“Thank you,” she said, and hoped she didn’t look as embarrassed as she felt.
“You’re welcome.”
They looked at each other until she was about to fidget, so she leaned over and unplugged the drill, then started wrapping up the cord.
“I don’t hate you, Jen,” he said finally.
She wasn’t sure what to say to that. That he had a right to? That she was glad he didn’t? That she believed that?
“You can’t go around giving people the impression that this case has been re-opened,” he said quietly.
“I’m not. I’m really not. It’s more for me than anything else. I just want to know more tomorrow than I do today.”
She grabbed her trash from the floor and, carrying it and the drill, headed for the kitchen. She heard Daniel behind her. Once in the kitchen, she tossed the trash into the can under the sink, then put the drill in the laundry room, on a shelf over the fairly new, Harvest Gold washer.
When she walked back out, Daniel was in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the brown accordion file on the kitchen table.
“Have you looked at it?” he asked her.
“Not yet. As much as I’ve wanted to see it, I also don’t.”
She’d left the box and wrapping from the back-door lock on the counter, and she busied herself by throwing them away, too.
“What’s the deal with the locks?” he asked her.
“I’ve been in New Orleans for over ten years. I’m not used to being out in the woods anymore. At least not alone.” It was mostly true, if not truthful. She didn’t know why she didn’t want to be straight with Daniel. Maybe because she’d hate to mistake concern for something else.
“Where do you keep your weapon?”
“In the drawer by my bed.”
He nodded, then looked back at the file. “You need a dog.”
“I need some tea,” she said, turning to the fridge. “Do you want some?”
He hesitated. “Okay.”
He stood there, awkwardly, in the middle of the room, while she got the Tupperware jug of tea out and poured them each a glass. She handed him his, then she sat down at the table. He hesitated a bit, then sat down in the chair on her right, the one facing the window. The one he’d always sat in. After school, before the drive-in, on rainy Saturday afternoons. Grandma had adored Daniel.
They both took sips of their tea. They both looked at the file and then tried not to look at it again. She stared at the middle of the table and saw more tuna fish lunches, late-night Cokes and rainy-day card games than she could count. She wondered if he saw the same thing. They’d laughed a lot together in this room. Everyone had.
He looked at her. “Are you going to look at it tonight?”
“I guess I might as well. It’s not going to be easier tomorrow.”
“I’d like to see it,” he said quietly. “If you don’t mind me staying.”
She looked at those blue eyes and saw compassion, but she also saw curiosity and stubbornness.
“Okay,” she said. She pulled the file closer, and undid the elastic band.
The file expanded a bit as it was loosed, but it wasn’t particularly thick, especially for three murders. There were three sections of paperwork, one for each victim. Each consisted of a stack of paperclipped documents, with stiffer pages at the back that were obviously eight by ten photographs.
At the time, it had seemed very clear to the officers who worked the case, and pretty much everyone else, that the murders were related. Once Claire Quindlen was killed, the theory had been that both Claire and Jonah had been killed for Claire’s civil rights activities. A week and a half later, Jennifer was standing at the airport in New Orleans with a light blue Samsonite and an overwhelming sense of loss.
She decided not to choose, and just pulled out the first stack of paperwork. It was her mother’s file. A basic information form was on top. Claire Elizabeth Quindlen. Born June 4, 1924. The dates struck Jennifer oddly. She’d always thought of her mother as a middle-aged woman. A beautiful middle-aged woman, but middle-aged nonetheless. Yet, she wasn’t. She’d just turned thirty-seven when she was killed. Barely seven years older than Jennifer was now.
The next page was the official autopsy report, with the outline of a woman with arms outstretched, front and back, that looked nothing like her mother. There were notes and lines drawn near and on the figure.
She pulled the paper clip from the stack, slid out the first picture, and felt the hairs on her arms and neck stand up. It was a fairly close shot of her mother sitting behind the steering wheel of their old Rambler. Just like Jennifer remembered, only in black and white.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daniel slide the autopsy report toward him.
She swallowed and made herself look at the photograph the way she’d looked at others, though not many others. The staring eyes with no warmth in them. The red petechiae in and around the eyes that looked like dark freckles in black and white. The bruising around the throat. The bloody scratches on both sides of her neck, which Jennifer now knew had been put there by Claire herself, fighting to loosen her killer’s fingers.
The picture was too close to show it, but Jennifer also knew that Claire had one foot outside the open door, and that both of her heels had come off in the struggle. She knew, too, that her mother had been wearing the charm bracelet that Jonah and Jennifer had given her the Mother’s Day before.
Jennifer let out a slow breath, then started laying the photos out in rows of five. There were far fewer pictures than Jennifer had expected, based on her very limited experience with murder cases. Maybe it was because she was the daughter of the once vital and beautiful woman splayed in the front seat of the old car, but she couldn’t help thinking that such a cataclysmic, life-changing event should have been documented with rolls upon rolls of film, and better pictures, to boot.
She stared at each picture in turn, and though he was silent, she knew Daniel was doing the same.
“I think I forgot how pretty she really was,” he said finally.
“Me, too.” She sighed. “You’d think my memories of her would be really clear, but they’re not. I mean, some are, but she was always going. She was always attending some rally or sit-in or meeting or something.” She looked up quickly, afraid she sounded self-centered. “I know what she was trying to do was important. I was proud of her. I am proud of her. But she wasn’t around very much those last few years.”
She looked back down at the photographs of the mother who wasn’t going to be around again at all. As her eyes drifted around a couple of the pictures of the inside of the car, something tried to catch her attention. She went back to the first picture, trying to figure out what it was.
Nothing jumped out at her about the marks on her mother’s neck, or anything else about her body, other than the obvious and distressing fact that the body was her mother, her Mom, the woman who had braided her hair, taught her to tie her shoes, and sternly advised her to be careful about compromising herself when she was alone with Daniel.
Her mother’s progressiveness about race had not carried over into her feelings about teens having sex and, of course, Daniel’s father was a pastor. Even so, there had been many times especially that last year, when she and Daniel had come pretty darn close to compromising the standards with which they’d been raised. Sometimes it had made her ashamed, sometimes it had excited her. She’d been young, in love, and full of hormones and a teenaged girl’s certainty that she knew her own future.
“Can I see the autopsy report?” Daniel asked.
Jennifer looked up from the photos, her face warming with the idea that he could read her mind. They used to joke that he could. It wouldn’t be as funny now.
She slid the autopsy report over to him, grateful that it took any attention away from her. Then she turned back to the photos. What was it that had
seemed to wave at her, asking to be noticed? She went over each picture as slowly as she could make herself do, but if there had been something, it seemed to be too tiny to catch on purpose.
“What did you do when you found your mom?” he asked her, and she looked up. He was focused on the pictures again, the two pages of autopsy results forgotten in his hands. “I mean, was her door open like that or did you open it? Was her leg outside of the car when you got there?”
Jennifer felt like a spider who’d been out in the cold was creeping up her backbone.
“I touched her,” she said. “I didn’t realize she was—her arm wasn’t hanging down like that until I grabbed her. It was hung up on the steering wheel. I mean, her arm was through the steering wheel.”
She looked out the window, not wanting to see her mother, not wanting to see pity on Daniel’s face as she remembered.
“When Mama Tyne went to drop me off in front of Mom’s shop, the lights were on, and we could see the back half of Mom’s car parked in back. Mama Tyne said she’d wait for me to get inside, but the front door was locked—I knew it would be, because Mom always kept it locked at night, well, daytime, too, after the lake. But Mom didn’t come to the door, so I walked around back.”
Jen watched a squirrel dash up the trunk of the apple tree outside the kitchen window. He shook his tail like he was waving at her, or waving her away.
“When I saw Mom’s door open, and her leg sticking out, I thought she was just getting in or getting out. But she didn’t answer me when I said something to her, and then I was by her door, and I saw.”
She looked away from the squirrel, looked down at the table without seeing the photographs. “I saw her face, but I didn’t get it right away. I grabbed her arm, and she was so cold. Too cold for the night. Her arm fell, or I dropped it, whatever, and I started screaming. Then Mama Tyne was there, and I don’t remember a whole lot about what happened right after.”
She looked up at Daniel, who was staring at the pictures on the table. “Except that someone called you, because you showed up at Grandma’s a few minutes after Mama Tyne and Inez brought me home.”
They had sat right there, at that same table. Grandma constantly wiping her eyes and popping up to get her more hot tea or a cold washcloth. Looking back, Jennifer guessed that taking care of her had been Grandma’s way of holding it together. Once the police, Mama Tyne and Inez, and Daniel’s father were gone, Daniel and Jennifer had moved to the couch, and Jennifer had stared at the floor as Daniel listened to Grandma talk through her shock.
Jennifer had woken up the next morning to find that someone had covered her with an afghan. Grandma and Daniel were sitting at the kitchen table again, drinking coffee, and Jennifer had been too preoccupied or in shock to ask if either of them had slept.
More and more, she thought less and less of her eighteen-year-old self.
“Mama Tyne called me,” Daniel said quietly.
Jennifer snapped back to the present, and when she looked at Daniel looking at her, she felt a pang of guilt. “I could always count on you. If I needed you.”
“That’s me,” he said ruefully. “Old reliable.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But that’s how it was,” he said.
“I didn’t expect you to still be waiting on me when I got back here, you know.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, for both our sakes.” He didn’t say it unkindly; he just stated it as fact.
She wanted to tell him she didn’t think so, but it wasn’t her right to say something like that. She wasn’t even sure she agreed with herself. She glanced over the pictures again, but if there had been something there that she should have noticed, she couldn’t find it now.
She stacked the photos of her mother’s crime scene and put the stack aside, then pulled out the second bunch of paperwork.
It was Jonah. Her own birthday was the first thing she saw; it jumped out at her from the information sheet. She blinked a few times, then straightened up. “Might as well get the worst of it over with,” she said, and pulled the photos of the scene from the back.
She’d seen it all before, though the elderly fisherman who had stayed to comfort the two girls, while his son raced to town to get the police, had not let either one of them get close to the car again. She felt sorry for that old man, now. He’d been out fishing with his son, and they’d heard the shots. A middle-aged couple had come, too, but Jennifer really only remembered the old man.
Since the fisherman had tried to shield the girls, Jennifer saw for the first time the damage the bullet had done when it had come out through Jonah’s throat. She knew from Inez that her brother had bolted upright when the first two shots were fired. One shattered the windshield. The second one hit Ned in the back of the head. One of the bullets that followed went through her brother’s neck. That one, she knew from hearing her mother told, had been from a .30 caliber round, a rifle.
She spread the next few pictures out a bit, whether she was trying to get it over with faster, or whether she was just torturing herself, she didn’t know. The second wound to her brother, which she knew about later but hadn’t noticed at the time. Another bullet, this one a .38, had hit him in the back, just below his right shoulder. She blinked a few times and cleared her throat. The pictures were horrible, but they weren’t any more horrible than being there, and she had been there.
It took her one moment too long to remember that Daniel hadn’t, and she jerked her head up and looked at him.
He was sitting there, still as stone, staring at his best friend’s torn throat, at the shot of him laid out on the ground, staring up at nothing ever again. Daniel sat there and stared, eyes wide and stricken, and Jennifer fought the immediate and overwhelming urge to comfort him.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.” She dropped her eyes and started gathering the photos, afraid she’d cry if she had to keep seeing that shattered look in his eyes.
She quickly gathered the photographs into a pile and shoved them back into the accordion file. Then she stared at the file for a long moment, and there was only the noise of the crickets and frogs coming through the window screen. Somewhere in there, she swore she could hear the sound of pain.
When she finally had the nerve to look at Daniel again, he was staring at her. She swallowed hard, trying to think of something appropriate to say that wouldn’t embarrass either one of them. He saved her the trouble.
“That night…” His voice was sandpapery, and he cleared his throat. “When we were in your room. After you fell asleep, I…there was some blood you missed, behind your ear.”
Jennifer felt a warm, swirling sensation in her stomach. She and Inez had been sent home from the hospital late in the evening, Inez with four stitches in her temple from broken glass and a bandage on her shoulder, where she’d been grazed by a bullet. Pastor Huddleston had driven Grandma and Mom home. Daniel had followed in his truck with Jennifer.
Later, after she’d taken a shower, she had fallen asleep on Daniel’s chest. They were both in her room, fully-clothed and with the door open. She’d fallen asleep listening to Daniel’s breathing over a gentle, mournful rain. She’d also heard the muffled sounds of her mother’s cries, and Pastor Huddleston’s gentle voice from the kitchen.
She could almost hear them now, as she sat there looking at Daniel. She could smell the greasy cotton of his work shirt from the gas station. The only reason he hadn’t been at the lake that day was that he’d picked up an extra shift.
“I licked my thumb and wiped it off,” Daniel said. “And I remember wondering—I still wonder sometimes—whose blood it was; Inez’s, Jonah’s, Ned’s.”
“I never touched Ned,” she said quietly. “At least, I don’t remember getting close…I don’t know.”
She studied Daniel’s face, as memories she could smell and feel and taste washed over
and through her. Lying on Daniel’s chest, listening to his breath and his heartbeat and the rain. Feeling hot and chilled both, her hair still wet from her shower. She and Daniel had been alone in her bedroom more than once, though, as far as she remembered, always when someone else was home. Even so, they had come close, more than once, to becoming intimate. It was usually Jonah clearing his throat in the hallway, or the loud creak of the loose plank in front of Grandma’s bedroom door that nipped it in the bud.
But as she sat there now, she realized nothing had ever been as intimate as lying on top of him, fully dressed in pajamas and a flannel robe. Neither of them speaking a word, as he lay there underneath her like a sponge, absorbing her grief and fear like it was spilled wine.
She felt the intimacy of it now, and felt her face color from the quiet between them then and the quiet between them now. That night eleven years ago, she could not have imagined a life without Daniel. Before the month was out, she’d been gone.
Jennifer realized they were still staring, and the look on his face made her wonder if they were remembering the same thing.
“You don’t have to be here while I’m looking through this stuff,” she said. “I’ll be okay.”
Daniel turned his glass around and around in the small pool of condensation that had formed beneath his tea. “You’re not the only one who thinks about it, you know.” He looked up at her. “I think about it all the time.”
When Daniel left two hours later, it was full dark, and Jennifer felt drained and slightly sick. By the expression on Daniel’s face when he’d said goodnight, he’d felt the same.
They’d spent the evening poring over photographs of dead bodies that had belonged to people they’d both loved. Gone over every detail of what the things that had killed them had done to their bodies. As police officers, they’d put themselves into the case materials hoping, but not admitting their hope, that they could solve the murders eleven years later. As the people left grieving, they wished someone had already done it.
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