Heather(78)
She has to drive all the way home before she gets good enough cell service to google Iris Owens and the address on the paper. Even without Google she recognizes the number as a New York City area code. Callie wonders if that means she made it, after all. Maybe not to NYU but to the city. To something like the life she imagined for herself there.
She practically sprints inside her house, pounds the name IRIS OWENS CORTLANDT into her computer. She’ll look at property records, at LinkedIn profiles, at social media, in time. But for now the first thing she does is click on the Images tab. She has to see for herself, who Annabelle has made herself into. What she has become.
Annabelle has highlighted her hair to a sunny blond, similar to the color in Sabrina’s mug shot photo. She’s thinner, and underneath the rounded face of her yearbook photos are some of the canny, sharp angles of Sabrina’s features. It is like she’s looking at both of them at once, layered together in the form of a middle-aged woman. She looks for the scar Trent Brentwood told her about but the woman in the photo is wearing long sleeves.
She clicks on the article affiliated with the photo. IRIS OWENS RECOGNIZED FOR VOLUNTEER COMMITMENTS
Iris Owens, mother of three, spends her afternoons volunteering at a soup kitchen—
Annabelle, the good one. But then … Why had she felt the need to reinvent herself? Why would she have run away and taken on a new name?
There’s another photo of Annabelle with her husband, taken at a school fundraiser that ran in a local paper. Ben Owens is not much taller than his wife, has a big, easy smile, a slightly receding hairline, and a crinkle to his eyes that to Callie indicates a jovial air. She googles him in another tab and finds that he works as a CPA in a two-man firm in town. His bio on the company’s page is folksy, sweet. Mentions his love of cooking, fishing, and camping, his beautiful wife, his three children. Property records indicate that Ben and Iris Owens purchased their home twelve years ago. On Google Maps she zooms in to see a well-kept Colonial with a basketball net fixed above the garage door.
Callie’s whirring with feelings: relief, that Annabelle found herself a new life, that it seems to be solid and steady, that she hasn’t been lost, destroyed by the world. Confusion: How did she pull it off? Forged documents? A new birth certificate? Does the husband know that she had spent the first part of her life as someone else? And most importantly: Why? Why would Annabelle rename herself, take on all of the risk and effort?
Unless she couldn’t afford to be who she had been. The girl who abandoned Baby Doe to the elements. The one who had run away, aching and alone and afraid.
Iris Owens doesn’t maintain any kind of social media. Even in the photos Callie’s found online, she looks reluctant, uneasy, her eyes cutting to the left in both images as though she wants to slip out of the frame.
The only thing to do is to go see her. Not on Christmas, not the days after, but in January, when everyone is back in school, when the world starts up again. This woman who not only could unlock the case, but could tell Callie once and for all who she comes from.
* * *
On January 3 she’s meant to meet with a middle school principal to discuss the D.A.R.E. program schedule for the following year, but she tells him she has the flu and can’t make it. Instead, she leaves at 6:00 A.M. and drives to Westchester while it’s still dark out, the first of the day’s light coming through the trees just as she leaves the Pines behind.
Iris and Ben Owens live on a curved street that slopes toward a little creek. The houses are all tidy, with wide, green lawns and neat bristles of hedges, and a low stone wall runs the length of the block. It’s still early when she arrives, the neighborhood just beginning to stir. Newspapers at the ends of driveways in blue-and-green plastic bags. A jogger making quick progress on the opposite side of the road lifts her hand to Callie in a wave. She parks in front of the house across the street from the Owens’s and slouches low in her seat.
Half an hour passes before there’s a flicker of movement behind the glass. A teenage girl emerges wearing jeans and a gray zip-up hoodie, with a bag slung on one shoulder, a thick blond ponytail swinging between her shoulder blades.
Callie sucks in her breath.
Iris steps onto the porch wearing black tailored pants and a fitted sweater in an icy blue that Callie knows must pick up the blue in her eyes. She reaches up to her daughter and tucks a strand of the daughter’s hair behind an ear. The daughter says something that makes Iris laugh. Two boys tumble out after them, younger, nearly the same height, probably just a year apart, with Ben’s curly brown hair, and they load hockey sticks and black duffel bags into the trunk.
They get into their car, a Volvo hatchback, a few years old, a bumper sticker with the name of the high school on the back. She thinks about the months she’s spent on this case, the time she’s stolen, the way the guys in the room laughed. About her mother and the answers she took with her when she disappeared, Fauver and his hulking shadow. All the time she’s spent feeling frustrated and confused and adrift. And so before she can argue with herself she’s following them. Her compulsion for answers drumming along her veins like a second pulse.
* * *
Iris takes her sons to school first. Callie parks and watches from across the street. The boys raise their hockey sticks in a form of goodbye and walk shoulder to shoulder into the building, one of them waving to a group of girls nearby, the other bending to pick up a shiny food wrapper that the wind blew against his shins.