Connor watched until Mariah and Zofie went into the apartment. Then, feeling sick, he started home.
His beeper vibrated before he got that far. He returned the call irritably.
"I'm sorry to bother you on your day off, Detective McLean," a young officer told him. "I'm told you are working on a case involving a Tracy Mitchell."
"Yeah." The light turned green ahead of him. He didn't notice until the car behind him honked. Accelerating, he said, "Yeah, I am. What's up?"
"She apparently ran away yesterday. Her mother didn't notice until today. She says she thought Tracy was at a friend's when she went to work at four o'clock, and she didn't look in her daughter's bedroom when she got home in the middle of the night." His carefully dispassionate tone suggested what he thought of such carelessness. "This morning, the mother thought Tracy was sleeping in. When she did finally discover her missing, she called around to Tracy's friends before reporting her gone. Just an hour ago, a state patrolman picked her up on Highway 101 near Silverdale."
Connor cut to the chase. "Where is Tracy now?"
"She's at a receiving home. Um—" papers shuffled in the background "—the Farrells', 1936 Nisqually."
"Got it," Connor said. "Thank you."
This might be the break he'd been waiting for. He wished it had come at any other time.
Rachel Farrell was a woman in her fifties who had been running a receiving home for teenagers since her youngest had left for college ten years ago. She was a gem, caring for troubled teens briefly until social workers, family or the court decided where long term placement would be. Her common sense, structure and comforting hugs had been just what a hell of a lot of kids had needed.
"Tracy?" she said, when she answered the door. "She's sobbing in her room. One minute she wants her mom. The next she screams, 'Don't call her! Please don't call her!'" She shook her head. "I don't know if she's ashamed or scared."
"Can I talk to her?"
"She knows you?"
"Yeah." He grimaced. "She probably ran away because she's tired of evading my questions."
He knocked hard on the door. "Tracy? It's Detective McLean."
"Go away!" she yelled.
He winced. This wasn't his day.
"Tracy, we need to talk. We might as well start now."
"I don't want to!" she wailed.
He paused, head bowed. How could he give her a lecture about facing the unpalatable when he'd been doing his damnedest to avoid personal responsibility? But he knew what had to be right for her—just as he knew what he had to do to settle the demands of his own conscience.
"Tracy," he said quietly, "you need to help us decide where you should go now. Will you do that? Or would you rather we decide for you, without understanding who hurt you or why?"
The silence stretched so long he was about to give up for now when he heard her say, in a small voice, "You can come in."
She was sitting up on one of two twin beds, a pillow clutched to her middle. Her face was a mess, wet and puffy, and her hair was wind-whipped and dirty. Nobody would have guessed her to be a pretty girl.
He nodded at the foot of the bed. "Can I sit down?"
She pressed her lips together and nodded. He sat and then waited.
She squeezed the pillow and said explosively, "I have to go home!"
"Why?"
Tracy looked at him as if he were crazy. "Because Mom'll be freaked. I can't just … just not go home!"
"But you ran away," he pointed out logically.
"But that doesn't mean…" She stopped, apparently snared in her own confusion.
"It suggests something is wrong at home."
She stared defiantly at him from puffy eyes. "Maybe I just, like, wanted an adventure."
He waited patiently.
Her chin trembled first, then her mouth. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks. Suddenly she hunched and buried her face in the pillow. Her shoulders shook.
"Ah, Tracy." Damn it, he shouldn't touch her, but he couldn't sit here and watch her shatter. He moved over and tentatively touched her shoulder.
She rolled toward him, burying her pillow and her head under the circle of his arm. He sat, awkwardly patting her back, while she cried out her sadness against his side.
Her grief sank into misery, and finally faded altogether into a kind of numbness. Still Tracy didn't move for the longest time. She felt … safe, as if she were a baby, swaddled in a blanket, conscious only of the heartbeat and warm encircling arm that were her security.
Weirdly, when she finally sniffed, wiped her face on the pillowcase and pushed herself upright, what she felt instead was old. Old and tired.
He was waiting, his face kind. Tracy wished suddenly, passionately, that he was her father.
"It was this guy my mother brought home." Somehow it wasn't so hard to say after all. "Eddie. I don't know his last name. She brought him home one night after work. They were both drunk. I think Mom, like, passed out."
The police officer nodded, his gaze steady. He seemed to know she wasn't done, because he waited some more. He was good at that.
"Mom always has boyfriends living with us. She won't listen when I tell her they're staring at me or barging into the bathroom when I'm in the shower or even … touching me. She says I'm imagining it."
"Are they all like that?" He asked carefully; she could tell what he was thinking. That she just didn't like her mother having boyfriends at all.
"No." She clutched the pillow again, even though it was wet and probably snotty. It helped to hold something. "Not when I was little. And this guy who lived with her for a couple of months when I was in sixth grade was okay. But Jason was a creep! And the guy before him, too."
"And you told your mother."
"She thinks I'm just trying to get rid of them!" Even as wrung-out as Tracy was, it hurt to think about how her own mother wouldn't listen to her. Wouldn't defend her. Having a boyfriend was more important to her than her own daughter.
"Tell me about Eddie. Had you ever seen him before?"
She shook her head.
"Did you get a good look at his face? Will you be able to identify him?"
She nodded. "He turned on the light." That was almost the worst part, that he'd wanted to look, that he'd made her look. It would have been bad enough in the dark, but then at least she could have pretended he didn't have permission to be in her bedroom.
"Tracy." Detective McLean's voice and eyes both held a command. "Where was your mother while you were being raped?"
Tracy had to bite her lip savagely to dull the other kind of pain. "In her bedroom. Like I said, she passed out."
"Before that. Did you hear them arguing? Talking?"
The light wasn't the worst part. This was.
She didn't know if she could tell him until she actually heard herself speaking, her voice a small, dry husk of itself. "They yelled. She said she wasn't in the mood. And … and he said she'd asked him home, she owed him. She … she said he could have anything else he wanted. To … to go find Tracy. She said, 'She's not sleepy.'"
"Had he seen you?"
She gave a tiny nod. "I had a movie on in the living room. I just had on some pajamas. Like, shortie ones. He … he kind of leered. You know?" She shuddered at the memory. "And so I said good night really fast and went into my bedroom and turned out the light and pretended I was asleep."
"So you think your mother offered you to him." It wasn't a question.
Her face crumpled. She hadn't thought she had any more tears in her, but she did. He held her again, while her body shook.
Eventually he had her tell him everything that had happened. She went through every word she'd overheard, then made herself put into words what that creep had done to her. The anger she saw on the policeman's face helped. Instead of making her feel worse, talking about it seemed to ease some tightness inside her.
"Tracy," Detective McLean said finally, "have you talked to your mother about this? Did you ask her whether she was sugg
esting this Eddie take you in her place?"
"She says she doesn't know what I'm talking about," Tracy said in a low voice. "She says she would never do anything like that. She tried to make me feel bad for even thinking it. But I heard her!"
"You know, I doubt very much that she actually meant any such thing," he said.
A tiny spark of hope she had never let die brightened.
"I suspect she thought he'd ask you for a drink or something to eat. It wasn't smart of her, but somebody drunk enough to pass out—and black out—isn't what you'd call smart."
She swallowed. "Then … can I go home?"
He shook his head, his brow furrowed regretfully. "The decision isn't totally mine, but I'm going to recommend you go into foster care for a little while, at least. Your mom has some problems she needs to work out before she can really take care of you. She's been putting you at risk by inviting men she didn't know that well to live in your home and then being gone at night, leaving you alone with them. Her drinking seems to be a problem. You should have been in counseling to help you deal with some of the feelings left by a rape. She needs to make changes so that you can feel safe at home."
Mostly what Tracy felt was this huge relief. She loved her mom. The idea of going to live with strangers was scary. But she'd told somebody, and other people would be helping her now. She didn't have to bottle it all up until she thought she might explode into a million tiny shreds of herself.
Her eyes damp with tears, she sniffed. "Okay."
After a short silence, he asked, "Was telling me so bad?"
Tracy shook her head. "I wanted to. You're really easy to talk to. It was hard not to tell you. But…"
"You love your mom. You didn't want anyone else to think bad things about her."
She gave a small nod.
"You know," he said, in an odd voice, as if he weren't totally sure of himself, "I'm thinking about not being a police officer anymore. I may go back to college for a master's degree so I can be a counselor for kids like you."
"Really?" she said on a rising note. "Could I see you?"
Detective McLean shook his head. "It'll be too late for you. We'll find somebody great for you to see. No, I just wanted you to know that you helped me make up my mind."
"I didn't know…"
"Yeah." He tapped her lightly on the arm with his knuckles. "It's a good thing, Tracy. Thank you."
Totally confused now, she said, "You're welcome."
He laughed in a friendly way and stood up. "I've got to write a report about you and contact DSHS. A social worker will come to talk to you, and she'll be the one to find you a foster home. But, listen—you call me if you're ever scared or need to talk or hate the decisions that are being made for you. Okay?"
She bit her lip and nodded. She thought maybe she really could call him. In fact, she wished…
"You don't take foster kids, do you?"
"Not right now. And since I'm not married and you're a young woman, I wouldn't be the best choice anyway."
"But I trust you." She flushed. "You don't look at me like … you know."
"Most men won't, Tracy." He was frowning again, but not as if he was mad at her. "Your mother doesn't have very good taste in boyfriends, I'm afraid. I guess you already knew that, huh?"
"I don't think she really likes them, either. I think those jerks are, like, the only kind of guy she ever meets."
"That may be. It also may be that they're the only kind of guy she thinks she deserves." He let that sink in. "Some counseling might help your mom realize she's worth more. She's a pretty woman. She can do better."
Tracy nodded and took a deep breath. "Will you arrest him?"
"Oh, yeah." Something hard glinted in his eyes.
It made her fiercely glad. "Thank you," she said. "I mean … for everything."
"You're welcome, too." His smile was so cool—sweet and gentle and friendly, as if he liked her. Looking at the closed door once he was gone, Tracy made a vow. She wouldn't fall in love, no matter what, until she met a guy like Detective McLean. He'd be, like, her standard.
A knock came on the door, and Mrs. Farrell came in. She had kind eyes, too. "How are you, Tracy?"
Tracy gave her a twisted smile that kind of hurt and kind of felt good. "I'm okay," she said. "I will be." And she knew it was true.
Zofie slept heavily, her face flushed and damp tendrils of hair clinging to her sweaty forehead. Mariah sat by her bedside in the dim bedroom, too spent emotionally to slip out and do housework or read or watch TV or even seek her own bed to doze until Zofie woke, miserable again.
She dreaded the ringing of the telephone. Connor would call, but she didn't know what to tell him.
She'd known from the beginning that she shouldn't date him, shouldn't fall in love with him. How had she thought it would end? she asked herself with a silent moan. She'd kidded herself that she was having a fling, that Simon need never know.
A woman having a fling didn't bring the man home to meet her daughter. Zofie was six years old; she had a big mouth. Sooner or later, she would have told her dad that Mommy was seeing this policeman named "Decktiv McLean, only he said I could call him Connor." Mariah could see now that she'd been asking for Simon to find out.
That horrified her most. Had she wanted to hurt Simon that badly? Subconsciously, was that part of Connor's attraction?
But she couldn't believe herself to be so cruel. No, she'd fallen in love with Connor despite their past, not because of it. She had to believe that if she were to salvage any self-esteem.
The question was, what did she do now?
She knew the answer and hated it.
She could not keep hurting Simon by rubbing Connor in his face. What she'd done to him was bad enough without this final insult.
It was best, anyway, she tried to tell herself. Look how she'd failed Simon, her love dying in the short course of their marriage. What was to say she'd be any more constant if she married Connor? Assuming, she thought with a wrench, he wanted any such thing.
Mariah buried her face in her hands. After this weekend, how could she tell Connor, Sorry, made a mistake?
How could she not?
Zofie liked him.
But Zofie loved her dad.
The little girl stirred, and Mariah straightened, hastily wiping her tears with her sleeve. But after a whimper, Zofie settled back into slumber. Very gently, Mariah smoothed the hair back from her small daughter's hot forehead.
Hadn't she told herself that she'd be content raising her daughter and working? That she wasn't meant to share her life with a man?
Apparently that, too, had been a lie.
Finally, stiffly, she stood and tiptoed out of the bedroom. It was only seven-thirty, but maybe she'd clean up the kitchen quickly and take a book to bed. The way she ached all over, it could be that she was coming down with a bug, too.
Sure, her inner voice jeered. It's called a broken heart. Or was it an inflamed conscience?
She was wiping the counter in the kitchen when the telephone rang. For a moment she hesitated, wanting badly to let it ring, to go shut herself in the bathroom so she didn't hear the message. She had a fleeting image of herself as a turtle, pulling into her shell. And then she thought, Zofie. The phone would wake her. Mariah snatched it up before it could ring again.
"Hello, Mariah," Connor said, in that calm, deep voice. "How's Zofie?"
"Not feeling very well." She kept her voice down and one eye on Zofie's bedroom door down the hall, left a few inches ajar. "She has a 101.6 fever."
"And couldn't play her game."
"They lost. One of her teammates called. They missed her in goal."
"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
She bit her lip. "Connor…"
"I'm sorry about more than Zofie. I shouldn't have … lingered this morning. I knew you weren't ready for Simon to find out."
"I don't think I was ever going to be ready," she admitted. "I should never have dated you, Connor. It was cru
el of me."
Anger edged his voice. "I investigated your ex-husband over three years ago. I didn't arrest him. I wasn't the one to accuse him. He and I were not mortal enemies."
"He doesn't see it that way," she said wearily. "It wasn't a job for him, like it was for you. It was personal. Of course he hated you."
"If anybody here should have a problem, it's me. I have to bear some responsibility for your marriage breaking up." Sudden intensity crackled through the phone wires. "What if, with my attitude, I made you afraid Simon had molested that girl, and he didn't do it? Would you still be married?" He made a harsh sound. "I'm in love with a woman who might still be married if I hadn't taken a dislike to her husband. What does that make me?"
Shocked, she said, "Connor, I'm the one who made a marriage vow. I'm the one who left my husband. I did it after you were gone from our lives. Yes, you scared me. But I should have had faith in him, and I didn't. That's my fault."
"Is it?" he asked.
She sat still for a moment, replaying the conversation. "You love me?" she whispered.
"You hadn't noticed?"
"Maybe," she swallowed, "I was trying not to."
"Because you don't love me?"
"Because I don't want to," she said starkly.
He was silent for a long time, but she knew he was still there. "What are you trying to tell me?" he asked finally.
Every word scraped her throat. "I should never have started this."
"And now you're going to end it?" He sounded disbelieving.
Whatever she did, she hurt someone. Everyone. She deserved the pain. But Simon didn't, and Connor didn't.
"I don't know," she said softly. "I need to think."
Voice raw, Connor said, "I'm going to find out whether Simon did it. You need to know. I need to know."
She opened her mouth to say… No. Shocked, she sat slack jawed. No? she asked herself in utter incredulity.
No, I don't need to know. No, it isn't the point. Maybe it never was.
"I…" she whispered. Of course she wanted to know, because of Zofie. But not to understand her own choices.
THE WORD OF A CHILD Page 21
