“Zachary, so good to see you!” Mr. Peterson shook his hand warmly and slapped him on the back in a half-hug. “How are you doing? Come in!”
Zachary was hustled into the house. Pat was in the kitchen, but came out wiping his hands on a towel to greet Zachary.
“Hey, Zach. How was the drive?”
“Good. No traffic. And it feels good to get away. I didn’t know how badly I needed this.”
Pat smiled. He was still in good shape, but he wasn’t a young man any more. His age fell between Zachary’s and Mr. Peterson’s, but he wore the years well, becoming more mature and distinguished.
“Well, you two sit down and start on getting caught up. I’ll have dinner on the table in a few minutes.”
Zachary sat down. There weren’t very many places where he felt like he belonged in the world. Mr. Peterson’s was one of the few. Maybe the only one, until Zachary found a new place for himself and settled in.
Mr. Peterson’s eyes traveled over him. Lines on his forehead deepened and the little fan of wrinkles around his eyes disappeared. “Are you okay, Zachary? How is the house-hunting going?”
“I’m actually looking now,” Zachary said. “I’ve got calls in to a few places, so it shouldn’t be too long before I find something. Then I guess I’ll need furniture and household stuff before I can move in. Just the basics. A couple more weeks, maybe.”
“Good. It can’t be easy just sleeping on couches.”
“Well, I’ve done it enough before.” Zachary shrugged. “But I’m wearing out my welcome. I was only supposed to be there a couple of days.”
“You can’t be expected to get back on your feet in a couple of days. It takes time to get your identification reissued and get your insurance check. Suddenly being without anything is more than just a setback.”
Zachary shrugged again and didn’t know what to say to that.
“So, what are you working on?”
“I have a new case. A boy who might have committed suicide. His mother hired me to look into it.”
“Suicide.” The lines on Mr. Peterson’s forehead became more pronounced. “Do you really think that’s a good idea? Doesn’t that… I don’t know… trigger feelings for you?”
“The possibility that it might be suicide hasn’t really bothered me. I can think about it without having suicidal thoughts… but other things about it have been…” Zachary didn’t want to say anything that would worry Mr. Peterson. He already had Kenzie and Bridget fussing over him. “Some of the other aspects have been… bothering me a little.”
Mr. Peterson nodded. His eyes got a little wider. “What other aspects?”
“He was in an institution. He was autistic and couldn’t live with his family anymore.” Zachary tried to swallow the sudden lump in his throat. He wasn’t talking about himself; it was Quentin. Zachary’s institutional life was long in the past.
“Ah. So that hits a little too close to home?”
Zachary made a little motion with his hands, trying to downplay it. But the words stuck so badly in his throat that Mr. Peterson had to know it was a problem.
“It isn’t much like any of the places that I lived. Except maybe the living units, which are pretty much the same as any detention cell.” He saw again the room where Quentin had died. Remembered Annie; Zachary trapped on the other side of the security door, unable to do anything for her. Screaming for help.
Mr. Peterson sat beside Zachary on the couch and put a comforting hand on his back. It was warm and firm and grounding. “What happened?” he asked quietly. “I know Bonnie Brown wasn’t the greatest place to be, but it was your safe place when you couldn’t be with a family.”
“Yeah,” Zachary agreed. “I chose to go back there. Christmases. When things got really bad. There were times I just couldn’t function in a foster family.”
“So, what happened? What are you thinking about?”
Zachary swallowed, trying to clear the lump in his throat so he could speak clearly. “I never talked to anyone about it.”
“Someone was hurting you? That place was full of traumatized kids. Kids who had been abused and could become perpetrators.”
“It’s not that…” Zachary didn’t deny the fact that there had been predators there. As there surely would be at any similar institution. “It’s… when I was there, a girl died, in the room beside mine.”
Mr. Peterson shifted, studying Zachary seriously. “You never told me anything about that before.”
“I never told anybody.”
“What happened?”
Zachary stared at the framed pictures on the mantle across the room. Some of them were photographs he had taken. Portraits of Mr. Peterson and Pat together. A small one of himself as a young man, standing on the street, sideways to the camera, bashful about having his photo taken.
“She was autistic.”
“How did she die? Was it suicide?”
“She stopped breathing. In the night. When they went to wake her up in the morning, she was dead.”
“So it wasn’t suicide or a suspicious death. Just one of those things.”
“Yeah.” Zachary breathed, staring at the picture of himself. “Maybe.”
“Do you think something else happened to her?”
When he thought about it, Zachary’s guts cramped up. He remembered the security guards, the police, Annie screaming. Too many images at once, overpowering.
“You’re not there, Zachary.”
You’re not there.
Zachary breathed in a deep lungful of air. He could smell Pat’s cooking. He was in Mr. Peterson’s living room, not Bonnie Brown. Though Mr. Peterson had calmed him with a hand on his back before, he wasn’t touching Zachary anymore, cautious of triggering a worse reaction.
“She had been violent the day before.” Zachary forced the words out, hoping they would help him to sort and stabilize the images. “Assaulted a guard. They called the police, had her arrested. She was still upset when they got there. Fought the police. She got like that. Everyone there knew she had meltdowns. Tantrums, they called them. Like she was a toddler.”
He breathed a little more easily. Blinked and tried to remain present. Annie was in the past. Zachary wasn’t a child anymore. No longer eleven and helpless. It had happened decades earlier.
“You think this tantrum had something to do with her death?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe something happened to her while she was fighting with the police.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.” Zachary shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
Neither of them said anything. The silence drew out.
“I don’t remember,” Zachary repeated.
“Okay.”
“Everybody ready to eat?”
Zachary looked up and saw Pat standing in the doorway, his stance indicating that he had been there for some time, waiting for the right moment to speak.
“Yeah,” Zachary agreed, getting up from the couch. “It smells really good.”
Mr. Peterson didn’t spring up as quickly as he would have a few years previous. It took a moment of creaking and rebalancing, but then he was smiling and striding toward the table, as if denying the fact that his body was aging.
“Just give me a second to wash up,” Zachary told them. He headed to the bathroom, waiting for a few moments in the still, quiet closeness of the space for his body to calm down, for the cramps to ease. He splashed cold water on his face and then toweled it off.
He returned to the dining room table to find Mr. Peterson and Pat talking companionably, not acting like he had put them out or made them wait for a long time. Zachary took a surreptitious glance at his phone before sliding it back away, trying to gauge the passage of time and anchor himself. When he was on his meds, time was more of a constant; it didn’t grow and shrink so dramatically.
He forced a smile and seated himself. “Thanks for inviting me,” he said. “It’s good for me to get away for a bit. Get away fr
om work.”
“And then I go and bring up your case,” Mr. Peterson said. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I didn’t mean that.”
They passed the dishes around and dished up. Zachary tried to hide the fact that he wasn’t taking very much, spreading the food out and commenting on how good it looked. Pat knew by this time that Zachary didn’t have much of an appetite when on his ADHD meds, so Zachary really didn’t need to cover the fact up, but he still worried about Pat being offended.
“How’s the photography going?” Pat inquired, attempting to pick the topic that was least likely to trigger a reaction from Zachary. “What are you working on these days?”
“Nothing right now. Lost all of my equipment in the fire.”
“Oh… I didn’t even think. I’m sorry.”
Zachary shrugged. “The insurance company will cover replacing a lot of it. Can’t replace the photographs and negatives, though. I didn’t keep duplicates anywhere else, or digital records in the cloud. Now… I know better.”
“That’s a devastating blow,” Mr. Peterson said, real pain in his voice. He was a photographer too. He could understand how hard it would have been to lose all of his artwork. “I’ll make you copies of everything I have. And I’ve got a couple of cameras I don’t use. Let’s go through equipment after dinner and I’ll give you some stuff to take back with you.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Zachary protested. But his spirits lifted at the thought of getting his hands on one of Mr. Peterson’s treasured cameras. He’d bought the digital camera he needed for his surveillance work, but he still preferred real film for his art. He smiled his appreciation and had a couple of bites of his dinner.
When Zachary got back from Mr. Peterson’s and checked on the voicemails that had been piling up while he’d had his phone turned off, he listened a couple of times to one from a soft-spoken woman.
Mr. Goldman, my name is Ava Kennedy. I’m the mother of a girl at Summit Living Center. I wondered if you could talk to us sometime in the next few days. I’d really appreciate it.
She gave her number, stayed on the line breathing for a moment, and then clicked off. Zachary wrote down her information. Was it possible that she or her daughter knew something about Quentin’s death? Some piece of information that was missing from his investigation? It was late in the day to be calling anyone back, so he put it aside to deal with in the morning.
He was feeling nice and calm and relaxed after his visit to Mr. Peterson’s, so after checking over his camera stops one more time and making sure his film was loaded and properly advanced, he took some sleeping pills and stretched out on the couch. He lay on his stomach with one arm hanging over the edge of the couch, resting his hand on the camera, the cool metal reassuring. Then he closed his eyes to go to sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
A
va Kennedy was a striking black woman, perhaps a few years older than Zachary. While her face was unlined, she looked tired and worn. She shook Zachary’s hand briefly, her slim hand small in his.
“This is Tirza,” Ava said, indicating the teen girl sitting on the bed, staring steadfastly away from them. She was a gorgeous girl with many of her mother’s features and a vague, innocent air. Her hair was done in neat corn-rows.
Ava sat down on the bed beside her daughter.
“Hi, Tirza,” Zachary greeted.
Tirza whispered something, turning briefly toward her mother, then away again, tugging on her earlobe.
“It’s okay, Tirza,” Ava said. “This is Mr. Goldman; he’s here to help.”
Zachary wasn’t sure how he was supposed to be helping Tirza. Ava had been cryptic on the phone, saying that she would fill him in when he got there. He wasn’t sure what Ava thought her daughter had to do with Quentin’s death, if there was any connection at all. Maybe she wanted to hire Zachary for another case and it was nothing to do with Quentin.
He noted that Tirza did not have on a black backpack and electrodes. That made her one of the minority of students who was being treated without skin shocks.
“What is it you wanted to talk to me about today? Do you have concerns about something here at Summit?”
“I… don’t know,” Ava said unhelpfully. “I’m hoping you can help to sort that out. I didn’t know where to go, and then someone said that you were a private investigator. I thought maybe there was something you could do to help.”
“So this isn’t anything to do with Quentin Thatcher’s death?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay… well, I’m not sure if I’m prepared to take on another case right now, especially one that might have something to do with Summit. My plate is pretty full…”
“Would you listen to our story and then decide? If you say you can’t help, I’ll understand.”
Zachary looked into her earnest, pleading eyes. He nodded.
“Alright. Go ahead.”
“Tirza is autistic, like Quentin. She was part of an after-school program here. Living at home, going to the public school in a mainstream program with accommodations for her needs. Working on social skills and whatever else needed a little work here.”
Zachary nodded encouragingly. He tried to make eye contact with Tirza, but she looked steadfastly away, acting as if she were unaware of Zachary’s presence or what he was doing there.
“About a week before Quentin died, Tirza disappeared. Between when her aide at the school made sure she was ready to go and when the car that was supposed to pick her up and bring her to Summit arrived.” Ava shook her head, expressing her confusion over this. “She had the same routine every day. She’d never had any trouble getting from her locker to the car. But half an hour later, I got a call from the car service saying that she had not shown up. Asking if she was sick. I dropped everything and went over to the school, but she wasn’t there. I called the police.”
Ava looked at her daughter with concern. Zachary could see no sign that the story was distressing for Tirza.
“They treated it like a runaway case.” Ava’s tone was outraged. “I explained to them that she was autistic. That she wasn’t a rebellious teen who might have just gone off shopping with a friend or meeting a boyfriend. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere other than the car, unless someone took her away. She went to the car every day.”
“You managed to find her again, obviously.”
“I wouldn’t leave them alone. I wouldn’t let them just brush it off as a runaway case. Forced them to issue an Amber Alert. Went to the media and made sure it was well-publicized that she was the victim of a kidnapping, not a runaway. Started an investigation into whether there had been any strangers hanging around the school, or whether anyone had been paying an unusual amount of attention to her.”
“Doing all of the right things.”
“Apparently. Forty-eight hours from when she disappeared from the school, she was found wandering beside the highway.”
Zachary looked at Tirza again. She would be an attractive target. A beautiful young woman not equipped to defend herself.
“How was it handled?”
“They questioned her as a runaway. They called me to come pick her up. Case closed.”
“They closed the case? What did she say to them?”
“She said she had gone with Damien.”
“Who is Damien?”
“I have no idea. They decided Damien was her boyfriend and that she had just decided to spend a couple of days with him, unconcerned about the people who might be worried about her.”
“Has Tirza told you anything about what happened?” Zachary looked at Tirza, unsure whether he should be addressing her directly. He had never liked it when social workers or foster parents talked about him as if he weren’t standing right there.
Ava nodded. “She gave me a very detailed account about going with Damien and being… passed around to a number of different men. She told me what happened to her. She’s not just making up a story.”
&nbs
p; Zachary swore. “Oh, Tirza. I’m so sorry.”
Her eyes flitted over to him and then she put her face against her mother’s shoulder, pressing into her.
“What did you do? Did you go back to the police with this?”
“Yes… but I don’t know how seriously they are taking it. They are still pretty insistent that this is just rebellious teenage behavior. They said they will investigate, but I don’t hear anything back from them. I don’t know if they’re doing anything.”
“What about her therapist? Isn’t there someone she can talk to here who will back her up, say that she’s not lying?”
“They say she is just repeating what she heard somewhere else. That she’s not… high functioning enough to be able to put an experience like that into words.”
“No,” Tirza protested, banging her fist against Ava’s body. “No, no, no!”
“I know, Tirza. I know you’re telling me the truth,” Ava assured her.
Tirza quieted.
“Are you… is she still taking the after-school program here?” It was obvious to Zachary that they had to be there for another reason. It was morning, so Tirza should have been at school, not due for her after-school program until her day was done.
“She hasn’t been able to go back to school. Or to function at home. I don’t know what to do with her. She’s regressed. Before this happened… she was pretty independent. She was going to school, could do things at home without me supervising her constantly, she had friends and was a happy girl. But now…” Ava put an arm around Tirza and cuddled her close. “When I take her to school, she cries and won’t stay there. She doesn’t want to talk. She’s depressed and self-harming. I can’t watch her all of the time to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself. Or do what Quentin did…” Ava trailed off, looking at Tirza, obviously not wanting to put ideas into Tirza’s brain. She sighed, eyes shiny with tears. “So I’ve had to put her into residential here. Even though I really don’t want to.”
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