“Oh, I guess I forgot to turn on the lights. What are you doing here, Stella?”
“I saw Justin at drop-off. He seemed stressed.”
I shrugged. “He can’t miss class.”
“He said that you got called in on some big story. Then I was driving by—because now I have to go to Target to buy a stupid purple sweatsuit—and I saw your car. Thought I’d try to get you to come to The Very Hungry Caterpillar with me. You know how I hate to face the mommy brigade alone.” She looked over at the papers covering my desk. “Not happening, is it?”
“Can’t, sorry,” I said. “I have an interview in half an hour.”
“All right, I won’t stay and distract you.” But instead of heading for the door, she started fishing through the pencils in the cup on my desk, sorting out the dull ones, discarding one that was missing an eraser. “Provided you tell me what the big story is.”
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“You know, people used to trust me to keep secrets worth millions.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “Discretion is one of my strengths.”
Though Stella loved to gossip, so far, she had seemed to know better when anything important was involved. I’d trusted her enough to tell her about the baby, my depression, even what had sent me to Dr. Zomer. She’d handled all those confidences respectfully, with a comforting nonchalance: Hey, we’re all crazy, honey.
“They found a body up by the Essex Bridge, a baby,” I said. “But, Stella, you really can’t tell anyone about it until my story is posted. The police will kill me.”
“Oh my God.” Stella’s eyes got instantly huge. She teared up as she clasped a hand over her open mouth. “That’s horrible.”
“I know,” I said, feeling a little thrown by the intensity of her response. But had I really expected her to make it less bad by laughing it off? A dead baby was a dead baby, even when you’d never had one of your own. “It’s completely awful.”
She closed her eyes and reached forward, grasping my hand. “Are you okay? Of all the stories for you to get.”
“I’ve got to be honest, it’s not great,” I said. I regretted telling her. Already, I felt worse. “I’m hoping it might be therapeutic.”
Stella raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure about that?”
“No, but every time I think about passing it off, I feel worse. Much worse.”
Stella frowned, considering. “Then you should stay on it.” She turned toward Elizabeth’s desk and began plucking the dull pencils out of her cup, too, leaning over to use the electric sharpener. I watched her jam in each pencil until it was ground to a bright point. I was pretty sure she’d start sharpening her fingers if I didn’t get her to stop. I reached forward and tugged the remaining pencils from her grasp. “Stella, what’s going on?”
“Shit, is it that obvious?” she said, her voice cracking. Then she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob.
“God, Stella.” She was not a woman who cried. “What’s wrong?”
“Jesus, I’m sorry. I don’t even know where that came from,” she said with a teary, manic laugh. She sniffled and sat upright, wiping her eyes. “Aidan got into some fight yesterday at school. An actual fight, with his fists.” Aidan was big on threats; he wasn’t usually big on making good on them. “And then I had this absurd run-in with Cole’s mother, Barbara, at drop-off this morning.”
Barbara was someone I avoided. She was the supermom to end all supermoms, and after a year and a half of profound maternal subsufficiency, I was fighting hard just to be a decent one.
“About what?”
“I told her Will didn’t like going to other people’s houses. And Barbara said in that judgmental-bitch way of hers: ‘Well, that’s just not normal.’ Like she’s some almighty arbiter of psychological stability.”
“That is kind of mean,” I offered tentatively. Because it wasn’t the nicest thing for Barbara to say, to be sure, but Stella was also overreacting.
Stella wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Christ, what does a girl have to do to get a damn tissue around here?”
“Oh, sorry.” I grabbed a box off Elizabeth’s desk.
Stella snatched a handful of tissues, wiped her face, then pressed her lips together. “This is what teenagers do—turn you into a sobbing lunatic But what the hell does Barbara know about normal?”
“Nothing,” I said, and that much was true. “People are only wound that tight when they’re about to fly into a million pieces.”
“See, I knew you would make me feel better,” Stella said with a smile. She wiped at her eyes as she stood, then pulled me into a hug. “Now I’ll leave you alone so you can go win that Pulitzer.”
I parked just off the lower end of the green near the old stone city hall. To the right, in a smaller but equally quaint colonial building, was the police station. I stood on the edge of the square, staring at it, unable to get myself to move. It had been a long time since I’d been inside a police station.
But the Butler, Pennsylvania, police department had once been like a second home. It was the place where I’d had my first soda, an orange Crush, sitting barefoot in my faded unicorn nightgown at the desk of a friendly, chubby police officer named Max while two other officers interviewed my mom.
They’d found us walking along Route 68 in the middle of the night, trying to find my father. He was off—as he was so often in the months before he filed for divorce when I was ten—with Geraldine, his then girlfriend, now wife of twenty-five years. Her house was two miles away, and my father had taken our only car.
“You can’t stop us from taking a walk,” my mom shouted to the officers before they were out of their car. Her voice already had that familiar tremble. Soon it would rise and explode into a million furious pieces. “There’s nothing criminal about a walk.” She might have convinced them had it not been for my nightgown and bare feet.
“She do this a lot, your mom?” Officer Max asked me that night.
My mother did most of the things a mom was supposed to do. She went to her job every day as an administrator at the Butler Department of Buildings, and she collected her decent paycheck. She paid the mortgage and kept our house in good living order. She cooked my dinner and sent me to school with money for lunch. But she was enraged by all of it.
After my father divorced her, the true work of my mother’s life became hating him. Making sure he knew it took up most of her time (and therefore mine) right up until she died of a heart attack while pulling weeds in our backyard the summer before my sophomore year in college. By then my dad had three-year-old twins with Geraldine, but he dutifully took up the mantle of sole surviving parent, at least financially. He also called on birthdays and invited me for holidays with an “I’m sure you already have plans” casualness. I hardly ever did, but I never went. Instead, I lived on as the orphan I had always really been. Right up until I met Justin.
“Does my mom do what?” I’d asked Officer Max that night, because there had seemed infinite possibilities.
“Take you out in the middle of the night looking for your dad?”
“No,” I’d said, staring down at my hands. “It was a one-time thing.”
That was a lie. Not my first about my mother and not my last. Because I was only nine, and already I knew there was one worse thing than having my mother. And that was having no mother at all.
When I stepped inside the Ridgedale Police Station, the floor was sloped and creaky, the carpet worn. The air had a decidedly musty but not unclean tinge. I would have thought I’d stepped inside the Ridgedale Historical Society were it not for the portraits of uniformed officers on the wall. Seated behind a small polished wood desk was a woman with spiky gray hair, a forearm full of gold bangles, and a beaming smile.
“Can I help you?” she asked brightly, her bracelets jangling as she straightened the wooden nameplate on the counter in front of her: Yvette Scarpetta, Civilian Police Dispatcher.
“I have an appointment with the chief of police?
” My voice rose at the end as if it were a question. Dammit. Enough with the nerves. “My name is Molly Sanderson. I’m a reporter with the Ridgedale Reader.”
Better. Not perfect, but I could live with it. I’d have to.
“Have a seat.” Yvette pointed to a row of antique-looking wooden chairs along the wall, then picked up the phone. “I’ll let Steve know you’re here.”
Question #5: Do you have enough resources to handle the scope of this investigation? Or will you have to rely on neighboring jurisdictions? That question was Erik’s, and it was a good one. Most of his questions never would have occurred to me, and I was grateful to have them.
“Steve’s right through that door straight to the back,” Yvette said after a brief phone exchange. “You can head on through.”
When I knocked on Steve’s office door, he was standing, talking on the phone. I hesitated, but he waved me in, pointing to the chairs in front of his desk. He was older than I’d realized out at the creek. At least early forties, with a face that looked like he’d been standing out in the elements most of that time.
Steve nodded again after I sat, and his blue eyes locked briefly on mine before he turned to face the windows. Outside was a full view of the green, the gray sky breaking blue. With his back to me, Steve tucked his one free hand under his other arm, which made his strong shoulders look even broader.
That guy could kick my ass, I imagined Justin saying of Steve. He liked to freely admit this whenever we were in the company of much larger men, which was fairly often. Naturally, the admission had always served to make Justin seem utterly invincible.
It was cold in Steve’s office, and I slipped my hands into the pockets of my coat as I waited. I felt the little slip of paper then. One of Justin’s notes. I knew without even having to look. He’d started leaving them for me again in the past few weeks. It had been something he’d done all the time when we started dating, back when I was finishing up law school and he was in the middle of his Ph.D. Quotes from poems, usually about love, tucked romantically somewhere for me to stumble upon. If I hadn’t already been in love with Justin when he started giving them to me, they would have surely done the trick.
I couldn’t remember exactly when he had stopped, but it had been gradual and natural, relegated—like so much spontaneous sex—to birthdays and anniversaries and then not at all. Now that Justin had started up again with the notes, finding them gave me a little thrill, as if I were cheating on my damaged self with the new, steadily improving me. And the notes felt like Justin’s way of welcoming me home. I smiled, rolling the scrap of paper between my fingers in my pocket.
“Yes, well, unfortunately, that’s it for the moment,” Steve said into the phone. “I’ll call you back if there’s anything new. Yep.” Silence. “Yes, sir.”
Steve exhaled loudly as he hung up, then rubbed an exasperated hand over his face as he sat down. I wanted to ask who it had been on the phone, the mayor, the governor? But asking a question like that—one I’d never get the answer to—would only undermine my credibility.
“Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with me,” I said as if the interview weren’t a little bit of extortion.
“If anyone should have the story first, it’s our local paper,” Steve said. “I know I can trust the Reader to present what’s happened in a fair and reasonable manner.”
A throwaway comment, calculated to make me feel obligated not to disappoint him. An agenda. Erik was right. Steve was smoother and more practiced than I’d anticipated, but then Ridgedale was hardly a one-horse town.
“I’ll do my best,” I said, holding Steve’s stare. “So the body is a baby?”
“Yes, a female infant,” Steve said with clipped efficiency.
“How old was she?”
“Medical examiner will need to confirm her age,” he said, then seemed to realize he would have to give me something in return for my silence. “I would estimate newborn.”
“Do you have any idea who she is?”
“Not at the moment,” he said. “We’re pursuing all leads. But if anyone has any information about the identity of the baby or the baby’s parents, I’d ask that they contact the Ridgedale Police Department. I’ll get you a number to include.”
“Was the baby stillborn?”
I’d been preparing over the past hour for that particular question. For saying that one word out loud. Stillborn. I’d been afraid I wouldn’t get it out. After my petite pregnant-herself doctor had held my hand and told me that my baby’s heart was no longer beating, I’d convinced myself that all I had to do was never say that word, and I could alter the history that had already been written.
“That’s the obvious question,” he said. “And the honest answer is we don’t know yet. Given the condition of the body, an official determination on cause of death isn’t going to be easy.”
“What was the condition of the body?”
“You saw for yourself where she was found. And with the weather we’ve been having? Freezing, then warm. Something like four inches of rain in two days, and that’s just this week. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what that might do to complicate things.”
“How long was she out there?”
There was a knock at the door, and a slight red-haired officer with a face full of freckles leaned in.
“We’re in Interview One, Chief,” the officer said in a voice that was much deeper than his small body would have suggested.
“Great, thanks, Chris,” Steve said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” When the officer was gone, Steve turned back to me. “To answer your question, we don’t know how long she was out there. That’ll be for the medical examiner to determine, too.”
“Do you think the baby is connected to the university?” I asked. “Given where she was left?”
Steve frowned and shook his head. “There’s no reason to suspect a connection to any of the students at the university.”
“Would the university tell you if there were?” I asked. “My understanding is that Campus Safety handles a lot of criminal matters on their own.”
“Not without keeping us informed, they don’t.” Steve leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. His mouth turned down. The university question had been one step too far, though his defensive posture had done nothing to assuage my curiosity. “Now, I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it at that for the moment. I have another meeting to get to. I’ll give you an hour to get a story online before we issue an official statement. That sound fair?”
I thought about my long list of other questions, all the ones I hadn’t asked, including my zingers about resources and Steve’s experience with this kind of complex investigation. But they all seemed premature or unwisely hostile now. “Can I ask one last question?”
“Can’t promise I’ll answer it,” Steve said tiredly. “But you can ask.”
“I came across an incident in my research, a death in town years ago. It happened in virtually the same spot where the baby was found.” I looked down at my notes. “A high school student named Simon Barton?”
Steve nodded grimly. “I wouldn’t read anything into the location. That area near the Essex Bridge is secluded. Even back then, there weren’t many places in Ridgedale that out of sight. Kids have always partied back there.”
“Is that who you think left the baby? Some partying kids?”
He shook his head, frowning down at his desk. I waited for him to seem annoyed, but he looked genuinely sad. “No, ma’am. I don’t think any party anywhere ends that way. At least I sure as hell hope not.” He narrowed his eyes at me, as if appraising the kind of person who would suggest such a thing. “You’re new to town?”
I was caught off guard by his shift in focus. My throat felt suddenly dry. “Yes, my husband just got a position with the university. He’s an English professor. We moved here with our daughter at the end of August.”
“A daughter, that’s great.” Steve’s face brightened. “How old?”
“
Five.” I picked up my bag from the floor as my mind tumbled forward. Was there any reason I didn’t want Steve to know these personal details? I didn’t think so, not that I had a choice anyway. “She’s in kindergarten.”
“At Ridgedale Elementary?” He smiled wider. “My son, Cole, is in kindergarten there, too.”
Cole. Which meant Barbara was his wife. I felt nervous remembering how I’d listened to Stella bad-mouth her. I’d even agreed with her.
“Actually, I think Cole’s in class with Ella,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound guilty. “I’ve met your wife, I think. Barbara?” Better to get it out on the table, hope he wouldn’t be able to tell I didn’t like her.
“Yes, well, Barbara is—” He hesitated, then nodded. “She saves my ass, is what she does. I couldn’t do what she does with the kids. No way.” He looked self-conscious. I wasn’t sure why. “Anyway, welcome to town. I’ve been here a long time, and it’s a great place to live. Despite this.” He frowned as he motioned to a folder on his desk. When he looked up, he seemed angry. “But I can assure you, we will find out what happened to this baby, Ms. Sanderson, and that person or persons will be held accountable. That I hope you do print.”
RIDGEDALE READER
ONLINE EDITION
March 17, 2015, 9:12 a.m.
Unidentified Body Discovered
BY MOLLY SANDERSON
The unidentified body of a deceased female was discovered in Ridgedale this morning shortly after 5:00. The body was spotted during a routine patrol by Campus Safety in a wooded area near the Essex Bridge.
Police remain on the scene and the investigation is ongoing. No further details are available at this time.
COMMENTS:
Samuel R.
10 min ago
“No details.” That’s it!?! A body?!! Was somebody murdered or something?
Christine
9 min ago
How can they post something like that without giving us any details? It’s obviously going to make us panic!