Warren halted in his rubbing motion and took the rag away. He’d managed to erase the first three letters, so that LER! was all that remained. “Just thought I might be able to help,” he said, stepping away from the car and giving her a smile that made me remember how he had always gone out of his way to be nice to Dawn, ever since he and his family moved into the neighborhood when she was two. It might have been because Warren and Maxine’s son, Sam, had been born with only three fingers on his left hand, which caused him to be mocked and ostracized by kids like Emmett Furth. I think Dawn’s lazy eye always made Warren feel sympathy toward her.
In fact, when she was about nine or ten, Dawn developed a downright crush on Warren. She told us as much one Saturday morning, looking out the window as he washed his car. “I like his curly hair,” she told us, looking pointedly at Joe, whose own hair—what he had left of it—was straight and wispy. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that his style was pure comb-over.
“Isn’t Sam the one you’re supposed to have a crush on?” I said.
“Sam’s weird,” she said, dismissing him with a wave of her cereal spoon. Joe and I looked at each other, and I knew what we were both thinking, though of course we would not say it: But Dawn, you’re weird, too.
Whatever positive feelings Dawn had once held for Warren were not in evidence now. Probably, I thought, it was because Warren had testified at Rud’s trial about seeing Dawn’s Nova parked in our driveway the night of the attack. “I don’t need your help,” she said to him with a bitter tone in her voice, “and be careful with my car. It’s a Corvette, you know.”
I was glad to see that though Warren wanted to smile, he held it back. “Yes, I know,” he said, making sure to survey the car with an appreciative eye. “It’s a beaut.” After a moment during which none of us spoke, he said, “That’s why I thought it would look better if we cleaned it up. You think?” After another moment, Dawn nodded, then turned to head into the house.
“Say thank you,” I called after her, as I’d done when she was a toddler. And as she’d done back then, she said the words half sincerely, without looking at the person they were directed to.
Warren set back to his task, and I told him I was sorry.
“No need to apologize, Hanna.” He rubbed a few more minutes, his breath coming out in white ribbons of exertion. “You didn’t mention Dawn was coming home,” he said then, and I remembered our conversation the day the reporters had come to get my reaction to Rud Petty’s appeal.
“I didn’t know. It was kind of sudden.”
“Ah. Well, that explains it.” He was almost finished. I could see only the faintest trace of the original blue now, and nothing of the ugly word that had been sprayed across the door. He was sweating; drops slid down the sides of his face. “We should give it a wax at some point, but that should do it,” he said, and impulsively, gratefully, I reached up to hug him and kissed one of his damp cheeks. He looked surprised, but then broke into a grin I hadn’t remembered seeing since before Maxine died. “I should have offered my services sooner,” he said, and we both blushed.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. How much we do—both Dawn and me.” I blushed some more, thinking I’d made a fool out of myself with that last part, considering the way Dawn had acted toward him. But if Warren was thinking the same thing, he didn’t show it.
“Well, I’ve had some experience. When Maxine went to her protests, she sometimes came back to find her car had been—decorated.” He smiled, perhaps remembering some particular message his wife had driven home from some rally. As long as I’d known her as a neighbor, Maxine had been an activist. I had a sudden vision of her setting off for one of her demonstrations against the invasion in Iraq: a slightly squat, round woman with her silver curls tucked under a red beret, waiting on the porch to get picked up by fellow sympathizers and driven off to Syracuse or New Paltz or Plattsburgh, where they would lock arms at busy intersections and chant “U.S. Out Now!” She always brought a tambourine to bang for good measure.
I told Warren I wanted to invite him in for coffee but that I had to get to work. He said of course, he’d take a rain check, and we both turned away. But then I heard him turn back and add, as if it were an afterthought, “So what are you going to be?”
Even now, it’s hard for me to describe my reaction to this. Of course I heard the words, but I didn’t understand them for another few seconds. I felt to the center of my being that he had asked me a profound question I should be able to answer. But I had no idea how.
“I’m sorry—what?” I said, my lips fumbling even those few syllables.
He seemed to recognize the anxiety his question had provoked, and he raised a hand to indicate that he hadn’t intended to touch a nerve. “Halloween,” he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the Furths’ front stoop, where Emmett had hung a mannequin by a noose. The figure wore a white shirt covered in fake blood and a Hannibal Lecter mask. The first time I’d walked to the driveway and seen it out of the corner of my eye, I cried out and stepped back before realizing the person was a fake. “I was just asking what you were going to be for Halloween,” Warren elaborated, when I didn’t show any hint that I grasped what he was saying. “It’s a stupid question at our age, I know. I was just trying to be cute.” He smiled and blushed again.
“Oh. That’s today? I didn’t even realize.” It was true; since Dawn’s arrival, I’d lost track of the dates. Warren had made it almost back to his porch when I called, “Thanks!” after him, and he raised his hand again in a wave without turning around to look at me. I’d made a fool of myself again.
I was unprepared. At the clinic, I was the one who’d originally suggested that everyone in the office wear some form of costume on Halloween, even the doctors. I remember the year Bob Toussaint came in dressed as a pirate and made the mistake of using his fake hook to lift a stethoscope to a three-year-old girl’s chest. It took me fifteen minutes to calm her down, but even after Bob took the hook off, she wouldn’t let him near her—we had to call in one of the female interns, who was dressed as Snow White, instead.
I stopped at the drugstore to see what they had left in the way of costumes. It was slim pickings, but I managed to find a cheap-looking tiara and a blond wig, and when I got to the office I fashioned a wand out of tongue depressors taped together with aluminum foil. All morning I went around saying to people, “Your wish is my command.”
“It’s good to see you back in the spirit, Hanna,” Francine said. She had to keep reaching up to adjust the moose ears over her head. “Hey, how’s that plant doing?” When I looked at her blankly, she said, “The one you were so sure was worth saving?” I realized she was referring to the ficus I’d picked up from the trash the day Ken Thornburgh came to tell me that Rud Petty had won a new trial.
Once I’d brought the plant in that day and set it down in the dining room, which was hardly ever used, I forgot about it completely. “Mommy, this plant has had it,” Dawn said the day after she moved in. She picked it up and laughed a little to show me how bad it looked. “Could it be any deader?”
“Just throw it away, would you?” I said, and she carried it out to the trash barrel in the garage. I didn’t want to look at it, remembering how I’d told Francine I would bring it back to life. That used to be my specialty, when I had my garden—my friend Claire always said that if my thumb were any greener, I’d be a Martian.
I didn’t feel up to telling Francine the truth. “Still working on it,” I said.
Just before lunch, I did a double take when I saw who was waiting for me in the clinic’s examining room: Gail Nazarian. “What, are you stalking me now?” I said, hoping she’d take it as the joke I halfway intended.
To my relief, she smiled—only slightly, but it was more than I’d ever seen her smile before. “That’s a good look for you,” she said, gesturing at the tiara on my head. “‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,’” she added, and I couldn’t tell if she was sho
wing off or trying to say something to me. When I responded by pulling off the tiara and throwing it on a chair, she sighed and said, “I do have a medical reason to be here. But yes, I’m trying to kill two birds.”
I looked at her closely, without wanting to let on that I was doing so. Her face appeared as unreadable as ever; I saw no signs of illness or distress. “What can we do for you?” I asked.
“It’s a urinary tract infection. I get them sometimes. I just need a script.”
“You couldn’t call your own doctor?”
She shrugged. “Like I said, I had another reason to come.”
“Okay,” I said, pretending to make a note so I wouldn’t have to look at her. “Shoot.”
“First, I wanted to say how happy I was to hear you’re going to testify,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you knew that. And we want to help you, if we can.” I guessed that by we she meant the people in her office—who, I remembered, could find the tooth fairy if they wanted to.
“How?” I asked. From her briefcase, she pulled a folder and held it out. I didn’t want to take it, but I also felt as if I had no choice. “What’s this?”
“It’s a copy of the interview police did with Dawn when they brought her in the morning after the attack. After they took her to the hospital, once they knew you’d survived the surgery.” She hesitated. “It’s not easy reading. But I thought it might nudge your memory.”
“I don’t see why it would.” Without looking down at it, I set the folder on the counter behind me.
“Now the second thing: I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me your daughter was home.” Those bird eyes bored into me; I felt them even when I looked away, realizing how similar this conversation was to the one I’d had with Cecilia on our doorstep the night of Dawn’s return. I also understood suddenly that Cecilia, trying to create the best news story possible, must have been the one to contact Gail to tell her that Dawn was back. “You know I want to talk to her.”
“Why? She doesn’t have any more information than she did before.” For a moment, because I missed it so badly, I was tempted to feel the kind of intimacy I used to share with Claire when we went for our Saturday morning walks with the dogs and talked about the things we told only each other and no one else. But then I remembered that Gail was a prosecutor, not my friend, and where I had been leaning toward her, I drew myself back.
She gave me a long look, and since I knew I was being tested, I made sure to hold my ground, even though I was squirming inside. But why? I asked myself. It’s the truth.
“And I still don’t understand why you don’t just call me when you want to say something,” I told her, hoping to deflect the intensity of her gaze, “instead of coming in person.”
“I guess I have an inflated sense of my own persuasive powers.” She gave a rueful smile.
“And if it does have to be in person, why here, instead of my house, like last time?”
The smile vanished so fast it made me breathless. “I didn’t want to show up when Dawn was around. Mrs. Schutt, we have reason to believe you might be in danger.”
“From Dawn?” I laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”
“From Rud Petty.” She slid awkwardly off the examining table and went over to her briefcase. “I can show you the cell phone records, if you want. He’s been in touch with one of his cousins, a real lowlife who’s already been in and out of jail twice and he’s not even twenty.”
“I don’t want to see whatever you have there.”
She must have heard how much I meant it, because she put the briefcase down. “We think he might be using the cousin to talk to Dawn.”
“Of course he isn’t. Why would he be talking to Dawn?” I could tell that my voice was scaling upward and louder, but didn’t seem to be able to rein it in. “Even if he wanted to do that, she doesn’t want to talk to him. She’s finished with all that. She’s trying to start over.”
Gail Nazarian gave me a dubious look. “Did you tell her you were planning to testify in the new trial?”
“I mentioned I was trying to remember what happened.” She made a face as if to say, See? “Why?”
“Because that would be information we don’t want getting back to Petty. Especially before you’ve actually remembered anything.”
My mouth betrayed me; I could feel it forming words I didn’t want or intend to speak.
“What?” she said, noticing. Her voice took on an excited edge. “You have remembered?”
I shook my head, in part because it had begun to hurt, as it always did when I felt a conflict brewing inside.
“Then what?” She wasn’t going to let it go; it was probably one of the reasons she’d made it so far as a prosecutor.
I hesitated. “You’re sure Rud Petty did it, right?”
“Of course we’re sure. Why would you ask me that?”
“I just wondered if you really had everything you needed to clear Emmett Furth.”
The bird eyes widened. “You’d better tell me what you’re talking about.”
I told her about the memory I’d had in the bedroom, and about seeing Emmett’s tattoo when he helped me carry the box in over the weekend.
“You’re sure the arm had a tattoo on it? The arm from that night?” she asked, and I said I was, even though I wasn’t, because she seemed skeptical of what I was saying. Even though I felt skeptical myself, I didn’t like that she doubted me.
“Okay. Well, thanks. That’s useful,” she said, not sounding at all as if she meant it.
“Are you going to follow up?”
“Sure. That’s my job.” I could tell she was less than thrilled by my report; she’d gotten her hopes up, I’m sure, that I remembered Rud Petty committing the crime.
To change the subject, I asked, “Do you really have a UTI, or are you making it up?”
“It feels better now. Probably just a false alarm.” She put her blazer on slowly, giving me a suspicious look, and said she wanted me to come down to her office sometime soon, preferably later in the week, to discuss my testimony.
Then she added that if I wanted, her office could offer me protection.
“I don’t need you to protect me.” I opened the door and had to stop myself from pushing her out. When she was gone I sat down hard, crushing the fake crown. Then I got up and carried the folder she’d given me out to the shredder behind Francine’s desk, intending to destroy whatever was in it, but at the last minute I withdrew the papers from the machine and stuck the whole folder into the bottom of my bag.
The Truth Is Out There
When I got home expecting to find Dawn in front of the TV, I was surprised to see her standing at the stove, cooking something I couldn’t identify. “I’m making Tuna Helper,” she said, with far more pride than should ever be attached to that sentence.
“I thought we were out of tuna.” I leaned over to pet Abby, who always perked up when I walked in the door.
“We are. I’m just making the Helper.” Dawn laughed, and her hyper cheeriness made me feel wary.
I asked, “Have you been in touch with Rud Petty?”
Her too-big smile collapsed. “Why would you ask me a thing like that?”
“You haven’t had any contact with him since the trial, right?” I didn’t know if she would hear, as I did, that I was begging her to convince me.
Her lips were as pale as her face. “I can’t believe you would even ask me that, Mommy.” She put a hand up to her chest as if something hurt her there. “I mean, what are you saying?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again without speaking. I was hesitant to mention what Gail Nazarian had told me about Rud Petty being found with a cell phone, or about her cautionary visit to the clinic that day. “I don’t know,” I faltered. “You were just so close—back then.”
“Well, of course we were. I loved him.” Though she stirred the noodles vigorously, I didn’t necessarily detect any anger in it. “But how could I possibly be in touch with him? I’ve b
een two thousand miles away.” She set the spoon down straight on the counter. If Joe had been there, he would have told her to use a napkin. “Besides that, why would I want to?”
“I meant by phone,” I told her, not answering the second part of her question.
“People in jail don’t get phones.”
“A pay phone, I mean. Can’t they do that?”
“How am I supposed to know what goes on in jail?” If her tone had been indignant, I would have been tempted to think she was feeling defensive. Instead, she just sounded puzzled about why I would be asking her these things.
We sat down to the noodly glop, and I pretended to like how it tasted. I took a long sip of water and decided I might as well ask the other question that had been on my mind. “What about Cecilia?”
“What about her?”
I could read in her face the answer to my question. “You called her, didn’t you?”
“No.” She leaned back and glanced away from me, and anyone could have seen that she was lying.
“Dawn.”
That was all it took, my murmuring her name, for her to implode the way I’d witnessed so often over the years, the crumpling-up of her reddening face before tears blasted out of her eyes as if they had a volition of their own. She nodded violently, thrusting her hands up to her face. “I’m sorry! But you don’t understand. She’s changed, Mommy.”
“Just tell me you didn’t let her into the house, after I specifically asked you not to.” I kept my voice as steady as possible.
Dawn shook her head with so much vigor her hair whirled around her head. “No. I would never have done that, knowing how you felt. I met her at Caprice. We had scones and lattes. It was nice, like we were friends or something.” The wistfulness in her voice threatened to scrape another layer of hardness from my heart, but I didn’t let it.
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