Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  Tess took the mug in both hands. The coffee was thick and strong and well-cooked and lukewarm, just like it had come out of some brown-stained glass-bottomed industrial coffee carafe in any truck-stop diner. She gulped it down and concentrated on the weight of it sliding into her.

  She stopped long enough to breathe. “Being in this kitchen again makes me think of your grandmother and her legendary gingersnaps.”

  “Nothing is as good as Nana’s gingersnaps. I swear we ate half the dough whenever she made them.”

  “Have you made any cookies with that runaway of yours?”

  Tess watched over the rim of her cup as Riley blinked. Riley opened her mouth and then shut it just as quickly. Her old friend had a face as transparent as glass. Riley should never play poker for money.

  Tess said, “You seriously thought I wouldn’t know?”

  “Not unless you’re psychic. You haven’t left your room since you arrived yesterday afternoon.”

  “Runaways give off a vibe.” Tess pressed the coffee mug against her thigh, grateful for the caffeine hit just starting to dull the pain in her head. “Skinny kid, dirty clothes, battered sneakers. No parents in the vicinity. A rucksack she grabbed when I eyeballed her. She answered my questions with one syllable. She kept ducking her head. Remind you of anybody?”

  “About six of my nephews.”

  “I drive trucks. I come upon runaways all the time hitching on the road and in the parking lots of roadside diners. You start to sniff them out after a while. How did this girl wind up crashing in Camp Kwenback?”

  Riley shrugged and leaned against the sink. “I caught her in the generator shed yesterday, when she was trying to find shelter from the rain. I lured her into my clutches with the offer of a warm fire and hot chocolate. If I had to guess by the bug bites on her legs and the clothes I found drying in the farthest cabin, I’d say she’d been hanging around town since the end of blackfly season.”

  Tess feigned surprise, though she knew it had been at least two weeks since Sadie had gone silent on social media. “She’s not a local?”

  “No.”

  “But you checked for alerts, right?” Tess took a sip of coffee, leaning back on her other hand. “Missing children websites, that kind of thing?”

  Riley grabbed a dishtowel and did her best to rub a layer of skin off her hands, watching the process as if she had money on the outcome.

  “Oooookay,” Tess said, trying to keep her voice light, like this wasn’t any real concern of hers. “I’m just thinking about her frantic parents.”

  “She told me that she doesn’t have any.”

  “Oh, I’m sure no runaway has ever said that.”

  “She said they died in a car accident.” Riley tossed the dishtowel aside, opened a cabinet, and grabbed a canister of coffee. “And yes, I believe her.”

  “Having no parents doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a guardian. She may have grandparents, aunts, even foster parents—”

  “I’ve considered all that.” Riley swiftly shoveled ground coffee into the filter.

  “Have you considered checking those skinny arms for track marks?”

  “Oh for goodness sake, Tess, she’s not a junkie. She’s here because she’s looking for her birth mother.”

  Tess started. She grabbed the counter for stability and felt the grit of embedded flour under the edge. Tess hadn’t expected Sadie to confess her real motives to Riley. That made Tess’s situation in Pine Lake all the more difficult.

  “She owns a Camp Kwenback towel,” Riley explained, as she closed the coffeemaker and hit the On button. “She told me that she was wrapped in it when her adoptive parents picked her up from the hospital.”

  Tess pinched the bridge of her nose again, even though the migraine had ebbed, because the action would hide her face.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Riley said, “but just think of what that kid had to do to trace the logo to this place.”

  Tess didn’t have to think. She knew. Sadie must have found a service that did searches for trademarks and logos. Sadie had saved up money somehow, paid for the search. Sadie had posted something mysterious a couple of months ago about finding what she’d been looking for. Oh, she was a smart one, her daughter. Knowing herself and Sadie’s bastard of a father, Tess wondered where the brains came from.

  Tess willed the throbbing behind her eye to ease. “So you’re a redhead, Riley,” she said lightly. “Got any secrets to confess?”

  “What?”

  “With that hair, you could pass as her mother easily.”

  “No, no, no way, no how.” Riley raised both her palms and leaned back against the counter. “I’ve never had any kids. And I have a soon-to-be-ex-husband to vouch for the fact that I never intend to have any.”

  That hung in the air for a moment, a confession of a different sort. Tess paused, debated whether to follow up on it, and then seeing how Riley looked away, Tess chose instead to stay on track.

  “Okay, then,” Tess said. “I have to assume your runaway came here because she knows you’re an adoptee, too.”

  “No, I told you, there was a towel—”

  “Easily filched.”

  “—and she didn’t know I was adopted. She was surprised when I told her.”

  “It’s a small town, Riley. She’s had a couple of weeks to ask around, right? Heck, five minutes in one of the booths at Josey’s and any stranger would know everyone’s business, including yours.”

  “C’mon, Tess. Who’s gossiping about me being adopted?”

  “Fair enough. I’m just saying it’s quite a coincidence.” Tess raised her hand to gesture to the solid roof, the kitchen full of food. “Being an adoptee would make you sympathetic to her situation. It’d make you more willing to help, give her place to crash, whatever. All it would take is a sob story about dead parents and the theft of a single towel.”

  Riley blinked, nonplussed. “You’re making it sound like Sadie’s some kind of manipulator.”

  “On the street, kids learn how to hustle. Real fast.” Tess, sensing Riley’s hesitation, took the chance to press a little harder. “You know Sadie’s last name. Right?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she came from?”

  “No.”

  “Do the authorities know she’s here?”

  Riley crossed her arms as the coffeepot began to gurgle behind her, looking around the room as if seeking spiderwebs in the ceiling corners. “The girl is just looking for her mother. She needs a couple of days to do some research. Once she realizes that her birth mother hasn’t been hanging around for the past fourteen years, waiting for her to show up, I’m sure she’ll go back to where she came from.”

  “Riley, did you ever go searching for your own birth mother?”

  Riley turned so pale so fast that Tess felt a kick of guilt. She’d gone too far. Tess didn’t have the right to ask that kind of question.

  Tess raised a hand in apology. “Hey, look, I’m—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, really, it’s none of my business and—”

  “I did look for her.” Riley rocked against the counter. “It didn’t turn out well.”

  Riley stared at the kitchen floor, but Tess could tell Riley wasn’t seeing the odd-size gray slate tiles.

  “I’m sorry.” Even as she spoke, Tess knew she had to use this unexpected vulnerability for Sadie’s sake. “Did you and Sadie talk about that? About how a search for a birth mother could go wrong?”

  Tess hoped the terror of the idea didn’t skitter across her own face as violently as it now skittered across Riley’s.

  “We discussed it. A little.” Riley swiveled against the counter, flipped open a cabinet, and pulled down another mug. “So,” she said, her voice firm, “you think I should just throw this girl out.”

  “Runaways mean trouble.”

  “I remember a time when everyone told me that you were trouble.”

  “Hell, I was trouble.”

>   “Not while you were here eating gingersnaps.”

  That much was true. And she would have loved to have stayed here, instead of crawling back to the dirty house in Cannery Row where her mother promised to get better and then pretended she wasn’t drinking cheap vodka for breakfast.

  Sometimes loyalty was a bitch.

  “I was trouble, yeah,” Tess agreed, “but Bud and Mary knew my name, where I came from, and why I was here, and so did the cops. But you,” she said, pointing a finger in her direction, “are currently harboring a minor—a stranger—a runaway. It could get you in loads of hot water.”

  “Getting in trouble might be a nice change from following the straight and narrow path and disappointing everybody, anyway. And I can’t exactly envision a Pine Lake police officer breaking down the door to slap handcuffs on Sadie or me.”

  Tess had seen Officer Rodriguez break a door down in the Cannery. She’d seen him come busting through and then seize her by the coat, throw her against the wall, and slap a cold set of handcuffs across her wrists. She’d had a bruise on her cheek for weeks.

  “Unfortunately, it could happen.” Tess figured if you’re always staying on the right side of the law, you don’t learn these things. “Depending on what this Sadie’s real story is, her guardians could send the cops here and charge you with endangering a minor, even kidnapping.”

  “For giving a kid hot chocolate, a library card, and the loan of a bike?”

  “Sounds like aiding and abetting, or it would, in the hands of any two-bit lawyer.”

  “I just keep thinking,” Riley said, “that maybe Sadie is running away from a bad home life. Maybe she needs sanctuary. Like you did.”

  “All the more reason to get this kid the help she needs right now, before she learns how to jump railway cars, beg for change, and hustle more soft-hearted Good Samaritans like you, Riley Cross.”

  Riley frowned at her. “I can’t believe I’m hearing you say all this.”

  “I’ve learned a lot from my bad choices. The juvenile delinquent you remember from Pine Lake is long gone.”

  “So much so that Tess Hendrick advocates for handing a runaway over to the police?”

  Tess felt the twitch in her jaw, the one thing she couldn’t suppress. She remembered her own wayward travels: Cleveland in the summer, Chicago in the early fall, St. Louis in the winter, back north in the spring, every day the same—wake up, beg, buy food, smoke, hang out, dodge the cops, move on. And she thought, yes, yes, she’d do anything—quit her job, drive eighteen-hundred miles, even call the cops on her daughter—to prevent Sadie from going down that same road.

  She’d do anything except tell Sadie the truth.

  “Hey, if you can get your runaway to go home without calling the authorities, that’d be great,” Tess said, forcing her stiff shoulder muscles to mimic a careless shrug. “But knowing what I do about the mind-set of a rebellious teenager, I don’t think you’ll have much luck with that.”

  Riley chewed on her lower lip. Tess knew she was wavering. So she nudged herself off the butcher-block table, strode across the kitchen, and took the phone receiver off the wall. It was tethered, so she stretched it to the end of its springy cord. “You want me to do it? If I make the call, then Sadie can’t blame you.”

  Tess hesitated as she heard a hiss from nearby. She glanced at the kitchen door, now rocking gently on its hinges. Riley must have heard it, too, because she clattered her coffee cup on the counter and shot over to the window by the sink.

  Riley said, “Damn it.”

  “What?”

  “She heard you.” Riley pushed past her. “She’s running.”

  Chapter Seven

  Sadie just ran.

  She flew into the pine woods. She kept her eyes on the ground, watching the needles she was kicking up, seeing her half-tied laces, the leaf that had gotten stuck between the rubber sole where it separated from the canvas. The word police rang in her ears.

  The first time she saw the police she’d been sitting in Izzy’s house in her penguin pajamas watching Japanese cartoons. Her mom and dad hadn’t picked her up that morning like they’d said they were going to. She’d liked staying at Izzy’s house, which was messy in a pillows-on-the-floor kind of way, but she’d spent a whole weekend there and Izzy’s brother was annoying and Sadie really wanted to go home. When the doorbell rang, she’d leaped up to greet them—but her parents weren’t there. Instead, two policemen blocked out the sunshine, talking to Izzy’s mom, and then those two policemen looked at her.

  She’d had a box of cereal in her hand, she remembered, and then suddenly it wasn’t in her hand and little oat pieces pinged and bounced and scattered all over the hall. Later—much later—she’d found a heart-shaped marshmallow in the pocket of her pajamas, sticky and covered with lint.

  Now Sadie rounded a tree to catch her breath and squeeze the memory away. She’d made it to the marshy part of the lake near the beaver dam. She realized she should have taken the bike. She could have gotten away faster. That was the problem with panicking. You get that squishy feeling in the middle of your gut, like the floor just disappeared, and then your stomach is in your throat and the two bagels and orange juice with it.

  Think.

  She bent in two to ease the pain shooting between her ribs. Her backpack shifted, tugging her tank top. She told herself she had been lucky. If she hadn’t decided to go back to the lodge before leaving for the library, to dump out the two survival books in her backpack and stash them in her room at Camp Kwenback, she would have never heard Riley and her friend talking about her in the kitchen.

  That Tess-woman had been doing most of the talking. It was hard to believe that skinny, tatted-up, hard-faced woman was a friend of Riley’s. She looked like she had a getaway motorcycle idling outside. Or a pack of lock picks in her back pocket. Sadie hadn’t liked the way that woman skewered her with one look from under those silly bangs. Social workers gave her that kind of piercing look. Like they could, with one glance, see right through Sadie’s head to all the lies she’d worked hard to keep hidden.

  She leaned over even further. Her heart was battering the inside of her chest. One thing was for sure: No way, no way was she going to the police. She knew what would happen then. They’d put her in a room and talk to her—talk, talk, talk—and then send in social workers who knew how to get information out of you like they had psychic powers. You go in and they ask questions about your whole family, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, neighbors, and all that information comes right up to the front of your brain whether you want to tell them or not. And if you don’t tell them what they want to know, then they’ve got to find another way to get rid of you, so the next thing you know, you’re on your way to some group foster home. Then you’re sleeping in the lower bunk while the kid on the top tells you he’s got a dead gerbil in his pocket that he stabbed with a stolen knife.

  A branch cracked. She straightened like a shot. Peering around the tree, she squinted through the woods to see a woman jogging in her direction. The sun hit the woman’s hair, and that’s when Sadie knew it was Riley.

  “Sadie, I know you’re out here.”

  Riley approached closer, close enough that Sadie could see she was sweeping the whole forest with her gaze. Sadie fumbled for the binoculars around her neck and scanned the woods behind Riley, looking for a herd of blue uniforms, seeing nothing but trees.

  Riley said, “I just want to talk, okay? Just talk.”

  Talk, talk, talk.

  Sadie dropped the binoculars to her chest and stepped out from around the tree. “I’m not hanging around here if you plan to call the police.”

  Riley’s whole face softened. “I’m so glad you’re still here.”

  “For now.” Sadie looked Riley straight in the face because grown-ups always thought you were telling the truth when you did. “All that stuff your friend was saying—she’s wrong. There is no one who cares enough about me to show up, drag me away, and charge you
with endangering or kidnapping or abetting or any of those other stupid things that Tess-woman said.”

  That woman was messing everything up. And Sadie was so close. Just a few more days and maybe Sadie would have found someone in the high school yearbooks whose face looked like hers. A few more days and maybe she would have found the one woman in the world who would give a damn.

  “Try to understand.” Riley wandered toward a fallen log and sat down. “Tess got a shock today when she saw you. You’re like a ghost from her past. She was a runaway, too. She ended up right here in Camp Kwenback, sleeping in one of those outdoor cabins.”

  “You told me that you knew her from high school.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  Sadie rolled her eyes. Little tiny town with itty bitty problems. “It’s not ‘running away’ if you end up a few houses over.”

  “Those two trips were tests. Later she took off for good. That’s why she looks like she eats nails for breakfast.”

  “Ex-runaway, ex-con, I don’t really care who she is. She shouldn’t be sticking her nose in this.”

  “That’s true. But for some reason, people stick their noses in my business all the time.” Riley squinted off in the distance. “And I can’t seem to help myself—I always listen. Which is why one day I woke up and realized I was living in an apartment that someone else decorated, working a job that I hated, and married to a man I couldn’t possibly make happy. Go figure.”

  Sadie’s jaw hardened. She didn’t need the sticky mess of someone else’s problems. She had plenty of her own. “Well, I can take care of myself, as long as the police aren’t interfering.”

  “Good for you. Me, I seem to give off a perfume of desperation. But I’m trying to change that.”

  “So are you going to call the cops on me or what?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Sadie’s heart leaped. “What about your Tess-friend?”

  “Tess will keep her mouth shut if I ask her to. She owes me.”

  “You’re not worried about being arrested if you let me stay?”

  “Not if you tell me the truth.”

  Sadie took a step back, hesitating. “I never lied to you.”