Blind Spot (16 page)

Alexa slumped against the wall. “You don’t need Mr. Blanchard if Daddy’s coming home.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

P
eople who live in New England yearn for spring the way a convict yearns for early release, but New Englanders are inevitably disappointed, for the spring they dream of through the dark confinement of winter never comes to pass. Instead, winter melts into a series of raw, gray days, then it becomes hot as hell. Suki was a New Englander born and bred, and a lifetime of cold, wet springs had never managed to crowd out her hope that
this
April would be different.

As she stared through the raindrops streaking the windshield of Warren’s car, Suki searched for the sun, for a brief glimmer of light, of hope, a sign that this trip wasn’t just a futile attempt to convince herself that she had it within her power to help Alexa. It began to rain harder.

They were heading west on the Mass Pike, crossing the state to reach the little hamlet of Sunderland, where Finlay Thompson’s daughter owned a fishing cabin on Okemo Lake. Warren had found Finlay so quickly that Suki was still having difficulty believing it had been this simple, that McKinna had gone to all the trouble of getting Finlay out of town, then made it so easy to find him. Ellery either thought her a fool or was so convinced by his own lies that he didn’t think he needed to follow through on them. Both possibilities were encouraging.

Warren had simply walked into the rec center office and asked Alice where Finlay was. Alice told him Finlay was taking a short vacation at the lake before starting his new job. When Warren mentioned he might like to stop by for a visit, she gave him directions. Alice and Finlay’s daughter, Donna, were good friends.

Suki smiled weakly at Warren, who smiled back, then they both quickly turned their eyes to the windshield. She lifted her coffee from the cup holder and took a sip. It burned her tongue. “So …” She cleared her throat. “Sure worked out well. You figuring out where Finlay was so fast. This being Saturday, and all.”

“Yup,” Warren said, flashing her a toothy grin. “Worked out well.” In rhythm with the song on the oldies station, he tapped the dashboard with his right hand, but every once in a while he missed a beat—a dead giveaway that he was neither as calm nor as cheerful as he was acting. Either that or he had a very bad sense of rhythm. It crossed Suki’s mind that Alexa might be right about Warren’s romantic interest—he
had
always been very nice at Kyle’s soccer games—but then she dismissed the idea. Given the circumstances, it was just too absurd.

Suki ran her fingers through her hair and stared out at the rain. Warren switched the wipers to the next highest speed. She took another sip of her coffee. It was still too hot. “Lovely weather,” she said.

“Lovely,” he agreed.

It had been like this since they left Witton, almost half an hour before. Stilted. Wary. The air in the car thick with their awkwardness. They didn’t really know each other and now, suddenly, they were confined in a very small space. A space that felt ever smaller and more uncomfortably intimate as the sky lowered and darkened. Suki glanced at Warren. His hands on the steering wheel were large and capable, his chiseled profile intent, imperfectly handsome. She quickly returned her gaze to the rain.

Suki scoured her brain for something to talk about. Aside from being a Ph.D. student in biology and a soccer coach, Warren was also a science mentor at the high school. Ironically, Devin McKinna was one of the students with whom he regularly worked. But Devin McKinna didn’t seem an appropriate topic, and she didn’t know much about biology.

Warren ratcheted the wipers up another notch and began to whistle along with the radio, but had difficulty maintaining the sound; it came out like a lot of puffing and blowing. Suki found the sound endearing. As she watched the landscape rushing by, the rain-blackened trees, their forking branches growing more gaunt and crooked as they reached toward the sky, Suki wondered how she was going to convince Finlay to act against his own self-interest. She didn’t need advanced degrees in psychology to know this was not a common motivation for human behavior.

Suki closed her eyes. The rain droning on the roof grew softer then louder then softer again. She drifted in and out. She was playing volleyball with her mother in the middle of a lake without shores. She was climbing rocks with Stan and six-year-old Alexa. She was at summer camp with Finlay, who grew uglier and uglier and laughed louder and louder, his tongue hanging from his mouth as he taunted her for her stupidity. She was at a prison visiting Alexa.

Suki’s eyes flew open and she bolted upright. It was very warm in the car. She was sweating and her mouth was dry.

Warren turned onto the exit ramp. He pulled up to the toll gate, paid the fare and smiled at her. “Have a nice nap?” he asked.

Suki took a gulp of her now-tepid coffee. She leaned back against the headrest. “I don’t know if it really was a nap. But it wasn’t all that nice.”

“You have those directions?”

Suki nodded, relieved Warren had no interest in the details of her emotional state. The route wasn’t difficult, and within a few minutes they drove up to a small cabin perched at the end of a narrow finger of choppy, gray water. There was a dark midsize Buick in the gravel driveway. When Warren identified it as Finlay’s, Suki swallowed hard.

“Ready?” Warren asked, pulling up the hood of his raincoat. It was still pouring.

“Ready,” Suki answered, although she wasn’t.

Warren raced to the cabin. There were no gutters or overhangs on the house, and the rain rolled down the roof onto Warren’s hood. He banged on the door. When Suki saw the door swing inward, she followed.

“Warren,” Finlay was saying, his lined face creased in a smile of welcome, his brow puckered with uncertainty. “Come in, come in! Come in out of the rain. What brings—” He stopped when he saw Suki, and his face flushed a deep red. He squared his shoulders and straddled the threshold.

Suki stood on the walk letting the rain pour over her, her arms crossed over her chest as she silently watched Finlay.

“Let’s get inside, Suki,” Warren said as if Finlay weren’t blocking their way. “It’s raining out here, you know.”

Finlay grunted and stepped aside, allowing them to enter.

The modest wood-paneled room smelled of dampness and decline; it contained far too much furniture. Light from a single lamp cut a cone of brightness through the gloom in one corner. A book lay open on an overstuffed chair. Sherlock Holmes. Finlay shifted from one foot to the other. He didn’t take their coats or invite them to sit.

Suki took off her jacket and shook it over the mat at the front door, then she hung it on the back of a rocking chair and turned to Finlay.

Before she could say anything, Warren motioned toward the couch. “Why don’t we all sit?” he suggested.

Neither Suki nor Finlay moved.

Warren touched Finlay’s arm. “We have to talk.”

“Now’s not a good time,” Finlay said. “Lil’s not doing so well.”

“What’s wrong?” Suki asked, speaking for the first time. Lil was Finlay’s wife. She had baby-sat for Stan when he was little and, although they didn’t see much of her, she had remained in contact with the family, sending boxes of homemade Christmas cookies at the holidays and cards on the children’s birthdays. “Stan’ll be back with his tail between his legs,” Lil told Suki about a month after Stan left. Stan always said Lil called them as she saw them—whether or not anyone asked her to. And this was true enough. “He’s just a roamer,” Lil continued. “Never satisfied, even as a little boy.” Then she had pressed Suki to her huge bosom, immersing her in the smell of sugar cookies and toilet water. “But he’ll tire of his adventure. They all do. God bless ‘em.” Of course, calling them as she saw them didn’t mean Lil’s vision was all that keen.

Finlay didn’t acknowledge Suki’s question. He looked at Warren. “She’s in the kitchen.”

“How’s she doing?” Warren asked.

Finlay shrugged. “Good days and bad days. She goes in and out from minute to minute.”

Suki tried to remember if she had heard anything about Lil Thompson’s being sick, but came up empty. Yet clearly something was wrong. She looked into the kitchen.

Lil was there, seated at the Formica table, staring dreamily across the room at the stove, her head slightly bowed. She was wearing a housedress, the flowered cotton kind she had always favored. Her apron was on backward and her lipstick was drawn halfway across her left cheek. She had a large pink bow in her hair, the sort usually worn by five-year-old girls. Dementia, Suki thought. How awful.

When the old woman turned and saw Suki standing in the doorway, her face creased with joy. “Oh, my dear,” she said, clapping her hands together. “I’m so glad you’ve come so early. I didn’t expect you till dinnertime. I started to call, but when I went to use the phone, I forgot how it worked.” Lil’s matter-of-fact tone chilled Suki as much as her words. “I wanted to ask you if Gary could look at Dad’s car. It’s making an awful racket and I worry that Dad’s going to get stuck out on some deserted road all alone one night. But I told your father that I was sure Gary would know just what to do.” Gary was Lil’s son-in-law. Impaired recognition, not a good sign.

“Just tell her you’ll ask him,” Finlay said, coming up behind Suki.

“Of course,” Suki said smoothly. “I’m sure Gary will be glad to take a look.”

Lil smiled brightly, expectantly.

Finlay walked over to his wife and placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’re going to go into the living room and talk for a bit, Lil. Will you be all right in here by yourself?”

“You run along with the young folks, dear.” Lil patted Finlay’s hand. “You know I can’t talk to people anymore. I just forget what I’m saying and confuse everyone.”

Finlay leaned over and kissed her forehead, then motioned Suki to follow him. They left Lil in the kitchen, smiling vaguely in the direction of the living room.

“Oh, Finlay,” Suki said, forgetting, for a moment, the reason for their visit. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. Did they give you a specific diagnosis?”

“Doesn’t much matter to me what fancy name they call it.” Finlay dropped into the rocking chair, oblivious to Suki’s wet coat. He cracked each of the knuckles on his left hand.

“The reason it’s important is because some types are treatable,” Suki told him. “Depending on the cause. If the dementia’s from heart disease or an endocrine disorder, even a vitamin deficiency—”

“Last week,” Finlay interrupted, “instead of putting the newspapers in the closet, she put them in the oven and forgot they were there.” He cracked each of the knuckles on his right hand. “Started a fire the next morning when she went to bake some bread.”

Neither Suki nor Warren said anything.

“If Donna hadn’t happened by at the time, who knows how bad it could’ve been.” The shadows of the rivulets of rain cascading down the front window played across Finlay’s creased face, dripping and crossing one another, flickering gloom and gloomier. “Lil was such a lively young thing,” he said, his eyes focused on the past. “But now it’s like she’s just slowly fading away.…”

Suki turned from Finlay’s pain. Lil was visible through the kitchen doorway. Gradual onset, Suki thought, progressive decline. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she was—very, very sorry. Seeing Lil brought it all back. Her mother. How her mother had been. In and out. Missing. “My mother slowly disappeared, too,” Suki said.

Finlay turned from the window and their eyes met for the first time. “My Lil comes and goes. And every time she goes, I wonder if it means she’s not coming back. But the part of her that looks like her, whether she comes back or not, still needs to be taken care of.”

Suki understood all too well what Finlay meant. Her real mother, the mother who had read her stories and taught her to draw and passed on her love of historical novels and her empathy for the underdog, wasn’t always within the woman who looked and smelled like her mother. But, somehow, that made Suki love that woman all the more.

“I love her just as much,” Finlay was saying. “Maybe even more.”

Suki nodded, knowing he was going to have to make the same tough decision she had made. Probably soon.

“I’m going to have to put Lil in a home soon. For her own safety.” Finlay stared out the window again and the rain’s shadows intermingled with his tears. He didn’t sob or make any noise; the tears just flowed down his face: unimpeded, exposed, proud. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he said, “but I need my benefits. For Lil.”

Suki pulled some tissues from her purse and offered one to Finlay, but he shook his head. “I understand,” she said. “Really I do, but I still need to ask you to help me. I need you to come back to Witton with us. To talk to the police. To tell them the truth—to tell them the boys weren’t at the rec center that night. To clear Alexa. Please,” she pleaded, “I need you to help me save my daughter’s life. She’s just a child, a baby. She’s only seventeen.”

Finlay eyes still sparkled with tears. “I understand why you have to ask,” he said. “And I know you’ll understand when I tell you that there’s nothing new I have to say to the police, nothing to change from my original statement. There just isn’t anything I can do to help you.”

It seemed to Suki that she had known Finlay’s exact words before he formed them, as if she had heard each one in her mind a millisecond before he spoke it. Perhaps this was what Lindsey meant by clairvoyance. “But there is,” Suki cried. “There’s so much you can do. With a few simple words you can right a terrible wrong.” She leaned over and grasped Finlay’s hands in hers. “You’ve got to be feeling badly about this. I know that you must.”

“Lil’s my first priority.” Finlay tried to pull his hands away, but Suki would not let go.

“Look,” Suki said, “I know a lot of people in social services. I’m sure there’s a way we can get you some coverage. Or help: a homemaker, transportation, day care.” She squeezed his hands and then sat on the couch.

“Can you guarantee me that Lil will be in a nice place, that she’ll be taken care of, not just thrown away?”

“There are no guarantees, but—”