6. Home
Home
We came home to a county that had a name.
It had been in a box in the basement of the police department for twenty-eight years.
"So they had it," I said, in Ray's car, on the way to the Westside.
"They had it in November of 'ninety-eight," said Ray Dominguez.
He had both hands on the wheel and he was looking straight ahead and his jaw was set in a way I had seen twice.
"They requested it because that's what you do in the first week of a missing person.
And then in February they decided she'd left town, and the file went from active to inactive, and everything in it went in a box.
" He took the turn onto Micheltorena. "Doc, I want to say something and I want to say it once.
In 1998 I was thirty-one years old and I was working patrol out of this same building.
I didn't touch that case. But somebody I ate lunch with every day for six years wrote *no evidence of foul play* on the bottom of that file, and he's been dead since 2011, and I have to go and sit in a room with that woman this afternoon and tell her that we had her daughter's dental records the entire time. "
"Ray—"
"I know what you're going to say and don't," he said. "I've been telling myself the version where it's nobody's fault since Tuesday and it doesn't take."
Rosalind Marsh lived in a small blue house on a street off Micheltorena with a lemon tree and a chain-link fence and a screen door that had been painted white so many times that the mesh had gone soft.
She was seventy-nine. She was very small, and very upright, and she had the same haircut she has in the photograph from 2018, and she opened the door before Ray knocked because she had been watching the street.
"Mrs. Marsh, I'm Detective Dominguez, we spoke on the—"
"I know who you are," said Rosalind Marsh. "Come in. Wipe your feet, the carpet's new." She looked past him at me. "And you're the dentist."
"Lila Bennett. I'm so—"
"Don't." She held up one hand. "Not on the doorstep."
The house was immaculate and small and smelled of coffee.
There were photographs on every wall — a girl at eight, at twelve, at sixteen in a graduation gown, at twenty behind the counter of a restaurant with her hair up, laughing at whoever was holding the camera.
There was one enormous framed one over the television, the one from the newspaper, and it was, I realized after a minute, the only one of a grown woman in the house, because there weren't any more after that.
She made us sit down. She brought coffee, which Ray tried to decline and got anyway.
And then Ray Dominguez, who is not a coward, told a seventy-nine-year-old woman that her daughter had been found on a bluff four miles from her house, that she had been there the whole time, and that the Santa Barbara Police Department had held her dental records since November of 1998.
Rosalind Marsh listened to all of it with her hands in her lap. She did not interrupt. When he got to the part about the records she nodded once, slowly, the way you do when something you have suspected for a very long time is finally said by somebody official.
"I know," she said, when he'd finished.
"Ma'am—"
"I don't mean about the records. That's new. That's —" a small movement of her jaw "— we'll come back to that, young man, don't think we won't." She set her cup down. "I mean I know. About Casey. I've known since the Tuesday."
"The Tuesday?"
"She went missing on a Saturday," said Rosalind Marsh.
"The fourteenth. And on the Tuesday the seventeenth, I was standing in that kitchen and I knew.
Not thought. Knew. Because she called me every Sunday of her life from the time she moved out at nineteen, every single Sunday at four o'clock, and on Sunday the fifteenth she didn't call, and on Monday I told myself a story, and on Tuesday I stopped.
" She looked at Ray. "I told your department that.
I told them she called every Sunday. And a man wrote it down and asked me whether Casey and I had argued. "
Nobody said anything.
"He asked me four times over three months whether we'd argued," she said.
"And whether she'd ever talked about going to Los Angeles.
And whether she had a boyfriend her mother didn't approve of.
And every time I said the same thing, which was: my daughter called me every Sunday at four o'clock.
" Her hands were perfectly still in her lap.
"And in February a lady from the paper called me and said the police had told her there was no evidence of foul play and Casey had talked about leaving the area, and I said, who did she talk to about leaving the area?
And the lady said she didn't know. And it was in the paper anyway. "
"Mrs. Marsh," I said, "did she ever talk about leaving?"
"To me? Never. Not once. She was saving for a house.
" Rosalind Marsh got up, went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, and took out a small blue savings passbook with a rubber band around it, and put it on the coffee table between us like a card being played.
"Eleven thousand four hundred dollars. In 1998.
On a waitress's wages, at twenty-two, and she showed me every entry.
" She sat back down. "Now you tell me, detective.
In your professional opinion. Does a girl who has saved eleven thousand four hundred dollars over four years to buy a house in her own town walk away from the bank book? "
Ray Dominguez looked at the passbook on the table for a long moment.
"No, ma'am," he said. "She does not."
"No," said Rosalind Marsh. "She does not."
And then — only then, twenty-eight years and four months after a Tuesday in a kitchen — she put her hand over her mouth and cried, and I moved across and sat next to her on her own sofa and put my arm around her, and Ray Dominguez went and stood in the little hallway with his back to us and looked at photographs of a girl at eight and at twelve and at sixteen for about four minutes.
At the door, going out, she caught my sleeve.
"You found her," she said.
"No, ma'am. A dog found her, and a storm. I just read a chart."
"You read a chart nobody read for twenty-eight years.
" Rosalind Marsh's fingers were like wire.
"Dr. Bennett. I'm not going to ask you for anything, because I've asked that police department for twenty-eight years and I've learned my lesson.
But I'll tell you what I want, and then you can do what you like with it.
" She looked up at me and her eyes were absolutely dry again.
"I want the name. That's all. I'm seventy-nine and I don't want a trial and I don't care about a prison.
I want to know the name of the man who did it before I die, and I want somebody to say it out loud in a room with his face in it. "
Bring the dog next time, she added. And then she shut the door.