Always.
I locked my bike in front of the Stearns County administrative building and walked to Dad’s office. I felt a twinge of nervousness between my shoulder blades, but his secretary smiled warmly and waved me in. My shorts and T-shirt felt as out of place as a ball gown as I waded through the deep carpeting to knock softly on the mahogany door.
“Come in.”
His office smelled like leather, wood, and Dad’s spicy aftershave. I’d thrilled at the book-lined walls the handful of times I’d visited, been awed by the massive desk dominating the space, as big as a refrigerator and the same deep red wood as the door. I hardly noticed them this time.
Dad had been reading something at his desk and looked up as I approached.
“Heather!” His surprised expression was replaced by delight, which was quickly taken over by worry. “Is your mom okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, closing the door behind me. “She’s fine. Junie too.”
He nodded. He’d been about to stand up but dropped back into his chair. He picked up his phone, pushed a clear button the size of a sugar cube, and told Mary at the front desk to hold his calls.
“Don’t tell me you’re here because you miss your old man,” he said, running his hand through his hair. Had it always been silver at the temples? I remembered him joking about a few grays, but hadn’t that been only last month? Pink blotches on his forehead signaled his rosacea was back. I’d need to remind him to get his ointment refilled.
“I want to talk about Maureen,” I said.
His head dropped. It must have been so hard on him, a friend of mine dead.
Dead.
I took a deep, shaky breath. “She didn’t kill herself, Dad. She was doing something bad.”
He sat up straight, his attention lasered on me.
I almost chickened out. “What was Sheriff Nillson like, Dad? Back in high school.”
His eyebrows drew together, but he gave me the respect of an answer. “A bit of a troublemaker, actually. You didn’t have to think when you were around him, which meant he and whoever was in his circle operated just this side of the law. It was mindless, mostly harmless teenage-boy behavior—vandalism, underage drinking, that sort of thing—but I didn’t like it, so we didn’t hang out in those days. He had respectable parents, though. They kept him from the worst of it. And he’s a good man now. He grew up. We all did.”
“I don’t think he’s a good man, Dad,” I said, my voice quavering. Then the story of the terrible thing I’d seen that night burst out, an infection finally released.
I told him about me, Claude, Junie, and Brenda in the tunnels, me wearing Jerry Taft’s army shirt, us being stupid and opening that door. I swore both me and Brenda had seen Jerome’s face in there. It was a lie, but I didn’t want Brenda out on the edge of that cliff alone, same reason I didn’t tell him it was Junie who’d opened the door. It didn’t change the important part of the story, which was that Maureen was on her knees for those grown-up men, and then, a few days later, she was dead.
“Murdered.” That’s what I told him.
He’d let me get it all out, had been as still as quarry water, but he held up his hand at that last word. “Wait, now, Heather, that’s a very serious charge.” He reached for a yellow legal pad and a pen, his face puckering like a sinkhole was opening inside his skull. “Tell me everything you saw, again.”
I repeated the story, exactly. He wrote as I spoke, and his pen scritches sounded like music. An adult was in charge, an adult who did this for a living. My dad.
“You didn’t see anyone else’s face? Anyone besides Sheriff Nillson’s?”
I shook my head. I liked how he was referring to Nillson formally, distancing him from us, no longer calling him Jerome.
Dad locked eyes with me, his pen poised over the legal pad. “Heather, this is very important. You’re sure it was him? We’re talking a man’s reputation here. His career. You cannot make a mistake.”
I slid a little sideways from myself. I almost came clean, told him I hadn’t actually seen Sheriff Nillson, only Brenda had. But then I remembered her face when she’d told me. She’d been sure. That was good enough for me. “Dad, I’m almost positive, but it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? If it was his basement, it was him.”
Dad tapped his pen on his chin as if considering it. “Yeah,” he grunted. He seemed far away suddenly. “Dammit, Heather. I’m so sorry. Sorry you had to see that, and sorry that Maureen is dead.”