Chapter 30
“Is Jane going to come back?”
“Sure she’ll be back,” Carey said. “We miss her and we worry about her, but try to remember she’s only been gone a day, and for most of it she was on an airplane.
She’s about the least eccentric or unreliable person I’ve ever met, and what she cares most about is here.
” He was holding May, and he gave her a kiss on her soft baby cheek.
“Jane’s done a lot of very difficult things to help people, and she’s very smart and very brave.
I admire who she is, but mostly I worry.
I didn’t know she was doing these things until I was already in love with her and trying to get her to marry me.
And it’s not something you get used to.”
“I’m sorry,” Katie said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel worse.
It’s just that things aren’t the way she thought.
She told me what these people had done to her before.
And she told me they were all dead, but there could be others looking for her, so it would be dangerous for me to be around her. She said she would never leave May.”
“I’m not saying that there’s anything irrational about the way you’re feeling tonight,” Carey said.
“I’ve always resented it when somebody would try to cheer me up by telling me I had basically imagined some situation that was seriously bad.
Jane really did think she could keep that part of her life in the past, and she was wrong.
But bad things have happened before, and so far, she’s always made it home. ”
“I was just letting myself be weak, I guess,” Katie said.
“That’s perfectly understandable too,” he said.
“Let’s say the very worst happens, and Jane can’t make it home.
You’ll still be a sixteen-year-old who is in trouble, and you didn’t ask for that or deserve it.
Jane and I have put a lot of thought into how we can help you build a good life for yourself.
If she can’t keep helping, I’ll help you alone.
You’ll still have a home where somebody’s always glad to see you, spend the next three years in a good high school, and then go to college.
You’ll still have to be Katie and not your old name, but I’m sure you can handle that. ”
“Thank you,” Katie said. “Can I take May for a while?”
“You must be tired,” Carey said. “You should probably try to get some sleep. I’ll bathe her and feed her a bottle and put her to sleep.”
“Okay,” she said. She got up and walked upstairs toward the other side of the house. Carey couldn’t help feeling a mixture of sorrow for her predicament and envy that she was probably young enough to be able to sleep tonight.
Officer Dave Fenton was thinking about the girl who had killed his brother Gerry.
Michelle didn’t intuit this because she had loved him for so long and so deeply that she could feel his thoughts—although she could.
She knew because he didn’t hide things. Every night after dinner he came into the living room and woke up the computer so he could get back to work on the case.
Half the time, he barely said anything to the kids during the evening hours when he used to help them with their homework, or listen to somebody’s presentation about refrigeration or aerodynamics.
She knew he had been sending himself reports and evidence evaluations and things from work.
She was pretty sure doing that was against policy and maybe even illegal.
She was also pretty sure that the IT people could detect things like that, and if they did, they would report him.
They weren’t cops; they were civilian technicians.
They were more like the machines they operated than like the men and women who went out in a patrol car and saw blood and realized that the next blood might be theirs and that they’d already said the last things they were ever going to say to their families.
He had been receiving things that he had asked for on his own, too—information from other police departments, county clerks, departments of motor vehicles.
He said he had asked for out-of-step vacation time too.
Usually, he took his three weeks when the kids were out of school in the summer.
He had told her that wasn’t happening this summer because he was saving his time to follow up on some leads.
He said he had to do it after school had started up again because she was a sixteen-year-old girl.
If she wasn’t in school somewhere she would stand out.
If she tried to enroll in a school somewhere she would get caught because she would need a parent to show up with her and furnish paperwork from her last school.
He was a really good cop. The worst thing she kept picturing was that she would be in some other state and he would find her there. He would try to arrest her and she would try to stick a knife in him and he would shoot her.
If only she could tell him.