Heather(44)

“So you dated? Or it was just casual?”

“Casual. Not my fault she wanted something more.”

“Did she ever tell you she was pregnant?”

“It is not mine. I always bagged it up with that girl. She got around too much. There were rumors she was with an older dude. Or more than one older dude.”

“Tell me about that.” Callie feels her impatience rearing up. Rumors rumors rumors. Crazy crazy crazy. Never anything concrete.

“Look, I don’t know. Someone told me she was with someone older. Married or something.”

“Married?” Not Fauver then. He didn’t get married until his midtwenties. Maybe someone from the bait shop? A teacher? Brentwood looks pleased at the sound of surprise in Callie’s voice.

“Yeah. Take a look at the real suspects before you go chasing me down for more child support.” She wants to interrupt him, remind him he’s not a suspect in anything, nor is she interested in his issues with child support. But he is on a roll. “I’m bleeding, here. I’ve got nothing. Fucking backpacks and crayons and rollerblades and soccer uniforms and all that shit. I’m trying to invest in my own thing right now! I’m going in on this charter boat with my cousin. We’re gonna take people out to catch flounder in the summer.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It will be nice! That is if these bitches don’t stop bleeding me dry. How’s a man supposed to do anything he wants to do with people always showing up and asking him to fork over his hard-earned cash.” He takes another long draw on his cigarette. Seagulls wheel and shriek overhead, then land at the end of the dock. Callie grits her teeth, wonders about these women doing the endless work of raising Brentwood’s kids. A shadow of a thought at the edge of her mind, of her own father, whoever he was. Released from ever having to wonder if Callie was sick or sleeping well or had enough to eat.

“There’s another thing. The baby. It didn’t survive. It was found in the woods.”

For the first time since she’s met him it seems that Trent Brentwood doesn’t know what to say. The silence thickens between them for a moment. She lets him stare out at the horizon, waits for him to talk first.

“Oh shit. I heard about that,” he says, finally. He looks at Callie, and there’s a flicker of sadness in his eyes. “I don’t think it was Sabrina’s. I mean, I saw her. Sometime that winter. She didn’t look pregnant to me.”

Callie isn’t going to get into it with him, the same way she didn’t feel like going there with Fauver. How some women might not show, especially not a first child, until pretty far along. How futile it is to explain the complexities of a woman’s body to a man, how it is possible to not know she was pregnant right away, particularly a girl with no access to the internet, who couldn’t pull up a thousand forums and websites telling her to take a test, analyzing her every symptom, finding lists of places she could go for help.

“What about her sister? You looking into her? Now she was a little … I don’t know. Weird. Kept to herself.”

At first, Callie thinks she’s misheard. “Sister?”

“Sure. Sabrina Riley had a twin. Her name was Annabelle.”

Callie can’t seem to focus, stares hard at the gulls picking at the scraps of cleaned fish at the end of the dock. “You—You’re positive about this?”

“Yeah. I was her partner for a biology project sophomore year. I remember thinking I hit it big. She was smart as hell and did the whole thing on her own, I just showed up and collected my A plus. Only one I ever got. You know I’m gonna remember that.”

“Tell me about her. The sister. Anything you remember.”

“Umm … like I said. Quiet. She had a scar on her arm.”

“A scar?”

“Yeah, she was always tugging her sleeve down to cover it. Like three inches long. But messy looking, like it didn’t heal right.”

“You know how she got it?”

“We didn’t exactly make small talk.” Trent moves as though he’s about to say something else, but then his phone buzzes in his pocket. He glances at the screen and his face changes. “You know, this has nothing to do with me. Okay? I gotta get back to my shift.”

He leaves Callie at the dock, the gulls still wheeling overhead, shrieking, diving, relentless.

A sister. A twin. An entire girl lost in the history of all this mess.

It takes every ounce of will not to shove her fist in her mouth and bite down on her knuckles until she bleeds.





CALLIE


She babysits Opal during another PT session, flips through the Baby Doe file for the thousandth time while Opal naps, pauses over Jenna’s statement. That girlish signature, the penmanship you can see the strain in. How scared she must have been, down in the station in an interview room. She is relieved that at least it was Frank Caputo who questioned her and took the statement. Frank would have been gentle, would have been delicate. Would not have pushed her more than he had to.

Jane is quiet in that drained way she is when she gets back from PT, so they don’t chat much before Callie says goodbye. Callie hugs her hard, though, and Jane squeezes her arm once, twice, as if to say, I’m still here, somewhere.

She marches through the facts again. Sabrina Riley disappeared right around the time the baby was found. Her father died two years later. Annabelle gone too, though who knows the timeline on that. So what’s happened to the house? She’s still on Jane and Damien’s Wi-Fi so she pulls up directions. A half hour the opposite direction from home, but what’s that matter? It’s technically her day off. Adrian is away for a conference in Wyoming. She’s got nothing to do besides stare at cobwebbed corners of her cabin, listen to the low drone of her neighbor’s radio.