Blind Sight: A Novel (28 page)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
A
search team on snowmobiles discovered the body of Benjamin Rathers a week later.
Inside the ski jacket worn by Rathers was a map and directions—in Dunton’s handwriting—leading to White’s home. Found in the nurse’s garage—apparently dropped there while the body was being loaded into a vehicle—was an envelope addressed to White, also in Dunton’s handwriting. Next to that was a balled-up slip of paper with a message:
Don’t come tonight. Don’t call. FBI watching and listening. Funds are forthcoming
Also found on White’s property was a set of snowshoes and poles, as well as Rathers’ boots and gloves.
Found inside the White house was Lydia’s shoulder bag. While she’d turned her backpack over to the tatt-shop owner, she’d managed to keep the purse. Inside were more letters from White and Graham to the Duntons. They contained enough detail to lead the girl to Brule, the beginning of her quest to learn about her birth mother.
Of particular interest to Bernadette was White’s living room. It was exactly as she’d seen it in her dream, down to the pile of broken
Peanuts
Christmas statues. Bernadette guessed that the two women had been fighting, and one had taken her anger out on the other’s cherished statue collection.
Sitting unharmed on an end table was the little wizard statue stolen from Ashe’s barn.
Michelle Dunton—who’d been airlifted to the Twin Cities—kept her lawyer by her hospital bed. She grudgingly answered some questions and the rest of the details were filled in by a paper trail.
The senator’s home and offices were raided, as was the cabin where he and his entourage had stayed in Walker. Michelle Dunton’s personal journal was seized, as were records showing cash withdrawals over the years. The bank transactions weren’t large enough individually to attract attention. When they were added together, they came to a handsome sum and, with the other documents, painted an ugly story.
Dunton and White had met in the lobby of a real-estate office in Walker about seventeen years earlier. Dunton was in the early stages of a land deal that would eventually become the gated community on Walker Bay, and White was there to investigate putting her late grandparents’ lake home up for sale. The two ambitious professionals hit it off, and Dunton persuaded White to hold off meeting with an agent until he could get a look at the cabin.
As the pair walked around the White property, the nurse confided that she hated selling the place but needed money to help her partner—a woman she’d met in Vermont—relocate her midwife practice to the Midwest. She also had to pay off a pile of loans. White had spent years in medical school and had her dreams dashed by an accident: she’d lost her left hand while using a chain saw at the cabin.
Dunton made his own confession: he had a mistress who needed to quietly and privately give birth outside the state. Outside a hospital, if possible.
Dunton and White came to an arrangement: for a lump sum, the nurse and her midwife partner would deliver the baby in the woods of northwestern Wisconsin. They’d hiked in Brule and knew of a cabin they could rent.
At the last minute, Dunton’s mistress balked: she wanted to deliver in a hospital. In the process of trying to escape from White and Graham, she either fell or was struck in the head. While she was unconscious, they cut out the child. It was unclear how much Dunton had witnessed or participated in—Michelle Dunton repeatedly raised the question in her journal while refusing to discuss it from her hospital bed—but the end result was that the body of the mistress was dumped in the woods.
Dunton’s payments to the two women never stopped. Whenever they needed funds, they wrote to him and he sent cash. They liked to gamble, and a lot of their money went to the area’s casinos.
The infant survived, and was raised in the senator’s home. False adoption papers were cooked up, and the story told to Dunton’s intimates was that the couple never wanted Lydia to know that she wasn’t their biological child.
Sixteen years later, Lydia’s relationship with her parents—particularly with her mother—turned sour. The girl began misbehaving at home and at school. Became pregnant. In her journal, Michelle Dunton wrote about a huge fight shortly before she sent Lydia packing:
Wanted to tell her the truth about her mother, but Maggie begged me to keep my mouth shut. All these years, that’s been my most important job: keeping my mouth shut. I hate it. Hate her. Whenever I look at her, I see that Everette woman.
A brief entry after Lydia was kicked out hinted that Michelle Dunton may have been complicit in the girl’s death.
What a relief! Should have tossed her out years ago. Would have saved us so much expense and grief. This will be a happier Thanksgiving for me. For Maggie, too, if he’d only see the light on his spoiled brat. When Lydia calls for money—and she will—I’ll send her straight to her mother’s caregivers and let them deal with her. It’s their fault we got stuck with her.
Michelle Dunton faced multiple surgeries to repair the damage done by the bullet, and her attorney was adept at playing the sympathy card. Political pressure—combined with sketchy evidence that the woman had had any direct involvement in any of the murders—stifled efforts to file state or federal charges against the senator’s widow.
EPILOGUE
S
pring came surprisingly early to the north woods that year.
Garcia parked the truck outside the manicured patch of green and turned off the engine. “Gorgeous day” he murmured, looking through the windshield at the blue Wisconsin sky.
Bernadette addressed the backseat passenger while scratching his head. “We won’t be long.” Then to Garcia: “Roll the windows down more.”
“Should have left him at home,” Garcia grumbled. “We could have taken a smaller ride.”
“He likes country drives.” She threw open the front passenger door and inhaled deeply. “Smells like fresh-mowed grass.”
They closed the truck doors gently, as if doing otherwise would wake the dead. Garcia pushed open the rickety wooden gate and held it for her while she stepped through. A hedge of lilacs sat on either side of the entrance and served as a fence of sorts, buffering the graves from the dusty road that ran in front of the cemetery. The sweet scent of the purple flowers was intoxicating.
The two agents walked side by side on the sidewalk, a band of tar that sliced down the middle of the square of grass. Standing at the far corner was Jerry Dupray, his hands folded in front of him as he looked down at the ground. He was dressed in a windbreaker and khakis.
Making their way to Dupray, the two agents wove carefully around the headstones. A few of the monuments were tilted and seemed on the verge of falling over. Most of the markers were very old, and their inscriptions had been worn away by the elements. Fading snippets of information remained, making the stones seem even more tragic.
Beloved wife and mo …
Died at bir …
In memor…
Died Nov. 16, 18 …
“Jerry,” said Bernadette.
He looked up and grinned. “Bernadette,” he said, and took her hand in both of his. “Nice to see you again.”
“I’m Tony Garcia.” The two men pumped hands.
“Those for me?” Dupray asked, looking at the bouquet in Garcia’s free hand.
“Maybe next time,” Garcia said, and handed the flowers to Bernadette.
She leaned down and placed the roses on the grave. Bernadette said a quick, silent prayer and made the sign of the cross. The trio stood for a minute, staring at the stone marker. It was nothing more than a flat rectangle of rose-colored marble buried in the ground. How many lawn mowers had glided around it? How many shoes had stepped over or on it?
In the distance, barking. All three looked toward the truck. “Did you bring a furry friend?” asked Dupray.
“Baby,” said Bernadette.
“Doesn’t sound like a little dog.”
“He’s not,” said Garcia. “He’s a moose.”
Bernadette explained that it was named Baby because it had been found guarding the baby at White’s house.
“Sounds like a pretty smart pooch,” said Dupray “If you don’t want him—”
“Saint Clare and I have joint custody,” Garcia said with a grin.
Bernadette’s attention returned to the gravestone. “We’re happy we could come up with her identity, so you could change it.”
Jane Doe
was now
Samantha Everette
.
Dupray hunched over the grave, rearranging the roses a bit. “Too bad her parents still don’t give a shit.”
Bernadette and Garcia had traveled to the mother’s home in Phoenix to deliver the news that her estranged daughter had died sixteen years earlier and had finally been identified. After hearing the sordid details of Samantha’s murder, and examining a photo of her dead granddaughter and her living great-granddaughter, the woman had shrugged. “What do you expect me to do?”
Contacted by telephone in Alaska, Everette’s father had given a similarly muted response. “Sam and me, we never had much to say to each other.”
Dupray stood up. “How’d the little baby make out?”
Garcia: “We’re not privy to—”
“Spare me,” said Dupray. “You FBI guys know my mother’s maiden name and what I had for breakfast last Tuesday.”
“David Strandelunder gave her up for adoption,” Bernadette said. “We heard a farm couple got her.”
He nodded. “Good. That’s good.”
“I grew up on a farm,” Bernadette added. “She’ll work her hind end off, but she’ll be safe and happy.”
“Did they give her a name yet?”
“I have no idea,” said Garcia.
“Do me a favor and find out,” said Dupray, his eyes locked on the rose stone. “I could amend the marker again.”
“What would you add?” asked Bernadette.
Dupray looked up. “Loving mother of Lydia and grandmother of…”
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Missing Persons, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY
and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Persons, Terri, 1958–
Blind sight / by Terri Persons. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Saint Clare, Bernadette (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. United States.
Federal Bureau of Investigation—Officials and employees—Fiction.
3. Precognition—Fiction. 4. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.E797B55 2009
813′.6—dc22
2008041781
eISBN: 978-0-385-53036-1
v3.0
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