The Lost Daughter (29 page)

“I didn’t really come here,” Alex said, hearing the tightness in his voice, “to talk about the distant past.”

“Didn’t you?” Sean’s limpid voice had an edge of hostility. “You want my help finding my wife for your purposes, Mr. Frazier, you need to clue me in.”

Alex pressed his palms together, miserable. He needed this guy on his team, and he couldn’t recruit him. “I don’t think it’s my place to do that, man.”

“So something is going on. You sleeping with my wife?”

“No.”

“Okay. Okay, I believe you.” Sean whipped out a ragged handkerchief and wiped his brow, all the way over the bald crown of his head. His voice grew louder; the cat jumped off the arm of the couch, and the smaller dog trotted over to him and whined. “But something did happen,” he went on. “To Brooke, I mean. And you
had something to do with it. And it’s wrong, damn it. I’m her husband. I have a disposition to promote her good. I ought to know what’s—what’s—”

“Been hurting her?” Alex finished for him.

“You could put it that way.”

I’ve been hurting her, Alex wanted to tell him. Her and everyone else. “You are her husband,” he agreed. “And maybe she ought to have shared some stuff with you. But her choices aren’t mine to make.”

He lifted his eyes to Sean. The guy, he could tell, wanted to lift him by his wrinkled white collar. He wanted to shake the truth out of him. But Sean controlled himself. He bit down on the next words: “You’re on your own, then.”

At a sound on the porch, the dogs jumped up and rushed together, whining, toward the front door. It flew open, and a small ginger-haired girl tumbled in. A pink backpack bounced against her shoulders. “Daddy, Daddy!” she called. Then she turned and saw the men in the living room.

“Well, hi, Bug. Done playing already?” said Sean.

It was the first time Alex had seen Brooke’s daughter up close. How pale she looked! Her eyes had a bruised cast, as if she were coming down with something. She had Brooke’s long limbs, her wide jaw and mouth.

“Who’s that man?”

“Don’t point, honey.” Sean stepped over to his daughter—she looked like him, too, the russet hair and close-set, tawny eyes—to lower her accusing arm. Alex stood as well, and put out his hand.

“I’m a friend of your mom’s,” he said. “My name’s Alex. You must be Meghan.”

Meghan fixed him with a withering stare, but with a glance from her father, she let Alex take hold of her fingers for an instant before
she snatched them away. “I need to make a diorama for tomorrow,” she said to Sean. “I forgot. Taisha’s mom helped her with hers already.”

Sean crouched until he was at the girl’s eye level. “Well, I’ll help you then.”

Meghan’s eyes flicked to Alex, then back to her dad. “We need to do it
now
,” she half whispered. “You’re not so fast as Mommy.”

“I’m pretty fast, though.” Sean stood. He seemed to stand taller, with his little girl next to him. “I got a job to do,” he told Alex.

“I can see that.” Alex tried smiling at Meghan, but she’d stuck her pinky finger in her nose and would not look at him. Reluctantly he moved toward the door. “It would be good for all of us, I think,” hesaid to Sean, “if you could let me know what you hear. Here’s my card.” He held the thing out, and waited several awkward seconds while Sean just looked at it, before he placed it on the mail table in the hallway. “It’s got my cell phone,” he added, stupidly. “Call anytime.”

“
Da-ad
,” Meghan said.

She pulled on her father’s arm. Alex was ready to avert his eyes and make a clean exit. But then Sean caught his sleeve. For a moment, the wall he’d kept up seemed to crumble, just a little. “If you manage to track her down—” he began.

“I’ll be in touch.” Alex gripped the guy’s hand and shook it. “Absolutely. You’ve got a beautiful daughter.” He smiled nervously at Meghan, who was tugging her father toward the kitchen. He waited for Sean to agree that he, too, would share news of Brooke. But Sean only pressed his palm and returned a sad smile.

Alex made his way out as father and daughter retreated to the kitchen. The dogs followed him to the front porch but trotted around to the back. He was left alone in the cool, bright day. He had come up empty. Whatever world of hurt Brooke’s husband found himself in, nothing would persuade him to join forces with some
man from Brooke’s past. Not unless…but no. There was a time when Alex should have betrayed Brooke’s secret—to her parents, his parents, anyone who cared about her. That time had been more than fifteen years ago, when she’d believed in a potion. That time had passed and left all its consequences.

He would get a night’s sleep, he thought, or whatever passed for such a thing. Today was Wednesday. He would finish the workweek. And then, whether he had heard from Brooke or not, he would return to his resolution. Brooke’s silence, in the end, he would take as her consent. When detectives came to question her—well, she could be silent with them, too. He shut the gate behind him. Sean’s voice—not his suspicious and resentful words, but the aria he’d been practicing, its buoyant rise and heartbreaking fall—played again in his head, as he drove away down the shady street through autumn leaves.

B
rooke was heading out on Route 6, toward the old Econo Lodge. Funny, she hadn’t noticed the sign on her way to Windermere. But she had been beat, by then. Now she recognized her impetus as the compulsion people often attributed to criminals, to revisit the scene of the crime. She knew she would find nothing there. Never had she even asked Alex what he did with the tiny limp body. Maybe he had buried it, back of the motel. Maybe he was planning to dig up its tiny bones and present such grisly remains as proof of his guilt.

It had been a mistake to stay with her mom. Stacey assumed Brooke was leaving Sean. Last night, after Brooke had spent the day uselessly scrolling through newspaper microfilms at the Scranton library, her mom had come home early. Stacey had spent the day in Scranton with a bunch of children’s-rights advocates; after four weeks of bickering, she reported, they had managed to draw up a new mission statement and knock off early. She had fixed an elegant dinner of salmon and endives. Her manner had softened. Brooke
had been such a trooper, she insisted; had devoted herself to her family; had tried every option. Every time Brooke protested that she was not leaving Sean, that they were simply in a rough patch, her mother’s lips had pressed together. “Hmm,” she had said. “A rough patch.” And when Brooke had stepped outside to call home and talk to Meghan, she still felt as though Stacey were eavesdropping.

“Where
are
you?” Meghan insisted.

“I had to visit a friend,” Brooke said. “She’s sick, and she’s having a birthday.” She lied not because the truth would rouse any suspicion—it was natural, if she was upset, to visit her mom—but because she didn’t want to picture Sean and Meghan knowing where she was as she dug into the past. Later she would tell them; later, when her search turned up nothing and everything went back to the way it had been.

“I want you to come home,” Meghan said flatly. “Daddy burned the toast.”

But she couldn’t come home just yet. One more day, she had told Sean, who sounded sober and sad. Maybe two. By the weekend, she said.

This road out of Windermere had always been a strip, littered with used-car lots, diners, gas stations with rusted pumps, and quick marts. Brooke remembered a few dairy farms, swallowed up now by fast-food joints. She tried and failed to locate Daisy’s Kitchen, where she’d had that long-ago fight with Alex. But fifteen minutes from the town limits she thought she spotted the motel, across from a trailer park that was still an eyesore. Only as she drew close did she see it wasn’t an Econo Lodge anymore.
PAINTBALL
was splattered in garish letters across a plywood sign at the entrance. She pulled off into the parking lot, asphalt pitted with craters and strewn with yellowing weeds. She got out of the car. A breeze had kicked up. Hugging her jacket around her waist, she moved to the back of the
building, where she leaned against a sand-filled metal barrel and took in the desultory view.

Last night she had slept deeply, as if plummeting to the bottom of an ocean. Her mom’s place had only a pull-out in the tiny guest room; she woke with the metal bar digging into her back. But for the first time in weeks she had slept through the night, with no dreams that she could remember. Her mom had tried, really she had, to make Brooke feel safe and welcomed and not badgered by questions. Stacey Willcox loved her daughter, however accidentally she had been conceived. “You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong,” Stacey had said at dinner. She had placed her hand on Brooke’s, and Brooke had been surprised at how light and dry it was, the anxious hand of a middle-aged widow. “But if you still want to do great things, you know you’ve got the support.”

“I never wanted to do great things, Mom,” Brooke had said.

Though now she wondered if she was telling the truth. On the backseat of the car sat the locked wooden box her father had given her in high school. It had moved to her mom’s condo at the bottom of a desk drawer filled with volleyball trophies and photo albums. Though the key to the box still dangled from the same chain on which Brooke kept her house keys, she had forgotten its existence until Stacey mentioned that Brooke could do her a favor by emptying the drawers so she could give away the old desk. Brooke had been reluctant to open the box in the condo. Inside, she knew, sat her old diaries, where she had recorded the dreams she used to spin. Dreams, she thought now, that a few hours at this very motel had erased.

She surveyed the back lot—a Dumpster, an array of poisonous paint sprayers, plastic beer cups, and cigarette butts. From inside the paintball arcade came the shouts and screams of kids, the thudding of blobs and bodies. At the edge of the lot, a fallow field waited for
a developer. Fifteen years, she thought. Almost half her life ago. She and Alex had both had to leave it behind. Now she would finish this pilgrimage along Route 6. Next, she would spend a day in the funny little Windermere Library, once a church, where all the old
Gazettes
were stored. She would read through every one, for that year and the following year, in case there had been a police report she’d missed. If she screwed up her courage, she might approach Alex’s old friend Jake, whom she had spotted in the center of the village as she drove through. He was just getting into his police cruiser, and she had smiled wryly. Jake the prankster, a cop. She wasn’t sure she could ask him to check old files without explaining why—but if there was nothing to be found, she could at least return to Alex with the news that the world bore no trace of the crime he claimed. And would that stop his claiming it? She shook her head. “What do you want, Alex?” Brooke said softly to herself—feeling, as she said it, that she wasn’t asking the question just of him.

She wandered a short ways into the field. She kicked over a few rotting wooden crates, filled with mud and mouse droppings. Turning to look across the road, she noticed the trailer park. It was indeed the same one that had been there long ago, its
Trails End Estates
sign reduced to
rail End state
. Rising next to it was a pile of land that Brooke didn’t remember. She frowned. She walked to the end of the paintball driveway and peered across Route 6. Yes, there it was—a huge sort of mesa just behind the gas station, with a long curving drive leading to its top and spindly trees holding down the earth. One of those landfill projects, probably, erecting a park over a mound of trash. The sun had come out and shone gently on the trees and manicured sod. Brooke tucked herself back into her car and maneuvered her way across the road.

The breeze blew cooler, up so high. Still, Brooke took a park bench facing away from the soccer game being played by a dozen
West Indians. From the swings came the shouts of a few children. For a moment Brooke shut her eyes and pictured Meghan on the swings, Sean with his muscled arms pushing her. That would have been August, in Lorenzo’s Garden, after the christening. How sweetly Sean had sung, that day. Then that night, his arms around her, the tang of his sweat.

Lorenzo would be going into the hospital now. She had offered to drive him; she had promised to visit him this week. She couldn’t let guilt over her past keep her from doing right by a friend right now. She would send him flowers, she thought, and then she laughed at herself. Flowers to a nursery owner! No. She would find what she could here and then go back. It was possible, she would tell Alex, that there had been life, possible that his panic had snuffed it. He needed to forgive himself, she would tell him. And then she would not go to him, or to Sean, but to her boss in the hospital. She would bring a bottle of good Italian wine, and every time Lorenzo mentioned death she would change the subject. There. That was enough of a plan.

Below, the traffic of Route 6 rumbled by—trucks, mostly, delivering to the weather-beaten towns that lay north of Interstate 80, angling up toward Elmira. Away to the west, the land rolled in slow waves. Brooke felt a kind of vertigo, up on this rise, as if time and space were both tilting beneath her. How strange to think that she had been happy here, had felt at home here, had felt her world complete. She fitted the key into the lock and opened the box.

There wasn’t much inside. A couple of old diaries, discarded letters, photos. She thumbed through the diaries. They were filled with earnest reflections on the impossibility of ever being beautiful; on the mediocrity of her English teachers; on whether she should throw her energy into becoming a great scholar or a great poet. There were poems that made her cringe. There were some surprisingly wise
observations of her parents—
Dad was young emotionally when he met Mom. He’d lived more places but those places never changed him. Then he met Mom and he was ready, just like she was. Except he was twenty years older. Lacey says she thinks it’s creepy, a 40 yr old guy with a girl just out of HS. I tell her it wasn’t like that but she thinks I’m being defensive. I don’t want to be naïve like Dad but I don’t want to act all wise beyond my years either. Not that Mom did that. I don’t know what she did really. She must have liked him back then, for a little while. Then I came along
.