The Blackbird Season

by Kate Moretti

  Vi stood in the middle of the living room with a rumpled man in khakis. “Alecia, this is Detective Harper.” She seemed not to know what to do with her hands and she wrung them in front of her, then crossed them around her middle.

  “Hello,” Alecia said. Gabe clapped loudly next to her and she attempted to shush him with a gentle hand to his head. “Vi, can you take Gabe back upstairs so we can talk?”

  Vi directed Gabe out of the room, under squawking protest, and she heard his heavy clomping on the wooden steps.

  “Do you want tea?” Alecia asked, averting her eyes, and started toward the kitchen, motioning for the detective to follow her. He did. “I just boiled a pot.”

  “Tea would be fine, Mrs. Winters.”

  She gestured toward the kitchen island and Detective Harper took a seat in one of the metal-backed chairs. While Alecia poured two mugs, she was able to study him out of the corner of her eye. Tall, thin, maybe sixty. He wore wireless framed glasses and an unkempt mustache. He looked like an insurance salesman rather than a detective, but it was the keen blue eyes behind the glass that made her hands shake as she scooped sugar. When she set the ceramic mug in front of him, it clattered on the wooden countertop.

  He seemed nice and comfortable with the silence.

  Alecia wiped her hands on her jeans. “What can I help you with, Detective?” she finally asked. She remained standing across the island. The other chair would be too close, too intimate.

  “I’m here to ask you about your husband, Mrs. Winters. And Lucia Hamm.”

  Alecia stared into her mug, the surface ringed and rippling from Gabe’s heavy running upstairs. She’d gotten so used to it she hardly realized he shook the floor anymore. Detective Harper looked around their small, thin-walled townhouse, the teetering clutter on every flat surface: papers and envelopes and folders and bills and toy trucks and felt markers—always markers everywhere—and felt the apples of her cheeks grow hot.

  “What’s to ask? I don’t know anything.” Alecia shrugged.

  “You might. Tell me about your husband. Where is he now?”

  Alecia felt a stab of annoyance. “He’s staying with a friend, Tripp Harris. I assume you know that already.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m unsure where our marriage will end up. Because I don’t know what happened with that girl.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Mostly, yes. But we’ve been less than perfect for a long time. I need space to think, that’s all. It’s temporary.”

  “What kind of troubles?” Detective Harper pulled out a small notebook and a Bic from his shirt pocket.

  “I hardly see how or why that matters. Just standard-issue troubles. Are you married, Detective?”

  Harris nodded. “Twenty-two years.”

  “Then you know. It’s not all skipping through meadows.”

  “No.” He smoothed the ends of his mustache with his fingers and wrote in his notebook. “But I’ve never asked her to leave so I could ‘think.’ ”

  “Then you’re a better man than me. Which is fine.”

  “Mrs. Winters, where was your husband on Monday night? Did you see him?” His voice was short, the banter was over. Alecia was relieved, she wanted him to just get to the point.

  “He came over around six. I was making Gabe dinner and he showed up, no call or anything, to get clothes. It threw me. We had a fight.”

  “About what?”

  “Who knows?” Alecia traced the handle of the mug with her finger. “Our life. Him not being here. The girl.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “He just denies it and I can’t make sense of it, that’s all.”

  “I’m going to need you to be more specific,” Detective Harper said. He sat up straighter, his patience with her waning.

  “I can’t be! He came over, I was mad, I picked a fight. He asked me if I believed him and I said I didn’t know. It’s literally the same argument over and over again.” Alecia felt the back of her knees sweat; a bead between her breasts rolled into her bra.

  “No new information?” he asked, sounding skeptical.

  “No,” Alecia lied. She had no intention of helping them arrest her husband, but she flashed on the Instagram picture and Nate’s plea, it was an accident. It might have been the truth, who was she to decide?

  “Mrs. Winters, have you seen Lucia Hamm?”

  “God, no. I’ve never seen her at all in real life. Only pictures.”

  “What pictures?”

  Shit. “I looked her up on social media,” Alecia admitted. This part was true. “She’s a teenager. You know, bedroom eyes, cleavage, the works. She’s got that hair. Crazy blond, it looks white.” She bumped her mug with a shaky hand, the tea splashing on the counter. “She’s got a look about her, though. Something in her eyes seems off.”

  Harper was quick, flat with his reply. “How so?”

  “Just, I don’t know. They’re . . . empty. Soulless. Don’t you think?” Alecia searched the detective’s face. It remained impassive. “Well, anyway.”

  “What time did your husband leave here on Monday night?” Harper asked, shifting in his seat.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe six thirty? He didn’t stay very long. Gabe was happy to see him and mad when he left.” Correction, Gabe was inconsolable when he left. For two hours. She didn’t add the part where she almost texted Nate not to come over anymore. That she’d bring him his clothes. Anything but throw Gabe into another fit. Her eyes skimmed to the back door, the missing glass panel that she’d duct taped over. Harper followed her gaze.

  “Your son do that, ma’am?”

  “He . . .” She didn’t know how to answer that. He’d thrown an IKEA kitchen chair at it, the leg cracking the glass, splintering it outward until she screamed, the walls shaking with it.

  He turned a page in his notebook and this, somehow seemed bad to her. That he would turn a page. The investigation took an unexpected turn.

  “He’s five,” Alecia said finally, her teeth clenched. “Do you know about autism spectrum disorder? These children can be violent. They are frustrated. That’s all I plan to say about my son.”

  He wrote, a wild, loopy scrawl for a moment and then flipped the page back and forth.

  He gave her a smile, quicksilver. “That’s fine, Mrs. Winters. You were home all night?” He thought for a moment, then added, “With your son?”

  “Yes of course. I can barely find a sitter for him in the daytime.” Alecia felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, a prickling sense that this was not routine. That this was something more, something bigger, darker. “What’s going on? I thought you were investigating Nate and this alleged relationship. Why are you really here?”

  The detective leaned back against the chair, the cheap metal creaking with the effort to keep him upright. He watched her carefully. “Because the last time anyone saw Lucia Hamm was Monday night. She’s missing, Mrs. Winter.”

  Alecia felt the world tilt just a bit. She gripped the edge of the island for support. “Missing?”

  “Not going to school, not at home. A teacher at the school filled out a report.”

  “Which teacher?” Alecia asked, sharp. She knew before she asked, before Harper said another word.

  “Bridget Peterson. You’re friends, right?” He raised his mug, slurped loudly on the now-cold tea.

  Alecia didn’t answer him. Instead, she pressed her palm to her brow bone where a cluster headache started to pound. Bridget? She had to know how this would look for Nate. The girl had likely skipped town. What the fuck?

  Detective Harper wasn’t done. “The last person to see her alive, that we know of, is your husband, Mrs. Winters.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Bridget, Thursday, May 7, 2015

  The mill had ceased production in 2005 and now it stood, forgotten, its exterior failing it in innumerable ways. The brick crumbling and the mortar giving way. The windows were soaped and broken, some fully punched out, so
me jagged and peaked. A large chemical tank stood rusting, the pipes skewed, uneven, their connections ripped and battered from winters in the mountains. Along the far side, overflowing into the parking lot, was a pile of blackened and rotting pallets, the weeds growing between the cracks, winding around the wood.

  Even the air felt dusty in her lungs.

  The sky had turned gray, the air warm and rumbling with the soft hint of a distant thunderstorm, and Bridget rolled down her car window. She could hear the dam behind the mill, a loud constant that drowned out birds, insects, other people, leaving behind only a whooshing silence. The parking lot was deserted, which wasn’t unusual, but Bridget sat in her car with the windows down, simply listening. If she closed her eyes, she could be anywhere: a beach, a spectacular waterfall in Hawaii (not that she’d ever been), the bank of the Flint River in Georgia, her feet ankle deep in gray-black clay mud. If she closed her eyes, she could be seventeen again, lying down in that muck, her hair tangled in the leaves and the rocks and the mud, her mouth and tongue seeking a boy’s. What was his name? Ricky Tomlin. Sweet Ricky Tomlin, a boy himself, but with a man’s wants, and those hands—God he knew what he was doing. Bridget could practically feel the mud, cold and chalky on her mouth.

  If she closed her eyes, she could remember being seventeen. Eighteen. In love.

  Everything now was so different: social media, the Internet, texting. It all sharpened people’s edges, made them the opposite of social. Turned them feral.

  Bridget got out of the car, shutting the door carefully behind her. She made her way across the parking lot, her sandaled feet crunching on stones and hardened dirt, the dust kicking up when she walked. Today, thankfully, she’d worn jeans to school, and although it was close to five o’clock, the looming summer meant longer days, and the air felt thick, almost viscous. She could taste it.

  It was easy to remember being eighteen, that was the thing. It was harder to remember being in love as an adult. Easier to remember Holden the way she’d met him under the blazing southern sun, his Yankee white skin blistering with the heat of it. On the patio of a Mexican chain restaurant, where the waiters slapped a straw sombrero on each of their heads and sang “Happy Birthday” in unison to the two of them, a table apart. He’d bought her a margarita; it had been her twenty-second birthday, his twenty-seventh, but it was their birthday, and this above all seemed to mean something hugely profound. Only a few years removed from Aunt Nadine’s mysticism, she’d felt so certain that she and Holden had been fated to be together from the moment she saw him.

  Remembering the early days of summer love and long nights in wet grass under black skies kissing and kissing and kissing with nowhere to be and no one to answer to. That was easier than remembering later, when love felt like something wet and slick in her hand. When they would fight until 2 a.m. until one of them fell asleep midstonewall, when they didn’t even have “real” things to fight about yet. After that she’d felt the early doubts sneak in, that maybe fate isn’t what held a marriage together. That sharing the same birthday didn’t mean they were destined for each other, that it didn’t mean anything at all.

  Maybe a month before he was diagnosed, she’d found something. A single broken acrylic fingernail in his car, painted red and sheared angrily from the base. He’d been at a conference the week before and lost in his own head since he’d been back. She prodded him but he blamed it on feeling sick—intermittently nauseous and tired—until he’d snapped back at her. She kept that broken fingernail in the fleece of her bathrobe pocket, waiting for the right time to bring it up, and she’d find herself rubbing the nail between her thumb and forefinger like it was the silk edge of a security blanket for weeks. The right time never seemed to happen.

  Then she found something else, a business card in his pocket from a radiology group from somewhere in New York. But that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was the writing on the back, a woman’s handwriting, and all it said was Watercress, 6:30. Which again by itself could have been anything. But the fingernail and the business card together made her skin crawl. The handwriting was loopy but neat and almost fanciful. She kept that, too, and a week later finally looked it up. It was a bar near the medical conference but not one on the charge cards or the bank statement. She supposed he could have not gone to Watercress at 6:30, and that would have been the simplest explanation, but her sixth sense tingled anyway.

  So Bridget did the worst thing she could have done and instead of asking him about it, she pulled out Aunt Nadine’s tarot and gave herself a reading. When she dealt the lovers card and the chariot reversed, she put the cards away and squared her shoulders and prepared to confront Holden the minute he came home.

  Except he came home and sat her down and told her he’d been diagnosed with stage III pancreatic cancer—the worst kind of cancer there was—but that he was going to beat it. She tucked the fingernail and Watercress 6:30 into the silky bag along with Aunt Nadine’s deck, then placed it in the bottom of her underwear drawer. Their life became chemo and radiation and surgery, something called a Whipple procedure, and diet modification. She learned new words like bilirubin, cachexia, protease. She forgot (almost) entirely about Watercress 6:30. Almost.

  Sometimes she wondered if the worst part wasn’t that he died, but rather that he died before she knew if he’d stopped loving her.

  She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the mill through a broken window, searching for remnants of Lucia. Why had she come? What would she say if she found her? She didn’t know.

  But she did know that Nate was in trouble, more so than before, if that were even possible. It was no accident that it was Detective Harper who took her statement and then followed her out the door. Back at Tripp’s, she’d all but run to her car, wanting to avoid any run-in with Nate, but also because Tripp was getting to her. Something had shifted, ever so slightly, and she wasn’t sure how to put it all back the way it was. She needed to be away from him and Nate and this whole thing, except she was pulled here, to the mill, just to check she kept telling herself. A quick look around and then she’d leave.

  She saw the flash of white on the other side, the window to her left, but it was opaque, heavy and gray, and she couldn’t get a better look. She moved down the line, the brick crumbling beneath her palm, and looked through the bottom panel, splintered in like it had been hit with a baseball or a stick. She knew the boys threw stones at the windows, accumulating points for a good loud break. The white flashed again, soft and downy, and Bridget’s heart skipped. She heard the distant pattering of feet so she called out, “Lucia!” with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

  The window at the far end was punched all the way in, the wooden lattices splintered at the edges and wide enough for an adult to climb through. Bridget was tentative with her footing, and the jagged glass scratched along her shirt, nearly cutting through to her skin, but she made it in, only a two-foot drop to the floor.

  Inside, she called out again, the building blocking out the sounds from the dam, her voice tinny and hollow bouncing against the cement. The room was darker than she’d thought, the sun having long been hidden behind twilight clouds, and she squinted trying to make out anything. From another room, or maybe the one she was in, she heard a rustling, and she spun one way then the other, convinced already that she’d made a mistake in being here. She followed the rustling, trying to steady her breath, which seemed to be coming in quick bursts, and called, “Lucia!” again, just to make sure. There was no reply.

  Bridget navigated around the stainless steel beams positioned every ten feet or so in the enormous concrete room. The floor was littered with cardboard tubing, various diameters, and if she wasn’t careful, she’d roll right over one and break a leg.

  The next room was filled with stainless steel machinery. Large steel tanks were sunk into the concrete floor, the steel of their caps rusted and thin. Piping, four feet in diameter, connected one tank to the other, a remnant of a mechanical assembly
line ending in the pulp room. Bridget ran her flashlight beam into one of the ragged openings, wondering what lay beneath the ground. What lived in those caverns—animals? People?

  She shuddered. Behind a beam flashed that white again, quiet and quick. Bridget followed it, whispered “Lucia,” the rustling of a soft step guiding her deeper into the mill. The air thickened and she turned the corner, expecting to see the girl, crouching, terrified.

  The thing flew at her before she knew what it was, shrieking and wild. Bridget screamed and covered her face.

  Someone grabbed her from behind, pulling her down.

  “Jesus Christ, Bridget. I can’t keep following you all over hell and creation. You’re going to get yourself killed.” Tripp’s hands were on her biceps, his fingers digging into her flesh.

  The white thing, the thing that flew at her, toddled away. A goose. Not Lucia. She’d been tracking a goose.

  “A snow goose in May?” Bridget asked.

  “A loner, maybe.” Tripp shrugged, his breath at her ear. “Lost?” The goose bleated in the corner, like them, looking for a way out. They’d come in here in the daylight, ventured in far too deep, and now the exit seemed impossibly far away and cloaked in darkness.

  Bridget struggled to calm her racing heart. “I really thought I’d find her here,” she said lamely.

  “She might be here, but we won’t find her tonight.”

  “What do we do with the goose?” He hadn’t let her go, and for a second, Bridget let herself lean back into him. His skin smelled mossy, a waxy, soapy smell.

  “We have to leave it, if we stay here any longer, it’ll get dark and we’ll be stuck. Don’t worry, he got in, he’ll get out. He’s weeks away from his flock, though.” Tripp said into her hair. “The guy is pissed; listen to him. We couldn’t get near him if we wanted.”

  Bridget didn’t move and was suddenly tired enough to lie down, right in the dark, in the dust and the steel and the warmth of Tripp’s arms and take a nap. He stepped back, putting space between them.