Callie
Opal is beaming when she turns around. “Here’s your money to pay the toll!”
There’s a green glassine bag in her tiny palm.
“Opal, where did you get this?”
Opal shrugs, the pride on her face a moment ago already gone.
“I need you to think really hard, Opal, and tell me where that’s from.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No, no, nothing like that. But I need to know. Please tell me?”
“Daddy.”
“Daddy gave this to you?”
“It was in his truck.”
The thud of her heart reverberates against her ribs. “And you picked it up when he wasn’t looking? Was it empty when you found it?”
“Empty. I thought … I thought it would be good for money. To play.” Her voice cracks on the word play, her lip wobbles, and then her face crumbles. Tears streak down her cheeks.
“Oh, Opal, I’m so sorry. Come here.” She pats Opal’s back as she sniffles into her shirt. “You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? I’m so sorry if I scared you. You know I’m not mad, right?”
Opal nods, her face still pressed to Callie’s chest.
“Everything okay?” Jane calls from down the hall.
“We good?” she whispers to Opal.
Opal musters a little smile, nods again.
“Yeah, all good in here! I think my bridge troll was a little too convincing.”
“Ha.”
Callie slips the baggie into the pocket of her jeans.
Does Jane know? Is this what Frank meant, when he asked if Damien seemed okay?
When Luke said that Damien was dealing with some regrets?
Is he on drugs? Is that what he’s really doing when she’s here babysitting?
Getting high out in the woods alone? It would explain a lot.
His moodiness. The day Callie showed up and he had been out on his mysterious errand, left Jane and Opal alone.
A buzz from her pocket. Jane. Bridge Troll, you also have to tell me about your man. You’ve been way too tight-lipped.
Later? Story is rated NC-17.
Oh hell YES. Get some, Callie Hauser.
You getting any, Jefferies? She’s started calling Jane Jefferies, like Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window. Jane’s still TikTok and Reddit obsessed, always scrolling through old cases, calling out facts to Callie and asking for her thoughts.
She knows her question isn’t subtle, but maybe it’s the way in to talking about whatever is going on with Damien.
Her mind reels. Maybe this is what Luke was hinting around, when he asked Damien the last thing he lied about.
Maybe he had a habit and is trying to get clean, was at a meeting that time Callie came over and Jane and Opal were here alone.
ha HA ha, Jane writes back.
Opal tugs at the hem of her shirt. “Can I watch Peppa Pig on your phone, Aunt Cal?”
“Uh, sure. A little bit.” Opal’s squeal of glee when Callie hands over her phone quells the queasy guilt she still feels at making her cry.
She steps out of Opal’s room once Opal is completely absorbed, her mouth slightly open, the colors of the video flashing against the pale skin of her face.
Jane is on the couch reading. She looks so peaceful, more like herself, than she has in weeks.
She’s been walking, with Damien and Callie’s help, up and down the driveway.
The fresh air seems to do her good. The circles under her eyes don’t look as dark.
Her smiles don’t have that sardonic crook at the corners quite as often.
“Opal let you free? How’d you pull that off?”
“Had to sacrifice my phone. Peppa Pig.”
“Ah. Praise be to Peppa. So wait, tell me about the guy. All the dirty details. Like I said. Not getting any over here. The doctors say it’s fine but … I don’t know. Hard to feel sexy when your husband has had to walk you to the toilet every time you need to take a shit.”
“You’ll get back to normal.”
“Normal wasn’t all that often, either.”
Her hand moves to the outside of her pocket.
She can feel the outline of the green bag through the fabric.
“Look, I realize that I really wasn’t around a lot before.
So there might be stuff I don’t know. I was checked out.
Too absorbed by my job. I should have been paying closer attention.
Should have been a better friend to you.
But I get the feeling you meant what you said in that voicemail—”
Jane opens her mouth to interrupt, stops when Callie holds up a finger. “I get the feeling you meant what you said, even if you really don’t remember calling me.”
Jane sighs, picks her fingernails, looks like she is deliberating.
“Sometimes I think that the whole world runs smoothly because women don’t ever say what they really think. The world would implode if we all threw up our hands, called bullshit at once.”
What truth is so dangerous for her to tell?
She thinks of Jenna, how Callie had no idea about the Baby Doe case, that Jenna had kept that secret wrapped up as though it were something dangerous, sharp.
Though Callie understands now. She has also been keeping her own secrets from Jane, hasn’t yet told her—or anyone else—about her relation to Baby Doe.
Hasn’t wanted to say it out loud, as though that might make it go away.
Instead, she feels it festering, pictures this secret filling her body, a black rot between her ribs, closing in on her lungs, her heart.
Callie clears her throat. “So, tell me.”
Jane takes a long breath, and Callie can feel her clenching, angry and exhausted and trying to decide which feeling should win out.
A crash from down the hall and Opal lets out a high, outraged howl.
“I’m on it,” Callie says. Jane gives her a weak smile. So much for that, she thinks, as she rounds the corner and finds Opal holding out the phone, her face pink with fury at an ad that’s interrupted her show.
Lynne Hamilton doesn’t respond to Callie’s messages—the original email, another to check in, and a voicemail—so on her next day off, a Tuesday, Callie gets in the car in the afternoon and drives north and west, out of the Pines.
The roads twist and turn and spit her out in a stretch of farmland, bales of hay stacked near the road, cows at pasture.
Then with a few miles to go the spaciousness constricts: low stone walls that look hundreds of years old.
Ivy-strewn Tudor houses, estates hidden behind meticulously sculpted topiaries.
And then, the school itself, Gothic architecture mimicking an Ivy League campus, she guesses, as if to say this is not so far off from that.
Callie parks in the back of a student lot, her Jeep looking dull and clunky among the sleek BMWs and Volvos. It’s 2:30, school should let out soon, and Callie is hoping to catch Lynne Hamilton before she heads out to the hockey fields.
A bell chimes from somewhere deep in the school, low and resonant—not the shrill scream of her high school bells, more like a grandfather clock.
The heavy oak door bursts open and a group of boys in navy crewneck sweaters and rumpled khakis bursts out.
They don’t even look twice at Callie leaning against the stair rail.
A thirty-something woman who isn’t a teacher?
She’s meaningless to them. Better for her, but depressing nonetheless.
A directory in the foyer tells her the history department is on the second floor.
She sticks tight to the railing, moving against the tide of students draining out of the halls.
Mahogany paneling along the walls, gilt-framed portraits.
She peers into doorways of classrooms, sees a man in corduroys wiping equations from a chalkboard.
A woman in pinched-looking boots arranging a pile of papers at her desk.
On the second floor the air still compared to the rush of the first floor, just a pair of girls giggling together in the halls, their shoulders touching.
One dark haired, one light haired. She thinks of Annabelle and Sabrina.
Wonders if they ever moved together through the halls that way, allies, speaking in code.
Finally she sees Lynne Hamilton, her head bent over an essay, a boy in front of her biting his lip.
She still has the same haircut she had in the ’90s, a short shag, though the blond has faded a little.
“Here, this is where you summarize the argument from Hallfield’s paper, but you still need to cite it.
Does that make sense?” She must sense Callie shadowing the door, looks up, and straight in her eyes, but then turns back to the boy just as quickly.
“I’d like to give you a chance to address this. Could you have it rewritten by Monday?”
He murmurs an assent, and thanks her. Lynne Hamilton does not immediately turn back to Callie once the boy leaves, but instead opens a desk drawer, deposits her red pen. She must know Callie is not a parent of a student, in her flannel and jeans.
“Can I help you?”
“Lynne Hamilton, yes?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Callie Hauser, Chief of Police, Pine Lakes. I’ve tried to get in touch with you a few times.”
Callie waits to see Lynne Hamilton’s reaction.
Sometimes with interview subjects that are hard to track down or avoidant, she gets a flicker of guilt.
Worry. Some kind of concession. Something that tips her mind to the way the conversation will go, what kind of power she might have over them.
But in Lynne Hamilton the flicker is too quick. Callie can’t catch it.
“I didn’t respond to your messages because I don’t have anything to tell you. I left that district nineteen years ago. I don’t know what I could possibly help you with when it comes to a case in the Pine Barrens.”
Callie clears her throat. “I would think you cared about justice. And about your students. Even the ones who weren’t paying tuition at a fancy private school.”
The effect is exactly what she intended: Hamilton starts at Callie’s bluntness, then casts an eye to the hallway, where another faculty member—a gray-haired man in a polka-dotted bow tie—passes by, lifting a hand.
When she responds her voice is as soft as Callie’s was forceful. “Please, let’s go to my office.”