How had it come to this?
Alice stood at the edge of the blue tarp covering her kidnapper’s grave. Rain had been predicted but the sun was out, hot. The mourners fanned themselves. They wore a bluish cast to their faces from the tarp overhead.
Bluer than he deserved.
She’d taken the temperature of this small gathering. Obligation, pity. Or outright manipulation, the tool that Juby had used. One of her texts had said: Think how u would feel if it was ur dad. That wasn’t fair, was it? Richard Banks—Rick—wasn’t even Merrily’s. He was a stranger, and so was Merrily, actually. Merrily, who was a stranger she had promised her actual dad she wouldn’t see anymore.
U might as well be kind, Juby had finally said, as though she knew exactly where to strike. People had been kind to Alice when her mother died. She didn’t mind paying it forward.
But really? What was she doing here? “Maybe you’ll be glad someday you were there,” Juby said in the car.
To top off her mood, she’d spent the morning before picking them up at Juby’s parents’ house searching for her Social Security card, unsuccessfully. To get a replacement of that, she’d need her birth certificate, which she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen.
At the grave, the minister sweated through his vestments and invoked some forgiving passages. Lost sheep, my ass. Alice fidgeted until Juby turned a stern jaw in her direction.
She would never be glad to have been here. She was only glad to see how few people suffered Rick’s loss. Other than Merrily, only one person bothered to cry, a woman hidden under a giant Royal Ascot hat on the other side of the gathering. Alice wondered at her, frowning, and kept herself outside the shelter of the tarp.
The minister stopped talking. A heavy silence took over. Time stretched on, thin, until Merrily jumped up and hurried out from under the shade. Juby grabbed Alice’s wrist and dragged her in the wake of Merrily’s long strides.
“What are you doing?” Alice hissed.
“You don’t recognize her?” Juby said. She released Alice’s arm. Lillian caught up after a moment, a little more breathless than usual from the heat. She took a seat on the nearest gravestone.
“Lil,” Juby whispered. “That’s someone’s nani.”
“They don’t seem to mind.”
Merrily stood at the side of a junker car, talking to the woman in the derby hat. Recognize who? And then she did. Rebekah. “What’s she doing here?”
“Mourning, I imagine,” Juby said.
“But Rick was—”
“You’re going to have to get this eventually,” Juby said. “Sometimes people get loved, whether you think they should or not. People are more than one thing, OK?”
Alice started making a list of the many things Juby had turned out to be but she kept silent until the woman at the car had handed Merrily something and driven off. “Well?”
“You have somewhere to be?”
Alice stretched her neck to see Merrily’s hand. “It’s an envelope. What do you think it is?”
“She’ll tell us. When she wants to,” Lillian said.
It seemed for a few minutes that Merrily wouldn’t even open the envelope. If she’d had a pocket, she might have hidden it. When she looked their way, she seemed to decide, tearing at the missive with both hands until the envelope skittered across the lawn, a white bird with broken wings.
Merrily walked toward them, the letter in both hands. Juby darted between stones to snatch the envelope out of the wind and brought it back.
“Is it OK, Mer?” Juby said, glancing nervously at Lillian.
Alice looked between the two and then back at Merrily, feeling as though she’d been left out.
“‘Hey, kid,’” Merrily read, her voice thick and wobbling. “‘If you’re reading this, it’s because I didn’t make it. It’s OK for me. I’m tired of the chase. But I wish I’d had more time with you. Thanks to your mom, I got more chances than I deserved. Sorry for the cloak and dagger shit, kid. She’ll have to explain it better but I’m worried she won’t explain it at all, so here it goes. I’m your . . . dad.’”
Lillian made a breathless sound, like she’d been kicked, and said something under her breath. She and Juby compared shocked faces, then Juby looked Alice’s way.
Alice wasn’t that surprised, not Lillian’s kicked-in-the-gut surprise, not Juby’s openmouthed awe. She felt strangely empty of emotion about it. She’d had a theory. The first time she’d seen Merrily, she’d had a feeling she knew her face, and not just from the avatar from the site where the younger woman had posted the plaintive message about Rick being missing. She looked like him a bit, when you paid attention. Sharp features, thin and awkward shape. Alice hadn’t known, exactly, but now it seemed like maybe she might have. Merrily had been in the kidnapper’s house as a baby, so where was the mystery there? Congratulations, it’s a girl.
“‘Yes, the real one,’” Merrily continued, choking through the words. “‘The things she told you or didn’t tell you were to protect you. If you’re reading this and I’m gone, then there’s no reason to protect you anymore. I love you more—’” Merrily’s voice broke and fat tears ran down her cheeks, left, right. “‘—more than you can know. I hope you have had a good life despite me being the worst father in the world. You were the one—’” Merrily stopped.
“What?” Juby said.
Merrily sniffled. “It’s scribbled out a bit there. ‘Tried to’ something. ‘The one I tried to keep in touch with,’ maybe? And then it’s signed, ‘Love, Rick.’”
They all waited. Behind them, some of the mourners talked loudly, impatient to get going.
“Love,” she breathed. “I wish he’d signed it Dad, just once. But I guess he didn’t think he had a right to. Or maybe he . . . I don’t know if I should guess what he was thinking.”
“I’m so sorry,” Juby said. “I was sorry before, but now I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks,” Merrily said. She squinted toward the grave. “I can’t believe she kept this from me my whole life.”
“It seems like. They were trying to keep you safe,” Lillian said. She spiked her cane into the ground to drag herself off the headstone and shuffled a few steps toward them. “Considering . . .”
“Yeah,” Juby said. “I think we can agree there might have been something to protect you from.”
Some of the bereaved had chosen open revolt, pulling their cars around the lead car. The driver for the Cruzes’ car leaned against its trunk, smoking a cigarette.
“I think it’s time to go, you guys,” Alice said.
Juby gave her a look. “It’s time to go when Merrily says it is.”
Alice sniffed. She was far more impatient with the scene than any of these so-called mourners. All this way, to stand at the grave site of the man who might have ruined her life, or ended it. How much time was the right amount to spend on such a person, out of respect? She had none, not for Richard Banks. Think how you’d feel. Yes, fine, she had respect for Merrily. A little. And it had turned out that Rick was indeed Merrily’s father, so . . . she got credit for doing the kind thing.
Alice knew the sting of that kind of loss, anyway. It was like no other pain in the world. She could relate—except she’d actually known her mother, hadn’t she? Had loved her, had been loved by her as well as she’d been capable.
No point in competing. All grief, open-ended. That was the thing Merrily really mourned, whether she knew it or not. The father he might have been, not the one he was. The trouble was, they were both buried in the same grave.
“I need a minute, I think,” Merrily said. “Can you . . .”
“Of course,” Juby said. She turned toward Alice.
“What?”
“Let’s give Merrily a few minutes.”
The three of them shuffled toward the grave, toward Mrs. Cruz’s folded arms and the small crowd who hadn’t managed to get out, all of them sour faced, even for a funeral.
“Tell me again,” Lillian said, her voice gruff with exertion. “Stolen why?”
Alice sighed. Juby had broken the news to Lillian about all the research swiped from the trailer, but Lillian still had questions. “It wasn’t stolen for a reason,” she said. “The thief used my backpack to carry stuff from the safe, and it was all in there. Along with all my IDs and money, by the way.”
“All your IDs?” Lillian said.
“You’ll need to get that replaced,” Juby said. “Do you have the right paperwork?”
“They’re very strict. About the paperwork,” Lillian agreed.
“You guys are so hot for paperwork,” Alice said. “I don’t have the right stuff but surely I can get it. Where do you get a copy of your birth certificate? I think the hospital where I was born is closed.”
“The county clerk where you were born.” Juby tilted her chin. “I’ll go with you, if you want.”
“I would have to go all the way to— Is there no other way?”
“You should go in person,” Juby said. “Since you don’t have a driver’s license, you’ll need to take your police report. They’ll want the original of that. And you don’t want to mail it. What if it gets lost?”
It was a long drive, three, four hours, probably. She hadn’t been to Victorville since she was three and had no interest in seeing it now. The town that had tried to seize her. She glanced toward the urn of Richard Banks’s ashes, a tarnished bullet of an urn.
“I’ll go tomorrow,” she said, as though it were no big deal. She didn’t want Juby to go with her. She had an idea that she might visit the library there and see if she could retrieve some of the lost research on her own. If there was any point to it. Richard Banks was dead.
She was tired of the glances Juby and Lillian kept sharing when they thought she couldn’t see. Every time they passed a secret look, she resolved more deeply to become the right kind of Doe Pages volunteer—sharper, more attention paid. She’d demand their respect. She’d found Richard Banks, hadn’t she? In a way? There he was, dammit. Mission accomplished.
She needed a new Doe. Maybe Jane Doe Anaho was beyond her abilities, but she could select another case to make her own. She didn’t need Lillian’s log-ins. She only needed the inspiration of the right case—
Alice was reminded of the grainy photo of Laura Schmidt, her slim neck and jawline almost visible in a low-quality image. A mug shot? Laura Banks, the news story had called her, except that they’d never married. Still, it was the couple of them who’d held her at that house. Laura Banks might be just as guilty, and she’d never been found? But Lillian was playing around with that Doe on the site, wasn’t she?
Then Alice remembered the other guy, her dad’s friend who had been missing twenty years from Victorville. A newer case, totally unrelated to Richard Banks, for once. Or was he unrelated? There had been a page about him in the frustratingly robust materials from Lillian. She hadn’t been able to bring her kidnapper to justice in quite the way she meant to. His death was unsatisfying, in a way, and would never make her dad see why the Doe Pages mattered. But maybe she could find closure for his friend’s family.
“When you go . . .” Lillian said. They all watched Merrily stumbling in from the cemetery lawn on heels, the letter flapping in her hand and then folded and tucked into the neckline of her dress. “You’ll want the certified version. Of your certificate. Raised seal. That’s what they call it.”
“Raised seal,” Juby said. “No matter what else they offer you.”
“Raised seal,” Alice repeated. She pictured circus animals, fish thrown.
“There’s an application to fill out,” Juby said. “And a fee. Take the checkbook or cash—”
“I think I can figure it out.”
Merrily took her mother’s arm and steered her toward the waiting car. At the last moment, Mrs. Cruz glanced back at the urn, her mouth a straight line.
On the way to her car, Alice passed the urn and resisted the urge to tip it over with a clang into the well that had been dug for it. She would never be glad she’d been here. It was a betrayal to her dad, to her mother, the entire family this man ruined.
She would never forgive herself for standing at his grave when she could have been at her mother’s. When she could have been anywhere else at all.