Angels Burning (28 page)

“That's when Cami got the idea to make Jessy have a baby. She got all excited. It was going to be like a scientific experiment. She said the best way to do it was to make Jessy think Cami wanted to have a baby more than anything in the world and was worried she never would 'cause she'd be too busy with her job. She said if Jessy thought she could make her jealous she'd do anything. And damn, if she wasn't right. It took some time, but Jessy got pregnant.”

She has a pleased smile on her face when she finishes.

“That's terrible,” I say.

My opinion doesn't sway her own.

“What's the matter? Don't you like babies? It's no big deal. Cami was right about how Jessy's life would turn out anyway.”

Our conversation is apparently over. Madison turns suddenly and heads down my porch steps, pausing at the bottom to look left and right, then takes off across the street at an unflattering jog that makes the roll of belly above her shorts shudder.

I go inside with my prize.

I'm not thrilled to hear about this side of Camio, but I'm not all that surprised. She was a teenage girl, quite possibly the meanest creature on earth. Even the best of them can have their moments of brutality.

I check on Mason and his marshmallow. I estimate he's roasting his third one already. I give him a graham cracker and part of a Hershey's bar and tell him that's enough and that I have a little work to do.

He makes his final s'more and follows me inside.

I take a seat at the kitchen table and pull Camio's binder out of the backpack. It's the standard three-ringed kind that can be found in any high school or college classroom, filled with lined composition paper covered with neat, careful writing in blue pen. Photos have been taped among the words. Each is of a different family member. Madison was right in that there isn't much text and what is here isn't psychological. Instead, Camio's jotted down the observations of any layman, much of it anecdotal, some of it interesting, most of it innocuous.

There's Tug and Jessy. Her mom. Uncle Eddie. Her dad and Shane. Grandma Miranda. Derk. Some random aunts, uncles, and cousins.

I turn to the last few pages and there's a picture of an elderly woman I've never met.

She's standing in a kitchen in front of a stove with a wrinkled old hand resting on the handle of a teakettle, smiling pleasantly, wearing a pair of lavender polyester pants and a blouse with tiny violets sprinkled over it. Her hair is a cap of pewter curls.

“Great-aunt Adelaide,” Camio has written.

I grab my nearest pair of glasses and begin to read.

I've never met Great-aunt Adelaide but I plan to soon. We've never been allowed to have anything to do with her because she and Grandma had a falling-out a long time ago and were never able to make up. I think this is very sad, since they're sisters . I want to find out what happened. I wonder if Adelaide was jealous of Miranda.

This is all she's written. There's no mention of why she decided to finally reach out to Adelaide, or if someone else was behind it, or if the meeting ever happened. I saw Camio's phone log and all the numbers were accounted for. She never called her great-aunt or received a call from her.

I peer closer at the photo. What I can see of Adelaide's kitchen is neat and clean but humble. I recognize the gray linoleum spattered with color like a few paintbrushes have been flicked over it as a style popular in the fifties. The curtains look homemade: a thin, partially see-through fabric of bright red apples trimmed in green eyelet. The refrigerator is an old model, a plain white rectangle with no signs of an icemaker or water dispenser.

Beyond her is a doorway to another room. I see the foot of a bed. I imagine the house is small like a cabin.

My heart almost stops.

I strain my eyes as much as possible, but I'm still not sure I'm seeing what I'm seeing.

I get up from the table and start throwing open drawers looking for the magnifying glass I confiscated from Everhart last summer when I found him and Dewey out in the station parking lot using it to burn ants.

It was a slow summer.

I find it and hold it over the photo. My hand starts to shake and I steady it with my other hand.

There's no mistaking what I'm looking at. The bed in Adelaide's house has a bed skirt and comforter on it from the Jessica Simpson Sherbet Lace collection.

NOLAN AND I DRIVE
in silence once again. He doesn't ask if I'm feeling any better after the Massey shooting. He doesn't give me an update on Zane's condition or the search for my brother. He doesn't wonder if I've looked further into opening a doodad shop and acquiring a bunch of cats. He doesn't express any concern for Shawna Truly and how she might be doing after confessing some truly horrible details of her life yesterday that she's probably never told anyone before and then going right back to that life. He doesn't praise me for my dogged perseverance and attention to detail that has led to discovering what might turn out to be the key piece of evidence necessary to solve the Camio Truly homicide.

He does practically rip my head off for not telling him earlier about my conversation with the ladies at the Sanctuary regarding Miranda Truly and her somewhat unhealthy relationship with her sister, Adelaide, and her nephew Eddie's attempt to kill her with an ax.

“You need to decide if you're a law enforcement officer or a glorified babysitter who ignores the rules and does whatever the hell she wants,” he told me roughly.

When he put it that way, I kind of preferred the second option.

In all fairness to Nolan, when I came out of the academy with commendations for sharpshooting and academic excellence I looked like I had all the makings of a dedicated, level-headed, proficient trooper and
might be a prime candidate for his beloved Criminal Investigations Division.

Nolan was not quite thirty but already a supercop by then. Already in CID. Already had the presence and demeanor of a leader and possessed that rare combination of gruff empathy and subtle sanctimony that made witnesses and suspects alike want to earn his esteem if only so he'd be on their side; he was a bully with a conscience.

He took an interest in me, not entirely professional but mostly. For all his sexist bluster, Nolan is a big supporter of women's rights. He has three daughters who all graduated from college, moved away, have careers and families, and manage to continue to love him even though he wasn't the most attentive father in the world and their mother probably fills their heads with tearful tales of neglect and woe during her constant visits, but I could be wrong about that. I shouldn't judge his wife. If she does complain about him, she probably has every right to do so.

Nolan had high hopes for me. Law enforcement in general is still very much a boys' club, and if municipal police departments have the metaphorical equivalent of a chain-link fence around them to keep females out, the state police have ten-foot-thick, towering stone walls with a fire-breathing dragon at the gate. He thought I could be one of the first women to break through the ramparts. Instead, I let down myself and my gender in the worst possible way: I let a man get to me.

My feelings for Nolan had become a distraction and were causing me to act recklessly. Sleeping with John to arouse his jealousy was incredibly stupid, hurtful, unprofessional, and just the beginning. I saw a future where I'd end up screwing every trooper in my barracks because I couldn't have the one I wanted.

I've never told him why I left. I've allowed him to believe that I couldn't hack it and, in a sense, I couldn't. I let my female desires come before my public-servant duties, and I know he would never be able to forgive me for that, but I've often wondered if he would care about me at all if I put being a cop in front of being a woman.

I try to enjoy the drive as much as possible. I watch the green humped hills fly by my window while Nolan stares straight ahead, yet I
know his eyes behind his glasses are darting all over the interstate searching for signs of motorists behaving poorly or strangely or in need of assistance.

It's another sunny day without a cloud in the hazy, Vaseline-coated empty blue sky. This weather makes it impossible for me not to recall childhood summer memories full of greasy, sweet county-fair smells, the lazy buzzing of bees, warm pavement beneath bare feet, and the promise each day presented no matter how badly the one before had ended. I was a kid but no longer a baby, old enough to know better but not old enough to know best: the recipe for hope. I miss that feeling.

I called Nolan the minute I discovered the comforter in the photo of Aunt Adelaide. There was no point in trying to begin a full-on investigation in the middle of the night. He decided to wait for daylight.

In the meantime he contacted the local barracks where Adelaide lived and found out her surviving daughter, Angela—now in her sixties, happily married, residing in Ohio, a grandmother of seven—had called the police recently because she couldn't get in touch with her mother. She said they talked frequently and she was worried because of her advanced age.

The cops found her place empty and her door unlocked. Her purse, wallet, and car were still there.

Nolan didn't uncover Adelaide's suspicious disappearance during his own investigation because she isn't a Truly and she doesn't reside in his zone. She was born a Thorpe and married Joey Bertolino, the middle child of another big, sprawling family, but this one made up of hardworking, hard-playing Italian miners. She was only related to the Trulys through her sister Miranda's marriage to one.

Despite these factors, and even though the missing-persons report was only filed yesterday, I know Nolan's beating himself up for not catching the connection, but because she's been reported missing, he's already able to have a team waiting here to search the place. There will be no more delays in discovering what happened to Great-aunt Adelaide if something happened to her at all.

The circumstances aren't looking good for her, though. Women in
their eighties don't just disappear. They also don't usually kill teenage girls, especially not by swinging heavy objects at them hard enough to crack open their skulls. Even though Addy may turn out to be the owner of the comforter that was wrapped around Camio, it's doubtful she was her killer.

Since Nolan neglects to tell me anything about the search for my brother during our drive, I assume this means he has no news. I'm trying not to think about what will happen if we don't find Champ. I'm worried for his welfare, but I have to admit I'm worried about mine, too.

I'm fifty years old. I've never been married or had children. I've never even had a pet. I don't consider myself to be a good candidate for instant motherhood.

I used to wonder what kind of mother I'd be and the thought would often scare me. I wanted to believe I'd be a good one, but I didn't have a good role model.

Our mother always did whatever she wanted to do without giving much thought to what she should do. She only tended to our needs when they coincided with her own or she was bored, but I know she didn't think she was neglectful.

I once heard a boyfriend ask her as they were departing the house for the night if my siblings and I would be all right staying home alone. Mom flashed me one of her dazzling smiles that always made me want to do her bidding and kick her teeth in at the same time.

“Dove is smarter than any grown-up I know,” she said sweetly and probably truthfully. “And besides, what's so hard about staying home? She knows how to change diapers and call the fire department.”

I was eight.

But truth be told, being left alone to fend for ourselves didn't bother me as much as her disinterest in our lives. I had lots of friends and spent time hanging out at their homes starting when I was in elementary school all the way through high school.

I saw moms drop whatever they were doing to rave over a gold star on a spelling test or an art-class project. I saw them sit down at the
kitchen table and ask about their daughters' days and listen to every inane detail. I saw them surprise their daughters with outfits they bought at Rankin's, and
Tiger Beat
magazines they picked up at the newsstand, and packs of silver- and gold-plated barrettes they grabbed on their way out of Woolworth's, with explanations that were given almost as afterthoughts but to me were astounding proclamations of intimate vigilance.

“I saw this when I was out shopping today, honey, and I thought it would look cute on you.”

“Look who's on the cover! I know you love this actor.”

“I picked these up for you; I remember you told me you lost a barrette in gym class last week.”

My mother never could have done any of that for Neely or me for the simple reason she didn't know anything about us. She went to her grave not knowing our favorite colors, favorite music, what we wanted to be when we grew up, the names of our friends, what scared us, what made us laugh, what we did in school that day because she never asked.

She might come home one night with a whole stack of movie magazines she wanted to read and we'd all sit on the couch and look at them together, or sometimes when she had an extra-generous boyfriend, she'd buy us an expensive pair of shoes or a coat or a dress, but it was always stuff we'd never wear because it wasn't what we liked.

From watching my friends at home with their moms, I learned the most important aspect of a mother's love was not the intensity but its reliable consistency.

I don't know what kind of mother Great-aunt Adelaide was to her two daughters, but I'm willing to bet she was a good one. I get a mindful, nurturing vibe from her before we even set foot inside her home.

I was right about the size of her house. It's barely more than a cabin. From the outside it looks like a child's drawing: a square base, a triangle for a roof, two identical-size windows with parted curtains symmetrically placed on either side of a red door. It's painted yellow and has two rows of red tulips planted in beneath the windows.