Callie
Annabelle makes them each a cup of tea. The cups rattle in their saucers as Annabelle carries them from the kitchen. The porcelain is thin, thin enough that you could probably bite through it.
“Yearbook committee.”
Annabelle frowns. “Excuse me?”
“You liked photography when you were younger, right?”
Annabelle’s mouth hangs open a moment before she remembers herself. “That’s right.”
Callie clears her throat. “I should make this clear right off the bat. I’m not a private investigator. My name is Callie Hauser. I’ve spent many years working as a narcotics detective but as of August of last year I’m Chief of Police in Pine Lakes.”
“Right,” Annabelle says, and is quiet for a moment. Callie presses on.
“Back in the parking lot you asked if Sabrina had sent me. She didn’t. No one in the area has seen her since the 1990s. But I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to her. What happened to both of you.”
Annabelle raises her hands, spreads them to indicate the contents of the room. A facetious gesture that makes them both smile awkwardly, shift in their seats.
“Could I ask you some questions about Sabrina?”
Callie swipes through her phone, finds the crime scene picture of the broken bracelet. “Does this look familiar to you? It was found not far from your former home. In late winter 1991.”
Annabelle presses her lips together. “It was Sabrina’s. It had been our mother’s. We had compromised, said we would share it. But Sabrina made it hers. She had a way of doing that.”
“When was the last time you heard from Sabrina or saw her?”
Annabelle sucks in a breath between her teeth. “It would have been March 1, 1991.”
Callie notes the date. One day before Baby Doe was found.
“Was she wearing the bracelet then?”
“I’m not sure. I’d think so. She almost never took it off. We fought over it. She didn’t want me to have a chance to take it back.”
“Can you tell me a little bit about that? The last time you saw or spoke to her?”
“She said she was going to talk to him and never came back.”
Callie gets the feeling Annabelle is slipping into a code.
That she is sliding into the middle of a conversation Annabelle has been having with someone else for a long time.
“Who is this him? Can you give me a name, here?” She braces herself, a second away from learning the truth, Annabelle’s and Sabrina’s and her own.
Annabelle shakes her head. “I don’t know his name.”
Callie can’t help herself, incredulous. “You don’t … You don’t know?”
“She only ever called him…” Annabelle looks to the ceiling, swallows. “She called him the Coyote.”
It takes her a moment to understand what she’s feeling. Crestfallen, and strangely relieved. “Do you know why?”
“No. Only that … no. I don’t.”
Callie’s mind teems with questions. Why didn’t Annabelle go to the police when Sabrina didn’t come back?
When did she stop looking and leave the Pines?
Slow down, she wills herself. Don’t scare her off.
“Okay. Can you tell me more about that? What were the circumstances around this conversation? Did she say he seemed angry or upset with her—I’m assuming we are talking about the man she was seeing, yes? ”
“Someone she had been sleeping with.”
Callie takes a sip of her tea. It scalds the back of her throat. “I heard a rumor that Sabrina had been with an older man. Was he older?”
“Yes. Probably in his midtwenties.”
“Did she ever mention his job? Or where he lived?”
“No. She became very private once she started up with him. We used to share everything, and then … she wouldn’t tell me anything.” Again, that closed-off look on Annabelle’s face.
“He drove a silver sedan. He would pick her up sometimes.”
“Did you ever see him? Could you describe him for me?”
“He had brown hair, brown eyes. Medium height, maybe five eight, five nine. He smoked cigarettes.”
“Did this man have any tattoos or birthmarks, any scars or piercings that would stand out?” She thinks of Fauver. She can’t be sure when he got the snake tattoo but the ink is pretty faded, the image weathered with his skin.
“I don’t think so. I only saw him twice. Once in his car and once at the Cranberry Festival. He was there with the chief of the police department, a bunch of other men. He was from the area, I think. He knew the roads.”
Callie sits up. Frank was named chief in 1989. “But you don’t know if he was a cop?”
Annabelle shakes her head. Callie thinks of Jane’s warning. Frank would never turn on one of his guys. Did Frank know who the father of Baby Doe is? Is he protecting someone?
“Was he with anyone else you recognized?”
“No, I didn’t know them.”
She ticks through the roster in her head.
Could be Keegan. Maybe that’s why he pretended to forget Sabrina’s name when she asked him, that day they sprung the muskrats.
It gives her a pang to think of him as this Coyote, but she’s been doing this long enough to know.
Takes all kinds. And Keegan had been so awkward when Callie asked if he knew Jenna.
Keegan, who had been easier on her than everyone else.
“I have to ask you a sensitive question. Had Sabrina been pregnant? I heard some rumors to that effect as well … Her name came up in connection with another case from around the same time and as far as motives for her disappearance go—”
Annabelle shakes her head quickly, cuts Callie off. “She wasn’t.”
The atmosphere in the room has changed, become stifled and charged. She knows the answer, but still, she has to ask.
Callie leans forward, tries to make her voice as gentle as she can. “Annabelle. Were you pregnant?”
“Please!” Annabelle bangs a fist on the coffee table, then covers her face with her hands.
Callie’s undrunk tea sloshes over the rim of the pretty little cup.
Annabelle’s sleeve has ridden up and she can see a part of the scar Trent Brentwood described.
Messy. Something that came back together all wrong.
Annabelle swallows, her eyes watering, her chin trembling so hard Callie wonders how she’s going to get the words out. “Please. Do not call me that name.”
Callie waits a beat. Stares at the splotch of spilled tea on the table. “You tapped on my car window. I was going to go home. Leave you to your knitting. You invited me here. Why?”
“She was supposed to help me! She promised. Said she would be there for all of it. She would find a doctor and be by my side and help me. And after … after we would raise the baby together. I wouldn’t have to do any of it alone.
It was going to bring us back together. Things were going to be all right again. ”
Tears leak down Annabelle’s face. She wipes them away with the heels of her hand.
Callie watches Annabelle—Iris, whoever she wants to call herself—cry.
She turns to the portraits on the wall again.
The boys with their salt-tousled hair and athletic shoulders.
Blair with her bright-blue eyes and easy grin.
When Annabelle speaks again, her voice is a hoarse whisper. “They don’t know. No one knows.”
It makes sense now. Why she couldn’t have gone to the police when Sabrina didn’t come home. Why she ran. She must have been terrified.
“She was going to see him, he wanted to meet. And she was going to blackmail him. Demand money.”
“Blackmail?”
“He was the only person I had ever been with. But apparently he used to brag to her about others. She said she would go to the police and tell them about all the underage girls he had been with.”
Callie is confused for a moment, until she’s not.
Annabelle seems to understand. “I just did it. Once. I got in to the car with him and that was it. I don’t know why. I guess I wanted to know what she was abandoning me for. Our mother had left a few years before. Our father was … checked out. She was all I had. And then, I didn’t even have her.”
Annabelle slept with her sister’s older lover out of spite?
Loneliness? Curiosity? She supposed it doesn’t matter now.
Her own head throbs thinking about the mental gymnastics.
The claustrophobia of keeping a secret for this long.
And this man, this man who was juggling girls, playing them against one another.
This man was Callie’s father too. She has to push the fact out of her mind while she’s sitting here with Annabelle, or else she’s afraid she won’t be able to do it, won’t be able to ask the things she needs to know.
She can’t be the daughter and the cop, can’t hold those two halves of herself together while she’s in this room.
“Why did you leave the note? In the factory?”
“After … after I had Blair. I knew it was far-fetched, that she probably wouldn’t ever see it. But I guess I just thought, I had so much. I had to try. If she was out there, I wanted to share with her. I wanted her to know I was okay. That I could take care of her.”
“I see,” she says. But Callie doesn’t ask which she Annabelle means. Either answer too unbearable, too sad.
A dull pressure forms at her temples. She doesn’t know what to do with this information.
It had been what she wanted, but now? Now what does she do?
Destroy this woman’s life? Hurt her children and her husband?
Or let her keep lying? How much choice does she have?
Healy and Nixon hadn’t been able to find a DNA match linking her to the crime, maybe they never will.
Callie is the only one who knows everything.
And she knows better than anyone what it means to have a secret—for years no one knew the extent of Jenna’s problem, so long as Callie showed up to school with her hair brushed, her homework done, her pencils sharpened.
A secret can feel like a form of control, but the secret is controlling you.
And the magnitude of this secret she’s uncovered here makes her head spin.
She takes a deep breath. “I want to find out what happened to Sabrina. I’d like to find a way to do that without implicating you in any way.
” She doesn’t know if this is a promise she can keep.
But she’ll try to find the answers. And she won’t sacrifice Annabelle to do it.
She’s already been through so much. Whatever she keeps from Ben and her children is her own burden to bear.
None of this conversation would be admissible in court.
It hasn’t been recorded. She hadn’t read Annabelle her rights.
She doesn’t have any corroborating evidence.
But now she knows one half of the story, which is so much more than she had before.
Annabelle is quiet for a long time. When she speaks again her voice is barely above a whisper. “How did they find … who…”
Callie hears the words she can’t make herself say, Who found the baby?
She weighs her options. At the beginning of this case she would have told the truth, would have savored the chance at righteousness.
That is was Jenna, her mother, who found the child.
Jenna whose life was marred by what Annabelle did.
But she knows it isn’t that simple. That Annabelle, and in her own way, Jenna, were both the same.
Two women doing what they felt they needed to in order to survive.
And Jenna somehow finding her way to the same man, this Coyote, after all of that.
“Someone out walking,” Callie says.
Annabelle watches her carefully. Another question in her eyes. Someone who keeps secrets recognizes withholding when they see it.
Callie relents. “Jenna. Your neighbor. She was out delivering papers.” She won’t tell Annabelle that she’s Jenna’s daughter. She doesn’t want this visit to take on the air of a vendetta. Because even if it started that way, things have shifted now.
“Have you asked her about him?” Annabelle asks. “The Coyote. She knew him too. She tried to talk to me about it once. I couldn’t do it. Maybe if I had everything would have been different. Maybe if I had let myself hear the truth … I don’t know.”
“You mean she tried to warn you about him?”
“Maybe. Maybe she did. I wasn’t able to listen. I blew her off.”
It makes no sense. Why would Jenna have warned Annabelle about this man, then gotten pregnant with Callie a year later?
Unless Jenna hadn’t had a choice.
She hates this man, the Coyote, with every cell in her body. Realizes, with a wave of nausea, that to hate him is to hate a part of herself.