Callie #2
Callie can’t help but marvel as she follows Lynne Hamilton across the hall.
Her office is filled with books and field hockey trophies, with two casement windows that look out onto the rolling green of the school grounds.
A far cry from the high school she taught at in the Pines, whose records Callie has been trying to access for background on the Rileys, only to be told the shed that held them was flooded ten years ago, everything too moldy to hang on to.
“I have ten minutes before I have to be out on the field for practice.”
“Do you remember a student named Annabelle Riley?” Callie asks, and as she says Annabelle’s name she catches it again: another flicker of something in Lynne Hamilton—not so much in her eyes, but a change in her bearing. She’s hit something. The Riley girls are a sore spot. The question is, why?
She clears her throat and whatever indecision or worry she had just witnessed in the woman is already gone. “Annabelle was in my Advanced Placement History class. I also oversaw her work on the yearbook committee as the committee’s faculty adviser.”
“Do you know what happened to her? It appears she left the area around 1991. Dropped out of school, along with her sister, Sabrina.”
“Annabelle left school that winter and never came back.”
“So did Sabrina.”
“Sabrina, I believe, dropped out earlier. In the fall. Those girls did not have much in the way of parental supervision, as you’ve possibly gathered.
Their mother was MIA and their father was always doing gig work, or at a bar.
And my god, that house. It was probably unsafe for them to be living there. ”
“The faculty knew this? The school was aware that they were on their own?”
Lynne Hamilton sighs. “You have to understand. The school took care of those girls as much as we could. Free breakfast and lunch. They were bused to and from the building. And they seemed to be doing okay. It seemed like the order and routine and support was good for them. Rather than risking a call to social services, having them separated, displaced. It would have been difficult to place two teenage girls in one foster home. They didn’t need a lot, but they did need one another.
Their relationship was very … symbiotic.
It took a lot to convince Annabelle to apply to colleges, even though she worked so hard, had great grades.
It felt safer, better for them, to be there.
To do what it took to keep them together. At the time.”
“And now?”
She sighs. “Well, they both left, didn’t they?”
“You must have been surprised that Annabelle would drop out, if she were so involved with her academics. If she was as determined to go to college as you thought.”
“She only would have left school if she had to.”
“Why do you think she had to?”
Lynne Hamilton takes a breath. It is a moment Callie recognizes from other interviews. A subject shoring something up. Deciding something. The cost of telling a difficult truth.
“I think once Sabrina left, Annabelle couldn’t get through the days without her. Her schoolwork suffered. She was more distractable. Still a good student, still perfectly behaved. But she was off, you know? I think she just couldn’t stand the separation from Sabrina.”
Callie has to hand it to her. She didn’t think she had it in her.
But Callie knows that Lynne Hamilton is lying.
The story has the well-worn feeling of a justification you run over again and again at night when you can’t sleep.
It means that something happened and Lynne Hamilton has long expected to have to answer for it. But what?
“So, where do you think they went? Did they ever talk about going anywhere together?”
“God, who knows? Annabelle had really wanted to apply to NYU. We were working together so she might apply to colleges and scholarships the following fall. They could have gone to New York. They could have gone to the shore. They might have gone twenty miles or two hundred. People underestimate teenagers. They are capable of a lot, and they let their emotions rule them. Everything that happens to them feels huge, feels black and white. There is an honesty in that, but it also drives them to dramatic decisions. Maybe Sabrina convinced Annabelle to leave. Who knows where they ended up.”
“Do you think Annabelle would have listened?”
“Annabelle was smart, but she wasn’t fully confident in her abilities all of the time.
I can see a version of events in which Sabrina persuades Annabelle to leave.
And Annabelle listens, because what she needs more than NYU or good SAT scores or great grades is her sister.
At least in her mind. I was less convinced that the relationship was healthy for Annabelle.
But it was what it was.” For a second Lynne Hamilton looks contrite, and Callie wonders if she is going to cry before she cuts her eyes to her phone.
“Look, I’m late for practice. The girls will be out there starting warm-ups.
It’s the last week of our season. Playoffs. Every second counts.”
“Sure, just one more thing before you go.”
“What’s that?” Callie can feel the woman biting back annoyance.
“Well, I find it a little odd that you have yet to ask me what I am investigating.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dropping out of school after the age of sixteen isn’t a crime. Both girls were seventeen that fall. Why do you think I’m here?”
By now Callie knows that Lynne Hamilton isn’t going to bring up the baby. That she’s shielding something, or someone. But it can be worth it to press someone who you know is going to lie. To see what they come up with. To see what they give away when they’re trying to hide something else.
Lynne Hamilton sighs. “Sabrina was involved with an older man. Or at least that’s what the rumors were at school. That he was a cop. I figured this was some sort of internal investigation.”
Callie is both shocked and not. It doesn’t feel like a lie.
It could make sense of everything. The sloppy investigation.
Why Sabrina would feel like she had nowhere else to go, no other choices.
But she hates how everywhere she turns she feels flatfooted.
How Trent, now Lynne, have caught her off guard.
“And … another question. I know, your practice, your girls are out there. But did you hear about the child they found? The baby? That winter, 1991. The same one the girls disappeared.”
“That was a very sad thing,” Miss Hamilton says, rising from her chair, sliding a backpack on her shoulders. “But I don’t know anything about that. Now excuse me, I need to be running drills right now.”
“Did you know Jenna Barry?” The question slips out and Callie hears the desperation in her voice. She can’t stop looking at the yearbook photo of Jenna. The girl she was before she became the joke down at the station, the woman with the crazed hair and glassy, dead-to-the-world eyes.
“I did.”
“She’s my mother. She’s the one who found the child.”
For the first time this afternoon Hamilton doesn’t have a polished answer at the ready. She studies Callie’s face, and Callie guesses she can see the resemblance now that she knows to look. “I’m very sorry. She was a sweet girl.”
Callie nods. She’s never heard that descriptor for Jenna.
Hundreds of other words come up for Jenna before she’d think to call her sweet.
Troubled. Lonely. Messy. Lost. But Jenna had been a girl once, just like Annabelle and Sabrina.
A girl brimming with her own desires and hopes.
Who had been something else other than the names everyone slung at her, all the labels everyone stuck to her back.