Chapter XLV
CHAPTER XLV
Late the next morning, with Zetta Nadeau’s duplicity still rankling, I drove down to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to meet Sam, my other daughter, for lunch at Book inside, we were talking about a dead child who refused to be released, and it still felt like winter.
“She’s frightened of being discovered,” I said.
“Not for her sake alone, or perhaps not even at all. She’s frightened for you.”
“If that’s true, I have no idea why.”
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you. Has Jennifer shared something else with you, something important?”
“No,” said Sam. We were concealing nothing from each other now. “It’s the secret Jennifer holds, the one she won’t reveal: why it’s so important that they, whoever ‘they’ are, don’t find out about you.”
“Much as I’d like to accept that the universe does, in fact, revolve around me,” I said, “thereby proving any number of ex-partners wrong, your mother included, that makes no sense. After all that’s happened, after all I’ve done, the worst of men—and worse than them—can’t but be aware of me. I haven’t hidden myself. I have the wounds to prove it.”
“Unless you’ve hidden something from yourself, something crucial, and you’ve buried it so deep that it’s been forgotten. Isn’t that what happens if you stay undercover for too long? You start to become whoever you claim to be, and your real self gets buried so deep that you struggle to find it again.”
“But the real self is never lost, not completely. It’s in there, somewhere.”
“Which begs two questions,” said Sam. “Who are you, and what have you suppressed that’s so dangerous?”
To that neither of us had the answers, and the one who might have was elsewhere.
“Can I ask you something in turn?”
“Of course,” said Sam.
“What do you remember of the night Steiger died?”
The man named Steiger had died on the beach at Boreas, a resort town in Maine. A sand dune collapsed, suffocating him shortly after he had killed a woman and moments before he was about to shoot me. When the dune came down on him, Sam was standing nearby, watching. She had refused to speak of it ever since, even to a therapist friend of Rachel’s, and I had let it go—until now.
“I remember being scared,” she said. “I thought I’d be blamed for it. I blamed myself.”
I waited.
“That man was going to kill you,” she continued. “I was frightened, and didn’t know what to do. Then—”
She closed her eyes, pictured, opened them again, resumed.
“It was like a series of images or outcomes came into my mind all at once: a gun materializing in your hand and firing, a wave sweeping him from the beach, the ground swallowing him up, all these things that couldn’t occur, until finally, I saw an avalanche of sand. That was when Jennifer came. I felt her. She was in me and of me, and she pushed . She took what was in my head and made it a reality. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to evade responsibility, because I’m not. I visualized Steiger’s death. I wanted him to be buried under all that sand, conceived it as a solution, but I couldn’t make it happen. Jennifer could, but she needed me to envisage it. So together, we killed him. Afterward, I was shocked, but I wasn’t sorry. I’m still not sorry. He was a vile man.”
“He was,” I said.
Sam touched my hand.
“Can someone have no regrets about something yet still want to make up for doing it?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Then that’s why I want to find a way to help others. And when I told you that Jennifer keeps her distance from me, I’m also keeping my distance from her. She came to me when I needed her—Steiger, the Dead King—and she’d come to me again if I called her, but it’s better that I don’t. I may not feel remorse for what happened to Steiger, but I didn’t enjoy it. If he hadn’t died, you’d have taken his place. It wasn’t as though I needed time to consider the choice. But Jennifer did like it. Dad, she’s angry, she’s so angry: not at me or you, but at someone or something else. There’s a nucleus to it, but Jennifer keeps it concealed. Like you, she hides her secrets. I wonder—”
She stopped talking, so I finished for her.
“If we’re hiding the same thing,” I said.
We ordered coffee and returned to Sam’s plans for the immediate future.
“I didn’t just visit Amherst on this trip, like I told you and Mom,” she said. “I also went to Lowell. Again.”
“Why Lowell?”
“They have a criminal justice program. I might have applied and forgotten to mention it.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, ‘ah.’?”
“Have you mentioned pursuing a criminal justice degree to your mom, even in passing?”
“No,” said Sam. “I could never find the right time.”
“Because you feared there might never be one.”
“Let’s say I wasn’t optimistic.”
She was correct about that much. Rachel’s brother had been a state patrolman, killed in the line of duty, and then there was also my history to consider. My father, an NYPD detective, had taken his own life after a shooting incident, and my experience with the same force had not been a happy one. My vocation as a private investigator had contributed to the end of my relationship with Rachel, put both her and Sam in danger, and left me with lifelong injuries, not to mention blood on my hands. Any suggestion on Sam’s part that she wished to pursue a similar line of employment might lead her mother to chain her to a D-ring on the basement floor until she came to her senses.
“Have you thought about becoming a police officer?” I asked.
“I’m not sure I’m cut out for it. Ultimately, like I said, I want to be a private investigator, but with a specialization. I’ll run a female agency, taking on only women as clients.”
I didn’t doubt her. This wasn’t a passing fancy.
“If you’re serious, you’ll need experience in the field after your formal education. It’ll be a long haul, with little return for the maximum of effort.”
“I could always come work with you. For you, I mean. At first. Like an apprentice.”
“Or I could just start banging my head against a brick wall now, to get used to the pain. No, I think it would be better if you worked with a more—”
I searched for the right words.
“Conventional agency?” Sam offered.
“That about covers it,” I agreed. “When it comes to the time, I can ask around. We’ll find somewhere appropriate.”
“I thought you’d say that, but I couldn’t not raise the question of working alongside you. It would have been like I didn’t want to, which isn’t the case. I can’t do what you do, or not the way you do it. I don’t know—I haven’t explained that part very well.”
“You’ve been doing fine,” I said, borrowing her own word. “If you’d said you wanted to follow directly in my footsteps, I’d have told you to stick to liberal arts. I’m very aware of how I ended up on this path. It was only through hurt, but it shouldn’t have to be that way.”
“And you won’t try to talk me out of it?”
“Would it do any good?”
“It would only make me dig my heels deeper.”
“What about your mom?”
“I was hoping you might be with me when I tell her.”
I laughed.
“Even Louis would tag along for that conversation only if he was armed and wearing riot gear,” I said. “As for me, I’d have to be dragged to Vermont, bound and sedated. No, that discussion is for you two alone. Seriously, if I’m with you, your mother will think we’re ganging up on her, which won’t help. Talk it through with her. Tell her your reasons. In fact, you can try telling me, because I still haven’t heard them.”
Sam sat up straighter in her chair, like a candidate at a job interview.
“I want to make a difference,” she said. “Shit, that sounds so lame.”
“A) There are other means of achieving that. B) Yes, it does sound lame. And C) Mind your language.”
“Sorry, I must remember not to say ‘shit’ in front of my D-A-D.”
“Funny, but you’re not answering the question, or only with a platitude. That won’t satisfy your mother. It doesn’t satisfy me either.”
She tried again, this time more hesitantly.
“The woman I gave your card to recently, she was crying in a Starbucks. I could have ignored her because that’s what the other customers were doing. They all looked embarrassed, and some of them even seemed annoyed. She was making them feel bad when all they wanted was to stare at their screens on their lunch break, and I got that. They could even have justified their response to themselves by arguing that she wanted to be alone and by intruding they’d make her feel ashamed of a public show of grief, which might have some truth to it, if only a self-serving one.
“But if she’d wanted to be alone in her sadness, she wouldn’t have been in a Starbucks. And if that was the case, what would it hurt to ask if there was anything I could do, even if it was only to listen? It turned out that her daughter had gone missing three years ago that day. She just vanished at the age of twenty-two. She—the daughter, I mean—had problems with depression and substance abuse, and was arrested a couple of times for soliciting. She got pregnant and had a son, who the mother helped look after. The daughter had gone AWOL a couple of times since the birth, for no more than a few days each time, after which she’d show up again, sadder and more bruised.
“But according to her mother, the girl had started to get her life back together in the months before she disappeared. She’d signed up for a beautician’s course and was working nights in a bar to cover her fees. She loved being with her son and had met a guy who liked being with both of them. Then—poof!—she’s gone. She doesn’t come home one night from the bar, but because of her past, it may be that the police don’t pull out all the stops at first—which is understandable, if not forgivable, though I accept it may just be the mother’s impression of events.
“But many of the police she dealt with, from first to last, were men. And the mother, she’s had her difficulties, too. She got married and divorced in the same year, before she and the groom could legally drink at the wedding, and has unwise tattoos, the sort that look like shit—sorry, my bad—when you’re young and shittier—sorry again—as you get older.”
“And she told you all this in one sitting?”
“I’m a good listener,” said Sam.
“More than that, you must have asked the right questions.”
“Are you saying I’m hired after all?”
“Not unless I took that bang to the head after all and didn’t notice. Go on.”
“So,” Sam continued, “there’s a particular law enforcement narrative from the start, and not one that favors mother and daughter. I’m not saying the police didn’t do their job or don’t care about the girl and what might have happened to her. What I am saying is that, from the beginning, mother and daughter were at a disadvantage. Now, after three years, her child’s disappearance is officially a cold case. The police move on because they have to, and there’s always a new kid to search for.
“Is this woman’s daughter coming home? Probably not. Is she dead? I think so. If the mother calls you, can you do anything for her? Perhaps, even if it’s only to help find a body for her to bury. But I want to be part of that ‘perhaps.’ In a world dominated by men who legislate, investigate, prosecute, and pass judgment, but who don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in that world, there’s a place for a female enclave, a safe space, and I want to be part of that as well. Have I answered the question?”
I don’t think I’d ever loved Sam more.
“Yes,” I said, “you have. What’s the girl’s name?”
“Lynette Reynolds. Her mother is Julee Reynolds. And I didn’t just give Julee your card, I also got her number.”
She produced a notebook from her bag, tore a page, and passed it over.
“You can keep it,” she said. “I’ve added her to the contacts on my phone.”
“Look at you, all twenty-first century. I’m surprised you even own a pen and paper.”
I folded the note and put it in my pocket.
“Thank you,” said Sam.
“I haven’t said that I’ll talk to her.”
“Not for that. I meant for not speaking about her daughter in the past tense.”
“It’s tied up with that same ‘perhaps.’ And what’s perhaps but just another word for ‘hope’?”
We prepared to leave. As I dropped some bills on the table to cover the tip, Sam asked: “Are you still seeing Sharon?”
Sam was one of the few people who referred to Macy by her first name. Macy had finally met Sam and me for dinner the last time Sam stayed over in Portland. They’d gotten along fine—not that I’d expected anything less of either. However, it was a relief.
“I am. And about what we’ve been discussing: she might be a good person to consult, either before or after you make your final decision. She might be a better role model, too.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Sam as we walked to the door. “Mom will come around, won’t she?”
“It’ll be hard for her, but there’s a good chance she will, because she understands hope too.”
I caught the two guys checking Sam out again.
“Eyes on the table, boys,” I said, “unless you’d like them blackened.”
They quit checking her out.
“Jeez, Dad,” said Sam. “You know, you’ll have to stop doing that at some point.”
“I will,” I replied. “As soon as you turn eighty, you’re on your own.”