The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  It’s all about outcome. And that takes guesswork. Clairvoyance even. Got to predict if reform school will destroy this kid, or actually reform him. Tougher than it sounds. I was one saved by reform school, or at least by the cop who sent me there. So I’m mindful of the possibility that what hurts most now might help most in the future.

  The truth is, for most small-town criminals, getting caught is deterrence enough. It’s humiliating to get caught drunk and disorderly by your former geometry student. And it’s scary for a married banker doing a late-night audit with a teller to look out his windshield and hear a cop, hand on a gun, say, “Heard someone yelling. That you, Mr. Peterson? You all right?”

  So when I was cruising one night over by the college, I didn’t arrest the town matriarch when I caught her rummaging through the trash bags just inside the college gates.

  It was a moonless night in late May. The streets were deserted—our town is full of working-class people who have to be up for the seven a.m. whistle—and the air was damp with mist. We’re in a valley, but still twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, so the nights are usually chilly well into spring. I wasn’t enough of a wuss to turn the car heater on, but I admit I considered the idea long enough to dismiss it.

  When I got to River Road, I rolled down my window, and it was all so quiet I could hear the water rushing by thirty feet below the guardrail. Tug Lewis was reporting in on the radio that Gemtown was secure, and he was stopping at the minimart for some coffee. The dispatcher told him to bring some Oreos back.

  I noticed the trash bags and barrels dotting the sidewalks and driveways, and remembered it was Tuesday, and tomorrow, way too early, the Roemer Refuse truck would be coming around to do the weekly pickup. I was just thinking I had to stop by my house and get the garbage out when I came around the corner onto College Ave and saw something moving behind a heap of three trash bags.

  Too big for a raccoon. Dog probably. I was a cop, not a dog-catcher, and besides, this was along the maple-lined row of brick faculty houses. I was still annoyed at the president’s refusal to compensate the department for the nine man-hours of traffic direction during graduation last week. If a dog ripped up and scattered professorial trash all over College Ave, served him right.

  But then someone stood up. Wasn’t a dog then. I cruised down the road, thinking it might be some fraternity prankster. But the college was out of session.

  I flipped on the beacon lamp mounted over the side view and angled it to illuminate the trash bags. There was the perp, spotlighted a couple dozen feet away.

  Okay, even for me, trained as I am to expect the unexpected, this was . . . unexpected.

  And I decided this was the time for discrimination, not to mention discretion.

  Couple reasons. First, well, if I remember my criminal justice class lectures, it’s not actually a crime to steal someone’s trash, as long as it’s out on public property. And these trash bags were sitting out there on the city sidewalk. Second, the trash thief was none other than Mrs. Margaret Wakefield, town matriarch, city councilwoman, and, for a few minutes twenty years ago, my mother-in-law.

  Now I didn’t know what the hell she was doing, but I knew I wasn’t dealing with an unregenerate criminal here. And so I pulled up at the curb right beside her and said in a casual tone, “You lose something there, Mrs. Wakefield?”

  She’d been so intent on her task, whatever it was, she hadn’t noticed me before that. Now she looked up, and I was struck by her complete lack of panic. I mean, she should have been panicked. She was caught. But she just said, “Chief McCain,” in that lofty tone of hers, like I was standing at the podium in the City Council room, requesting more money for Kevlar vests.

  “Mrs. Wakefield.” I got out of the car and stood there, arm on the frame of the door, waiting to see if she had some good explanation for her actions.

  She didn’t even bother. She opened the last trash bag and started rummaging through it.

  I closed my door and came round the front. “Mrs. Wakefield,” I said again, this time shining my flashlight on her.

  She looked up at me, frowning. I’ve never figured out if she actually forgot I was once briefly married to her daughter, or if she was just too proud to acknowledge it. Rich people really are different, as some author said. Or maybe Laura had said that, back in the days when she used to try to explain her family to me. Things rich people don’t want to have happened just didn’t happen.

  I came from a family where no one ever forgot anything. And we kind of defined “dysfunctional”, so there was a lot to remember. I never see my brother Luke without reminding him about how he flushed my gerbil down the toilet. He was always killing animals, accidentally on purpose. (Far as I know, he hasn’t grown up to be a serial murderer. Not that I’d ever let him take care of my Labrador.) My family never forgets.

  But Mrs. Wakefield was gazing at me with no more than mild disapproval. “I am in no danger, Chief McCain. You may resume your patrol.”

  I wanted to say, “Yes, your highness,” just to see if that would get a reaction. But I didn’t. She’d brought the resolution to hire me for this job, and I guessed she could get me fired too.

  And what she was doing wasn’t actually illegal. A sign of insanity, sure. She’d always struck me as on the edge, as a matter of fact. No one else around here would agree with me, because she was always so controlled and calm. But that was just her breeding, her training. Never show emotion, that’s what she’d been taught. Didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.

  Good cops have to have intuition. And my intuition always told me this was one angry woman. Not necessarily all that in touch with her inner rage, but acting on it anyway. And unacknowledged rage, that was more dangerous than the overt kind.

  I’d seen it in that “stay away from my daughter” speech of hers, the one that implied otherwise my parents’ house would be fire-bombed and Laura locked away in a padded cell.

  The trouble with control is you have to keep it. And to do that, you have to keep it all in. Never tell. And that’s what I thought was going on with Mrs. Wakefield here. Something had snapped in her, and she was never going to tell. There was some reason that made sense to her, something that impelled her to root through the trash here, and no one else needed to know. And no one should question it either.

  The rage was because she couldn’t keep it all under control.

  “Where’s your car, Mrs. Wakefield?”

  “I walked,” she said serenely, jamming her hand into the last bag. At least she was wearing a rubber glove. She pulled out a handful of envelopes, glanced at the one on top, and shoved them back in.

  “Let me drive you home.”

  “Oh, that’s very kind of you. Just one moment—oh, yes. Here’s what I need.”

  And she pulled out a ragged piece of string that glistened in the light of the streetlamp. With her free hand, she withdrew a plastic bag from her sweater pocket and slid the string inside.

  Then she rose, slipped her rubber gloves off and stuck them in the trash bag, tied it back up, and came compliantly over to my car. As stately as a queen, she climbed into the passenger side and buckled her seatbelt. Then, as I started the engine, she held out the baggie. “Analyze this, will you?”

  Automatically I took the bag from her and held it under the dashboard light. Dental floss. Used. “Analyze it?”

  “For DNA. And report back to me, please.”

  I started to object. But then I said, “Takes a few weeks, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. Just contact me when the results are in.”

  Well, I know mild paranoia when I see it. And she was at that age that Alzheimers got started. So I took her home and dropped her off and the next day I called Merilee Knight, her housekeeper, and asked as casually as I could if Mrs. W. was all there.

  Well, I didn’t put it that way. But Merilee understood. Mrs. W? Sharp as a tack. So, I probed, nothing weird going on?

  “Oh, well, you know her type. Everything’s a
production. Got to be a big deal. But she’s fine.”

  “She got something going up at the college?”

  “Yeah. Planning to make a big donation. The deans and presidents over here every week, courting her and her bucks.”

  I thanked her and hung up, figuring that explained it. Well, it didn’t explain it in a way that I could understand. But if Mrs. Wakefield was going to give a lot of money to the college, she probably had some reason for looking through the faculty trash. Not a reason that’d make sense to me, but then, I’m not giving my money away. Maybe she was looking for dirty magazines. Love letters from lady faculty members to the deans. Something that would disqualify these guys from receiving the funds.

  I wasn’t sure about that dental floss. But just in case she asked, I stuck it into the samples we sent that month to the DNA lab in Charleston. I mean, I’d given up a secure detective position with union wages and protection down in Tennessee, not to mention consigned myself to long drives every weekend to see my daughter. I wasn’t going to lose this job because of dental floss.

  When the Charleston lab report came back a couple weeks later, I glanced at the results. Without another sample as comparison, Mrs. Wakefield’s sample yielded nothing but an incomprehensible string of letters. Still, I was impressed. Might be crazy, but she was clever. Who would have thought a civilian would know that a string of floss would yield actual DNA information?

  I made a conscious decision not to speculate about what use she planned to make of this information. Discretion again. Anyway, she never called and demanded the report, so I let myself forget about it. There were enough weird things in this town without worrying about an old lady’s curiosity.

  I had about another year to prove myself and restore the department. This was a secretly demoralized town. Wakefield was precarious enough in the best of times, trying to be a nice pretty middle-class college town in the middle of a state full of backwoods hollers and abandoned coalmines and industrial waste. And since the “middle-class” part was dependent on the ability of outsiders to pay for private college tuition and expensive ski vacations, the recession had hit hard. Wakefield was hanging on, but it was like an old widow trying to keep up appearances by taking the ‘87 Caddy for a weekly carwash.

  I didn’t help matters much, I reckon. Took the job on the condition they spend a couple million on a new police station and lockup and seven new squad cars. But I had them at a disadvantage. Something else no one in town was talking about was the last police chief, the one who spent the second half of his twenty-year career helping a local car dealer transfer heroin up the line to Pittsburgh. Both his lieutenants were implicated, and so the city needed someone from the outside, someone untainted. That was me. (Everyone politely pretended not to remember the five years my family had lived here—let’s just say, my dad has always been the entrepreneurial type.) I had good credentials from a larger town, and all the cutting-edge training their own force lacked. They needed me. And I made them pay.

  But now it was time for their investment to start showing results. Not enough that I’d cleaned up the department, gotten rid of the good old boys whose major talent was ignoring what their buddy the former chief was hiding in the evidence lockers. Not enough that I’d got three new recruits who’d already passed through the state training academy so that their tuition didn’t come out of our budget. I had to restore confidence, and that meant officers out there patrolling every day and every night, visible, high-profile, pulling over the speeders and the drunk drivers and rousting the teenagers from the parking lot behind the minimart. And it meant keeping any more serious crime outside the city limits.

  Once school was out in June, I took my daughter on vacation for a week— Disney World for her and Cape Canaveral for me—and when she went back to Bristol, I was preoccupied trying to trap the teenaged graffiti artist decorating all the bridges with Japanese letters. Impressive talent—if I found him, I’d write a letter of recommendation to some art school—but cities up to and including New York have learned that ignoring graffiti ends up encouraging other more violent teen crime. So I or one of my officers spent every night cruising up and down River Road, looking for movement under the three bridges. No sign of the artist—except, occasionally, a stone newly decorated red or black ideogram that an officer would dutifully photograph and my secretary would excitedly look up on some website: “It’s the symbol for the moon!” or flower or fire or peace or whatever.

  This was West Virginia. Mountain West Virginia. We didn’t have any Asians here. The high school didn’t teach Japanese. The college didn’t teach Japanese. I blame the Internet.

  Anyway, that was what passed for a major crime wave in Wakefield.

  I never expected the next crime would be initiated by the homecoming of my high-school sweetheart and her two religious sisters.

  I’ve never been the type to look back. So it wasn’t like I spent the last twenty years wondering what might have been with Laura. I can’t say it should have turned out differently— that would be dishonoring my marriage and the love that created my daughter. Maybe that marriage didn’t last, but I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t real.

  By the time I married Michelle, I was over Laura. Oh, I still cared enough to leaf through TV Guide to see when she might be appearing on some show. I wasn’t so stupid I’d actually watch—Michelle would not have taken that well, to say the least. But I was glad when Laura was nominated for that Emmy, and felt a little better about the end of us. In the unlikely event that we’d stayed married, she’d have been stuck in Bristol, Tennessee, maybe doing Community Theater in the evenings. And she had too much talent to be trapped down home.

  No need to speculate what sort of life we might have had together, because I knew the life I got was a good one, even with all the trouble. I had those first years with Michelle, especially after Carrie was born, which were the happiest of my life—there’s nothing like watching a child grow, with the one other person in the world who enjoys it just as much as you do. Like everyone always says, we grew apart, but those early years were worth the pain that followed.

  So when finally—finally—we stopped trying to resurrect that lost time, I was in the mood for something uncomplicated. A relationship without weight. Not sure why the high-school sweetheart seemed to be the answer, except that high school, in retrospect, seemed so simple, and so did the Romeo-and-Juliet conflicts we faced then, none of which would matter much now.

  And Laura made it sound so easy. What did I have to do, after all, but what I wanted to do? Every man’s dream, right? A beautiful Hollywood star shows up, swearing that you and only you can restore her sexuality, through your uniquely healing passion. And then you both move on, with sweet memories and no obligations.

  Hey, works for me. It would work for you too, I bet.

  Only it didn’t. Oh, we had our interlude, and she conquered her fear, and . . . yeah, by transferring it to me. I’d hardly gotten out of bed before I started obsessing about the guy who hurt her.

  I stopped myself from pushing her to report the crime. She was right—after so long, there was no way an investigation could end well. It’s hard enough to get an indictment and conviction on a date-rape case, even with physical evidence. But a year later? No way.

  But that didn’t mean I could let it go. If he was still out there, still walking around, still dating, that probably meant he was still raping. Silence might save Laura’s career, but it might doom other women.

  There had to be a way . . .

  I’d half-formulated a plan—needing only the identity and location of the rapist—when the entire Wakefield family followed the matriarch down that path to madness.

  It was a weird coincidence that Tom O’Connor, the journalist, was kidnapped while I was in bed with his sister-in-law. For a day or so, I thought maybe it wasn’t a coincidence—I don’t know, like they wanted a potential witness out of the way, or wanted me distracted. But pretty soon I acquitted Laura of conspiracy, at least
pre-crime.

  Still from the first, there was something off about this kidnapping. First thing—no one gets kidnapped in Wakefield. A non-custodial parent might keep a kid a couple extra days, requiring a visit by an officer, and, if things are slow at the courthouse, the assistant prosecutor, just to subtly remind the offender that this is a crime. But a real kidnapping? Of an out-of-towner? I have to say, of all the crimes I’d anticipated when training my officers, this didn’t even register.

  As I drove to the crime scene, I ran through the possibilities. Means, motive, opportunity. A foreign correspondent might have made a few enemies, but why wait till he comes to this remote mountain town to strike? You practically have to be a native to find your way here through the hills, and getting out in a hurry—well, the nearest major highway is forty-five miles away along sharply graded twisting roads. And strangers, especially foreign strangers, get noticed in Wakefield. The arrival of an Arab or even a European would occasion a few calls to the police station, and we’d gotten none of those.

  It didn’t take me long to conclude that it was an inside job.

  I stood in Tom O’Connor’s motel room, trying not to choke on the chloroform fumes, surveying the scene. CNN was on the TV; the laptop was powered up and connected wirelessly to the Web. I used a pen to punch a key on the laptop, and saw that the victim had been answering his email and broken off mid-sentence—something about a student’s spring semester grade, nothing interesting. Next to the keyboard was a glass, half-full of whiskey. I bent to smell it. Good whiskey. Strong enough to momentarily overwhelm the sweet-sick smell of chloroform. But there was no liquor bottle on the desk or dresser, or in the wastebasket.

  The door was clean. No sign of a break-in. Looked like he let the assailant in.

  Now granted, this was Wakefield, and even an out-of-towner would know that the crime rate was pretty low. Still, this O’Connor guy, by all accounts, had worked in the most dangerous places in the world, and already lived through one kidnapping. So would he have opened the door to a stranger? I didn’t think so.