Birthday Girl

by Matthew Iden

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t mind if you don’t believe what I believe. I know what the truths are.”

  “I’m glad one of us does.”

  A young family of four—blond, sunny, smiling—walked past them down their aisle, trays in hand, looking for a table large enough to eat and horse around on. The father’s eyes slid over Elliott. He called to his kids and they moved to the other side of the restaurant.

  Elliott straightened in his seat; he’d been hunched over his food like a miser. “You ready? We might be able to catch the Colliers before the end of the day.”

  The two of them stood and headed for the exit. As they pushed their way through the glass door, she saw him glance back at the family where the kids giggled and ducked as they tried to daub ketchup on each other’s noses. The father, feeling the stare, raised his head to look at them. She expected Elliott to turn away, unwilling, maybe, to gaze on the scene of family bliss or afraid of ruining it for them. But, this time, he just smiled and followed her outside.

  22

  Dave

  Dave pulled up to the curb and sat in the cruiser for a full minute, staring at the café with the bistro tables, checkered tablecloths, and wicker chairs placed close in pleasant intimacy. Though it was not quite noon, waiters and busboys were already busy in and around the patio’s outdoor seating. Most seats were occupied, despite the chill autumnal weather—lunch in DC was serious business.

  They weren’t comfortable things, these meetings of theirs, Dave thought, full of awkward pauses and unspoken words, but it was something he had to do. When you had so little family—in their case, only each other—you had to hold on to it. Working where he did, he’d seen too many fractured, dysfunctional, abusive families dissolve. Sure, a lot of the time it was because of actions from within, but sometimes it wasn’t, and he’d seen the consequences of a family that allowed itself to be torn—or, in many ways, almost sadder—drift apart until there was nothing left.

  So, every few months, less often lately, he reached out and arranged a lunch or a coffee. They’d meet at Ted’s or Bistrot Lepic or, if he was in a hurry, at one of the chain restaurants. She never made the arrangements, and sometimes he wondered if she’d just as soon stop meeting. He’d suggested it once, but was surprised when she’d vehemently told him no.

  He saw her now, walking up the sidewalk, heading for the café, enquiring if her brother was there yet. She was tall and thin, and dressed well, if a little dowdily, making the small gap between their ages seem much wider. In fact, within the last few years, she’d come to resemble their mother. Or maybe that was just his memory playing tricks. It had been thirty years since he’d seen her, after all, and any woman over a certain age began looking, in one way or another, like his mother.

  Dave got out and walked over. They exchanged a dry kiss on the cheek, then he allowed the hostess to lead them to an inside table. Political power brokers and lobbyists, forced to sit at the bar and shout their conversations at each other, turned to see who merited a booth in the back. He smothered a grin with his hand. Once in a while, rarely, being a cop had its privileges.

  Once they’d been seated, she ordered hot water with lemon and the house salad, her usual, regardless of where they ate. He had a Sam Adams and roast beef sandwich au jus.

  The beer went down fast, and he toyed with the glass handle of his mug, tilting it back and forth, as he searched for something to say, settling for, “How have you been?”

  Her hands were folded in her lap. She watched his hands as they fidgeted. “Fine, fine. Work is busy, as always. A coworker told me recently that the place would fall apart without me.”

  “Nice of her to say.”

  “It was,” she said, giving a small smile. “It’s rare for anyone in government to get thanked, even by someone else in government.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said with a laugh, surprised and thankful they could find a common thread. His hand slipped, however, and he caught the beer mug at the last second.

  “Don’t do that!” she snapped. Her hand came down over his wrist. “I can’t stand when you fidget!”

  He looked at her in surprise, the feeling of empathy and connection gone as quickly as it had appeared. She had her foibles, but she hadn’t lost her cool in . . . well, he couldn’t remember how long. He put both hands up in surrender. “Hey, no problem.”

  She looked away, her expression peeved. The awkwardness was back, and they let the clatter and buzz of the restaurant swallow them. To his relief, their meals arrived and he dug in. They ate in silence until, picking at her salad, she surprised him by asking, “How is your work? Have you saved any more children?”

  He frowned, hearing a whiff of condescension. “You make it sound inconsequential when you say it like that.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way. It’s just that, from all the cases you’ve described to me, the children seem worse off than when they started.”

  “Why? Because they go to foster care?”

  She gave an eloquent shrug.

  “You might not believe this, but what you and I went through was not nearly as bad as some of the things I’ve seen on the job. The foster system isn’t perfect, but most of the kids in it are infinitely better than where they came from.” He wiped his hands on a napkin. “I mean, is your job so very different? We both decided to help children, to make something out of our past instead of . . . I don’t know, surrendering to it.”

  “I suppose. Though, sometimes I wonder just how much good we can do. It seems as though everything is against us,” she said, her voice trailing off; then she shook her head as if coming to. “Never mind me. Your work. Tell me more about what you’ve been doing.”

  He quirked an eyebrow. She didn’t often show this much interest in his job. “There’s never any shortage of kids in trouble. Lots of leads, tons of investigations. Oh, there was one we actually saved and not from his own family, for once. An overdose we caught in the nick of time. We almost lost him.”

  She tsked. “There are so many these days.”

  “True.” He hesitated, wondering if he should mention the peculiar memory that had struck him when he’d seen the boy’s clothes, then dismissed it. She wasn’t one for whimsy, only concrete facts. “How is the house holding up?”

  She sighed. “It’s fine.”

  He lowered the sandwich he’d raised to take a bite. “Something wrong?”

  “No. The old pile just needs repairs, as always. I think the roof will need replacing soon.”

  “Do you need money?” You know I’ll gladly pay to never see that place again.

  “I don’t think so, but thank you for offering.”

  “Sure.”

  The conversation petered out and, eventually, it was obvious that they’d run out of things to say. Normally, Dave would be the one to try and slip in one or two more topics, just to keep the anemic conversation rolling. Today, however, he looked down at his watch and pushed his mug away.

  “Sorry, I have to cut this short. I have to head back to the office and catch up on some work.”

  She dabbed carefully around her lips with her napkin. “Catch up? Were you playing hooky, Detective Cargill?”

  She always said it that way, having never quite accepted the fact that he’d taken their foster family’s name. He sighed, refusing to rise to the bait. “Not really. I spent time earlier in the week pulling files as a favor for an old friend. All my regular work had to get put on hold, so now I have to pay the piper. And this particular piper is a hard-ass named Lieutenant Green.”

  “Well, I certainly understand that.” She patted her hair. “I should get back, as well.”

  “Do you want a ride? It’s just across town.”

  “No, thank you. You know I don’t like police cars.”

  They stood, he walked her out, and they exchanged another dry kiss on the cheek. “It’s good seeing you.”

  She looked back at him with the same buttonhole eyes he’d remembered s
ince he was a child. “It’s always good seeing you, too, brother.”

  23

  Charlotte

  Charlotte dusted the entry table and the lamps, the picture frames filled with their old prints of fox hunting scenes and fishermen, the brass clock-and-barometer set. She slipped the rag in between each banister on the steps and along each patch of oak flooring on the sides of the faded wool carpet runner that smelled like a wet dog.

  The others dashed through the work, but she always took her time, moving intentionally from the steps to the living room to the entry hall and into the dining room. There wasn’t anything to do afterward, so why rush? Not to mention, Sister punished them if they didn’t do the job right, so Charlotte made sure she polished each and every nook.

  And today she had another reason.

  Lingering by the front door, she ran the rag over the locks and the dead bolt. Two were locked from the inside, two from the outside. The door was ancient and thick, with deeply grooved and beveled panels the size of cookie sheets. Over the years, the panels had warped and developed cracks that were too small to see out of, but big enough to let in a whisper of air.

  Charlotte glanced over her shoulder, then ran the dust rag over everything a second, unnecessary time, passing her hand over the knob.

  Her mouth went dry as it turned easily.

  But of course the locks were the problem. Working quickly, she slipped the key she’d found in Charlie’s room out of her pocket, then bent to compare it to the lock. A whisper of a breeze sighed through the cracks in the door, gently pushing at her face and hair.

  Her heart sank. The key was ancient, obviously older than the locks, and the shape so different she didn’t need to try it—she could tell from looking at it that it didn’t fit. She kicked the door in frustration.

  “What are you doing?”

  Charlotte jerked around, instinctively hiding the key in the dust rag. Tina sat on the steps, elbows on her knees, chin on her fists, watching her.

  For how long? Charlotte swallowed. “I was smelling things.”

  “You do it every time you dust.”

  “So?”

  “Sister wouldn’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it looks like you want to go outside. To leave.”

  Charlotte looked at the other girl curiously, her fear temporarily forgotten. “Don’t you miss seeing trees? Smelling the grass or the leaves?”

  For a brief moment, Charlotte could see Tina struggle with the idea. Then a shadow passed across the girl’s face and she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not allowed.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it.”

  “I’m going to tell Sister what you were doing.”

  An invisible hand clutched at her throat, but she forced herself to stay calm. “Go ahead and tell her.”

  “You don’t care?”

  “What more could she do to us? We’re already locked up like rats.”

  “She can do worse,” Tina said with a grin. “A lot worse.”

  “Like what?”

  The girl’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve never been in the cellar. She’s buried bodies down there. I’ve seen them.”

  Charlotte yawned extravagantly. “Nice try.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t believe me. Sister probably wouldn’t even be that nice. Not after I tell her what you were doing.”

  “Do it and I’ll get the others to give you another whipping.”

  The girl’s grin melted away. A couple of months before, Tina had been on a tear, giving Sister nightly reports and making up things about the other kids when she couldn’t find anything wrong. Sister had punished them. Charlotte, sick of it, had gotten the other kids together to exact revenge, with Charlie holding her down while the rest of them beat Tina with rolled-up socks and shirts so that they wouldn’t leave a bruise. Tina had stopped tattling for a while afterward, but with Charlie gone, she was obviously bold enough to begin bullying them again.

  But the promise of a beating was enough to chase her off today. She said a bad word at Charlotte, then ran up the stairs. Charlotte watched her go, glad to have chased the little snitch away, but her stomach churned at the close call. If the girl had spotted the key in her hand, no amount of threats would’ve kept her from telling Sister. In which case, Charlotte was dead. But she figured Tina would’ve found it impossible not to gloat about having something that juicy to tell Sister.

  The bigger question was, what did the key fit? Slipping it back into her pocket, she swallowed her disappointment, then bent down again. Tina was right—she did stop at the door every time she dusted, sniffing and thinking of the world outside, and she might as well do the crime if Tina was going to tattle on her anyway.

  Scents of decaying wood and grass filtered through, along with a touch of gasoline, still lingering in the air hours after Sister had left the house. Another smell, too, that she couldn’t place . . . it reminded her of walking to school in the rain, kicking the carefully raked piles of orange and yellow that had been left in the street and on the sidewalk. That was it, rotting leaves. Which meant it was fall outside. Another season gone.

  Charlotte kicked the door again, then reluctantly left the hall and moved to the dining room. Knickknacks and sideboards in the room made dusting a challenge, and doing it properly took an hour. Her routine was to start at the windows and work her way inward. She would tug back the curtains, dust the blinds, and run the rag along the sills, being careful not to get carried away since the paint on the sills was chipping and trying too hard would only make a mess.

  When she reached for the curtain at the big window in the corner, however, she paused. What she first mistook for a stain on the fabric disappeared when she passed her hand over it: it wasn’t a stain, it was a small patch of light. Pulling the curtain back, she discovered that a marble-size hole had appeared in the plywood covering the window, maybe where a knot in the cheap wood had fallen out.

  Glancing over her shoulder to make sure Tina wasn’t watching, she leaned over until her chin was almost resting on the windowsill. The hole was small and not entirely round, but if she placed her head just right and squinted, Charlotte could see outside.

  She felt as if she could see the entire world through that small circle. At a guess, the window faced toward the back of the property and the view was actually boring—a little bit of overgrown yard and some bare trees leaning in the breeze—but tears filled her eyes. It seemed like forever since she’d seen the outside.

  The only man-made object in view was a battered wooden fence that outlined the edge of the yard. In the center of the fence was a gate missing a board in its middle. It didn’t lock, and she watched as it banged open and shut in the wind. The disappointment of the key not fitting any of the locks faded, replaced with a tingling sensation that ran from her fingers to her toes and back.

  Because where there was a gate, there was a path.

  And where there was a path, there was a place to go.

  24

  Amy

  Dusk pushed the day away in pieces, bringing a gloom that swallowed the edges of things until suddenly you had to squint just to make out the letters on a street sign or the numbers on a house. A light rain spattered everything, putting a sheen on the road and the tops of cars.

  Cupping her hands around her eyes to shade them from the streetlight glare, Amy peered around the BANK OWNED—FORECLOSURE sign into the living room window of the tenement. Dirt and an algaelike buildup had grimed the windows, marring the once-white vinyl edge.

  “No one home?” Elliott asked as he rounded the corner of the house.

  “I don’t think so. Anything in the back?”

  “A T-shirt, rotting in the mud. Broken lawn chair. Rusty old grill. They’ve been gone awhile.”

  She descended the porch steps, hugging her arms to her body. “If we could get to a library, we might be able to look up the ownership records, see how long it’s been since the Colliers moved.�
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  “But not to where.”

  “No.”

  “We’ve got a few more names on the list, right?” Elliott said as they walked back to her car. Neither of them mentioned that time was working against them. “Who’s next?”

  “The Goldsteins, I think. They live off Florida Avenue, somewhere near Shaw.”

  “Ten minutes with traffic. Let’s go.”

  With a quarter hour to find parking, it was more like half an hour. Amy looked out at the corner, brick and tar-paper row house from the comfort of the car, her head rocking subconsciously to the rhythm of the windshield wipers.

  A simple pipe-and-elbow railing ran from the sidewalk along a cracked concrete walk to the porch. Lights illuminated the bottom two windows of the home like wide-open eyes, while the mouth of the house smirked at them thanks to a set of sagging, sway-backed wooden steps.

  They slid out of the car, then walked to the door. Twilight had petered off to dusk. Bright white streetlamps threw their shadow ahead of them as they walked.

  Elliott eyed the steps. “How about we go one at a time?”

  On the porch, they stood shoulder to shoulder at the door. Amy rang the doorbell, then knocked firmly.

  The door was opened by an emaciated man in his thirties, with a sprinkle of gray in an unkempt beard that forked unevenly past his chin. The sharp tips of his shoulders and ridged bumps of his sternum showed clearly through the material of a yellowing undershirt like the bones of a beached fish. Sunken eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them; then he opened the screen door forty-five degrees. The laugh track of a TV show erupted in the room behind him. He stared at them.

  Nervous, Amy started her introduction, but he interrupted when she began talking about Lacey, what had happened, and how it might relate to him. “I don’t have no kids.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I said I don’t have no kids.”

  “You mean . . . you’re not Aaron’s father?”