The Weight of Living

by Michael Daigle

  Lauren gasped. “Sarah Lawton.” She looked back and forth between Calista and Frank. “Sarah Lawton.”

  Calista folded her arms on the table and cradled her head. “Yes,” she said to the crook of her arm. “That’s why I found Sister Katherine. It was her family who adopted the girl who became Sarah Lawton.”

  Even though his mind was a screaming WHAT THE HELL? Nagler, ever the cop, asked “How did you get to Georgia, or how did you get to Jersey?”

  Calista raised her head, suddenly weary. “You know, Frank, some of this I don’t know. I don’t know how I got to Georgia. I’m guessing Garrettson/Harrison threw us all in a car and drove us to the middle of the Georgia woods. Or maybe I was born there. I don’t know who my mother was. She could have been one of my older ‘sisters.’ I know, how, um, strange...”

  “I was going to suggest perverted,” Nagler said.

  “Frank,” Lauren sighed.

  “Yeah, it’s okay, he’s right,” Calista said, crying. “But you have to understand what it’s like living inside a family like that. There is no point of reference to even begin to find another answer. You are told this is the world. You never see other children. Never see other homes, other adults.” She looked up at Nagler, pleading for understanding. “It just becomes your turn.”

  Silence; shuffling as Nagler moved his elbows on the table shifting the papers. Soft weeping.

  “I know how I got to Jersey, though,” Calista said, recovering her voice. “Hitched, five rides with truckers with lust in their eyes for a lithe thirteen-year-old. After the Atlanta cops asked me all their questions, they put me in social services and forgot about me. So I left. Came here looking for Sister Katherine.”

  Nagler stood up and waved his hands like he was surrendering. “Okay, too much. How...?”

  “She was on sex abuse chatrooms looking for victims. Used a log-in ‘Sarah Lawton.’”

  Of course she did.. He stared out the window into the darkness; the palest dawn leaked over the eastern hills. He closed his eyes and felt the world and everything he thought he knew sink into a mist.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Where is Alton Garrett?

  Calista was gone when Nagler awoke.

  Her brief note said, “I’m sorry for the confusion. You need to understand how hard all this is. Tell Leonard I’m coming back soon.”

  I hope so for his sake.

  He sat on the couch on the front porch with his elbows on his knees, hands clutching a cup of coffee. Sunlight dusted the roof tops and made blazing the tips of tree branches that extended from the dense morning haze.

  Of all the things Calista said, this was what stuck because it was so worrisome: What happens when he loses control? Then the thing she didn’t say: She never mentioned Alton Garrett, except in the abstract.

  The door beside him creaked open and Lauren walked out wrapped in a pink terry robe that she held closed, ties dangling. Nagler leaned back, looked at her briefly, then at the floor. Last night had not been his best night.

  “I’m, uh...”

  “Don’t be sorry, Frank,” she said softly as she sat on the couch, pulled her legs under the robe and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Calista can be a handful.”

  “Still...”

  “Hey, look, overtired, over-caffeinated and being given information that changed practically everything you knew. Remember how this started, just a little girl standing in the cold? And now it’s about rape and incest, and old bankers and dirty old men, murders apparently, stolen money and real estate and books...” Lauren sat up, crossed her legs and pulled the robe tight. “And what is it with all those books in the cellar?”

  Nagler chuckled. “Those are the ones from the foundation that Bruno Hapworth sent to Leonard. Someone is going to want them, especially when they figure out that Bruno included all the company secrets. That’s why we made a big show of using the police evidence van. We sent the original boxes to the police lock-up, and the books here. I looked at the list of names Bruno included in his files. One of those folks is going to try to take the books. We’re going to peel this back layer by layer until we get to the main guy, whatever his name is.”

  Lauren scrunched up her face, and said, “Okay. Didn’t Bruno say that some of those children’s books tell the tale of the Sisters’ Home when the girls were held there? Let me look for those titles? Maybe it will tell us something.”

  “Sure, if you tell me what you and Calista have been up to. How much do you know?”

  “That obvious?”

  Nagler just shook his head.

  “She was trying to find the other five girls.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Lauren.” Then, “Do they even exist?”

  “I guess. Calista was going by herself. I couldn’t let her.”

  “Where?”

  “We went looking for the road to the old Garrettson compound, but it is all overgrown. Hilly, rocky, wet, but I noticed something that I thought was odd — A power line running up the side of the mountain from the main road. There are no houses there, Frank. It wasn’t a high- tension line. There is one of those in the area. This looked like a regular residential power line.”

  “Maybe it’s running to houses over the top of the hill?”

  “I looked at a map. There aren’t any. It’s park land.” Lauren shrugged, then stood up. “Maybe it’s just old.”

  “Why would those girls or anyone be there? Didn’t she say the place was abandoned when the officials took the kids? That was decades ago.”

  “She just seems to think someone is there. I don’t know. She needs a touchstone to the world that is not that fucked-up family, Frank. Maybe I have to be it.”

  He stood up and pulled Lauren to her feet, the robe slipping open. He ran his arms inside and felt the chilled skin of her back. “I can’t tell you to stay away, but I can offer caution. Calista seems all over the map.”

  “I’m being careful, Frank. I need to come back here every night.”

  He smiled and kissed her. She pulled away and shyly wrinkled her nose. As she reached for the door, Nagler asked, “Where’s Alton Garrett?”

  Lauren opened the door and turned quickly back to Nagler. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice adrift. “Calista knows, but she wouldn’t tell me, because she knows I’d tell you.” She glanced into the street, then at the floor and then at Nagler. “And I would.” She entered the house.

  Nagler followed and began to collect the papers and files scattered on the kitchen table, placing each in its original order as best he could recall. He flipped with irritation though the pile of jumbled photos when he realized one was missing.

  “Shit, Calista,” he said. She had taken the head shot of Randolph Garrettson.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The tweed hat

  “Hi, Grace. What can you tell me about incest?”

  Grace Holiman, the county social worker, filled the phone with a long breath.

  “Oh, Frank. I see you’ve got to the Garrettson saga.”

  “Geez, Grace, am I the only person in this county who doesn’t know about them?”

  “It was, what, a century ago, Frank, maybe more, but it was a classic case. Old Remington Garrettson. He was in his mid-thirties and married a girl from Pennsylvania whose family learned he had some iron on his farm, sort of a marriage of convenience. He did, but he oversold it. His mine was small compared to others in the region. And it was remote, at the far northern edge of the mine district. No good road, and no direct link to the railroad. He probably made more money selling cider. Anyway, she died young giving birth to their third daughter. He cut off contact with the outside world, except for some business contacts. Then it began. He ‘married’ his oldest daughter, who gave birth to two more girls. Then he married his second daughter because the first girl had not given him a son. The second daughter had three children, two boys, and it just snowballed from there.”

  “And no one outside the family thought the behavior was odd,” Nagler s
aid.

  “From the few records we have, mostly from business contacts or salesmen who visited the farm because rumors said there could up to fifteen people living there, people described the Garrettson family as ‘standoffish’ or peculiar. Remington Garrettson was said to be domineering and messianic.”

  “Okay,” he said. “And the kids, I understand, were sent to foster homes.”

  “Well, most of them.” Holiman coughed. “Sorry. Three of the women, who by then were in their twenties, were sent into the world with essentially a pat on the head. One ended up in Greystone, insane, and the others disappeared. Why the interest, Frank?”

  “Calista Knox, Leonard’s physical therapist and friend, told me she was a descendant of the Garrettsons and her life was basically a repeat of the farm experience, except in Georgia.”

  “I’m not aware of that,” Holiman said. “As far as we know today, the family never took up that similar lifestyle again. But the records are always incomplete. So who is Calista’s rapist?”

  “Randolph Garrettson, the man who apparently is behind the company that owns the Catholic Sisters’ Home. So tell me, Grace, is incest, um, I don’t even know the word, transmittable?”

  “It can be learned, enforced,” she said. “There are several cases of generational incest. I suppose, a member of the family, being exposed to the old family stories, could adopt the behavior. Why?”

  “I’m just trying to understand all this. It’s well, pretty new to me.”

  “To everyone, Frank, except professionals.”

  “I’ll bet. Wait, another question. Did anyone track the original Garrettson kids, where they ended up, families, that sort of thing”

  “Up to a point, I imagine. His was a pretty shocking case, especially for that time. They took away Garrettson’s family and left him on the farm alone, which for someone with his self-important, domineering personality, was probably hell.”

  “I ask because Calista suggested that one of the Garrettson girls was adopted by a Paterson family and was given the name Sarah Lawton, the girl in the Warren Appleton diaries, the same girl Sister Katherine said was her sister who brought down that entire enterprise, and whose photo hangs on the wall behind her desk.”

  Grace Holiman was silent a moment. “I...I really had no idea. I’m mean it’s interesting, but is it important?”

  “To my cop brain it is, if it’s true,” he said abstractly. “Think about it, a line from Remington Garrettson to Randolph Garrettson, Alton Garrett and Calista Knox, then Sarah Lawton, Sister Katherine, the Catholic Sisters’ Home, its current owners, which we sort of know as the Mine Hill Foundation, to our street kid. Maybe I’m the only one to whom that makes sense.”

  “Wow,” she said softly. “What if you’re right?”

  “I wish I knew, Grace.”

  ****

  Nagler checked off one of the names on his list of fourteen from Hapworth’s files.

  The first one was too easy: The manager of the Boundary Motel where the tapes of Bruno Hapworth had been made. An unannounced code inspection produced a dozen violations and video cameras in three rooms along with a set of fairly high-end recording equipment.

  While it wasn’t the direct link he’d had hoped it would be, it wasn’t bad. Nagler thought that the manager was part of the conspiracy to blackmail Hapworth. Instead, he was illegally recording guests having sex and posting the videos on porno sites. That’s probably where Bruno’s blackmailers found him. It was just Hapworth’s bad luck, Nagler decided. These guys also found a couple teachers, male and female, a priest, and two business owners — skills they apparently did not need at that moment.

  What they needed was a lawyer and Hapworth fit the bill. His shady reputation probably didn’t hurt.

  Next on the list was the clerk in the county’s real estate office with thousands in college debt and a gambling habit. She got paid two hundred dollars a lead for a home and a grand when the sale was made. Since her job was to post the listings for publication, she made sure her client’s dates were at the top of the list, and with Hapworth as attorney, the illegal sale was closed. It was both slick and obvious, Nagler marveled. The foreclosure volume was so great, no one noticed a few odd listings once a month. You could fool anyone if the paperwork looked right.

  Nagler watched her cry and shake as he sat across the table in the interrogation room, watched her eyes become dark and sunken as the weight of their conversation settled in. He gently explained to her that she could help herself by helping them, and let her guess what that could mean.

  Next were two real estate agents and one of their secretaries — with whom the agent was having an affair — who filed phony sales reports for several of the companies associated with the Mine Hill Foundation. One was an alcoholic, the other had a drug problem, and both their businesses were failing. The secretary just wanted the money, and, oh, her boyfriend.

  It was an interesting chain, Nagler decided. Real estate agents, recording secretaries, and an attorney: A perfect circle. Neither knew of the others, and no one knew the ringleader. That’s why conspiracies succeeded, he knew. Everyone separately does their little part, but no one knows the end game.

  But more, he realized, all these people were chosen for a specific reason: they had a weakness or a secret that could be exploited. Booze, cocaine, greed, sex, a list of vulnerabilities that to a man like Garrettson/Harrison offered an opening. What was it that Calista said? Victims teaching victims, using victims.

  The police department had issued a press release detailing the arrests.

  The phone rang and yanked Nagler out of his reverie. It was Dan Yang.

  “What’s all this?” Yang asked, less than pleased. “It’s page after page.”

  “Hi, Dan. Thanks for your help, again.” Nagler forced the comic cheer. “It’s from Bruno Hapworth, the attorney for that foundation. I think you will find it fills in a lot of the holes in your spreadsheet.”

  “Oh, man. This must be two hundred pages.”

  “I know. I’ll have the city name a street for you, maybe a square. Dan Yang Square. How’s that?”

  Yang chuckled, relenting. “Alright. I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can. Question, though. Why not do this in-house?”

  “You know city hall’s computer system, Dan. It’s a very broken system.”

  “Oh, right. Indeed. Very broken.”

  Very broken. No point putting this information where it could be seen. If a clerk inside the county land office could be reached, then someone in the Ironton Police Department could be as well.

  He glanced around the office and watched two officers work the phones and two others typing at computers. It’s odd, he thought, that this place suddenly seems unsafe.

  The rattle and grind of rush hour greeted Nagler when he stepped onto Sussex. Sluggish lines of vehicles bumped along the narrow streets to intersections blocked by the one car whose driver tried to beat the light and failed, only to be surrounded by a school of honking cars and yelling drivers who clogged the roadways until the next light change.

  Pedestrians danced through the narrow lanes and pulled down caps or held papers to shield their eyes from the stream of intense sunlight that filled the Stonehenge gaps of the downtown buildings with a glow thick enough to touch.

  That’s what Nagler did as he waited at Blackwell for the light to change, and when he dropped his hand from blocking the sunlight, ahead about a block, was a man in a herringbone tweed fedora. He was nearly a foot taller than the crowd he was walking in, and had his back to Nagler, walking away.

  Nagler quickly crossed the street and started to follow that hat, hoping that its wearer would turn slightly so he could see the man’s face. There was something familiar about the size and movement of him, but Nagler was too far away to be sure.

  The crowd shuffled away and was replaced by another at the corner as the lights changed, but the hat did not move other than to shift left to right, as if its owner was searching for someone. N
agler slipped into the recessed entry to the liquor store and watched through the front window glass.

  When the hat wearer strode off to the left, toward the railroad tracks, Nagler pivoted into the storefront next to the liquor store that used to be a newspaper office. Nagler knew it had a back door that opened onto a parking lot across from the train tracks, and he could make up a half a block of distance quickly. He stepped into the parking lot shielded by a ramshackle wooden passageway that acted as a rear alley to some of the businesses.

  He couldn’t count how many times he had stood there on patrol watching handshake drug deals, or in the dead hours after midnight watching the cars slowly patrol the streets, looking for a date; a coupling in a trash-strewn doorway.

  He leaned against the wooden outer wall of the shell and waited. Between him and Warren there were a dozen parked cars and a couple small trucks owned by a local shipping company.

  The hat had not appeared.

  Did I guess wrong? Nagler wondered. There were a couple of stores along the street, or maybe he turned back.

  He poked his head out for a quick peek and between the tall boxes of the moving vans he spotted the hat, standing, turning, still searching.

  Then it moved to the left. As Nagler shifted to the opposite door jam, his left foot stepped on a small rock that rolled away and as his ankle turned; the pain jumped through his leg like fire. Nagler clenched his teeth and closed his eyes to contain the agony.

  When he opened his eyes, the man in the tweed hat was standing at the corner near the tracks, facing east. Jerrold McCann. Police Commissioner Jerrold McCann.

  For some reason Nagler wasn’t shocked; he almost laughed aloud. Maybe because the tweed fedora looked ridiculous on the large head of such a big impressive man, like a little kid’s hat.

  Like a hat the man’s father wore, the style, not the fabric. Like a skinny blues harpist, worn with an open-collared white, short-sleeved shirt, or a sidewalk grocer with hands big enough to cradle three peaches at once as he tucked them gently into a paper bag, a stub pencil behind his right ear that he used to scribble “30 cents” on the sack before handing it the customer with a smile and a nod. But not on the head of a six-foot-eight, two-hundred-fifty-pound ex-football player.