All We Know of Heaven (2 page)

The Flannerys bought the Stoddard house, on the same block as the O’Malleys but, for practical purposes, on an other planet. Wynn Stoddard had owned four banks before his death from a stroke, after which Annika Stoddard just couldn’t keep the place up. Although none of the O’Malley kids had ever really seen the inside of the Stoddard house, they imagined it was like a house where movie stars lived. The room Bridget’s parents would sleep in was as big as the whole downstairs at the O’Malleys’. There was a pool with a slide behind black iron gates in the back. In the tile at the bottom of the pool was a mosaic of a dolphin.

Naturally, everybody expected the Flannerys to be stuck up.

They weren’t at all. They were friendly and thoughtful and had big block parties.

Stuck up or not, Maury saw early on that Bridget would always get away with murder. She took money from the family’s Christmas charity jar and bought twenty kids soft- serve from the Big Dipper truck. She climbed so high into the poplar tree in her yard that when a storm approached, her mother had to call the fire department to rescue her while the tree swayed back and forth and Bridget, unafraid, waved to the other kids on the block—whose parents kept yelling at them to come inside.

The tree incident had happened the summer that the Flannerys moved to Bigelow. Maureen was only one of the crowd of kids from Bigelow Court who watched in awe. She didn’t know Bridget to speak to, only to admire.

But on the first day of kindergarten, Bridget asked Mau reen, “Do you want to be my friend?”

When Bridget asked her if she wanted to be friends, Maury didn’t know what to say. She didn’t have friends yet; she only played with her mother and her brothers and her cousins.

“Don’t you want to be my friend?” Bridget asked again, stepping a pace closer.

Maureen shrugged, unsure of what to say. The new girl’s pigtails looked exactly like her own pigtails, her greenish eyes duplicates of hers. But Bridget wore Top Shelf jean shorts and a shirt that spelled out
ANGEL DOLL
in rhinestones. Maureen wore a terry cloth top with a kitty on the shoulder

that her mother bought at Koberly’s for seven dollars and ninety-nine cents. All the O’Malley kids only had clothes that “went” with all their other clothes.

“If you want to be my friend,” Bridget went on, “you have to do what I tell you.”

This was the test. What Bridget told Maury to do was to help lock the door and push all the little desks against it when Teacher left the room to get her new attendance book. Terrified, Maury found herself shoving desks over to the door as they listened to the teacher’s outraged pound ing. She did pee her pants a little and start to cry. But she did what Bridget told her.

“Don’t be a baby!” Bridget told her sharply. “If you’re a scaredy-baby, we can’t have any fun.”

A maintenance guy ended up having to climb in the win dow and let Miss Hoskins back into her own room.

This set the pattern for Bridget’s and Maureen’s life for the next eleven years.

When six girls went to RollerAmerica with Mrs. Flan nery for Bridget’s ninth birthday, Bridget told Maureen that only babies held on at the top of the roller coaster. It wasn’t until the second time around that Maureen noticed that she and Bridget were the only ones with their hands up.

The dares never stopped.

They stole glitter eye shadow from the sale bins at Ko berly’s. Maureen—who probably looked as helplessly guilty as if she’d stolen diamonds instead of a tiny plastic case

containing a cake of blue and a cake of gold—was the one who got caught.

But Bridget stuck by her.

“It was all my idea!” Bridget insisted to the mean lady store detective who saw this only as evidence of Bridget’s virtue. Bridget was relieved, but horrified that Maury had to take the punch.

“You’re lucky to have a friend who tries to protect you!” the mean lady lectured Maureen. And as a punishment, she made Maureen put on
all kinds
of makeup and then called her parents so they could see her looking that way.

Mrs. O’Malley grounded Maureen for three weeks; but Bridget, who was truly sorry, rigged a basket-and-string system outside Maureen’s window so that she could send up more stolen makeup and a box of gourmet brownies left over from an “Occasion.”

She gave Maureen things that her own family would never be able to afford—and for keeps, no take backs: fuzzy sweaters, stuffed animals, bubble bath, an MP3 player with
flannery’s occasions
etched into the case. When they both had a crush on Brandon Hillier, they called him from pay phones so he’d never be able to trace their number. After he started going out with Becca Donahue, they scraped the filling out of Oreos and replaced it with toothpaste, leaving the cookies in a red bag covered with hearts and tied with a bow outside Brandon’s locker, signing it with a forgery of Becca’s big, babyish scrawl.

Bridget loved Maureen. Even after she fell in love forever

with Danny Carmody, Bridget pledged to see Danny only on Saturday nights—both so that she wouldn’t get the reputa tion of being a “wifey girl” and so that Maureen, who didn’t have a guy, wouldn’t feel left out.

Maureen managed to keep Bridget’s sweet sixteen party from her for six weeks—even though Bridget’s parents and half of the class were in on it.

Nothing fazed Bridget.

But when she complained about having to help her siblings take down the tent in the giant heated display shed that cold night, only to have three hundred colored lanterns burst to life and a hundred kids yell “Surprise!” Bridget melted into tears. Maury was as happy as if Bridget had given her a sweet sixteen party back last spring. She had given Maureen a locket, real gold, with the pictures they’d had taken together at the mall, the black-and-white ones when they wore men’s hats and black slip dresses. And that was really special.

Bridget’s birthday was December 10.

Winter break started December 23, but Maury and Bridget had practice because there was a cheering com petition on Christmas Eve. (“It’s sacrilege!” Mrs. O’Malley insisted.)

Maureen didn’t mind—but then she pulled a groin mus cle and knew she would have to stuff herself with ibupro fen and wrap her thigh in the morning and even then she might not be in any shape to compete.

“Like we care about this competition! There are like four

schools in it! It’s not even a real regional,” said Bridget. “You want me to drive, Maury, so you can rest your leg?”

“That would be great, Bug.”

And they slapped palms and threw their gym bags into the back of Maureen’s Toyota.

county highway g, december 23
‌

7 p.m.

From a branch of one of the trees hung a little letter jacket. From another hung a sock. One of them pointed that out right away. They could see the jacket, the sock, and the glittery little megaphone that hung from the zipper—like grotesque ornaments on a Christmas tree—despite the sheltering wing of pine bough draped in heavy snow.

They could see other things, too.

“Is there blood on the trunk of the tree?” Leland Holtzer asked. She was glad that she and Caitlin Smith were there. No one else could say that they actually had been
there
be

fore Maureen was even taken away. The cell phone tree— and Cody Halavay’s police band radio—had alerted every one, news racing through the air like blood through an artery. She asked again, “Is there blood on that tree?”

“It could be just sap or something,” said Eric Kroger, the guy Leland was sort of with, though so far all they’d done was have one heavy makeout session in Britney Brous sard’s rec room. She wondered if they would be going out now because this was one of those things that, if you went through it with another person, bonded you forever.

A thing that changed you forever. And she was only six teen. Leland shivered with horror and excitement.

Forever
, Leland thought.

The snow kept falling as the police worked for hours past sundown. It fell so hard that Bob Haackstad, who was mighty religious, said it was like a vengeance. But the chief, Henry Colette, spoke up and asked Bob: A vengeance for what? No one did wrong here. Just two kids and a poor, tired, long-haul driver trying to get home for Christmas.

The skid marks told it all.

The little white Toyota had crossed the line.

The poor truck driver was not hurt, but no one could say he hadn’t suffered.

He was there, working right alongside them, his cigar shredded by the snow, his stubbled chin trembling. He tried to collect the debris from his rig—the headlights and the big, ornate hood ornament.

The driver scared them at first, to be honest.

The minute they showed up, when the gasoline was still pouring and the motors were whining and smoking, he came running up out of the ditch in the woods carrying Bridget in his arms, blood all over him. The paramedics wanted to kill him on the spot for moving her.

Not until later did they find out that at least some the blood was from his mouth, which he’d knocked on the steering wheel jumping down from his cab. He ran down into the ditch in the woods after Bridget. She had been thrown that far from the vehicle, thirty feet or better.

He shouldn’t have moved her.

But after they got her on the board and assessed her, all of them were thinking the same thing, though no one was saying it, that it probably wouldn’t matter. Except for the bruises and the smears of dirty snow, the skin on Bridget’s legs was as white as her sweater was red, her lips the color of a storm cloud—dark blue. You couldn’t tell if she was blond or brunette, or a white or a black girl, or even a girl. Everything was pushed out of shape. Hat Carney, the veter an medic on call that afternoon, thought of a broken egg, or a watermelon thrown against a tree. There were no words for how awful it was. But they got a tube down her windpipe and got it working right away anyhow. They couldn’t bear not to. They started a line running Ringer’s and admin istered epi while they screamed through the small towns and onto the highway—talking to the docs at Anne Morrow Lindbergh Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis all the way.

About five minutes away, they got a thready pulse. The ambulance driver kicked the pedal and two-wheeled it into the bay.

Back at the scene, Maureen was a sodden, broken thing being extracted by the Jaws of Life.

The trucker watched. He asked if he was being charged with a crime.

“Of course not,” said Henry Colette. The trucker then shocked Henry by grabbing his arms and leaning on him like he was his long-lost brother.

He babbled out, “They crossed right in front of me, on my mother’s grave if I’m lying! They didn’t see me none! I wouldn’t ever hurt anyone. I wasn’t going but forty! All I had to get to was the Days Inn up there a mile! The snow ’n’ all! One more mile!”

To Patrolman Denny Folly, only a few years older than the girls and about to puke, the trucker said, “I saw the blond one’s little face!”

“They were both blond,” said Henry Colette.

Denny Folly pointed to the tree. “That has to be hair and skin,” he said. The kid was gray. Who would clean that up, Colette thought? Not the coroner. He couldn’t just leave it there. Colette grabbed an evidence bag out of his inside pocket and packed the matter from the tree into a zipped bag with a little snow. He handed it to Denny Folly, who did disappear for a moment then into the trees.

If Colette had a best friend apart from his wife, Margo, it was certainly Bill O’Malley. They had wrestled together

at Bigelow and UM, roomed together all four years, stood up in each other’s weddings. They didn’t see each other as much now, but their four-day catfishing trip to Kentucky each spring was a sacred tradition; and Henry Colette stood godfather to one of Bill’s twin boys, the one called Wil liam Henry, who went by Colette’s own first name. Henry and Jack O’Malley were sophomores at Gustavus Adophus now, which must cost Bill a pretty penny, although Henry expected the twins had good scholarships. When the chil dren were younger, they all went to the Boundary Waters together for a few summers. Henry Colette thought of Maury’s sweet soprano last Christmas in the pageant given by the kids making their confirmation at Holy Mother of Sorrows. She sang one of four solos: “Some children see Him dark as they. . . .”

Now Colette’s own voice sounded like a shovel driven through a crust of icy mud. He barked instructions to the officers: Pick that up; call this service or that. They watched as he looked over the trucker for signs that he was drunk or drugged up. The truck driver was no local: He drove for Memphis Mercury Cartage, a long way from home. He smelled of nothing but vinegar chips and blood. On some impulse, Colette took out his cell phone and called his Mar go to ask if the man could stay over with them until inqui ries were made, have a hot shower and a sleep in the guest room. He couldn’t bear the thought of the guy alone with his thoughts in some cheesy motel—Colette happened to know that the Days Inn was filled with Christmas travelers

and there were rooms only at the Wood Haven, a low-rent, rendezvous sort of joint. He even asked Margo if she would make some doughnuts and hot coffee. Margo already had the fryer out for making the cinnamon doughnut holes the grandkids loved for late breakfast on Christmas morning. Colette told Denny Folly to drive the trucker, whose name was Lawrence Cooper, to his house, though he had no idea why he didn’t simply go himself. There was no point standing out in this weather after the Jaws were used

to pry Maureen free from the driver’s side.

From what Colette could see, this was going to be as bad as that night, twenty years ago, when he worked as a Berry County deputy under old Sheriff Corcoran. It was a night as tender and warm as this one was bitter. The driver of the car carrying the Cleary girls (both of them, Diane and Deborah) and their dates, who were coming home from the Teke formal at Bright Wing Country Club, hit the Fortenses’ oldest boy in his new, big, black pickup. A Dodge, if Henry Colette remembered. Not one of those kids lived. Diane was three months pregnant—secretly engaged, the way kids were twenty years ago even when they were just seniors in high school, planning to get married in a month. The top of Deborah Cleary’s head . . .