Lucinda had never liked the old rectory, now serving as temporary sheriff’s office. The place smelled of candle wax and furniture polish, and despite its vast windows that spanned from floor to ceiling, shadows lurked, as if the dark woodwork itself swallowed up the room’s natural light.
Lucinda walked into what had once been the old parlor, now the sheriff’s makeshift office, to find Kirk with his feet up on his desk.
Lucinda’s father would never have taken such a lax posture working such a case, or no case at all. A man with his feet on his desk was a man too smug for his job, a man beneath his station.
Kirk gnawed at a Lucky Spot breakfast sandwich, same as he’d eaten each morning going back sixteen years to when he and Lucinda had dated, the first time around.
They were good sandwiches. Joe at the Lucky Spot slathered his homemade biscuits with maple syrup then griddled them. Used a thick wedge of aged cheddar. Bacon from hogs raised at High Meadows farm. Eggs. Gooey yolks as orange as an Indian paintbrush petal. But to eat one every day proved an appetite unchecked, an adolescence never outgrown.
Kirk sucked yolk from his thumb.
The sandwiches were the first food Lucinda and Kirk had shared after she’d given herself to him. She despised the term, given herself, but that’s how it had felt. She’d succumbed. Her first boy. The only boy, she’d thought, dreamily envisioning a future with him.
They’d sat at a booth at the Lucky Spot and shared a breakfast sandwich. Not saying a word, relishing the secrecy of what they’d just shared in the empty apartment above the hardware store Kirk had been painting before the next tenants moved into it. When their eyes met, he’d smiled an easy and unguarded smile. A kind smile. And she’d believed she’d tapped into a part of him no one else got to see. The real Kirk. She’d felt giddy with pleasure for drawing this side out of the Tough Boy, proving his toughness was an act masking a soft side she alone had the power to conjure.
Kirk looked at her now and licked his fingers. Smiled. That smile. The devil in it.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I’m the deputy sheriff.”
Kirk sniffed, licked at yolk at the corner of his mouth. “What do you plan on doing? You don’t have any experience in this sort of thing.”
“More than you.”
“How’s that?”
“Sally.”
“I mean legal. The law. Investigation. You can’t be nosing around and certainly can’t be going out to crime scenes on your own.”
Nosing around. Christ. It was his MO, though, and it did not surprise or anger her; it was as expected from him as a grunt was from a hog. His nonchalance, however—this infuriated her. His indifference to the urgency and seriousness of the missing girl was inexcusable. He should have been up on his feet coordinating, delegating, investigating.
“I was at the crime scene because you were unreachable. When you’re supposed to be reachable at all times. The parents tried to locate you.”
“I was on a call. I got to their place quick enough. You, though, you shouldn’t have gone inside the place, you could have contaminated it.”
Lucinda bit her tongue as Kirk reached in the bag and took out a sandwich.
“Remember these?” He smiled. All the hardness in his face melted like winter ice on a spring day.
“What are you doing in here like this?” Lucinda glanced at his boots propped up on the desk.
“Mentally preparing for the press waiting in the other room,” he said and set his feet on the floor. Slid the sandwich across the table toward her. “One won’t kill you.”
She poured a cup of weak black coffee into a Styrofoam cup. Kirk got up and stood too close to her.
She moved away.
“Child Welfare’ll be here pronto,” he said. “I can hand that over. Think you can handle it? I need to put heads together with the troopers on the search and the real investigation. You can do background.”
Background.
“I thought you’d handle the press and I would support the state police with searches,” Lucinda said.
“Don’t throw a tizzy. You will help. But I can handle these two things at once.”
Lucinda glanced through the doorway at reporters and camera operators talking and prepping for questions in the adjacent room.
“I’ll handle Child Welfare,” Lucinda said. “Then help with search coordination. I can handle two things at once too.”
“I knew you’d see it my way.” Kirk winked at her on his way into the other room.
Lucinda did not know what to expect or what to ask the Child Welfare liaison. Her only experience with foster care was her own personal experience. Her parents had been her sole foster parents since she was five days old and adopted her at five years old. They were her true parents, no one else, and she was fortunate to have their love and kindness, could not relate to the experiences some children in the foster system endured.
She wanted to do her utmost in the meeting with Child Welfare, do whatever was asked of her role as deputy, even if it was Kirk manipulating her with his authority. Her father had always said respect the chain of command, if not the commander.
She’d abide by that, for as long as she was able anyway. This was not 1987. She was not her father. And her father had never had to report to the likes of Kirk. If he had, he may have made an exception to his mantra.
The best approach to the meeting with Child Welfare, however, would be to simply listen. Her father had said to listen to those who know more than you, let them speak first and the appropriate questions will come. Lucinda was beginning to appreciate the pressure her father must have weathered when Sally and her mother had disappeared. Especially with his friend as the prime suspect for a time. What a nightmare. No wonder it had taken its toll on both men. Especially Jonah. First chance she got at personal time, she needed to get up to see Jonah at his cabin.
Dale came up from behind, giving her a start.
“Where’d you come from?” Lucinda said. “You scared me.”
“Through the back. Private powwow with Kirk?” He nodded through the doorway, to Kirk patronizing the press.
“We were discussing the girl,” Lucinda said.
Dale wrapped his arms around her from behind.
She took his hands from her hips and stepped from his embrace. “I’m working.” Did any man she knew respect the bounds of professionalism?
“Looked like you were having coffee with him,” Dale said.
So there it was. Jealousy. She did not have the time for it.
“I have an interview with Child Welfare,” she said.
Kirk rambled into the room, locked eyes with Dale.
“Sneak in the old back door, did we?” he said. “How’s the insurance racket?”
Dale didn’t correct Kirk, who knew damn well Dale was a realtor, respected by both buyers and sellers, a rarity for the profession.
“Real estate,” Lucinda said. Lucinda had met Dale two years ago when she’d been looking to buy a small home for herself. He’d not been her agent, but when he’d overheard her speaking to his colleague at the office, he’d said, “I know the perfect place for you.” Lucinda had resisted rolling her eyes. Of course a realtor knew the perfect place. Didn’t they all? It just came in, I haven’t even listed it yet, he’d said. You’re lucky. Lucinda had rolled her eyes then. Yes, lucky me, she’d thought. She’d waited for this agent who claimed to have the perfect place to hoist himself up from his desk and horn in on the sale. Take advantage. Instead, he’d given the agent Lucinda was working with the address and handed over a folder and a set of keys. “If it’s not the one for you,” he’d said, now preoccupied with his computer screen, no longer looking at her, “you’re out of luck in this town.” He’d said this town as if he’d been the one living here his whole life, and Lucinda was a newcomer, instead of the other way around. As if Lucinda hadn’t known the town as well as him.
The place Dale had suggested hadn’t been perfect. It had been better than that. Perfection didn’t exist, anyway, and its approximation was dull, plastic. However, the house was just right, as Dale had been on his and Lucinda’s first evening of bowling and pizza together after Lucinda had closed the deal on the house and insisted she buy Dale a beer for directing her to a home she had not even known existed in her small hometown.
“Right. Real estate,” Kirk said now. “Sell the land out from under us locals.”
“That’s not what I do,” Dale said.
“Right. Well. This room is for official business only,” Kirk said.
Dale looked at Lucinda.
“It is,” she said.
“Using it for coordination. Lots of coordinating to do,” Kirk said. “Lots of late hours ahead.”
“I’ll see you at the house,” Lucinda said to Dale.
“I’d like to help search,” Dale said.
“Get over to the grange hall then,” Kirk said. “With the rest of the volunteers.”
“I’ll see you later,” Lucinda said. “I have something I want to talk to you about.”
Dale made to kiss Lucinda; she offered her cheek. She did not feel comfortable with affection on such a somber case as a missing child.
“Got it,” Dale said and went out the door.
“Sensitive,” Kirk said.
A woman entered the room, fur earmuffs slung around her neck as she plucked a stray hair apparently shed from the frizz of gray hair on her head, her eyeglasses steamed up when she breathed. She reminded Lucinda of a woman she’d known in the past, but Lucinda could not place the woman in her mind.
Kirk nodded and sauntered out to address the reporters.
The woman removed her glasses and lowered them on their chain, clasped a binder against her chest.
“Deputy,” the woman said.
Lucinda nodded. Yes. She was. Not a crossing guard. A deputy sheriff, working the background of girl who was missing, and quite likely the victim of a serious crime. “And you’re?”
“Maxine Fields.”
“Have a seat,” Lucinda said. “I poured coffee.”
“I refrain from caffeine.”
As she sat, Fields opened the binder and looked at Lucinda as a mother might look her child in the eye before explaining a hard fact of life. It set Lucinda on edge, made her feel remotely culpable for some vague sin she could not recall committing. To calm herself, she took her notepad out of her jacket pocket and perused it for a solid question to put forth.
“Let me shed some light,” Fields offered, as if sensing Lucinda’s uncertainty of where to start. “Let’s see. Gretel Elizabeth Atkins. That’s a name given the missing girl by the state. We estimate she is roughly seven years old, though by her physical appearance and her mental and emotional makeup due to trauma, she would pass for perhaps four or five years old. Her date of birth is unknown. Place of birth, New England, as best we can narrow it down. Her biological parents are unknown. She was abandoned outside the hospital Emergency Room in St. Johnsbury at around two weeks old, give or take a month. She weighed five pounds, thirteen ounces. Her parents never turned up. No one ever turned up. There was no record of a regional birth to parents that fit the girl’s stats during a two-month time frame. Child and Family Services checked across the river in New Hampshire. No records there either. Or western Maine. Or eastern upstate New York. She must have been given birth to privately. A teenage mother. Likely. Happens every day. Gretel is a mystery, as if she appeared out of thin air.”
The information took Lucinda aback. She’d thought with the girl being in foster care there’d be troves of information on her.
Fields glanced at the binder.
“Her first foster folks were good people,” she said. “Very good people,” she stressed, as if to make certain Lucinda understood that the parents who subsequently ended up with her were the anomaly, and not the other way around. “But the father lost his job and they had to leave the state. She, Gretel, lost out.
“After that,” Fields continued, “she was a ward of the state for a time. Then she got taken in by a couple who”—she paused—“who abused the system. The woman proved to be an alcoholic. She blacked out while Gretel, who was eleven months at the time, fell out the open window of the second-story apartment and into the bushes below. Gretel broke both legs. She still has a limp. There was, it seems, brain trauma, though the extent is unknown as she’s still developing. If it’d been a sidewalk she fell onto instead of bushes . . .”
Lucinda shifted, uncomfortable. The more the woman spoke, the more grateful Lucinda felt for her own parents; and guilty somehow too. How did she deserve such a good home and parents while another child did not? The truth was that “deserve” played no role. It was the luck of the draw. Fate.
“Aren’t foster parents screened?” Lucinda had told herself she’d refrain from asking questions until Fields was finished but could not help herself. She knew nothing about how the foster system worked. Or failed to work. She assumed many foster parents were loving, generous, well-meaning people. As her own parents had been. Why, then, did she have an instinctive distrust of foster care?
The woman did not answer Lucinda’s question. “It gets worse, I’m afraid,” she said. “Her next foster situation.” She paused again. This was difficult for her, a personal embarrassment, an affront; it seemed Fields took failings of the system personally. “They, unfortunately, passed the girl around,” Fields said.
“I don’t understand,” Lucinda said.
“They shared her . . .”
“But . . . she’s seven,” Lucinda said. She felt as if she might be sick. She thought of Sally, who’d disappeared at about the same age as Gretel. Even when Lucinda had finally understood Sally was likely never coming back, and had become aware of the epidemic of sad crimes against women and children, she’d never imagined Sally in such a situation. She’d always kept Sally safe in her mind, comforted and protected, still with her mother, at least. Or she thought of Sally and her mother as, simply, gone, vanished, as if they had gently, peacefully dissolved. Lucinda shuddered. Coffee acid ate at her stomach.
Fields flipped a page in the binder. “I’ll spare the details, unless you’d like—”
“Leave the binder. I’ll dig deeper as necessary. Who does this kind of stuff?”
“More people than you care to know,” Fields said.
“How can they fool the system meant to protect the kids they harm?”
“The system’s made up of people. Well-intentioned, hardworking, overworked, fallible people. Sometimes they, we, I, miss things.”
Lucinda wanted to be angry with the woman, ask her how anyone could miss things? Yet Lucinda felt no anger toward the woman. Only empathy. Even if Lucinda had been angry, lashing out served no end. Her father had spoken of the need to compartmentalize the viciousness of the world, to keep it locked up and at bay so one could continue with one’s work, one’s life. Lucinda needed to do that now, focus on finding Gretel.
“I’ve seen worse,” Fields said. “Much worse. Fortunately the likelihood of PTSD for the girl is negligible. That’s the one blessing of acts like this happening so young. The young brain isn’t built to create long-term memories. This type of abuse, however, may stay with certain victims. It seems to almost molecularly alter them. The mind may not remember, but the body does.”
Fields closed the binder.
“I don’t know what to say,” Lucinda said.
“There’s nothing one can say,” Fields said.