Two Graves (25 page)

Oh, God, here we go.
She walked up to the door and knocked. A sudden silence. Was he going to bolt out the back?

“Hello?” she called, hoping to forestall that.

More silence. And then a voice from inside. “Who is it?”

She took a deep breath. “Corrie. Your daughter. Corrie.”

Another long silence. And then suddenly the door burst open and a man tumbled out—she recognized him immediately—who enveloped her in his arms and just about crushed her.

“Corrie!” he cried, his voice choking up. “How many years have I prayed for this! I knew someday it would come! My God, I prayed for it—and now here it’s happened! My Corrie!” And then he dissolved into great hiccuping gusts of sobbing joy that would have embarrassed her if she hadn’t been so completely flabbergasted.

I
NSIDE, THE CABIN WAS SURPRISINGLY COZY, NEAT, AND
even charming in a beat-up, rustic sort of way. Her father—she called him Jack, unable to bring herself to say
Dad
—showed her around with no little amount of pride. It consisted of two rooms: a kitchen-living-dining area, and a tiny bedroom just big enough for a rickety twin bed, bureau, and washstand. There was no plumbing or electricity. An old Franklin stove supplied heat. An upright camping stove on legs, supplied by bottled gas, was used for cooking, and next to it an old soapstone sink was set up on two-by-fours, its drainpipe simply dumping water onto the ground under the floorboards. Drinking water came in plastic jugs lined up by the front door, filled, he said, at a spring half a mile from the cabin.

Everything was in its place, clean, and orderly. She noted no liquor bottles or beer cans anywhere. Red paisley curtains added a cheery note, and the rough wooden kitchen table was spread with a checked tablecloth. But what surprised Corrie the most—although she didn’t mention it—was a large cluster of framed photographs that dominated the wall above the table, all of her. She had no idea so many childhood and baby pictures of her even existed.

“You take the bedroom and get settled in,” Jack said, opening the door. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

Corrie didn’t argue with him. She dumped her knapsack on the bed, and rejoined her father in the kitchen. He was standing over the stove.

“Are you staying for a while?” he asked.

“If that’s okay.”

“
More
than okay. Coffee?”

“Oh, my God, yes.”

“It ain’t French press.” He laughed and dumped some coffee grounds into an enamel pot filled with water, stirred it, and put it on to boil.

So far, after the initial effusive greeting, both of them had somehow refrained from asking questions. Although she was dying to—and she knew he must be, too. It seemed neither one wanted to rush things.

He hummed as he worked, brought out a carton of doughnuts, and arranged them on a plate. She suddenly remembered that humming habit of his—something she hadn’t thought of in fifteen years. She examined him surreptitiously as he bustled about. He was thinner and seemed astonishingly shorter, but that must be because she’d grown up. No man could shrink from giant size—which is what she remembered—to a measly five foot seven. His hair was thinning, with one jaunty tuft that stuck out from the top; his face was deeply scored but still strikingly handsome in a kind of sparkling, cheerful, Irish way. Even though he was only a quarter Irish, the other parts being Swedish, Polish, Bulgarian, Italian, and Hungarian. “I’m a mutt,” she remembered him once saying.

“Milk, sugar?” he asked.

“Got cream?”

“Heavy cream.”

“Perfect. Lots of heavy cream and three spoonfuls of sugar.”

He brought the two steaming mugs over, set them down, and took a seat. For a moment they drank in silence and Corrie, realizing she was famished, ate one of the doughnuts. The birds were chirping outside, the late-afternoon light came dappling in through the rustling leaves, and she could smell the forest. It suddenly seemed so perfect she began to cry.

Like a typical man, Jack leapt up in a complete panic. “Corrie! What’s wrong? Are you in trouble? I can help.”

She waved him back down and wiped her eyes, smiling. “Nothing. Just forget it. I—I’m kind of stressed out.”

Still all aflutter, he sat down and went to put his arm around her, but she shied away. “Just… hold on a moment and let me kind of get used to this.”

He withdrew the arm all in a rush. “Right. Of course.” His extreme solicitude touched her. She blew her nose, and there was an awkward silence. Neither one wanted to ask the other the first question.

“You’re welcome to stay here long as you like,” Jack finally began. “No questions asked, free to come and go as you please… Um, do you have a car? I didn’t see anything.”

She shook her head. And then she said, without really meaning to: “They say you robbed a bank.”

A dead silence. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t.”

Immediately, Corrie felt something go cold inside her. Already he was lying to her.

“No, really, I didn’t. I was framed.”

“But you…
ran
.”

He smacked his head, shaking his tuft of hair. “Yeah, I ran. Like a damn idiot. Totally stupid, I know. But I didn’t do it. Please believe me. They’ve got all this evidence, but it’s because I was framed. It happened like this—”

“Wait.” She held up a hand. “
Wait
.” She didn’t want to hear any more lies—if in fact they were lies.

He fell silent.

She took a long drink of her coffee. It tasted wonderful. Grabbed another doughnut and took a big soft bite.
Stay in the moment
. She tried to relax, but the real question she wanted to ask, the one she’d been avoiding, kept coming back again and again to her mind, and so she finally swallowed and asked it.

“What’s up with all those packages and letters in your closet?”

Jack stared at her. “You saw them?”

“What went on, exactly? Why did you just leave and… never call? For fifteen years?”

He looked at her, surprise and sadness mixing on his face. “Duette wouldn’t let me call you, said you didn’t want to talk, and… and I understood that. But I sent you something just about every
week, Corrie. Presents, whenever I could afford them. As you grew older, I tried to guess what you might be into, what you might like. Barbie dolls, children’s books. Every birthday, I sent you something. Something nice. And when I couldn’t afford to send gifts, I sent you letters. I must have sent you a thousand letters—telling you what I was doing, what was going on in my life, giving you advice for what I guessed might be going on in your own. And it all came back. Everything. I figured Duette stopped it. Or maybe she’d moved and left no forwarding address.”

Corrie swallowed. “So why did you keep on sending me things when you knew I wouldn’t get them?”

He hung his head. “Because someday I hoped to be able to give them to you myself—all of them. In a way, they’re kind of like a diary; a diary of my life, and—this may sound strange—of
your
life, or your life as I imagined it. How you were growing up. What your interests were. If you’d started dating. And…” He paused, embarrassed. “Having those letters and packages around, even though they’d been returned… well, after a while it almost felt like having you around, too. In person.” Another pause. “I’d always hoped you’d write me, you know.”

When she saw the closet full of letters and packages, Corrie had guessed—in fact, hoped—that this would be the explanation. But the last thing had never occurred to her: that, all the time she was waiting to hear from her dad, he’d been waiting to hear from her. “She said that you refused to pay child support, that you shacked up with another woman, couldn’t keep a job, spent your time drinking in bars.”

“None of that’s true, Corrie, or at least…” He colored. “I did spend way too much time in bars. And there were… women. But I’ve been clean and sober for nine years. And I tried to pay child support when I could, I really did. Sometimes I went without eating to send her a check.”

Corrie shook her head. Of
course
what her mother had told her all these years wasn’t true. How could she have been so dense as to believe it—believe her lying, embittered, alcoholic mother? She
suddenly felt horribly thickheaded and stupid. And guilty—for fifteen years of thinking bad thoughts about her father.

And yet her overwhelming feeling was one of relief.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For not realizing all that. For… being so
passive
.”

“You were just a kid. You didn’t know.”

“I’m twenty-two years old. I should’ve figured this out a long time ago.”

He waved his hand. “Water under the dam.”

She couldn’t help smiling. “
Over
the dam.”

“I never was any good at sayings and speeches. But I do live by a philosophy, and it’s a good one.”

“What’s that?”

“Forgive everyone everything.”

Corrie wasn’t sure that was going to be her philosophy—at all.

He finished his cup, rose, picked up the pot. “More coffee?”

“Please.”

He poured them each another mug, sat down. “Corrie, I do want to tell you about this so-called bank robbery. I was framed by someone at work, I don’t know who. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with their scamming the customers, overcharging them on the financing. That’s how they make their money, you know—on the financing. Problem is, they all do it. Except for one—Charlie, the only decent guy there.”

“But you
ran
,” she said again.

“I know. I’ve always done stupid, impulsive things. I figured I could hide up here while figuring out the truth. But obviously I don’t even have a phone here, and I had to toss my cell phone, because they’ll use it to track me. So now I’ve no way to investigate—and by running I’ve made myself look guilty as hell. I’m stuck here.”

Corrie looked at him. She wanted to believe him.

“I’m not stuck here,” she said. “I could investigate.”

“Come on,” he said, laughing. “You? You don’t know the first thing about being a detective.”

“Yeah? For your information, I’m studying law enforcement at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, I’m getting straight A’s, and back in Medicine Creek I worked as the assistant to one of the country’s top FBI agents on a famous serial killer case.”

His eyes widened. “Oh, no. My daughter, a
cop
?”

T
HE MAN APPEARED SO SUDDENLY IN THE DOORWAY OF
Madeleine Teal’s office cubicle that she literally jumped. He was a very strange-looking man, dressed in black, with a pale face and gray eyes, and he radiated a restlessness bordering on agitation.

“My, you gave me a start!” she said, pressing a hand to her ample bosom. “Can I help you?”

“I’ve come for Dr. Heffler.”

Now, that was a strange way of phrasing it—he did look more than a little like the grim reaper—but the man did have a mellifluous voice with a charming southern accent. She herself came from the Midwest, and the various New York accents still grated on her nerves.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

“Dr. Heffler and I are old buddies.”

Old buddies
. Somehow the way he said it didn’t sound right. Nobody would use the word
buddy
to describe Dr. Wayne Heffler, who was a pretentious, pseudo-upper-class, condescending twit, as far as Teal was concerned. She had known plenty of Hefflers in her long career, but he was truly the worst: one of those types whose highest pleasure was found in reviewing the work of subordinates, with the sole purpose of finding fault and pointing it out in front of as many people as possible. Meanwhile, he neglected his own work and left others to scramble to cover for him, knowing they would be blamed if something went wrong or fell through the cracks.

“And your name, sir?”

“Special Agent Pendergast.”

“Oh. As in FBI?”

A singularly disturbing smile spread over the face of the special agent as a marble hand slipped inside his suit coat and withdrew a wallet, opened it to display a shield and ID, then gently closed it and reinserted it into the folds of black wool. With a not-displeasing sense of anticipation, Madeleine Teal pressed the intercom button and picked up the phone.