by David Bell
“I thought you didn’t offer opinions or judgment unless asked?”
“You seem like you can handle it,” she said. “So, am I right?”
My throat felt constricted and phlegmy. “When I look around, I see that everyone else is moving on, has moved on, and maybe I should do the same.”
“Maybe?”
“I should move on,” I said.
“But why? Why now? What’s changed?”
I reached into my own coat pocket and brought out a ziplock bag. I handed it across the table. Susan took it, examined it, and then looked at me.
“A wilted flower,” she said.
“Before I came over here today, I went into Caitlin’s room. I do that from time to time.”
“Is it still her room?” Susan asked. “Have you changed it?”
I shook my head. “It’s exactly the same.”
“Ah,” she said as though my answer meant something. But she didn’t explain.
“She wore that coat to the park in the days before she disappeared. Then the day she disappeared she wore a different coat. I think the man who took her-the man in that drawing-gave her the flower. It was right before Valentine’s Day.”
“Hmm.” Susan held the bag in her hands, turned it over, and looked at it from all sides. Her nails were short and unpainted. She seemed to be taking the flower very seriously. “Maybe she picked it up off the ground. Or took it from the cemetery, off of a grave. Or a school friend gave it to her. There are other possibilities.”
“Why would she keep it in her coat if that was the case? It’s like she was hiding it.”
Susan shrugged. “I think you should share this with the police. It’s over my head, to be honest. But if it’s evidence, if it’s important, they should see it.” She handed the bag back.
I took it and held it in my hand for a long moment. I couldn’t imagine giving it away to the police. It was foolish, I knew, but it seemed like a strong link to Caitlin, and I couldn’t just give it away.
“It’s like an artifact, isn’t it?” Susan asked.
“You read my mind.”
“I don’t do that. But I will tell you that when my husband moved out of our house he left some of his things behind. Some old clothes, some books. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them.”
“When did you finally do it?” I asked.
“Never,” she said. “They’re still right there and probably always will be. That’s why I understand how that woman I mentioned felt about her son. And how you feel about this.”
“I don’t know if that’s encouraging or disturbing,” I said.
“Neither do I.”
I slipped the plastic bag into my coat pocket. “Well, since we’re telling each other all our dirty little secrets, I thought I could ask you one more thing.”
“Shoot.”
“You read the paper, right? And saw the story about the press conference where the police released the sketch? You know that I mentioned seeing something-someone-in the park where Caitlin disappeared.”
“The ghost,” she said, holding her hands up and making air quotes.
“What do you make of that?” I asked. “Is it possible? Did I see something. .?”
“You saw something,” she said. “I’m an open-minded person by nature. I tend to think it’s possible there are things we just don’t understand in this world. People and things we don’t understand. Maybe you just saw what you wanted to see.” She paused and studied my face. “We all have ghosts, Tom. We trail them along behind us like banners.”
“Or like weights,” I said.
“What are you going to do with your weight?” she asked.
I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.
But I didn’t get up to leave. I stayed in my seat.
“The police. .” I said.
“What about them?”
“The police think Tracy might know the man she saw in the strip club. And she came by my office at the university and hinted at the same thing.”
“I told you I shouldn’t-”
“And then she asked me for money.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Did you give it to her?”
“Am I being played here?” I asked. “Is she up to something?”
“Tracy is not fully healed. You need to keep that in mind when you have dealings with her. If she asks you for money again, I suggest you don’t give it to her. I’ve made that mistake with her before.”
“I guess it’s hard to resist the urge to help,” I said. “It’s hard to forget she’s somebody’s daughter. Somebody somewhere.”
“We all are, aren’t we? We all are.”
Chapter Twenty
The cell phone woke me the next morning. My eyes fixed not on the buzzing, vibrating phone, but on Caitlin’s red coat, which I’d tossed across a chair the night before. The coat that had held that red flower.
I looked at the clock: 6:15. Early. It was still dark beyond the curtains. Predawn.
I didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID. I thought about letting it go to voice mail, but I looked at the coat again. Something wasn’t right. The phone shouldn’t be ringing so early. .
“Hello?”
“Tom? This is Detective Ryan.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Tom, I need you to come down here right away.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the coat. I felt cold, the blood in my body icy.
“What is it? What happened?”
“We may have found Caitlin, and we need you to come down here and see this girl for yourself.”
I tried to work my mouth, but no sound came out. My jaw moved up and down like a broken hinge.
“Tom? Can you come down here, or should I send a car to get you?”
“You found her,” I said. “And you need me to identify. .”
I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t refer to my daughter as simply a body, a pile of remains or dust scattered by the wind and wild animals.
“No,” Ryan said. “She’s alive. This girl is alive, and we need you to come down to the station right away. Now, can you drive yourself or do you need me to send that car?”
“Alive. . Caitlin? Are you serious?”
“No joke, Tom. This girl is alive.”
I closed the phone and spoke at the same time.
“I’m on my way.”
My hands shook. I gripped the wheel tight to steady them, and the pressure I exerted made my knuckles ache. I thought they might crack open and bleed. My speed crept too high, so I overcompensated and drove so slow other drivers came within inches of my bumper. My heart thumped at twice its normal pace, and my extremities felt numb, as though they’d been severed from the rest of my body.
When I reached the station, I parked my car at a crazy angle and barely managed to shut the door before running inside.
She’s here. She’s here. This is it. She’s here.
I was two steps inside when Ryan intercepted me.
“Where is she? Where?”
“Come with me.”
He clamped his big hand on my biceps and led me down a short hallway to the familiar conference room. He guided me inside. My eyes darted around the room. It was empty.
Ryan closed the door behind us.
“Where is she?” I asked. “Are you bringing her in here?”
“Sit down.”
“I want to see her.”
“You will. But sit down first.”
“I don’t want to sit down. I want to see my daughter.”
I started past him, my right arm brushing against his left. Ryan took hold of me again, but this time I shook loose and reached for the door. Ryan grabbed me from behind like a wrestler and pressed his mouth close to my ear. I felt his hot breath as he spoke.
“Not yet,” he said. “You need to sit down.”
His voice was steady but laced with steel. His arms encircled me, dug into my rib cage. I couldn’t get loose. He was too big, too strong. Surprising
ly so. I struggled a little more, but we both knew it was futile.
“Are you going to sit?” he asked, his voice practically inside my head.
I nodded, went limp. “Sure, sure.”
He didn’t really let go, but with less force turned me away from the door and back toward the conference table.
“Sit here,” he said.
I sat, straightening the collar of my jacket, which had shoved up under my chin during our struggle.
“We need to talk about a few things before this goes any further,” Ryan said.
“Is it her?” I asked. “Is it really her?”
Ryan nodded. “We think it is. Caitlin wrecked her bike when she was little, right? It left a pretty distinctive round scar.”
“Yes, of course. She got eight stitches.”
“This young woman allowed a female police officer to look at her knee. She rolled her pant leg up. The scar is there. We’ve gone ahead and fingerprinted her in order to make a comparison with the prints that were taken when she was little. That will take a few hours, but I don’t have any doubt, looking at her and comparing her to the pictures of your child. This is your daughter. It’s Caitlin.”
I felt the sharp pain in my chest, the same one I’d felt in Caitlin’s closet. My heart swelled like a balloon, expanding until it reached my throat and choked off the passage of air. I put my head in my hands, closed my eyes. I squeezed them tight until I saw firework patterns on my eyelids, great starbursts of red and green. Caitlin. Here.
Alive.
Ryan’s hand landed on my shoulder. I let go of everything-the runaway theories, the unreturned calls, the suspicions. I stood up and wrapped my arms around him.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” I squeezed him tighter, a reversal of our little struggle from a few minutes earlier. He smelled like shaving cream, and I felt his own gentle but awkwardly delivered man-pats against my back.
“It’s okay. We have some things to talk about, Tom. Just sit down. Go ahead there. It’s okay.”
I ended up back in the chair, my vision blurred by tears. I wiped them away with the backs of my hands. Ryan handed me a box of tissues. I don’t know where he found them, but I took one and continued wiping at my eyes.
“Do you want some water?” Ryan asked.
“No, I’m fine. What happened?” I asked. “What the fuck happened?”
Before Ryan could tell me, someone knocked on the conference room door. I looked up.
“Is that her?” I asked.
Ryan went to the door, but it opened before he reached it. Abby stepped into the room, the whites of her eyes prominent, the corners of her mouth turned down. She took short, tentative steps across the carpet and didn’t look up or make eye contact with anyone.
“Who invited her?”
Ryan’s head turned toward me. “I called her, Tom. She’s Caitlin’s mother.”
“She hasn’t acted like it. A mother wouldn’t give up on her child.” I stood up. “You were wrong, Abby. You and Pastor Chris. She’s alive. She’s right here, alive, and you were dead fucking wrong about it.”
Ryan held his hand out toward me. “Please, Tom. Not now.”
Abby didn’t look toward me. She sat in a chair across the room. She dropped her hands into her lap and twisted them around and over the top of each other.
“Are you okay, Abby?” Ryan asked.
She finally spoke in a low church whisper. “It took me a while to get here. I was so. . surprised when you called.”
Ryan grabbed one of the rolling chairs and moved it out into the center of the room so he was between us. He sat down, feet splayed, his knees far apart.
“I’d like to tell both of you what’s going on and how we got to this point,” he said.
“Yes, please. I’d like to know,” I said.
“Abby,” he said, “do you want to hear this?”
For a moment, it looked like she wasn’t listening. Then she nodded.
“This morning, at approximately three-thirty, officers on a routine patrol saw a young woman walking along the side of Williamstown Road, out near the mall. She looked too young to be out at that time of night, so the officers questioned her. She appeared to be in good health. A little dirty, but with no obvious signs of injury. She didn’t appear to be drunk or under the influence of drugs. She didn’t have any identification, and the officers on the scene were going to take her to juvenile detention for processing-that’s routine when a kid turns up like that with no ID-when one of them, a female officer, thought she recognized the girl from somewhere. She remembered the coverage of Caitlin’s burial and the sketch of the suspect. She asked the girl, pointedly, who she was.
“The girl got nervous and agitated. She told the officers, ‘I know you think I’m that Caitlin Stuart girl, but I’m not.’ That seemed to confirm things for the officers, so they brought her here for further inquiry, and they decided to call me.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Was she brainwashed? What was wrong with her?”
Ryan held up his finger, indicating there was more to tell.
“When I arrived at the station, I questioned her about her identity and where she lived. She wouldn’t tell me anything else except to repeat that line. ‘I know you think I’m that Caitlin Stuart girl.’ When I asked her why she was out walking so late at night, who her parents were, where she went to school, she just stared at me like she was deaf or didn’t understand English. I offered her something to eat, and she asked for a cup of coffee.”
“Caitlin doesn’t drink coffee,” Abby said, her voice just above a whisper.
“Did she ask about us?” I asked.
Ryan shook his head. “She kept asking us to let her go.”
“Are you sure it’s her?” Abby asked. “It might not be her.”
Ryan nodded. “It’s her. She looks smaller and younger perhaps than the average sixteen-year-old. Maybe she hasn’t been eating as well. I don’t know. But that means she looks more like the pictures taken before Caitlin disappeared than we would have suspected. Then I told her we were going to fingerprint her, which she went along with. It’s going to take a few hours to find out if they match, but-I told Tom already-this girl has the same scar on her leg from a bike accident.”
“She was eight,” Abby said. “She needed stitches.” Abby finally looked up and faced Ryan. “But that’s not proof. Lots of people have scars. Until you have DNA or the fingerprints or an X-ray. .”
“Jesus, Abby,” I said. “You really don’t want her back, do you?”
She looked at me. “I don’t want to get crushed,” she said. “I don’t want that for either of us.”
“I understand that. I do, Abby,” Ryan said. “And, ordinarily, I would try to wait for something more conclusive. I don’t want to wind you both up for nothing. But in a town this size, people are going to know that girl’s here, and before things get too far away from us, I want you to be able to see her. I wouldn’t have brought you both here if I weren’t certain. My gut tells me this is it.”
“Let’s go see her then,” I said.
Ryan held up his finger again. “We have some things to take care of once you’ve seen her. We have to get her to the hospital to be examined by a doctor. You won’t get a lot of time, and the time you spend with her here, today, might be the last quiet moments you have for a while. This is going to be a hell of an adjustment for you two, and since we don’t know where she’s been or who she was with, we all need to be prepared for anything.”
“We know who she was with,” I said. “That man in the sketch. Did you ask her about him?”
Ryan shook his head. “It’s best in a case like this not to press too hard at the outset. Not to ask too many questions too soon, even if we want to.”
“A case like this?” Abby asked. “Are there other cases like this?”
“I just mean when a child has been kidnapped or run away.”
“No, no, no, no. Not a runaway,” I said. “That man, the sketch-tha
t proves it. She didn’t run away. Someone took her-they took her from us.”
Ryan nodded along, placating me. But then he said, “I know this has been a long road for the two of you, but I can promise you what we already know and see is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more to the story here, and we’re going to have to get to it.”
“What are they going to do at the hospital?” Abby asked.
I knew. I knew I knew I knew. I didn’t want to hear it, but I knew.
Ryan confirmed it.
“They’ll do a complete exam. Gynecological included. They’ll be looking for evidence of sexual assault and pregnancy.”
Abby made a small noise in the back of her throat.
“Someone who needs to be checked for those things didn’t run away,” I said.
Ryan stood up. “Wait here, and I’ll go see if things are ready. I thought I’d give the two of you a moment together before we bring you back. I think maybe you have some things to get straight before you see Caitlin.”
“Ryan?” I asked. “Is this going to be all right?”
He offered me a small smile. “Your daughter’s back. Doesn’t that mean this is a good day?”
When he was gone, I turned to Abby.
She didn’t look at me.
“Abby?”
She remained rigid as a block of wood.
“Abby? Are you okay?”
“I was at the church, working, and then Ryan called me.” She was looking at the floor. “I knew something bad was happening, something about Caitlin. I wasn’t expecting this today, Tom. This just comes out of nowhere.”
“It’s not a bad thing, Abby.”
“Why did you say such awful things about me?” she asked, raising her head.
“Are you looking for an apology? Because I’m not offering one.”
“Do you really think I don’t deserve to be here?”
“It’s not about you, Abby. Your feelings have nothing to do with this day.” I stood up. “But I can tolerate the idea of you being along for this. I’m willing to put up with that. . for Caitlin. But I’m also not going to wait for you. They should be ready for us now, so get up and let’s go.”