Senseless Acts of Beauty (17 page)

Her older, wiser self, conscious of Riley standing next to her, tried to keep her mouth shut, but there was no restraining the mouthy fifteen-year-old within her. “You know, Rodriguez, you could have just asked me on a date, and we could clear up all this sexual tension.”

“The new law allows us to test old evidence. The new tests give better, more accurate results. The combination of the law and technology activated a whole slew of cold cases—”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

“Do you ever take anything seriously, Tess?”

The use of her name stunned her. She didn’t like the way he spoke it, didn’t like the way it sounded falling off his lips. That was her new name, that was her new life. Rodriguez was her old life. And in her new life, there was only one thing—one young girl—who she cared about enough to take seriously.

Riley removed her hand from Tess’s arm and laid it firmly on her back.

Well, Tess thought, maybe two.

“Victims have rights, too,” Tess said, the stair creaking beneath her as she shifted her weight. “You told me that once.”

“You gave me permission to investigate this case a long time ago.”

“When I was half conscious in a hospital bed. There’s no statutory limit on that kind of permission?”

“Victims of sexual assault”—he paused, his gaze flickering to Riley, checking her face for acknowledgment—“often don’t pursue prosecution out of some misguided sense of guilt or shame—”

“Now you’re a shrink.”

“Some cases I wouldn’t pursue. I’d let them go cold and keep them in a box in the basement.” That anvil jaw shifted. “But I knew Theresa Hendrick when my badge was still shiny. Theresa’s a tough young woman who has lived a tough life. She is strong enough to handle this.”

“You don’t know anything about me, Rodriguez.”

The words came out of her like fire but they were a lie. She knew it, and worse, he knew it. This cop knew more about her than her own classmates at Pine Lake. He’d arrested her when she’d stolen tampons from Ray’s. He’d brought her back home to the cluttered house and met her drunken mother, who’d answered the door braless in a tank top, clutching a can of some off-label beer. He’d caught her half naked with a boyfriend in the Cannery. He’d sat next to her hospital bed where she’d lain, bruised and battered, describing the man who raped her.

Maybe that’s why she was always pushing him away.

He said, “Once I realized the statutory limits could be circumvented, I went back to the evidence files to see if any further investigation was even possible.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “It turns out we still have your old rape kit.”

Tess flinched. She remembered the sore swabbing, the plastic zip of her clothing into marked forensic bags, including her favorite cotton-soft sleep shirt, stained with blood and semen.

“The chances of any retrievable DNA from a fifteen-year-old kit were low,” he continued, “but so was the chance of Theresa Hendrick showing up in Pine Lake so many years after the crime.”

Her heart tripped. “What, a girl can’t come home and see her friends?”

“C’mon, Hendrick, I know how impossible it is for you to ask for real help. Why the hell else are you here, lying low in Camp Kwenback, visiting me under false pretenses in the precinct, other than to help in the prosecution?”

Sadie.
Tess closed her eyes, willing away the first stab of a rising migraine. Rodriguez had jumped to conclusions. She couldn’t challenge those conclusions because she couldn’t tell Rodriguez about Sadie.

“So I did,” he continued, “what I had to do. I sent the rape kit to an upstate crime lab to be retested. I called in an old favor and appropriated special funds in order to have it expedited.”

“Don’t you have any hot city hall embezzling crimes to investigate? Bar fights to prosecute? Stoners to rout out of the Cannery?”

“Some cases stick in a cop’s mind.” His nostrils flared as he flattened a hand on his bent knee. “Some cases make a cop wonder if he couldn’t have done something earlier to prevent them from ever happening.”

She felt a strange vibration and realized she was shaking. She stared at the trembling palms of her hands, thinking about one night when he’d dragged her home. She remembered his face when her drunk of a mother opened the door. She remembered him holding her back by the arm as she tried to shoot into the house and seek safety in her upstairs room. She remembered him several days later, pulling up to her on the street, talking to her momentarily sober mother, lingering on the porch, finally handing her his card.

You’re going to need this someday.

She’d torn it into pieces, put the pieces in an ashtray, and set them on fire.

“They found DNA, Tess,” he said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to run through a criminal database.”

Her blood left her extremities, her body went cold, and she felt the pinprick of numbness in her fingers and toes.

“This morning,” he added, “we got a hit.”

Tess took a step back and stumbled up the porch. She didn’t want to hear this. She resisted the childish, irresistible urge to slap her hands over her ears, to strike them and strike them and strike them so she wouldn’t hear the name of her rapist. And once again she was in her childhood bedroom with the sound of the bolt giving as he broke open the door, and there he was looming over her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Tess’s voice shook as she backed up against the door. “I told you not to do this.”

“We’ve got him, Tess.” Rodriguez’s brow rippled. “He’s in jail on another assault charge, but he’s up for parole in a few months.”

A few months.
She looked wildly at Riley’s stricken face, willing Riley to make him stop.

“We can prevent him from doing this to any other woman,” Rodriguez persisted, “when you press charges, face him in court, and tell the truth.”

Everybody was so convinced that truth was always a good thing—but it was a lie that saved Sadie. Sadie grew up in a bubble of happiness with a loving family, having all the clothes and food and protection that she needed as she had grown into the young woman who’d shown up at Camp Kwenback—because Tess gave her up to let Sadie live with a lie that wasn’t born out of an act of bloody violence.

She said, “I’m leaving.”

Rodriguez lifted his foot off the last stair and stood, legs splayed, blocking her path down the stairs. “You ran once. That didn’t solve anything.”

“You can’t force me to testify.”

“You’ll let a rapist go free?” He skewered her with an eye. “You’ll let him go free to do this to another woman?”

“You always were a bastard, Rodriguez—”

“You won’t disappoint me.” He shook his head, convinced. “Not in this.”

She couldn’t seem to breathe. Rodriguez wouldn’t move, and he was so big, looming over her. Riley gripped her arm from behind, and Tess tried to shake it off, but Riley only shook her harder.

“Tess,” Riley said, yanking.
“Tess.”

Tess whirled on her, ready to shout, but Riley wasn’t looking at her. Riley was staring down the gravel road. Tess’s heart skittered as she turned around and saw Sadie coming up the road, leaning over the handlebars of her bike, pumping hard, the gravel grinding under the rubber of her wheels.

By instinct Tess pressed down on the stair beneath her right foot like she was pressing down on the brake. By instinct her right hand sought the ball of the gear shift, grasping, her thoughts stuttering ahead to the coordination needed to downshift to slow all sixty-two thousand tons of her eighteen-wheeler down. Her fellow big-rig drivers had warned her about this all the time. You work in this business long enough, they said, you’ll be caught up, you’ll feel a tremendous hit. Sometimes Tess felt that her whole life she’d spent roaring seventy miles an hour down a snow-dusted road with her headlights illuminating only the next one hundred yards or so—tense for those white lights to flash on something—a hitchhiker, a herd of elk, a ghost—too late for her to downshift, too late for her to stop.

Because Tess knew by the furious way Sadie skidded to a stop at the bottom of the porch, by the way she ignored the police officer; by the way she planted her feet on the ground and eyeballed them.

Sadie
knew
.

W
hy didn’t you tell me?”

Sadie crossed her arms and ignored the police officer. Riley had probably called the cop to take her away, like some collarless dog caught pooping in the front yard. But Sadie didn’t care about police officers or foster care or any of that right now. She was too focused on ignoring the blonde standing next to Riley. She was too focused on watching Riley, who’d stilled like a rabbit Sadie had once startled while walking in the woods.

Riley said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know what I’m talking about.” Sadie tried to shift her gaze to the woman in black but she just couldn’t. It was like there was a doorstop on her eyeballs, preventing them from turning in that direction. “You both know what I’m talking about. You and
her.
”

Riley took a step down the stairs. “Sadie, why don’t you come inside—”

“You know where I just came from?” Sadie settled her weight on the far back of the bicycle seat. “I was doing a little shopping, thinking how very
nice
you’ve been to me these past weeks, how much I was going to miss being someplace where someone gave a damn about me. Then guess who I bumped into?”

Riley poised on the bottom stair, stricken, the Tess-woman pacing beyond her.

“Old Mrs.
Hendrick
, that’s who.” Sadie couldn’t seem to stop bobbing her head. It was like that plastic Elmo figure that her mother used to keep on the dash of the car. “Old Mrs. Hendrick stared at me with those buggy green eyes, dropping a jar of pickles like she’d just seen a ghost.”

The blonde made a quiet, strangled sound while Riley stared at Sadie with those troubled eyes. And Sadie worked it all out quickly, adding that choking noise to all the other evidence until she couldn’t deny that every clue led to what she’d been too afraid to believe.

Tess Hendrick really was her birth mother.

Her mind pivoted away from that truth, a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree screaming mental swivel. No way on earth was that nosy, tatted oil-trucker her mother. That prickly jerk had been living in the same inn with her for all this time, doing her best to push her away. Sadie wished she was young enough to pretend she didn’t see it, pretend she didn’t know what she now knew, wished the trucker would stop pacing and say something.

Then the cop, who’d been standing there like a stone, said, “Someone tell me what’s going on—”

“It’s none of your business.” Sadie didn’t have any trouble glaring at the cop, though a shiver of prickles spread across the back of her neck. An odd expression passed across his face, a quiver of what looked like confusion. Maybe he’d seen her around town, marked her as a runaway already. She didn’t care. He was a stranger, and he had nothing to do with this. He could just butt the heck out.

Then she focused on Riley, because Riley had known, Riley should have told her, Riley she’d trusted.

“You lied to me.” Her mouth felt hot.

Riley opened her mouth to say something but nothing came out.

“I thought I could trust you.” Sadie gripped the handlebars, feeling an urge to back away and then pedal out of here. “You knew all this time, and you didn’t tell me anything.”

“I didn’t know until last night.” Riley shared a look with the blonde, now sinking into a crouch at the top of the stairs. “I would have told you if I could. But this isn’t my secret to tell.”

“Yeah, I get it. You kept to the girl code.” Sadie lifted her fingers in air quotes. “You two were just protecting each other. Pine Lake High, rah, rah, rah.”

She hated that Riley had such a quick excuse, such a reasonable one, too, because Sadie remembered seeing the two of them pacing around the bears by the mini-golf in the middle of the night. She didn’t want to believe Riley didn’t know until just then. She didn’t want to believe that Tess could have kept this secret so long. Sadie looked down at her knuckles, turning white where they crushed the pink rubber of the bike’s handles.

She wished there were just one person in the whole, wide world she could really, truly trust.

“Tess,” Riley said, over her shoulder, “why don’t you walk down to the boathouse? You two can have a little privacy there.”

“Who says I even want to talk to her?” Sadie felt panic rise within her. “Who says I’m hanging around to listen to whatever she’s got to say to me now, when all she’s wanted to do all this time is get rid of me?”

She’d envisioned this so differently. She’d imagined calling her birth mother first, maybe hearing the sound of a dog barking in the background, the sound of food sizzling on a skillet, the rumble of a husband’s curious voice. She imagined the surprised pause, the voice that held a catch of tears, a confession that she’d always known this day would come. Sadie imagined a sudden invitation to visit, an offer of a weekend to meet the extended family, a plane ticket paid and forwarded through the mail. She imagined a meeting in a bright, white airport where she’d dress right, in nice shoes and a swirling dress with her hair pulled back. In her mind, when she saw her birth mother—a soft woman with sad eyes and a trembling lip, because she was sure she’d recognize her immediately in the crowd, as if a light shone only on her—she’d open her arms and start running.

Sadie heard the creaking of the floorboards as the blonde jerked up, swiveled, and walked into the inn, and Sadie could only guess that she kept walking through to the sliding back door and then down to the boathouse by the lake.

Sadie stared at the door, breathing hard. Riley placed her hand on her shoulder. Sadie jerked, trying to knock it off, but Riley just held on all the tighter.

“Remember in the attic,” Riley said, “when I told you my story?”

Sadie remembered fragments of that afternoon, the dust motes swirling in the light coming through the window, the smell of pine resin, the musty book full of old photos, and most of all, the pain in Riley’s voice as she talked about her birth mother’s rejection.

“Even in the best of situations,” Riley said, “a conversation like this is going to be difficult. Maybe you should put it off until you’re feeling strong and clear-headed—”

“Why? Am I not going to like what she’s going to say?”

Sadie tripped into Riley’s melted-chocolate eyes in the hope of seeing some real assurance; some guarantee that Tess had a good reason for skulking around Camp Kwenback without saying a word. But Sadie knew how to read people. She understood what it meant when someone stared at you while a muscle flickered in the corner of their eye and the edges of their smile quivered. For all of Riley’s mustered confidence, her hand trembled upon Sadie’s shoulder.

“You’ve had a shock, Sadie,” Riley said. “You can choose to wait.”

She heaved in breath after breath, and it wasn’t because she’d raced back from town. She knew she didn’t have any real choice. Yeah, she could back up and turn the bike down the path and race away, but that cop was watching this whole scene like he was taking notes to be tested on it later. It wasn’t likely she’d make it to the train station to catch the 10:30 a.m. to Manhattan without him driving up, lights twirling, to seize her for the usual do-gooder interrogation.

“I’m not waiting.” She swung her leg off the bike. “This is what I came all the way up here for.”

She left the bike in Riley’s care as she turned toward the beaten path around the side of the lodge. She walked as if both her legs had fallen asleep, stumbling, weaving a path toward the boathouse she could just see through the stand of birch trees. One part of her hoped the blonde wouldn’t be there. She hoped that the coward had scrambled up to her room to pack rather than face her after so much time. If that were the case, then Sadie could shrug it off like it didn’t matter that her birth mother had rejected her not once, but twice. At least she could avoid this confrontation that her birth mother didn’t want anything to do with anyway. She could head back to Queens with Plan D in her mind and never give her trust to a stranger so easily again.

Her heart did a little double trip when she squinted and caught sight of the figure in black pacing on the boards.

Suddenly every step was a strain. When Sadie finally reached the shade of the boathouse, she avoided the blonde’s eyes. A breeze rustled the trees, sweeping through the open area, bringing the odor of muddy banks, a vague smell of fish. Two paint-chipped boats were roped in two bays and knocked up against the pilings. She walked toward the closest bay where she leaned against one of the posts.

Birds shouldn’t be singing. The water shouldn’t be gurgling against the banks. The sun felt warm on her hair, and it all just made her mad.

The blonde wandered into the shadow of the next bay, her arms crossed, her gaze on her own toes like she was checking her nail polish. “Did she say anything to you? My mother? At the grocery store?”

“Doesn’t matter what your mother said,” Sadie said. “I want to hear everything from you.”

Already the blonde was trying to get Sadie to make this easy, to breeze over the details she might already know.

“Everybody’s telling me she’s sober now.” Tess scraped her flip-flop against the boards. “I haven’t seen her so I don’t believe it. She was never sober when I lived here.”

Sadie remembered the vague scent of neglect that clung to Mrs. Hendrick, but she hadn’t smelled any alcohol on her. If this woman was looking for sympathy, Sadie would rather give it to the devil.

“So,” Tess said, “you’re probably wondering why I wrapped you as a baby in a Camp Kwenback towel.”

Sadie bumped against the post. She had a hundred million questions, but that particular one she hadn’t intended to ask—at least not right away.

“That’s what led you to Pine Lake, right?” Tess asked. “The strange thing is, that’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen.”

Sadie felt splinters tug on her T-shirt as she sank against the post like she’d been hit right in the chest with a dodge ball. So there it was, an admission that her birth mother hadn’t ever wanted Sadie to find her at all.

As if Sadie needed more proof.

“I ran away from Pine Lake twice when I was younger than you.” The woman gripped her arms hard. “The first time I didn’t know where I was going. I just headed out through these woods. I stumbled upon this place by mistake when I saw the light through the back windows. I crept up and peered through and saw Bud sitting by the fire reading the paper. I saw Mary with her feet up on the table, talking on the phone. Bud and Mary—Riley’s grandparents—they took me in, no pesky questions. Just like Riley did for you.”

Sadie tightened her jaw because that sounded like her own story. She’d trudged blindly through these woods, too, on the day she’d hopped off the train. She remembered being worried she’d never find her way out of the woods until she saw the line of broken-down cabins, and beyond, the spill of golden light out of the lodge and a redhead sweeping the back porch with a real broom.

“Riley’s grandparents let me sit around by the fire and do nothing.” Tess squinted down at her feet. “Mary served me hot chocolate and corn chowder and gingersnap cookies until I couldn’t eat any more. The best thing about that visit is that, for weeks, I didn’t have to clean floors or go grocery shopping or do anything but come home from school, do my homework, and run wild in the woods. They even made my bed.” Tess took great interest in rubbing one flip-flop against the other. “I felt like a kid instead of the nursemaid I’d become. Riley tells me you know how that feels, too.”

Sadie’s shoulders tightened. So Riley had told Tess about Nana, too. Well, Riley sure had been free and loose with Sadie’s secrets, as free and loose with them as she’d been tight-lipped about Tess’s.

Her anger focused to a pinpoint that threatened to burn a hole in the floorboards at her feet. “If you liked Riley’s grandparents so much,” she retorted, “why did you go steal a towel from them?”

“That towel wasn’t the first thing I’d filched without paying.” The Tess-woman shrugged. “I didn’t have a lot of sense back then. And though I didn’t know it at the time, when I stole that towel, I was pregnant with you.”

Sadie’s gaze wandered to Tess’s belly. She couldn’t envision anything growing under that wall of muscle. And she didn’t feel any sort of umbilical cord bond tugging at her, like she’d always expected to feel, even as she hated herself for searching for it.

“Rodriguez, the cop you just got all mouthy with,” Tess said, still nattering on about nothing, “he kept coming by Camp Kwenback where I’d holed up. He made all the guests nervous, and I didn’t like doing that to Bud and Mary. So I left Pine Lake and took that towel with me.” The blonde’s voice hitched in a funny way. “I stole that towel, Sadie, because I needed to remember that there were two people in the world who gave a sh”—she paused, her jaw working—“who
cared
about me. And they weren’t even my biological parents. I bet you know how that feels, too.”

“You don’t get to ask about that.” Sadie kicked a leaf off the edge of the bay into the water. “You don’t get to talk about my parents.”

Sadie’s mind suddenly flashed to when she’d sat on the pink carpet of her bedroom with her back propped up against her bed, wearing her penguin pajamas, and her mom sat close beside her with the book
Goodnight Moon
open on her lap, reading in her singsongy voice only to stop at every page and ask Sadie, “Where’s the mouse now?”

Where’s the mouse now?

“Ah.” Tess’s voice was low, soft. “So it worked.”

“
What
worked?”

“The towel.” The blonde dropped her arms to her sides. “I wrapped you in it hoping your adoptive parents would be as good to you as Bud and Mary had been to me.”

Sadie pushed away from the pillar and shot down the length of the bay as if she could walk away from that confession, too soft to be believable, too strange to consider. It echoed in her ears as she toed off her canvas sneakers and laid them on the warm boards. She plunked down, peeled off her socks, and tucked them into her shoes. Then she ignored the splinters that pierced the skin behind her knees as she dropped her legs over the edge.

She focused on the feel of the cool water flowing past her skin as she moved her legs to create eddies of current, trying to slow the rushing of her thoughts and to lower the burn of her anger. Her toes were ghostly blobs, barely visible from the surface. Here, in the narrow end of the pond, the water was the color of the cream soda Nana loved, always served with her lunchtime grilled cheese.