If the Witness Lied (11 page)

“T
HAT’S
M
ADISON,” EXPLAINS
J
ACK
. “G
O SAY HI
.”

“Madison?” repeats Tris, his interest piqued.

What does her name mean to him? How much memory does an almost-three-year-old have? Does he recall her fleeting visits? Does he wonder why she didn’t stay?

“Hi, Madison!” he shouts, running toward her. He allows Madison to hug him but quickly squirms away. Tris has always been an efficient hugger: squeeze and leave. He doesn’t leave this time. “You’re crying,” he says, worried.

She’s not exactly crying. She loves him so much she’s soaked in tears. “The wind is in my eyes,” she fibs.

Tris is wearing a baseball cap. Baseball was their father’s favorite sport. He’d have loved seeing Tris in that cap. Tris takes it off and gives it to Madison. “There. Now the wind can’t get in your eyes.”

He’s going to be like Dad. Dad loved to give stuff away. She perches the cap on her head. “Thank you, Tris.” Then she glares
at Jack. “He’s soaking wet, Jack. All the playground equipment is wet. It’s too cold for him to be out here in that thin jacket. I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes for him.”

He glares right back. “The first thing you do is nag? Drive away if that’s your best effort.”

“Let’s go in the library, where it’s warm and his clothes will dry out.” She’s sorry to begin rudely, but she’s right. This has been the case all their lives. Madison is right more than anybody.

“I know what you’re thinking,” says Jack, “and you are not right a higher percent of the time than I am.”

“Feel his clothes.”

“Okay, so they’re wet. So you’re right this time.”

They’re laughing.

“I’m not going inside again,” says Tris. “I don’t care if I’m wet.”

“Last time you and I were here,” says Madison, “you were too little to climb the library tree house.”

“The tree house!” he says scornfully. “I can get up that in a minute!”

“Wow. Show me.”

“Okay.” He races on ahead.

Jack and Madison take up conversation as if they’ve never been separated; as if they last argued walking to the school bus this morning. “I need to apologize to Tris,” says Madison.

“Don’t. He doesn’t know you did anything. He doesn’t know there is anything. It’s one reason I’m so mad at Cheryl about this television concept. There’s a chance—not a good one, but a chance—for Tris to escape what happened. And here
she is, setting it up so there’s no escape. He’ll crash into that accident all his life. When he’s five and starting kindergarten. Eight and playing Little League. Out come the headlines. Each time it’s going to kick him in the face. Somebody is going to step away from him. ‘You’re that kid?’ they’ll say.”

Tris is pushing himself against the heavy back door to the children’s room, but it won’t open. He isn’t strong enough. And what about the Jeep? Was he strong enough then? Could Cheryl—would Cheryl—really lie about such a thing? What kind of person would implicate a toddler?

Madison opens the door for Tris. He charges in. Also just like Dad. All forward motion, all the time.

The library is full of soft noise: terminals hum, librarians chat, pages turn, printers click. Tris does not pause at the temperature control panel placed too low or the adult computer terminal left on but not occupied. Even though Tris is the button master, he has a mission: to prove he can climb the tree house.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said about the brake,” murmurs Jack. “But Mad, the thing is, if it wasn’t Tris, then it was Cheryl. And she couldn’t accidentally release a parking brake by accidentally reaching inside somebody else’s car, accidentally brushing against it and then accidentally locking the car after herself.”

“I agree. And if somebody causes the death of somebody else, and it’s not an accident, then it’s a murder.”

The sentence comes rather casually out of her mouth. But her own word—“murder”—assaults Madison, rolling down on her with the weight of a vehicle.

When she walked away last winter, did she abandon her two brothers into the care of a murderer?

*   *   *

Angus Nicolson enters the drive-thru lane. Smithy just wants to get home, but she doesn’t want to offend him. He’s the producer. It’s only a ten-minute delay, she comforts herself.

“What’s your favorite photograph of your mother?” asks Angus.

Easy. The photo she uses as wallpaper for her cell phone.

In this photograph, Tris is a week old. Mom is in bed, of course. Dad is sitting next to her, leaning on the headboard, holding Tris. Smithy and Madison are also sitting on the bed, smiling at the camera. Mom has lived through it. She’s fine, the baby is fine, everybody’s going to live happily ever after.

Jack is standing beside the bed, and behind his sisters. He is elfin. Over the next few years, he’ll shoot up a foot and turn into a completely different person.

Baby Tris is asleep. He’s a sleepy newborn. He opens his eyes, checks you out, has his bottle, goes back to sleep. Such a good boy! everybody exclaims.

They don’t say it now.

Smithy doesn’t show Angus this photograph. She’s never even been okay when Kate asks about the photograph.

Kate!

Smithy has forgotten that Kate exists. The world of boarding school—Smithy’s universe since February—vanished from her
mind. Kate, with whom she had breakfast twice this very morning, seems as remote as her grandparents in Missouri.

Angus puts his window down because it’s almost his turn to place an order. A gust of cold wet wind envelops Smithy. “What’ll you have?” Angus asks. He smiles his huge toothy smile.

She is suddenly, massively, creeped out. What is she doing in a car with a total stranger—a man who could be anybody, a man who refuses to take her home? A man driving the long way instead of the short way?

All of a sudden, he’s not just a stranger—he’s strange. This whole thing is strange.

A feature on the Fountain family won’t showcase Mom the heroine or Dad the solid, steady great guy. It’ll showcase Tris, baby destroyer of families. It won’t be about beautiful people. It will be about raw pain. Hers. Jack’s. Madison’s.

It will destroy Tris.

Angus hasn’t asked yet about her favorite photograph of Tris. She’s got it on her phone too, and sometimes she can stand to look at it. Dad took it when Tris was learning to walk, a skill that consumed all of Tris’s time and attention. He woke up in the morning desperate to be lifted from the crib, hardly able to have breakfast, eager to start. He circled the coffee table a million times back when he still had to hold on, and as soon as he achieved unassisted walking, his goal was the stairs.

For a toddler, stairs are enticing architecture. Smithy was the one willing to go up and down with him all day long. Tris didn’t know that turning around was treacherous, that his little feet would not stick to the stair. Smithy was his main catcher.

Dad took a great shot of Smithy helping Tris down.

In no time, stairs were history. Tris ran, crayoned, wore little blue jeans with stitching on the seams. Smithy turned up the cuffs so he’d be fashionable. He had little baseball shirts and little train engineer overalls. When he began talking, he was such fun, Smithy could hardly stand it.

But to get Tris, they lost Mom.

Smithy thinks of this every day, sometimes every hour.

And every day, sometimes every hour, she thinks of her mother’s final assignment: you and Madison be the best big sisters on earth.

Angus will want me to discuss that on television, she thinks now. That’s the point. Crawl inside their little hearts and souls, scrounge around, leave them stripped and sobbing in front of the world.

“I have to hit the girls’ room,” she says casually, releasing her seat belt before Angus can end his smile. “Meet you in the parking lot.” She’s out, slamming the door behind her. Cars move forward and Angus has to drive up one. He cannot see her now and he cannot get out of line.

Also caught in the take-out line is a TV van. Probably even vampires like French fries.

Smithy darts in to find McDonald’s packed with teenagers—not surprising, since Saybrook High is next door. She peels off her jacket, turns it inside out so only the white fleece shows and walks out with a high school group. It happens so quickly that Angus probably hasn’t moved up a car length.

The teenagers don’t notice her. They’re laughing hysterically
at nothing much, crashing into each other on purpose and high-fiving. She walks faster than they do, using them as a screen.

*   *   *

Tris proves how quickly he can climb, while Madison and Jack take a position behind the beanbag chairs. They are not invisible to the librarian—the library is arranged so that there is no such thing—but the staff pays no attention. They think nothing of two teenagers and a toddler early one Friday afternoon; home-schooled kids are here all the time.

“Say you’re right,” says Jack. “Say Cheryl did it. Why? What would make her do that?”

A TV cop show requires a complex, gruesome murder within the first minute. But this is life, where murder doesn’t happen. Only breakfast happens, and then school, and you outgrow your clothes and watch a little TV, and your friends come over.

Madison has a hard time squashing a spider. She can’t watch Animal Planet because some poor dog gets hit by a car or some little meerkat roasts in the Kalahari sun. And she and her brother are actually discussing the possibility that their very own father, the one they need so much and can never replace, was killed by another person?

Madison cannot think of a reason to kill anybody, never mind Dad. Furthermore, she isn’t just postulating that Cheryl killed Dad. She’s saying Cheryl blamed a two-year-old for it, thereby taking a second life—Tris’s. And now, Cheryl plans to chop it up, burn it and make a TV show out of it.

“If we accused her, Cheryl would get a lawyer,” says Jack. “The lawyer will point out that individual vehicles behave individually. Some Jeep in a parking lot has nothing to do with Dad’s Jeep a year ago. I don’t think the police ever investigated, you know. Nobody ever asked for Dad’s stuff, not even his laptop and his briefcase. I have them in the attic over the garage. A real investigation includes fingerprints. If Aunt Cheryl had ever been questioned or fingerprinted, we’d know. She’d have whined for months.”

No police investigation?

It occurs to Madison that in letting go, the police might have been trying to help Tris. Maybe the cops had little boys of their own and just couldn’t go there. It’s a little kid, they probably thought, wincing. Make this nightmare longer and deeper? Nah, let’s drop it.

“Or Cheryl could shrug and say Dad goofed up,” says Jack. “Didn’t quite get the car in neutral. Didn’t pull up the brake hard enough. Tris only had to touch it or fall against it. I wish we knew why Dad got out of the Jeep to start with.”

“He was rescuing a stray cat?” suggests Madison. “Getting the newspaper? Or he dropped something? Or Cheryl did and Dad had to squat down and reach under the Jeep to get it?”

“But then Cheryl would know why Dad got out of the Jeep, and she’s always said she doesn’t.”

“But if she could be a murderer, then she could be a liar, too.”

They try to think of a reason for Cheryl Rand to lose every bit of control and decency. Why destroy the very person giving her a home and salary?

Before Cheryl showed up, by far the most difficult part of life was just getting to stuff. Every sport, club, group, play, activity and friendship required a car and a driver. The Fountain kids walked, biked, begged for rides, took late buses and were generally a pain in the neck to coaches, teachers and other parents. Dad hired housekeepers. None of these women worked out. They didn’t stay or couldn’t be counted on or did the wrong things. And they didn’t chauffeur. Dad cut back his workday, but even so he could barely drop Tris off at day care and still pick him up within the time allowed. The baby spent half his life in a car seat, while Dad kept track of Madison, Jack and Smithy on his cell phone and drove all over town dropping one kid off, grabbing take-out dinners, eating on the run, picking up the next kid.

Call me Aunt Cheryl! cried this long-lost semi-relative, appearing out of nowhere.

Nobody was actually fond of Cheryl Rand. In fact, they were glad Tris was in day care, spending his time with people who were crazy about kids. Cheryl was crazy about the house. She had a great place to live and a good salary. If she wanted more money, she could have asked for a raise or found another job. She wouldn’t have had to kill.

And if she’d been planning to kill, she wouldn’t have chosen a method as iffy as a moving car. What are the odds you could even bruise somebody that way, let alone kill them? The chances are much better that the victim would just jump out of the way.

Madison slides into a daydream—not for the first time—in which Dad jumps out of the way.

“Maybe Dad decided to fire her,” guesses Jack. “He told
Cheryl he appreciated all she’d done, here’s a good-bye check, hit the road.”

Madison can imagine Cheryl having been upset if she’d gotten fired. But upset enough to kill? “There has to be more to it. Maybe Dad found out that Cheryl was buying herself shoes with the money Dad gave her for the house. Or she locked Tris in his room so she could watch TV in peace.”

Tris can tell they’re talking about something interesting. He climbs down from the tree house. All interesting discussion comes to a halt. Tris looks at them suspiciously.

“Guess what I have in my backpack,” says Jack.

Instantly Tris is excited. “What?”

“The fire truck!”

Madison even knows what fire truck it is. Nonny and Poppy brought it when they visited last summer—that awful failed visit when nobody made an attempt to talk to their grandparents because nobody knew what to say. The truck pops, sirens, squeals and grunts. It has red and yellow blinking lights. It needs four batteries. One is always dead.

Jack shrugs out of his backpack and Tris joyfully gets to work on the Velcro closure. Tris doesn’t seem to mind how hard it is, he just keeps at it. Is this evidence that he did move the brake? Kept shoving and pulling until he got it to work?