Chapter 14
Before they took off for Vermont, Tina and Jack met with Marigold, who was working her other job—roofing.
“Actually, I’m an all-around handyman,” she explained after climbing down the ladder she’d set up to repair the Witherspoon cottage. She wore gray coveralls and a tool belt, along with work boots and a kerchief around her bright hair. “Anything needs fixed, call on Marigold.”
“I have about a hundred things I could use help with—” Jack began, but she waved him off.
“Sorry, I’m booked all the way to next year. Shortage of workers on this island. Hot tip, just watch YouTube how-to videos, you’ll figure it out. So what’s the latest on this motherfucker?”
“We’re going to Vermont to talk to Kate Mansfield,” Tina said. “But before we go, we need as many details about Adam as you can dredge up. Physical, psychological, financial, childhood, anything you can recall. We think there’s a possibility Adam is Lloyd Mansfield, previously Martin.”
“And this is based on a watercolor of a sandcastle?” Marigold screwed up her face. “Such a long shot. He never mentioned sandcastles to me. We never even went to the beach. I suggested a beach wedding and he said he’d only go for that if the beach was in Hawaii.”
“Did you ever get the impression that he’d been to Sea Smoke before, like as a child?” Tina asked. Her ever-present notebook was out again.
“You know, maybe.” She tilted her head, squinting into the distance, as if to call up those memories.
Clouds were accumulating in the sky, low gray ones that felt almost claustrophobic.
She was probably running out of time to get this roof fix completed.
“I can’t point to anything specific, but once I mentioned the Old Southwest Woods, and he seemed to already be familiar with them.
Usually only us islanders know those woods.
But he’s very intelligent and picks things up fast.”
“Can you say more about that?” Tina looked up from her notebook.
“Well, like with my job. I’m always on call, but only certain calls require that I get off my ass and help Luke.
We have a code, us and whoever’s volunteering at dispatch.
One time the dispatcher sent me a code and Adam saw it first, and said, ‘it’s nothing important.
’ He was right, but I’d never explained the codes or even told him we had codes. He put it together all on his own.”
Jack met Tina’s eyes, and although she showed no reaction, he knew she was thinking along the same lines. Hadn’t Marigold found that suspicious? Was Adam a bit too interested in her job with the constable?
“So he’s highly intelligent, what else?” Tina asked. “Did he ever mention anything about his childhood, or his parents? You two were engaged to be married. Were his parents planning to come to the wedding? Did you ever meet them, or speak to them?”
With every word, Marigold flinched almost invisibly. Jack felt for her, but the questions had to be asked.
“He said he’d gone no-contact with his parents.
He wouldn’t say why, but he did say that he wouldn’t want me anywhere near them.
I don’t really know what he meant, but I thought maybe…
.abuse?” Marigold shrugged helplessly. “That was something he knew a lot about, so I figured that was why. I should have asked more questions, but it’s such a sensitive area.
I’m used to just puttin’ it all out there, but Adam’s not like that.
I figured I’d learn more after we married. ”
“Did he ever mention a sister?” Jack asked, ignoring Tina’s sharp glance—she’d told him that she liked to do the questioning.
“No. But I’m pretty sure he has one.” She hit the back of her neck, where a mosquito had landed.
“He got a text once from a number labeled as ‘sis.’ We were…busy at the time. I asked later who ‘sis’ was, if she had a name, and he said, ‘forget about her. My entire family is toxic.’ But—okay, this might be something, I just remembered. I was going to call her about the wedding, so I grabbed his phone when he was asleep. That time, his entire contact list was empty.”
“As if he’d erased everything?”
“Maybe. I asked him about it and he said his phone had died and he hadn’t downloaded anything to the replacement phone yet. But it didn’t look like a new phone. I wonder if me asking about ‘sis’ freaked him out? I can’t believe what an idiot I am.”
Poor Marigold looked so wretched that Jack couldn’t take it. He stepped toward her and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “You shouldn’t blame yourself. I think my sister fell for his act too, and I know how smart she is. You are too. Love can make us do crazy things.”
Shocking him, Marigold burst into tears and flung herself against him. He patted her on the back in a fatherly way, like how his grandad used to comfort him when he’d lost a mackerel off his line. “You’re okay, everything’s going to be all right,” he murmured. “Live and learn, right?”
Over Marigold’s shoulder, he met Tina’s gaze. She tapped her pen against her lip, looking somewhere between amused and relieved that it wasn’t her.
Marigold sobbed against his chest for a while.
He didn’t rush her, just kept patting her on the back and offering vague words of comfort.
After about a minute, Tina twirled a finger in a wrap-it-up signal.
After two minutes, she tapped her wrist watch.
They had a boat to catch. He knew that. But he also knew that Marigold needed this, so he ignored Tina.
Finally Marigold drew away and wiped her face with the sleeve of her thermal work shirt.
“You’re a kind man. Wish there were more like you.
” Then she turned to Tina. “I just thought of something, while Jack was hugging me. Adam has a big burn scar on his left torso, it goes all the way from his lower rib to a few inches below the nipple. That won’t help identify him if you see him on the street, but maybe it’s a clue. ”
“Did he say how he got it?”
“He said it was from boiling water getting splashed on him. That’s it. No other details. That sounds like abuse, doesn’t it?”
On the ferry boat to Harbortown, Jack studied the photos of Adam Johnson that Tina forwarded to him. The man with Marigold had brown hair with a cut Jack recognized as expensive, a tanned face, and a smile that didn’t quite touch his eyes.
Had Jessie fallen for this man too? He didn’t seem like her type. Her last boyfriend had been a spoken-word poet with ear gauges, and before that she’d dated an oboe player in a chamber music group. How had a “financial consultant” smooth-talker wormed his way into her heart?
On the other hand, Jessie had a soft spot for trauma victims, possibly because of her own history. When Marigold had mentioned the burn scar, a little warning bell had gone off in his head.
Seth/Adam could have easily appealed to Jessie’s soft heart by revealing his painful past, especially if he too had cut off contact with his family, as Marigold had mentioned.
“There’s something else,” he told Tina over the drone of the ferry engine.
She sat next to him on one of the slatted benches that lined the walls of the ferry’s lower deck.
Her legs were crossed, one foot jiggling up and down.
The lumbering pace of the ferry could drive some people crazy, but as a kid he’d always loved it.
“Jessie cut off contact with our parents for a few years. That might be one reason she connected with Adam. It sounds like he did the same thing.”
“Huh. Why?” She spoke in a clipped tone, as if uttering words was a chore.
“Why?”
“Why did she? Cut off your parents?”
He drew back, startled by her brusque tone. Tina was always pretty direct, but now she sounded downright rude. “Is that relevant now?”
“Could be.”
Was she okay? She didn’t even sound like herself. “I already told you why.”
She looked blank…and also a bit pale and clammy. “More details, please?”
He sighed, made sure no one else was close enough to hear over the engine noise, then explained.
“Like I said before, Jessie was abused by a longtime friend of our dad’s.
When she first spoke about it, after high school, my parents didn’t believe her.
They thought she was being her usual imaginative self.
I kept telling them kids have imaginary playmates, not imaginary abusers.
Jessie cut off contact with them because she was so hurt.
Even today, there’s some tension, but at least they finally cut that man out of their lives.
You can see why I don’t talk about this.
It’s Jessie’s business. But if it helps find her… ”
He didn’t see how it would. But he realized that he trusted Tina Chen and wanted her to be completely in the Finnegan loop.
But was she listening? She wasn’t even looking his way. She seemed to be staring off into the distance.
“I’m sorry,” Tina said after a moment, during which she seemed to struggle with something, maybe emotion? “It makes it worse, not being believed. At least she had you.”
He dropped his chin to his chest. “I wasn’t around enough. I was deployed then.”
“But you believed her.”
“Of course. I was pissed my parents believed that prick over Jessie. They get it now, but it was rough going for a while. They never really understood her the way I do.” The engine noise dropped a few decibels as the ferry boat downshifted to pull into the terminal in Harbortown.
The other passengers gathered up their things and lined up to disembark.
He clamped his mouth shut. He wasn’t going to talk about any of this when someone could overhear.
Tina asked no more questions as she bolted to her feet and grabbed her overnight bag. They’d each brought one in case they got stuck in Vermont for the night. She hurried down the ramp; he barely managed to keep up with her.
“Are you okay?” he asked her once they’d reached the glass-walled terminal building. She was bent over, hands on her knees, heaving in gulps of air.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” he said mildly. Apparently he was supposed to ignore how strange she was acting. “My car’s in the parking garage. Want to wait here while I get it?”
She agreed with a quick nod.
By the time he rolled up at the curb in his Audi, she was standing upright again, some color back in her face.
She slung her bag into the back seat and slid into the bucket passenger seat, seemingly oblivious to the buttery leather. “I get seasick,” she explained brusquely. “Very seasick. The ferry’s marginally better than those water taxis, but it’s all bad.”
He thought back over their conversation on the ferry and burst out laughing.
“Are you mocking me?” she asked.
“No. I’m mocking myself. I bared my soul and you were barely holding on to your lunch. I thought you were uncomfortable talking about things like that. But you were just literally nauseous.”
“Yeah, sorry.” She fastened her seat belt.
“When I’m seasick like that, it’s better if I don’t talk.
I’m sorry if I didn’t seem sympathetic. I would have explained, but if I even refer to the concept of seasickness, I get sicker.
I have to focus on a point on the horizon and think about something completely different.
But I heard everything you said even if I didn’t react properly. ”
He couldn’t stop chuckling as he steered his Audi through the city and onto the highway that led west to Vermont. “I thought you couldn’t look at me because you were repelled.”
“Of course not. I’ve worked with a number of abuse survivors. Not being believed adds an extra layer of damage. I sincerely believe Jessie was lucky to have your support. That doesn’t happen in every family.”
“I know. On the show we’ve done a number of storylines involving abuse. I know that’s not the—”
“It’s very important.” Tina interrupted, surprising him. “Spreading awareness is so helpful. I watched those episodes and I thought, I bet they consulted with some professionals, because the topic was handled very well.”
“We did.” He’d insisted on it, because of his personal family experience.
“That was when my parents changed toward Jessie, after they watched the show. They finally got it. One of my proudest moments ever. Before that, they just couldn’t believe that their old familiar friend could have such a dark side. ”
She simply nodded, as if she understood completely. He didn’t want compliments or flattery over something so sensitive, and was relieved that she didn’t offer anything like that.
“What about your family?” he asked after some time had passed in silence.
“What about them?”
“You have one?” he asked dryly. “Or were you born in a police locker and assembled from pieces of evidence?”
“Cute, very cute. I have a family. They hate my job. We celebrate all the Chinese holidays and also the Jewish ones because I grew up over a deli and we thought we were assimilating. I spent my childhood being official family translator because English and Cantonese are completely different. My Cantonese sucks, by the way.”
She paused, as if testing to see if he was still interested. He was. “Why’d you become a detective?”
“In the town where I grew up, we had a very corrupt local sheriff. He had a special hostility toward Chinese immigrants, but he was just generally greedy and open to bribes. I fucking despise corruption with every cell in my body.”
The fierceness with which she said that sent a chill down his spine. “Preach.”
“The only antidote for corruption is law and order. And I’m too physical to be stuck in an office writing briefs. So I chose the first half of Law and Order. Seen every episode of every spinoff, by the way.”
He put out a hand for a high-five. “Same, babe. Same.”
Although she went along with the high-five, she shook her head. “We are not the same. I can’t even count the ways we’re not the same, but for one, when’s the last time you got told to go back to your own country?”
He heard the hurt in her voice, even though she wore a wry smile as she said it.
“Shit. Never. Sorry. What do you say when that happens?”
“Since it’s usually when I’m arresting someone, I say, ‘You have the right to remain silent and I highly recommend it.’”
God, she really was something, this badass policewoman with her bottomless well of wit and sass. Suddenly, he was really looking forward to this trip.