Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  “I thought I could contact my dad’s old secretary. His lover. As far as I know, his longest lasting one. He and Janice began their affair right after we’d moved to Dallas.”

  Hardesty hummed into the phone. “Yeah. Let me check into her background. What’s her name?”

  Danielle gave it.

  “I want to make sure she doesn’t have a criminal history. I’ll get back to you by end of day so we can coordinate.”

  “All right.”

  “Want me to talk to her?” the chief asked. “Save you the hassle.”

  Danielle considered the offer. Her father spent hours of time with the woman—hundreds more than he spent with Danielle. Now, after her conversation with her father, that rubbed her wrong.

  Like she’d misunderstood Hank Foster’s motivations. If anyone would know how Hank felt about the past, Janice would.

  “No,” Danielle said slowly. “I’d like to talk to her. I mean, if that’s okay.”

  “For now. Long as she checks out clean,” Hardesty said. He grunted. “I want to give this case my full focus but I’m splitting time and it’s not easy. I’d hand it over to one of my detectives, but I just feel like I need to finish it.”

  “I appreciate that, Chief. I really do.” Though, Danielle wondered if a detective wouldn’t be better, too. Able to focus all his or her attention. Not that she was even sure that’s how a detective’s job worked. Maybe they had multiple cases going at once.

  “If I give you the go-ahead on this, I want you to promise you’ll tell me the time and place you’re meeting.”

  “You got it.”

  “I’ll have an officer there. One of mine or maybe one from the Dallas PD if they can manage the personnel.”

  “Thank you. That makes me feel better.”

  “You know what would make me feel better?” Hardesty said. “You listening from now on.”

  Danielle promised she would.

  Chief Hardesty called her while she was making dinner. Since arriving home, she’d almost convinced herself the encounter with her father wasn’t as sinister as it had seemed then.

  Almost.

  Hardesty gave her the go-ahead to meet with Janice. He even provided Danielle with her current phone number, a courtesy Danielle appreciated. After thanking the police chief, she dialed the number.

  “Hello?” the voice said. It was soft, friendly. Danielle’s ventral region seemed to hiccup then dance in self-recrimination.

  “May I speak to Janice?” Danielle forced the words through her closing throat. This proved much harder than talking to Trevor.

  The silence crackled, made Danielle’s perturbation palpable, a cold, sweaty gray-brown haze emanating from her mouth.

  Then, “This is she. May I ask who’s calling?”

  Danielle swallowed, the small amount of saliva choked her, causing her to hack before she could answer. Voice numbed with mortification, she said, “My name is Danielle Patterson. My father is Hank Foster.”

  There was a long pause. Danielle waited for the click, anticipating Janice would hang up.

  “I heard from someone at the foundation that your mother passed away recently. Cancer, wasn’t it? Condolences. I hated to hear that.”

  The sincerity in Janice’s words dripped from her voice, pulsing through the phone speaker and taking Danielle by surprise. What to say to the woman who cheated with her father?

  “Thank you.” The inanity almost made Danielle laugh. “I hoped you’d be willing to meet. For coffee or something. I’d like to talk to you.”

  Another hesitation. Janice must’ve been ruminating over Danielle’s request, rolling there in the unlit space of telephone wires.

  “When and where?”

  The fresh, delicious scent of freshly brewed coffee struck Danielle as she opened the door. The place was mostly empty, which satisfied Danielle’s semi-noire envisioning of their meeting: the once-young mistress seated, grilled by the self-righteous daughter.

  But the music playing was quiet, introspective, and blew the mood. Some band Danielle never heard before.

  Janice sat at a small table near the front, looking very like the image Danielle carried for the last fifteen years. A bit of gray crept through her wavy cloud of brown hair and her face was beginning to crease around her mouth, but her eyes were direct and friendly. Surprising.

  Danielle settled into the chair across from Janice and rubbed her hands down her thighs.

  “Thank you for meeting with me, Mrs. Granger.”

  Janice smiled. Her teeth flashed briefly, lighting up that freckled-visage and made her heart-stoppingly engaging. Danielle could see why her father had loved this woman; it would be difficult not to.

  “Call me Janice, please. Married a decade, but I’m still not used to the ‘missus’ part. You turned into a lovely young woman. I knew you would be. Your eyes are amazing. I told your father so. He worried as I’m sure most fathers do.”

  Danielle laughed. “There were a few years when I wasn’t sure I’d turn out at all.”

  “Hmmm.” Janice sipped her coffee, looking at Danielle over the rim of her cup.

  “I think I’ll order a drink,” Danielle said, standing. Danielle forced herself to take a deep breath as she walked up to the counter.

  Coffee in hand, Danielle returned to the table. She meticulously stirred in some cream. Tapped the spoon three times against the rim, and set it down on the chunky white saucer. Out of options to avoid looking at the other woman, she finally met Janice’s eye.

  “Didn’t know you were in the area.”

  Janice tilted her head to the right, just a little bit so that brown hair spilled across her long, white neck. “Well, as you probably know, after Hank’s heart attack, while the work remained vital, the place just wasn’t the same. He soon found a new love, so I left.”

  Danielle forced her hands to relax their grip on the handle of her mug. “No, I guess it wouldn’t have been pleasant to see the two of them together.”

  Janice stayed solemn, folding her hands neatly on the laminated tabletop. “Forgive me. I’m surprised you wanted to see me is all.”

  “I’ve thought about you over the years. Off and on,” Danielle said, meeting Janice’s eyes this time.

  “And that was difficult. That’s what you’re not saying, right? I was the reminder for you that your parents didn’t stay together.”

  “Look, this is getting away from me.” Danielle took a deep breath, released it heavily. “Did my father ever mention Jonathan?”

  “Ah.” Janice shifted in her chair, more alert. “Yes, he did.”

  “I’m glad to know he had someone to confide in.” And Danielle was—because that meant she could now find out what was said.

  “He never told me much—we didn’t discuss your mother,” Janice said with a deprecatory smile. “I didn’t want to hear about her. Call it jealousy if you will, but, now that I’ve looked back, I think I lacked the maturity to handle with my lover’s complicated past. And he did have quite a bit of baggage on those shoulders. Hank was so busy trying to save everyone else’s child, he forgot to take care of himself. Ninety-hour weeks and skipped meals were pretty standard for us then.”

  Janice sighed, her eyes alight with the memories.

  “He burned with this fire, an authenticity to him that isn’t easy to find. It took me a long while to do so.” Janice’s laugh was rueful, as rich and vibrant as she was. “I was also old enough to understand it would be better to have that drive tempered. Such ambition is what drew me to your father, but it ruined us eventually, as it did your parents.”

  “My father didn’t ever say anything about that—about what tore my parents apart? About what happened between them after Jonathan’s murder?”

  Janice drained her cup. “He so wanted to turn back time, as I’m sure everyone who loses a child does. When Hank spoke of Jonathan, it was halting, something he rarely did, if at all. There was more to it than he told me. Something about the way . . .” She pa
used, her lips pursed. “‘For the greater good.’ Hank said that often when he was neck-deep in work for the foundation, saving other kids. He regretted not being a better father.”

  Heat surged through Danielle; she recognized it as anger at the depth of his betrayal. “He wasn’t one,” Danielle murmured. “Not to me. But that doesn’t matter now.” She hated the way her voice sounded. “I have two sons of my own,” Danielle said. “My youngest is just about Jonathan’s age now.”

  “I want you to know that your father did help people. Statistically, the crime rates for abuse and murder fell six and three percentage points after AMEAC opened that shelter, and another two full pooints the following year. From there, we stabilized. Some years were better than others, but all in all, the rates never got back to what they were in 1983. That mattered a lot to Hank, as it did to me and the children he did help.

  “I get calls occasionally. From some of the kids we took in. You must remember; this was before that Safe Place initiative. Our shelter was about the only place kids could go back then. I’ve received calls from four or five of the kids over the years, most from that first year or two, thanking me for getting them out of their destructive home lives. They’ve built better lives for themselves and their families now. One’s a state Congressman, and he helped draft the Safe Place bill.”

  Danielle nodded, thinking back.

  Janice pursed her lips, her attractive brown eyes losing their sparkle. “He tried, Danielle. He worked hard as a demon all those years—I’ve never seen someone work so hard—to make things better.”

  Janice’s eyes were an echo of her belief in him, still, even after he’d dumped her for a younger, bouncier version.

  Danielle’s hand tightened around her coffee mug. “I don’t think I need to go into detail over my family’s tragic missteps. You saw more than enough of them.”

  Janice’s eyes darkened, became less friendly.

  “I don’t mean to be rude.” Danielle sighed. “It’s just not going to change what happened. Yes, my father’s choices shaped a lot of who I am, and I am dealing with that. I’m trying to deal with that. That’s why I wanted to see if my father spoke to you about Jonathan. I want to know, but more, I want to leave it in the past, where it belongs. Then maybe he and I can reconcile.”

  Janice stared at Danielle for a long time, clearly looking for something. Then she leaned down and pulled out a beat-up yellow envelope. Danielle’s name stood out in thick block letters across the middle.

  “I found these in your father’s briefcase the night he had the heart attack. I told him he must have left his briefcase at the foundation. He’d just gotten to my place when his arm went numb. I put his briefcase in the same place he always left it the next time I was in his office. I smuggled it in, under my coat. He asked me about it on two occasions. I lied, of course. He’d left me for Christy by then so I didn’t feel too bad about it.”

  Janice smiled a bit, not the bright grin she commonly flashed.

  “He began to treat me differently, and I think he knew I kept these, though he never found them. And he did look.”

  28

  Danielle

  Anger didn’t encompass what Danielle felt. Janice had held this information for years, had never bothered calling Danielle, handing it over to the police as evidence. Danielle never knew it existed for sure. She snatched the envelope from Janice, clutching tightly.

  Janice stood. “‘For the greater good.’ That’s all I know about your brother’s death. I made my decisions; now you’ll make yours.” Janice touched Danielle’s clenched hand briefly. “I guess they denied you a normal life even as they tried to protect you from what they’d done, become. Don’t destroy yourself and your family by not accepting the gift you have.”

  Janice’s eyes were serious and sad, then she turned and strode from the building, her brown suede boots clicking in a rhythmic tenor that seemed to nip at Danielle as they touched the wooden floor.

  Long after Janice left, Danielle stirred herself enough to order another coffee. Glancing at her watch, Danielle confirmed the time. Half an hour until she needed to pick the boys up from school. With hands that trembled, she turned over the envelope and slit the back in small, careful flicks of her finger. A single sheaf of paper was inside.

  She fumbled to unfold the paper, her fingers stiff.

  Voluntary stay in Houston VA for hallucinations. Log says he checked out the morning of March 28, but no one saw him from 10:00 p.m. the night before.

  Her mother’s handwriting—the page maybe ripped from one of Nancy’s journals? Danielle stared at the words. Her father was never in the military, never went to Vietnam. He couldn’t have been at the VA. From what Arlen Hardesty had told Danielle and what she’d seen from some of the pages he’d shared with her, Nancy always wrote the name of the person. And each of the pages were dated. This one read1997. The year Danielle turned sixteen.

  Danielle remembered her father coming to the house for her birthday. He’d called and asked her to go to dinner with him the night after her sixteenth birthday. Just the two of them. Something they rarely did together, especially since he’d moved out. Three miles down Central Expressway to an efficiency condo near what would years later become the booming Lower Greenville section of the city. Then, it was a small oasis of decency in what would become a funky and eclectic part of town. Her mother had kept trying to talk Danielle out of going.

  1997

  “Why don’t we do something instead?” Nancy asked, a worry line marring her smooth brow.

  “It’s just dinner, Mom.”

  “I know. But . . .”

  “And it’s not even my birthday. I told him I couldn’t go on Friday because I already have plans.” Danielle looked at her mother’s puckered face. “We are going to that funky French movie, aren’t we? I’m totally psyched about eating pizza while I try to read subtitles.”

  Nancy smiled, but it wobbled. “Yes, we’re going. It won the Cannes Film Festival. I’m glad you’re interested in some culture. We haven’t traveled as I’d hoped.”

  “So, anyway it’s just for dinner. I think Dad’s taking me to Landry’s or something.”

  “You’re going out to dinner?” Nancy said.

  “Yeah, you know Dad can’t cook.”

  “And then you’ll come back here? Straight back, right? I’ll expect you by eleven.”

  Danielle rolled her eyes. “C’mon, Mom, I’m going out with Dad. It’s not like it’s a date or anything.”

  Her father knocked, as he always did, and Danielle found that odd. Then she remembered her mother had all the locks changed after he’d moved out. He stepped into the hall and the energy in the space dimmed, then hummed differently.

  “Mind if I use the bathroom?” he asked. “And I’d like to pick up my Bible. The family one. Should be upstairs in that spare bedroom. I’d like to have it for my study group on Wednesdays.”

  Mom followed him to the foot of the stairs, watched him enter that room. “Hey, Mom. Do these heels look alright?” Danielle asked. She stood near the coat closet, examining her feet.

  Nancy glanced back at her from her spot at the foot of the stairs. “What?”

  “These heels, do they work with this skirt?”

  “They look beautiful, Danielle.”

  “You didn’t even look at them,” Danielle complained.

  She turned to face Danielle fully. She glanced at her shoes and then at Danielle’s skirt.

  “Yes, they’re perfect. You look lovely.”

  “I think I should change them,” Danielle said as she wiggled her toes a bit.

  “They match nicely. I’m going to see what’s taking your father so long.”

  Her mother turned back to the stairs when Dad started down the steps, taking them so quickly he nearly ran into Mom. “Got it,” he said, raising the thick leather-bound book in his hand.

  “What’s the magic hour before you call the police?” he asked.

  “Eleven.” Mom w
alked Danielle to the door and hugged her. She whispered in her ear, “I mean it.” She leaned against the doorframe and watched them walk to Dad’s car—a late model SUV. He’d bought it just a few months ago saying he didn’t need a pickup anymore, though Danielle couldn’t remember ever seeing him use the bed of his Chevy.

  Danielle waved back at her mother, who was standing there, stiff form silhouetted, when her father pulled out of the drive.

  The conversation was relatively ordinary; he talked about his work to save kids while he ate his steak. Danielle wondered if she was supposed to be impressed with the restaurant or his work.

  Her father dropped Danielle off at 11:20 and all the downstairs lights were blazing. He hugged her and kissed her forehead before she opened the door.

  “I won’t see you for a while. Gonna be real busy.”

  “Oh.” Danielle’s shoulders fell. She’d had fun.

  Dad stood there for another moment before turning on his heel and sauntering back to his car.

  “You’re late.”

  Danielle rolled her eyes. “I was with Dad. C’mon.” She sat on the stairs to take off her shoes. Her toes had started to cramp.

  “There are things . . . you don’t understand.”

  Danielle smirked up at her mother. “Then explain them to me.”

  Nancy looked away and crossed her arms over her chest. “Not now. When I’m sure.”

  ***

  Her father must have ripped this page from her mother’s journal. Probably that very night—one of the few times he was in the house after their separation.

  The other paper was tissue-thin and ripped from a Bible, presumably the one he’d insisted on getting that night. The page was titled “Isaiah.” Hank had written across the top:

  God has forgiven me my sins. Because of Jesus Christ, I am washed clean.

  Beneath, he had underlined:

  “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”