Dark Road Home

by Anna Carlisle

  “I don’t know if there’s room in the freezer for all that,” Gin said doubtfully.

  “No, just dump them. Your father can’t eat any of this. And you and I shouldn’t.” Madeleine patted her stomach as though some pudge had managed to sneak onto her size-four frame when she wasn’t looking. “Make sure the labels stay on anything I need to return, if you don’t mind. I’ll wash all those dishes later.”

  Gin dutifully picked up the bags, following her mother into the quiet house. Her father had headed back to the nursing home with Grammy, looking as exhausted as Gin felt. She’d almost offered to go along with him, but the truth was she wasn’t sure she could bear the silence.

  Instead, she pretended that Madeleine needed her.

  She was standing at the sink with the disposal running, scraping soggy noodles down the drain, when her mother came back into the room wearing navy yoga pants and a matching pullover. She went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out an unopened bottle of white wine. “Want some?”

  “Sure.” Gin had drunk one diet soda after another at the service, just to give her hands something to do. She dried her hands on the dishtowel her mother kept neatly folded by the sink and followed Madeleine out to the screened porch.

  Evening was falling slowly, ushering in the fireflies and the scent of charcoal, the shouts of children carrying over the neighbors’ fences.

  “I like to sit out here and watch the river,” Madeleine said, settling into a chair and putting her feet up on the matching caned ottoman.

  Gin settled on the love seat next to it. “I don’t remember you ever taking the time to sit out here before.”

  “Wait until you’ve got a bunch of kids running around underfoot and a husband who’s never home,” Madeleine said. “With the twins here so much . . . I was lucky to get five minutes to myself to shower.”

  “Did you resent that, Mom?” Gin had never really considered those early days from her mother’s point of view. “I mean, having to watch over kids who weren’t even yours while Dad and Spencer worked all that overtime?”

  The name still felt funny on her lips. After calling him “Mr. Parker” her entire life, Spencer had insisted she call him by his first name when she came home to visit the summer before she started medical school. “You kids are all grown up,” he’d said, raising a toast at the barbecue he hosted for the two families. Then, cutting his gaze to Tom, he’d added, “Well, some of you, anyway,” which had prompted laughter from everyone but Tom.

  “Not really,” Madeleine shrugged. “I mean once you’ve got two, a couple more . . . well, it’s more work, but not that much more. And I mean, poor Spence, widowed with two newborns. Nowadays it’s a different story, but back then there weren’t many options for single dads. I guess your father and I just felt it was the right thing to do.”

  “I’m surprised he never got remarried. If nothing else, it would have been easier, with the kids.”

  “When was he going to date anyone long enough for it to get serious? Those two—back when they were trying to get the surgery center going, they barely came home to shower and sleep.”

  “Mom, you should demand reparations,” Gin said, only half kidding. “Even if he only gave you minimum wage for all that childcare, you could probably retire.”

  Gin regretted her words the minute they were out. But trying to apologize—to convince her mother that she took her political career seriously—would be even worse.

  Her parents would have more than enough money to last the rest of their lives, even if neither worked another day. Richard earned well as a surgeon, and as far as Gin knew, her parents had never even touched her mother’s inheritance. Each worked for their own reasons, even if those reasons were murky. Richard still racked up as many as twenty joint replacements a week, in addition to tirelessly campaigning for the still-nascent regenerative-medicine department. As for Madeleine—whether her mother worked to give her life meaning or to give her an excuse not to face the gaping hole left by Lily’s absence, Gin had never known.

  Guilt, guilt, guilt—every interaction with her parents seemed rife with it. Gin drank her wine, letting the tart, cold liquid slide down her throat, welcoming the pleasant blur it promised.

  “Listen, Virginia.” Her mother set her wine down on the little glass patio table and leaned toward her. “I think it would be best if you avoid Jake while you’re here. Lawrence, too, as much as possible. Your father . . . well . . .”

  She didn’t bother finishing the sentiment: Your father gets so upset, it’s best if we try to stay out of Daddy’s way. Old excuses made during the sisters’ teens, when Lily’s clattering joyful presence sent Richard’s blood pressure through the roof. His angry door-slamming when she failed a test or ignored a curfew.

  “Mom . . . I know Dad’s angry, but we don’t know that Jake did this. He was investigated, and they let him go.”

  “He’s not the only one who thinks Jake got off easy,” Madeleine said, and Gin couldn’t bring herself to ask if she herself was among his doubters.

  “I thought I’d go up to the county offices on Monday.”

  “Have you talked to anyone up there yet?”

  “Only about my statement, so far.” The detective who’d come had talked to them each individually, drinking tea on this very porch. Gin hadn’t had the nerve to ask her parents what it felt like to have their statements read back to them all these years later, but for her the experience had been both discomfiting and strangely blurring. “You say here that you know your sister was still at the school at four o’clock because she was working on a theater set,” the detective had said, prompting a sudden sharp memory of the streaks of blue paint on her sister’s wrist, from painting clouds on a canvas backdrop. Details she’d forgotten had the effect of erasing the time that had passed, so that she felt seventeen again as she talked to them.

  “So you think you’ll be able to talk them into letting you help?”

  “I hope so, but it’s complicated. What will work in my favor is that they are going to need a very particular skill set as the investigation moves forward.”

  “What skills exactly?”

  The back screen door opened, saving Gin from having to explain that exhumations of long-buried bodies posed particularly difficult challenges at autopsy, as decomposed tissues often disintegrated when they were handled, something she hoped to shield her parents from having to know.

  Richard came out onto the porch, carrying the jacket he’d worn for the service. His shirt was wrinkled and his face bore glints of silver where his five-o’clock shadow was coming in.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Did Lawrence call?” he demanded, not bothering to return the greeting. “On the day of her service, for the love of God.”

  “Richard . . .”

  “No, no one called,” Gin said. “Why don’t you get a glass and join us? It’s been a long day.”

  “I just . . .” Richard shook his head, and turned to go back into the house. Then he changed his mind and turned around again, stumbling against the outdoor dining table. Gin wondered if he had been drinking, just as the smell of strong liquor reached her nostrils.

  Her mother had smelled it, too. She was up out of her chair instantly, watching him warily. “You’re back sooner than we expected.”

  Richard shrugged, then slumped into one of the dining chairs. The jacket landed on the table in a pile. “Gordon offered to take Mom back.”

  Gin exchanged a worried look with her mother. Gordon was her father’s cousin, a timid man who owned several fast-food franchises in Pittsburgh. She hadn’t heard either of her parents mention his name in years. It seemed unlike her father to entrust his elderly mother’s care to someone who was virtually a stranger.

  “But I saw you leaving with her,” Madeleine said.

  “Gordon met us in the parking lot.”

  “But—where did you go? We’ve been home almost an hour.”

  “Had a drink with Spencer and Tom.” Rich
ard’s petulant tone was out of character. With a sickening feeling, Gin wondered if this was evidence of something worse, something deeper between her parents. Naturally tempers were stretched thin now, but had things been deteriorating between them even before the discovery of Lily’s body?

  “Not just one, it looks like,” Madeleine shot back.

  “Well all right, sue me, I’m guilty as charged,” Richard said angrily. “Only in this town, I guess that doesn’t mean much. You can kill people and walk around like you own the whole goddamn joint.”

  “Dad, don’t. Please.”

  He was breathing hard, his shirt sticking to his neck. It was damp under the arms, and Gin wondered where he and the Parkers had gone—somewhere without air conditioning. Maybe they’d had a drink on Spencer’s back deck, although neither was big drinker. Tom was a different story.

  “I’m sorry, Virginia, but someone’s got to say it. Or there won’t be any justice for anyone, the way this is going.”

  “Dad, they’ve barely reopened the investigation. They’ve delayed the autopsy, and they won’t get results back from the lab for another week at least. These things take time.”

  Her father regarded her with unfocused eyes, his jaw working. “Now look here, I don’t know how they do things up in Chicago, but you need to remember this is a small town. Lawrence has been running things for thirty years, and he’s tight with those county detectives. And he’s got a hell of an incentive to keep this covered up.”

  “Dad. Please. I know you have your doubts about Jake. But let the investigation take its course. Lawrence isn’t going anywhere, and I’m sure they’ll be questioning Jake closely.”

  “But you don’t think he did it.” Richard pointed at her with his index finger, shaking his head. “Or else you don’t care. From the first day that he walked into this house, he did nothing but throw my rules in my face and lie to all of us. Virginia, when are you going to open your eyes? What did he tell you, that it was an accident?”

  “Dad!” Gin gasped. She looked to her mother for support, but Madeleine had gone ashen, gripping the arms of her chair.

  “You could never see the truth about him,” Richard said. “None of us could ever say one word about that boy before you’d rush to defend him.”

  “Dad, he was my boyfriend. But that doesn’t make me blind to—”

  “You both need to just stop this,” Madeleine said, finally finding her voice. “Richard, you’re drunk and you’re making a fool of yourself. I’m not going to sit here and listen.”

  Gin looked from one parent to the other. She’d never seen her father like this—not even in the dark days after Lily’s disappearance. He’d always hidden his pain, tried to bury it with his work. Watching her parents battle, Gin felt the pain of loss mix with her guilt over having been absent.

  Madeleine got up and pushed past them, jostling the table and knocking her wine glass over. It fell to the slate floor, smashing into shards, as she raced into the house.

  “Dad,” Gin begged, bending to pick up the biggest pieces of glass. “You’ve got to calm down and let the authorities handle things. Don’t get Mom so upset.”

  Richard awkwardly crouched next to her, clumsily reaching to help. “She just needs to listen,” he said. “You both have got to listen to me.”

  “Let me get this,” Gin said. “You’ll cut yourself.”

  “Nobody listens,” Richard mumbled, holding up fingertips red with blood.

  13

  Gin pulled into the cracked driveway in front of a modest, white-sided ranch house with black shutters. On either side of the flagstone walkway leading up to the front porch, tractor tires had been put into service as planters, overflowing with red and white geraniums. An American flag flew from a polished brass pole. A carved wooden sign on the wall next to the door said, “A Bad Day Fishing Beats a Good Day Workin’.”

  Gin knocked tentatively, wondering if it had been a poor idea to come here, but Lawrence came to the door immediately, peering out over half-moon reading glasses.

  “Ginny-girl,” he said politely, as though he wasn’t surprised to see her the evening after her sister’s memorial, a memorial he hadn’t attended. “Come on in. You’ve caught me in the middle of the crossword, actually, and it’s been kicking my butt.”

  “I’m sorry to barge in on you. I should have called.”

  “This is a tough day for you, I expect,” he said, leading her to the living room, where he offered her a seat on a velvet couch that was faded from the sun.

  Gin took a deep breath as she sat down. The best way to get through this was to be direct and focused. She had often advised medical students on how to deal with the family members of the dead, emphasizing that a matter-of-fact delivery is far preferable to letting one’s own emotions bleed into the exchange.

  “My father is still convinced that Jake had something to do with Lily’s death,” she said, forcing out the words despite knowing they had the power to hurt the old man. “And I have to admit that he makes a . . . reasonable case.”

  Lawrence paused in the act of lowering himself to his recliner. For a moment, he kept his head bowed, a frown tugging at his wrinkles. Finally, he merely nodded as he sat down. “I see.”

  “But you don’t believe it. Please. Help me understand why you’re so sure.”

  “He’s my son. So anything I tell you—why would you believe what I say?”

  Virginia had no answer for that. “I’m not sure. But I still want to hear your thoughts. Anything you can tell me about the investigation. I mean, not the official part but . . . I guess I’m just asking you what you believe in your gut.”

  Lawrence gave her the ghost of a smile. “An unusual request coming from a doctor. If I remember my lessons, the scientific method doesn’t leave a lot of room for intuition.”

  Gin returned the smile, glad for the note of humor to lighten the discussion. “I guess I’m not here as a doctor today. Maybe as a . . .” A sister? A daughter?

  A woman who had reached the age of thirty-six, the years passing like pebbles under the wheels of the job that consumed her, without any idea who she was supposed to be? “A friend,” she finally settled on.

  He nodded. “All right. Well, you have to remember that our unofficial assumption was that she had run away, especially after you and your mom figured out that some of her things were missing.”

  “Her old backpack,” Gin recalled. “And a couple of changes of clothes. But we didn’t even notice that for a few days. And Mom insisted that she could have left them at a friend’s house, or lost them somewhere—she was constantly losing things.”

  “Yes, but from our perspective—let’s just say that the missing items confirmed our initial assumption, that Lily had taken off intentionally. Even out here in the sticks, we’d seen plenty of runaways over the years. Even kids from nice families.”

  “I know,” Gin said. “I can see how you would have reached that conclusion. Especially because it’s what everyone wanted to believe.”

  “But now we need to take a fresh look at everything. Let’s start with who could have done it. Have you come up with your own list?”

  “I’ve . . . had some ideas,” Gin said carefully, not wanting to admit that the question had kept her up in the middle of the night ever since she’d learned Lily had been found.

  “It’s just me and you here, Virginia, we’re just talking. Tell you what. Would it help for us to go over the whole sequence of events again, walk it through together? This old, creaky brain and your sharp insights?”

  Gin felt her tight muscles relax fractionally in the face of his encouragement. “I’d like that,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to hear myself think sometimes, over at Mom and Dad’s.”

  “Well, sweetheart, we’ve got all the time in the world. At least until this old codger falls asleep in his chair.” He chuckled. “Happens more often than I’d like to admit.”

  Don’t let your guard down, Gin cautioned herself, despite feel
ing at ease for the first time since coming back into town; Lawrence hadn’t risen to chief in this town by being as harmless as he let people believe. He had a powerful reason to convince her of Jake’s innocence—and she had an equally compelling reason to dig out the truth, no matter whose guilt it revealed. So she would do well to remember their interests weren’t necessarily aligned.

  “All right,” she said carefully. “Well, in the days leading up to Lily’s disappearance, I remember that she was acting . . . different. She was moody, emotional, more unpredictable than usual.” She thought of telling Lawrence about finding her sister sobbing in the shower, and decided against it; it didn’t change any of the other facts. “And she was definitely spending more time with Jake. Before that, we were all together a lot, of course. But for the first time, I’d see them off together, just the two of them, sitting up on the trail above the creek talking. Or she’d go along with him in the truck to get sandwiches while the rest of us stayed back.”

  Lawrence frowned, tugging at the collar of his ancient western shirt, but said nothing.

  “Did he say anything to you?” she asked. “About Lily? About . . .” She felt her heart twist at the thought, but this was the time for truth, the time to lay it all out. “Him and me? Was he, you know, unhappy? Getting ready to break up with me?”

  Already Lawrence was shaking his head. “I didn’t know anything about any of that. I promise you, Ginny-girl, Jake never said anything about being unhappy with you, or fighting with you. I mean, I’m just an old thick-skulled dolt when it comes to women, but to hear my son talk, the two of you were in it for the long haul.” He sighed and ran an age-spotted hand through what was left of his hair. “He was crazy about you, my boy was.”

  Gin felt the tug of his words, the longing to believe that fantasy of young love—and pushed back against it. “But he was also eighteen. Come on, Lawrence, we were just kids. I didn’t know my own mind back then either, didn’t have the faintest idea what love was.” Another lie, her conscience chided her; she ignored it and spoke more forcefully than she intended. “What about that morning? Did he say anything, do anything, out of the ordinary?”