Serena did the math in her head. “She would have been starting to show.”
“We know she carried the baby to term,” Maggie said. “Assuming the child survived, it seems likely that the baby was adopted. Do you remember any relatives, cousins, neighbors, who had a baby around that time? Someone who might have taken custody of Andrea’s child?”
Denise shook her head. “No. You have to understand what my parents were like. They wouldn’t have wanted that baby anywhere close to the family. They would have acted as if it had never existed. Hell, to me, the baby never did. They never even told me that I had a niece or nephew. So whoever took it, I doubt they were in Duluth, and I doubt they let Andrea knew who it was.”
“We’d like to search the house,” Maggie said. “She must have kept something from back then. Something that would give us a clue what really happened. And maybe where the baby went.”
“Go ahead, search all you want,” Denise replied. She gestured toward the stairs. “Andrea has a spare bedroom that she used as an office. If she kept anything, it’s probably in there.”
Serena and Maggie made their way to the stairs together. They found Andrea’s office in a small bedroom that faced the basketball courts beside the house. She had a wall of built-in bookshelves, mostly filled with science textbooks, three steel file cabinets on the adjacent wall, and a weathered oak desk in front of the bedroom’s small window. When Andrea sat at the desk, she could turn around and stare outside at the park next door.
“She used to watch the kids playing,” Serena murmured. “Stride said she did that all the time. Imagine spending every day of your life thinking about the child you gave up.”
“Do you think Steve Garske knew?” Maggie asked.
“He was her doctor. I’m sure he did. He would have been talking to her about secondary infertility when she couldn’t get pregnant again. So he knew why the threat of exposure was so traumatic to her. He wasn’t just protecting Stride by hiding Ned Baer’s body. He was protecting Andrea, too.”
Maggie began opening drawers in the desk. “I confess I never liked her. I said some pretty mean things about her to Stride. Now I feel a little bad about that.”
“Take a number,” Serena replied. “I’m the one who broke up their marriage.”
Maggie stopped and looked up. “Don’t put that on yourself. Their relationship was broken long before you came to town. She and Stride were wrong from the beginning.”
“I know, but still, it’s a little weird being here,” Serena admitted, opening a drawer in the first filing cabinet and pawing through the contents, which were mostly biology quizzes and tests that Andrea had prepared for her classes over the years. “I feel strange trying to find secrets about my husband’s ex-wife.”
“I’m sure.”
She noticed that Maggie had stopped searching and was staring out the window instead. “You okay? Is something wrong?”
Maggie didn’t look at her. She had her badge in her hands and began turning it over in her fingers. “Do you think Stride will ever come back?”
“I have no idea. I hope so.”
“K-2 wants me to take over while he’s gone.”
“Of course, he does. You’re the natural choice.”
“He already made the promotion official. I’m Lieutenant Bei now.”
“Congratulations.”
Maggie kept rubbing her badge in her hands. “I know we’ve had our problems. Me being a cheating whore. You being an ice-cold bitch. That sort of thing. How is it going to work with you reporting to me?”
Serena chuckled softly. “We’ll be fine, Maggie.”
“I need a partner, and I know who I want,” she said.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You know, as soon as Stride wants the job back, it’s his,” Maggie went on. “I’d never stand in the way.”
“I guess we’ll all cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Maggie chewed on her lip. Serena knew that, in her heart, Maggie was a more vulnerable person than she let anyone else see. Her prickly sarcasm was a shield. “If Stride had died, I’m not sure what I would have done.”
“Me neither,” Serena replied. “I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.”
They kept searching in silence. Maggie went through all of the desk drawers, finding nothing. Serena did the same with the filing cabinets. They had no luck. Everything that Andrea kept in the office was related to her work at the high school, or to her financial records, but there was nothing personal about any of it. It was as if her distant past had been completely erased and she didn’t want to remember anything from her earlier life.
“If Andrea didn’t keep records from back then, it’s going to be difficult to find what we need,” Maggie said. “We have no idea what hospital she would have used, if they used a hospital at all. Or when the actual birth was. Or what adoption agency they used. We’re looking for a needle in a haystack after thirty years.”
Serena shook her head. “Something’s here.”
“You sound pretty sure. This was a child of rape. Maybe she wanted to forget what happened.”
“No way.”
“Okay. Where do we look? A safe deposit box?”
Serena stood in the middle of the office and thought about it. “No, let’s check her bedroom. She would have kept the memories of her child there. Not in the office. She would have kept it close to her.”
“You think so?”
Serena didn’t answer. Instead, she continued down the hallway to the master bedroom that overlooked the lake, and she went directly to the nightstand next to Andrea’s bed. When she opened the top drawer, the first thing she found was a stack of folded white cards made of heavy stock. She pulled them out and opened the first card. Inside was a handwritten message in block letters.
Forgive every sin.
She opened the other cards one by one and found the same message inside each of them.
“‘Forgive every sin,’” Serena murmured.
“Devin Card used the same phrase a couple of days ago,” Maggie said. “He was assaulted seven years ago when the accusations came out. Somebody jumped him on the street one night and beat the hell out of him. He said that’s what the man told him as he did it. ‘Forgive every sin.’”
“I think these notes came with the suncatchers,” Serena said. “There’s a box in here from one of the suncatchers and another of the cards inside.”
“So what sin?” Maggie asked. “The sin of rape?”
“Or the sin of giving away your baby.”
“You think these came from Andrea’s child?”
Serena stared at the neat stack of notes that had kept in the nightstand. “I think Andrea thought so. She kept every one.”
“Is there anything else in there?”
Serena dug into the nightstand again and found a handgun in the top drawer, but nothing else of interest. As soon she opened the second drawer, she discovered a metal lock box, which she removed and placed on the bed. The box was secured with a combination lock, but when she pushed the latch aside, she found that the numbers on the lock had been left at the correct combination.
She opened the lid.
“Oh, hell,” Maggie said. “Look at that.”
Inside, they found dozens of photographs, the brightness of their color fading after decades had passed. All of the pictures showed the same thing: Andrea as a teenager, holding a newborn baby in her arms. A boy. The photos showed her feeding her child. Changing him. Grinning as she held her son in the air. The two of them asleep on a blanket in the grass. Serena didn’t think she’d ever seen such happiness and love on a face as she saw in Andrea in those pictures. And it occurred to her that Andrea probably hadn’t had that look of happiness on her face again in the decades since then.
“She didn’t want to give him up,” Maggie s
aid.
“No. That’s obvious.”
“I wonder how long she kept him before her parents made her let him go.”
Serena turned over the pictures and saw dates written in ink on the back. “The photo of her with the newborn is in May. May 14. This one here in the grass is late July.”
“Two months with a child, and then you have to give him up?” Maggie said.
Serena shook her head. “I can’t imagine it.”
“Is there anything about the adoption? The name of the agency? Anything about where the boy went?”
“No. I wonder if her parents even told her. I wonder if they just took him away.”
“Oh my God.”
Serena dug down to the bottom of the lock box. Amid the memorabilia of the few weeks that a young mother had shared with her son, she found a birth certificate. She pulled it out and examined the text. She didn’t notice the hospital, or the doctor, or the time of birth.
Instead, she focused on the one detail that told her everything she needed to know.
“Andrea gave him a name,” Serena said.
Maggie looked at the faded print on the birth certificate where Serena was pointing. “Son of a bitch,” she gasped. “Brayden.”
42
Cat sat with Brayden on the clifftop overlooking the Deeps.
The recent storms had swelled the current, making it a maelstrom of whitewater and whirlpools surging toward the lake. Late afternoon shadows draped the rocks. The river looked angry, and Cat could see a reflection of the water in Brayden’s turbulent mood. His dark eyes had a sunken quality, like twin caves. Greasy cowlicks hung from his hair, and he hadn’t shaved in days. When she put an arm around his shoulder, she could feel his whole body tensed into knots.
“Stride had to kill someone this year,” Cat told him softly. “I saw what it did to him. I saw how it haunted him.”
Brayden shook his head, not wanting comfort. “That was a good shoot. This isn’t the same thing at all. I made a mistake. I killed my—I killed an innocent person. She should be alive right now.”
“You also saved me.”
“Stride did that, not me. And he nearly died in the process.”
“Colly would have kept shooting. Who knows how many others she might have killed? You stopped her.”
“I screwed up,” Brayden insisted.
“I understand that you’re upset. It’s natural.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I can live with this.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m sorry, but you have no idea what I’m feeling. You don’t understand. You don’t know what I did.”
“Try me.”
But Brayden said nothing. He looked lost in a maze, with no way forward. As they sat there, he got a text on his phone, which he read with an expression that somehow deepened the darkness he felt. He shoved his phone back in his pocket without telling Cat who it was, or what it was.
Only seconds later, her own phone rang. It was Serena.
“Is Stride okay?” Cat asked, without even saying hello.
“He’s fine, Cat. This isn’t about him. Where are you?”
“At the Deeps.”
“Is Brayden Pell with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Cat, I want you to leave right now,” Serena told her. “Don’t ask any questions, and don’t say anything. Just come back home.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain when you get here. Don’t tell Brayden about this call, please. Just leave the Deeps by yourself.”
“Sure. Okay.”
Cat hung up the phone, but she made no effort to get up or leave. Instead, she twisted her body around on the rocks and sat cross-legged next to Brayden. Calmly, she brushed back her chestnut hair. She knew he could feel her looking at him, but he stared at the waterfall without acknowledging her.
“So do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Cat asked. “That was Serena. She wants me to leave right away. It’s about you.”
He shrugged. “They know. That was the text I got. They know.”
“Know what?”
“Who I am. I figured they’d find out eventually. Honestly, I’ve thought about coming forward for years, but if I did that, I knew she’d be exposed, too. It wasn’t my secret to share. I knew she didn’t want anyone to know about me. I didn’t care about myself or what would happen to me. I was trying to protect her.”
“Protect who?” Cat asked.
“Andrea.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Andrea Forseth was my birth mother,” Brayden told her. “She had a baby, and no one knew about it. She had me.”
Cat’s eyes widened with shock. Her lips parted, and she covered her mouth with her hand. Then, as the dimensions of the tragedy settled over her, she reached out and put her arms around Brayden’s neck. “No.”
He nodded, his face like granite. “Now she’s dead because of me.”
“Brayden, that was a terrible accident.”
“Really? Because it doesn’t feel like an accident. It feels like fate. Like I’m being punished for what I did seven years ago.”
“What did you do?”
Brayden looked around at the Deeps, as if he could see things here that she couldn’t. “I guess it doesn’t matter who I tell anymore. Now that they know, they won’t have any trouble proving it. I kept everything. It’s all in a box in my attic. Ned’s laptop. His papers. His gun. I guess I thought one day I’d tell Andrea what I did, how I’d saved her. Avenged her. But I can’t tell her about it now, can I? It’s too late.”
“Tell me,” Cat said.
Brayden lay back, stretching out on the rocks. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the trees and sky. He spoke quietly, his voice barely louder than the thunder of the river.
“I didn’t know I was adopted until I was in high school,” he said. “Grace and Bob Pell kept it a secret. It only slipped out when I was a senior, and Bob and I were having one of our usual arguments. He made some comment about someone like me never coming from his blood, and then he told me the truth. That was the first time I knew that I had another mother somewhere else. A mother who’d given me up.”
Cat stayed silent and let him speak.
“Bob Pell didn’t know who she was, how old she was, why she gave me up, anything like that. It was a closed adoption. The only thing he knew was that my birth mother was from Duluth. The weird thing is, knowing all of this finally gave me a purpose in life that I’d never had before. After high school, I moved to Duluth. I loved the lake, and God knows I wanted to get away from my father, but somewhere in my head, I also thought I could track down my birth mother. I wanted answers about where I came from. About why she abandoned me.”
“And you found her?” Cat murmured.
“It took me a while, because I had so little to go on. I started dating a nurse, and she helped me get access to hospital records. The thing is, the Pells had always told me that my birthday was in the summer. That was when they adopted me. Later, I discovered that Andrea had kept me for more than two months before giving me up. I guess when she had to go back to school, her parents told her she couldn’t keep me. I was looking in the wrong time frame and didn’t even know it, so for a long time I was at a dead end. Anyway, it took me three years, but eventually, the search led me to Andrea. A thirty-nine-year-old woman, married to a cop. She would have been seventeen when she had me.”
“Like me,” Cat said, with a new sense of wonder. “She was just like me.”
“That’s right.”
Suddenly, Cat pulled away from him and sprang to her feet. “That’s why you felt a connection with me, isn’t it? That’s why there was never anything between us. I reminded you of her. A teenager who gave away her baby. Just like your mother.”
“I told you it was complicated.”
“I can’t believe I acted like such a fool,” Cat said.
“You didn’t. Believe me. This was my problem.”
Cat sat down next to him again. “What did you do when you found out who she was?”
“I watched her. That’s all. I got to know her from a distance. I’d sit outside her house on the weekends when I had time. Or I’d follow her to the high school where she worked. I just wanted to get a sense of who she was. I thought about introducing myself, but I wasn’t ready to do that. And I was pretty sure that she wasn’t ready, either. A part of me was angry, too. How could she have given me up?”
“Because she loved you,” Cat said. “Because she wanted a better life for you. That’s why I did it.”
“I know. But understanding it isn’t the same thing as forgiving it. I spent some time with a therapist, trying to figure out how to forgive my mother. She told me the same thing. That sometimes letting a child go is an act of love.”
“Don’t think the guilt ever goes away,” Cat told him. “It doesn’t.”
He said nothing. His face was dark with his memories.
“One day that summer, early in August, I saw a man show up at her door. After he left, Andrea went outside and sat on the front steps, and I could tell she was very upset. Crying. I didn’t like seeing her that way. I wanted to know this man and what he’d said to her. So I tracked him down by the car he was driving, and I located the motel where he was staying. He was a journalist. His name was Ned Baer.”
Brayden’s fists clenched, and then he released them. He sat in silence for a little while.
“I found out what Baer was doing in town—that he was researching the rape accusation against Devin Card. You can’t imagine what a thunder-
bolt that was for me. Suddenly, everything made sense. I realized that Andrea was the one behind the accusation. That she’d been raped. That was how she got pregnant. That was how I came into the world. I was born of violence. And Devin Card was my father. I didn’t know what to do. I was so furious. I needed to know more. I broke into Andrea’s house when she and Stride were away, so I could find out what happened. I found a box she’d hid, with pictures of her and me, and I realized she loved me. Despite what had been done to her, she loved me. I was going to pieces, Cat. My whole identity had been stripped away from me. And I felt so bad for my mother, for what she’d been through. I bought her something—a suncatcher—and left it for her anonymously with a note. Forgive every sin. I knew, somehow I just knew, that she blamed herself for letting me go. I didn’t want her to do that. But I also couldn’t come forward. Not when I knew she was so desperate to keep what had happened a secret.”
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