Where They Found Her (19 page)

“
Hannity
starts in ten minutes,” he said, stepping around me to his recliner. “So you’ll need to make it quick.” He dropped himself down and jerked out the footrest in one practiced motion. He pointed at a couch that was either heavily patterned or very dirty or both. “Have a seat if you want.”

“Oh, okay, great,” I said, feeling my way carefully, praying I wouldn’t trip and end up facedown on the revolting carpet.

“Sorry it’s so dark,” he said, motioning to the curtains. “Got to keep them closed. Otherwise, when the drones come, they’ll be able to take pictures of everything. A couple shots of me looking long in the tooth, and”—he snapped his fingers—“like that, they’ll convene a death panel.”

Naturally: death panels and drones.

“I understand,” I said.
That you’re delusional
. “With the curtains closed, I guess you couldn’t have seen anything related to what happened to the baby?”

“Who said that?” He sounded defensive again. “Damn police. Because I won’t talk to those numb-nuts doesn’t mean I don’t know things. I just don’t think it’s my job to do
their
job by spying on people. I believe in personal liberty: every person’s right to do as they wish.”

“Including leaving a baby out in the woods?”

“Who the hell am I to judge?” He shrugged.

His beliefs seemed mostly random and nonsensical, but there was a thread of extreme conservatism. I hoped if I pulled at it, something interesting might unfurl.

“But if we don’t hold people accountable for their actions, what kind of world will we have?” I asked. “A welfare state.”

“You got that right.” He narrowed his eyes at me. Then he nodded as though he’d come to some conclusion. “Come on, let me show you something.”

He waved me down an even darker, more cluttered hall, where he could be planning to house me. I hesitated before following. I’d been out of shape for a long time, but I’d have to hope that I’d retained some kind of muscle memory if he charged at me.

“Did you see what happened to the baby, Mr. . . .”

I pulled out my phone as I walked behind him, quickly texting Justin the man’s address with no explanation. If I didn’t come home, it would at least give him a place to start. He was going to love hearing why I’d sent it, when I was forced to explain later.

“I didn’t see what happened to the baby,” the man said, turning in to the laundry room to the left of the door out to the garage. “But I seen something.”

Inside, there was a telescope pointed out the window. He walked right over and placed a satisfied hand on it, as though it were the answer to all my questions. I stared at it, unsure what to say. The telescope made me feel better and worse—better about the possibility of this man having seen something useful; worse about the kind of person he was.

“What did you see?” I asked, my voice a quiet rasp.

“You believe in ghosts?”

No.
But that wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. “Sure, I guess,” I said. “Why?”

“Because I saw one.” He leaned over to peek through his telescope. “Late one night, couple weeks ago.”

“What did you see?”

He looked back at me and nodded gravely. “It
looked
like a girl,” he said meaningfully. “Crawling out of the creek. She was covered in something, too, like war paint. Dark, you know, like that camouflage.”

“Camouflage?”
Curious, not skeptical. Inquire, don’t challenge.

“Yeah, all over her face.” He demonstrated how she might have applied it.

“And you saw her climb out of the creek?”

“I saw her twice. This time she came out of the creek and threw up. And she had the war paint. Last time, no paint. And she was running, in a red dress.”

“This time?” And I’d been so hoping he’d say something that would prove him less delusional than he seemed.

“Yep, this time she climbed out and threw up.” He shrugged. “Bent over the yard down there. Drunk, maybe. Then she took off, ran that way along the trees. With the paint on her face.”

“When was the other time?”

“Oh,
long
time ago—fifteen, twenty years. Long, long time. It was the night that kid fell down and hit his head at that party.”

“But it was the same girl?”

“Yep.”

Great
.

“I went outside with my camera, so I could get proof this time. You know, send it into one of those ghost-hunter shows. But by the time I got out there, she was gone. Disappeared.” He clapped his hands together. “Just like that.”

“So you don’t have any pictures?”

“Nah, but I do got one thing. If I can find it.” He started yanking open the drawers in the laundry room, which hadn’t been used to launder anything in God knew how long. “It’s in here somewhere. Hold on. Ah, wait. Here it is.” He had something hidden in his fingers. I opened my palm, bracing for something damp and disgusting to be placed there. “It was hers. I found it in the street after I seen her here the first time.”

Luckily, it was just cool and heavy. When I looked down, it was a small silver bracelet with words engraved on the inside:
To J.M. Always, Tex.

“I’m telling you. It was the same girl. A goddamn ghost.”

ONLINE EDITION

March 18, 2015, 10:26 a.m.

The Legal Insufficiency of the Infanticide and Neonaticide Paradigm

AN ESSAY BY MOLLY SANDERSON

The body of a newborn female infant was discovered in Ridgedale less than thirty-six hours ago, near the Essex Bridge. The medical examiner has not yet released an official cause of death, and the baby remains unidentified.

Many have concluded that the infant’s parents are responsible. Indeed, national statistics may support such assumptions. Children under the age of two are twice as likely to be murdered as they are to die in a car accident. According to recent Bureau of Justice statistics, in murders of children under the age of twelve, 57 percent of the perpetrators are the victim’s parents. Further, in those cases, women account for 55 percent of the defendants. Meanwhile, women account for only 10.5 percent of all murder defendants.

At the same time, our understanding of maternal psychological disorders is continuing to evolve. Once thought of as a disorder that struck women only immediately after birth, postpartum depression is now known to be far more disparate. Women can suffer from birth-related mood disorders as early as their first trimester of pregnancy; likewise, symptoms can first surface long after labor and delivery. Contrary to previous assumptions, maternal depression can also manifest in a myriad of ways, many far different from what some might consider traditional depressive symptoms, including psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders.

In the tragic event that a mother does take her newborn’s life—neonaticide—maternal depression, whether pre- or postnatal, often fails to meet the strict definition of insanity required by a court of law. Thus, expert testimony regarding the mother’s mental state will often be barred. However, even if insanity is not an appropriate defense, juries and judges could still be allowed to consider evidence of a mother’s mental state as one issue of fact to be weighed. This compromise alternative remains largely unexamined by our justice system. There are few areas of criminal law as unsettled as neonaticide. Often the severity of the crime is determined purely according to prosecutorial discretion; charges ranging from murder to illegal disposal of a corpse are common. Such inconsistency only serves to further complicate already volatile legal and emotional terrain.

There may be no crime more tragic than a mother taking her child’s life. But we cannot allow our fear about what the murder of a baby says about us as human beings to relegate it to the unexamined provenance of monsters. Because those monsters are somebody’s daughter or sister. They were once somebody’s mother.

COMMENTS:

JoshuaSki2

57 min ago

Speak for yourself, Molly Sanderson. No woman I know would ever kill her own baby. No way, no how. You know who does that? Animals. That’s who.

SaraBethK

55 min ago

Why are you trying to make this kind of behavior okay? “Anyone” could kill a baby?? Really? Lots of people have unexpected pregnancies and go on to raise happy babies or they give them up for adoption or they raise them to be unhappy—but they don’t KILL THEM!!! Why are you defending this mother when you don’t even know what happened?

MommaX

52 min ago

Lack of money=lack of education=fewer options and higher stress. 22% of American children live in poverty in the U.S., with the rates among minority children much higher. Maybe there are people who really are just evil. Or maybe there are people who are forced by circumstance to make awful choices.

WyomingGirl

50 min ago

Did any of you hear about that case in Newark where they found a dead baby and then a long time later they found out the mother was dead? She was murdered also. For all we know they just haven’t found the mother’s body yet.

Anniemay

45 min ago

Personally, I prefer to stay sold on the idea that it was some scared kids. But it would certainly be helpful if the police told us something more . . .

Gracie55

37 min ago

This whole thing sounds like a witch hunt to me. Why don’t we just round up everyone in Ridgedale who makes less than a certain dollar amount because unwanted pregnancies are more common in that group. Just because something is effective doesn’t make it right.

ariel.c

28 min ago

I’ve been biting my tongue here, but if no one else is going to say it I will. Absentee parenting. None of this ever would have happened if teenagers weren’t left unsupervised. I’m not saying it needs to be the mom. But it needs to be SOMEONE for God’s sake.

tds@kidsrus

25 min ago

Ariel, are you seriously blaming this baby’s death on working parents? We don’t even know who the baby belongs to! Grr.

HeatherSAHM

21 min ago

Okay, maybe Ariel could have said it better, but I get her point. The parents who abandon babies are usually young. And only a parent who is really out of touch—or simply out of the house—would not notice that their own child was pregnant.

246Barry

11 min ago

HE IS STILL OUT THERE. FIND HIM.

“Should we stop and get some ice cream, Cole?” Barbara called brightly as Steve drove them home. But she hardly felt lighthearted. Ever since she’d seen Cole’s terribly violent drawing—all the blood and that missing arm—Barbara had been frantic. Quietly, though. She’d been doing her very best to keep her worry to herself, or at least away from her son.

Cole’s appointment with Dr. Kellerman, a slight man with unnecessarily unkempt hair and saggy brown eyes, had been a real disappointment. It wasn’t much more than a glorified playdate. And it had been so traumatic being in that little observation room, watching Cole through the one-way glass as if he were some kind of animal. Barbara had kept promising herself that she wouldn’t get wound up afterward. But that was easier said than done.

“At this point, it doesn’t make sense to press Cole on exactly why he did the drawing,” Dr. Kellerman had said after his forty-five minutes of games and puzzles (and hardly any talking to Cole) were finished. “It’s unlikely that he even knows.”

“How can you possibly be sure?” Barbara had all but shouted. Unwise, obviously, unless she wanted to be blamed for everything. She couldn’t help herself though. “You barely
asked
Cole anything.”

“Trying to compel Cole to explain himself at this juncture would be both ineffective and counterproductive.” Dr. Kellerman’s voice had stayed calm, soothing, as if Barbara were the patient. “It would likely only add to his anxiety.”

“So that’s it?” Barbara asked.

“At this immediate moment, what triggered Cole to do that particular drawing isn’t nearly as important as managing his anxiety. That’s what’s behind both his acting out in school and the drawing.” The doctor went on, “With some careful assessment, we may find that his anxiety has been going on for quite some time, and these incidents represent some kind of peak. Sometimes it’s possible to notice certain sensitivities only in retrospect.”

“Cole isn’t sensitive,” Barbara had snapped. And that was that. She wasn’t listening to Dr. Kellerman anymore, and she didn’t care if he knew it. “He never has been.”

Besides, Barbara already knew exactly what was going on. Cole had heard something he shouldn’t have or seen some kind of violent video game or some bit of a terrible R-rated slasher movie, and it was haunting him. And there was only one place that could have happened: Stella’s house. It was that older son of hers, probably, or maybe some fly-by-night boyfriend of Stella’s. That was the best-case scenario: a movie, a game, something two-dimensional and not real-life.

Because Barbara had seen enough of Stella to know that there might be no end to the inappropriate nonsense that went on in her home.

“Honey, did you hear me about the ice cream?” Barbara called again.

When Cole still didn’t answer, she craned around, bracing herself to see him sitting there in his car seat, staring out the window in that awful zombified way. Mercifully, his head was tipped forward in his sleep. He looked so peaceful and perfect like that. The way he’d always been. It made Barbara want to cry. How could he have fallen apart so quickly and so completely?

“Home,” she whispered to Steve, motioning toward the backseat.

Steve glanced in the rearview at Cole sleeping, and nodded. He made a left onto Rainer Street, taking the back way, under the canopy of bowed beech trees on Mayfair Lane. Those trees had always seemed so magical and mysterious when Barbara was little, riding in the back of one of her dad’s Al’s Autobody pickups. Now they just looked ugly and evil.

She turned to look at Steve as he drove on. He was trying to seem relaxed, unconcerned, but she could see the worry gathered at the corners of his eyes. He’d actually seemed off ever since he came home to bring them to the appointment, even though he’d been fine that morning. Barbara hadn’t asked what had happened in the intervening four hours at work. She wasn’t going to, either. She didn’t care about any investigation right now, not even one about some poor baby.

What Barbara cared about was
her
baby. She would have preferred that Steve hadn’t gone into work at all that morning, but that was her husband: Duty calls, he goes. And now here he was, distracted again. She especially hated this particular faraway, worried look. She’d seen it before, and nothing good ever came of it.

Barbara had never liked the parties in the woods. Too out of control for her taste. Of course, that was what most of the other kids in Ridgedale High School loved about them. Sometimes as many as a hundred kids spread out all over the place—couples hooking up, boys playing their stupid game, girls gossiping in their cliques. Everyone drunk on the beers and whiskey they’d stolen from or been given at home. It was impossible to find any of your friends, and even when you did, everyone was too messed up to have an actual conversation. Barbara put up with the stupid parties, though, because Steve thought they were fun, especially “drunk obstacle,” not that he was ever allowed to play. He was never drunk enough.

Steve hadn’t proposed yet, but she knew he was planning to once they’d graduated. Sometimes she wondered if he’d already talked to her father about it. There was tension between Al and Steve whenever they were in the same room. But that might have been because the two men didn’t really like each other. Al had built the lucrative Al’s Autobody from the ground up, and he’d been looking forward to Barbara marrying someone to take over the family business. Instead, she had fallen in love with Steve, whose father had been a police sergeant killed in the line of duty back in Houston when he was six. Raised by the forever-frosty Wanda, who’d come to Ridgedale for a fresh start—a second cousin had offered her a good job at his insurance agency—Steve had always wanted to be a police officer like his father. He wasn’t going to give that up for Al’s Autobody, no matter how easy the money.

Even with a proposal in the works, Barbara knew she shouldn’t keep Steve on too short a leash. They’d be grown-ups before long, and Barbara didn’t want Steve to have regrets. And it was their senior year and, as Steve kept reminding her, their last chance to have fun. So she’d learned to bite her tongue and go to the parties in the muddy woods where she always ended up getting some piece of clothing smudged or torn. She tried to pretend to have fun sitting around on those soggy logs, talking to girls who’d been her friends for years but who she wouldn’t miss after graduation. And she let Steve go off with his teammates to play their stupid game and forget about her for an hour or an entire evening. Because he always came back when he was ready, every single time.

It wasn’t as easy to let him roam, though, once
she
started buzzing around, talking to Steve about her perfectly nice family who didn’t like her or the boys she loved who didn’t love her back or the boys who (naturally) dumped her once she’d lifted her skirt. Jenna had no shame, either. She couldn’t have cared less that Steve belonged to someone else. Not that Barbara was worried, because honestly, how could you take a girl like that seriously—garbage is as garbage does. And Steve knew better than to fall for Jenna’s bells and whistles. He loved Barbara. They complemented each other perfectly. Barbara was their head. Steve was their heart. He was just too nice to turn his back on some pathetic whore with no self-respect. And that might not have been a nice thing for Barbara to think, but that didn’t make it any less true.

By that last Saturday in May of their senior spring, Barbara had had enough of the parties. Still, she’d gone out to the woods again to make Steve happy, even though she’d had a splitting headache. Her only request was that they leave early. But when she wanted to go, she couldn’t find Steve anywhere. She looked for him for at least twenty minutes before she spotted him—not with the other boys, like she’d thought. Instead, there he was, at least a five- or ten-minute walk down the creek, sitting on a rock.
With
Jenna.

There was plenty of space between them, their hips weren’t even close to touching, and all they were doing was talking. But it was the
way
they were talking that made Barbara’s heart feel like it had been cleaved in two. Worse was the way Steve looked at Barbara as he tried to explain on the way back to his truck. His eyes were so filled with regret, not about what had happened but about what was
going
to happen. What Steve was helpless to stop.

“It’s okay,” Barbara had said, smiling hard and waving his explanations away like she didn’t have a care in the world. “You’re trying to help her, I know.”

Because the last thing in the world she wanted was for him to make
excuses
. She didn’t want to hear how much thought he’d already put into the whole situation.

“I do feel bad for her,” Steve had said once they reached his truck. And then he paused. There was a “but” there.
But that’s not . . .
Barbara had no interest in hearing the ending.

“Because you’re a nice guy, Steve.” She leaned over to kiss him before he could say anything else. “And that’s why I love you.”

As Steve carried Cole up to bed, Barbara sat down at the kitchen table with her coat still on. Their morning coffee cups were on the table, and there was unopened mail on the counter, and the pile of unfolded laundry and scattered toys. Ever since that meeting with Rhea, Barbara had been too distracted to worry about housework. After just a day of inattention, the house was falling into disarray. The mess couldn’t be helping Cole. Maybe it was making things worse.

Barbara jumped to her feet, snatched up a mug in each hand, and marched toward the sink, where the caked breakfast plates were piled up. Underneath were their dinner dishes from the night before in several inches of brownish, foul-smelling water. It was revolting. All of it. But she’d barely made it through dinner with Caroline after seeing that drawing—a drawing Cole seemed not to fully remember doing—never mind doing the dishes afterward.

She’d left it to Steve to get them an appointment with Dr. Kellerman in the morning. No matter what it took, she’d said before taking Cole up to bed. Steve surely had to pull strings, maybe throw his status around, to get them in so quickly. She was grateful he hadn’t felt the need to tell her about it.

Barbara was staring down at the disgusting filth when Steve came back downstairs.

“Well, he’s out cold,” he said with forced cheer, as usual trying to pump her up so he could sneak out the door. “If nothing else, that Dr. Kellerman sure knocks him out. Reason enough to go back.”

“I’m never going back there.” Barbara jammed her hands into the crowded sink. “And neither is my son.”

Why had she let herself think about that stupid party all those years ago? Because now here she was, about to have yet another fight with Steve without him knowing what they were actually fighting about. But she was suddenly so
angry
at him. Furious. All that history, he was responsible for every last page. Maybe if Barbara hadn’t been so distracted by
her
being back, she would have been paying more attention to whatever was happening with Cole.

As Barbara tumbled her hands around the sink, a glass stacked on top of one of the dinner plates slid off to the side. She grabbed for it, but it slipped through her fingers and shattered, the pieces vanishing into the grimy water below.

“Dammit!” Barbara yelled as she jerked off her coat and threw it on the floor. Then she grabbed the edge of the sink and started to cry.

“Whoa, hey,” Steve said as he came up behind her. She waited to feel his hands on her arms, but he didn’t touch her. “It’s going to be okay. Cole is going to be okay.”

Barbara turned around and pressed her face against his chest so she wouldn’t start screaming at him. Because everything seemed like his fault suddenly. She stayed there for a long time, until Steve finally patted her shoulders.

“You should get back to work,” she said, when he still hadn’t hugged her. Because that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? To get back to the job that Barbara was beginning to wonder if he might not love more than her. Anyway, if he stayed, she couldn’t be sure what she’d say. “I’ll be fine, really. I’ll be even better when I see you on the news announcing that you’ve arrested the person responsible for what happened to that poor baby.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t hold your breath.” Steve shook his head, then scrubbed his hands over his face.

Barbara took a breath:
Make nice, ask about it
. Steve hated it when she was cold, absolutely hated it. He didn’t ever
say
that, of course. Steve was never one to criticize, but he’d draw right back into that shell of his. And once he was tucked in there, it was impossible to pry him out.

“What about that girl in the hospital?” she asked.

He shook his head. “There’s something not right with that situation, given the way she took off,” he said. “But
her
baby isn’t
that
baby. Midwife swears she gave birth three weeks ago to an eight-pound baby. The ME isn’t ready to make an official announcement yet, but he’s sure the baby wasn’t that old.”

“But she ran away.”

“Who knows? Maybe your friend Stella put her up to that.” He was joking, that was clear. “Apparently, Stella really likes drama.”

“Drama? Who told you that?” Serious or not, he’d gotten the idea from somewhere.

“Oh, her friend Molly—Ella’s mom. The reporter for the
Ridgedale Reader
.”

“Did she mention Will or Cole? What did she mean, ‘drama’?”

“No, no, no.” Steve waved a finger back and forth. “I shouldn’t have even mentioned Stella. There’s no reason to think that she has anything to do with what’s going on with Cole.”

“But he heard or saw something somewhere, Steve. And it wasn’t here.”

“First of all, you’re deciding that’s true. That’s not what Dr. Kellerman said.”

“I know it’s true, Steve. Something happened to Cole when he was with Will. At his house.”

“Barbara, you
can’t
know that. Even Dr. Kellerman said it could be some kind of preexisting—”

“Steve, stop it!” Barbara shouted. “Stop making excuses so I won’t get angry at some woman you have no proof is innocent and who you don’t even know!”