Somebody Else's Daughter (43 page)

45

Nate's conversation with Claire the night before had filled him with a deep sense of resolve. And as the firelight had played across her face he'd experienced a vivid revelation. He was going to marry her.

That morning, Lloyd Jernigan, the Latin teacher, had called to see if Nate would mind taking out the girls' cross-country ski team; he was sick in bed and there was a practice scheduled on the trails over by the lake. Nate could think of nothing better than skiing before work and told him he'd be happy to do it.

The girls on the team were well-equipped skiers in brightly colored parkas and they were a good team, having won several races already that year. Some of the trails were on school property, but many wandered off into the woods and some reached as far as Hawthorne Road. The trails were open to members of the community, and were used often, but on that morning Nate observed that the woods were eerily serene and vacant. They'd finished their route, which Lloyd had expertly laid out, and were on their way back to the boathouse for hot chocolate and scones when something caught his eye. He held up his arm for them to stop. “Hold up a second,” he said. “Wait here.” The girls immediately began to chatter as he took off his skis and went down the incline on foot. It was the skirt that caught his eye, the unmistakable tartan plaid. There was a girl down there, he realized, down near the water, in a bed of bloody snow.

He told the girls to wait there, not to move, then went down to get a better look, coming upon her twisted legs, the black high-top sneakers, the rumpled knee socks, a small tattoo on the back of her calf. There was the tangle of auburn hair, her slender white arms stretched over her head as though she'd dropped out of heaven. Her face was turned from him, concealed by a layer of blood. He couldn't see her, but he'd know those sneakers anywhere. He staggered to her side, reaching out his hand, but there was too much blood. Pieces of flesh seemed to be missing. Part of her ear, a wound on her neck like a jellyfish. Two fingers raggedly severed at the knuckles. Her clothing almost entirely shredded.

He backed away. His head began to pound. It wasn't possible.
This isn't happening.

She wasn't moving. She was cold, her body twisted. He took off his coat and covered her, then started screaming for help, his voice rising up through the trees, over the tree tops, then echoing back to him across the black surface of the lake.

Within minutes, the cops arrived. An ambulance. Yellow streamers were stretched between trees, barricades were put into place. The EMTs kneeled at her side. Having determined she was gone, they backed off, respectfully, looking down at her like fallen prey.

Nate borrowed one of the girls' cell phones and called Jack Heath, but he didn't answer. He called Greer Harding, who screamed something into the phone about insurance liability and lawsuits; he couldn't make it all out and he didn't understand a word of it. He hung up on her. Dazed, he watched from a distance as photographs were taken of the body. The detective was a man named Croft, distinguished, in the crowd of police personnel, by a brown felt hat. He wanted to ask Nate some questions. “This is my partner, Judd Whalen,” he told him. The three men shook hands. They went along the trail, then down the incline to the body. Nate explained how they'd been out skiing. Croft kneeled at her side, a knight to a princess, pulling on plastic gloves. “Do you know her?”

“I don't know,” Nate muttered. “I can't tell. There's too much blood. I'm assuming she's a student.” His voice quavered.

“She's got the uniform on, doesn't she?” Croft said.

“Yes, sir.” Nate's eyes burned.

“Looks like an animal got to her,” Whalen said. “Maybe a bear. Man, that's a damn shame.”

“There were some sightings of bear last week, but that was over in Washington County,” Croft said. “And these puncture marks are too small for bear. It looks more like a dog to me.”

“I'll tell you what,” Whalen said. “That ain't no ordinary house pet.”

“Could be the same animal that attacked the little girl a couple of months ago. We never did find that dog. Offered a big reward too.”

“Not big enough,” Whalen said. “We've had problems with people fighting pit bulls. Some of those dogs are worth big money. But this, I hate to see this. This is a damn shame.”

More cops were coming through the woods. Nate saw Jack Heath in the distance. He was talking to his wife, who looked distraught. She backed away from him, as if with disgust, hiding her face. Heath had on a white turtleneck under his standard blue blazer. He looked like a politician, Nate thought. He pushed his way through the throng to get to the girl, to get a look. “This is Mr. Heath, Detective,” one of the cops said to Croft. “He's the school headmaster.”

Croft shook his hand. “Mr. Heath.”

Nate watched Jack's face go peaked as he looked at the body. He excused himself and ducked into the trees, retching. When he recovered, he returned to the group hovering around the body and apologized. “She's not ours,” he said, barely audible.

“How can you tell? You can't see her face.”

“That tattoo, for one thing. None of our students have tattoos. It's against school policy. We'd expel a student for behavior like that.”

Croft's head tilted slightly, Nate noticed, as if he'd been stung by something but wasn't going to let it bother him. “Sounds like you run a pretty tight ship over there.”

“We expect our students to follow the rules, Detective.”

“No argument there,” Croft said, picking up the girl's wrist, noting a phone number written in ink. “Can we get someone to check this number, please?” Then he took out his handkerchief and dipped the cloth into the lake. “If she's not a student, what was she doing in that uniform?” he said to nobody in particular. He wrung out the handkerchief then ran the cloth gently over her face. “Why don't you show us your pretty face, darlin',” he said to the dead girl. They watched as her face revealed itself in all its reckless beauty.

46

When Joe had opened Willa's door that morning and found an empty room, he'd experienced a feeling of dread unlike he'd ever known. It was a physical experience, and he couldn't seem to breathe. They'd gone out looking for her, driving all over the place, but she was nowhere to be found and it never occurred to either of them to look at Sunrise House. They were up all night, waiting, hoping, then, the following morning, Regina called. Willa was there. Apparently, she was in quite a state. She had been walking all day, looking for her friend, Pearl, and hadn't been able to find her. She'd told Regina about the meth. And she'd told her about something else too. Something she could not discuss over the phone. Joe had agreed to come at once and he'd run out of the house in a hurry, slipping on his shoes without socks.

The roads were bad and it had begun to snow again. It was still early; people were on their way to work. He had to drive carefully. Down near the lake, there seemed to be a lot of traffic, and when he passed the school, and then the access road to the trails, he saw police cars parked along it. Something must have happened, he thought.

On Route 7, the traffic thinned. Still, he drove slowly, carefully; preparing himself for what would come next. It occurred to him that his daughter's relationship with the prostitute was about more than experimenting with drugs and that, in a profound way, they'd all been part of it, watching the events unfold. It seemed to Joe that, somehow, Pearl had become a symbol in Willa's mind of the sort of person she might have been had her birth mother raised her. Joe had gotten a glimpse of her biological mother—her name had been Catherine—in the car that day, just moments before her death. It had been a haunting vision he would never forget, but Willa could only imagine her and it had taken her into a dangerous world. In his daughter's mind, she had to find a way to be
like
her somehow, and, based on the information supplied in the letter, had seen in Pearl a girl akin to her natural roots. Joe reasoned that, in a deeply pathological way, Willa's charity to her was a kind of penance for getting a better deal in life, after all.

It had started with the letter, he realized. It was after that that she'd started pushing her limits, staying out too late, daring them to complain, to punish her, which they hadn't, knowing, as if instinctively, that she was testing them, waiting for them to step in and say
stop!
But, for some reason he couldn't quite fathom, they never did—until it was too late.

Perhaps they hadn't wanted to intrude, as if, whatever she was going through, was a natural rite of passage that they, as parents, simply had to accept. Perhaps they felt guilty, even, as though they were accessories to the crime of her destiny, as though adopting her had been wrong somehow—selfish of all the adults involved. They had to wade through all those feelings. They all had to, in their own way. It was something real yet awful and abstract. They couldn't define it, they couldn't discuss it. It was a dark feeling, heavy, amorphous. Desperately painful.

And then, that awful day, when he'd gone into her room and found her getting high, saw her stash and the small pipe, he'd grabbed her. “Don't you know how much I love you?” he'd demanded, flushing the white powder down the toilet. “Do you have any fucking clue how much you mean to me?”

But she was already a monster. “You can't control me!” she'd screamed at him, wiping her continuously running nose, her eyes distant, her face a mask. It was a side of her he'd never witnessed, and in a flash, just before the door slammed in his face, he'd seen the tattoo. He'd been so furious that he had to make a deliberate effort to restrain himself from hitting her. Because at that point, it was the only thing he'd really wanted to do.

He turned onto Montgomery Street, then wound down to the cul-de -sac. He had never actually seen Sunrise House and it came to him now that he'd relied on the school for too much—he'd trusted them, perhaps, too readily. He'd never met this woman, Regina, and had pieced together an image of her based on scraps of Willa's stories, but when she came to the door she was different than he'd expected. She had a big warm face, and was dressed professionally, in a wool suit. “Mr. Golding?”

“Hello, Regina.”

“Please, come in.”

He stepped into the foyer and stamped the snow off his shoes.

“I'd like to speak with you a moment in private.”

“Sure.”

He followed her into a small office and they sat down and she told him what Jack Heath had done to his daughter in the school van.

It would be hard for him to put the way he felt into words without sounding like a madman. A kind of primal energy rushed through his body. It was a natural instinct, he thought, that made killing Jack Heath seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it would take all of his concentration to tame it.

“I'm very sorry,” Regina said. “I know it's a very difficult thing to hear.”

They stepped into the foyer and she went up to get Willa. He could hear footsteps overhead, the creaking floors, and then the galloping footsteps of children. There were four of them in all, and they came down the stairs, apparently happy to see him. One little boy looked up at him and said, “Are you Willa's dad?”

“Yes, I am.”

The boy studied him. “Hell-o. I'm Tyrell.” He reached out his hand for a shake.

“I'm Joe. Nice to meet you.”

Then he saw her. She had come down the stairs. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she looked as if she'd been crying. “Daddy,” she muttered, and ran into his arms. He held her hard.

Driving home, he tried to focus on the road. He could feel his rage spilling over. He glanced at her, grateful that, at least on the outside, she seemed all right. He took her hand and tried to smile. He wondered how she had processed the violation. He could not be certain how he'd behave when he saw Jack Heath again.

In some way, if he read into it, he could interpret the incident as a bitter lesson, given his line of work, and one that, perhaps, he had needed to learn firsthand.

When they got home, Willa went upstairs to bed. She was very tired and needed to rest. Candace sat with her, holding her hand, stroking her hair.

He left the house, he needed some air. He needed to think. He walked in the woods and he cried. Every aspect of his life, he thought, had been tainted with compromise, the endless negotiation of what he had and what he didn't, what he deserved, and what was just out of reach. He felt betrayed by Heath, who he'd considered to be a friend. His life in general had been a neatly wrapped package of lies. As a younger man, he'd wanted to make films, to tell important stories that moved people, but he'd ended up limiting himself to porn. He'd wanted to live a good life, an honorable life, and, to some degree, he had, but it was shrouded with deception. He'd wanted to be a good husband, to respect and honor his wife, but he had not been faithful, and, as a result, he had deprived her of happiness. Until he'd met Claire, he'd been contemptuous of most women, insinuating himself into their lives with little consideration of their feelings. And as a father, he realized, he'd been distant, afraid perhaps that, because they didn't share blood, he had no right to try to influence or change her.

Later that night, when he heard about Pearl on the evening news, he understood how fragile they all were, that vulnerability was a human trait they all shared and needed to respect, and how, in a matter of seconds, based on the fickle inclinations of fate, your life could change forever.

47

Just like the time at Remington Pond, the news about the girl traveled fast and Jack Heath was keeping everything in line. He had always been especially capable in situations that demanded unprecedented strength and character. As a boy, his father would put him through drills of one challenge or another. Bomb scares, floods, fires. “Rise to the occasion,” he was fond of saying, and Jack too liked the expression.