Heather(14)

A half hour passes before another call comes in, Keegan asking for backup on an accident scene. Robbins and Latour are engaged on a theft issue at the Stop and Shop. Or so they say. Callie will be sure to look for that incident report. She sighs, gets the details on the accident location, and tells Keegan she’ll make her way over there.



* * *



She drives west, passing a cranberry farm. A yellow school bus in the parking lot. A field trip—though she can’t help but wince at the sight of the bus. There’s a row of kids toeing up to the edge of the bog in bright sweatshirts. One of the mothers on the trip bends over her daughter, smears sunscreen on her cheeks, as the girl tries to duck away.

At the accident site she finds Keegan standing next to a conversion van that wrapped itself around a tree on the town’s little Main Street, where there is a general store, a gas station, a pizza parlor.

She approaches the vehicle. In the back, stacks of long, narrow cages.

“Muskrat traps. One of them got loose. Driver tried to catch him without pulling over first,” Keegan tells her, gesturing at the twisted van, more stacks of traps lined up on the side of the road. She squints and can make out fur between the bars. She toes closer until she can see the muskrats’ twitching whiskers and hand-like paws, the long snake of their tails.

“What’s the plan for these guys?” Callie asks.

“We can’t tow the vehicle with them in there. Let’s free them and call it a day,” Keegan says. Keegan and the older guys give her shit, but the tenor is different from the younger cops. Something if not quite avuncular, at least not pointed.

She puts her fingers on the bars of one of the cages.

“Careful you don’t get bit. They can have rabies.”

“Why do they trap them?”

“You can dye the fur, make it look like mink.”

“There a lot of money in imitation mink these days?”

“It’s resourceful, I’ll give them that.”

She waves a sedan around the flares and cones, though she can tell the driver wants to linger, rubberneck. “I guess.”

She waits a beat to ask the next question. “I’ve been looking into that Baby Doe case from the ’90s. You were on patrol when they found the baby, right?”

“Rookie. Just took my test the year before.”

“How about my mom? Did you know her?”

Keegan falters. Takes a minute to put together his thoughts. “Not really. I was a few years older. But I knew it was a kid who found the baby.” Keegan shakes his head. “God knows how that would mess with you.”

“It just seems like in a small town, people would talk a little more. About something like this. They would have theories about who might have been involved.”

“I think people wanted to put it behind them. The idea that someone here, one of us, did it? No one wanted to sit with that.” Keegan rubs his chin. “But there was a name, for a little while. A high school girl.”

“That would track.” Can’t tell her parents, no access to medical care.

Keegan springs another trap. The muskrat scampers off.

“Help me with these last few traps and we can call it a day, yeah?”

Keegan lifts a trap from the stack, sets it on the ground, slides a bar from a latch to spring the door open. A brown ball of fur slips out, disappears into the underbrush.

She releases the next one, the mechanism snapping open fast and hard, nearly catching her finger. She gasps louder than she means to, louder than the moment warrants, her nerves sizzling, her exhaustion getting the better of her.

The muskrat doesn’t move for a moment, not until she taps the bars, and then it skuttles out, nose twitching.

“Will they be okay? This close to the road?”

“Oh, Christ, we’d be doing everyone a favor if we let them get hit. Mean little bastards. They’ll find water soon enough, that’s how they’re made.”

“Keegan, what was the name of the girl?” she asks him. “The one people talked about back then?”

He rubs his knuckles into his eyes. “Shit. I forget. Back at the station we’ll ask one of the others during shift change. I don’t exactly remember that much about a teenage girl from all those years ago.”

Of course not, she thinks. Teenage girls, so similar as to be interchangeable. Paper doll cutouts. Forgotten, disposed of, left behind.



* * *



At the station Keegan holds the door for Callie, then cups his hands around his mouth and yells to McIntyre, who is at reception talking to Della. “Hey, Mac, what was the name of that girl who lived out in the big colonial off of 206? By the paper mill? She was your brother’s age I think.”

“Her? He used to say she’d blow people behind the school for weed.”

Callie tries to catch Della’s eye, but Della only stares at her computer monitor.

“Shawna something?” McIntyre offers. “She was real cute. Blond, little.”

“No that’s not it. Susannah?” Keegan says.

“Maybe that. Riley! That was the last name.”

“Susannah Riley?” Callie says. “We’re sure that’s it?”

“Yeah, yeah that sounds right,” Keegan says.

“Why do people think it was her?”