Damian climbed the steps. “Please. You gotta tell me what’s going on with my sister.”
The officer took an eternity reading his license before handing it back. “I’m Officer Burdick.” He shook Damian’s hand in introduction and with the other pushed the door open behind him. “My partner’s inside taking your mother’s statement.”
“How is she?”
“Holding up.”
“And Dinah?” He almost couldn’t ask, didn’t want to hear the response.
“We’ve issued an Amber Alert and closed the roads out of town.”
“Mom?” Damian barreled down the hallway. Every lamp in the house burned, filling the small rooms with brash, unnatural light. In the living room, an end table lay on its side with magazines scattered across the carpet. Broken glass crunched under his feet.
Jesus Christ. The last six years, all he’d worried about was this, T.J. tracing them to New York, to Pine Point, and hurting his mother and sister. He’d been so careful. He’d locked the doors and lain awake at night tense with listening. He’d warned his mother again and again. Yet somehow, T.J. had broken through the cracks of their life anyway.
Hannah sat at the kitchen table with another police officer opposite her. He looked to be twenty-five at the most, and Damian wondered what kind of experience the kid had. Writing a few traffic tickets? Checking for underage drinkers at the town bars? Pulling a drunken husband off his wife? He couldn’t imagine anyone in Pine Point was equipped to deal with a kidnapping. He sure as hell wasn’t.
The baby-faced kid with the dark blond crew cut stood and offered his hand. He spoke in the same clipped tone as his partner on the porch. “Mornin’, sir. My name’s Officer Wallace.”
Damian didn’t answer. “Are you okay?” He hugged Hannah’s thin shoulders and tried to stop them from shaking.
She remained silent. A crumpled tissue in her hands twirled around and around her fingers until it shredded and fell to her lap. Her left cheek, red and swollen, was beginning to purple. Tears tracked a path to her chin and dripped off onto the table.
Damian forced himself to pull open a drawer and find a frayed towel. He dumped some ice cubes into it and wrapped it closed at both ends, the way he had so many times in the past. Sick. I’m going to be sick. “Mom?” Frightened, he leaned down and stared into the depths of her gaze. He held the towel to her bruised cheek and stroked the back of her hair with one hand.
“Mom? I’m right here.”
After a long minute, Hannah blinked, and her eyes readjusted to the light. Her head leaned into his touch, seeking comfort. Pupils swelled and saw him. “Damian.” The word fell from her mouth and bounced onto the floor, void of expression. With an unsteady hand, she reached up and took the makeshift ice pack from him.
“She hasn’t said too much since we arrived,” Officer Wallace began, “but she was able to give me a brief statement.” He flipped the pages of a small spiral notebook. “She was in the kitchen making breakfast, heard something out back of the house…” He frowned at the notepad. “When she looked out the window, she saw the suspect. She attempted to secure the door—”
“It was unlocked?” How many times had he told his mother to keep the deadbolt fastened? Not that it mattered. T.J. could have broken it off with one hand.
“I’m not sure if it was locked or not,” the officer answered in a neutral tone.
Not judging, Damian thought, just doing his job. Gathering and reporting the facts.
The man kept his face down and continued to read. “She attempted to secure the door, but the intruder forced it open before she could. He threatened to hurt her if she didn’t tell him where Dinah was, and when she didn’t—”
Good girl.
“—he pushed her out of the way and went through the house looking for the girl. Did some damage in the living room and hallway—”
“I saw.”
Officer Wallace cleared his throat. “He found Dinah upstairs in her bedroom and carried her out to the car. According to your mother, she appeared to be a little confused but not frightened. Happened approximately…” he looked at his watch, “…forty-five minutes ago.” He closed the notepad.
Tears continued to drip down his mother’s face, and every so often she raised a hand to wipe them. Under the kitchen lights, the moisture on her fingernails gleamed, like an odd manicure painted by grief.
“I’m sorry.” She pressed the towel to her cheek with a weary hand.
“Don’t you dare apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not your fault.” It’s mine. I wasn’t here to stop him. Enraged, guilty, helpless with grief, he wanted to cut his own throat, tear out his hair, run to the roof and jump off into blackness, as if the pain would somehow bring back his sister and punish him for his negligence all at once. He couldn’t believe he’d been careless enough to spend the night at Summer’s.
Again he heard her confession that she’d given T.J. directions. It took all his strength not to punch the nearest solid surface. I trusted her. Okay, maybe she hadn’t known who T.J. was. But shouldn’t she have suspected something? Where the hell was woman’s intuition at a time like that?
“What are we doing?” he demanded. “What can I do?”
The cop rested his hands on an ample belly. “Got two patrol cars out in town now. We’ve notified every department between here and Albany to the east, Syracuse to the west.” He cleared his throat. “If you can find a recent picture of your sister, that would help. Not much else you can do except wait.”
Damian found some extra copies of Dinah’s school picture and handed three to the officer. Then he trudged to the sink and splashed water on his face. His fists opened and closed. Staring out the window, he pictured T.J. there, waiting in the shadows of the lawn, creeping around the house to find the weak spot. Like a fox sniffing out his prey. He brought a hand close to his mouth and then retched. His mother turned away, and the cop cleared his throat. Damian retched again, turned on the water to rinse it away and wept.
Ten minutes passed. Twenty. He paced around the first floor like a jaguar. Restless. Angry. Needing out. Hannah picked up a sponge and circled it over the kitchen counter in a sweeping motion, again and again, her eyes somewhere beyond the house.
The three of them waited, silent, as the minutes marched by. The clock on the stove read six fifty. Six fifty-five. Seven o’clock. Hannah returned to her seat at the table. Damian continued to pace, cracking his knuckles and staring from the refrigerator to the countertops to his mother and back again. The policeman’s radio crackled with static.
Suddenly the cop who’d been watching the front door strode into the room. “We have a lead.”
Hannah rose with a start, the napkin shredded to soggy confetti in her lap. “Tell me,” she said, her voice clear and steady. Her fingers pinched the table and she swayed on her feet. “Tell me you found my daughter.”
Damian fought to keep his heart from leaping out of his chest. No bad news, it thudded. No bad news. If he’s done something to Dinah, I’ll rip every limb from his body.
“Apparently the kidnapper called the police station a few minutes ago. Says he wants guaranteed full custody of the girl.” He cleared his throat. “We weren’t able to get a trace on the call. But ah—right now he’s considered armed and dangerous. From what he said, there’s a possibility he has a weapon of some sort.”
Hannah’s face lost all color. “He has a gun?”
“We don’t know that,” Officer Burdick responded. “Ma’am, we have our best negotiator waiting for him to call back. Odds are, if your ex-husband really wants custody of his daughter, he’s not gonna do anything to hurt her.”
“But you don’t know that for sure,” Damian said. Fear choked him. He knew T.J. better than these men did. He knew what the bastard was capable of.
“No,” the policeman said. “We don’t.”
<
br /> Chapter Nineteen
“Did you hear about Dinah?” Summer closed the ambulance corps’ break room door. She’d come straight here as soon as the sun crested the hills, unable to think of anything else. When she walked in the front entrance, the kid sitting behind the desk simply pointed to where Gabe waited in the back.
He nodded. “A few minutes ago, on the scanner. I’m sorry.”
She rubbed away more tears. “How can this happen? Here in Pine Point—how?”
“I don’t know.” He sat on the arm of a chair and cracked his knuckles. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. “Is that why you came? To see if I could help? I don’t know if I can. I mean, I’ll try, see if maybe—”
“No.” She shook her head. “I w-wanted to tell you—that I remembered. Just this morning.” She drew in a deep breath. “I remember what happened the night my brother died.” She looked straight at him. “You lied.”
Gabe said nothing.
“You told them you were driving the night of the accident.”
He waited an eternity before answering. “Yes.”
“But why?” She could barely breathe. “Why would you do that?”
He sank onto the couch in the center of the room. “It’s hard to explain.”
After a minute, she sat beside him. Her fingers brushed his. “You let me drive because you were drinking. And because I wanted to.”
His chin dipped in acknowledgement.
“I didn’t have a license.” She recalled the arguments with her father over that. Too dangerous, he’d say. You don’t need to learn. Not until you’re eighteen. I’ll take you wherever you need to go.
She said the next words quietly, piecing them together as she went, unearthing her own history though it pained her with every breath. “You were at a party. At the Hadleys’.”
“Only until you got off work.”
“I know.” She’d never suspected Gabe of cheating on her, and she didn’t now. “We didn’t go to the drive-in?” That was the only part that remained fuzzy.
“We did, but it was crowded. So we left. It was late, anyway, and Donnie was supposed to be home—”
Summer pressed her hand on top of his. She remembered the rest. Taking the keys from Gabe when she smelled beer on his breath. Insisting she drive his car. Thinking the few times her father had let her practice were enough.
But with her teenage crush beside her, the warmth and excitement of the night and the bright headlights at the intersection—it had all confused and distracted her. “I should have stopped.” There wasn’t a sign in her direction, just a flashing yellow light, but she should have stopped anyway. She should have known; it was a dangerous crossing, and people blew through it all the time.
“Oh, God. Wait—what’s—why isn’t that car stopping? Gabe?”
Her foot moved from the gas pedal to the brake, but not in time. A flash in the rearview mirror, her brother’s pale face, flew across the periphery of her vision. Exploding metal. Screaming tires. An impact that shook every tooth in her head.
Then nothing at all.
“How could you tell them that?” She sobbed. “Why?”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
She let herself lean against him and bear the weight of her head and shoulders. Her eyes closed, and she began to shake with silent sobs. Of course it was.
Gabe put an arm around her. “Summer, Mr. Hartwell ran the red in the other direction. He had a stop. You had a yield. Plus he’d been drinking, was bombed out of his mind. Everyone knew that.”
She couldn’t answer. That was why we rushed to get out of the car. Gabe hadn’t wanted anyone to see that she was driving. She, the one without a license. She’d been at the wheel the night her brother died. Not Gabe. Pinpricks of light behind her eyes turned to black.
“Son, come over here, please. Just have a couple of questions to ask you…”
As the cop turned his back, Gabe peeled her fingers open and pried the car keys from Summer’s sweaty palm.
“B-but…you went to jail for me.”
Gabe sighed, and for the first time, she heard sadness in his voice. “Well, I thought Hartwell was gonna make it. Thought they’d charge him. I never guessed…”
“That they’d charge you instead?”
She felt him nod against her cheek. With one arm around her, he sat motionless.
“Why didn’t you just tell them the truth?” She whispered the words into his shirtfront.
He didn’t have to answer. She could tell by the pulse in the hand that touched her cheek, and in the way his chest heaved with the weight of the last ten years.
“It was the right thing to do, Summer,” Gabe said after a long time. His voice was rough. “Your dad—he lost his son that night. I didn’t want him to lose his daughter too.”
* * * * *
Summer sat on a stone bench in the town park long after Gabe had left for a call in Silver Valley.
“I didn’t want him to lose his daughter too…”
His daughter. Like Dinah. Summer pressed one hand against her mouth. What if another child was about to die in Pine Point? They hadn’t heard anything in the hour she’d stayed at the ambulance corps. No news of Dinah, good or bad, had crackled over the police scanner.
The bench bit into the backs of her legs. An ant crawled over her toe and continued on to climb a blade of grass. She didn’t move. If she did, she thought she might break. She couldn’t go back to the house. She could barely remain upright. The sun burned the back of her neck, but she didn’t care. She was surprised she could still feel anything at all. A horn beeped somewhere over on Main Street. She didn’t look up. Instead she studied the veins on the backs of her hands and the blood that ran through them.
So much blood that night…
Now that she’d cracked open that part of her memory, it seemed the details wouldn’t stop coming. Her brother’s Yankees hat sitting astride the double line in the road. The police sirens screaming in her ears. The tears that wet her shirtfront. A single stoplight flashing red one way, yellow the other, in a macabre smear of color that lit up the sky. The blood on her hands and Gabe’s face, the shattered glass sprayed everywhere she looked.
How did I forget?
She turned her hands slightly and watched the shadows they cast on the pavement. It was funny, the way the mind worked. If she hadn’t forgotten, she probably would have gone mad.
It wasn’t your fault.
Her head swung back and forth as she silently answered Gabe’s reassurance. It was, of course. Gabe might not have avoided the accident if he’d been driving, but then again, he might have. He would certainly have slowed at the yellow light. And he might have paid better attention. He might have seen the other car, braked sooner, or swerved into the safety of the shoulder. Or he might not have.
The historian in her whispered something else. You can study every last detail, her favorite college professor had told a full lecture hall. You can put all the pieces of an artifact back together. You can match up all the edges, mend the lines until they become invisible, but you still won’t know it all. You will never be able to step back with both feet to that moment of creation and truly relive it. We can only work with the knowledge we have now. We can only imagine.
And so, Summer had made a life out of imagining. She’d spent hours putting together the pieces of other people’s lives. She’d become fascinated with unearthing clues and determined to write stories that would decipher them. She lived the museum, loved it, made it the career that consumed her. Until now. Until she was faced with her own pieces. Unlike all the rest of history, she didn’t have to conjure any part of this story; she knew it front to back and beginning to end.
After a long time, she opened her eyes. Every part of her felt as though it weighed a hundred pounds—her head, her eyelids, her hands, and her feet when s
he tried to make them work. It took her two tries to remain standing.
She might have ruined her relationship with Damian, she might have endangered Dinah’s welfare, but one thing was simple enough: she couldn’t let the residents of Pine Point go on thinking Gabe had killed her brother. She had to make that right, anyway.
* * * * *
Summer walked the half-mile from the ambulance corps to downtown Pine Point. Zeb’s Diner had been a fixture on Main Street for as long as she could remember, and as she crossed to it, she gazed with nostalgia at its red-and-white striped awnings. How many heartaches had she and Rachael nursed here? How much gossip had they shared? She hadn’t stepped foot inside the place for ten years, yet the jukebox sat against the same wall, and the brightly lit menu hung above the same shiny counter. Even the color scheme remained identical—turquoise leatherette booths with silver chrome molding and a black-and-white checkerboard floor. Old photos of 1920s celebrities hung at crooked angles on the wall.
She met Rachael at a back booth and spilled the entire story in a matter of minutes. “…and so thanks for coming.”
Rachael fished a stack of napkins from the dented dispenser and handed them over. “My dad told me,” she said as Summer started to cry. “He’s got the scanner turned on. Police from here to Silver Valley have all the roads blocked. They’ll find the guy.”
Summer blew her nose. “What if they don’t?”
“Don’t say that. They will.”
She reached for a menu. She wasn’t hungry, but she needed to distract herself. And she needed something to hold onto.
“I know you’re upset,” Rachael said around her straw, “but it’s not like it’s your fault. The guy sounds like a total psycho.”
Summer choked. “Actually, I think it might be. My fault, I mean.”
The straw dropped from Rachael’s mouth. “What do you mean? How?”
“I gave him directions to their house.”
“What?”
She told the story as quickly as she could.
“Stop it,” Rachael said before she had finished. She shook her head. “You told him how to get to County Route 78? That’s it? That’s what you’re beating yourself up about?”
Summer's Song: Pine Point, Book 1 Page 17