by Gregg Olsen
“We’re figuring that out right now,” I say. I look over in the direction of victim advocate Nora Harper, who’s just arrived. Nora is a tall woman with a calm and gentle presence that is entirely suited to her role. No one has ever complained about Nora. She’s never been crossly Yelped or rated in an unkind manner by anyone. Ever. In her office at the end of the hall is a large bulletin board with pictures, drawings, and letters from those she’s helped, attesting to her genuine goodness.
“We’ve charged Mia’s husband,” I say. “Assault. Leaving a child unattended.”
Nora’s eyes meet mine. “All right, then.” She introduces herself to Mia and gently nudges her as the two of them walk slowly down the hall. Mia’s rubber-soled shoes squeak against our freshly waxed linoleum floor.
“Ally’s only one,” I hear her say. “Just two weeks ago. We had a big party. Luke got her a special pink-frosted cake from work. The biggest cake they make at WinCo that’s not for a wedding. Ally was so happy. She really was.”
She stops and faces Nora.
“This isn’t really happening, is it?” she asks.
I see Nora press her hand against Mia’s heaving shoulders as she guides her past the other offices. The victim advocate doesn’t say anything to the young mother.
Nora has been in moments of undeniable tragedy more times than she cares to revisit. She knows that no words matter right now. The only thing she can do is listen, acknowledge, and do her best to follow Mia’s lead. The victim, or in this case the mother of the victim, always lets her know how best to help them through a nightmare.
“Telling someone that they’ll be all right,” Nora told me over coffee one time, “is the last thing anyone wants to hear. Sure, things will get better. Time will diminish the pain. But things will never be all right.”
The officer who had notified Mia about her daughter in the hospital parking lot leans in and whispers in my ear. I step back and look into his eyes.
“Seriously?” I ask.
Mia Tomlinson is human tissue wadded up and sodden with the tears of a mother who has lost everything that matters. While Carter confers with the prosecutor’s office and Luke is sulking in a jail cell, the young mother in the nurse’s smock dissolves into tears in the interview room. She sits in the same chair that her husband occupied moments before. I wonder if she catches a whiff of the scent of her dead baby or her husband’s nervous sweat.
Mia’s messy bun is now undone, and her hair tumbles past her shoulders. With her eye makeup now on my blouse, she looks incredibly young—a teenager. I offer her water, and when she takes it, I notice she wears a Celtic-knot gold band on her ring finger. She pulls at the ring now and then. A nervous habit for a devastatingly stressful time.
“I still don’t understand why Luke’s been arrested,” she finally says. Her blue eyes are soaked. Full of sadness. Heartbreaking. Mia’s words are on a hamster wheel, and she keeps repeating the same phrase over and over. “I don’t understand.”
This is Nora’s area. Though I want to comfort Mia, I can’t at the moment. I need to know what she can tell me about that day.
More than anything, I need to know why she said what she’d said to the patrol officer.
“I left at six,” she tells me, reaching for a Kleenex that I’ve scooted in her direction. Just in case. “Ally and Luke were asleep. I kissed them both goodbye. Soft, like. I didn’t want to wake them. We’d had a rough night. Ally cried for almost an hour. Kept all of us up before she went down around 1:00 a.m.”
“Was that unusual?” I ask.
“Lately, no,” Mia says, fidgeting with her ring once more. “We don’t have air-conditioning. We’ve opened all the windows and set up a couple of fans. We’re on the second floor. Heat rises.”
“It has been very hot this week,” I say, stating the obvious, but doing so just to keep things moving. Just to keep her feeling supported enough to continue.
“Terrible,” she says, sipping some water. “I wish we had AC. The people next door have one of those portable units that fits into the window. It costs them an extra hundred a month to run it. Luke says the expense would be worth it. I say we don’t have the money.”
“What else did you do this morning?” I ask.
“Packed Ally’s diaper bag,” she says. “Some snacks too. Also packed Luke’s lunch. He brown-bags it most days. We’re saving money where we can, because I’m taking classes to get my nursing degree. Like I said, money is really tight. I have another year to go.”
“That’s great,” I tell her, though I’m thinking of the diaper bag. The evidence report indicated that besides diapers, the diaper bag contained spit-up rags; a change of clothes; and a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, and some chips—a lunch that he left in the car with Ally. It’s odd, I think, that he didn’t go out to the car to get his lunch.
“It isn’t easy working full-time and being a mom too,” Mia says.
I know and I nod. “Then what?” I ask. “What happened next?”
She wrinkles her nose and takes another tissue. “Nothing, really,” she says. “I went to work. Luke texted me good morning around eight or so.”
“Did he say anything about Ally?” I ask.
Mia stops to think, recalling the morning. “No,” she says. “Just that she was happy. They were heading to McDonald’s for breakfast, then to day care and to work after that.”
I state the obvious, not because she needs reminding, but because I’m looking for a reaction.
“But Ally never got there.”
Mia blinks back more tears, sniffs, and takes a second Kleenex from the box. “I guess not.”
I think of what the patrol officer whispered in my ear before the interview, but for the time being I hold that peculiar detail inside.
“Didn’t the day care inquire about Ally?” I ask.
Mia takes her eyes off me and reaches for her phone. “No,” she says, scrolling through her messages. “They did send a note about a beach walk that had been canceled.” She finds the message. “Nothing else.”
“Was that a group message?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “Everyone got it.”
I ask her what time it was sent.
She looks at the screen on her phone. “Ten twenty-three.”
“Did Luke get it?”
She nods. “Yes, sure. Debbie’s good at keeping everyone informed.”
As with the lunch still in the diaper bag, I wonder why that message hadn’t jogged her husband’s memory that morning. When it came through, Ally was probably still alive. Didn’t Luke see that and recall that he hadn’t dropped his daughter off?
Mia is looking at photos on her phone. She seems a little lost right now. I can see that she’s playing out the morning in her mind.
“This is Ally yesterday,” she finally says, her voice growing stronger. “Just yesterday! It’s the last picture I took of her.”
She holds the phone so I can see the image. It’s poignant and beautiful. Ally’s red hair and blue eyes fill the screen with the most beautiful colors. She’s smiling at someone as she sits in her high chair. A bowl of cereal with some loose Cheerios that resemble tiny wheels that have fallen off an axle sits before her on the plastic tray. A cat calendar with a Siamese next to a goldfish bowl adorns the wall behind her. A half-dead jade plant, its leaves shrunken and falling, sits on the cluttered kitchen counter.
“Her dad was making faces at her,” Mia tells me.
“She’s beautiful,” I say.
All of a sudden Mia looks at me with renewed intensity. It’s as if she’s suddenly snapping out of a fugue and beginning to consider the circumstances that are swirling around her. The cyclone that is catching her. The whirlpool that nudges her inside.
“This isn’t really happening, is it?” she asks.
I wish it weren’t. “I’m so sorry,” I tell her. My words come at her as softly as possible. “I’m afraid it is.”
She puts down her phone but continues to g
aze at the photograph.
Now is the time to bring it up. “You said some things to the police officer that I’ve been wondering about.”
That propels her back into the moment. “What?” she asks, now meeting my direct gaze.
“Before the officer told you what happened to Ally, you mentioned two things,” I say, weighing her reaction. “About researching hot-car deaths and about the possibility that Luke might have forgotten Ally in the car.”
She barely flinches at what I’ve said.
“Yeah,” she says. “He and I talked about the dangers of a hot car. He looked it up online and told me that a car can turn into an oven in a matter of minutes.”
“When did Luke do that?”
Mia doesn’t hesitate. “This week,” she says. “A few days ago. That’s what’s so terrible and ironic about this. Luke and I discussed it. We’d seen that story about that mom in Texas who left her twins in the parking lot at Walmart and, you know, basically cooked them alive.”
She doesn’t draw a connection to Ally being cooked alive too.
“How did you research it?” I ask.
“I didn’t,” she says. “Luke did. Online. He even printed out an article about that Texas case. I think he was worried about it. He loved Ally so much. Told me every day that being a daddy was the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“He was concerned that it might happen to her?”
She nods emphatically. “Yeah. Very. Told me that he was afraid that he’d forget her in the car. That he’d get to thinking about work or something and then just, you know, leave her by mistake.”
“And that’s what happened, isn’t it, Mia?”
She takes a breath. “That’s what I told the officer. It was almost like Luke predicted it.”
Saying his name brings a new wave of tears.
“I need to see him,” she says.
“You can’t at the moment. He’s been processed. Arrested. His next visit is with a lawyer.”
Mia pushes back from the table and stands. “But this was an accident,” she says, her voice rising in volume. “Luke can’t be in trouble for an accident. That doesn’t seem fair. That girl in Texas didn’t get arrested. The police said that she’d been punished enough for her mistake.”
I catch Carter in his office after the interview with Mia. It’s after seven, and I need to get Emma. I need to hold her in my arms and read her a book with a happy ending. I need to tell her that I’m sorry that work kept me away from her. It doesn’t happen often. And when it does, it crushes me because I don’t ever want to be that parent figure that doesn’t put the child first. She’ll know about Ally’s death because Carrie Anne has the news on 24-7. I’ll tell her that occasionally bad things happen to good people.
At seven, she already knows that, of course. From my job and from her own life too.
“Mom’s in denial,” I tell Carter.
“Dad’s a strange bird, for sure,” he says.
“I don’t believe his story, one whit. Mom dropped a bomb. Says that Luke researched hot-car deaths.”
“Yeah, Davis told me,” he says.
Todd Davis is the reporting officer.
“Planned this, didn’t he?” I ask, already feeling that I know the answer.
Carter nods. The sun is out, and I know that if I didn’t have Emma to go home to that he’d ask me out for a drink.
“Just a beer,” he’d say.
I’d decline, like I always do.
“I want to learn more about you,” he’d offer, as though that’s something I’d want to share with anyone.
“You know everything there is,” I’d say, though I know that he doesn’t. My fall from grace was well documented on the Internet. How my gambling addiction was fodder for the blogs. How my investigative partner and boyfriend, Danny Ford, botched the Kelsey Chase murder investigation. How my sister survived the propane explosion that killed her husband. All of it was there with a click of a mouse.
Well, not all of it. There were some things I’d somehow managed to keep to myself.
“Let’s hit up his work colleagues tomorrow first thing,” Carter says. “Then work our way back to witnesses at the scene.”
“Day care too,” I say. “I wonder what they know.”
Carter shuts down his computer, and we head toward the back door of the police department.
The air hovering over the parking lot is hair-dryer hot. It blows in my face as Carter and I make our way to our cars, slotted next to each other. There’s no awkward lingering. That’s by design. We both have things to do. He’s going to stop at the Long Shot Tavern on Columbia for a beer or two and then go home to his sparsely furnished apartment. I’m going to get Emma and bring her to the red-shingled house that has been part of my life since I was born.
The house where my sister, Stacy, and I learned to love and hate each other.
With Emma nearly finished with her recitation of what happened during her day, I twist the knob, and we go inside. Shelby greets us at the door, trying to jump up. I bend down and give her a little love. It’s too hot to pick up my dog just then. Emma’s been a chatterbox all the way from Carrie Anne’s. Although I’m not really counting, she tells me that she hates hot dogs for the third time.
“That’s what I had for dinner,” she says.
“I’m sorry about that. We’ll have pizza tomorrow night.”
“I like pizza.”
“I know you do,” I say.
This is a girl who has no compunction when it comes to telling me what she likes or doesn’t like. She’s confident. Assured. She’s a blond like her mother, but she thinks like a brunette, as my father would say. I know that’s silly, but that’s how I feel. When I pick her up, set her on the counter, and fish through the refrigerator for something decent to eat, she carries on, telling me like it is.
“Carrie Anne says hot dogs are good for you. Can you believe that? I didn’t tell her that they are made up of guts and stuff.”
“Not all hot dogs,” I say. “Maybe Carrie Anne buys the good kind.”
Emma looks absolutely certain. “There is no good kind,” she says.
I give up on finding something good to eat for now and bend down to retrieve a Popsicle from the freezer.
Emma sees what I’m doing, but she doesn’t judge.
“As far as Popsicles go,” I say, “this is the good kind.”
She smiles and takes it.
“Yes,” she says. “Cherry. Real fruit juice. No artificial sweeteners.”
Who is this kid? I ask myself as I take a piece of cold chicken and set it on a paper towel. (No need to wash a dish if I don’t have to.) Where did this mini-adult come from? I know the answers to the questions running through my mind, but still they come. Her father is dead. Her mother is out of the picture. Emma no longer asks about them as she first did when we left the suburbs of Seattle for Hoquiam. My heart skipped a beat when her class did a family tree assignment at the end of first grade. It was just the two of us on her hand-drawn tree.
“You’re my auntie mommy,” she said.
I felt sad about that. I didn’t intend to rewrite the history of her life, but I knew then that I’d been avoiding mentioning my sister, Stacy, and her husband, Cy. I decided to correct that then, because it was the right thing to do. “What about your daddy and your mommy?” I asked.
Emma got out a green crayon. “They are here,” she said, pointing to a clump of grass above the tree’s roots.
I didn’t press it. I let myself believe that Emma had kind of buried her parents. That was fine. That was, I thought at the time, the way it should be.
“What about Grandpa?” I asked, partly because I was curious about what she thought of my father, but also because I wanted to change the subject. “You didn’t include him in the family tree.”
Emma made a face. “Oh, yes,” she said, hastily drawing a figure of an old man sitting in a wheelchair. She thoughtfully coiled some hair on his head and gave him an
alert look that didn’t reflect reality at all. Finished, she looked up and smiled. “Here he is.”
Now, as she sucks on her Popsicle, her tongue and lips are turning bright red. I eat my chicken and pour a glass of chilled white wine. Emma does most of the talking. Seven-year-olds have a way of uncorking the entire day. There are no boring parts. Everything is worthy of a recounting. I listen to her every word, nodding, looking interested. And while I am, I cannot stop thoughts of Ally Tomlinson from coming into the kitchen with us. What happened to her has hit a nerve, and there’s no denying it. I think back to the case that led to my personal and professional demise. Kelsey Chase, a three-year-old, abducted from her mother’s car in a Target parking lot.
The case was my unraveling. It took me to places that I never could have imagined. It transformed me in every way. I questioned my judgment. I passively stood by while everything I believed in was upended. My sister, Stacy, and the man that I thought I loved had been caught up in the ugliest endeavors, and I had been used to facilitate the cover-up of a murder. Or two. For the longest time I contemplated suicide. I thought only a kind of permanent darkness—a lights-out, I called it—would end my shame. Stop my self-inflicted suffering.
Not so. The little girl with the red tongue and lips was the answer. As Emma sits on the counter telling me about Carrie Anne’s cat, Rex, using a potted plant as a litter box, I silently thank God for her. I love her with every fiber of my being. My salvation was in ensuring that she made it through life unscathed. Loved. Challenged in the right ways. Strong.
Everything that I wanted to be.
Even though she is not mine by birth, I know that inside of me is that agape love all mothers have.
All except Stacy.
I toss the paper towel and take the wooden stick from Emma’s tiny hand. The upstairs windows have been open all day, fans doing double duty, but the space is still sweltering.
“Carrie Anne says that rich people have air-conditioning,” she says.