by Kate Flora
“Does the girl have access to a car?”
“Good question,” I said. “She’s too young to drive. The students don’t have cars, but maybe a friend does? Or an older brother or sister? The big question is why she ran. Whether it was really because she was upset by how the community would regard her, or fear of going back home, or was it something more sinister, like she was running away from a specific someone.”
“Stepfather sounds like a good possibility.”
I agreed. “Look,” I said, “I’ve got to go. We’re talking to some of her friends, and the detectives are waiting.”
Back in the room, Miller gave me a look and shook his head. “Just a consultant, huh?”
I nodded.
“And the guy you were just talking to on the phone, he’s what? Your boss?” He hesitated, then added, “Your partner?”
Cops. They hear through walls. Listen at doors. Are suspicious of everyone. “My husband.”
“Right,” he said.
I didn’t want to play games. We had more important things at stake here than my privacy, and his suspicions could cloud our ability to work together. “He’s a detective. Maine state police. Works homicide.”
He nodded, somewhat mollified by my explanation. Often, with cops, learning that I’m married to one moves me, in their “us vs. them” world, into “us.”
“So how are we going to find this girl?” he asked.
“You’re the detective.”
“And you’re the expert.”
I’m good at what I do, but I’ve never in my life felt like an expert at anything, though I still hold the somewhat naïve belief that there are experts in the world. I really didn’t know how to find Heidi without more information, but I did know something about the independent school world, so I had a strategy.
“Keep talking to her friends, for starters. Even if they don’t know where she’s gone, they may have ideas. May know who else she might have turned to for help. We’ve already learned a whole lot from Jaden, though I believe he still knows more than he’s saying. It may take another interview to get the rest. It’s not easy to convince a kid that age that they’re actually helping a friend when they reveal a confidence. And it’s likely we’ll learn more from her roommate, her other friend, Ronnie, and this girl, Tiverton.”
I thought Tiverton was a town in Rhode Island. But parents will give their children distinctive names. Probably, the zeitgeist being what it was, every child born this year would be named Mason, Oliver, or Claudine. I did not share this thought with Sgt. Miller.
I wasn’t sure he knew this yet, so I said, “Her father said that her roommate and Ronnie both called him when all this happened, which means they were close enough to Heidi to know, or have access to, her father’s cell phone number. Her mother wasn’t going to tell him.”
“Ugly divorce?” he said.
“Sounds like it.”
Gareth had barely gotten back when his assistant, the one who worried about him not eating properly, stuck her head in. “Excuse me,” she said, “but Bella Hastings is here.”
He nodded his thanks. “Send her in.”
“Uh…Gareth.” She let it hang in the air a moment, then said, “She’s very upset.”
“Excuse me,” he said to Miller and Flynn, and stepped out of the office.
We could all hear the quiet murmur of his voice, and then he came back in, followed by a tiny Asian girl with pixie-cut hair and scared brown eyes. She moved with the bowed head and reluctant gait of someone going to her execution.
“Bella,” he said, “this is Thea Kozak, who is working with us on Heidi’s situation, and these are Detective Flynn and Sgt. Miller. Bella is Heidi’s roommate.”
Like a child raised by very proper parents, Bella took a deep breath and then offered me her hand. Hers was cold and trembling. I said I was pleased to meet her. What I wanted to do was put an arm around her and reassure her that Miller and Flynn didn’t bite. But that was Gareth’s department, not mine. I was still walking a fine line with Miller and Flynn. So far, they’d been fine, but cops tended to be territorial.
I watched her approach Flynn, with his bulky body and his square, hard face like she really did expect to be bitten. And watched Flynn unbend, and smile, and take her tiny hand between both of his. “Brian Flynn, Bella, and relax. I may look scary but I’m really a nice guy.”
When she hesitated, he said, “I understand people around here are big on telling the truth, so make that really, really nice,” and that made her smile.
I realized I’d been holding my breath, and that Miller had been watching me instead of watching Bella. So maybe he still didn’t believe my call with Andre had just been a wife talking to her husband. We would have to see how that played out.
When Bella was settled, Miller took her through the same questions he’d asked Jaden. His questions and my questions. Despite Flynn’s reassurance, it took a while before she started giving more than the briefest of answers. She was embarrassed now that she hadn’t realized Heidi was pregnant, but Heidi was a big girl. Compared to Bella, almost anyone would seem big, but from her description, it sounded like Heidi was tall like both her parents and big boned like her father. Basham was a lean man but not slight.
“Big,” she said, “like wide shoulders and tall. Not fat.”
She confirmed that Heidi had had a good relationship with her father and a bad one with her mother, adding that Heidi knew her father was kind of self-centered and unreliable but at least he knew she existed, which her mother didn’t. “That’s why I called him,” she said, “because Heidi needed someone and I knew her mother wasn’t it.”
She paused a moment, then said, “You know, Heidi and I, I never thought we’d be close. I mean, except that we’re both from California, we’re pretty different. But she’s just about the nicest girl I’ve ever known. Girls, in my experience, often aren’t nice. I mean, at my last school, they were really mean and competitive and so were their parents. That’s one reason I chose Simmons. I thought they wouldn’t be like that here.”
She looked at Flynn and then at Miller. “I know people are saying she did an awful thing and so she must be an awful person, but she’s not. I don’t think Heidi has any meanness in her. I mean like her mother treats her so badly and tries to make her feel awful about herself because she isn’t interested in being glamorous or in clothes or make-up and stuff, and she just keeps on being patient and forgiving her mother like she’s the adult and her mother is the child.”
Heidi was sounding too good to be true, but that was my cynical side speaking. It shouldn’t be a bad thing for someone to be nice. I could have used a friend like Heidi when I was a miserable, too tall, adolescent with a chest boys couldn’t stop staring at.
“She never said anything to you that suggested she knew she was pregnant?”
Bella gave a vigorous shake of her head. “No way. The night before…you know…the baby? She thought she was getting her period. It had been irregular, so she was glad. Well. Um.”
She looked at the three men and blushed. “I mean, yeah, it’s a pain, but when she didn’t get it, she was worried that maybe there was something wrong with her. She even went and talked to the nurse about it, but the nurse told her that sometimes happened at her age and not to worry.”
I made a quick note about that. Another thing we needed to track down. Find out what the whole story was. When that visit took place and whether there were notes about it. Part of my job is to be alert to places where a school might not have adequate procedures or could let something potentially serious slip through the cracks.
“Do you know if the nurse asked if she might be pregnant?”
“I think she did,” Bella said, “and Heidi thought that was funny.”
Without waiting, Bella addressed the question they hadn’t yet asked. “Heidi doesn’t lie. That’s something that’s important to her. I absolutely believe that she didn’t know she was pregnant,” she said. “She was as surprised at this as the
rest of us. I know…” She waved a hand to ward off interruption. “I know people are saying it’s impossible. That she couldn’t have not known. But I live with her. Yes, she was modest about dressing and undressing, but that wasn’t because she was trying to hide something. That was because of the situation in her mother’s house. She’d just gotten in the habit because she didn’t have much privacy.”
“Tell us more about that,” Flynn said. “What did she tell you about the situation at home?”
“There were people in and out all the time. Her stepfather—General Norris—and some of the men who worked for him. Her room was just down the hall from the living room, and she said people kept walking in on her.”
We could all see that she was holding something back, and Flynn tried to dig it out. “Did she say which people?”
Bella was silent, the silence of someone trying to work out how to share important information without betraying a confidence. Finally, she gave a helpless shrug and looked at Flynn. “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone about this.”
I thought I knew what ‘this’ was, but life is full of surprises, so I held my tongue and waited as Gareth stepped in.
“Bella, right now, we’re concerned for Heidi’s safety. She’s physically and emotionally vulnerable and she’s disappeared. Right now we don’t know if she’s run away or if she’s been taken. Either way, we need to find her, and part of conducting a good search for her is having good information. About her state of mind, about what might have happened at home that made her decide to come to Simmons. And about how her pregnancy happened. I know you believe you’re protecting Heidi by keeping her secrets, but you might be putting her at risk.”
He gave that a moment, and then said, “Sometimes we have to betray a friend’s confidence because we care about her. Especially when her safety is involved.”
Nobody tried to rush her, which really impressed me. Cops can get impatient and start pushing. But everyone waited until Bella had sorted things out for herself.
“It wasn’t just one person,” she said. “Heidi’s like…well you know, really pretty, and she’s got…well, you know, before she gained some weight…I mean, before it looked like she’d gained weight…um…with the baby, I mean, she was—” She stopped, looked around at us as she searched for the right words. “Hot,” she said, finally. “She had the kind of figure a lot of girls would die for and yeah, she’s not a skinny mini like me. I mean, she says her mother told her she’s plain and too heavy, but her mother is a real bitch. Her mother’s wrong, too. Heidi believed her, but it wasn’t true.”
She looked down at her tiny hands, clasped together so tightly as she fought her fear. “What she told me is that her stepfather, and some of the other guys who were in and out of the house, they just kept walking in on her. Like walking into her bedroom without knocking and stuff. Her mother wouldn’t let her put a lock on her door ’cuz she didn’t believe what Heidi was telling her.”
She raised her head, amazement on her face, like she needed us to understand how baffling this was. “So Heidi always dressed and undressed in the bathroom, because that door had a lock. Which is why she was always so secretive about getting dressed. Because I guess, even though she was safe here, she didn’t really trust that it wouldn’t keep happening.”
“Did she say who those ‘other guys’ were?” Flynn asked.
Flynn, I noticed, not Miller. I wondered how they worked out the roles. Whether Miller was better with boys and Flynn with girls? Despite his initially fearsome appearance, Flynn seemed to have a knack for interviewing Bella.
Bella gave us all a “can you believe this?” look. “There was a man she referred to as her ‘funny uncle,’ which I thought meant he wasn’t an uncle at all, or funny, but just a man who acted in an inappropriate way. And there were two men who worked for The General, and at least one of them did it, too. Kept walking in on her. She didn’t use any names. She was very uncomfortable talking about it. It was just, you know, that she needed to tell somebody, I think. When we were talking about why we came to Simmons.”
“Did she ever mention her guitar teacher?” I asked.
“Will?” she said.
I nodded.
“He calls her sometimes to check up on her. If she’s doing okay. See if she’s still playing. He sends her music. Heidi doesn’t laugh much, but when she’s on the phone with him, it’s like she’s talking to her best friend.”
She didn’t seem to find that odd, and I didn’t want her to, so I let it drop. I saw Miller make a note, but figured he was on my wavelength about this one and would ask me later.
Even without Will, we had at least three candidates for baby daddy without leaving the house. Poor Heidi. She’d come here because she needed refuge. Now that was coming apart.
Miller moved on to questions about Heidi’s disappearance. Running my questions. Had Heidi called her? Bella wrung her hands, lowered her head, and tried not to answer. But she’d been reminded that Simmons was a truth-telling place, so after an uncomfortable silence, she said, “She called me last night and asked if I could help her. If I could think of someplace she could go. But like her, I’m from California. Sure, we go into Boston sometimes, but that wouldn’t be a good place for her. Not right now, even if she could find a safe place to stay.”
There weren’t many safe places for a young girl like Heidi to stay. So many predators of all ages and sexes. And there was the risk of complications from her delivery. Or someone she’d turned to for help who was a false friend. Even her parents were unreliable. My dark mind was running scenarios involving her mother and stepfather. How far might they go to keep a secret? And whose secret was it?
Where was her father in all of this? Had she confided in him? Might he have been willing to help her disappear? And if so, why? He’d made it clear Heidi couldn’t live with him, so what good would helping her to hide do, when it seemed the best result for Heidi would be to get things resolved in a way that let her remain at Simmons? Was he aware of a greater threat, one beyond escaping the humiliating judgment of her peers? When he came for his interview this afternoon, we could ask.
Bella fell silent and we all waited, hoping what was coming might be important. “She asked me to find her purse and get her some money from the stash she kept in her desk. I took her coat, too, because she’d left it behind when she went to the hospital. I didn’t even get to speak with her. She was asleep. I’d put her things in a backpack, and I just left it on a chair.”
She looked guiltily at Gareth. “I didn’t know her plans, but I didn’t see how I could not do that much for her. Maybe Jaden knows more.”
Not that Jaden was telling us, but we’d all felt like he was holding something back. It wasn’t much comfort to know she had money and her coat. Could she have called a taxi? An Uber? Gotten it to meet her somewhere off campus? Could she have left without going through the gate? Her calls would be in her cell phone records, but I had no idea how long it might take to get those. Miller and Flynn could get the number from Bella.
“Just to confirm,” I said, “Heidi had her phone with her? That’s how she called you?”
Bella nodded. “Can I go now, please?”
I looked at Gareth and saw that he was running the same questions in his mind. Instead of answering, though, he stood. “Thank you, Bella. If you think of anything else that might help us find her, please call me or tell your dorm mother. It’s important.”
She nodded and headed for the door, looking no more easy about going than she had about coming. Halfway to the door she turned. “Dr. Wilson, do you think Heidi is okay?”
“I hope she’s okay,” he said. “Two last things. What color is her jacket?”
“Blue,” she said. “Ice blue. We went shopping for jackets together last fall. It was so much fun. Because we never needed heavy jackets in California.”
“Thank you. And how much money does she have?”
“I didn’t count it, I just grabbed the envelope and put i
t in her purse. But I think it was at least a couple hundred dollars. And she has a credit card.”
With a student ID and a credit card, Heidi might be able to get pretty far away. A taxi, a train, a plane? Who knew where she might go? Checking on credit records and whether she’d bought a ticket was outside my realm. That was up to Miller and Flynn.
Before she left, Flynn asked for Heidi’s phone number.
We all watched Bella leave. I didn’t know what the others might be thinking, but my dark mind was churning out visions of ice blue fabric surfacing in the river that flowed past the campus. Or a vulnerable young girl in a physically depleted state wandering around Boston during last night’s awful weather, looking for a place to hide.
Clearly, it was time to consider a new line of work.
Sixteen
I’d interviewed many students at other schools as part of my efforts to be sure schools were taking proper care of their student population, but this felt different. There was something oddly uncomfortable about sitting in Gareth’s office and having a succession of students come in, tell what they knew, and depart. Like we were a review board or something. Or cops, like Miller and Flynn. My increasingly cop-like nature made it hard to back away, yet this task felt removed from my job of protecting Simmons. Sitting and asking questions, though I knew it was important, seemed like we were delaying the moment when we’d have to get back out there and resume the search for Heidi. I knew campus and local police were searching even as we sat here. But hours had passed since she disappeared and so far, we had no good clues about where to look for her.
Hours had also passed since Gareth had spoken with Heidi’s mother, yet there was no sign of Mrs. Norris. He’d called again, after our interview with Bella, and gone straight to voice mail. Worst case scenario, which I knew we were both imagining, was that she’d blown off their conversation and gotten on that plane to California. If what we’d learned from Jaden and Bella was true, she had good reasons to duck hard questions, especially questions from Miller and Flynn. Like many a mother before her, it sounded like she’d failed to protect a young daughter from predators in her own home. Predators she’d been complicit in bringing there herself.