But that didn’t mean she couldn’t change. She was going to do something tangible and real and she wouldn’t let history repeat itself.
“I want your help,” she told him, her gaze focusing on the entryway of the reception hall: the narrow table with the narrow flyers, a pale blue one that seemed to glow the color of her eyes. “We can do it together.”
“Do what?” Henry asked.
“I want to find the guy. The one I told you about. I want to tell Andrew’s uncle about him. I want to know his name.” She looked at Henry, a little wary of his reaction, but when he took in her face, he looked relieved, as though he, too, had sensed the shift in her, a kind of resurrection behind her eyes.
“Okay,” he said. “Where should we start?”
They spent the late-afternoon hours scrolling through the sex offender database, Catherine’s fingers hovering over the keyboard and her mouth turned down in disgust as she read. Henry sat next to her at the table. They’d gone to the Panera by the Westfield shopping center. Henry got a sandwich with cheese that dried on the bread like white glue and she slathered a chocolate muffin in butter and felt sick.
They gave up after a little over two hours. No face was right. None matched what was in her memory. Henry suggested they try again tomorrow. She agreed, but once at home she couldn’t help thinking back to their spat at the church, that bitterness just under the surface. Her fault, she knew. A mistake over four years old now.
After that summertime backyard kiss, she’d left to go to her house, confused and overwhelmed, but in a good way. She hadn’t even made it down the street before she heard her name and turned.
Mrs. Brisbois had called out to her from the front porch.
“Catherine Ellers,” she said as Catherine walked up to her. “And what were you doing with my son just now?”
Shame, white-hot at her throat and face. Mrs. Brisbois’s mouth twisted.
“You follow my son like a shadow, girl. I don’t like it one bit. I’m going to have a talk with your mother, see if we can’t distance the two of you from each other.”
“I’m leaving,” Catherine said stupidly, a little desperate. “So you don’t need to do that.”
“Leaving?” Mrs. Brisbois was so thin she made Catherine think of Halloween skeletons. “Leaving where?”
“Here. For camp.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.” Maybe that was why Henry had kissed her, she thought. A goodbye kiss.
The camp was near Olympia. Six weeks, during which her nerves and homesickness slowly morphed into something approaching joy. She’d always loved being outside. She scraped down thin sticks for art projects and wrestled with the straps of orange life jackets and laughed over sparking fires with girls who liked her as though by default. Catherine met a boy there with black hair and freckles on his tan skin. She couldn’t stop looking at him during mealtimes, and he grinned back at her, flushing at the ears. They kissed in the middle of a nature scavenger hunt, looking for a leaf that has been chewed by an insect. It had been different from the kiss with Henry, quick and shy and damp from the heat. They’d hugged hard that last day of camp, and he gave her a handwritten letter on yellow paper. When she got home she put it in her jewelry box with the letters her other camp friends had written her. Catherine returned home feeling like someone new, older even. And, just like that, Henry didn’t fit into her life the way he used to.
She remembered that first day back, how he ran to her door as soon as he realized she was home. She’d looked at him across the threshold and felt a pang of loss she couldn’t explain to herself. Maybe Henry’s mom had been right. Maybe she and Henry had been too close. Had she been his shadow? She didn’t want to be anyone’s shadow. Henry suddenly seemed so far from her, even though he was just feet away. Talking to him felt different, the words jagged, something large and awkward between them she couldn’t shift and didn’t really want to. Something had changed; his name didn’t quite beat in her like blood the way it used to.
I put you away.
She shook her head, hard, forcing herself back to the present, to winter and Amy and the task at hand. She showered again, ate dinner, and waited for sleep. It came, finally, but in nightmare-intervals: flashes of Amy in a cold room, stripped, with a tray of scalpels waiting next to her.
She woke at nine in the morning to a text from Andrew.
His uncle was interested in meeting with her. Could she come to the police station?
She did, Henry in tow, with Molly left behind because, in Henry’s words, “I’m not trying that therapy dog thing with actual police officers.” Andrew met them in the lobby, standing by a potbellied man around her father’s age. As she and Henry approached them, Catherine felt like she was sleepwalking through a bad dream, like any minute the roof would cave in, or the cars just outside would turn into giant white spiders and rush the front doors.
She told herself to get it together. She told herself the world was real.
They reached Andrew and his uncle.
“Robert Harper,” the man said, giving her a brisk handshake, then Henry. “But people call me Bob.”
“Bob Harper?” Henry echoed as his hand fell back to his side.
The name rang something in Catherine’s memory.
Bob laughed. He had white-pink skin, as though mildly sunburned. “Yes, like the weight loss trainer. Biggest Loser. I get it all the time.” He slapped his stomach. “I like to mess with people, tell them I saw the error of my ways with all that health crap. Some even buy it.” He turned to Catherine, his tone changing at once. “Andrew tells me you knew Amy Porter.”
“Y-yes,” she said. “I used to babysit—nanny. During the summers.”
He nodded at that. “Come with me.”
He led them through the lobby and down a few hallways with distinctly lower ceilings. The more they walked, the less impressive the already humble building became: green checked tiles like the high school, and a faint smell of dust, as though the place only went through the most cursory of cleanings. Eventually he led them to a larger room, with desks stationed at intervals and uniformed police officers milling about with a few in plain clothes, coffees in hand. There was the sound of typing, of chatter, a general aura of activity. Nearby, a man took a mechanical bite of an English muffin as he pored over a stack of papers; he didn’t seem to notice that an unopened bag of granola had fallen to the floor at his feet.
“Over here,” Bob directed them, or rather just her and Henry; Andrew seemed to know his way around.
“I used to come here a lot when I was younger,” he explained as they squeezed their way past a group gathered at one of the desks. “Wanted to be a cop. Thought it was the coolest thing.”
“And now?” Henry asked.
“Not so much.”
Catherine said nothing, even as they reached Bob’s desk—close to a thick metal column that went right to the ceiling—and he began to rummage in the drawers. They hovered awkwardly, then, with various items in hand—paper, pen, phone—he led them down a side hallway into another room: it was small, with green walls and two chairs on opposite sides of a metal table.
“You boys can wait out here,” Bob said good-naturedly.
“But—” Henry and Catherine said at once.
“Come on,” Andrew said to Henry, sounding resigned. “There’s coffee and stuff in this room down the hall.”
Henry gave Catherine an uncertain look, but she tried to smile as he walked away with Andrew. She hadn’t realized she would be doing this alone.
“I hate this room,” Bob said, closing the door behind them. “Always makes people nervous and never the right ones. Don’t worry. It’s just so we have some privacy.” He sat down heavily in one chair, and Catherine took the other. She wondered now if she’d been right in even coming here, in thinking she’d have anything useful t
o add to all the activity she’d just seen. What if she got in the way? What if she wasted his time?
“We record all these,” Bob said, “just to let you know.” He waved a hand vaguely toward the ceiling. “Completely standard. But I wanted to mention it.”
“Sure,” Catherine said, her heart thudding.
“So you used to watch Amy Porter during the summers?” Bob asked her, now picking up his pen.
She nodded, swallowing against a sudden lump in her throat. “Summer of 2017 to last summer—2019,” she said, trying to sound like she knew what she was talking about. “Started when Amy was ten.”
“What was that like?”
“What?”
“What was your typical routine? What did Amy like to do? Not like to do? You spend time with any other kids or adults or was it just the two of you? What places did you two frequent? Things like that.”
“We baked a lot,” Catherine said slowly. “Amy…liked to bake. We watched movies. TV. We didn’t really hang out with other people that much. Well, Hannah Walsh, sometimes—a kid, Amy’s best friend,” she added before Bob could ask. “But usually it was just…kind of the two of us.” She sat up a little straighter. “Amy didn’t really like going outside that often unless she was delivering her bread. I wanted to mention that. She was a very indoors person if the weather wasn’t perfect. If given the choice, I don’t think she would have gone out the other night. Not on her own with it that cold. I just—I don’t think that’s what happened.”
Bob nodded. Catherine could tell he was taking in her flushed cheeks, her bright eyes.
“You say you have a, ah, person of interest? Maybe someone paying too much attention to Amy—”
“Yes,” she said at once. She was feeling jumpy. She wanted to stand up but forced her palms under her legs. She began to tell Bob about last summer, the front yard and the sudden arrival of—
“Well, I don’t know who he was,” she admitted as Bob wrote quick, illegible notes. “Henry and I spent hours yesterday looking up names, sex offenders, and I couldn’t find him. No one who looked exactly like him, anyway. But he was…There was something wrong about him. About how he looked at her.” She broke off as images flashed into her mind, the room spinning away to make space for them. How small Amy was compared to a full-grown male, that obscene proportion, the horror of it all. The fear.
She sucked in a breath. Her arms and neck were covered in goose bumps. She made herself continue: “Amy did a lot with First Faith, and I think she might have met him at the soup kitchen while she was volunteering. This man—he looked like he might be homeless. I wonder if she—if he saw her there and…”
“Amy volunteered at the soup kitchen?” Bob asked, jotting down a few more lines, his eyes still on her.
“I don’t know for sure,” Catherine admitted. “But I think so. I can maybe check—”
“Leave that to us. You okay to work with a sketch artist?”
Catherine stared at him.
“A sketch artist,” Bob repeated, picking up his things and getting up. Slightly startled, Catherine followed him from the room. “We have a good one,” he continued, leading her back to his desk. “Assuming she’s in today, but I think—Sandra?” He addressed a person at the desk next to him, a large, well-dressed woman with almost-violet lipstick. “Takira in today?”
Just then, she saw Henry and Andrew appear around the corner, paper cups of coffee in hand. She waved to them, and they began to weave their way toward her through the desks and people.
“Everyone’s in today, Bob,” the woman replied wearily, barely glancing up from her computer screen. Her brown-gold skin made Bob look, in contrast, like a blotchy snowman. “Try asking Grant.”
Bob rolled his eyes, sat down in his chair, and called, “Grant!”
The woman winced and shot Bob a glare. “You are an infant,” she said.
“Couldn’t do it without you, Sandra,” Bob said cheerfully.
“What are you up to now, Bob?” a resigned but amused voice said, just as Henry and Andrew reached her.
Catherine turned to see a bald man with a stack of papers in a folder under one arm. It was the one who had been eating the English muffin. Bob grinned up at him, hands behind his head.
“Sandra said Takira was with you.”
“I did not,” Sandra replied, eyes still on her computer. “I said—”
The man called Grant rolled his eyes. “She’s here. You got a witness?” He scanned the three of them, as though sizing them up, then his eyes stopped on Henry and his gaze hardened. “You kids see anything?”
“They’re mine, Grant,” Bob said with exaggerated disapproval. “Go do your own work.”
Grant was still looking at Henry. “You see anything?” he asked again.
“Not me,” Henry said with a nod toward her. “Catherine.”
“Huh.” Grant seemed skeptical at that, even suspicious. “Well, I sure hope it’s something useful. I’ll tell Takira you’re looking for her.”
He strode away.
Catherine turned to Henry, eyebrows raised. His cheeks were flushed as he watched Grant disappear into a side office.
“You done?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “No, I have to do a sketch—work with a sketch artist, I mean. You know that guy?” she added quietly, though she could tell Bob was listening.
“Sort of.”
She raised her eyebrows a little higher.
“I know his daughter,” Henry admitted, his voice just as quiet. “Went out with her a couple of days ago.”
Bob snorted. Henry gave him an indignant look.
“We went on one date. That guy—her dad—came to the restaurant. Like he was checking up on us. Kind of killed the mood. I drove her home after that.”
Bob chuckled but Andrew was looking at Henry impatiently, his fingers drumming against his jeans. Before anyone else could say anything, a black woman with impossibly lean arms was at the desk.
“So,” she said briskly. “Who here has a face in their mind?”
Stupidly, Catherine half raised one hand. Like she was in class or something.
The woman gave her a steely smile. “Well, then. Let’s give it a name, shall we?”
* * *
—
The two boys sat alone at Bob’s desk; he had been called away on some errand or other and Catherine was still with the sketch artist, who had led her down a side hall to a separate office, just as Bob had. Henry was sprawled in a chair dragged from a vacant desk nearby, and Andrew sat in Bob’s chair, spinning it in circles. He watched the room blur around him, trying to convince himself that he was calm, that Catherine would be done with the sketch artist soon, that Henry was not about to kill him.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that Henry really didn’t like him, though seeing himself from Henry’s perspective, he kind of understood: him coming to Catherine’s house, the connection to her…attack (his mind skipped around the word rape like a crack in a sidewalk). Still, Andrew didn’t like how Henry looked at him, with frank suspicion, almost as if he were daring Andrew to comment on it.
Not that Andrew would. He wasn’t big on confrontation. It had taken all his courage to even come to Catherine’s house to return her cards and coat, and he had been checking Snapchat and Instagram and even Facebook on his phone as he drove to her house, hoping she would respond and they could do this whole thing a different way.
“So why did the guy give you her coat back?” Henry asked him now, clearly on the same train of thought.
Andrew planted his sneakers on the dirty floor and the chair stopped spinning. Henry was leaning back in his chair as though relaxed, but Andrew could tell his body was coiled, tense.
“He didn’t fight me,” Andrew said. “I knocked and he opened the door. I was going to ask what had ha
ppened, but then I saw the coat on the floor—”
“How’d you know it was hers?”
“It had ruffles. And it was small. I just picked it up and left. I didn’t want to stick around.”
“So you didn’t say anything to him?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean, not really?”
“It means not really.”
Henry nodded as though he’d just thought of something and sat up in the chair. “So, you’re in her year?”
“I’m a freshman.”
“What’s your major?”
“Not sure yet.”
“And you’re close by?”
“What?”
“Where you live. You’re close?”
“I guess.”
“Your parents don’t care you bailed at Christmas?”
“I was home for Christmas,” Andrew said, not bothering to correct Henry’s use of the plural, though he felt his irritation spike. “I left afterward. You want to know my address, too? My middle name?”
To his surprise, Henry let out a short laugh.
“What?” Andrew asked, his face heating up.
“Catherine and I have a thing about middle names.”
Andrew paused. “Lane.”
“What?”
“That’s my middle name. Lane. Andrew Lane Worthington.”
“Hang on.” Henry dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out his phone. After a moment he let out another short laugh, eyes on his phone screen. “It literally means road. There’s no, like, other significance to it.”
“It was my mom’s maiden name.”
“Let me check Worthington…” Henry tapped his screen. “By a river,” he said. “I actually thought it would be something about—”
“Being worthy.”
“Yeah. Guess not. Jesus, that’s dull. You know what Andrew means?”
Andrew shrugged.
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