Callie #3
There’s a clatter of bells when she walks into the market, which is charmingly old-school.
Trent Brentwood stands behind the display case where whole striped bass, silver and shimmering, laid out on snowy beds of chipped ice.
Blue claw crabs in rows, metal buckets filled with rings of cleaned squid, a doormat of a flounder with its flat, dead eye fixed skyward.
In a freezer behind her, quarts of fish stock.
A tank of lobsters, all in one lethargic pile.
Homemade red sauce. Piles of lemons in wire baskets and tins of Old Bay stacked in a pyramid.
Brentwood has tattooed forearms: several women’s names in script, a picture of Jesus looking mournful, his hands pressed together in prayer.
She knows before she sees it that somewhere on his body it says Mother, and as he wraps a fillet of tuna in brown paper she spots it, curling out from underneath his gloved hand.
He hands the fish to a wooly-haired woman who drops it right into her handbag.
“What are you cooking tonight, Mrs. Wentzel?”
“I’ll sear this and make a side of potatoes and green beans, some good bread from the market—they bake fresh on Tuesdays, you know—and for dessert some banana pudding.”
“Okay then. What time should I come over?” He bats his eyelashes at her.
“Oh, Trent, you come over any old time, okay?”
“You’re sweet, Mrs. W. You’re the best. You enjoy your dinner, okay? And one of these days I’m gonna take you up on that.”
Mrs. Wentzel moves toward the door and his eyes fall on Callie.
“What can I get for you, Miss? We got bluefin, just caught this morning. If I were you I’d snatch that up while it’s fresh.
” Ah, he’s one of those, she thinks. The kind of man who can make anything about sex.
Mrs. Wentzel felt it. Callie feels it now.
Something indecent about the most banal of questions, how he cut a glance at Callie when he said snatch. This is her guy.
“You’re Trent Brentwood, right?”
At the sound of the last name he understands this is serious. The smile that crinkled his eyes contracts. His flirtation revoked. “That’s me.”
“I’m Chief Callie Hauser, Pine Lakes. Do you have a minute to talk?”
Brentwood calls out to a coworker she can’t see over his shoulders and she can tell he’s wary by the way his shoulders rise.
“Hey Doug, can you come cover me up here for a bit? I gotta go down to the docks.” He doesn’t take his eyes off Callie even while he pulls his gloves off and even in this, she sees it, the proximity to sex.
The snap and slide of the rubber reminding her of the way some men pull off a condom. Watching you watch them do it.
“You gotta stop smoking so much, dude,” comes a voice from the back.
“Quitting next week, brother, quitting next week.”
Callie follows Trent out of the shop, across a parking lot littered with crushed clamshells, and down to a bench near the docks.
She feels something too, replacing the flirtatiousness.
Fury. Brentwood is skinny but she can see him being the kind of guy who gets into bar brawls.
Who has a surprising strength coiled tight in him.
Can see those white teeth gritted into a grimace.
Interesting. Fauver isn’t cleared in her mind, but she can see Brentwood for Sabrina’s disappearance, too.
He’s agitated, ready to blow his lid without her doing much at all. She crosses her arms and he paces back and forth. She counts backward in her head from ten, knows he’ll talk first.
“Look,” he says. “If this is about child support, I’m doing the best I can, okay? I told Jenny, I told her, that things are a little rough right now. That it was going to be late.”
“I’m not here about Trisha.”
“Amanda?” He kicks at some of the clamshells. “Shit. She’s never asked me for a thing since that kid’s been born. She’s gonna start now?”
“I’m not here about Amanda either.”
He looks up, confused and intrigued.
“How many children do you have, Mr. Brentwood?”
“Four.” He pulls a packet of cigarettes out of his apron, shakes one loose, lights it, takes a long draw. “At least that I know of.” A flash of it again. That charm, the wink-wink of it.
“Well, as it happens, I’m here because your name came up in regard to Sabrina Riley, who was believed to be pregnant in 1991 before she went missing.”
“Are you serious? Who is putting my name in when it comes to that shit?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters! I got a lot of enemies, Officer Hauser. Lots of people trying to drag my name through the dirt, and look. You see me. I’m just trying to make an honest living, pay my bills.
Who was it? Pete Turner? That guy is a prick.
Why you think I got outta those woods the second I graduated high school?
Because people there talk too much shit. They got nothing else to do.”
“On the contrary, in this instance I can’t get anyone to talk enough shit. I’m finding it difficult to get anyone to tell me about Sabrina Riley. Maybe you could describe your relationship with her.”
Brentwood rolls his eyes. “We hooked up a few times. She was fun. Until she wasn’t, you know?
Broads like that need to come with a warning label.
It’s going to be all fun and games and a little Malibu Rum in the Wawa parking lot and then all of the sudden you’re getting bitch-slapped at school on Monday morning because she hears you took another girl out on the back of your four-wheeler. ”
“So you dated? Or it was just casual?”
“Casual. Not my fault she wanted something more.”
“Did she ever tell you she was pregnant?”
“It is not mine. I always bagged it up with that girl. She got around too much. There were rumors she was with an older dude. Or more than one older dude.”
“Tell me about that.” Callie feels her impatience rearing up. Rumors rumors rumors. Crazy crazy crazy. Never anything concrete.
“Look, I don’t know. Someone told me she was with someone older. Married or something.”
“Married?” Not Fauver then. He didn’t get married until his midtwenties. Maybe someone from the bait shop? A teacher? Brentwood looks pleased at the sound of surprise in Callie’s voice.
“Yeah. Take a look at the real suspects before you go chasing me down for more child support.” She wants to interrupt him, remind him he’s not a suspect in anything, nor is she interested in his issues with child support.
But he is on a roll. “I’m bleeding, here.
I’ve got nothing. Fucking backpacks and crayons and rollerblades and soccer uniforms and all that shit.
I’m trying to invest in my own thing right now!
I’m going in on this charter boat with my cousin.
We’re gonna take people out to catch flounder in the summer. ”
“That sounds nice.”
“It will be nice! That is if these bitches don’t stop bleeding me dry.
How’s a man supposed to do anything he wants to do with people always showing up and asking him to fork over his hard-earned cash.
” He takes another long draw on his cigarette.
Seagulls wheel and shriek overhead, then land at the end of the dock.
Callie grits her teeth, wonders about these women doing the endless work of raising Brentwood’s kids.
A shadow of a thought at the edge of her mind, of her own father, whoever he was.
Released from ever having to wonder if Callie was sick or sleeping well or had enough to eat.
“There’s another thing. The baby. It didn’t survive. It was found in the woods.”
For the first time since she’s met him it seems that Trent Brentwood doesn’t know what to say. The silence thickens between them for a moment. She lets him stare out at the horizon, waits for him to talk first.
“Oh shit. I heard about that,” he says, finally. He looks at Callie, and there’s a flicker of sadness in his eyes. “I don’t think it was Sabrina’s. I mean, I saw her. Sometime that winter. She didn’t look pregnant to me.”
Callie isn’t going to get into it with him, the same way she didn’t feel like going there with Fauver.
How some women might not show, especially not a first child, until pretty far along.
How futile it is to explain the complexities of a woman’s body to a man, how it is possible to not know she was pregnant right away, particularly a girl with no access to the internet, who couldn’t pull up a thousand forums and websites telling her to take a test, analyzing her every symptom, finding lists of places she could go for help.
“What about her sister? You looking into her? Now she was a little … I don’t know. Weird. Kept to herself.”
At first, Callie thinks she’s misheard. “Sister?”
“Sure. Sabrina Riley had a twin. Her name was Annabelle.”
Callie can’t seem to focus, stares hard at the gulls picking at the scraps of cleaned fish at the end of the dock. “You—You’re positive about this?”
“Yeah. I was her partner for a biology project sophomore year. I remember thinking I hit it big. She was smart as hell and did the whole thing on her own, I just showed up and collected my A plus. Only one I ever got. You know I’m gonna remember that.”
“Tell me about her. The sister. Anything you remember.”
“Umm … like I said. Quiet. She had a scar on her arm.”
“A scar?”
“Yeah, she was always tugging her sleeve down to cover it. Like three inches long. But messy looking, like it didn’t heal right.”
“You know how she got it?”
“We didn’t exactly make small talk.” Trent moves as though he’s about to say something else, but then his phone buzzes in his pocket. He glances at the screen and his face changes. “You know, this has nothing to do with me. Okay? I gotta get back to my shift.”
He leaves Callie at the dock, the gulls still wheeling overhead, shrieking, diving, relentless.
A sister. A twin. An entire girl lost in the history of all this mess.
It takes every ounce of will not to shove her fist in her mouth and bite down on her knuckles until she bleeds.