Half Moon Bay

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Half Moon Bay Page 3

by Alice LaPlante


  * * *

  Naturally the teenagers who found Heidi documented the scene with their cell phones; that’s what this generation does. They order a meal, they take a photo and post it. They find a dead body, they do the same. The police tried to clamp down on the distribution of the crime scene photos, but it was too late. Jane sees the phones being taken out at the Three Sisters, studied, handed around, but manages to decline with a semblance of sanity when someone offers to show her what’s on one of them. She’s seen it all already.

  Jane held her own child like that, just so. What remained of Angela had also been carefully wrapped in a blanket. We’ll leave you alone, then, said the doctor, and she and the nurses exited the room. Jane’s daughter’s upper torso was intact but cold. She had inherited Jane’s bright red hair from some long-ago Irish ancestor. Her eyes so black you could barely see the irises. Yes, they were open too, Jane could see herself reflected in their dark depths. A modern Pietà. Jane did not look any place but Angela’s face, miraculously unscathed. The doctors had been considerate. What was left of the lower body had been tightly wrapped in hospital linens. Jane remembers swaddling Angela as a colicky infant, wrapping the soft cotton blanket tightly around the small, furious, kicking red body. Jane knows she should be in sympathy with Heidi’s parents, but she isn’t. She has more in common with the murderers. She’s killed, and then held the victim of her deed in her arms. Somehow Jane knew this had been the case with little Heidi as well. She had been loved to death.

  * * *

  Jane studies the photo of Heidi on the front page of Moon News—the same photo that was on the flyer distributed after her disappearance. The parents were lucky, Jane thinks, that Heidi was taken at this age and not later. The McCreadys’ grief was pure, unblemished by disappointment or bitterness that would have inevitably arisen as Heidi grew older. None of Jane’s friends with teenage children were altogether happy with their choice to reproduce. The ones with full-grown adult children even less so. The worry! The pain! If I had known then what I know now, they had told each other at book club meetings and coffeehouses, only half joking. What an idiot I was, thinking I needed to have children to be whole, they’d say. I wish I could write a letter to my younger self, explaining how wrong she was. Jane had been one of them, the regretful, complaining mothers. She had that on her conscience too.

  * * *

  The police are everywhere. Not just the limited Half Moon Bay police force, but San Mateo County sheriffs are making the rounds. They are interviewing everyone. There is word that the FBI will be coming in, forming a task force, because of the child kidnapping angle. Something about the Lindbergh Act. But the two men in uniform who come to Jane one afternoon at the nursery are locals.

  Jane recognizes one of the cops by his voice. It is the one she’d spoken to the night Heidi disappeared, the one who circled her name on his pad. She can finally see his face clearly. He is much younger than she would have guessed. An unlined, untested face, and therefore one not to be trusted. Jane finds herself ill at ease these days with those inexperienced in life. Does that include children? It does.

  You said you didn’t know the McCreadys, the policeman begins abruptly. No social niceties.

  Jane is carefully wiping the leaves of the lilyturf (Liriope spicata) plants to keep them moist. Each leaf coming out a deep pure green after her wet cloth passes over it. She continues what she is doing. She breathes in deeply, as she’s been taught to do in times of stress.

  I didn’t. I mean, I don’t, Jane says, finally. I knew that people with that name lived up on the hill, but I’ve never spoken to them.

  But you have. This was the other cop, the one with the San Mateo Sheriff’s Department patch sewn on the shoulder of his uniform. If it wasn’t an interrogation, Jane would have warmed to this man. He reminds her of Rick, with his narrow blue eyes and sandy-colored hair that curls around his ears. A deep quietness that reassures.

  They came here and bought some plants from you. Quite a large order. They remember you distinctly. Your red hair. Your boss remembers them too.

  Jane feels trapped. She’s never been good with authority figures. She invariably feels guilty of whatever has occurred. She is willing to admit to anything anyone accuses her of. In middle school, when her teacher called her to the front of the room to commend her on an essay she’d written, Jane blurted out, I didn’t plagiarize! Which of course caused the teacher to treat her with suspicion thereafter. Jane learned not to say what she was thinking, instead tried hard to look nonchalant and innocent when lunch money went missing or obscene graffiti was scrawled on the gym walls. But she’s not a good actress and can’t always force herself to do what liars apparently did to convince people of their innocence. Look people in the eyes. Don’t swallow. Don’t put your hand near your face, especially don’t hide your mouth or eyes. Don’t make any grooming gestures. Jane had practiced not lying in the mirror. She was terrible at it. Her hand was always straying to her face, and she always hesitated and swallowed before answering even the simplest questions. Jane would appear a liar even if asked for her name, or her favorite color.

  When was this? Jane knows it sounds like she is buying time. She is.

  Last January. January fifteenth, to be exact.

  Jane considers what to say.

  I was not . . . myself . . . back then, she says. I had only just arrived here. A lot of things from that time are a blur.

  The nicer-looking policeman nods in what could be interpreted as a sympathetic manner.

  Nevertheless, it was a little odd to find you wandering alone in the dark the night the little girl disappeared, he says. At that place, at that time.

  I often wander in the dark. Especially to that place. Especially around that time of night.

  Even though the beach closes at sundown?

  Not to locals, Jane says. Not to me.

  This makes both cops stop and look more closely at her.

  You’re somehow privileged? the friendly one finally asks without hostility, just interest, it seems to Jane.

  You know you could be ticketed for trespassing after hours, says the other, at the same time. He is hostile, Jane decides.

  Yes, and yes, says Jane. But it’s not patrolled, and everyone knows it. Then, fiercely, You’re wasting my time. She turns her back on the cops to tend to her lilyturfs. She’s learned, over the last year, that being rude rather than polite, pushy rather than obsequious, gets her what she wants: to be left alone.

  But it doesn’t work. The questions continue.

  Where were you earlier that evening? (Home.)

  Can anyone vouch for you being there? (No.)

  What were you doing? (Straightening up. Organizing stuff. Reading.)

  Do you have a car? (No.)

  How do you get around? (Motorbike.)

  Her answers to the last questions seem to terminate their interest. We might have more questions for you later, the friendly cop says finally, and they turn to leave, but not before the unfriendly cop plucks a glorious white rose from one of Helen’s prize bushes and holds it to his nose.

  Why don’t flowers smell like anything anymore? he asks no one in particular.

  Jane considers this a victory.

  * * *

  Despite all the police activity, no plausible suspects emerge. No one is charged. It must be a stranger, people say. They view anyone who recently moved to the coast with suspicion. There haven’t been many of them. The Schroeders, a boisterous family of six. The parents opened a frozen yogurt store on Main Street six months ago, are wonderfully patient with all the kids who hang out there. Greg and Jim, a young cohabiting couple, doing something in the arts scene up in San Francisco, and frequently away on trips. A few other unlikely persons. No single older men, normal or strange. Everyone in couples or families. No weirdos, unless you count the ones who have lived here for years. And Jane of course. Jane tries to look innocent. She tries to look concerned. She keeps her hands away from her face, doesn’t pat
her hair. But she feels the burden of the unasked questions. Who are you really?

  * * *

  The faces of the townspeople, the shopkeepers, are grim. This is when the coast typically gets its most beautiful weather, but even that isn’t cooperating. The usually joyous preparation for the big Pumpkin Festival scheduled for the third weekend in October have begun, but sotto voce. Posters are being placed around town, fields mowed, pumpkins harvested. Local stores are gearing up for their busiest time of the year—pumpkin harvest brings in even more than Christmas—but everyone is subdued. Fewer families come to the beach on weekends, fewer customers from over the hill stop by Smithson’s on their way home. The sky is a metal gray and the wind chills you even if you’re wearing layers. Jane shivers as she rides her motorbike to and from work. Bad juju is in the air.

  * * *

  Jane is kneeling by the side of Route 84. Five hundred yards west of the old San Gregorio Store. Within spitting distance of the Pacific Ocean. Tending the roadside memorial that’s been here for nearly a hundred years. A small wooden cross. A teddy bear and a companion stuffed rabbit. And always fresh flowers. This is one of Jane’s secret places.

  A child died on the road here, a long, long time ago. Whether in an accident involving an early automobile or an unfortunate fall from a horse and wagon, no one alive knows. Jane has asked, but people just shrug. Jane discovered the shrine soon after she arrived on the coast, in her meanderings during endless solitary weekends. A clandestine society to which she anonymously belongs tends the site, keeps the flowers fresh, and replaces the teddy bear and rabbit when they become wretched and stained from the rain and sun. A community that mourns together yet alone.

  This memorial isn’t the only one on Route 84. This road is hazardous, twisting as it snakes up the mountains that overlook Silicon Valley and then heaves over the summit and down through the redwoods onto the California coastal plain. Cars as well as bicycles and motorcycles go too fast around the blind curves. They crash into redwood trees, plunge off precipices, run headlong into deer. Drink is frequently involved. Fatalities galore. It’s become a bit of a tradition for people around here to put up these crosses, leave flowers at these sites of conflagration and death.

  Most of these homemade shrines don’t last more than a couple of months before being vanquished by the elements. People lose interest. The memories fade, the urge to honor the dead dissipates. The flowers on little Heidi’s memorial, over on Route 1, are already wilting.

  Jane doesn’t approve. She’s seen too much death. She’s smelled its breath. You can’t—shouldn’t—forget such things. Nine months ago, still mad with grief for Angela, Jane closed her mother’s mouth, held it shut so that the face didn’t freeze into an unsightly gape. They’d been warned by the funeral director to do this immediately after her last breath. He didn’t want to have to break her jawbone to make her presentable for the viewing. Jane had taken the night shift at her mother’s bedside with full knowledge of what might be expected of her.

  It’s heavy stuff. That’s meant literally. The weight of your mother’s chin in your palm, the upward pressure you exert to bring her lips together. The muffled click as her teeth meet. These are sensations Jane will remember forever. She holds the jaw in place for five long minutes. Then she says a quick prayer—although she’s not a believer, not really—and releases, and to her relief, the mouth remains shut. Her mother will have nothing more to say now. Jane more or less successfully represses the impulse to laugh. The face was still warm. To caress a face is an intimate act, an intimacy her mother mostly denied Jane when alive. This thought does something to Jane. She decides she’s had enough. She leaves the room, changes her plane ticket, and goes back to California early, skipping the wake and funeral.

  She adopted this shrine in recompense, for that and other sins. She’d passed it numerous times before finally stopping, curious about a grief so fresh that someone placed fresh flowers here twice or even thrice weekly. That’s when she saw the date: October 18, 1917. The cross is white, and that too is constantly refreshed with new paint, but you can still read the D-A-R-L-I-N-G carved into it. Whose darling? A mother, of course, Jane thinks. Although her word for Angela when little was sweetheart. She didn’t realize how much she used the endearment because it came so naturally. Sweet. Heart. Yes, of course, that is what you call your daughter. Jane had never used an endearment before in her life. She didn’t realize the force of her habit until she understood Angela thought sweetheart a synonym for child Now I’ll be the mommy, and you’ll be the sweetheart, she’d say in the car. Or, Look! Sweethearts! as they passed a playground with children on swings or seesaws.

  * * *

  Behavioral psychological studies have shown that if you intermittently reward rats with food pellets for pressing a lever, they will obsessively press that lever, even when nothing comes out for long periods of time. Hungry for pellets and not able to discern a pattern to their disbursement, a rat will press and press the lever until it dies of exhaustion. That was Jane in her previous life. Seeking emotional sustenance from unlikely places. And randomly getting it, occasionally being blissed out of her mind with it, which turned out to be considerably worse than never being rewarded at all. She remembers Tennyson from her undergraduate days: ’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Don’t fall for that line. Tennyson was never in that cage pushing the lever.

  * * *

  The night Jane’s husband told her he was leaving, she had just washed her hair. A new shampoo, one that smelled of peppermint. A rather momentous occasion. For the first time since Angela’s death, Jane had showered. She had rubbed this new peppermint-scented shampoo into her hair. She had soaped her body with lavender body wash. She was trying to excite her senses. She was trying to bring herself to life again. She was going through the motions. Later, in the living room, toweling off her hair, she even smiled when Rick walked into the room, even grasped his hand when he placed it on her shoulder. The therapist had told them, Touching is healing. Then Rick said those words. I’m in love with Clara. Clara? Oh yes. Jane remembered. The girl at work, the one in HR. The one with the big personality. That of course had made Jane feel particularly small. The girl resembled a young Charlotte Rampling. He’d laughed about it at first, telling Jane how all the men in the office were obsessed, how she’d charmed the head of IT to the point where he’d spontaneously invited her home for dinner, to the mystification of his wife. Then Rick had simply stopped talking about her, about this Clara. Jane should have guessed. But she had been at that point otherwise preoccupied, so she missed the signals, was stupidly blindsided. She supposed the faint sting of hearing Rick’s words was good news of a sort: she was still alive. If you pricked her, she could still bleed. But there was surprisingly little pain. It hurt to breathe, but then it always hurt to breathe nowadays. Her mouth was dry, her skin numbed as if encased in rubber. The shower notwithstanding, Jane was not yet feeling things. So what did she do? She proceeded to comb the tangles out of her wet hair. And then took a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and made five precise incisions on her left wrist. Jane watched the blood well up from the cuts, then bent her head and licked it off her skin. A sweetish, slightly salty taste. From then on associated in her mind with betrayal.

  * * *

  Little Heidi’s funeral is a bit of a circus. Everyone in town attends, as do many, many strangers. Death attracts. Jane knows this from experience. Heidi’s story is featured on CNN the night before the funeral, and the rest of the media come sniffing for something people will tune in to or read. Dead child as clickbait. Reporters from the major newspapers from San Francisco and San Jose and a dozen national media outlets show up. Titillating stuff, after all. Everyone of course wanting to know if little Heidi had been sexually violated, so much so that the police spokeswoman has to repeat We found no evidence of sexual assault throughout the press conference that preceded the funeral. Television vans with satellite dishes on top block Main Stre
et near Our Lady of the Pillar, where the funeral service is held. Crime bloggers show up—Jane hadn’t known such people existed until she meets one in Three Sisters. We’re better journalists than traditional journalists, and better detectives than the real ones, the woman boasts. The bloggers even specialize: murder blogs, murder-of-children blogs, murder-of-little-girls blogs. This one, a woman in her fifties, dressed a little casually for a funeral in jeans and T-shirt, is a specialist in young girl abductions. Certainly she asks Jane more pointed questions than the local police had. Are local children free to play outside by themselves? How vigilant are parents? Any strange characters living here? Jane notices the blogger surreptitiously tapping an icon on her phone before laying it on the table between them. Jane tries to leave. The woman puts a hand on Jane’s arm. It is a seemingly casual gesture, but the pressure hurts. Jane shakes it off but sits down again. She is easily bullied.

  Who do you think did it?

  I have no idea, Jane says.

  No rumors?

  None, Jane says firmly. But in fact there have been. About Fred Barnes, the football coach for the Half Moon Bay Cougars, whose wife suddenly divorced him two years ago and left with their two little girls without saying anything. And Jim Yang, who runs the local lumberyard, who is married but childless and known to ogle younger teenage girls, offering them sugar-free chewing gum and cans of Diet Coke when they walk past in their groups of three or four, giggling and taking selfies. Both men. Both clearly needing something from the world that they weren’t getting.

  The blogger catches something in Jane’s hesitation.

  Tell me, she says.

  But Jane resolutely shakes her head. Bad karma to snitch. Even if Jane had anything to say—she didn’t—she would have kept her mouth shut. Jane learned that early in life.

  She later sees the woman in Three Sisters and hears she was at the site where Heidi was found, casually stepping over the police tape that had been wound around the place to keep her ilk out. The Moon News includes a link to the woman’s blog: In Memory of Her. EVERYTHING POINTS TO A LOCAL CONNECTION is the headline. POLICE HAVE A SHORT LIST OF SUSPECTS. In the blog is a list of locals, all men, Fred Barnes among them. The woman’s name is Emma. Emma Jones, her byline almost as big as the headline. Jane wonders how this Emma found out who is on the list. Jane wonders how Emma can sleep at night, given her job.

 

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