Angels Burning (24 page)

“CAN I GET YOU
a glass of water?” I ask her.

I've let five minutes pass. I thought about leaving her alone again, letting her have some time to herself and collect her thoughts, but when I tried to get up, my legs wouldn't work. Shawna's revelation has left me stunned, shaky, and exhausted.

“Some coffee? Tea?”

She shakes her head. She blows her nose on one of the tissues she keeps pulling from her purse. Women sometimes keep one or two loose ones or one of those mini travel packets, but I've never seen this many coming out of one handbag like scarves from a magician's sleeve.

She takes the latest used one and places it in the snotty, tear-saturated pile mounting at her elbow.

“The children aren't yours.”

I put it out there as plainly as possible. We'll see where it goes.

“Derk and Tug are mine,” she sniffs. “The older three are Clark's.”

“So he was married before?”

She shakes her head.

“So he wasn't married to their mother?”

She nods.

“This all makes a little more sense now,” I tell her. “I didn't realize how much younger you are than Clark until I started checking you out and snooping around for your yearbook.”

We both look down at the book. She's kept it open to the page of her and her friends and glances at it from time to time. I think the image is giving her strength.

“There's ten years between us.”

“How old were you when you married him?”

“Nineteen.”

I must make an unconscious sign of disapproval because she quickly follows with, “No one made me.”

I smile at her. “That's kind of a strange piece of information to provide unsolicited.”

“I just mean I wanted to marry Clark. He was good-looking and nice to me. And I needed to get out of the house.”

She stops talking and looks guiltily at her hands clutching yet another tissue she's begun to slowly shred.

I don't let my mind wander into Shawna's childhood home. I don't want to know what went on there. It's enough to know she probably had no family support, no one to run to. On the contrary, she had a need to escape. The Trulys sniff out the weak and unprotected.

I feel bad now about asking her about her dreams earlier. She was probably so beaten down by the time she met Clark Truly, taking care of him and his three kids, that retiring to the couch at the end of the day may have seemed like a dream to her.

“I'm impressed,” I say, trying to make it up to her. “Really, I am. That's a lot to take on. Three stepkids when you're just a kid yourself. How old were they then?”

“One, four, and six,” she rattles off automatically.

Her expression softens, maybe from recalling pleasant memories of them at that age or maybe secretly rejoicing in the fact that now one's dead, one's in jail, and one's saddled with a baby of her own.

“You must've really loved Clark,” I say.

“I didn't know about them,” she lets slip out.

She flashes me an embarrassed look.

“What do you mean?”

“When I married him, I didn't know he had kids. They were kind of presented to me afterward.”

“Wow,” is all I can think to say.

I sit back in my chair and take a moment to digest yet one more unbelievable
ingredient in the steaming stew of Shawna Ridge Truly's life.

“How could you not know?” I ask her.

“He never talked about them. Nobody did. I never saw them.”

“So what did you do when you found out? If it had been me I would've headed straight for divorce court.”

She smiles. It's the first time I've seen her lips in any shape other than a scowling frown or an angry straight line, and the difference changes everything about her. Years fall from her face. When I met her I thought she might be in her late forties. She's only thirty-four. Now she looks it. Her posture even improves.

“I was kind of a hell-raiser back then,” she says. “I had a temper. I said there's no way I'm staying. I can't take care of three kids. He lied to me and it was a big lie. I was getting out.

“We had a huge fight. Miranda was the one who calmed me down and convinced me to stay on for a little while and see if we could sort things out.”

At the mention of Miranda's name she swallows her smile and the glimpse of a younger, livelier Shawna is gone.

I wait. At this point, she wants to tell me her story. I can sense it. We all want someone to know our worst secrets, even if it's only one other person. It makes them real. I wonder if she's ever unburdened herself before. I don't know who she could have possibly confided in.

She digs back in her purse. I'm surprised when she doesn't bring out yet another tissue. Instead, it's a wallet from which she extracts an old photograph hidden behind some credit cards. She hands it to me. It's a picture of a cat.

“The only thing I brought with me from home besides my clothes was my cat, Sugar. I named her that because she was all black except for white around her mouth and chin like she'd been eating sugar.”

I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach; the tale of Sugar is not going to end well.

“I'd had her since I was little.”

The tears begin. They're silent this time. They stream down her round cheeks.

“I woke up the next morning after the fight and she was dead. Slit wide-open from her little white chin down through her belly.”

“Oh, God,” I say.

I reach out and take her hand across the table.

“I'm so sorry, Shawna.”

“I should've run,” she says, her voice coming in hitching gulps, “but I didn't have anywhere to go. Police don't care about dead cats, and my family cared even less. None of them would tell me who did it. No one was sorry. They acted like it was no big deal.”

I move my chair around the table until I'm sitting beside her and put my arm around her shuddering shoulders.

“I woke up the next morning and all my hair had been cut off. And my privates shaved.”

“Jesus,” I say under my breath.

“Miranda must've put something in my food and drugged me 'cause I'm a light sleeper.”

I'm rarely left speechless, but this is one of those times. I don't know what to say to her. I try to imagine what would have been going through her mind back then, the combination of fear, disbelief, and isolation that would have allowed Clark and Miranda to control her and eventually own her altogether, body and soul.

“Other things happened, too,” she continues but doesn't elaborate. “Anyway, I decided it was best if I stayed. Tug came along the next year and after a while I got used to Clark's kids. I came to love them.”

“Where was their mother during all this?”

“All Clark would tell me was she's dead. Killed in a car accident.”

The hair on the back of my neck stands on end, but I'm not sure why.

“You just told me you loved Clark's children. What changed?”

She goes back into her purse for another tissue and wipes her face.

“One day,” she begins, “Miranda takes me aside and tells me the mother of Clark's children was his cousin Layla.”

This latest horrible piece of the puzzle doesn't arouse any kind of reaction from Shawna. I suppose by the time she discovered it, nothing could shock her.

“I guess they'd been doing it for years. No one knew. Layla kept having babies, and her mom kept helping her raise them. No one ever knew who the father was or if there was a bunch of fathers. No one cared. She said it was her business and everybody stayed out of it.

“After she died, Clark went and told her mother—his aunt Addy—everything and said he wanted the kids. I don't know what went on between them. Miranda and Addy are bitter enemies. I've never even met her. But I would guess Addy loved those three babies and wouldn't want to give them up. But under the circumstances what could she do? They were Clark's legal property. Then I found out for myself why she might have let them go.”

She stops speaking and gives me a frank look with no emotion behind it like she's giving me the instructions to install some random appliance.

“She was repulsed by them after she knew,” she says, “ 'cause that's how I felt. I could barely look at them after that. And I hated myself for feeling that way. It wasn't their fault. But I couldn't love them anymore.”

As much as I'd like to end this conversation, there's an important reason why I began it and I haven't reached my goal yet, although I'm not sure I can get there through Shawna alone. She's talking well now. I need to fire questions at her.

“Why would Miranda tell you this? She had to know it might affect the way you felt about the kids. You'd think she'd want you to love them and take good care of them.”

“She knew I loved them. I think that's why she did it. She wanted to hurt me. She was always hurting me. Hurting everyone. It's what she does best.”

“Do the children know?”

“They think their real mom was a nice lady who was killed in a car accident.”

“They don't remember anything about living with her or Addy?”

“Camio was only a few months old when Layla died and they went to live with Clark and Miranda. Jessy would've been three. Shane five. They were too young to remember.”

“And they've never wanted to find out anything about their mother? They've never wondered why they've never met any of her family?”

“Once Miranda tells you something's a dead topic, it's a dead topic.”

I let the bomb drop.

“Could she have killed Camio?”

The same smile she showed me when she described herself as a hell-raiser returns but only for a second before it turns into something dark.

“Death would be a gift,” she tells me. “An escape from her. She wants people alive so she can torture them.”

“Is there anyone in the family you think might have done this?”

She shakes her head. “These are hard, mean people, but they seem to draw the line at killing. Besides, none of them had a reason to kill Camio.”

That you know of
, I think to myself.

“Who do you think did it?” I ask.

Her eyes fill with tears again, but they don't fall this time.

“A stranger,” she says, running her finger over the photo of her cat. “I want it to be a stranger.”

I LEAVE THE INTERVIEW ROOM
with the intention of stripping off my clothes, kicking off my shoes, getting in my car, and driving naked until I reach the nearest ocean, then jumping in and swimming until I find a deserted island where I can live alone far away from all people and the things they do to each other.

But the feeling passes.

I run into Nolan and two uniformed troopers. I was right. They had been searching Lonnie Harris's house earlier. They stopped by on their way out of town after hearing shots had been fired at the police station.

“That was a great interview, Chief,” one of the troopers says.

The other trooper smiles and nods his agreement.

Nolan stands behind them, hands in his pants pockets, his lower jaw working a piece of gum, his sunglasses hiding his eyes. He doesn't say anything.

Singer and Blonski are here as well. I motion them toward me and speak to them out of ear range of the others.

“Give Mrs. Truly a few minutes, then take her home. Be very polite and kind.”

I look around the station. My eyes light on Everhart's desk. A bunch of his buddies who race in demolition derbies with him on the weekends thought it would be funny to send a big sissy bouquet of congratulatory flowers to his workplace.

“And give her those flowers,” I add.

Blonski raises his eyebrows at me.

“Just do it.”

I know Nolan will want to talk to me, but I don't return to him and his troopers. I head to my office.

I take a seat behind my desk and try to look as composed as possible.

I haven't done much to personalize this space other than put a few framed photos on top of my filing cabinet. There's one of Champ when he was Mason's age in a Pirates ball cap with a bat thrown over his shoulder grinning at the camera, freckle-faced from the summer sun. Gil would have already been molesting him but we didn't know. Or I should say some of us didn't know.

I've studied this photo hundreds of times looking for an outward sign I missed. I've tilted it from side to side thinking in a certain light at a certain angle it might react like a truth-revealing hologram and his dear face would turn into a screaming death mask of agony, or I'd spy Gil with devil's horns sprouting from his shellacked hair leering over his shoulder, but I've never been able to see anything in it but a normal, happy-go-lucky boy, and I guess that's why I like it.

Next to it is a photo of Neely and me, six and eight years old, standing next to Grandma's old Plymouth on an Easter Sunday suffering the indignity of being forced to wear dresses to church, our skinny arms linked, our knobby-kneed bare legs ending in identical white patent-leather shoes we immediately scuffed up, me accidentally, Neely on purpose. My dress was navy, fitted, with a belt and Peter Pan collar that I wore like a uniform, and I had to restrain myself from directing traffic in the church parking lot or telling the little kids to slow down; Neely's was a pale yellow shift patterned with tiny daisies that she loathed.

Grandma used to call us Salt and Pepper. It wasn't a wildly original nickname, but it made sense for us: Neely with her light, almost Nordic good looks (Passing Through could have been a Viking, I used to tell her, or maybe a ski instructor) and me with Denial Donny's black Irish mop of tangled dark curls and dark brown eyes that Mom's genes had diluted slightly, like putting cream in coffee.

The final photo is one of only a handful I've ever seen of my mother and the three of us. We're sitting around a picnic table at the Lick n' Putt. We look completely normal. A lovely woman with three lovely children about to eat some lovely hot dogs and fries and play some miniature golf.