Chapter 4 #2
Kirby looks at Callie with disbelief. “You wanna stay alive? You don’t piss that guy off.”
Back at the station she shuts the door to her office—something she almost never does—and dials Jenna. She wills herself to concentrate on something blank, simple: the cup of pens on her desk; the patch of wall discolored from where someone had once hung a framed picture.
She gets Jenna’s voicemail again.
“Mom. Please let me know you’re okay. I just … Just call, all right? Or text. Anything.”
The girl—whose name was Layla Hart—let Callie drive her to the hospital in the end, silent and seething.
Callie had walked her to the check-in desk at the ER, offered her her cell phone number if Layla needed any help down the road.
But she still can’t shake it, the chill that runs through her every time she has to pull someone back from the edge.
A half hour passes before another call comes in, Keegan asking for backup on an accident scene.
Robbins and Latour are engaged on a theft issue at the Stop and Shop.
Or so they say. Callie will be sure to look for that incident report.
She sighs, gets the details on the accident location, and tells Keegan she’ll make her way over there.
She drives west, passing a cranberry farm.
A yellow school bus in the parking lot. A field trip—though she can’t help but wince at the sight of the bus.
There’s a row of kids toeing up to the edge of the bog in bright sweatshirts.
One of the mothers on the trip bends over her daughter, smears sunscreen on her cheeks, as the girl tries to duck away.
At the accident site she finds Keegan standing next to a conversion van that wrapped itself around a tree on the town’s little Main Street, where there is a general store, a gas station, a pizza parlor.
She approaches the vehicle. In the back, stacks of long, narrow cages.
“Muskrat traps. One of them got loose. Driver tried to catch him without pulling over first,” Keegan tells her, gesturing at the twisted van, more stacks of traps lined up on the side of the road.
She squints and can make out fur between the bars.
She toes closer until she can see the muskrats’ twitching whiskers and hand-like paws, the long snake of their tails.
“What’s the plan for these guys?” Callie asks.
“We can’t tow the vehicle with them in there. Let’s free them and call it a day,” Keegan says. Keegan and the older guys give her shit, but the tenor is different from the younger cops. Something if not quite avuncular, at least not pointed.
She puts her fingers on the bars of one of the cages.
“Careful you don’t get bit. They can have rabies.”
“Why do they trap them?”
“You can dye the fur, make it look like mink.”
“There a lot of money in imitation mink these days?”
“It’s resourceful, I’ll give them that.”
She waves a sedan around the flares and cones, though she can tell the driver wants to linger, rubberneck. “I guess.”
She waits a beat to ask the next question. “I’ve been looking into that Baby Doe case from the ’90s. You were on patrol when they found the baby, right?”
“Rookie. Just took my test the year before.”
“How about my mom? Did you know her?”
Keegan falters. Takes a minute to put together his thoughts. “Not really. I was a few years older. But I knew it was a kid who found the baby.” Keegan shakes his head. “God knows how that would mess with you.”
“It just seems like in a small town, people would talk a little more. About something like this. They would have theories about who might have been involved.”
“I think people wanted to put it behind them. The idea that someone here, one of us, did it? No one wanted to sit with that.” Keegan rubs his chin. “But there was a name, for a little while. A high school girl.”
“That would track.” Can’t tell her parents, no access to medical care.
Keegan springs another trap. The muskrat scampers off.
“Help me with these last few traps and we can call it a day, yeah?”
Keegan lifts a trap from the stack, sets it on the ground, slides a bar from a latch to spring the door open. A brown ball of fur slips out, disappears into the underbrush.
She releases the next one, the mechanism snapping open fast and hard, nearly catching her finger. She gasps louder than she means to, louder than the moment warrants, her nerves sizzling, her exhaustion getting the better of her.
The muskrat doesn’t move for a moment, not until she taps the bars, and then it skuttles out, nose twitching.
“Will they be okay? This close to the road?”
“Oh, Christ, we’d be doing everyone a favor if we let them get hit. Mean little bastards. They’ll find water soon enough, that’s how they’re made.”
“Keegan, what was the name of the girl?” she asks him. “The one people talked about back then?”
He rubs his knuckles into his eyes. “Shit. I forget. Back at the station we’ll ask one of the others during shift change. I don’t exactly remember that much about a teenage girl from all those years ago.”
Of course not, she thinks. Teenage girls, so similar as to be interchangeable. Paper doll cutouts. Forgotten, disposed of, left behind.
At the station Keegan holds the door for Callie, then cups his hands around his mouth and yells to McIntyre, who is at reception talking to Della. “Hey, Mac, what was the name of that girl who lived out in the big colonial off of 206? By the paper mill? She was your brother’s age I think.”
“Her? He used to say she’d blow people behind the school for weed.”
Callie tries to catch Della’s eye, but Della only stares at her computer monitor.
“Shawna something?” McIntyre offers. “She was real cute. Blond, little.”
“No that’s not it. Susannah?” Keegan says.
“Maybe that. Riley! That was the last name.”
“Susannah Riley?” Callie says. “We’re sure that’s it?”
“Yeah, yeah that sounds right,” Keegan says.
“Why do people think it was her?”
“Because she was a slut,” McIntyre says. “Odds were pretty good someone knocked her up and she didn’t know who the dad was.” The word slut hits Callie like a slap. He looks at her as he says it, a satisfied gleam to his eye that tells her he relishes the chance to aim this word her way.
“She went AWOL right after the baby was found. She had dropped out of school before so it was hard to tell when she went missing, but no one ever saw her around here again. Innocent people—they don’t run.”
Something about that timing doesn’t sit right with Callie. A teenager, vulnerable, had just given birth, somehow finds the resources and the wherewithal to start a new life somewhere else? But she humors Mac. “I’ll look into that.”
“Look into it? You actually trying to solve the case?” McIntyre shakes his head, fixes her with a pitying look.
“Asking questions. Sometimes with cold cases time shakes things loose a little bit.” She bites her tongue about the bracelet, about the sense she has that there’s a bigger story here.
“Sometimes some high-horse detectives think they can show some Pineys a thing or two about good old-fashioned police work. Like one of those HBO shows. Keegan, you going to the Tavern?”
“I was going to have one, yeah.”
Keegan gives her a look—sheepish—but his loyalties are his loyalties. The guys all drink together in the one-room bar up the road. She sees their cars parked in the sandy lot every time she leaves a shift. Frank used to go—he’s told her as much—but no one has ever asked her along.
Back in her office Callie searches Susannah Riley in the system.
No records. Nothing online, no social media—or rather, too many Susannah Rileys that social media is of no immediate use.
Girls twisting their torsos to pout at a camera.
A Susannah Riley in England who posts pictures of her garden.
Gnarled wisteria vines heavy with flowers. Tulips so purple they are nearly black.
Fuck it, she thinks. She’ll use the bathroom, then get out of here. Her limbs are suddenly heavy with exhaustion.
In the stall she lets her head drop to her hands, lets her body go limp. She texts Jane, asks her how her day has been.
Jane sends her a link to a TikTok video. I’ve been going down such a rabbit hole with this one. Oh, and Opes made you a necklace. It’s hideous and she’s so excited to give it to you.
I’ll wear it with pride.
Maybe wait till you see it first.
Callie clicks on the link and watches the first few seconds of the video.
A lipsticked young woman with glossy hair explains that a woman was found dead in a field in 1979 in Western Pennsylvania, the cops looked at all the wrong people, but she’s got a lead that is about to blow this thing wide open …
Callie closes the video. She can’t deal with these internet detectives, their affected righteousness and thirst for gore. She texts Jane: Wanna know about the real life of a cop? I just spent my afternoon springing twenty-five muskrats from traps.
She puts her phone away, washes her hands, and when she turns to the door she finds a blue Post-it note on the back, eye level.
Sabrina Riley, it says, in Della’s looping script.
Sabrina Riley she finds in the system. An arrest at seventeen for disorderly conduct in front of a bait shop where she was employed at the time. Time of arrest, 7:00 P.M. No mention of drugs or intoxication. A broken window. An altercation with a one William—Billy—Fauver.
“No shit,” Callie says, lets out a little whistle.
Billy Fauver is in the system, too. His record is lengthier: one arrest for marijuana possession a decade ago, for which he did community service; poaching; a handful of traffic violations; arrested again, five years ago, in relation to a domestic dispute, battery; charges dropped by his ex-wife, a woman named Angela Harris.