Delia’s vision blurred along the periphery, and she swallowed hard. Maybe this would be enough for Juniper, maybe the stupid scratchy sweater would be enough and they could go back to painting and nothing more.
Juniper ran two more rows of paint up the wall, coming dangerously close to the ceiling.
“I remember now; you had on flip-flops and tan shorts.” Juniper eased the roller back into the tray and set it down. She licked her lips and pressed her bottom teeth along her top lip the way she used to do when she was a kid.
Delia’s paintbrush clattered to the tarp covering the floor. She picked up a rag and mopped up the puddle of white paint. She couldn’t look at her sister.
“There was too much smoke. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t see anything,” said Delia.
“But you said you could hear Dad. What about Mom? Could you hear Mom? Do you mean they were both still alive then?”
“I don’t know! For God’s sake, J Bird, please stop. I don’t remember.”
Baxter was suddenly at Delia’s side, pushing his head into her hand. His fur, still damp, took on all the odors of the marsh, rich with plant life, amphibians, and muck.
The torrent of emotion caught her off guard, the heat of her tears unstoppable. Delia turned her head away, embarrassed, and covered her face. Baxter planted his butt on her feet and pressed his entire body against her legs.
J Bird put down her paint roller. “Jeez, I’m sorry. I forget that it was different for you. I forget that maybe it’s harder to have memories that you want to forget than to not have enough memories. Let’s go home. I can come back tomorrow after my shift and finish the painting.”
CHAPTER 25
Juniper
Juniper finished her shift at the bakery by ten on Monday morning, went home, walked Baxter, and headed straight for the J Bird Café. The opening date galloped toward them, and she would have to spend every spare moment getting the building ready. Greg and his minions weren’t there today.
“If you want to hire a painting crew, just let me know,” Greg had said. “Otherwise, call me when you’re finished. We can’t do anything else inside until you finish painting.”
Painting soothed her almost as much as baking did. She liked the rhythmic movement of rolling paint on a wall, watching the fuchsia and melon walls emerge after decades of beige. They chose high gloss white for the trim. Greg had uncovered an old tin ceiling, and once it was cleaned and painted silver, Juniper thought it looked like the night sky when the moon was full, the kind of soft silver light that reflected off the ocean.
She couldn’t remember seeing Delia as undone as yesterday when Juniper had pressed her for details about the fire. She could at least make it up to her by getting the café ready for the oven delivery.
She’d been painting for hours. Everything seemed to take longer than she imagined. Juniper knew the restaurant renovation meant the bathroom had to be up to code. The doorway had to be wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair, there had to be ventilation, and besides, who didn’t want ventilation in a bathroom? In a bakery, the aromas rolling through should come from breads and soups, coffee and tea, if tea had a smell, and Juniper wasn’t sure that it did. But she wanted the bathroom to be rather odorless.
She didn’t want to put up the compulsory sign that said, EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS, as if there were a question of whether she or Delia would wash their hands after using the toilet. Or that they were raised in a home without running water. How could anyone look at them, with their firmly tied aprons, their hair pulled back, carrying a tray of croissants from the oven to the display case, and imagine that they wouldn’t wash their hands?
The sign was part of the state health code, but it seemed to be more of a reassurance to customers. Juniper was determined to come up with a better, friendlier sign for the handicapped accessible men/women’s bathroom. Maybe, LET’S ALL WASH OUR HANDS.
The window above the toilet was the kind that slides to one side. Juniper put her left hand on the sink and stood up carefully on the closed toilet seat. The seat and lid were old, but thick and sturdy, made from either a massive hunk of plastic or possibly wood with glistening white laminate paint.
She picked up a wet cloth from the sink, intending to wipe the window, but a branch from a tall bush caught her eye. A lilac bush brushed against the building, and two leggy branches caressed the window. This was the south side of the building, and the lilacs would bloom early. There would come a time in the spring when the bathroom would smell like lilacs, just the way her bedroom had when she was growing up, when the lilacs had pressed against her upstairs window. One day her mother had opened her bedroom window and reached out with a pair of clippers and grabbed a handful of the fragrant blooms. “These are for you, J Bird.” They filled a canning jar with water and placed the dark purple lilacs in a jar. It seemed like they lasted forever.
The back door creaked open and she jumped, dragged out of her childhood reverie. “Anybody home? I need a chocolate éclair.”
It was Ben. His big brother voice hit a familiar place with her. Where would they be if not for Ben, finding housing for them after her parents died, helping Delia fill out student loan forms? Baxter was back home or he would have greeted Ben with his ticker-tape-parade wiggling and dog serenade.
“Hey! I’m back here in the bathroom. Look out; there’s wet paint everywhere.”
Ben stretched his head and neck around the corner. “So that’s why my buddy Baxter isn’t greeting me. Goldens don’t make good painting companions, unless you like doggie tails dipped in paint.”
Juniper hopped off the toilet seat and held the paintbrush high while she hugged Ben.
“What do you think of our place so far?” She felt like a teenager angling for a compliment.
Ben turned around slowly, taking in everything with exaggerated concentration. “What you’ve done with the sawhorses and brown paper over the windows is, well, stunning. And the drop cloths on the floors. Just beautiful,” he said, stroking his chin.
“Oh, come on, really, what do you think?”
She wanted him to see that their business venture was in the final stretch. Correction: She needed some of Ben’s magic praise, the kind that had sustained her as a kid.
“I’m so proud of you. Once people taste anything that comes out of this kitchen, they will be helplessly addicted to the J Bird Café. You’ll own them. By the way, exactly where is the kitchen?”
“Right in back of you. See, the ovens go against that wall, cooling racks over here, and a partial wall goes here so that people can see the bread coming out of the ovens. The ovens are coming tomorrow, so that’s why we’ve been pushing to finish the painting.”
Ben took a few steps toward the back of the building. The limp was still there, slight but noticeable.
“I think you should get your money back from the knee surgeon. Aren’t those surgeries supposed to be foolproof?” she asked.
Ben leaned over and rubbed his knee, frowning. “Nothing is foolproof with surgery. You’d be surprised by what can go wrong. I’m taking care of it.”
She’d be glad when Ben was back to normal again, without protecting his knee all the time. It made him look older than he was, a bit drawn around the mouth.
“And by the way, what the heck was wrong with you the other day when I stopped in at the clinic with Baxter? You’ve never given me such a brush-off before,” she said, hands on her hips.
Ben looked out the side window. “Don’t take it personally. Please. I haven’t been feeling all that great after the surgery and a couple of bouts with the flu. Don’t get old like me, sweetie.”
“Old? Don’t say that!” She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck. “You are not permitted to get old. Or sick. And stop limping right now.”
Ben laughed and gave her a big squeeze. “Okay, I promise. Your job is to keep me stocked up on chocolate éclairs.”
“Our grand opening is the first weekend in October. I want you to
put it on your calendar and put a big sign up at your office. Tell all your patients that it’s mandatory for them to come to our café. But mostly I want you to be here, with Michelle and the kids.”
Ben had kicked in money to cover some of the startup costs of the renovation. Seven thousand dollars, which the sisters insisted was a loan. They’d even written a contract that all three of them signed to say that payments would begin within two years, or sooner if they turned a profit. He had been there for them every step of the way since the fire. When Ben’s mother moved to Florida, he cosigned the loan so they could buy her house.
“I wouldn’t miss it. I just wanted to stop by for a quick check on how you were doing. It looks great, kiddo. I’ve got to run; I’m meeting a friend for a dog consultation. I told him to cruise by here and I’d help him out.” Ben looked upward to the right corner of the ceiling. “Cool tin ceiling,” he said, patting the doorframe. “You can always call on me if you need grunt labor. I can haul trash or plant flowers in the window boxes. Just don’t ask me to do anything that requires actual carpentry skills.” He winked at her and left.
Juniper rinsed out the paintbrush and roller. She opened the side door to put the brushes outside to dry when she heard Ben and another man talking. She took a few steps into the side yard and saw the back end of a sage green Camry. Ben leaned into the passenger window, looked left and right, and then slid an envelope into his pants pocket. He took several long steps to his pickup truck and drove off.
Juniper sat on the step and picked paint from her fingernails. Ben had done house calls in the past, usually when an old dog needed to be euthanized and the owners wanted the dog to die at home. But was he taking payments outside the office, a little tweaking of the books by not recording cash?
Ben was her model for how to be an adult, how to be responsible and still have a good time, how to find a good partner and stay married, how to love what you do, how to be kind and generous. He was out of sorts lately; that was clear when she stopped by his clinic with Baxter. But today he was the old Ben, the last friend that her father had, the one who didn’t abandon him when he was at his worst, bloated up like a whale on medications. Sometimes you just had to let people be who they were, let them have their highs and lows. If Ben wanted to pull in a little cash without running it through the clinic, then Juniper wasn’t going to say anything about it, especially not to Delia. She had Ben’s back. It was the least she could do for him.
CHAPTER 26
Two years ago, Ira changed the old Mr. Coffee machine in the staff room for a single cup brewing system. It was true that the staff meetings were no longer a battle zone for who would clean the glass coffee pot, empty the grounds, buy the coffee, or remember to turn it off at the end of the day. There were no longer signs in the break room, posted with anonymous anger, YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T LIVE HERE.... CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF!!!!! But Delia still cringed at the environmental carnage of Keurig K-Cups in their individual plastic firmness, destined to fill landfills right next to mountains of disposable diapers. It was eight forty-five a.m., and she popped a French roast K-Cup into the holder, closed it, and waited for her cup to fill.
She and Ira had arranged for a morning meeting with Detective Moretti in Ira’s office. Foster Services had a close relationship with the police. In the case of abused or abandoned kids, the two agencies needed each other. Delia didn’t want to overstep her role by telling the police that they needed to dig deeper to help them find Hayley’s family, and yet that was exactly what threatened to burst out of her mouth as she sat down next to the detective in front of Ira’s desk.
Moretti was a big man, a couple of inches over six feet. Delia sometimes saw him at night at the Y, headphones on, jogging on the treadmill with a white towel draped around his neck. It was hard not to notice him, but she assumed that he didn’t want to engage in small talk any more than she did while she was sweating away on the elliptical machine. They would nod an acknowledgment at each other.
Today, he looked like he’d already been at work for hours.
“We immediately followed up on your lead about the library in West Hartford. The Hartford PD told us there are no security cameras in the library, so we were unable to use that technology. We were already checking into the security cameras at the stoplight closest to the hardware store based on the date of the receipt, but it’s unlikely we’ll be able to narrow down a vehicle, since there was no vehicle at the murder scene,” he said.
He spoke like he’d been trained to exclude all extraneous information. Delia grew up with a father who was bombarded by extraneous information: the messages delivered by katydids in late summer, the patterns of the bar codes in the grocery store, the secret directives sent through television commercials.
Delia sipped her coffee. She was sure that a residue of plastic made it into her cup. “What about the woman in the library, the one who worked at the children’s desk? The one who disappeared around the time of the murders,” she said.
This time he turned his head to look at her. “She didn’t check out. She’d been a volunteer for about six months, and the library sometimes uses a shortcut for verification in order to save money. The only official identification that the library required of her was a driver’s license, and that was bogus. Every CORI check costs the library fifty dollars, so if nothing pops up with the license when they send it to the local PD, they take a chance and skip the CORI. It turns out that she had stolen the identity of a teacher in the area who never knew her ID was stolen. She was smart; no claims were made on the stolen credit cards, so there were no red flags.”
Ira tapped the fingers of his right hand along the edge of his desk. “But you must have a description of her from the people at the library.”
“Hartford police sent us a compilation of her description.”
Was this guy only going to answer direct questions? Delia wished he would bend a little in their direction.
“The longer that Hayley spends away from her family, the more traumatized she is. Our entire goal is to find her family as quickly as possible,” said Ira. “We’re not intruding on your territory, Mike, it’s just that we feel strongly that she has parents out there. We told you about the Skype calls that were made between Hayley and her mother.”
Moretti leaned forward slightly. “I know. You guys do good work. But I am more and more certain that these crimes are part of a large heroin network, larger than we’ve ever seen in Maine. Technically speaking, we have a lot of unconnected dots. We have heroin residue at the scene of the murders, three people killed execution style, we have a receipt for a hardware store in West Hartford, we have one vic from Tennessee, another male unidentified, and Emma Gilbert, who lived in Florida. Emma had no priors, and she had been reported missing by her boss at a radio station a few months back. And now we have a library volunteer with a falsified identity who left the library around the time of the murders. My guess is that the crime organization moved the library girl out and we won’t see her again,” he said.
Ira stopped tapping his fingers. “And we have Hayley. She’s a five-year-old girl who wants to go home,” he said.
The detective’s stick deodorant pulsed a wave of scent to Delia, carried on increased body heat. He had saved something for last, something that he didn’t want to say.
“We’ve seen an exponential increase in heroin in the last two years. The state is struggling to stay in front of this, and we’re not winning. We’ve already had sixty-one deaths by heroin overdose this year in Maine. This case may be our entryway into a major supply line of heroin coming up from Mexico through Nashville, Tennessee.” He paused and shifted his feet. “I need to interview Hayley. I need to ask her about the killings.”
Delia swallowed hard. She knew this was coming now that Hayley was more settled at Erica’s, enrolled in kindergarten, talking freely. She and Ira had been expecting it.
“I want to do the interview,” said Delia. “What if you come along, but I ask the questions? I know
how to talk with Hayley, and I know when she’s not going to stop talking.”
He tightened his lips. “I have a daughter who’s ten. I understand what you mean. But you don’t know what information I might need, or how to follow a thread.”
Ira’s wall clock was a cheap, battery-powered replica of the kind that was in every classroom in schools. The ticking filled the silence between the three of them.
“Then tell me exactly what you need to know, what you think this child might be able to tell you. I’ll call Erica and set up a time, and I’ll make sure Louie is with us,” she said.
“Louie? Is that one of the foster mom’s kids?”
“Um, no. He’s a Maine Coon cat. Are we good? I’ll do the interview?” asked Delia.
Moretti put his hand on a cell phone that vibrated in his pants pocket. “Do you have some time now? We can go over what I would normally ask. I will need to be there. But if you skip something or lose a thread, I’m going to ask her a question. This isn’t my first rodeo, and I’ve worked with kids before. Excuse me while I check this call.”
Leaning to one side, he extracted the cell phone from his pocket, looked at the screen, tapped it, and returned it to the pocket. “I need to be back in the department in an hour. Can we go over the details now?”
Ira stood up. “You two can work out the details without me. I need to look at applications for a caseworker.”
Delia felt a twinge of guilt. Hiring a replacement was time-consuming, fraught with phone calls to references and also with scheduling interviews. It was hard to balance her excitement about J Bird Café with the burdens she was going to leave behind with Ira. And right now, it felt like she was never leaving, at least not until Hayley found her family. Ira didn’t look up as Delia and Moretti left his office. He was already deep into a pile of applications, most of them from people brand-new to the profession.
The Tiger in the House Page 11