Chapter 5
“Thank you,” I say, and give his hand a squeeze. “I want to hear more about your dad and your staff meeting, but let me try to reach this lawyer first.”
As we rise from the couch, I remind Bas that there’s lunch for him in the fridge, but he says he first wants to check something with Jorge.
He seems slightly distracted, and I’m left wondering if it’s because of the grisly details I shared or the fact that I’ve kept so much to myself all this time. Or both.
I make my way to my office, a lovely space at the back of the house originally designed as an extra guest bedroom. The two windows look out onto the back of the property, and from here I can see Maitena and Jorge’s half dozen cows grazing on the grass.
I grab my phone, tug Schmidt’s letter from under the pile of books where I left it, and settle into the old leather armchair.
After taking a deep breath, I call the cell number listed on the letter.
The call goes straight to voicemail, so I leave a message, asking him to call as soon as possible today.
My gaze drifts to the small bookcase next to the desk and the two framed photographs of Melanie perched on top of it.
One is from the last year of her life, when she was home briefly during the summer, a picture taken clandestinely by me while she was reading in an armchair, her long brunette hair piled on her head in a messy topknot.
Though most people who saw her would have pegged her as the “creative” type, she was also strikingly pretty, which in high school had probably kept her from being marginalized.
The other photograph is of Mel at ten. She beams at the camera, holding up a copy of A Wrinkle in Time, which we’d just finished reading together.
“Mom, I want to be Meg,” she’d exclaimed. “More than anything.”
Once, during the months after she died, as I wept alone in our loft, I stupidly wondered what it would be like if Mel were only traveling through a tesseract and eventually found her way back to us.
Seconds later, as I’m about to return to the great room, Schmidt calls.
“I know you spoke to Logan,” I tell him after a perfunctory hello, “but I wanted the chance to talk to you as well.”
“Of course, not a problem,” he says. “I have to jump on another call in . . . in ten minutes or so, but I’m free to chat until then.”
I snicker to myself over his word choice. Chat. Is that really how he’d describe a discussion about Calvin Ruck?
Plus, hearing his voice again has rocked me more than I expected.
Despite how many years have passed, it’s so familiar—both the slightly distinctive cadence and the forced deep tone, his clear attempt to disguise a slightly higher-than-normal pitch.
I used to wonder why he’d chosen to be a litigator since it meant working so hard each time he opened his mouth in court.
“Needless to say, I’ve read your letter,” I say. “Are there any updates I should be aware of?”
“Not really from my end, though as you probably heard, the police in Ohio and Pennsylvania have recovered the remains of the two other women Ruck claimed he killed. And I’m sure your husband told you that Ruck passed away not long after I met with him.”
“He told me, yes.” I’m about to correct the husband mistake but catch myself. Why should I advertise the extent of my losses to Schmidt, of all people?
“From what I hear, a distant relative arranged to have the body cremated,” he adds.
If only Ruck had been alive for that experience. But he was never going to get his due, even with two consecutive life sentences.
“And what about Ruck’s claim regarding my daughter?” I say. “What are your thoughts on that?”
“Gosh, I know it’s probably thrown everything into a horrible tailspin for you and your husband, but I’ve come to assume it’s true.”
“Really? You don’t think he was just pulling your leg?”
Silence.
“I did initially,” he says after a few beats.
“He always seemed to get off on messing with people’s heads, especially the cops’.
But based on the veracity of what he divulged about the two missing women, and the fact that he finally copped to the Plattsburgh murders, I’d say he probably wasn’t pulling my leg—or anyone else’s. ”
“Oh, so he summoned you purely to clear his conscience,” I say with as much sarcasm as I can manage. “He wanted to confess his sins and also give a heads-up that Mel’s killer was never apprehended.”
I hear him clear his throat.
“I don’t believe Calvin Ruck had a conscience. No, in my opinion, this was all about ego.”
I feel my frustration mounting.
“What are you talking about?”
“I hate putting it this way—especially to you—but Ruck seemed to have a horrifying pride in what he’d done. In his handiwork, if you will. He wanted credit where it was due and not where it wasn’t.”
I can’t stay on a minute longer.
“Thank you for your time,” I say. “Good day.”
I end the call without giving him a chance to say goodbye. My hands are trembling, not only from talking so much about Ruck but also from the last thing Schmidt said, that Ruck wouldn’t want credit for an atrocity that wasn’t his own.
So what am I supposed to do with all this? Just bide my time at the chacra as things unfold—even unravel—over five thousand miles north?
I force myself from the armchair, take a seat at the desk, and open my laptop. I promised Logan I’d select some of Mel’s poems for the program, and I decide to do it now and take my mind off the call with Schmidt.
I don’t have a lot of her work, just one short story, a ten-minute play, and about twenty haikus, several of which were published in the campus literary magazine, The Muse, which Mel became editor of during her sophomore year.
Logan and I found printouts of the others in a file on her desk—in the off-campus apartment where she was living at the time of her death.
I know all the haikus by heart and, as crazy as it sounds, the play, too. I’ve reread the poems countless times and studied them, not only in the hope of understanding the full meaning of her words but also understanding Mel as well. I only wish there were more.
Because the thing that I’ve never shared with Sebastian—and that Logan was always decent enough not to draw attention to—is that Mel and I weren’t close when she died. In fact, we weren’t close during big chunks of her life.
As much as it hurts to admit that to myself, it’s been better to face the truth than let it stalk me during the middle of the night.
Mel had been a difficult baby, crying for hours at a time the way colicky babies do for no apparent reason. Though her pediatrician assured us it would probably pass by the six-week mark, it lasted far longer.
The situation was made worse by my low-grade postpartum depression.
I wanted so desperately to be a good mother, and my failure to comfort her left me glum and exhausted.
I seemed so klutzy at mothering in general, awkward at handling both her and the endless equipment that came with the job (grade for collapsing a stroller easily: D; grade for strapping on a snuggly: C+; grade for using a breast pump: C-).
Once, when she was a few weeks old, I took her to the park, holding her for a while in my arms. As I was struggling to place her back in the stroller, a drunken derelict sitting on another bench yelled out, “Hold her neck up.” Even he knew what to do better than I did.
The clouds finally lifted when she was about four months.
Her colic abated, and I began to find her staring at me in utter fascination with those lovely blue-green eyes, the same shade as Logan’s and so much more arresting than my pale-blue ones.
At last, we were deliriously in love. And I felt a million times more competent.
But around the age of three, things went to hell again. She developed, of all things, a phobia of buttons. Known as koumpounophobia, it’s extremely rare, and, like my childhood fear of the dark, there’s not always a clear reason.
The child psychologist we consulted suggested she might have become fearful of swallowing one or worried they were germy, but, regardless, she insisted on wearing only pants and skirts with elasticized waists, pullover tops, and jackets with zippers.
She even refused to look at picture books in which buttons were drawn on the characters’ clothing (yes to Goodnight Moon because you can’t see the buttons on the bunny’s pajamas, but “No, no, no!” to Corduroy because the darn bear was actually searching for a button).
Her preschool teachers had to work around it, and playdates were loaded with land mines.
That’s not to say she couldn’t be wonderfully affectionate, but there were other times when she acted sullen and disinterested.
I only made it worse by pushing and prodding—“Sweetheart, come sit with Mommy” or “Look what Mommy has for you.” The therapist I saw encouraged me to back off a little, and I tried, but it did little good.
And then, when she was around seven, she grew less agitated and seemed to fall in love with me again.
She’d become a voracious reader by that point, but also adored being read to, and we spent hours on the couch or in bed devouring children’s novels as well as poetry, both the kind of poems that kids her age found fun—like “Paul Revere’s Ride”—and more sophisticated fare.
I loved seeing how curious certain poems made her.
After we’d read Robert Frost’s “Birches” for the first time, she’d wanted to know if I had been a swinger of birches as a girl, and did I dream of going back to be one again, like the poet did.
(“No, we never had birches in our yard,” I told her, “but I so wish we had.”).
She’d also asked why Frost said life could feel too much like a “pathless wood.”
I giddily thought this was it, that we’d found our groove as mother and daughter, but that period was over in five or so years.
The teen years arrived—erupted, really—and next to them, the button-bashing phase seemed like a breeze.
Logan wasn’t spared, but I got the brunt of it, with her finding fault over the simplest things I said and did.
Once, when I told her, “Have a good day,” she responded with, “Never tell me what to do.”
Things finally started to improve slightly during her sophomore year at Carter, perhaps because she was coming into her own.
She was more civil to me suddenly, and when she was home for breaks, she made Logan and me laugh with her wry observations about both campus life and the world at large.
She was editing the campus literary magazine, just as I’d done in college, and once or twice, she asked for my opinion.
At moments here and there, she even seemed to appreciate me again.
But then, before I could begin to relish the change, she was gone.
Sitting quietly at the desk, I copy four of the haikus and paste them into a fresh document. Then I compose a short email to Logan:
Not sure how many you have room for in the program, but if it’s only one, please let it be this one:
Will you welcome me?
As I leave a pathless wood
Returning to birch.
I don’t explain why to him, but there’s a specific reason for my request. Maybe I’ve been grasping at straws all these years, but since the haiku—one of those we found on her desk—has a clear reference to the Frost poem Mel and I read so many times together, I’ve told myself that in the last days of her life, she was hoping for us to really connect like we had when she was a child.
A soft knock at the door tears me from my thoughts.
“Come in,” I call out.
I twist around in the desk chair as Sebastian enters the room.
He’s wearing his brown suede jacket with the sherpa collar and lining, and his cheeks are ruddy from the wind.
Though Bas has an MBA and sees himself as both book lover and businessman, he really enjoys working on the property—mowing, doing repairs, tending the vegetable garden, even helping Jorge with his cows and the goats that he and Maitena keep for making cheese to sell.
“You’ve been outside all this time?” I ask.
“Yeah, walking around with Poco, trying to figure out what he ate out there, but so far, no clue.” He smiles. “Though we had a heart-to-heart, and he’s assured me he’s done blaming you for the stomach purge.”
I smile back. “Good, because he’s breaking my heart . . . What are you up to now?”
“I thought I’d make a fire and do some paperwork on the couch. Want to join me?”
“Love to.”
“Were you able to reach the lawyer?”
I let out a gust of air. “Yeah, just a minute ago.”
“And?”
Lifting my head, I raise my eyes to the white plaster ceiling, with its beautiful old wooden beams. I try to gather the thoughts that have been swimming in the back of my mind since Schmidt uttered that grim explanation—about Ruck wanting credit where it was due and not where it wasn’t.
An explanation that has the horrible ring of truth.
It feels suddenly as if I’m standing on a frozen lake and have just heard the faint crack of ice beneath my feet.
“Those seeds of doubt,” I say, meeting his eyes again. “They’re even bigger now. Because the lawyer doesn’t believe Ruck killed Melanie.”
“Oh, Bree,” he says. “This must be awful for you.”
All I can do is nod.
“What will happen from here, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” I rise from the chair and walk toward the window, staring out without really seeing.
“It’s possible that when the detective compares all the files, he’ll decide Ruck was just fucking with his lawyer, and then it’s back to case closed.
But if things don’t sit right with him, I suppose he might reopen the investigation. ”
“Will Logan keep you informed, at least?”
I spin around.
“Yes, but I can’t count on him to play middleman. I need to find out myself what the cops are thinking and make sure this whole thing doesn’t go off the rails.”
“You’re going to call them?”
“No, not call them,” I say, feeling a swell of anxiety. Because a decision that’s been taking shape since I spoke to Schmidt is now fully formed. “I’ve got to go back to Cartersville—as soon as possible.”