmas Eve. Two years after Italy and the accident.”

  Her mother’s strange words sifted into her mind as her father spoke: Christmas Eve she was returned. I was singing at the cathedral … such a beautiful cathedral. It was ordained …

  “Next to the cathedral downtown is Saint Joseph’s Hospital. They have an Angel’s Cradle there,” he said. “It’s a Catholic-administered facility, and the hospital staff, together with the police, wanted to put an end to the practice of young, unwed, fearful mothers dumping newborns to die in places like public washrooms or dumpsters. So they came up with the idea of a safe place where these mothers could leave their newborns without criminal repercussions. And police agreed that they would not pursue the mothers of those infants left abandoned in this safe place. A cradle was constructed for this purpose, or that’s what they call it …” He wavered.

  “Go on, please,” she said quietly.

  He cleared his throat and took in a deep breath. “The cradle itself is a tiny cubicle with a cot inside. It has a door at about waist level that opens onto the street. All a mother had to do was open the door in the street, right next to the hospital’s emergency exit, place her baby inside, and close the door. She could then leave. Within a few minutes an alarm would sound inside the
hospital, and nurses would open the cubicle from another door on the inside. They’d find and treat the baby. The infant would then go into the system and be adopted out.”

  The angels brought her back. They did. She didn’t belong there. They returned her …

  No. It couldn’t be.

  She could not have been left in the cradle as a newborn—not possible. The timing did not work.

  Her father reached for the bottle Angie had left on the side table, and he topped up his glass. Cupping it in his hands, he regarded the play of firelight on the contents.

  “That Christmas Eve in eighty-six, while your mother was singing with the choir at the midnight Mass, some kind of violent gang fight erupted downtown, and it spilled down the street outside the church. From inside the cathedral, we heard gunshots, screaming, and tires screeching. Then nothing. When we came out, it was all quiet. So very quiet because it had started to snow. But we learned later through the media that the Angel’s Cradle alarm had sounded that night, close to midnight. And inside the cradle they’d found a young girl, around four years of age, bleeding profusely from a slash across her mouth.” He paused. “Knife wound, they thought. Associated with the gang fight.”

  Her hand went slowly to her mouth.

  Uciekaj, uciekaj! … Wskakuj do srodka, szybko! … Siedz cicho!

  Run, run! Get inside!

  “The child couldn’t speak,” he said. “Mute from shock, they thought. Then later, they wondered if you understood English—”

  “Me?”

  Emotion glittered in her father’s eyes. “Long red hair. You had no shoes. It was winter and you had no shoes—just a little pink dress. Like a party frock, but old and torn and covered in blood.” He drank more. It seemed to ease the words for him as they got harder for her to hear.

  “When the story finally ran in the paper, when the details started coming out, and when the police couldn’t find anyone related to you at all, you went into the system to be adopted out.”

  She blinked, unable to fully absorb what he was saying. His words were slotting like jigsaw pieces into a full picture that explained things with harsh clarity. But at the same time they didn’t.

  “It was a mystery, Ange. A case that went cold. But in the photos that your mother and I saw in the media, you looked exactly like our four-year-old Angie did when she was taken from us. The red hair. The right age. It was haunting, the fact that she—I mean, you—were found right outside the church where your mother was singing, where in her prayer she’d felt a link to you again—”

  “To Angie, you mean,” she said. “Not to me.”

  “She felt it was you, Angie. Arriving, returning, right on the cusp of Christmas Day, like a child in a manger. And your mother saw it as a sign. A very powerful sign. She believed you had been sent back by angels, and that we had to do everything in our power to claim you, adopt you, bring you rightfully home to us.”

  “That’s crazy—that’s insane.”

  He looked down into his glass again. “She wasn’t well in her mind. I know. I … I don’t expect you to understand what happened, how it happened, but in believing you were her baby come home, and in going through that adoption application process, in her desperate desire, her need to prove herself worthy to the authorities as a potential adoptive mother, she pulled herself together. She managed to appear normal again, and her depression of the past was put down to PTSD and sheer, all-consuming grief. We fostered you for a while. And when we were selected to be your parents—”

  “Because no one else wanted me, right?” she interjected. “A four-year-old isn’t exactly the easiest thing to adopt out. Plus there was my questionable history and inability to speak or remember on top of it all. So you got lucky.”

  He chose to ignore her jabs. “In finally bringing you home, your mother really did begin to shine again. She had purpose. She had love and laughter and energy. My Miriam came back to life, Angie. You brought her back to me. And I … I don’t know if you can ever understand love like I have for her, but she … she’s my everything. She’s my world. And seeing her become whole again …” His voice drifted. He cleared his throat. “I just let it be. I let her believe.”

  “You called me Angie?” she said with disgust. “You gave me the same name as a dead child? How could you do that?”

  “I didn’t see the harm,” he said, his voice suddenly small. “It made your mother better. And you were starting to thrive. Learning to speak, to sing. To laugh. I—”

  “You inserted some abandoned kid into a dead child’s life? How can that be normal? How can that do no harm?”

  “It didn’t do harm—you did start to thrive. We became a family. We moved out of town, to the island—to Victoria, just before Christmas in eighty-seven, and when we arrived here, you were just our Angie.”

  “And that’s how you introduced me? As the child in the photo album? All those early pictures that led from birth up to Italy—that’s not me? And then you just continued plunking in my pictures after the real Angie passed?”

  Silence.

  “And you were never going to tell me that you and Mom are not my biological parents?”

  He rubbed his knee. “I thought we might, you know, tell you one day, when you were older. Or if some medical need arose. But … it didn’t happen. You really did become our Angie in our minds, and why should we hurt you with such terrible news—the truth of where you really came from? No one knew anyway. All the leads to that case just dried up. There was no one to even test for paternal DNA. So why not just let it be?”

  “Because it’s not the truth.” She lurched to her feet, dragged her hands over her hair, her whole world tilting dizzyingly on its axis. Everything she knew to be true suddenly was not. Her whole life would now have to be reexamined through a different lens. That person she saw in the mirror was someone else. Her sense of self had to be recalibrated. She wanted to run. To escape. She wanted to bust out of her own body, get blind drunk, go fuck herself senseless at the club.

  “So I have real parents—biological parents—out there somewhere.” It wasn’t a question. She was just stating it out loud as a way to process this. “They might be dead. They might be alive.” She paused, glaring at him, an anger rising fierce inside her, and it was cut through with pity, with sympathy, because he, too, was so alone now. It was like they’d shattered their entire past as a family on this night. And it was all over. Gone forever.

  “Where do you think I came from? You must have a theory. Was my mother Polish? Did I ever say Polish words when I eventually learned to speak again?”

  He shook his head. “No. Just English. You’d forgotten everything that came before the Christmas Eve that you were found in the cradle. No one knows, Ange. The local police, Interpol, other agencies—they all tried working at the case, but no relative ever came forward to claim you or to offer a DNA sample. And none was ever found. You were just there, Angie. The Angel’s Cradle baby. Waiting for us.”

  Something struck her suddenly. “Tell me one more thing. Why did we stop going to church?”

  “Because one Sunday service just before Christmas your mother saw a look in your face when the church bells rang, and she … I think she was worried that church might make you remember something. We never went back after that.”

  CHAPTER 62

  Merry opened the door to her tiny apartment and stilled. The air felt changed. Someone had been inside. She clicked on the hall and living-room lights. A drape wafted in a slight movement of air.

  Quickly, she moved to the window and drew back the drape. The window was open a crack, cold night air seeping in. Her heart kicked to a stutter. She had not left the window open. She rammed it shut, brain reeling. She spun around. Listened.

  No other sound. Apart from the thud of blood against her eardrums, her own rapid breathing. She eyed her front door, across the living room, the expanse suddenly seeming huge. Maybe she should make a dash. In case someone was inside the bathroom, her bedroom …

/>   Cautiously, she moved, and a floorboard creaked underfoot. She froze. Nothing. Then she saw it.

  On her tiny dining table abutting the kitchen counter was a small baggie containing white crystals, a glass pipe, a Bic lighter.

  She swallowed, her gaze shooting to the door to her bedroom. She waited, listening. When nothing sounded, she moved carefully across the room and edged open her bedroom door. Nothing. She checked the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, the closets, under the bed. Returning to the table, she stared at the baggie. There was a plain white envelope under it. She had to touch the bag in order to get to the envelope. Merry picked it up, opened it.

  Inside were two grainy photos, taken at night. One of her VW Beetle driving along the bay at the Uplands Marina. The other was a photo of herself wearing a toque and down jacket, crouching between a truck and a Sorento, her massive telephoto lens aiming right at whoever shot this photo. She flipped it over.

  YOU ARE DEAD

  Merry began to shake. She stared at the baggie in front of her. The old, edgy hunger roared its head, fierce like a dragon reawakened from slumber. Panic tightened like a lasso across her throat. Hurriedly, she made her way to the door where she’d left her backpack. She fumbled to open the side pocket where she’d stuck Angie Pallorino’s card. Merry found it and dialed the number.

  It rang, then clicked over to voicemail. She killed the call, paced, stopped, stared at the drugs. No. No. No. With trembling fingers she punched in the detective’s cell number again. Once more, it kicked to voicemail.

  CHAPTER 63

  It was near midnight when Maddocks parked in the West Bay Marina parking lot and made his way along the boardwalk to the marina gate in the blustery wind and rain. The beers with Holgersen and the guys at the Flying Pig had done zip to tamp down the effects of the cortisol still fizzing through his veins—helluva two days. And he remained worried about Angie. Hungry for Angie. Edgy about Angie. She was consuming his brain—he’d driven past her apartment block on the way home and looked up at the top floor at the corner unit where Holgersen had told him she lived. No lights had been on.