Sympathy Between Humans

by Jodi Compton

  “You want me to be a guardian to the Hennessy children?” I said.

  “Not quite a guardian, more like a watchful eye,” Lorraine said.

  “I have no background in social work,” I reminded her.

  “But you are a responsible law-enforcement professional, and you seem to have had more contact with these kids than anyone else.” She paused. “Marlinchen Hennessy is an extraordinarily good candidate for guardianship, and she’s only weeks away from her eighteenth birthday. We’re not comfortable leaving the children on their own for that amount of time, but sending the children into foster care seems, well, ludicrous.”

  Hedging, I said, “I’m not sure Marlinchen would agree to it.” I was thinking of how we’d left things between us.

  “In fact, when I made my home visit, the oldest daughter spoke highly of you,” Lorraine said.

  “Only daughter,” I corrected her. Marlinchen Hennessy had no sisters.

  Lorraine smiled, and I realized I’d stepped into a trap, revealing myself as someone who’d invested time and energy into knowing this young family. I sighed.

  “I’m not totally opposed to stepping in,” I said, “but I think there’s a larger problem here. Marlinchen is pursuing guardianship of her younger siblings and conservatorship of her father, at the same time. Don’t you think that’s a bit much?”

  Lorraine bit her lip. It was the judge who spoke. “Detective Pribek,” he said, “the family is still the sacred and essential unit in American life. Before we in the judicial branch split one up, we need to have damn good reason. If there were other relatives, even a close friend of the family, who could step in here, I’d go that route. But there isn’t. In this situation, I feel that this is the best I can do for the family.”

  “What is it I’d be doing?” I asked, yielding.

  “Just keep an eye on them,” Lorraine said. “Ensure that the laundry is getting done and they’re not having cold cereal every night for dinner. You certainly don’t need to be living with them, but spend some time out there.” She paused. “I should also mention that you get a stipend for this.”

  “But it won’t be a factor in your retirement planning,” Judge Henderson added dryly, and I surprised myself by laughing with him.

  “So,” Lorraine said, “are you willing?”

  What they were asking was far afield of the work I did for Hennepin County. I had no children; I hadn’t even grown up with younger siblings. But I realized something: it was too late to say I wasn’t involved. Our last meeting notwithstanding, I liked Marlinchen Hennessy. And if I spent more time with her, I might be able to finish what I’d started: locating Aidan Hennessy.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  ***

  They hadn’t told me, but Marlinchen Hennessy had been in another room all the while. After I’d agreed to supervise the Hennessy kids, Lorraine had brought her in and explained the situation to her. Marlinchen, not surprisingly, had assented.

  We’d gone back downstairs in the elevator together, where I’d told her that after I was done with work, I’d drive her home, and we’d explain the situation to her brothers. Marlinchen had nodded, quickly agreeable, otherwise quiet. I’d left her at a small table in the second-story plaza of the Pillsbury Center, drinking a Coke and doing homework.

  Clearly, I thought on my way back to work, Marlinchen still saw me as an authority figure. If I was going to spend the next few weeks looking in regularly on her and her brothers, I at least wanted her to loosen up a little.

  What I needed was to spend some time with Marlinchen in which I wasn’t probing into uncomfortable family affairs, time in which neither of us brought up Hugh, or Aidan, or family finances, or jurisdictional lines. What we needed was to do something totally different. Something fun.

  When I got to the detective division, I told Van Noord I was going to leave a little early.

  ***

  “We’re going to get arrested,” Marlinchen said flatly.

  At six, the day’s light was just starting to mellow. Marlinchen and I were on a county road outside the Cities, near the St. Croix River. I’d pulled the Nova over to the side so she and I could switch places.

  Marlinchen had been fine a little earlier, when, in an empty church parking lot, I’d taught her the basics of driving. She’d made a 15-mile-per-hour circuit around the pavement, braking, learning to reverse. “This isn’t that hard,” she’d said, pleasure growing along with confidence.

  Now it was a different story.

  “Do I have to do this on a highway?” she said, her voice taking on a wheedling quality. “Shouldn’t I start out on a 25-mile-per-hour street somewhere?”

  “Those kinds of streets have cross traffic, four-way intersections, and kids on wobbly bikes,” I told her. “Here you’ve got nothing but clear, straight road.”

  A flatbed truck roared past us at 75 miles per hour. Seeing that, Marlinchen eyed me reproachfully.

  “You’re running a household without even being able to drive to the store,” I said. It was an argument I’d made earlier, when I’d first suggested a driving lesson to her. “You need to learn this.”

  “What if I’m not going fast enough for the traffic?” she asked.

  “They’ll pass,” I said. “Country drivers love to pass; it breaks up the monotony.” To forestall any further argument, I got out of the car. Halfway around the front fender, I saw Marlinchen reluctantly climb out as well.

  “With great effort,” I said dryly, when we’d traded places, “unwrap one of your hands and put down the parking brake, like you did before. Good. Now, with your foot on the brake, put the car in drive. Your right foot. Do not drive two-footed.”

  Marlinchen pulled to the shoulder and stopped there, looking around. A few seconds passed, then a few more. There wasn’t a single vehicle in either direction. I didn’t know what she was looking for.

  Was I pushing her too hard? I’d wanted her to loosen up for once, and do something fun, but Marlinchen didn’t seem to be enjoying herself at all.

  “We’re the only car in sight,” I pointed out. “Conditions are not going to get any better.”

  Marlinchen took her foot off the brake and pulled onto the road. The speedometer needle rose with painful slowness to 30. Then to 35. Finally to 45.

  I said, “The speed limit’s 55.”

  “I know,” Marlinchen said.

  “Which means much of the traffic is going 65,” I explained. “Speed up.”

  The engine noise pitched upward, and the speedometer needle began to creep forward again. When it got to 60, Marlinchen looked visibly relieved at being able to ease up on the accelerator.

  “Feeling okay?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, sounding surprised. Her hands relaxed on the wheel. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “No destination,” I said. “This road runs a long way. Just get comfortable with driving.”

  In the right-side mirror, a vehicle appeared. It looked the size of a fly, but that was changing fast. The fly resolved into a big Ford pickup, gaining on us fast.

  “Look in your rearview mirror,” I said.

  She did. Instantly, her hands tensed on the wheel again.

  “No problem,” I assured her. “He’s going to pass us.”

  “What do I need to do?” Marlinchen asked me.

  “Nothing. He’ll do it all. Watch what he does.”

  The truck caught up with us and tailgated for about twenty seconds. Marlinchen looked in the mirror at him for about nineteen of those seconds.

  “Don’t spend all your time looking at him,” I said. “Be looking ahead. That’s where you’re going.”

  The truck, having asked us to speed up and getting no response, dropped back a polite distance. Then its big black nose dipped slightly out toward the center line, looking ahead, where there was no oncoming traffic in sight, just broken yellow lines. The driver swung out easily into the opposing lane, sped past us at about 90 mph, and
cut back in.

  “Wow,” Marlinchen said.

  “See?” I said. “No big deal. If there was any opposing traffic, you might have wanted to ease off the accelerator a little, just to make sure he could get back in safely. Or, once he was ahead of you, you could flash your lights. That means you’re letting him cut back in.”

  “There’s a code of conduct?” Marlinchen said. “Cool.”

  We drove another ten minutes. Then a vehicle came into view ahead of us. A goldenrod machine, a tractor. We were gaining fast, and it was soon clear that the farmer was driving about 20 mph.

  “Pass him,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Pass him. This guy’s crawling. We’ll be stuck behind him forever if you don’t.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Yes you can. This car’s got some power. It’ll do it. But once you start, don’t try to pull out. Indecision gets people hurt.”

  We fell in behind the tractor. I looked ahead to ensure there was no one coming.

  “You’re clear,” I said. “Go.”

  The engine throbbed as Marlinchen swung into the opposite lane. The rpm needle jumped, and the speedometer began climbing: 70, 75, 80. There was that interminable moment, the one where you feel like you’ll never draw clear of whatever you’re passing, no matter how slow it was going a minute ago. We crawled forward. On the horizon, a small white blur appeared. An approaching vehicle.

  Marlinchen did what I’d half known she would. The engine noise dropped to a low hum, the rpm falling. She wanted to cut back in.

  “No!” I told her sharply. “You’re committed, remember?”

  The rpm noise pitched higher again, and the speedometer climbed to 90. Then 95. We cleared the front end of the tractor. Marlinchen kept the accelerator down; 100 miles per hour. She glanced back to the tractor.

  “You’re clear,” I said. “Get back over.”

  With visible relief, she did. A moment later, a white pickup whizzed past us. It hadn’t even been close, really.

  “Oh, wow,” Marlinchen said. She took a deep breath and let it out. Then she looked in her rearview and waved gaily back at the tractor’s driver, as though he’d done her a great favor. “That was kind of fun.”

  “ ‘Fun’ is not a familiar feeling to you, is it?” I asked her. “Do you want to pull over and put your head between your knees until it passes?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Marlinchen said, and broke into a high string of giggles at her own boldness. I laughed, too.

  “You think you’re a real badass now, don’t you?” I said. “That was nothing. When I was your age-”

  “Here it comes,” she said good-naturedly.

  “- my friend Garnet Pike and I were learning to do a fishtail 180, also known as a bootlegger’s turn.”

  “I don’t know what either of those things are,” she said.

  “It’s a 180-degree turn you do using the parking brake while cranking the wheel around hard. You can’t do it with a lot of the cars they make today, with high centers of gravity. Garnet had read about it and wanted to try. So she talked me into borrowing my aunt’s car, a sedan with a good engine, and we went out to the airport.”

  “The airport?” Marlinchen said.

  “You’re thinking of MSP. This was just a rural airport, one runway, no tower. And in the evening, when we went, no one was taking off or landing.” I backpedaled slightly. “I’m not saying we should have done it. It was trespassing.”

  “In other words, don’t try this at home,” she said.

  “Right. Anyway, the runway was the perfect spot to practice, both long and wide, with nothing to hit. After two false starts, Garnet got up her nerve and did it. And back then, whatever Garnet did, I felt I had to do,” I said. “So we switched places, and I did.”

  For a moment I was back there, hearing the sound of my own giddy, relieved laughter, seeing the little scented pine tree rocking crazily from Aunt Ginny’s rearview mirror. To this day, it’s what I think of when I smell that synthetic pine scent.

  “Let me guess,” Marlinchen said. “You want to teach it to me.”

  I shook my head. “No, I know you’re not ready for that. But I’ll do a demonstration for you.”

  “No, thank you,” she said firmly. “I’d toss my cookies.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” I said. “It’d be over before you knew it. In fact-”

  “Look, a Dairy Queen!” Marlinchen interrupted, excited by a red-roofed shack on the roadside. “Can we stop?”

  “You’re driving the car,” I said.

  ***

  A short while later, we were sitting at a shaded spot overlooking the St. Croix River. Marlinchen had driven us there while I held her large, semiliquid ice-cream confection and my own order of onion rings. Ahead, the sun was shining on the river, but behind us, iron-colored clouds were piling up in the west. The contrast was so stark it almost looked like the thunderheads had been added into the scene with a moviemaker’s computer graphics.

  “Going to be some weather tonight,” I said. “A storm, maybe hail.”

  Marlinchen spooned up some of her ice cream. “The big storms used to scare me when I was a kid,” she said. “One of my first memories is of lightning striking the house. I didn’t see it, I just remember the noise, and how scared my mother was. For years after that, any loud noises scared me,” she said.

  “It was that bad?”

  “I don’t think I would have been affected by it so badly if my mother hadn’t been,” Marlinchen said. “She came into my room, crying, and told me ‘Lightning struck the house’ and put me straight to bed. I started crying, because she seemed so upset. I thought she meant that lightning was going to strike the house again and again. She slept in the bed with me that night.”

  Elisabeth Hennessy had drowned under suspicious circumstances, with whispers of suicide surrounding her death. Her daughter’s memory made me wonder if Marlinchen’s mother had been troubled throughout her young life, if a highly tuned nervous system had turned the excitement of Minnesota ’s summer thunderstorms into terrifying psychodramas.

  “Is something wrong?” Marlinchen asked me.

  “No,” I said. I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask whether Elisabeth Hennessy had been fearful or neurotic, so I filed away the issue for another time.

  “How old were you when your mother died?” Marlinchen asked me.

  I hoped my surprise didn’t show on my face. She was something of a mind reader. Not spot-on, but close. “I was nine,” I said. “Almost ten.”

  Marlinchen paused with her plastic spoon halfway to her mouth. “The other day, I thought you said you came to Minnesota when you were 13,” she remarked. “What happened in between?”

  I’d told the story of my migration to Minnesota to a number of people, and none had asked that specific question. Until now.

  “I told you my dad was a truck driver, right?” I said. “He was on the road a lot. But until I was 13, my older brother, Buddy, lived at home. Then he joined the army and moved away, so I would have been living alone. That was mostly why. But also…” I hesitated.

  “What?”

  “That summer, I think, a girl went missing. She was about my age, and in a small town, things like that cause a real panic.” A waterbird swept low over the river. “I haven’t thought about that for years.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was a long time ago. I was young.” I shrugged. “Anyway, that might have had an influence on my father’s feelings. Besides that, I was becoming a teenager. My father probably thought I needed a feminine influence.”

  “I see,” Marlinchen said dryly. “So it was your aunt’s feminine influence that led you to break into airports and practice stunt driving?”

  “Right,” I agreed. “Ginny was the mellowest aunt ever. She worked evenings and weekends at a bar and grill, and she mostly let me do my own thing. Want one of these?” I held out the onion rings, and she took one.

  “Thanks
. So is your aunt still up on the Range?” she asked.

  “No, she died when I was 19, of a stroke. Not like your dad,” I added quickly, seeing Marlinchen’s little twitch of reaction. “Hers was down in the brain stem, where a lot of the body’s autonomic functions are. If there’s such a thing as a good location to have a stroke, that’s not it.”

  After a few minutes, when Marlinchen had finished her ice cream, I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said, “let’s head out.”

  We walked down to the car together in silence. This time, I got behind the wheel, and at the end of the dirt lane we’d followed to our vantage point, I turned north instead of south onto the road.

  “Aren’t we going the wrong way?” Marlinchen said as we continued to accelerate.

  “Yes,” I told her. Then I hauled up on the parking brake and turned the wheel hard. The Nova slewed in a 180, back wheels drifting briefly onto the shoulder, and then we were heading west, picking up speed again.

  “See?” I said. “That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”

  17

  Another gas-station mini-mart was hit; it was clearly the same two perpetrators. Welcome back, guys, I thought.

  After taking initial witness reports, I reviewed security video from the first two stores, hoping that by watching tape from the day before the robberies, I might recognize these guys without their stocking masks, casing the place.

  When I got off work, I was thinking that it might be a good night to go out to the lake in time for dinner. Marlinchen’s cooking was probably better than mine. I rode the elevator down to the parking garage.

  “Detective Pribek!”

  I turned to see Gray Diaz approaching along a lane of parked vehicles. He wasn’t alone. The man behind him was in his early fifties, tall, and slender, dressed in simple plainclothes: shirtsleeves and trousers, no tie. His eyes were gray behind wire-rim glasses. He too was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.

  “I’m glad we caught you before you left for the day,” Diaz said. He was holding a piece of paper in his hands. “You know Gil Hennig, correct?”