Mike was on the way home when, for a reason he couldn’t explain, he felt a need to go over to the cemetery. Without questioning it, he turned around, and he now stood in an almost trance-like state at Jonah’s grave. Fang remained in the truck, too tired to move.
The morning he had lost it out here on the phone with Jess—he had cried for Sarah, absolutely, but he hadn’t been able to release her. Even later, when he listened to Merrick more or less say that Sarah was dead, a part of Mike still refused give up hope. When he packed up her room, a cry of hope rose up and told him that what he was doing was wrong. Now, as he stood here at the gravesite, he found the hope still there, still digging in its heels. I’m not leaving and guess what? You can’t make me.
Maybe Bill had a point. Maybe digging up all this stuff was a distraction.
Jonah lay six feet under, sealed behind wood, preserved in embalming fluid. The grass had recently been cut. Mike saw wet grass clippings stuck to the sides of his shoes, and he remembered how Sarah loved to run around barefoot and would sometimes come back in from outside with the bottom of her feet stained green, clippings all over the carpet, driving Jess crazy. He remembered how she loved to scoop the cheese off pizza—“Daddy, it’s the best part, and I only want to eat the best part”—and he remembered how she would throw a fit if she wasn’t allowed to pick out her own clothes or decide the amount of blueberries she wanted in her pancakes or put in the number of chocolate chips she wanted in the cookies she and Jess baked together. When he thought of Sarah, it was always these moments of toughness that came to him, these small ways she had of trying to control her world, to prove that she was independent and had a mind of her own and God help you if you got in her way. Remembering Sarah in this way—this spirited toughness she used to move through life—maybe that was a distraction too. Maybe he didn’t want to see her as willingly walking off with Jonah, no matter how upset she was.
Why didn’t you kick and scream when Jonah picked you up, Sarah? Why didn’t you have one of your patented meltdowns? I would have heard you. Why did you just walk away and leave me?
That coffin held not one body but four. And it would be that way forever—unless he wanted to hold a separate service for Sarah, maybe bury her snow jacket and snow pants when the police released them. Only you didn’t bury things. You buried people. You prepared them for their journey into the ground and whatever lay beyond it. You didn’t say goodbye to a snow suit. He couldn’t.
How do I say goodbye to what I don’t even know? When was the right time to give up on the people you loved?
Mike turned around and stared down Evergreen Street. Two boys were having a sword fight with sticks, going at it hard, the mother or babysitter sitting in a plastic patio chair on the porch, flipping through the magazine spread out on her lap.
Maybe if he went through with a service of some sort, maybe it would tell his circle of friends that he had finally accepted Sarah was gone. I love you, Sarah. Goodbye. Now everybody leave me the fuck alone.
Some time later, he took out his phone and dialed Sam’s number.
“Your ears must be burning,” Sam said. “I was just talking about you.”
“Oh yeah? With who?”
“With Nancy. I just got off the phone with her. She called to tell me about her blind date last night.”
Mike thought of Nancy coming at some guy with that truck-driver mouth of hers. Poor bastard.
Sam said, “ How’d it go in New York?”
“It’s been … You in the mood for some company?”
“Sure. You eat yet?”
“No. How you feel about dogs?”
“I had terriers growing up.”
“What about big dogs who drool?”
“I’ve got plenty of towels.”
“One last question: If Nancy’s free, you mind if I ask her to stop by?”
“Not at all. What’s going on?”
Mike turned his attention back to Jonah’s gravesite. “I’ll explain when I get there.”
Over dinner,Mike filled Sam in on New York, Merrick and Bill.
“You probably know why I asked Nancy to come over,” he said.
“Makes sense, especially after what you just told me.”
“So what do you think?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. If you need to dig into these things, then dig. Dig as far as you want to go, and if you decide that you want to stop, then stop. There’s no right answer here. Who gives a shit what anyone else says or thinks?”
“You always knew how to get right to the point, Sam.”
“It’s better than living life in those pesky gray zones.”
They ate in silence for a moment. Mike said, “I had a good time the other night.”
“The cannolis were good.”
“I was referring to the company.”
Sam smiled. “I know.”
It had been a good time. Nice and effortless. No pressure to act or say anything in a certain way. That comfortable rhythm that they once had was back again and he didn’t want to ruin it.
“My life is a bit messy,” he said.
“Everyone’s life is messy, Sully.”
The doorbell rang and Fang popped his sleepy head up off the floor. Sam buzzed Nancy in, and when she stepped into the dining room with a bellowing “Howyadoin?” Fang scrambled over to meet her, tail wagging, sniffing madly around her body.
Mike said, “You want me to pull him away?”
“Are you kidding? This is the most affection a man’s shown me in weeks.” Fang followed Nancy as she walked over to the table and sat down. “So,” she said to Mike. “What are you so anxious to talk to me about?”
Mike told her. When he finished, Nancy was quiet, digesting all of it, Mike supposed. Sam’s windows were open; a cool evening breeze, mixed with the sounds of traffic and people, filled the room.
“Okay,” Nancy said. “Margaret Clarkston didn’t come right out and admit to having an abortion.”
“No, she didn’t come right out and say yes,” Mike said, “but I know the question hit home.”
Sam said to Nancy, “Can you find out if she had the procedure?”
“Normally, I’d say yes,” Nancy said. “Nowadays, health insurance picks up the tab. And everything’s stored on MIB.”
Mike said, “What’s MIB?”
“Medical Information Bureau,” Nancy said. “Basically, it’s a computer network that stores all of your medical records. Insurance companies generally use it.”
“I thought medical records were private.”
“Welcome to the digital age. Forget MIB. I doubt you’d find any information there. Margaret Clarkston’s somewhere in her late sixties, right?”
“Sixty-six,” Mike said. Her age had been noted in a recent Globe article.
“That meant she had Caroline when she was twenty-seven—real old for back then. So let’s say she had this procedure done when she was, oh, I don’t know, twenty. That’s forty-five years ago—1958. Your dad wore a cardigan sweater and smoked a pipe while your mom was just oh so happy to be playing Susie Homemaker. You didn’t mention the word abortion, let alone have one.”
Sam added, “If she had one done, chances are it was done in secret.”
“And hopefully by a doctor who didn’t botch the job,” Nancy said. “Pay your cash, get it done and pray that you’d be okay. It was a completely different time back then. No yellow page ads, no pro-life commercials on TV. Before sixty-seven, abortions were illegal.”
“And no computers either,” Sam said. “At least, no personal computers. Back then, everything was stored on paper.”
Mike said, “So there’s no record of the procedures.”
“For Clarkston? I doubt it. Even when Rose Giroux had the procedure, I’m willing to bet it was still secretive,” Nancy said. “A lot of women probably gave anonymous names, paid in cash. No records. And even if a file did exist—I’d say it’s next to impossible, but let’s say that a paper file does exist somewhere. The only way I’m going to get my hands on it is to bribe someone who works at this clinic. I think that’s a dead angle anyway. I’m willing to bet that place in New Hampshire wasn’t even around when Margaret Clarkston had it done.”
“So what you’re telling me is that there’s no way to find out,” Mike said, feeling defeated.
“The best way is to ask directly, which you did. If Merrick calls her,my guess is she’ll say no to him. Cops generally don’t call over the phone. They show up to your house unannounced and shove a badge in your face and make you talk until you give them what they want. What’d he say about this?”
“He said he’d look into it.”
“And you don’t believe that,” Nancy said, “which is why I’m sitting here.”
“You got it.”
“Can I be honest here?”
“Is it possible for you to be any other way?” Mike asked.
A grin tugged at the corner of Nancy’s mouth, then disappeared. “My sources told me the police already found personal items belonging to all three girls inside Jonah’s house, under a floorboard in his bedroom. And we know about the blood inside the jacket hood, and we know Jonah committed suicide.”
Mike took in a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said. “I guess I don’t understand the point of trying to investigate something that’s a dead end and is only going to prolong your pain.”
“Why am I the only one who finds this odd?”
“Women get abortions. Not all women, but when a woman decides to get it done, they don’t go around advertising it. Maybe they confide in a friend or two, but mostly they keep quiet and go on with their lives, try to come to grips with what they’ve done.
“Which brings me to my second point,” Nancy said. “You’re Catholic. As a fellow die-hard Catholic myself, I speak from firsthand experience when I say that us Catholics, practicing or not, are terminally obsessed with shame and guilt. I’m not trying to play armchair shrink here, but have you ever considered that your need to continually poke around despite the overwhelming facts might have something to do with you trying to correct what happened that night on the Hill?”
“What if there’s a connection to Jonah buried in all of this?”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some sort of connection.”
“I hate to say this,” Nancy said, “but I think you’re grasping at straws here.”
“So you’re not even willing to entertain the idea?”
“I bill out at one-twenty an hour, plus expenses. You want me to dig, I’ll dig. It’s your tab.”
“I think this warrants some digging.”
“Okay then,” Nancy said. “I’m officially on the clock. Let me grab a pad of paper and we’ll get started.”