Chapter 2 #2
“The devil. Out there, stalking through the trees in the night, looking for souls to prey on. But even in the day you can feel him. Lurking. That itchy feeling like something bad is about to happen. That’s him.”
“Enough with the superstition, please.” In the Pines you can’t escape the lore of the Jersey Devil.
The creature was born in these woods, a mess of a thing: bat’s wings, a goat’s head, forked tail, hooves, and claws.
There’s a local brewery that makes a decent IPA with a cartoon of the devil on its label, but for most people, rational people, the devil was more of a mascot than something anyone arranged their lives around, like Jenna did.
When Callie was young Jenna liked to tell her stories about a hunting cabin that belonged to her family for generations, where the men in their line used to keep vigil, guns in their laps, should the devil show his face.
If the cabin is real—when pressed, Jenna could never tell her where it was—Callie thinks it’s more likely it was a hiding place for the men who didn’t want to go home and face their wives after a bender.
“I’ve seen him myself. And let me tell you, you hear that devil scream, you’ll never be the same again. You think you’re safe? No. No gun or badge is going to help you.”
Callie doesn’t say anything, just takes a long inhale and tightens her grip on the steering wheel.
The drive to the station is twenty-five minutes from where she pulled Jenna over.
Every few miles the moonstone glow of animal eyes catches in her headlights.
Deer, mostly. Occasionally, a pair of eyes closer to the ground—something stealthy, a predator on the prowl.
Raccoon. Fox. Nothing but blackness in the rearview.
It’s so dark it looks like someone’s thrown a cloth over it.
“You feel it too,” Jenna says. “Nothing good coming from a night like this.”
Callie itches at her neck, knows that when she finally gets to take this stupid uniform off that the skin will be welted, angry underneath.
“It’s a good thing I got you off the road before you killed somebody. That’s the real evil out there. Careless people who think nothing of hurting someone else.” Callie’s voice is harder than she intended and Jenna flinches.
“How is she? Jane?” Jenna asks.
Callie chooses her words carefully. Wants them to hit like a dart. “They’re hoping she’ll be able to walk on her own again in a few months.”
Three months ago Callie’s best friend, Jane, had been out at dusk foraging for wildflowers when she was mowed down in the road.
Looked up to see the car nearly upon her, no headlights, Jersey plates.
Silver or white, Jane couldn’t remember when she came to, hazy with the aftereffects of anesthesia and the mind-rearranging drip of pain meds.
Her face remade by bruises and swelling, a broken leg, metal plates and pins holding her left arm together.
Nerve damage that might be permanent, causing migraines that make her whimper, shut her eyes to the slightest change in the light.
“Frank and Lorraine helping her?”
“As much as they can.”
“Always playing the martyr, that Frank.”
“What do you mean by that?” She’s never heard anyone speak ill of Frank.
As the former chief of police his word meant everything when it came to recommending Callie for the job after his predecessor suffered a major heart attack.
Cops and civilians alike revered him, and he had only gotten out of the game when he hit sixty-five, mandatory retirement.
He still hangs around the station all the time, the guys pumping his hand and slapping him on the back like he’s the star quarterback striding into the homecoming dance.
There’s a local park named after him near the lake, Frank Caputo Greenspace, complete with a shining new playground.
Jenna groans, drops her head to her chest. “Nothing,” she mumbles. “Don’t listen to me. Can’t trust a word out of my mouth.”
More darkness, thick and resinous as sap all around them.
Jenna is quiet for long enough that Callie wonders if she’s fallen asleep.
But then Jenna starts to sing. It takes Callie a moment to recognize the Nirvana song that had been playing when she pulled Jenna over—Jenna’s made it her own, something low and plaintive and pretty.
Coulda been the next Lucinda Williams, Jenna used to gripe.
If Lucinda Williams had wasted all her time falling off bar stools.
Jenna sings until they pull up to the station—a small log cabin in a wash of fluorescent lights.
Callie cuts the engine and they sit in the quiet for a moment. It’s Jenna who speaks first.
“Come on, Calliope. Why don’t we finally get this over with?”
The word finally sounds odd, until it occurs to Callie that maybe Jenna has been chasing this fate, something she considered a forgone conclusion.
Fucking up again, getting sentenced, paying her dues.
Callie knows that feeling too. Willing the bad thing to just happen already, so you can get on to facing it.
At the station she asks Latour to book Jenna. He grumbles to Collins on his way to do her processing. “She’s back?” he mutters. “Like shit you can’t get off your shoe.”
“What was that?” Callie asks, swiveling hard on her way to her office.
“Nothing,” he says, holding her stare. The younger guys might not know that Jenna is her mother.
For some reason Jenna gave Callie her father’s last name—before he split for the West Coast. As a kid she hated the division between them, the distance it created, like Jenna never wanted to claim her.
But as the chief of police it’s useful. Maybe they can book Jenna, charge her, and no one will have to know anything about the whole unpleasant business.
“Clock out after you process her, please. No overtime.”
“You got it, Hauser.”
“It’s Chief!” Jenna calls, from down the hall. In the small station you can hear most conversations unless they’re conducted at a whisper, another thing that irks Callie—this feeling that she’s always being watched. “My only daughter is gonna end up a cop, at least get her title right, dickhead.”
Latour and Collins turn to Callie, Collins with his mouth agape and his eyes lit up with questions. Latour doing his best to hide the smirk tugging at the corners of his lips.
“Like I said. Book her and clock out,” Callie says, through clenched teeth.
She retreats to her office, reviews a stack of reports and duty logs, but feels restless. She can hear her mother singing again, low and a little bit more gravelly than when Callie was young. She must be driving Latour crazy. Despite herself the thought makes her smile a little bit.
She sighs, stacks her reports, powers down her computer. She’s been on for twelve hours. Time to call it a night.
She grabs her bag from the back of her chair and slips out of the front door, but halfway to her car she realizes she left her keys on her desk.
When she leaves her office for the second time she sees Latour and Collins outside the holding room when she returns, their backs to her.
They are talking in hushed tones, so she stays still for a moment, listens.
“According to Mac, her problems started when she found a body.”
Callie waits a beat. The guys on the squad like to make a lot out of the Pines’s reputation as a mafia dumping ground, all the thugs from the big North Jersey gangs trundling corpses out to the woods, like that episode of the Sopranos. Paulie and Christopher stumbling through the trees.
“Oh shit. What’s the story there?”
“Your girl Jenna? She found a dead baby.”
As if on cue, Jenna starts to sing again. This time, Bruce Springsteen.
Callie waits for another punchline, the guys messing with her. Maybe they know she’s listening. Jenna sings on. Like a freight train running through my head. Oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire.
“You’re serious?” Collins asks.
Latour clears his throat. “She was out delivering papers and there was a newborn. Side of the road.”
The detail makes Callie’s breath catch in her chest. She figured Latour and Collins had their wires crossed, were thinking of some other sorry soul.
But Jenna used to tell Callie about her job delivering papers as a teenager, how her fingers were always smeared black with ink.
And that it was the best job she ever had, because all she needed to do was to walk and sing, walk and sing, sling a paper here and there. Peaceful.
“What’s the deal? Whose was it?”
“Nobody knows. Just one of those things. Case went cold.”
The back of Callie’s neck gets hot. One of those things?
“How old was she? Jenna?”
“Sixteen, I think. Frank always told us to take it easy on her. Guess Hauser didn’t get the memo.
” He lets out a rough little chuckle that makes Callie ball her fists.
She leans against the wall, wills her shoulders to relax, but when they do her keys slide out of her pocket, slap against the floor.
Latour and Collins turn toward her. Latour stares at her, insouciant, holding back a smile. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Chief.”
She clears her throat. Draws herself up. “I want all the files we have on this Baby Doe case on my desk by the time I come back in the morning, Latour.”
Before she leaves she microwaves a cup of water and dumps a packet of Swiss Miss in it, stirring hard to work through the clumps. Latour is nowhere to be found—probably out back, playing some stupid chiming game on his phone while he smokes—so Callie slips into the holding room, delivers the mug.
Jenna wraps her hands around the warm drink. She must have been picking at her cuticles again. Dots of fresh blood on her thumb. Callie stares at her. Why didn’t you ever tell me?
“What?”
“Why were you out there tonight, Mom?” Jenna must have heard the guys talking in the hallway. Must have heard them address Callie once they realized she was there. Knows that Callie knows now.
Jenna looks up at her from underneath that unruly tangle of hair. “I told you. Sometimes you just feel the devil at your back and you’ve gotta run.”
“Right.”
She knows this mood of Jenna’s, the shame sinking in, turning her stony and defiant. But something about the thought of leaving Jenna here, with Latour and Collins, and knowing this awful Baby Doe thing, makes her wish she had something to offer her. A sweater. A solid meal.
Jenna’s feet are still bare on the cold linoleum. Callie undoes the laces on her boots, peels the navy socks from her feet, lays them on the table.
“Come on, I don’t want those,” Jenna says, wrinkling her nose.
“Mom, just take them, would you?”
Jenna just juts her chin, petulant.
Callie stares at the clock behind Jenna’s head, watching the twitchy tick of the second hand. “Look. You’ve had a long day. I’ve had a long day. But maybe once you’re out … once you’re booked and you get through all that, detox again … we can talk? About this thing that happened? The baby?”
“Is that why you’re being nice to me? Because you feel sorry for me, Calliope?”
“No … I … but I think—”
“I know what you think of me. You accused me of hitting Jane. Of letting that girl bleed out in the road. So this dear daughter act? It’s bullshit. All cause you heard some rumors about something that happened thirty years ago?”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I’m not talking about it, Calliope. I made my statement and I’m done doing anything for the cops in this town. It’s the shame of my life that you’ve become one of them.”
In an instant the room feels too small and hot, the ticking of the clock so incredibly loud.
Callie worked so hard, so much harder than anyone she knows in the force, to get through high school, taking every shift she could at the pizza place to stay up on rent as her mother lost job after job.
She got a full ride to Rutgers, graduated summa cum laude.
She’s pursued extra training as often as possible, made herself valuable to her team.
She’s done so much to be able to stand on her own two feet and not feel the world spinning beneath her, like it did when she was a kid.
She clears her throat. The words emerge like the low growl of a cornered animal.
“I’m sorry you feel that way. Best of luck with your sentencing.”
She passes Latour in the hall, who mimes eating popcorn.
“Oh fuck off, would you?”
Outside the station she stares at the tops of the trees for a long time, barely distinguishable from the black of the sky.
Her heart is racing. Her bare feet rub against her boots.
And for a second, she feels it. Something primeval, a force moving through her body.
Seeping into her and out of her. For a second, before she shakes the feeling off, she understands it.
How Jenna would believe there’s something malicious lurking out there, something you can’t escape.
Callie heads home to her little one-room cabin on the lip of a cedar water lake so small it doesn’t warrant a name, or like many places in the Pines, goes by a name only the longstanding locals know, something that no one bothered to codify, label on a map.
Through her bedroom window the water, with the moonless night, is dark as tar.
In bed she struggles to get comfortable, can’t unclench her fists, relax her jaw.
Callie was a bad sleeper as a kid—always on alert for the thump of Jenna tripping over something or falling down the stairs—but as an adult, deep, restful sleep had become one of her few pleasures during her grinding ascent in Narcotics.
Up north, Callie installed a home security system in her apartment, had a personal weapon locked away in a safe on the off chance of an intruder, and worked out hard four days a week so that her body was strong and her reflexes were good.
Adult Callie slept soundly, knowing she only had to look after herself and that she could do it well.
All that has gone to shit in the Pines and she spends the night tossing and turning.
She could have just driven Jenna home, let her sleep it off, no one the wiser.
Now, all the guys know she’s the kid of the biggest mess in town.
Now, she’s got this case in her head from thirty years ago. One of those things, the guys had said.
She turns over, looks at her phone. 2:00 A.M. The woods eerily still outside her window, a quiet that makes her every thought ring out, echo back to her. And she decides then that no, that’s not good enough. It won’t be one of those things. Not on her watch.