A Family of Strangers

by Emilie Richards

  “Most girls would settle for turning heads.”

  “She went through an awkward stage, which your sister somehow bypassed.”

  “I’ve looked at the photos in Wendy’s scrapbook. Greta was outgrowing the awkward phase when the photos stopped.”

  “She was such a nice girl. Polite, funny. I loved her sense of humor. Once she brought me a bouquet of daisies, and when I looked closer, I realized she’d hidden a chocolate bar in the middle. She knew I loved chocolate and I didn’t want anybody to know what an obsession it was. That was priceless, don’t you think? How many girls that age pay attention to something like that?”

  “She sounds really special.” I sipped and waited.

  “Her parents moved away after she died. I tried to stay in touch, but we were a reminder.”

  “Did this happen at our house?”

  “Oh, no, thank God. Both houses had pools. In the summer the girls were either in the water at our place or Greta’s. And sometimes they went to the beach with their other friends. Wendy was the stronger swimmer, though. By the time she was eight, she was competing on the swim team. The Harolds moved here from somewhere in New England. I don’t remember where, but not the coast. So Greta didn’t start lessons as young as Wendy.”

  She was meandering. I had a feeling she didn’t want to get to the bad part. “I know how careful you are. You were always around when I was in the pool. Even when I was a teenager.”

  “It just makes sense. But nobody was watching the night Greta drowned. Nobody but Wendy, and she couldn’t save her.”

  “What happened?”

  “They sang in the chorus. It was one of the activities where Greta surpassed Wendy. She had a gorgeous high soprano and thought she might like to sing professionally someday. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The chorus had their end of the year bonfire. Somebody’s family had a house on the bay, and they got permission to build the fire on the beach, roast marshmallows and hot dogs—something nobody is allowed to do today. Both girls were there, and after they ate, they went for a stroll. The sun had set and nobody saw them leave. The chaperones said they would have stopped them if they’d known, but Wendy and Greta sneaked off.”

  When she didn’t start up again, I prompted a little. “So it was dark...”

  “Greta decided she wanted to swim. She thought it would be fun. Wendy tried to talk her out of it. She warned her not to go in, because she knew Greta wasn’t a strong enough swimmer to take that kind of chance.”

  “But she went anyway?”

  “Greta started swimming away from shore, mad because Wendy wouldn’t go in with her. Wendy yelled at her, but she wouldn’t come back. So Wendy decided to run back and get a chaperone. Before she could get even halfway, she heard Greta screaming, and Wendy knew she was in trouble. She ran back and jumped into the water to find her, but she couldn’t. She said it was like Greta had never been there. And by the time the authorities got to the beach to help search, Greta was gone for good.”

  The story was awful enough. I could only imagine how much worse reality had been. “Did they find her body?”

  “Farther up the beach, but not for another hour.”

  I felt so sorry for everyone involved, Greta most of all, of course. Wendy, who hadn’t been able to stop or save her best friend. The parents of both girls. The chaperones. Every other student at the bonfire.

  “The other night you said that Wendy was distraught afterward. I can see why.”

  “She was in a daze for months. She didn’t want to finish the final week of school. She didn’t want to go to parties or activities. So we rented a house for the summer in the North Carolina mountains. I found a counselor to work with her, for all the good it did.”

  “I’m sure staying in town would have been worse.”

  “Some people blamed her. Some of their friends said Greta’s death was Wendy’s fault, that she should never have sneaked off with her. But others said it was Greta who wanted to sneak away. Pretty soon everyone who knew the two girls had taken sides. It was terrible for your sister.”

  “And the next year?”

  “She started high school, and some kids in her classes were from other middle schools. She found her feet socially again, but she never had another close friend, at least not one like Greta. She’d have a couple of girls over to spend the night once in a while, but the next time the girls would be different.”

  “Equal opportunity friendship.”

  My mother sat back. “She was never the same. I’d catch her staring into space at the oddest times. I had to nag her to finish schoolwork, but eventually that improved, even though she never concentrated as well. I think that’s where the messy habits began. She just forgot to clean up after herself, like her mind was elsewhere.”

  One thing stood out for me. “I’m amazed nobody ever told me this.”

  “It’s a hard story to repeat, Ryan. Wendy just wanted to move on, so that’s what we did. The Harolds moved away almost immediately. Wendy and Greta’s old friends found new interests and new friends in high school. At first there was talk of a service project to honor Greta, but nothing much came of it. I think some club raised money for swimming lessons for kids who couldn’t afford them. But that only lasted a year or two. Your father established a college fund for Greta’s younger brother, but I don’t think her parents ever touched a cent.”

  “They blamed Wendy?”

  “I think it was more that they wanted to move on. To this day, though, I think Wendy blames herself. If they had stayed with their other friends and hadn’t taken that walk down the beach. If she had convinced Greta not to go in the water. Or if she’d gone into the water, too, maybe Greta would have been okay, or she could have saved her.”

  All this had happened before I was born. Did any of it reflect on Wendy’s situation now? Had she learned to care less about other people because she’d seen how painful caring could be?

  How much emotional damage lurked behind Wendy’s lovely smile? Was she using tranquilizers and sleeping pills to keep it at bay? Or worse, was she using tranquilizers and sleeping pills for respite from her children, who demanded so much of her? I couldn’t believe any of it.

  “Please don’t ever tell her you know,” my mother said. “It’s not something we talk about. In fact, let’s talk about something else now.”

  Not talking about things that mattered was another part of my family heritage. This time, though, I had to introduce another unpleasant subject. “I ran into Ella yesterday at the grocery store.”

  “Oh.”

  When nothing else was forthcoming, I capsulized the encounter. “I wish I’d known that she’s no longer working for Gracey Group. I made a fool of myself. What on earth happened?”

  “I’d planned to tell you the next time you came home.”

  Of course she’d never expected a homecoming under these circumstances. “So why was she fired?”

  “She wasn’t. Fired, I mean. Your father arranged for her to take an early retirement. She left with her pension, and all her health benefits until she turns sixty-five.”

  “Well, somebody thinks she’s got plenty of work left in her. She’s a part-time receptionist for a dentist.”

  “Yes, Dr. Borgman. He’s an orthodontist. Part-time is probably a good idea. Ella was forgetting things, making mistakes and then insisting other people were at fault. Your father felt the job had become too complex and stressful for her. I promise you, everyone tried to help her, your sister most of all. She even volunteered to take some of Ella’s work if Dad just let her stay. But in the end he hired a young man to replace her, and Carl does his job without complaint and takes orders, something Ella wasn’t doing well.”

  “She wasn’t taking orders from Dad?”

  “No, the problem was taking orders from your sister. Ella had known Wendy since she was a little girl, and
then suddenly, Wendy became the person Dad worked closest with, instead of her. Plus Wendy became her immediate supervisor. The reorganization made sense, steps to help Wendy take over Gracey Group one day. But Ella retaliated. She put off important projects Wendy assigned, then claimed Wendy’s requests had come in too late. Finally she missed a big deadline for a project with your father, too. He had no choice but to let her go.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry. She was like family.”

  “But she wasn’t family.”

  No, “family” was somewhere hiding from law enforcement. I moved on to a safer subject. “So tell me where you think we should put the Christmas tree.”

  We spent the next fifteen minutes deciding Christmas details. Neither of us wondered out loud whether Wendy would be home by then or not. We were planning a holiday without her, just in case.

  When we finished, Mom insisted she had to leave, and I walked her to the door. “I’ve been wondering,” she said, “do you need to get back to Delray at some point for your job?”

  For the first time in days, I’d put aside both Milton Kerns and Wendy Wainwright and spent my morning working on Out in the Cold, slogging through a list that would have been easier to complete in Delray Beach.

  “If I can find a way, I do need to go back for a day or two to put my head together with some of our crew. We have details to consult on.”

  “What kind of details?”

  “Sophie—you remember Sophie?” I went on after she nodded. “She found a cold case a bit north of Seabank. She sent me the background, and now we’re both intrigued. A little boy went missing about ten years ago, and the authorities believed they might have found him. Only before they could do a DNA test, he disappeared again. If we do this one, we’ll be following the story in real time, as the search progresses. We’ll do the background, talk to all the suspects, his family, his teachers. We’ve found some interesting side developments we can explore. It’s the kind of case we’ve been looking for.”

  “I still remember how surprised I was when you became obsessed with crime in college, and later with reporting it.”

  “I’m more obsessed with justice.”

  She smiled, as if she were proud of me for noting the difference. “When I think about it, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Do you remember that right after your dad and I married I worked on a newspaper?”

  “I don’t think I would have forgotten something like that.”

  “You probably thought it was too dull to remember, and the job was short-lived. I covered weddings and school board meetings. If I was really lucky, I got to attend city council sessions, but only if there was nothing worth noting on the agenda. I thought I was putting in my time so I could move up to something more interesting, like crime or politics.”

  “You could have covered both in one fell swoop.”

  She smiled a little. “I got pregnant with your sister before I could uncover one good story. Suddenly I had a whole new career path.” The smile disappeared. “Maybe I should have kept the job. Maybe then I wouldn’t have measured my success by how perfect my daughter was.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for anything Wendy does.”

  “I don’t even know what she’s doing.”

  I realized then that she’d said daughter, not daughters. I also realized it hadn’t been a mistake. “By the time I came along you were less interested in perfection? Or after my difficult entrance into the world, did I just seem hopeless?”

  “No, by the time you were born I was more interested in you and less in myself.”

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “I didn’t need a project when you were born, Ryan. I just needed a daughter.”

  We were poised on a precipice, but neither of us were ready to jump or retreat. I cleared my throat and moved back to her career. “So I come by my journalistic talents honestly.”

  “You come by your interest honestly. I never got far enough to know if I had talent, but more important? I understand how much you’re sacrificing for Wendy. I have an idea of the pressure you’re under.”

  I was touched. “I’m dealing okay.”

  “Would it help if Dad and I take the girls this weekend so you can go back to Delray? He’s a little depressed. Holly and Noelle would cheer him up. We’ll watch The Polar Express, and I’ll have somebody set up our tree so the girls can decorate it. Then they can bring the leftover ornaments here to decorate yours when you come back. It’ll be good for all of us.”

  My nieces were getting used to me, and we were establishing routines. But Mom’s offer opened another door, one I could explore on Friday night. If I dropped Holly and Noelle at my parents’ house after school, I could do a little detective work in the evening before I drove to Delray. Then I could head back to Seabank on Sunday afternoon and still be the one getting them ready for school on Monday morning.

  When I didn’t answer immediately, my mother resorted to her voice of steel. “I think it’s a good idea.”

  “It is. Thank you. That will be great. But just so you know? Your talents of persuasion have been passed on to your granddaughters.” I slung my arm over her shoulders and guided her out the door. “Before you leave, let’s swing by the garage so I can show you what the girls made me buy. Did you know that Santa’s a sucker for a tropical vacation?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  On Thursday morning I promised myself I would work on Out in the Cold after my jog with Teo. I had to make sure all my appointments were in place for the weekend, and that I had all the necessary information to meet with the most vital crew members. This plan left me enough time to do a few side trips before I met him at Confidence K-9s.

  Today my nieces were ready right on time. This close to Christmas, school was more fun with plays, recitals, and arts and crafts projects. Sadly, our Christmas preparations had hit a snag. When I backed out of the garage with Bismarck beside me, Santa and respective tropical scenery were a puddle of vinyl on our front lawn. To circumvent tantrums, I promised both girls I would pump them up as soon as I got home.

  I had carefully mapped my route to Confidence K-9s, and after I dropped them off, with the dog as my copilot, I navigated to a section of town in the western suburbs. Most houses here were window-dotted rectangles with tile roofs and carports. Some yards were patches of sand and weeds, while others were well-tended St. Augustine or Centipede grass, sporting poinsettias interspersed with garden gnomes and Christmas elves. The neighborhood was solidly working class, and not that different from my own in Delray Beach.

  At a stop sign, I checked the street names again as a woman inched through the intersection using a walker that sported tennis balls on the rear legs. If I was lucky, a man named Craig Leone lived two blocks away. I’d traced him here using the phone number that had shown up on Wendy’s deleted voice mail.

  I’m always surprised what I can find out about someone after a few minutes on the internet. Forty-five-year-old Craig was either divorced or separated, because he and a woman with the same last name lived at separate addresses now, while last year they had lived together. He was also a father, and definitely a man who’d strayed from the straight and narrow at least one time too many. Without half trying I’d been treated to the specifics of a brief stint in our county jail.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d find today, but I knew what I was looking for. I was hoping to find the maniac who had jumped me at Wendy’s town house. I had no intentions of confronting him. If Craig was my culprit, I would turn over his address to the police or get advice about what to do from Teo. If I found a complete stranger, then I’d figure out how I could talk to him about my sister. Of course, I wouldn’t talk here at his house. I would do it in public, at Against the Wind. I thought the chances were probably excellent that I’d find him sitting at the bar tomorrow night. In his message Craig had sounded like a regular.

  Once the woman with
the walker was safely across, I made my way to the right block, where the house I sought was second from the corner. I pulled over to the shoulder one house away.

  Craig Leone’s yard was shabbier than his neighbors’. My high school botany teacher had relished field study, and I could still identify crabgrass and nutsedge—with a few sandspurs thrown in—sprouting in tufts.

  The concrete-block house needed a fresh coat of shell-pink paint. Plastic flamingoes and a birdbath had been optimistically placed under a front window, so at some point, somebody at this address had cared. But as I watched the man working on a motorcycle at the top of the gravel driveway, I doubted the happy homemaker had been Craig himself. The muscular tattooed guy with the shaved head and beer belly, the very same guy who appeared to be tearing the motorcycle to bits with his bare hands, wasn’t a flamingo kind of guy, although he might chew the head off a live one on a dare.

  Motorcycle man might not be the only resident at this address, but I had seen Craig’s mug shot online. This was Craig Leone, and now, in person, I could see he wasn’t my feisty intruder. He was larger and broader in every way.

  My next job was to discover how he knew my sister.

  With stop one completed, I moved on to stop two. The quickest way to get to Against the Wind would have taken me right through the intersection where John Quayle made his last stand. I went the long way, parking on the street in front of the bar, a building that had obviously entered the world as a mechanic’s garage. To the left was a pawnshop, complete with metal bars crisscrossing every shiny surface. To the right, a used-car lot looked like a final resting place for junkers. Against the Wind was perfectly situated to draw customers from the neighborhood.

  The bar was fronted by a parking lot with spaces just wide enough for motorcycles. Where signs advertising motor oil and radial tires had once hung, new signs for Milwaukee’s finest framed glass-paneled doors that had probably opened to separate bays. Since there were no Hells Angels or the local equivalent milling in front, I got out and crossed the parking lot to peek inside. The bays had been converted into one long room, with a bar against one side and half a dozen tables on the other. The space in the middle housed two pool tables. Most interesting of all, the bar rested on three motorcycles, evenly distributed to hold the weight, or at least to look as if they did.