He said, now, “Who knows about the pregnancy?”
She jumped like the question was a bolt from the blue, which he guessed it was. He’d kind of blurted that out. “My grandpa. Not Dyma, not yet. I didn’t want her to worry.”
“About college,” he guessed.
“About any of it. This is her chance. This is her time.”
He thought, When is it your chance? But he thought he knew. Her chance had been once Dyma went to college. Before she’d realized she’d be pregnant then.
She said, “I need to tell you something. Before we get the results back. I don’t know if now’s a good time, though. I mean, obviously it’s not a good time. It’s a terrible time. But I don’t know when will be a better time.”
“Go ahead.” He tried to smile. “I could use some distraction.”
“It’s a confession,” she said, and he thought, What? She’d stopped taking her pills on purpose, or something?
No, that couldn’t be it. How would she have known the condom would break?
She put him out of his suspense. “I didn’t tell Mark yet. My ex-boyfriend. Partly because the dates are better for it to be you, and partly because …” She trailed off.
“Yeah?” he asked. “Why?” He should be half-crazy about the thing with her. The thing with the baby. But he didn’t seem to have space for it. Too much to think about, and he had to let some of it go.
“Because I’d rather it was you,” she said. “And I feel like I need to let you know that. Otherwise, it feels like a guilty secret. I’m wishing it’s you. And I know you’re thinking it’s because you’re richer, but I don’t think so. There’s a maximum amount of child support I’d get anyway. It’s not like I could live on it. Although you’d probably be more likely to pay it, so there’s that. I wouldn’t expect you to be involved with the baby much, either. It’s not like you wanted it.”
He thought, That’s good, because I’d be a lousy father.
She went on, “It’s not even because you’re better-looking. Mark is good-looking, too. You’re one of those beautiful people, though, the ones other people stare at just because they enjoy looking at you. So is Dyma. And I’m not sure that’s always so helpful.”
He didn’t say that he didn’t know what she was talking about. He said, “It opens some doors. You can probably skate on it some, to be honest.”
“It can make you lazy,” she said. “Entitled. Things come too easily, and they always have, so you don’t know the difference. People smile at you more. They pay more attention to you. They give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s good that you played football. I’m guessing you don’t get handed much in football.”
“Nope. You don’t.” This was a weird conversation to have on the day your whole life story had been upended, but it was distracting, he guessed.
“It can make you less kind, too,” she said, “because you don’t struggle enough, and you don’t understand how much other people do.”
“Probably,” he said. “Not sure I see that in Dyma.”
“I hope not. I tried, and so did my mom. Dyma’s beautiful and brilliant, though, and I don’t think I’m just saying that because I’m her mom.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you are.”
“She has so many gifts. She’s mostly a hard worker in school, but that’s because she’s so passionate about her interests and she wants to learn more, not because she’s got that … drudge factor. Which I have, so I know the difference. Being willing to slog through, whether you want to or not. She does skate some, in English and History, things like that. It comes too easily. And I wonder if she realizes how lucky she is. Why was her date to the prom an NFL player?”
“Fair point,” he said. “And by the way? I think the kindness comes from you. Also the relentless honesty. Probably the brilliance, too.”
“I’m not brilliant.”
“No? I wonder. What would you have done if you hadn’t gotten pregnant? But you don’t want me for my money or my good looks. So why?”
“Because you’re kind. That’s what I kept coming back to. Which is silly. Dyma would probably tell me it’s not an inherited trait. But I don’t think … I’m trying not to have it be …” She stopped.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m not going to take advantage of it,” she said, “or I’m going to try not to. I just think it’s a good quality. An important quality. It makes everyone else’s life a little bit better, and that matters. The older I get, the more I think that kindness is what matters most. It doesn’t pay, and there’s nothing flashy about it. But it matters. You’re kind, and I want that for this baby.” She smiled at him, so sweetly that he got a head rush. Of emotion, which was weird. “I’m sure there’s a quote in the Tao about it, but I don’t care.”
He took her hand across the table. He shouldn’t. It was an extremely bad idea, whether he was the dad or he wasn’t. He needed to keep his distance. Any lawyer would tell him so. His lawyer would tell him so, the minute he clued her in.
He did it anyway. He squeezed her hand and said, “Hey. Who’s flying with me to North Dakota again, helping me face the hardest thing I’ll ever do? Who jumped right in as soon as she heard and started making me a sandwich? You’re right that kindness makes everybody else’s life better, but you don’t have to worry about it. If it’s an inherited trait, or even if it’s not, the baby will have it. No matter who the father is. Because it’ll be coming from you.”
32
Secrets and Lies
An hour later, Harlan was slowing the car on a back road. A few miles out of town, with fields on either side. A cold, clear day, with a pale blue sky and a biting wind that seemed to be coming straight from the Pole and sweeping across the flat prairie with nothing to block it.
A house ahead on the right, and two cars parked on the side of the road. A gray sedan and a silver SUV. Jennifer knew this was it, because she saw Harlan go rigid. More rigid.
The house looked completely normal. Ranch style and painted white, with a brick chimney, a front porch, concrete steps, and a rail fence surrounding a patch of neatly mown lawn. A few shrubs, some trees around it to break the wind, and no flowers. It was out in the country, surrounded by fields fuzzed with the vibrant green of springtime growth, but the nearest neighbors were only a couple hundred yards away. You couldn’t actually call it “lonely,” even if it looked that way. It was a little plain, but it was well kept up, and it didn’t look one bit menacing. It looked, planted on the flat prairie under an endless sky in the late afternoon light, like an ad for “Midwestern.”
Harlan pulled the SUV into the drive, the front door opened, and Annabelle was running down the steps to him in her stockinged feet, her blonde hair whipping around her face in the chilly wind. He caught her in a hug, and then he held on. For about a minute.
There were two other people on the porch now. A middle-aged woman who was probably the social worker, and a relaxed-looking man in a sport coat and cowboy boots, his hair a little long, who would be … what?
“Didn’t anybody else come?” Harlan asked Annabelle.
“Yeah,” she said. “My softball coach. Ms. Neal. She had to pick up her kid, though, and you were almost here anyway. She helped, though. She made sandwiches.”
That was what women did, Jennifer thought, in times of trouble. They made sandwiches. Whatever else happened, people still needed to eat.
Inside the house, then, which was like the yard. Neat, reasonably clean and well furnished, like nobody was short of money here, but a little bare. A little cheerless. No tablecloth on the dining-room table, and although the TV was enormous and looked new, the last kitchen and bath upgrades had clearly been a couple decades ago. Like the faucets still worked, so why would you change them? Jennifer knew that, because, of course, she’d had to pee. That was one thing she remembered from the last time she’d been pregnant. You always had to pee.
Ten minutes of questions and answers, then, Harlan asking for more
detail and the man in the cowboy boots, who introduced himself as Eric Johnson, detective, saying, “I’d like to ask you a few questions first. Get the lay of the land, you might say.” Still looking relaxed, in a respectful kind of way. Jennifer had a feeling he was a whole lot sharper than he let on, though.
The social worker said, “If you’re willing to take responsibility for Annabelle, Mr. Kristiansen, I’ll have you sign, and then I’ll go.”
“My sisters were here when my mom left,” Harlan told Johnson after the social worker had gone. He sat down on the couch, pulling Annabelle down beside him and telling Jennifer, “Sit.” When she looked startled, he gave her the ghost of a grin and said, “Please. Also—get yourself something to eat, if you need it,” before going on to address the detective, who took a seat in an armchair on the opposite side of the couch from Jennifer like this was a social chat. With somebody you absolutely didn’t want to talk to.
“I wasn’t here at the time Mom left,” Harlan said. “Or when we thought she left, I guess. I was off at college, so I don’t have much to tell. Alison is driving down from Minneapolis right now, though, and Vanessa’s flying in tomorrow from Miami.”
“I’ll have a talk with them, too,” Johnson said. “But it’s important to get your impressions now, as they occur to you. Talk it through, see what comes up.”
Before the siblings had a chance to compare notes, Jennifer thought. She told Harlan, “You could have a lawyer here, if you like.”
Harlan said, “I don’t need a lawyer.” Which, she thought, his lawyer would probably disagree with. “Did you show them the postcards?” he asked Annabelle.
“No,” Annabelle said. “I didn’t think of it. I already said as much as I know, but I hardly know anything. I barely remember. I just remember that Mom was gone, and Dad was mad.” She was shaky and pale, but she was holding up. More toughness in her than you’d guess. Just like Harlan.
“What postcards?” Johnson asked.
“Our mom sent postcards, after she left,” Harlan said. “Five of them, about one a month. And then they stopped.”
Annabelle said, “But doesn’t that prove that Dad didn’t do it? Or—wait. She could have come back up here, I guess. Maybe that was why the postcards stopped. Maybe she wanted to come home, but something …” She trailed off, because that “something” would have been one thing. Meeting her husband again.
Not likely, though. More like a guy who’d made up an elaborate story when it had happened, and found a way to reinforce it. Presumably, he’d bothered to copy her handwriting, too, which was a lot of planning. A lot of effort.
He’d buried her car.
A lot of effort.
Johnson said, “Can I see the postcards, do you think?”
Harlan went to a low bookshelf near the big-screen TV that held obvious pride of place in the living room, and pulled out a shoebox. He rifled through it, said, “Huh,” brought it back to the coffee table, and went through it more methodically.
School pictures, mostly. Some sports pictures, too. Not put into an album or in a frame, just tossed into a box. It was a bleak idea, but it hadn’t always been true, because a group of framed photos hung on the wall around the bookcase and TV, maybe a dozen of them altogether in a casual, friendly grouping, in all sizes and with all different frames. A wedding picture, a handsome blond man and a laughing, vibrant brunette, impossibly slim and pretty in her simple gown. A beautiful couple, anybody would say.
Baby pictures, then, and little girls in braids with missing teeth. A framed newspaper article featuring a photo that had to be a young Harlan in a football uniform and pads, leaping impossibly high into the air for a catch, his body bent backward into a graceful C. The oversized headline said, Patriots Win State. Somebody had been proud of that.
Stairstep kids, too, all dressed for Christmas, their hands on each other’s shoulders. In the latest picture, which was bigger and placed in the middle, they were posed outside the house, by the rail fence. Easter, maybe. There was Harlan, impossibly good-looking, his charisma all but leaping out of the frame, with a little girl on his shoulders, her white-blonde hair in neat French braids, smiling out of her whole face while their sisters perched on the top rail on either side and a black-and-white mutt of a dog lay on the grass in front of them, its tongue lolling as if it had stopped chasing a ball a minute before. A sea of multicolored tulips burst out of the ground around them, so there had been flowers here once. And a dog. And happiness.
“They’re not here,” Harlan finally said, and asked Annabelle, “When did you last see them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They weren’t at the top of the box anymore. Maybe … a couple years? I didn’t really … like to look at them anymore.”
“What did the postcards say?” the detective asked.
“They said she missed us,” Annabelle said. “That she’d see us soon. That the weather was nice. The last one said that she was going to get a house with lots of bedrooms, so there’d be room for us.” She looked at Harlan. “What else?”
“They were from different places,” Harlan said. “Like they were moving around. But the last one, the one about the house, was from Phoenix.”
“They were moving around?” the detective asked. “Who’s ‘they?’”
Jennifer thought, Wait. The postcards had been here for years, and now they were gone? When only Annabelle and her father were living in the house? She was betting Johnson hadn’t missed that.
“A guy who worked at the bookstore,” Harlan said. “Austin Grant. He was sort of a hippie. Very laid-back guy. Older, maybe fifties, because he had some gray. And a ponytail. I remember that, because it was unusual at the time. She used to go in and buy books after work and talk to him, I think. She worked as a school nurse, but I guess you know that. He was the one she left with, Dad said.” He stopped. “I guess he wasn’t. I guess he just left at the same time … she did. I hired a private detective a while back to look for her. He managed to find him, but Grant said he hadn’t left with her at all. His story was that he’d just moved on. He thought he’d told her he was going, he said, but he couldn’t remember. He was surprised she was gone. Said he had no idea. The detective thought he might be lying, and I was sure he was, but I didn’t know what to do about it. The detective couldn’t find her at all, not in Phoenix or anywhere else. I guess we know why now.” He told Annabelle, “Sorry, Bug. I was going to wait to tell you until I saw you. Didn’t want to say it on the phone.”
She said, “That’s OK.” She was looking down, and Jennifer could feel Harlan thinking, I need to do something about this. About her. And his frustration that he couldn’t think what, and he couldn’t do it now anyway.
He looked at the Johnson again and asked, “Have you talked to her parents? Our grandparents, in Florida?”
“We have,” the detective said. “When we found her. They provided the DNA samples that we used to identify your mother’s remains.”
Remains. The word sat there like a boulder. Impossible to ignore. Impossible not to think about exactly what they’d found when they’d opened that car door, twelve years later. Jennifer could see Harlan thinking it, and she could see him hoping that Annabelle wasn’t.
After a minute, Johnson asked, “Did you know that your grandparents contacted the police here after your mom disappeared?”
Harlan got still. And then he took Annabelle’s hand, gripped it, and said, “No. But I wasn’t here.” The words came out tight. He was thinking, Jennifer was pretty sure, Why didn’t I do that? Why didn’t I ask? He went on, though, “Did you know, Bug? Did they come here?”
She said, “I don’t remember. I was too little. I remember them coming sometime, maybe when I was in first grade? Second grade? But Grandpa had a fight with Dad, and they left. Sorry,” she told the detective. “That’s all I know.”
“My other sisters will know more,” Harlan said. “Mom wasn’t real close with her parents, though, I don’t think. We didn’t see them m
uch. Looking back, I’m pretty sure they didn’t like Dad.”
“I’ll be asking your sisters these questions, too,” the detective said. “But please don’t discuss this with them ahead of time. I’d like to get their unfiltered recollections.”
“If her parents reported it,” Harlan said, “what happened? Was there an investigation?”
Johnson said, “We did question your dad about it at the time. Informally, because there was no evidence of a crime, but your mother was gone, and her parents were positive she wouldn’t have left her kids. Of course, parents don’t always like to believe the worst of their kids, but … we asked. Your dad showed the detective a postcard from your mom, postmarked Austin, Texas. He told him what clothes she’d taken, and that her suitcase and car were gone. There were none of her clothes in the closet, though. None of her stuff in the bedroom drawers, or in her bathroom. Kinda strange, the detective thought, to toss all her things after only a couple months. Angry, was the impression. More than angry. But that would be natural, if his wife had left him and the kids. Also, he mentioned the guy from the bookstore.”
“Did anybody check into that?” Harlan asked.
“Yes. They located him. He was working in Montana by then, and he claimed he hadn’t been more than friendly with your mom. A casual friendship, he called it, and he’d had no idea she was leaving her family. Very nervous, but he had a record.”
“For what?”
“Dodged the draft. Vietnam, end of the war. Moved to Canada for twenty years, and then came back.”
Shame the Devil (Portland Devils Book 3) Page 25
