Make, Take, Murder (27 page)

Detweiler rubbed his hand
across his mouth. I warned him on the phone about what I’d found, and he’d stopped to buy himself a large bottle of Diet Coke. He had also called Hadcho with the news. I think my liquid drug of choice—cola—was rubbing off on him. He shook his head in amazement at the image before us. “I’m glad you didn’t go any further. I’ll need to take these layouts with me.”

“I want to see what’s here.”

“You don’t need to see this. You don’t need this seared into your brain.”

“I’m responsible for returning these items to Cindy’s family. I can’t vouch for their safe return if I don’t know what’s here,” I argued. “These are store property. Fortunately, the rules say that upon submission, the pages belong to us. I’m sharing this with you as a courtesy. We agree to return them to the submitter as a courtesy, too.”

“But there’s more there. You think she hid something else on the page.”

“Yes.”

“Hang on.” He phoned Hadcho again, and this time told the other detective to bring a search warrant. Hadcho was already on it.

“Otherwise, we could run into problems. A smart attorney would try to suppress this,” said Detweiler as he stroked his chin. “Whatever ‘this’ happens to be.”

I went about my work in the store, while Detweiler sat on a stool and waited. It seems like it took Hadcho forever to show up, but my watch said he’d made good time.

The two men stood on either side of me.

I was both sick at my stomach and insanely curious. My body was recuperating from the impact of the first photo. With Detweiler at my side, I thought I could handle whatever came next. Hadcho stood poised with a digital camera to record what I’d found. The three of us stared at the horrific image on the table. Our eyes kept returning to it the way you can’t help staring at the aftermath of a car crash. Your common sense tells you to turn away, but tragedy is magnetic. Perhaps that’s God’s way of reminding us how incredibly fragile we are. We hurtle ourselves through life at a breakneck pace, confident we are invincible. But we aren’t. And when we see death or destruction we are forced to recalculate, to reassess the thin silver thread of life that ties us to this existence.

Before us was a photo that turned my stomach. Cindy labeled it: “Miscarriage at four months.” The image zoomed in on a pair of tiny hands and feet resting on a bloodied scrap of newspaper. On the back of the photo was a shrunken hospital bill for a D and C from a clinic in a nearby suburb. Behind both of those was a photo of a battered Cindy—obviously a self-portrait given the camera angle. On its back was a bill from a doctor for wiring her jaw.

I turned my attention to another embellishment, a photo of the Gambrowski’s home. From behind it, my tweezers pulled a list of dates and injuries. Another list detailed appointments with doctors, chiropractors, and physical therapists.

“Smart lady,” muttered Detweiler. “I can corroborate these appointments and the dates of her treatments. In one domestic abuse case in Virginia, a supervisor used her calendar to track the days her employee missed work or showed up with bruises. That informal record was entered into evidence, proving that the dates of the beatings dovetailed with visits to local emergency wards. It goes a long way toward showing a continuing pattern of abuse. That husband was convicted, and he’s still spending time behind bars.”

He rubbed at his eyes. “It’ll take us a while to hunt down these people and get them to talk. We can do it, though. We’ll subpoena them.”

Detweiler bagged the photos, labeled the evidence and jotted notes on an official-looking form. His skin usually radiated a healthy glow from working outside at his parents’ farm, but this morning, he was pale. I probably looked a little green around the gills as well. “How hard do you have to hit a woman to make her miscarry?”

“There are a lot of variables. It depends on the woman and on her pregnancy. And on how hard and where the man hits her.”

“How common is it? I mean does this happen often?”

“One study done in the UK in 1997 identified domestic violence as the primary cause of miscarriages or still-births. Another study noted that 30 percent of the time, physical abuse first occurred after the woman became pregnant.”

“You’re saying the pregnancy becomes the catalyst for the violence?”

“Evidently.”

“So Cindy is telling us she lost this baby because Ross beat her?”

“This baby and maybe others.”

“Others?”

Detweiler looked away from me. A tiny muscle along his jaw line twitched. “Sexual abuse has been proved to have a strong correlation with fetal loss overall, but emotional abuse has the strongest association with multiple stillbirths. Once a woman experiences domestic abuse, she is 50 percent more likely to lose a pregnancy.”

“So, maybe she lost other babies?”

“It’s certainly possible. She must have had Michelle, what? Twenty-two years ago? Considering Mrs. Gambrowski’s age, it’s feasible she could have gotten pregnant and lost the babies many times.”

“Lost multiple babies …” I whispered.

I had to know. I hastily pulled apart the page, separating the largest background of 12 x 12 inch paper from an interior mat approximately 11½ by 11½ inches. Out tumbled four more grisly photos. On the back of each was a date. By my count, Cindy had lost at least five babies.

I gritted my teeth and clutched at the table edge. After a moment, the hot spate of anger abated.

Detweiler said nothing, his beautiful green eyes assessing me. His hand moved toward mine slowly. An inch away, he hesitated, withdrew.

Tears filled my eyes, my throat squeezed shut and I cried for those poor little ones. Slowly, gently, Detweiler pulled me into his arms and held me. Hadcho looked away. I rested my face against Detweiler’s shirt, soothed by the steady lub-lub-lub of his heart.

Leaning there against him, I wondered if he knew how much I’d like to have another child. Was it palpable, this feeling of desire? Did we women send out Morse code, dot-dot-dash, I-want-a-bay-bee, S-O-S? Wasn’t it feasible that a silent hormonal signal passed between potential couples, signaling in the same way you stand up in a crowded stadium and wave to a friend, “Come sit by me”?

I think so because I felt a roar within me, a supersonic buildup of pressure, and my mouth opened as if to cry out. A tiny, “Eek,” escaped, but I pulled away from him. I slapped my fingers over my lips real quickly and forced myself to back away.

Grounding myself in the here and now, I reached down and squeezed the inanimate wood tabletop hard as I could. Once I’d bled off that excess energy, I grabbed a tissue and dabbed at my eyes.

A thought came to me.

Clenching my jaw shut, and stiffening my spine, I lifted the page with both hands to the level of my eyes and took note of the thickness of the piece.

An embellishment is to a scrapbook page what a scarf, a pin, or a belt is to an outfit. These small additions add visual punch and emphasis. They tie together colors and patterns. They direct and sometimes fool the eye. Since most are add-ons and not printed directly on the paper, nearly every embellishment adds depth, even if it’s just a smidge. In addition to the thinnest layer of the paper, there’s also a thin layer of adhesive. Taken together, there’s always an elevation.

But usually, a canny scrapbooker will accentuate an embellishment even more. It just adds a whole new level of “oomph.” Most of us favor raising a tag or an accent with 1/8-inch foam tape or foam dots.

As I rotated the page, I could see that the entire 4 x 3 inch page title was elevated on Cindy’s layout. But the lettering was flat. I wondered why she would go to the trouble of raising the mat and not use chipboard, glittery, or textured letters?

That didn’t make sense.

Unless she was sending a signal.

I peeled up the page title mat.

“What’s that?” Hadcho wondered as we gazed at a rectangular plastic slab roughly the size of a credit card. A small label dated it a month before Cindy’s disappearance.

“It’s a recording device,” I said. “We don’t sell them but you can get them online. It’s self-contained. This model both records and plays back. See? There’s the play button.”

“I’m going to kill you and chop you up into a hundred little pieces,” growled Ross Gambrowski. “See if I don’t, Cindy! I’ll cut you up into hamburger and throw you in the trash where you belong. No one will ever be able to find all of you when I’m done!”

Detweiler handed over a
receipt and promised me the department would send another receipt for the scrapbook page to Michelle Gambrowski. But first, it would be entered into evidence.

“The lab will have to go over this.” Hadcho’s eyes were brittle as two pieces of ice. “Mrs. Lowenstein, I need your signature and statement to attach to my chain of custody.”

I nodded. “Laurel and Clancy can also verify the provenance of the page. We were looking at it earlier because it was a contest entry. They know I didn’t find the hidden info because if I had, we’d have all seen it. We were looking at all the pages in the contest trying to decide on a winner.”

“But you missed this information?”

“I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t look for the hidden jour-naling—and she did an ingenuous job of tucking it away. The idea the page concealed information came to me after I reviewed a list of the classes Cindy had registered for.”

I left the office to round up my two co-workers who had come in a little before Detweiler arrived. While they wrote up brief statements, I watched the floor. Fortunately, only one customer stopped by, a husband who wanted a gift certificate. Minutes later, Clancy and Laurel took my place up front, and I typed up a brief statement to accompany the scrapbook page. “There’s no way any of us could have inserted these photos or written this script,” I explained to Hadcho and Detweiler. “We’d have had to tear apart the whole page. But you’ll be able to verify that at the lab, I assume.”

Hadcho shrugged and his eyes caught Detweiler’s. “Probably this won’t matter much to convince the prosecutor to file charges. Instead we can use it to get collaborative statements from doctors, family friends, and so on. We can get subpoenas. It would be pretty tough to stay silent with this sort of proof tossed onto the playing field.”

“I wonder if the daughter will talk,” Detweiler mused.

“You never know in these domestic cases,” said Hadcho as we tucked the page and the statements into a large shopping bag.

“I’m not sure how Michelle will take this,” I said to the detectives. “After all, Ross is her father. Now that Cindy’s gone, he’s all she has. This information will make her an orphan, sort of.”

The two detectives both stared at me, wordlessly. The quiet discomforted me. Despite my attempts to hold their gaze, I looked away. “You know, you only get two parents. No matter what they do, or how they treat you, you … you always love your family.” That last word flew out on an exhale. I knew it sounded lame, but I also knew it was the truth.

“Michelle Gambrowski won’t have a choice about talking to us. The law is the law. We’ll take this to the lab, talk with our boss, and then decide how to proceed,” said Detweiler. “We need to get right on this.”

The two men took their leave, their heavy footsteps reflecting the long hours of work ahead.

I stood over the sink, rinsing and sloshing and washing my hands repeatedly, trying to wash away my feeling of guilt. Honestly, though, the more I thought about the situation the stupider I felt. Michelle had been trying to tell me where to look all along! I mean, wasn’t that “gift” set of books from Cindy all a hoax? A big road sign pointing to hidden meanings? Wasn’t it possible that Michelle was counting on me finding the evidence? I sighed and considered slamming my head against the wall.

What a dope I’d been.

And I knew why. I just couldn’t face my part in the deception.

I raised my head and stared into my own eyes. I noticed the tiny scar splitting my right eyebrow. I thought about where and how I’d gotten it.

My lower lip trembled. Had I missed Cindy’s hidden pain and Ross’s cruelty because violence had once been a daily occurrence in my own life? My mother never needed medical attention, but there had been plenty of shoves and slaps from my dad. For the most part, my sisters and I knew how to keep a low profile. Especially when Dad was in what we euphemistically called “one of his moods.” But the summer before I left for college, he’d raised an angry hand to my face and his wedding band split my eyebrow.

Had Michelle suffered worse than I? At the memorial service, she stayed clear of her dad. I recalled how frightened she looked when I mentioned her visit to the store.

“Oh, no,” I moaned. Was she all right? Would Ross hurt his own child?

He murdered several of his own children, didn’t he?

I raced out of the bathroom and dialed Detweiler.

“Michelle! I’m worried about her!” The words rushed out.

“I know. We sent a car to sit outside the house. Gambrowski called his attorney and we had to move the officer. Until we process this, we’re stuck. We can’t drag him in. We can’t do much of anything! We’ve got to interview people and back up her story before we can move ahead.” Detweiler let loose with a string of curses.

Usually, he hid his frustration from me. Not this time.

“Do you think he’ll hurt her?”

“We have no evidence of that.”

“But you have evidence of him causing the miscarriages!” My voice rose a notch. “Men like him settle all their arguments with their fists. They think it’s their right! They justify—”

Detweiler cut in. “There’s nothing more I can do for Michelle tonight. Not yet anyway. I have to go.”

His voice was curt, and his dismissive tone chilled me. I nodded (although he couldn’t see my response) and stumbled through a goodbye.

I’d had about enough from Chad Detweiler. His light switch behavior—on/off, on/off—grated on my nerves and tore down my ego. While I appreciated the kindness his family had shown Anya, that was a separate issue. His wife had threatened me. He had led me on. I was sick of being played as a patsy by other people.

“You okay?” Clancy put a hand on my shoulder. “You look unwell. I know that album was upsetting, but thank God you found those photos!”

“Thank God,” I whispered. (Although privately I thought, “God where are you in all this? Huh?”) I had to keep moving. I got up and started pulling out the special make-and-take tag that was our gift to all the crop attendees. Pulling another bottle of Stickles from our store stock, I found myself face to face with a display of holiday layouts. We’d challenged our customers to use the Stickles when creating pages that celebrated family. I knew most of the women, but not all of them.

Or did I really know any of them?

How many more of them lived in fear?