Chapter 40
CALLIE
Collins: You hear? Fauver died of an OD. Found him three days later.
Callie: More ghost story shit.
Collins: Won’t miss that sorry bastard. House stuffed with goodies, cell phone full of texts to his cronies.
Callie:…?
Collins: Active investigation, not at liberty to give details to civilians.
Callie: You suck.
Collins: Charming as ever, Hauser. But let’s just say I think we got our dealer. Thought you’d wanna know.
She feels an instant sense of relief. No one will miss Fauver, and as far as she knows, he was the only one who could connect the other drugs to Jane in any meaningful way.
Him and Damien, who, so far, has kept his mouth shut.
She’ll tell Jane, next time she goes to stay with her and Opal at their apartment on Long Beach Island.
Jane still does physical therapy once a week, her leg still drags a little, always will.
But she can keep up with Opal, who she walks to preschool every morning.
Sometimes Adrian visits alongside Callie and teaches Opal the names of the kinds of seaweed that wash in on the tide.
You should keep him, Jane says, as they sip takeout coffees and watch from down the beach.
Callie hasn’t told her that they talk about it. A small ceremony by the river. Barbeque and homemade cake. Soon, though, she’ll confess. Once the haunted look dims a little from Jane’s face.
Lorraine comes over on Sundays. Callie hasn’t seen her, tries not to cross her path.
Jane says she does it for Opal, that Lorraine still shows up with her trays full of lasagna and ziti and tiramisu and keeps herself busy cleaning and cooking and rarely meets Jane’s eye.
Callie wonders if she still wears the charm bracelet. Or if she feels lighter without it.
Annabelle gets off on first-degree charges but is sentenced to involuntary manslaughter.
Callie visits her in prison, where she’ll serve one year and do another two years’ probation.
The first time she saw her Annabelle had a black eye.
The other inmates dispatching their own haphazard ideas of justice, when they discovered what she was in for.
Those other women who had to leave their babies outside the barbed wire–ringed walls.
She was quiet and shrunk into herself, but before she left she told Callie that she wanted Jenna’s address, so she might send her a letter.
“Do you think she would mind that? I want to apologize. I want to say I’m sorry about what happened to her. And that I’m sorry I didn’t listen. Maybe everything would have been different if I did.”
Callie tells her about Jenna’s new job, her sobriety, that she’s even recorded a few songs and put them up online. Sorrow-soaked songs tinged with just enough hope to sound just right in her pretty voice, roughened with time and life.
Della’s daughter, Wren, writes a story about Luke, and the rest of the Caputo men, that is published in the New York Times under a headline: The Devil in the Pines.
It describes the way Luke preyed on young women, the way Annabelle was punished.
There’s a picture of Luke that runs below the headline, and another of Jenna standing in front of her house, her hands on her hips.
She dispatches Callie to buy extra copies at the deli, tapes her own photo to her fridge.
When Callie brings Adrian over to meet her it’s the first thing she shows them, followed by her four-month sober chip.
Callie had asked Della again what she knew the day she put the Post-it with Sabrina Riley’s name on it on the bathroom mirror.
“I didn’t know anything, other than something bad had happened to those girls. I had no idea Annabelle … no idea what would happen to her, of course.”
Della, it turns out, was the one who sent the file on the Baby Doe case up to Healy’s team, hoping they might take it upon themselves to find out where the Riley girls had gone.
She hadn’t wanted to do it while Frank was still chief.
She knew there was something off about the way the case was handled, but it was a hard time for her family.
She had just found out she was pregnant again, and her husband had been laid off.
They needed her job, she couldn’t rock the boat.
But she admitted to talking to her girls about the case a little.
About the itch it left behind. And in the end Callie is grateful for Wren, for the publicity she’s stirred up.
There’s a huge movement online of people who are rallying behind Annabelle, a fervor to see Luke punished.
Callie declined to be interviewed by Wren but she was relieved to find out that the DA was working on charging him.
That the tides were finally turning against him.
Callie braces herself to find Annabelle with more injuries the next time she visits, but she appeared unscathed.
She had started working in the prison kitchen.
Through a letter she wrote and circulated through her husband, she had quadrupled the prison library’s stock of paperback books via donations from their town.
“What’s with you and libraries?” Callie asks, aiming for lightness, though of course everything turned so quickly after their first meeting among the knitters.
Annabelle offers her a thin smile but soon the look on her face turns thoughtful.
“I thought for so long I was trying to be good, to atone, but it’s different.
Maybe there’s a part of me that’s doing that.
But I think what I want most is to feel like I belong somewhere.
It feels … dangerous, not to belong. You know people are helping Ben with the kids?
Driving them to sports practices and school?
There’s a few former friends who cross the street when they see Ben, but mostly people are trying to be kind.
Maybe that’s what I was doing all this time.
Creating spaces where I belonged, where I would never feel like I wouldn’t have help. ”
Callie recognizes the impulse. After all, that was part of becoming a cop.
A uniform that meant she was claimed, sanctioned, by the rest of the group.
Even Damien acted the way he did because he was trying to belong.
In a moment of desperation, Annabelle had no one to keep her from the worst, most base, version of herself.
No one to claim her as theirs. The girl whom so many people failed or harmed in order for her to do what she did.
And the same with Jenna. Her mother’s treatment, her father tending to her day and night, and then working double shifts to pay off the medical bills.
It left Jenna on her own without anyone to keep her safe.
Left her to fend for herself against Luke, the Caputos. A battle she was always going to lose.
“What will you do now?” Annabelle asks her.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Callie says, the admission making her edgy.
She’s been in touch with Chelsea about the Luke Caputo case.
Luke had been arrested the week before. She thinks of what Jenna said to her that day in the cabin.
Callie has, for so long, defined herself against the messiness and pain of her upbringing.
Her legacy was darker than even she could have guessed.
But Jenna had also given her the gift of a lineage.
Of people who were willing to start over, their own way.
And that’s what she’ll do, too. Over and over until she gets it right.