CHAPTER 8
The gray sky hemmed in the White Mountains as Hester pulled the truck off Route 93 and headed east toward New Hampshire’s lake country. Waffles slobbered on the passenger’s-side window beside her. It was early, maybe too early after a long night with Kate, and the drive from Somerville had taken an hour and a half. The road snaked past a series of Dunkin’ Donuts and gun shops, through towns of clapboard-covered farmhouses and forests of pine, knotted maple, and white birch. The GPS led her a few miles from the highway, and then around the perimeter of Lake Winnipesaukee, and into the foothills.
Once Hester got to Holderness, she turned down a dirt road that led to a run-down motel on the opposite side of the street from the lake. The motel had a neon sign missing some letters, and tiny outbuildings. It was the kind of place where people didn’t stay anymore. A rusty Civic with two Bush-Cheney bumper stickers sat in the rutted driveway. This was Cheryl Jenkins’s motel. Hester had thought about calling ahead before coming and then had opted for surprise instead. Now that she was here—now that she saw that it was the kind of place that showed up in the horror movies she watched—she wondered if that had been a mistake. At the very least, she was glad she’d left Kate with Morgan.
She took the keys from the ignition. Across the street, the lake had frozen over into a thick sheet of gray that stretched almost to the horizon. Snow from earlier in the week covered the shoreline, which was dotted with a mixture of sand and trees. Hester still wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask this woman, but, more than anything, she hoped to get a better sense of who Sam was as a person, and why he and Gabe had run away. Even more so, Hester wondered why Sam and Gabe had stuck together all these years and through all these moves. Part of that story must lie here. She knocked on a door to a small house with a sign that read “Guest Registration” over it. She heard the patter of footsteps. A thin woman in a flowered bathrobe opened the door a crack. She must have been in her mid-fifties, and had wispy, graying hair falling to her shoulders. “Can I help you?” she said in a girlish singsong.
“Cheryl Jenkins?” Hester asked.
“Yes, but I don’t have any money, whatever you’re selling.” She smiled like someone who’d brushed off years of Girl Scouts cookies. “And if you’re looking for a room, we’re closed for the season.”
“I’m not selling anything,” Hester said. “I have some questions, though. About a foster kid who stayed with you a while back.”
“I’ve had dozens of kids stay with me,” Cheryl said. “Some of them I remember better than others.” She laughed and added, “But mostly I remember the bad ones.”
“This boy’s name was Gabe DiPursio. Do you remember him?”
The smile faded from the woman’s eyes for an instant, then returned in full force. She glanced over her shoulder into the house and pulled her robe closed as if realizing for the first time that she wasn’t dressed. “What do you want with him?”
“Could I come in?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’ll only take a minute of your time. I have a few questions.”
“And I don’t want to answer them.”
Hester smiled and shrugged, making herself look as unthreatening as possible, which wasn’t much of a stretch. Daphne had always told her that was one of her strengths, but when it didn’t seem to work with Cheryl, she said, “I drove all the way from Boston.”
“And you can drive right back.” She went to slam the door.
“I met Gabe yesterday,” Hester said quickly, which seemed to catch Cheryl off guard.
“And where’s that?” she asked.
“Down in Boston. In Somerville, really.”
“Are you telling me he’s only been in Massachusetts all these years?”
“No,” Hester said. “He’s lived all over the place.”
“So you met him yesterday, and decided to hop in your car and drive to an abandoned motel to speak to me? He must have had good things to say about me.”
“He didn’t have anything to say about you.”
Cheryl lifted her chin. She was quiet, her silence smoldering, but she finally gave in. “Wait here.”
The door slammed shut, and from outside, Hester could hear footsteps moving away, then the one-sided hum of Cheryl’s voice on the phone. When the door opened again, she’d changed into a red Christmas sweater and a pair of green sweatpants. “I’ll give you five minutes,” she said.
“Do you mind the dog?”
“Whatever.”
They passed through the registration office and into a small kitchenette behind it. The house was clean and tidy, efficient yet surprisingly spacious. Christmas lights hung along the tops of the cabinets, and out in the living room an artificial tree was covered in gold and red balls. Fox News bellowed from a sixty-four-inch television set as, Hester suspected, it did most of the day. Cheryl filled a kettle and put it on an electric burner. She was a bird of a woman, someone whose hands always moved, from her thin hair to the bobbles on her sweater, to the appliances on the kitchen counter. Even after she’d made two mugs of instant coffee and topped Hester’s off with Cremora and sugar, she could barely keep from straightening anything within reach.
“Gabe DiPursio,” she finally said. “Of all the kids that stayed with me, he was not one I expected to hear about again. Not from someone like you, at least. I mean, you’re not a cop, are you? You don’t look like a cop, but these days you never know.”
“Imagine me as a cop,” Hester said. “I don’t think they’d let me fill out the application! But why would you think I was a cop?”
“Just curious. But mostly I’m curious why you’re curious.”
“Gabe stayed with you, right?” Hester said. “Where? Here?”
“You first,” Cheryl said.
She still smiled, and her voice still skipped from word to word. She put her mug down on the coffee table, then moved a coaster under it. She straightened a pile of magazines, forcing Hester to fill the silence. “Gabe went to live with another family after you, right? He went to live with Lila Blaine and her brother.”
“I wouldn’t say family,” Cheryl said. “I had a family. That house was more like a big-boobed tart and her faggot brother.”
The rage in Cheryl’s voice caught Hester off guard. She took a sip of her coffee and set the mug down. “Lila Blaine hired me,” she said. “To find her brother, Sam. The boy Gabe ran away with. I found Gabe too.”
“Those two are still together. What? Are they a couple?”
“I don’t think so,” Hester said. “At least not from what I saw, but you never know. Did you think there was something going on between them when they were kids?”
“Not between them,” Cheryl said. “A lot happened that summer. And a lot of it wasn’t good.” Hester nearly asked her to elaborate, but now that Cheryl had started, it was as though she couldn’t stop. “I didn’t always live here,” she said. “I used to have a house down the street too. A nice house, with a barn and animals. Cats. Dogs.” She scratched Waffles behind the ears. “The house was big, with lots of room for kids and family. I sometimes had eight foster kids staying with me at the same time. And it wasn’t for the money. I’m not one of those awful people you hear about on the news. It was for those kids! It was fun, and full of life, and every single day felt like a day at camp and, well, it was a good time in my life. It’s a time that I miss.” She looked out the window at the barren lakeshore in the distance. “And then it wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“Gabe happened. He went to live with that Blaine woman without telling me.”
“He went to live with her and you didn’t know?”
“Now you do sound like the cops,” Cheryl said. “You sound like they did that summer. I had seven other kids staying with me. I’d say where’s Gabe, and one of them would say he’s over at the Blaines’ house. I’d call, they’d say everything is fine and dandy, and I’d say, right, come home when you like, or stay if you like. I’d ask Lila if she was fine with him staying there, if she needed anything from me, and she’d say, nope, we have it all covered. That went on for a week, then two weeks, then two months, and then he ran away and let’s just say . . .” Cheryl lowered her voice. “The shit hit the fan.”
“That must have been terrible for you,” Hester said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t make you rehash this.”
Cheryl seemed grateful for the small kindness. “It was,” she said. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I lost all my kids. And then I had to hire a lawyer because Gabe’s junkie parents listed me in a suit against the state, and that meant I lost my house. And all along, Lila was sitting pretty down the road. She still has her lake house too. How much do you think that place is worth now? Do you know how much this dump would be worth with a bit of shorefront?”
The smile had left Cheryl’s face, and her voice had lost its spring. Hester tried to imagine how she’d have felt in Cheryl’s place. She’d have been angry and resentful, maybe even vengeful, but to her, Cheryl simply seemed resigned. “Will you see him again?” Cheryl asked. “Gabe?”
“I don’t know,” Hester said.
“My advice would be to stay as far away from him as you can.” Cheryl leaned forward. “I had a lot of kids come through my house over the years. Probably thirty or forty in all. Some of them were sweet, others were angry. Some were sad. I could deal with any of those types. Angry was even my specialty. But Gabe was something else. He wasn’t anything. Having him in the house was like living with an empty shell. I could never tell if he was waiting to be filled up, or if it was even possible to find something to fill him with. If one of my cats had gone missing, Gabe was the first kid I’d’a pointed the finger at. I thought he’d be dead or in jail by now.”
Note to self, Hester thought, don’t bring Kate to that house in Davis Square again. “So you were glad he went to stay with Lila?”
“Not glad. Relieved might be a better word.”
“And why didn’t you go to family services and get him another placement?”
“Who says I didn’t try? Finding a placement for a fourteen-year-old isn’t easy, especially one who’s been in and out of the system so many times. Honestly, I wish I’d listened to my instincts and insisted. None of this would have happened if I had.”
Waffles lifted her head and barked. A few seconds later, a car pulled into the driveway outside. Hester glanced through the window to see an ancient teal-colored hatchback blocking in her own truck. A moment later, the kitchen door slammed open, and a wiry man wearing a sheepskin coat came in.
“Bobby,” Cheryl said. “This is Hester Thursby. She knows Gabe.”
Bobby Englewood. He’d been the next person on Hester’s list to visit. She watched as he shut the door behind him without showing the slightest sign of surprise at the mention of Gabe’s name. She knew he lived down the street from Cheryl, in Moultonborough, and worked for a private agency placing children in foster homes. He must have been the one on the other end of the phone a few moments earlier. He was in his mid-thirties and had the look of a man who thought a lot about his hair but never quite got it right. He had a guarded confidence and seemed the antithesis of any social worker Hester had ever met. This guy, she suspected, had roamed the hallways in high school like a predator and had done anything but protect the weak. He also smelled like a bar. As he stepped into the living room, Cheryl’s house suddenly felt crowded, and there was a palpable tension as he glanced from Cheryl to Hester, a tension so thick Waffles howled toward the ceiling. Hester put a hand on the dog’s collar to quiet her.
“Cute,” Bobby said. He let Waffles sniff his hand, and then scratched her neck. She left Hester’s side and rubbed up against his leg.
“Very discerning,” Hester said, to lighten the mood, but Cheryl’s hands had begun to flutter again. She touched a magazine and her hair and picked up her empty mug and put it down.
“I don’t want to take up any more of your time,” Hester said.
“But I just got here,” Bobby said.
“You’re blocking my truck.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
Hester couldn’t tell if he meant it as a threat. She felt in her pocket for her phone. How long would it take the police to get out here? Did the Holderness police department even have more than one deputy? “Could you move it?”
“Maybe.”
Bobby leaned against the wall like he was practicing his James Dean moves.
“And maybe not?” Hester asked.
He raised an eyebrow and winked at her.
“Quit it, Bobby. You’re being a jerk,” Cheryl said, sniffing the air around him. “And have you been drinking? It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning.” Her voice, surprisingly strong, seemed to cow Bobby for a moment. “She’s harmless, okay. Completely harmless. She knows Lila Blaine. She’s been looking for that brother of hers and stumbled on Gabe. Turns out Gabe lives down in Boston.”
“Good ol’ Lila,” Bobby said, cupping his hands at his chest.
“I got it,” Hester said. “She has big tits.”
“Pocket-size here has a temper.”
Hester took a step toward him, and when he laughed, Cheryl stepped between them and led Bobby to the sofa. “Sit down and drink some coffee. Maybe it’ll sober you up and make you human again. She barely knows Gabe. Met him yesterday. Came here today,” she added in a way that made Hester feel as though she was feeding Bobby cues. “Come and sit down, sweetie. He’s a jerk, but he’s harmless.”
Hester perched on the arm of a chair. Waffles jumped up beside her and tried to climb on her lap. “I’ll stay,” Hester said. “But don’t call me ‘pocket-size’ and don’t call me ‘sweetie,’ and you can either move your little go-cart when I’m ready to leave or I’ll drive my truck right over it. Got it?”
Bobby let out a long belch.
“Honestly, Bobby, you’d think you were raised by wolves,” Cheryl said.
“Wasn’t I?”
“Oh, do shut up,” Cheryl said. She took a sip of her coffee. “What’s Lila want with that boy anyway?” she asked. “Her brother? She didn’t seem very concerned when he disappeared. I figured she knew where he was all along. Didn’t you, Bobby?”
Bobby shrugged and seemed to resign himself to having a civil discussion. “It sure would have helped if she’d offered up some information then. I don’t know if she knew where those kids went or not, but I can guarantee she was thrilled they were gone. Lila’s not exactly the nurturing type. She didn’t tell anyone they’d left for weeks. She said she figured they’d turn up and only got worried when they didn’t come back in time for school.”
That answered Hester’s question about how hard Lila had looked for her brother. After all, it had only taken Hester a couple of days to find him. “Did she ever tell anyone about these?” she asked, taking the postcards from her bag and quickly explaining where they’d come from.
“That little cunt,” Bobby said under his breath as he thumbed through the cards.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Hester said.
“Yeah, that’s a no. She knew all along where they’d gone?”
“At least since the cards started coming,” Hester said. “What else can you tell me about Lila?”
Bobby let out a sigh. “Got a beer?” he asked. “I could use a drink.”
“Not at this time of the day,” Cheryl said.
“Cheryl here is always looking out for my best interest,” Bobby said, “whether I want her to or not.”
“No one else does,” Cheryl said.
“It’s good to have friends, right?” Hester said.
“When you want ’em,” Bobby said.
“So tell me about Lila,” Hester said. “Was she ever a friend?”
“Not exactly,” Bobby said. “She was a year behind me in high school, and we dated for a while. Went to the prom together, but I wouldn’t say we ever actually liked each other. She knew how to party, I’ll tell you that much. We went to Plymouth State together too, her first year, at least. She had to drop out when her parents died.”
“And how did she take that?”
“I’m not really sure,” Bobby said. “We weren’t exactly on speaking terms by then. I fucked that one up in the way only a horny teenager can.”
Hester returned the postcards to her bag. She asked a few more questions but didn’t learn anything she didn’t already know. Finally, she pulled a business card out. “I’ve taken up enough of your time. Call me if you think of anything. And thanks for your help.”
“I’m not sure if we helped much,” Cheryl said.
“More than you know,” Hester said, putting her coat on and heading toward the door with Waffles in tow.
“I’ll move my car,” Bobby said, grabbing his keys, but outside he didn’t seem in a rush. He leaned against the cab of Hester’s truck and ran a hand through his hair, and in that move, Hester could see him as a high school student, all confidence and swagger. He’d have been a boy whose attention Hester would have yearned for, and hated herself for craving it. Even now, it annoyed her to find him attractive.
“It’s cold,” Hester said, her breath freezing as she spoke. “And I should get going.”
“Nice ride,” Bobby said. “An F-150. How do you even drive this thing? Are you big enough to reach the pedals?”
“I manage,” Hester said. “I move the seat close and turn off the airbag. But thanks for pointing out my height. I love it when people do that.”
“What does one of these things go for? Thirty grand? Forty?”
“I don’t know. It’s my boyfriend’s. He uses it for work. I don’t even own a car. I don’t really need one in the city.”
Bobby looked toward Cheryl’s house, then out over the lake. “Sorry I was such an asshole inside,” he said. “We’re close-knit around here. We watch out for each other, and when Cheryl called, I guess I thought she might be in some trouble again. Hearing that DiPursio kid’s name dredged up bad memories.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Hester said. “And apology accepted. How do you even know Cheryl?”
“We go way back. I lived with her in high school. She’s always watched out for me. She made sure I went to college.”
Suddenly their relationship made more sense, the subtle give-and-take, the way Cheryl could scold Bobby without eliciting any anger. “You came through the foster system?” Hester asked. “You were one of her kids.”
“Yeah. And sometimes I feel like I still am.” Bobby turned his gaze from the lake to Hester. “Tell me. Why’s Lila interested in those boys again after all these years? Why now?”
Hester still had that same question, no matter what Lila had claimed. “She told me she’s selling her lake property. Half the money belongs to Sam.”
“Is that what she told you?” Bobby said. “Are you sure this isn’t about the body?”
Hester felt the cold creep into her coat as a chill ran down her spine.
“The one they found over by where Lila lives,” Bobby said. “It’s all they’ve written about in the news this week. They dug it out of a shallow grave on Saturday.”
The same day Lila had called Hester.