Bring Her Home

by David Bell

  Adam scratched his head. “I don’t. But I’m not plugged in to the high school scene. You think he did it?”

  Bill jumped when his cell phone rang, the noise slicing through the room. “It’s the police.” He scrambled to take the call. “What is it?” he asked before Hawkins could say anything.

  “Are you at home, Bill?” Hawkins asked.

  “I am. Is she all right?”

  “I’m not calling because there’s anything wrong. In fact, I just finished speaking with your sister at the hospital, and Summer’s condition is unchanged.”

  “Jesus.” Bill’s hands felt sweaty. He wiped one on his pant leg. “What is it, then?”

  “I’m on my way to your house now. You’re still there, right? I wanted to ask you about something.”

  “Can we talk at the hospital?”

  “I’d rather talk at the house. I’m coming right by there if you sit tight.”

  Bill detected something beneath Hawkins’s voice, an edge that seemed out of step with the cop’s usual practiced detachment. “I wish you’d hurry. I’ve already been gone too long.”

  Hawkins hung up without saying anything else.

  “What’s that?” Adam asked. “Trouble?”

  “The cops. They want to talk to me. Here.”

  “But . . .”

  “He says Summer is fine. Unchanged.”

  “Good,” Adam said.

  “But I’m going to call Paige just to make sure.”

  “You don’t need me to stay?” Adam asked. “I can.”

  “No, thanks, Adam. I’ll keep you up-to-date.”

  “If you need anything, call. Or come by for another Dickel when you’re home.”

  “I think I’m going to be at the hospital a lot.”

  “And, look, when all of this is over, when Summer is better, we’ll go fishing again or something. All of us. We’ll do something normal.”

  “Thanks. That sounds, well, it sounds normal.”

  Bill dialed Paige while Adam showed himself out of the house.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “She’s doing fine,” Paige said. “I mean, her condition hasn’t changed since you left.”

  “Is something wrong?” Bill asked.

  He couldn’t tell if Paige’s voice sounded subdued due to her location in the hospital, or if, as he feared, it was something else, something worse.

  “You have to tell me, Paige. If I need to come down there now . . .”

  “You don’t.” There was a pause, and then a shuffling as Paige moved around, perhaps to a different location where she could speak more freely. “Hawkins just left.”

  “And you told him everything you knew? About the phone call Summer made to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did she mention those kids to you on the phone? Clinton or Todd?”

  “No, Bill.” She sounded frazzled, on edge.

  “So what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “It’s the police, that detective. They’re going to be asking you questions.”

  Bill looked out the front window where at that moment Hawkins’s dark blue Impala was pulling into the driveway. He watched the detective step out of the car, hitching up his pants a little as he started up the walk to the front of the house.

  “What kind of questions, Paige? About Summer’s sex life?”

  “No, not that,” she said. “Something else.”

  “What?”

  But then Hawkins was ringing the doorbell and peering through the window, his face pressed against the glass until it grew dark.

  “Call me if anything changes,” Bill said. “And I mean anything.”

  He hung up and went to let the detective in.

  Hawkins came in, walking with a more purposeful stride than Bill had seen him use before. His shoulders were thrown back, and he passed by Bill without making eye contact.

  Bill shut the door and followed the detective into the living room. “What is this, Detective? I’m trying to get back to the hospital.”

  “Sit down, Bill. We need to talk about something.” But Hawkins remained standing.

  Bill stopped a few feet away from the detective and didn’t sit down either. “I know my sister told you about that birth control stuff. But it’s not fair if you start to look at Summer differently because of that. She’s too young to know what she’s doing. And even if she did consent to sex with Todd Stone or any other boy, he still might have hurt her. In fact, that makes it more likely, right? Aren’t people usually hurt by someone close to them?”

  “This isn’t about your sister. Or the birth control.”

  “Then what is it?” Bill asked. “Did you catch somebody?”

  “Have a seat, Bill.”

  Bill understood. The detective wanted to push him around a little, assert his authority over Bill and control the situation. The urge to resist, to push back, tried to take over Bill’s mind, but he knew he couldn’t get anywhere that way. As though the effort pained him, Bill eased down into a chair. Once he was settled, the detective took his time following suit, adjusting his pant legs and then reaching into his coat pocket to take out a small spiral notebook, one that almost disappeared in his big hand. It seemed to take another twenty minutes for Hawkins to find his glasses and perch them on the end of his nose, changing his demeanor from gentle good old boy to no-nonsense inquisitor.

  “Is there anything you’ve been meaning to tell us, Bill?” he asked, his voice cold.

  Bill’s eyes rolled of their own accord. He felt like he had no control over their coordinated motion. “This again? Haven’t we been through all this—”

  “I’m thinking of something that occurred in the early-morning hours of November first last year.”

  “You want me to remember that far back. I don’t know—” Bill stopped as he remembered the events of that night a few months earlier. Through the window behind Hawkins’s head, Bill saw the bare trees moving in the wind, the branches jerky and awkward. “You’re not going to bring that up.”

  Hawkins studied the tiny, low-tech notebook. “At one thirty-five in the morning on November first, the police received a nine-one-one call from this residence.” He looked at Bill over his glasses. “Summer placed the call.” He let that hang in the air a moment, then turned back to the notebook. “She said her father had grabbed her and shaken her, causing an injury to her arm. She wanted the police to come and help her.”

  A burning sensation grew on Bill’s scalp, the kind a person felt from sitting out in the sun too long without a hat. “I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “I think you do,” Hawkins said. “Now, just tell me what happened that night, and we’ll see what we do with the information.”

  “I’m going to the hospital.”

  “Bill.” Hawkins removed the glasses, his blue-gray eyes boring in. “This is going to be a huge distraction. Secrets are a killer when a case like this is going on.”

  “The killer is the killer, not this so-called secret.”

  “What happened that night?”

  Bill saw no way out, but he said, “You’ve turned my life upside down already. You’ve been through the whole house, my financial records, and my computer. I handed all that over to you voluntarily. I want you to look at everything there is to look at.”

  “But you didn’t mention this. And I need to know what happened.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “How did you find out?” Bill asked.

  “The officer who responded that night came forward,” Hawkins said, his voice a little warmer. “He filled me in. He still had detailed notes in a logbook, even though no charges were filed.”

  Bill squirmed on the couch. As if seeing Summer in the condition she was in at the hospital, her body on display to be poked and prodded by strangers, her every action and flaw
examined by the police and the media weren’t bad enough, now Bill found himself forced to relive one of the worst nights of his life. He tried not to feel sorry for himself, not to indulge in an unproductive round of self-pity, but he had to admit his days hadn’t been so golden recently. Julia’s death. Summer’s disappearance. Summer’s injuries. Haley’s death.

  And the autumn night the police came to his house.

  Summer went out that night with Haley. It was Halloween, but he knew the girls weren’t going trick-or-treating. Without probing for too many details, Bill learned they were going over to someone’s house to watch movies. Unprompted, Summer said to him, “It’s just girls.”

  At the time, the comment raised a red flag. Why point that out when he hadn’t asked any questions about anyone’s gender? But Bill tried hard not to be that dad, the guy who stood on the porch with his loaded and racked shotgun, the one who followed his child’s movements through her cell phone. He felt like he faced enough challenges raising a daughter on his own without adding to them. And Halloween fell just a month past the one-year anniversary of Julia’s death. He wanted to think Summer was moving on, having fun like any other kid.

  Bill refused to give out Halloween candy. Every year, he turned out the lights and retreated to the back of the house where he watched an NBA game or a documentary on the Civil War while the neighborhood kids passed by. He enjoyed the holiday when Summer was little, when a sense of wonder filled her eyes as she dressed up and then returned home with a bag full of candy. But for several years, Bill had lacked patience for the whole thing. The kids who came to the door often seemed rude, and he dreaded the inevitable small talk with neighbors and acquaintances who, even a year and a half later, continued to speak to him in a pitying voice as though Julia had died just a few days ago.

  Bill fell asleep that night as the Spurs and the Warriors went into overtime. When he woke on the couch, the clock across the room reading one thirty-five a.m., he assumed Summer was already in. He’d told her to be home by midnight, and even before Julia died, she always pushed it to the last minute. In the year since Julia’s death, Summer had started coming in later and later. Never all night and never so late that Bill grew really worried, but she was pushing and pushing at the boundaries he had set for her.

  And that night when he woke up, she wasn’t in her room.

  Bill walked by the open doorway, the hair on the back of his head mussed from the couch, his unlaced shoes in his hand, and saw no sign of Summer. Her bed was empty, the Ikea lamp glowing. Bill walked through the rest of the house, checking every room. Nothing. And then he checked his phone. Also nothing.

  He put his tennis shoes on and walked out back, making sure Summer and her friends weren’t sitting on the patio, gabbing away beneath the stars while the night grew chilly. But all was silent there.

  Every few minutes Bill sent texts to Summer, but she answered none of them.

  “I look back on that night now,” Bill said, his voice expansive, “and I realize it was kind of a sneak preview of what I’ve gone through the last couple of days.”

  “She was running around with her friends and didn’t call,” Hawkins said, clearly using information he’d gleaned from the responding officer.

  “I don’t know which friends now,” Bill said. “Paige told me Summer called her about six months ago, asking about birth control. This night I’m talking about was about four months ago. Maybe the two are related.”

  “But you don’t know if she was with the boys I mentioned that night,” Hawkins said. “You don’t know if Clinton Fields or any of his friends were there.”

  “I never found out.” Bill squirmed again, his scalp burning not with anger but embarrassment. “First I went out the front door—you know, checking to see if she was out there or on her way in. Some little assholes had smeared dog shit on the window, that window right behind your head. Probably because I didn’t give out candy or something. So I’m doubly pissed then, you know? I don’t know where my daughter is. I’ve got dog shit to wash off the window. . . . I’m just about to start calling her friends’ parents when she comes strolling in the front door almost two hours late.”

  “Had she been drinking?” Hawkins asked.

  “I don’t know.” Bill shrugged. “Not obviously, but I didn’t smell her breath.”

  “Did she say where she was or who she was with?”

  “She said she was with her friends and that she lost track of time.” Bill’s laugh sounded brittle, like cracking ice. “The thing is, that’s the most normal, believable explanation in the world. Nothing dramatic. Nothing crazy. No excuses. She lost track of time.”

  “From what I’ve heard about Summer, she was usually in control of her own destiny. Kids and teachers from school say she was the one who made plans. She was the one who made decisions. Probably nobody led her astray that night. No one else made her late.” He watched Bill, almost like a therapist, waiting for him to go on and finish the story.

  “All of a sudden it’s a problem that my daughter was confident,” he said.

  But Summer’s explanation didn’t set Bill off that night. Her attitude did. For the first time ever, she was openly disdainful of her father, as though she considered him simply a peripheral figure in her life, no more important than a neighbor down the street or the guy who came once a month to read the gas meter.

  They’d stood near each other in the living room, the glow from the streetlight distorted by the smeared dog shit on the window, and Summer waved her hand at Bill as she started to walk away, a gesture of complete and total dismissal.

  Bill surprised himself. He reached out and grabbed her by the forearm, and when Summer gasped and tried to pull loose from his grip, Bill tugged even harder, causing her to lose her balance and slip to the floor.

  The whole thing took two seconds, and it unfolded with a dreamlike quality, as though Bill were watching someone else, some crazy man, take hold of his daughter and shove her down.

  When Summer hit the floor, Bill let go, stepping back. Her eyes filled with tears—not of hurt but of anger—and she called Bill an asshole as she stormed down the hall to her room.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Bill closed his eyes, unable to look at the detective sitting across from him. He couldn’t bear for those all-seeing, all-judging eyes to rake him like searchlights. He doubted a man like Hawkins ever lost his cool, even with his own children.

  “I snapped out of it,” Bill said. “I was back inside myself once she stormed off. And I told myself to let it go. To let her cool down overnight while I simmered down as well. We’d lost Julia just a year earlier. I felt shitty. Totally shitty, like I wanted to chop off my offending hand. But I was still mad at her too. Summer could be so, so defiant. So stubborn. That dismissive attitude. The same attitude that told those kids they could smear dog shit on my window because I didn’t give out candy on Halloween.” He looked to Hawkins for understanding. “She’s a teenager, you know? You give one a stern look, and they lose their minds. We tried to raise Summer not to be an entitled brat, but I guess she couldn’t help acting the way kids sometimes act.”

  “So she called the police,” Hawkins said, prodding.

  “From her room. Next thing I know, there’s a cop at the door. I honestly thought maybe he’d seen the dog shit and stopped by to take a report. Instead, he wanted to talk to me. An abuse allegation, he called it. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.”

  Bill nearly fell through the floor when Summer emerged from her bedroom, cell phone in hand, and told the officer she was the one who called the police, that she’d reported Bill for grabbing her by the arm.

  But she backpedaled right away. Seeing the cop in the house—gun at his side, badge gleaming in the light—and understanding what it meant to report her father for abuse caused her to reconsider. She answered a bunch of questions the officer asked, and then Bill answere
d a bunch more, and in the end the officer left without filing a report or contacting the child welfare agency.

  “We never talked about it,” Bill said. “She went to bed, and I went to bed. The next day, things were a little tense, but neither of us brought it up. I guess my enduring punishment was a bit of the cold shoulder and standing out in the sun cleaning crusty dog shit off my window. It’s like that with a teenager. Hot and cold. A week later, we watched a football game together. We were fine. I wanted to tell her not to be as whiny as everyone else her age, but I didn’t. I left well enough alone.”

  “And it never—”

  Bill sighed and looked over at the detective. “I’m sure every guy who’s ever abused his wife or children says it’s the only time it ever happened, but that’s the only time it ever happened. She got spanked on rare occasions when she was a kid, more by Julia than by me. And we’re talking a handful of times, if that. No, I never touched her again. Never.”

  “You’re lucky they didn’t press charges,” Hawkins said. “If she’d insisted, if she’d made a bigger stink about the injuries or requested medical attention, they would have taken her away from you and investigated further. It could have been ugly. The responding officer is supposed to file a report, even if he doesn’t make an arrest. They don’t always do it, so you caught a break.”

  “I don’t need you to lecture me on close calls. I’m living in one, remember? Can I go to the hospital now?”

  Hawkins held up his meaty hand, telling Bill to slow down. “Do you think something happened that night to set her off? Something with her friends?”

  “I don’t know. Summer has other girlfriends. That Teena Everett I told you about. She’s kind of the third wheel to Summer and Haley. They were better friends in junior high, and I get the feeling they don’t always want her around.”

  “They have a fight or something?”

  “No. Teena’s just a little squirrely. Haley and Summer kind of left her behind the way kids do. They outgrew her. But maybe she knows something about that night. For some reason, Teena’s been hanging around a little more lately. Have you talked to her?”