Riley didn’t bite. Tess pulled a face. Wise-ass remarks didn’t do any good deflecting curiosity if the recipient didn’t react.
“Yesterday I was convinced I’d go back,” Tess heard herself saying, “but now I’ve got a problem. I’ve worked as a big-rig driver for so long that all the High Plains truckers know me. It’s a career; it pays a decent wage. But it means I spend most of my nights sleeping in my cab. The closest thing I have to a home is temporary housing I rent during the downtimes. The most stable thing in my life is a drop-box in Bismarck.”
“Do you love the job?”
Tess thought about dragging twenty-foot hoses, climbing the spindly steel catwalks in a sweaty fireproof suit, the High Plains winds buffeting her truck as she blinked, bleary-eyed, down flat highways, shoveling out in sub-zero weather during a snowstorm.
She said, “Let’s just say it keeps me in tats and jeans.”
“Then quit.”
“Just like that.”
“It’s incredible how it feels,” Riley said, “to leave a job you don’t love. I think it’s the one decision I’ve made that I haven’t once regretted.”
“Starvation might be an issue.”
“Yeah, I’ve pretty much been living on a large helping of guilt with a side of failed expectations. That’s what my mother has been serving up anyway.”
“Hey, a silver lining—that’s one of the few family dysfunctions I managed to avoid.”
“You want it? You know, just to complete your set?”
Tess laughed, and she heard Riley laughing, too, and the combination was a singular, striking harmony.
Tess found herself blinking. “The thing is,” she said, clearing her throat, “it’s not a good time to be a jobless high school graduate these days. And I’d need a job if I were to—”
The words stuck in her throat. She couldn’t believe what she was about to say. She felt like she’d tiptoed into a minefield she’d planted for herself.
Riley’s voice was as light as air. “You’re pretty good with your hands, Tess. I suspect there’s always work for someone who can use a hammer and a saw.”
Tess blurted, “Did you know I used to raise chickens?”
“Get out.”
“My best broody hen was a Golden Laced Wyandotte. She’d do a staggered hatch of six eggs at a time and not lose a single one of them.” She had no idea why she was telling Riley all this. “The Buff Orpington was pretty good, too, a nice producer.”
“I think I just experienced a seizure because I didn’t understand any of that.”
“I’m talking hen breeds. We preferred the Silkies. We’d have dozens of fresh eggs every day of the week. We sold the ones we didn’t eat ourselves.”
“You really did live on a farm in Kansas.”
“I also had an organic garden covered in chicken wire to keep out the critters. In season I’d pick peas in the morning, shell them in the afternoon, steam them, and serve them to Callahan at night when he came home from the fields.” Tess snorted a laugh. “Isn’t that a pretty picture.”
And it was, for a little while, idyllic and calm, except she always felt like it was somebody else’s picture and she was just taking up space in the frame.
“I hate to break it to you,” Riley said hesitantly, “but we’re not in Kansas anymore. I’m not sure you could raise chickens for a living around here.”
“No, no.” Tess’s sandals scuffed on the graveled path. “The point I’m trying to make is that domesticity was an experiment of mine. Eighteen months of matrimony ended when that farmhouse all but burned to the ground.”
“I’m so sorry, Tess.”
Tess swallowed a breath. She’d expected Riley to ask if she’d done it. She’d even gone tense, waiting for that verbal shiv between the ribs. After all, Riley was present in the crowd all those years ago when Tess, on a dare, set the insides of a metal garbage bin on fire. But Riley hadn’t asked that question, and now the silence was like a ringing in her ears.
“I know it was my fault, any way you look at it.” That night, she’d built up a head of fury that gave off more heat than the red tips of the cigarettes still smoldering when she’d fallen asleep on the couch. “Let’s just say there’s a good reason I don’t smoke anymore.”
“I’m glad of that, though I’m sorry—”
“Last night,” Tess interrupted, not wanting to hear another murmur of sympathy, “after our talk, all I could think about was those months in Kansas. Settling down with Callahan should have been wonderful. And it was, for a while. But raised the way I was, Riley, growing up in Cannery Row with my mother…I’m just not so sure I can ever live any kind of normal domestic life.”
“But,” Riley said, mounting the stairs of the porch, “you spent the night in your car thinking about it, didn’t you?”
Tess leaned against the stair railing, feeling like she was back in the hospital again, chewing over the same arguments. She remembered holding her wispy-haired baby girl, swaddling her in soft cotton blankets, telling the adoption counselor she’d changed her mind, she wanted to keep her daughter; there must be a way she could keep her. The adoption counselor asked her how she intended to support the child, where she’d live, how she’d work, and who would watch the baby while she worked, how she would pay for diapers, formula, clothes, a crib, toys…and Tess remembered tensing up as the questions came at her. Sadie must have felt it, too, because she’d started crying. Tess jiggled her, trying to get her to stop, and then the nurse marched in. The nurse looked at her and the counselor looked at her—flat eyes, knowing eyes, weary eyes—and Tess, exhausted, hormonal, shattered, did what she was expected to do. She handed Sadie into more experienced hands, knowing she could never be any kind of decent mother.
Tess took a deep breath, feeling the cool morning air right down to the bottom of her lungs. Maybe things could be different now. She felt different after last night’s confession in the shadow of Bud’s bears. She imagined she felt a little like the flatbed of her rig after a thirty-ton trailer had been lifted from her semi, the joints and axles rising light and groaning in blessed relief.
The sound of a car rumbling up over gravel drew their attention.
“Huh,” Riley said, glancing at the approaching black-and-white. “It’s awfully early for a police officer to be making a house call.”
“It’s never too early for Rodriguez to harass me. I wonder what this is about now.” Tess’s heart did a stuttered beat. “Didn’t you say Sadie took the bike into town?”
“Yes.” Riley looked at her. “So?”
“So no Sadie, and here’s a cop coming up the drive.”
Possibilities hit Tess like buckshot. In her mind she saw an SUV canted on the shoulder, blue smoke rising on the side of the road, a bicycle wheel in a ditch turning above a twisted frame.
“Mothers,” Riley murmured, shaking her head. “They always think the worst.”
“I’m not—” Tess cut herself off and then flushed as she dipped her knees a fraction to see into the backseat of the police car as Rodriguez turned into a parking spot. “She’s not in the car.”
“Of course she isn’t. Rodriguez doesn’t know anything about her. And Sadie is very good about following the rules of the road. Stop worrying, Tess.” Riley raised her voice as Rodriguez exited the car, “Good morning, Officer.”
“Morning, Riley.”
“You’re here awfully early,” Riley said. “Should I be worried?”
“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not always the bearer of bad news.” Rodriguez gave Tess an eye. “Occasionally I lead little old ladies across the street. Once in a while I actually save kittens.”
“Just don’t bring those kittens here.” Riley gripped the binoculars on her chest. “They’re the number one killer of birds, you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Rodriguez turned his eyes on Tess. “I’ve got something to discuss with you.”
That anvil-jawed face gave away nothing. Tess said, “I
s something wrong with the precinct phone?”
“Some things are better discussed in person. Besides I wanted to catch you before you skipped town. You have a bad habit of doing that.”
“Last time I checked, you weren’t my parole officer.” Tess leaned back and scraped her coffee cup on the porch rail. “Or have you just come by to confess your undying devotion?”
“Put away the shiv, Theresa. You’ll want to hear this.”
Riley put a steadying hand on Tess’s arm. “Can I get you some coffee, Officer?”
“No, but I would like a moment alone with your smart-mouthed friend here, if you don’t mind.”
“Riley can stay.” Tess slapped her hand over Riley’s before Riley could mumble an excuse. “I want Riley to stay.”
The embarrassment she’d expected didn’t rise like she thought it would. She eased her death grip on Riley’s fingers but she did not let her go. She would think about why later. New adrenaline flooded her veins because, as far as she knew, there was only one piece of unfinished business between her and Rodriguez.
“All right then,” Rodriguez said. “If you’re sure.”
Then Rodriguez did something that made Tess more nervous than seeing him break down a door at the Cannery. Rodriguez hesitated. He adjusted the waistband of his regulation blue pants. He sighed. Then he crossed his arms and gripped his biceps and took great interest in scraping the gravel under his shoes.
“After your recent visit to my precinct office,” he began, as he lifted one foot onto the second stair, “I decided to dig into things.”
“Things.”
“I don’t like cold cases. They clog up the system. The files grow, take up too much space.”
Tess’s jaw tightened. “Didn’t I tell you to back off?”
“At first I just researched the statutory limits to be sure I wasn’t mistaken that they’d passed.”
“Come on, Rodriguez. You have that rulebook memorized right down to the footnotes.”
“My instinct was right. It turns out there was some legislation at the state level about that statutory limit issue. Just a few years ago.”
“So you’re you a lawyer now?”
Riley squeezed her arm, and Tess tried to restrain herself.
“The world changes,” he said. “Technology advances, and the laws change with it. Now there’s a DNA exception to the statutory limits.”
Her older, wiser self, conscious of Riley standing next to her, tried to keep her mouth shut, but there was no restraining the mouthy fifteen-year-old within her. “You know, Rodriguez, you could have just asked me on a date, and we could clear up all this sexual tension.”
“The new law allows us to test old evidence. The new tests give better, more accurate results. The combination of the law and technology activated a whole slew of cold cases—”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
“Do you ever take anything seriously, Tess?”
The use of her name stunned her. She didn’t like the way he spoke it, didn’t like the way it sounded falling off his lips. That was her new name, that was her new life. Rodriguez was her old life. And in her new life, there was only one thing—one young girl—who she cared about enough to take seriously.
Riley removed her hand from Tess’s arm and laid it firmly on her back.
Well, Tess thought, maybe two.
“Victims have rights, too,” Tess said, the stair creaking beneath her as she shifted her weight. “You told me that once.”
“You gave me permission to investigate this case a long time ago.”
“When I was half conscious in a hospital bed. There’s no statutory limit on that kind of permission?”
“Victims of sexual assault”—he paused, his gaze flickering to Riley, checking her face for acknowledgment—“often don’t pursue prosecution out of some misguided sense of guilt or shame—”
“Now you’re a shrink.”
“Some cases I wouldn’t pursue. I’d let them go cold and keep them in a box in the basement.” That anvil jaw shifted. “But I knew Theresa Hendrick when my badge was still shiny. Theresa’s a tough young woman who has lived a tough life. She is strong enough to handle this.”
“You don’t know anything about me, Rodriguez.”
The words came out of her like fire but they were a lie. She knew it, and worse, he knew it. This cop knew more about her than her own classmates at Pine Lake. He’d arrested her when she’d stolen tampons from Ray’s. He’d brought her back home to the cluttered house and met her drunken mother, who’d answered the door braless in a tank top, clutching a can of some off-label beer. He’d caught her half naked with a boyfriend in the Cannery. He’d sat next to her hospital bed where she’d lain, bruised and battered, describing the man who raped her.
Maybe that’s why she was always pushing him away.
He said, “Once I realized the statutory limits could be circumvented, I went back to the evidence files to see if any further investigation was even possible.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “It turns out we still have your old rape kit.”
Tess flinched. She remembered the sore swabbing, the plastic zip of her clothing into marked forensic bags, including her favorite cotton-soft sleep shirt, stained with blood and semen.
“The chances of any retrievable DNA from a fifteen-year-old kit were low,” he continued, “but so was the chance of Theresa Hendrick showing up in Pine Lake so many years after the crime.”
Her heart tripped. “What, a girl can’t come home and see her friends?”
“C’mon, Hendrick, I know how impossible it is for you to ask for real help. Why the hell else are you here, lying low in Camp Kwenback, visiting me under false pretenses in the precinct, other than to help in the prosecution?”
Sadie. Tess closed her eyes, willing away the first stab of a rising migraine. Rodriguez had jumped to conclusions. She couldn’t challenge those conclusions because she couldn’t tell Rodriguez about Sadie.
“So I did,” he continued, “what I had to do. I sent the rape kit to an upstate crime lab to be retested. I called in an old favor and appropriated special funds in order to have it expedited.”
“Don’t you have any hot city hall embezzling crimes to investigate? Bar fights to prosecute? Stoners to rout out of the Cannery?”
“Some cases stick in a cop’s mind.” His nostrils flared as he flattened a hand on his bent knee. “Some cases make a cop wonder if he couldn’t have done something earlier to prevent them from ever happening.”
She felt a strange vibration and realized she was shaking. She stared at the trembling palms of her hands, thinking about one night when he’d dragged her home. She remembered his face when her drunk of a mother opened the door. She remembered him holding her back by the arm as she tried to shoot into the house and seek safety in her upstairs room. She remembered him several days later, pulling up to her on the street, talking to her momentarily sober mother, lingering on the porch, finally handing her his card.
You’re going to need this someday.
She’d torn it into pieces, put the pieces in an ashtray, and set them on fire.
“They found DNA, Tess,” he said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to run through a criminal database.”
Her blood left her extremities, her body went cold, and she felt the pinprick of numbness in her fingers and toes.
“This morning,” he added, “we got a hit.”
Tess took a step back and stumbled up the porch. She didn’t want to hear this. She resisted the childish, irresistible urge to slap her hands over her ears, to strike them and strike them and strike them so she wouldn’t hear the name of her rapist. And once again she was in her childhood bedroom with the sound of the bolt giving as he broke open the door, and there he was looming over her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Tess’s voice shook as she backed up against the door. “I told you not to do this.”
“We’ve got him, Tess.” Rodriguez�
��s brow rippled. “He’s in jail on another assault charge, but he’s up for parole in a few months.”
A few months. She looked wildly at Riley’s stricken face, willing Riley to make him stop.
“We can prevent him from doing this to any other woman,” Rodriguez persisted, “when you press charges, face him in court, and tell the truth.”
Everybody was so convinced that truth was always a good thing—but it was a lie that saved Sadie. Sadie grew up in a bubble of happiness with a loving family, having all the clothes and food and protection that she needed as she had grown into the young woman who’d shown up at Camp Kwenback—because Tess gave her up to let Sadie live with a lie that wasn’t born out of an act of bloody violence.
She said, “I’m leaving.”
Rodriguez lifted his foot off the last stair and stood, legs splayed, blocking her path down the stairs. “You ran once. That didn’t solve anything.”
“You can’t force me to testify.”
“You’ll let a rapist go free?” He skewered her with an eye. “You’ll let him go free to do this to another woman?”
“You always were a bastard, Rodriguez—”
“You won’t disappoint me.” He shook his head, convinced. “Not in this.”
She couldn’t seem to breathe. Rodriguez wouldn’t move, and he was so big, looming over her. Riley gripped her arm from behind, and Tess tried to shake it off, but Riley only shook her harder.
“Tess,” Riley said, yanking. “Tess.”
Tess whirled on her, ready to shout, but Riley wasn’t looking at her. Riley was staring down the gravel road. Tess’s heart skittered as she turned around and saw Sadie coming up the road, leaning over the handlebars of her bike, pumping hard, the gravel grinding under the rubber of her wheels.
By instinct Tess pressed down on the stair beneath her right foot like she was pressing down on the brake. By instinct her right hand sought the ball of the gear shift, grasping, her thoughts stuttering ahead to the coordination needed to downshift to slow all sixty-two thousand tons of her eighteen-wheeler down. Her fellow big-rig drivers had warned her about this all the time. You work in this business long enough, they said, you’ll be caught up, you’ll feel a tremendous hit. Sometimes Tess felt that her whole life she’d spent roaring seventy miles an hour down a snow-dusted road with her headlights illuminating only the next one hundred yards or so—tense for those white lights to flash on something—a hitchhiker, a herd of elk, a ghost—too late for her to downshift, too late for her to stop.
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