by Mira Gibson
He killed the engine, claimed the keys, and climbed out, as the cool, damp air filled his lungs. Lying over the lake was a thick cloak of fog, which seeped out across the grass and turned to mist all around him.
The porch was precarious at best. New boards sat flush around ancient ones he feared to tread. Dale’s attempt at handy work, he figured. Rather than rebuild the whole porch he’d take it one board at a time. There had to be a name for that, but it was lost on him, too early in the morning for idioms and adages to spring easily to mind.
As he watched his step, favoring the new boards over the rotted ones, Cody felt a strange conflict brewing inside him. He’d been downright elated when Hannah had called, her voice feathery but weighted in conviction to say she’d be sticking around. She hadn’t said how long. He got the impression she knew, but was keeping it to herself for the time being. The news had lifted him out of a serious funk, which was the dark side of his conflict.
She’d rejected him, a juvenile way of putting it perhaps, but that’s how he felt. He wouldn't describe his feeling for her as yearning. Yearning, pining, longing, those words were too small. What he'd been feeling since he set eyes on her at Gemma’s, and the torch he’d carried for all their years estranged, had erupted in that motel room. Maybe it was hope. He felt compelled to do something, anything that might bridge the gap that separated their lonely hearts - that’s how she struck him, lost and lonely. But she’d denied him, herself, throwing a wall up, shutting him out.
When she'd called this morning he told himself nothing had changed. The whole drive over he’d been challenged not to pray her decision to stay had much to do with him. But maybe, just maybe a little part of it had.
He gave the door a knock and hoped like hell Dale wasn’t around. Last he’d seen of the man Dale’s fist was making contact with his left eye, filling him with shame and a deep sense of satisfaction. He’d deserved it.
Through the door came Hannah’s voice, shouting, “Just getting bundled up!” Murmuring kindly, “Shoot your arm through. Your lace isn’t tied. I got it, zip up.” Then the door pulled inward, Hannah holding a frail, little blond girl by the shoulders.
The sight of him seemed to make the girl hesitate, shift back on her feet into Hannah, so he stepped away and tried not to stare at her or search for similarities between the sisters.
“Come on, sweetheart,” Hannah told her, guiding Candice across the porch then taking her bony little hand to walk down the steps.
He was quick to open the passenger’s side door, but felt awkward and useless when she urged Candice to hop on in, scoot over to the middle seat.
“She’s had some odd behavior,” Hannah told him, tone soft so the child wouldn’t overhear. “Nothing violent, but…” Hannah clipped a sharp inhale, struggling to wrap her mind around it, then couldn’t finish the thought.
Cody noticed her eyes looked darker than usual, as he eased the door shut after he was sure Hannah had tucked herself neatly into the passenger’s seat. As he rounded the hood, he finally knew why her eyes looked darker, delayed reaction as it were. Black eyeliner, and her shirt was bright, too. Same old coat, though, but she hadn’t zipped it. Almost seemed like a rejection of sorts. She wasn’t willing to let it embrace her. At least he wasn’t the only one.
When he opened his door, Candice was staring at him with unblinking eyes, her face squared on him at such an angle it reminded him of the Exorcist. Odd behavior to say the least, he thought as he turned the key and checked the side mirrors. He wondered if she’d do that the whole drive. Christ, he hoped not.
It wasn’t until he got to the main road where the asphalt was smooth that he noticed the silence around him was stifling.
“I’m Cody,” he told her, feeling the burn of her razor sharp blue eyes boring through the side of his head. “I’m Hannah’s high school sweetheart.”
“Friend,” she corrected, head turned to her side window.
Riding the swell of his embarrassment, he added, “We’ve got a fun day planned. You’re going to meet my friend, Judy. She’s heard all about you and she’s impressed. You’re going to love her. Then if Hannah’s game I was thinking we could get some ice cream and steal away for a round of putt-putt.”
Cody wasn’t sure what to make of the tone he’d taken with Candice. He sounded like a God damned idiot talking in a higher pitch than was natural and being extra loud as though the kid were deaf. He cleared his throat and addressed Hannah to recalibrate since she hadn’t said a word.
“I put a call in to my buddy who manages Pirate’s Cove. You remember Hamilton? Said he’d let us in.”
He would’ve liked a met gaze, but when she told the window it was real nice of him to do, he took it as one small victory in the war to win back her heart.
The urge to tell her she looked nice was glaring, but he held his tongue, didn’t want to come off too strong. And soon enough they were pulling into a strip mall just past the Sanbornton-Tilton line.
It looked dismal - a dentistry practice of questionable repute, a grunt lawyer no one needed unless they’d been arrested for the worse varieties of petty crimes, and a holistic healing establishment known to dole out a hand-job or two if it was facing the cusp of the month with too little cash to make rent, all peppered between vacant spaces, their For Sale signs faded and peeling in the windows. And Judy St. Clair’s office was dead center amidst the depression, though Cody didn’t see the strip mall as depressed. He was desensitized he’d been here so many times.
Hannah required no help getting Candice inside the anteroom of Judy’s office. Cody locked up and started after them, and was the first to reception, while Hannah got her sister situated in one of the chairs.
He tapped a dingy bell on the counter and spied through her office door, which he hoped was ajar because Judy was eager to welcome Candice. The bell rang in strange timing with an eighteen-wheeler roaring along the street outside, as he waited, wondering why there never seemed to be a receptionist.
Behind him, Hannah tried to get Candice to take her coat off, but the girl preferred to stay insulated. No one had explained to her that she was here to see a psychologist to help her talk, get her to say anything, the highest hope being she’d have it in her to communicate what had happened to her that night a month back, how her mother’s blood came to be on her hands, and the many details Cody hoped lay fresh in the back of her mind. But Candice wasn’t aware of any of this. She only knew she’d been taken to an unfamiliar place. God only knew what could happen.
Judy St. Clair drew her office door inward with gusto, brown eyes white all around and darting at Candice like a heat seeking missile. Judy looked alert, electrically so, to meet the girl who’d become something of a mystery to this town. Her hair stood on end like it always had, a nest of brown frizz she didn’t see the sense in taming, but today it appeared especially undone, as though her excitement over Candice permeated her entire being down to the tip of every last strand.
“McAlister!” Gruff voice, startling punctuation, as her eyes darted wildly from face to face before settling on Cody.
“Thanks for taking her,” he said extra soft to compensate.
With a masculine grip, she shook his hand then started for Candice.
Hannah was aghast, lips parting, her expression drooping downward, as Judy barreled over. Her energy made her seem three times her size and the way she leaned over and got nose to nose with Candice, forcing her wide smile in the girl’s face, was cause for more than a little alarm. But Cody trusted her. He’d once seen Judy get a traumatized six-year old boy to open up about heinous acts he’d endured. In Belknap county, Judy was an unsung hero as far as he was concerned, a shining pillar of the judicial community. She put men behind bars, the worst kind of criminals who chose their victims carefully, children, so as to never get caught.
“I’ve got a doll, Kiddo! You just show me where he touched you!” She wheezed out a laugh and swung her big face over to Hannah. “That’s a joke.”
/> Cody died a tad on the inside.
Palm flexed at the woman, she told her, “If there’s any way you can take this seriously.”
“She hasn’t been talking. She’s dissociating. It’s good and it’s bad. She's learned to tuck herself into her own head. It's a means of protection - that's the good part. Got to rustle her out.” Judy smiled wide. “Unless she’s been violated the suggestion to show me where she was touched won’t make the kind of sense to her you think it will. Relax.”
Hannah screwed her face up good at that, but didn’t argue. Instead, she chose to glare at Cody, those piercing blue eyes rimmed in black. Kendra’s lasers he’d hoped he’d never get caught in.
Judy got down on her knees and looked up at Candice, though she addressed Hannah.
“Has she been acting like an animal?”
“What?”
“Barking? Meowing? Squawking like a chicken?”
“Ah, no.”
“See?” Judy punched her thigh. “No sexual trauma.” She grunted her way to her feet. “Alright, Kiddo, up and at ‘em.”
“She’s been walking in circles, staring at her feet,” Hannah offered.
“Sounds adorable,” said Judy, as she attempted to rouse Candice from her chair.
Dismissed, Hannah added, “She made this tone.” She had to take a minute to muster up a better description. “Like a note she’ll hum then sing for as much breath as she’s got.”
Judy seemed interested in that, thanked her, then led Candice around the empty reception desk and they disappeared into her office, door closing with enough of a slam that Hannah flinched.
“Sorry,” he started in. “She works with child sexual trauma cases. Maybe that makes her a bit laissez-faire with this kind of thing.” He quickly followed up with, “She’s the best in the Tri-State area, I swear.”
Karmically speaking, Dale’s long ago right hook was making sense.
“Hungry?”
***
Hannah feigned interest in Marjorie’s long winded, complaint filled anecdote about keeping her azaleas flowering into late autumn, which centered mostly on her son, Blake and his ineptitude at pulling his life together in a manner that would even remotely resemble self-sufficient. How Blake had a damn thing to do with her gardening was entirely lost on Cody, and by the looks of it, Hannah as well. She was nice enough to smile when Marjorie finally wrapped it up. She asked for coffee with half-n-half and a stack of pancakes then passed her the menu.
“The same,” was his response when she batted her overly shadowed eyes down at him.
“Judy’s a firecracker,” she commented without a shred of a compliment.
“Her methods rub people the wrong way especially parents, but I wouldn’t have recommended her if she didn’t get results.”
Hannah seemed to hold her tongue, but her brows said it all. They shot up and the slight shake to her head told him if Candice didn’t improve radically she’d never let him live it down.
“You look nice,” he blurted out. “Your eye makeup and stuff.”
She countered with, “Any word about that man talking or, I guess writing to your cops about what happened?”
Cody waited for Marjorie to slide their coffees on the table then when the waitress paced away he reminded Hannah of the big picture. “He’s still recovering. It’s been a day, barely. He’ll come around.”
She searched his expression, which never lied.
“It’s more complicated than recovering, isn’t it?”
“We have him in the ICU with two officers standing guard plus hospital security has been briefed. No one gets in without first being carefully scrutinized and we assured him of this, but he’s terrified.”
“He told you he’s terrified? He could say that much?”
“He communicated it.” Cody stiffened under the magnitude of it all. “Not that he needed to. It’s in his eyes. When I looked at him I just sensed he wasn’t scared to die. He was scared not to. He was afraid if whoever’s behind this got to him he’d suffer a fate worse than...”
Her eyes closed as though it was necessary to rid the notion worse than Kendra from her mind. When she opened them, her gaze was on her purse and Cody knew what would come next.
Sure enough, Hannah turned cautious and slipped an ounce of whatever was in her flask into her coffee.
“She’s definitely alive out there,” he said, though the small token was recycled from yesterday’s reassurances.
Hannah drank her coffee down, steam wafting up her cheeks and causing her brow to knit together.
“I’ve been wrestling with this,” she began but it amounted to pausing, drawing in a deep breath, working her jaw in a way that pained him. Then she turned on a dime, hit in with a firm accusation. “You knew my mom was on meth?”
Dale’s proverbial fist making contact again, he couldn’t find words.
“She’s been arrested?”
“Yeah.”
Hannah poured liquor into her empty mug, sucked in a mouthful, then attempted to digest both.
Beyond their window, a torrent of red maple leaves fluttered to the parking lot, but Cody couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“My mom was an addict.” As she dove in, Cody breathed a sigh of relief that he kept imperceptible. This was what she’d been wrestling with not his lie of omission. “Trust me, my head is spinning, but in the last year that’s what she was. You found meth at the scene. And you have a tongue-less guy in custody, also an addict?”
"We think so."
In silence, she reflected on her summary. “Why keep her alive? And why torture her by removing her hand?” Again, silent examination, then a slow brainstorm. “It couldn’t have been for money. She doesn’t have any. And even if she stiffed them on drug payments that wouldn’t warrant this level of sickness.”
Hannah eyed her lap where he presumed her flask was then scanned the diner. Marjorie was bouncing another version of her woeful tale off the cook. No prying eyes. She planted her flask on his side of the table, which awoke his inner teenager. Claiming it fast, he hid it on his lap then was cautious about using it to doctor his coffee.
Her eyes relaxed watching him and he didn’t have the heart to admit that nipping booze at ten in the morning was the last thing he needed. So he drank, as did she, something of a bond forming between them.
As she went on, now grounded by the residual burn of alcohol in her bloodstream, he presumed, her unemotional approach to the facts struck him as admirable.
“I hate to say it, but it seems personal to me. Like whoever’s behind this really wants to hurt her or someone close to her.”
“Who’s close to her?” he asked, assuming no one could have it in for Kendra that badly.
“I want to say Dale, Mary, and Candice, maybe me, but I haven’t been in this world for eight years.”
“We can rule out Candice.” She was easy. Dale and Mary not so much.
Hannah thought about it, but was interrupted when Marjorie angled their breakfast plates onto the table.
As much math as they’d done, the equation still wasn’t clear, and the sum total far beyond their grasp.
***
In the toy-cluttered bowels of her office, Judy cleared a family of puppets from her shabby Ikea sofa, the faded vomit stains on which Cody couldn’t overlook. Conjuring memories of trauma was a messy business.
Cody didn't wait for Hannah to choose her spot, but intervened before she could sit on a stain. She smirked confusedly at him and sat where he indicated, then he took a seat beside her.
All eyes were on Candice who lain on the floor as though on a blanket of snow, arms and legs grazing in smooth patterns. He could almost see the angel she was making.
Judy observed her and mouthed silent mention that she’d been at it for well over ten minutes.
Proudly and as though she could predict the outcome, Judy asked, “What are you making, dear?”
“A mess.”
Hannah beamed at Cody then whip
ped her gaze to Candice.
“It’s not a mess, honey, it’s a snow angel,” Judy supplied to ease the shame from Candice’s activity.
Hannah burst out laughing and it quickly turned to joyful tears, but she didn’t dare comment for fear of interrupting Candice, high hopes for what she might say next.
Judy gave Candice her attention for a few more moments then shifted it to Hannah.
“There were three men.”
Hannah looked dumbfounded in ecstatic glee that eventually subsided as she leaned in, chin to palm, marveling.
“This was in the forest. I’m using Candice’s words, mind you. I haven’t endeavored to draw connections and I won’t.”
“Yes, I understand.” Hannah said.
“They wore masks and the van was white.” Judy pinched her lips together so as not to seem so full of her accomplishment, but her eyes flared and her hair seemed to vibrate on end. “They wore work boots, but never spoke. Kendra was...” she mouthed the next part to save Candice from undo re-traumatization, “stabbed.” Once she’d gotten that out she resumed a normal tone. “Lower abdomen, I’d say by the way Candice described her keeling over.”
“Was she on the ground for long?” Hannah asked eagerly to lock down whether or not it had been Kendra who’d scrawled that message in the dirt, Cody figured.
“She didn’t mention.”
“How did you get this out of her?” Hannah was in awe of the whacky woman who only an hour ago had come across as a total charlatan if not downright dangerous to children on the whole.
Judy hesitated in a manner that told Cody the answer would be so simple it’d break Hannah’s heart.
“She might not feel she's important at home,” she explained, the implication of which was just as Cody had feared. “If she’s not listened to anyway and respected then why would anyone care?” Judy let that hang for a moment then elaborated. “A child’s trauma can be impacted detrimentally if they assume they won’t be believed. It’s the bottling up of emotions, the silence they give to horrendous events that locks them into a shell, if you will. It’s not enough that she’s fed and bathed and clothed and that there’s a roof over her head. She must be nurtured."