Heather(55)
She can feel it on her body, the smell in her hair, all over her skin. The skunk, the sweat from the effort of taking out the mailbox, the staleness of the station, all of it combines to feel like the smell of failure, of something ruined that can’t be saved. In the bathroom she scrubs herself head to toe, working a loofah over her skin until it is raw. She thinks of Jane’s shower chair and scrubs harder, eyes watering.
After she showers she makes herself a pot of pasta that she eats standing up, pours a glass of wine. She hasn’t really eaten all day and the food and the shower return her to herself. She flips through Annabelle’s yearbook again, looking for any kind of notes, the scrim of a teenage girl with a secret to hide, with a grudge, a boy whose eyes she blacked out in pen. Nothing but Lynne Hamilton’s inscription in the back.
She scans again, looking for a boy with features like her own, lingers over a senior whose left canine tooth that is pointed like hers, before scoffing at herself, this foolish line of thinking. Mostly she takes after Jenna, or did before Jenna’s drinking warped her looks, with the same red hair and upturned nose that makes her look younger than she is. She flips past Jenna’s page quickly. It hurts to see her, those round eyes and tidy pearls of white teeth.
In the faculty pages, Lynne Hamilton has a canny smile, a short, sporty haircut, and the set of her narrow shoulders telegraphs an easygoing confidence. She looks like the kind of woman who is all movement, all metabolism, and as soon as the shutter snapped she bolted off to do something else. In addition to being a faculty yearbook adviser, the yearbook mentions she was also an assistant field hockey coach.
She googles Lynne Hamilton. Lynne Hamilton New Jersey teacher yields a faculty profile page at a private day school in Princeton. The school has a motto in Latin, a crest featuring some kind of bird of prey. Lynne Hamilton is the head field hockey coach and has won several state awards for her distinguished teaching. The school tuition is $60,000 a year.
There is an email address listed on the page, so Callie takes another swig of wine and writes her a note, asking if she might have some time to talk. After that she buys three security cameras online and springs for express shipping. She can mount one in the corner of the porch, another to one of the trees on the drive, and a third out back. Between the dead animals and Fauver’s late-night visit, she wants a little insurance. Anyone who steps foot on her property, she’ll know, and from now on, she’ll have proof.
* * *
Adrian texts her on the last day of his conference out West and they make plans to kayak again. I swear I do other things, he says, but it’s just really good to get out there before the weather turns. She tells him she’s looking forward to it, seeing him and being out on the water, and finds she’s telling the truth about both. It was good to use her body that way, to do something slow and meditative. She hadn’t realized she needed the release. And of course she feels it too, the creep of winter. Frost silvering the ground more mornings than not. Even the woods seem stiller, austere, with the animals starting to go into hiding, hoarding their sustenance away.
She has driven by Luke’s nursery three times in the past week, nothing suspicious that she can make out from her car, just a woman loading an armful of potted mini cedars into her back seat and a man tenderly carrying a wooden birdfeeder across the lot. There’s a shop in what used to be an old barn and the farmhouse where Luke lives behind it, but she doesn’t want him to know she’s watching him—not yet. Then, the day before she meets Adrian, she stops by again, but this time she decides to park, gets out of her car, and paces the perimeter of the property. She pauses in front of two greenhouses, padlocks on the doors. She’s not there for more than a minute before she hears footsteps behind her.
“Chief Hauser. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Shit. She knew this was a possibility. That he’d find her here, and she’d be forced to come up with a convincing lie.
“I’m thinking of sprucing up my place.”
“Bullshit,” Luke says, crossing his arms.
“I’m worried about Damien. And Jane.” She realizes she’s taking Luke’s advice from the night of the dinner. Tell a lie as close to the truth as you can get. “They seem like they’re struggling. With money. With everything.”
“You talk to my dad about it? I’m not Damien’s keeper.”
“Between you and me, I think your dad is more invested in reprising his role as good old Chief Caputo, in having a hand in this drug case, than anything going on with his family.” It’s the truth, but Callie also wants to see what he will do, with a mention of the drugs. Whether it makes him nervous to think of Frank circling.
Luke raises his eyebrows, amused. “Damien doesn’t always make good choices. He tries, but he doesn’t always think things through. I’m sure he’s dealing with some regrets right now.”
“Like?”
“Guy’s got a wife who needs a lot of medical care, a kid at home, his little pet business isn’t going to cut it, it wasn’t before all of this either.”
“Too bad he isn’t as enterprising as his brother.” Callie nods at the greenhouses. “Whatcha growing in there?”
Luke narrows his eyes. “Kale. Swiss chard. Though it’s about the end of the season for them, would cost me an arm and a leg to keep the heat on through the winter. You can take a look if you’d like.”