by Mira Gibson
Grieving this extra layer of loss, she climbed in her car and started it up. As soon as she was buckled in and about to shift into first, the image of a scarred thigh popped into her mind. She knew it was supposed to be Roberta’s, the marks she’d seen when the girl had let her dress fall off, but for some reason her brain was associating the image with her sister.
The memory was faint, but real.
She’d seen the same scars on Doris.
Without question, she had. Her sister's scars had been in the same exact place—the upper thigh. Self-mutilation. Why had Doris been doing that to herself? She knew it was a symptom, but of what?
Clinically speaking, she knew the reasons behind self-harm. Overwhelming emotional turmoil—sadness, distress, anxiety, confusion—could become so extreme that a teenager, at a loss for a healthy way to cope, might seek to alleviate the internal pain by hurting themselves.
At least you have scars on the outside. Roberta had told her that, the first day Gertrude had shown up at the house. She’d said she didn’t have scars on the inside, but open wounds that never healed.
Did Doris?
Roberta had clearly been compelled to reflect those internal wounds on her body, cutting her skin, bleeding, darkly soothing her emotional pain.
But why had Doris done that?
Gertrude could feel the answer deep within her memory, dodging around her brain, evading her. She sensed with absolute certainty that her sister’s cutting had revolved around the real reason she’d moved in with Gertrude. And Gertrude even sensed that the particular reason somehow dovetailed into the car accident, but the truth behind it all remained hidden in corners of her mind she couldn’t access.
Her frustration built as she wracked and wracked her brain. It felt like sifting sand through her fingers in search of a pearl on a five-mile beach, and soon she was furious. Because of it and for reasons she couldn’t explain, Jake Livingston came to mind. Though it was borderline insane and devoid of all logic, directing her anger at him and his article, felt satisfying. He’d glorified Charlie King, ridiculed Zhana, and most egregiously of all he’d blamed the DCYF for Maude’s death. And recognizing all of this—who and what he really was—she realized despising Jake Livingston felt more than satisfying. It felt right.
And she had every intention of giving him a piece of her mind.
Chapter Ten
The floodlight angled over the front door shed just enough light for her to recognize his pickup truck—mist-gray finish, dents along the side, the rear fender banged up.
She parked on the grass, killing the engine before she even came to a complete stop, and started for the front door, as fog undulating over the grass crept towards her.
The Saltbox house looked a century old at least. Swallowed in gnarly Birch trees that were emerging from the soil, the roots of which threatened to shift the foundation, the architecture looked as dilapidated as the King's.
As soon as she reached the door ready to pound on it and demand answers, it popped inward and Jake, surprised by her arrival and a bit confused, asked her if she'd broken down.
“What the hell was that article supposed to be?” she blurted out.
“Provocative,” he said, but it sounded more like a guess. “I can explain.”
“Provoking who?” In the throes of confronting him, her thoughts scrambled and articulating herself was shot to hell.
“Can I invite you in?”
She hadn’t anticipated that, hadn’t planned this beyond unloading her frustration. His welcoming tone, his easy stance, the concerned glint in his eyes, and his cooperative attitude had her thrown.
“Come in, please,” he said, making room as though doing so would summon her inside.
“Did you get a chance to get your car over to Larry’s?” he asked when she hadn’t moved.
“Not yet.”
He quirked his eyebrow at that and plowed his fingers through his chestnut hair, drawing attention to its cowlicks.
“Really, we can talk inside.” He scanned the dark road behind her as though he didn’t trust it.
Giving him a quick glance as she debated, she noted worn-out jeans and a thin, moth-eaten tee hugging his relaxed posture, both of which gave her the impression she’d caught him unwinding. And when she followed him into his cluttered living room and spied a bottle of beer on the coffee table, it confirmed as much.
“Feel like a beer?”
Without thinking she said, “I can’t drink,” but didn’t know why.
As Jake feigned tidying up, clearing files and old newspapers from the couch and making excuses for the disarray that sounded more like fibs—Usually it isn't this bad and I’m this close to hiring a maid peppered in with misplaced compliments I wish I couldn’t drink and You must be a morning person—Gertrude wondered why she thought she couldn’t drink.
Images of her kitchen over the years flashed through her mind—white wine in the refrigerator door, liquor in the cabinet above the stove, beer bottles in the recycling bin. It wasn’t that she couldn’t drink. It was that she shouldn’t, but why?
The answer came clear as a bell as if there was a second person in her head—because of the accident.
She’d been drinking that night?
Gertrude nearly touched upon the memory, when the sight of Jake plucking up his beer, causing dew droplets to roll down its side, yanked her back to the present time.
“I’m not happy with how the article came out,” he started. “For what its worth, I didn’t write half of it.” Off her skepticism, he added, “My editor must have rewrote most of it, because what they printed wasn’t what I turned in.”
She wanted to doubt him, but he carried himself with an air of honesty she couldn’t overlook.
“Really,” he protested when she screwed her face up, her expression lagging behind the speed of her thoughts. “I can show you what I turned in.” Nearly interrupting himself, he blurted out, “Ah, it’s upstairs. You’d have to come up to my computer. It’s not a laptop.”
She hadn’t even sat down.
“I’m not going upstairs with you.”
“Right, no, I know. I wouldn’t either.” He glanced around, seeming to take in her perspective. “And I didn’t mean it like that.”
Suddenly awkward for tipping her off that the thought of her upstairs in some other capacity had perhaps crossed his mind, he took a moment to drink some beer—big, nervous gulps. Then he sat, pushing a precarious tower of files behind him on the couch. If she’d been inclined to sit, he hadn’t left her much room.
“All that stuff about the DCYF wasn’t me,” he went on.
He seemed sincere, but she couldn’t understand why it was so important to him she believe it. Why did he care what she thought?
“Has Roberta approached you at all?” When he studied her instead of responding, she stated, “I think she’s being coerced,” but his rising brows told her she’d been too vague. He couldn't make the leap from her first point to her second. “It’s obviously no secret I’m her social worker.”
“Yeah, I got that,” he said, a crooked smile forming at the corner of his mouth.
“She confided in me.” Before she could go on, she drew in a deep breath, mourning the loss of her ethics for what she was about to reveal. But then she stopped herself. Jake didn’t have to know about the real reason five men had been incarcerated for tangling with Roberta, and he shouldn’t. She needed to be extremely cautious about what she told him. He could print anything, or worse, his editor could pervert it to Roberta’s detriment. “I think she might try something with you.” It wasn’t enough for him to catch on, so she added, “Seduce you. Make claims. Get you into serious trouble.”
“Like the others.”
"So you know?"
Holding her gaze was his confirmation.
She asked, “Has she done anything?”
“I’ll watch my back. You should too.”
Offended on Roberta's behalf, she asked, “You think
she’s responsible?”
“You think someone else is?”
“Off the record,” she warned so there would be no misunderstanding. When he agreed with a nod, she disclosed, “She indicated Charlie had put pressure on her."
He stilled, studying her, and though he grew serious the light behind his eyes brightened.
“I want you to see something,” he said, jumping off the couch. “I’ll be right back.”
He padded up the stairs and as she sat, angling herself into the corner of the couch and assessing the three feet beside her to estimate whether or not he’d have room, she heard him hunting around overhead—objects clanking to the floor, Jake muttering swears.
When he returned, he was so focused on a sheet of paper in his hands, which looked as if it’d been shredded then taped together, that he sat on the couch, oblivious to their close proximity. His leg brushed against hers and if she hadn’t crossed her arms and pressed herself against the arm of the couch, their shoulders would’ve touched.
“I found this,” he said, tilting the sheet so she could look at it with him. Bold letters at the top of the form read: Homicide Report. And she noted it was only partially filled out. “My guess is that the responding officer filled it out, but was discharged, and the form was shredded.”
“Where did you find this?”
“Dumpster diving.” Two seconds after he admitted it, his face flushed then he added, “There’s a lot you can find out rummaging through trash.”
“I’m not judging.”
Returning her eyes to the report, she skimmed over the content.
“See here?” he pointed to the Details of Offense section.
“Weapon not present,” she said, reading out loud. Then she repeated the detail, mumbling under her breath as though the tighter she grasped the information the more disturbing it became. “If she shot herself, the gun would be in her hand if not a few inches away depending on how she hit the floor. How could there be no weapon if she killed herself?”
“Exactly.”
“Unless,” she countered, playing devil’s advocate, “Charlie or Zhana didn’t want this coming down on them and they removed the weapon.”
“But that wasn’t how things were framed in the police report that was filed.”
When she glanced at him, their eyes locked and she sensed he wouldn’t look away until she did.
“The police report on file,” he went on, “was a different form first of all, one for suspected suicide. And it notes that a GLOCK 27 was found near her right hand.”
“What?”
“Here’s what I think,” he said, setting the stage. “When the King’s called the cops, the responding officer arrived, read the scene, found no weapon, and immediately thought it was a homicide. I doubt he’d draw up the report then and there. That’s not how it's done procedurally. But maybe he was a smart guy, got a bad feeling when his superiors showed up. Maybe when he got back to the precinct he went ahead with filling out the homicide report. Maybe he was going to submit it to someone he thought would believe his account, someone beyond the cops who were behind the cover up. Or maybe he was so green he did start filling out the report on the scene and got shut down. Either way, someone at the house that night, one of the cops, didn’t find a weapon, and made this report. And get this; the GLOCK 27 noted on the report, which correspondingly was logged into evidence at the precinct, was only logged in the system. My contact at the station told me the actual gun isn’t sitting in the evidence locker.”
“And that’s why Charlie has refused to turn in his weapons?”
“At this point I doubt if anyone over there would dare to match the firearms against the registrations, apples to apples, but if they did, they might come across the murder weapon, or more likely would not find a match, which would be evidence someone discarded the weapon after using it to kill Maude King.”
Gertrude needed a moment to absorb the magnitude of it all. She wanted to believe the Homicide Report was some kind of horrendous administrative error, that it wasn’t an indication of conspiracy, but there was no way for her to make the leap.
“If Maude didn’t kill herself,” she said finally, “then who did? And why?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
She felt him staring, as chills washed over her.
“Hey, are you okay?” he asked when she started trembling.
She had hoped it wasn’t obvious. “Yeah. Fine.” Crossing her arms tighter, she added, “Just cold.” But she wasn’t. She was riveted.
“I wanted to talk to whoever wrote up the Homicide Report,” he went on, “but the bottom wasn’t signed. So I asked my contact at the precinct, an HR guy. He told me that just three days after Maude’s death, on July 5th, one of the officers dropped off the payroll. A guy named Kevin Robinson. I tried to get in touch with him, but was told he had left town, no forwarding address, no indication as to where he went. It’s like the guy disappeared.”
If Maude had been killed, if people who knew were disappearing, it meant that Roberta was in danger far graver than she’d ever anticipated. Roberta had revealed her father's twisted nature and how she had to do things though she hadn't understood the greater picture of why. Was obeying her strategy for staying alive? Had Maude not risen to the same potential?
“Do they know you have this?” she asked, taking the tattered report from him to skim it.
“I’ve been careful. But if Roberta’s aiming to get me locked up...”
“Then they probably know," she supplied then began thinking out loud, refining the motive to a razor’s edge that might cut to the core of this thing. "The other men lived around the King’s. Do you think they saw something at the house and were eliminated for it?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn't tell me.”
She sank into deep thought, engulfed in fears that this case was way over her head, her supervisor’s head, insurmountable.
“Hey,” he said, as concerned as he’d been before, reading her expression and gently touching her shoulder—his hand warm, strong, and weighted. “Let me give you my numbers.”
He worked his cell phone out of the front of his jeans and started tapping the screen with both thumbs. “What’s your number?”
Vacantly, she recited it for him, and when he tapped the screen a few more times then shoved his cell in his pocket, she felt her own phone vibrate once in her jeans.
“That’s me,” he said as though there would be any question. “Are you going to be all right getting home?”
She said, “Yeah,” but her voice was a thread.
“Let me walk you out.”
Getting up from the couch, he took the report from her and set it beside his beer on the coffee table. When they reached the front door, he held it open for her and she paused on the mulch walkway, while he closed up.
“You can call me any time,” he mentioned as they walked out of the floodlight’s glow and into darkness—shadows upon shadows throughout the woods surrounding them.
Abruptly, she turned to him when they neared the driver’s side door, asking, “You think Charlie killed his own kid?”
“At this point, all I know is that Maude didn’t kill herself. And her murder, I believe, is a very small piece to a very dark puzzle.”
Consumed with that notion, she opened the car door as if floating through a nightmare, but then felt his hand clutching her arm. He softened his grip now that he had her attention and stepped in, angling his face so near hers that her breath hitched in her throat.
Softly, he said, “Thanks for the heads up.” Then he released her, adding, “But I’d never mess around with Roberta.”
She tried to smile, but it wavered badly, as she climbed behind the wheel. He helped her close the car door properly then backed away, watching her as if he wouldn’t head inside until her car started up properly.
As she drove off, tires grinding over gravel and the shock of headlights illuminating both the beaten road and the green d
usting of vegetation that flanked it, Gertrude kept her gaze on the black horizon as if it held answers, real, but hidden and lying in wait.
Jake was burning in the forefront of her mind, distracting her from dreadful thoughts of Doris, the dark connection between her unexplainable reaction—I can’t drink—and the night that had taken her sister. Soon her scattered thoughts focused into a laser beam.
She sensed more than remembered they’d gone to their parents' house that night. Something had happened, but she couldn’t place what.
Doris flashed through her mind—cardigan hems pulled over her palms, her chipped nail polish, her fingernails tapping the bar as if to say hurry up, her eyes, blackened with liner, staring Gertrude down as if she could evoke guilt if she glared hard enough.
They’d stopped in a bar. Gertrude had needed a drink, her bones buzzing from the confrontation—Just one drink, and One more and that’s it, and Don’t give me that look, we’ll leave after this one, last one, I promise. The pit stop had sent Doris into a silent rage.
The memory cleared, leaving the road ahead and a crippling knot of remorse in her throat that she couldn’t choke down. Would they have crashed into the lake that night if she hadn’t stopped for a drink?
The accident, the particulars, the cause and effect, were still beyond her recollection, but the overwhelming sense it had been her fault was all too clear.
She turned off Opechee into her driveway, as a pair of deer flitted across her front yard, their white tails erect and catching the light. Rats that kill people, she thought, cringing at the stupid comment she’d made to Roberta, as she got out of her car and carefully shut the door.
She hadn’t explained to the girl what she’d meant by that, how deer had a tendency to dart in front of cars at night, causing the driver to swerve, hit a tree, or God knows what.
It suddenly occurred to her, though fuzzily, had she swerved that night? Had something jumped in front of her car?
