Fall from Grace (10 page)

“You get that from the chief?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“But they were only specific about me?” I asked. “Nobody said anything about the paper, did they?”

There was a pause as Whitford realized what I was talking about and must have wondered how to react to it. He finally said, “No,” and it was as ambiguous a
no
as anybody could have said. It could have meant, Don’t ask me to do this, or it could have meant, They didn’t mention the paper and I get what you’re saying. The way he said it also told me that people were eavesdropping on his call, not listening directly to our conversation but listening to his side.

“Do you know Brent Anderson?” Brent, who was working on a story and listening to my side of the conversation at the same time, stopped writing and looked up with an inquisitive expression on his face. I waved a hand to stop him from asking any questions.

There was another pause, and then, “Yes.” Again, as ambiguous as his previous statement.

“Well, Brent has a desk right next to mine and he says hi.” Brent looked even more confused but I just smiled as if nothing was wrong.

Again, another pause, this one longer than all the rest. I figured he was smart enough to know what I was asking him and to weigh the options of what would happen if he did it. Finally, he sighed. “Third time, Leo. Fuck you.” And then he hung up.

I wasn’t concerned with how he had ended the call. There was a bit of lightness in his voice, a lilt that told me he understood but that even so, I was being a dick to ask him. Or he might just be telling me to fuck off and I would never hear from him again. I stood up, went around my desk toward Brent’s side. “What the hell was that about?” he asked, turning his chair around to face me. “Why are you bandying my name around without my permission?”

“It’s just a little favor, Brent, and I’ll owe you one,” I said, slowly turning his chair back so he could face his computer. “I just want you to check your e-mail for me, if you could.”

“Jesus, Leo. What the hell are you doing?” he said. He tried to turn back toward me, but I held his chair in place.

“Just check the goddamn e-mail, Brent. You’re not in any trouble, okay?”

He clicked on his mouse a few times and his e-mail in-box came up. Like those of most reporters for a major metro daily, it was covered in red letters indicating more than a hundred unopened e-mail messages. Ever since the paper started putting each reporter’s e-mail address at the end of a story, we were deluged with messages ranging from comments about our stories to spam to messages from crazies who knew in their hearts that the way we wrote made us the perfect vehicle to tell their truths, to everything else in between. He clicked on his “get new messages” link, and while a bunch more red lines appeared, there was nothing with an EPS prefix. We tried again and again over the next few minutes, but nothing came up. Whitford hadn’t understood, or if he did, he wasn’t interested. I would have to find Grace another way and it would be much more difficult, maybe even impossible.

“Thanks, Brent,” I said dejectedly. I was about to head back to my desk when he tried once more. “Hold on, Leo. I think we may have something,” he said. “I take it you’re waiting for something from Detective Whitford, am I right?” His mouse-free hand was pointing at one of the red lines.

“Yeah,” I said, leaning over his shoulder to see the screen better. There was a message from someone named Whitey.

“Didn’t know he had a nickname,” he said, clicking to open the message.

“Please don’t use it next time to see him, because then someone might know that he uses his personal e-mail to talk to the media.” It had taken Whitford so long to respond to my request because he had gone off-site. Because he had committed some infraction by letting me into the tent, someone was probably watching his e-mail use at the EPS, to ensure he wasn’t sharing information he shouldn’t be sharing. The message was simple. No greetings, just the letters
DL,
which was Whitford’s way of saying they had found her driver’s license, and an address. It was exactly what I was looking for.

12

The foster mother remembered Grace, and obviously, her defenses were down because it only took a little bit of convincing to get her to let me in. She was a chunky woman in her early forties and she wore a loose sweater and sweatpants, probably in an effort to hide her weight. The house itself wasn’t dirty but it wasn’t clean. It was quite obvious that kids lived here and ruled the place. Toys were scattered across the floor, along with crayons and torn pieces of paper with half-finished drawings. There were a few plates with half-eaten pieces of food, and half-filled glasses with various drinks placed haphazardly on various coffee and end tables.

The furniture was old and out of style, but in decent shape, no holes or rips. The TV was blaring, competing with various types of music and squeals of laughter and children’s yelling coming from somewhere down the hall. The walls were covered with photographs, tons of them, with different kids at various ages, many them generic school photos. But there were others of people on vacations gathered in a group for the family picture at whatever place they had stopped. Interspersed with these photos were certificates, the kind you get just for participating in some sport or event or class. There was even the odd child’s drawing of high quality, jammed into a plain black frame and given a place of honor on a wall.

The smell of fresh cooking, some type of stew with a touch of sage and basil, lingered in the air. And even though I noted the lack of any Aboriginal features in Mrs. Lewis’s face, I noticed a slew of dreamcatchers hanging from the ceiling, slowly spinning as the breeze from the forced-air furnace kicked in. The place had a sense of chaos, but it seemed under control.
Lived-in
was the proper term. Still, because of my upbringing I had to fight the urge to clean up the place.

Even though we had lived in a small three-bedroom “personnel married quarters” house, a PMQ, most of the house was off-limits to us. Our living room was used only when guests were over. The rest of the time it was blocked by baby gates, the furniture covered with tight plastic sheeting. We weren’t allowed to touch anything in the kitchen, never allowed in our parents’ room, and barely allowed to play even in our own rooms.

Our only place of refuge in any of the PMQ houses I lived in was the basement. Mom and Dad gave us a tattered couch and armchair, a rectangle of used carpet, an old black-and-white TV (no cable), and free rein to do what we wanted, as long as we kept quiet. Growing up, I had to keep most of my toys not in my room but in the basement. So it should come as no surprise that even now, I spent most of my time at home in the basement. The former foster home of Grace Cardinal looked like the kind of home I wished I’d grown up in.

The look on Janet Lewis’s face was friendly, yet worried. She had already received the bad news about her former foster child, so there was also a touch of grief. I had to be very careful because while tears made for a good story, I didn’t want her to become a mess of weepiness. I turned down her offer of milk and cookies but she insisted and disappeared into the kitchen.

There was nervous energy in her walk, but it was nothing unexpected. She had nothing to hide, no skeletons in the closet, no abused children chained to a post in the basement, but she probably had had too many visits by police and social workers in the past few days because of Grace. No doubt this was the nightmare that all parents, even foster parents, worried about.

While she was gone, I wondered if my parents ever had the same nightmare. Not that I would ask them. Mom would dismiss my queries with a wave of her hand and change the subject to talk of the weather. Dad would grunt and tell me not to be stupid.

I took in the place, looking for any photos of Grace or any clues about whether she had been still living here. There were too many photos for me to determine whether Grace was in any of them, but I knew I would have to ask; couldn’t have this kind of story without one or two of those. There was also a black address book in the middle of the table. I was about to pick it up and start flipping through when Mrs. Lewis came back into the room.

She was carrying a tray of cookies and started saying, “I’m sorry, my husband is at work,” but a couple of kids, seven or eight years old, came barreling into the room, screaming up a storm. One of them clutched a toy, holding it in the air while the other chased him, grabbing for it. “Gimme, gimme,” the kid shouted while the other laughed manically. They did a couple of circuits of the room, ignorant of our presence, until Mrs. Lewis reached out to stop the one with the toy. The other kid banged into his back and took the opportunity to grab the toy. They tugged back and forth for a few seconds until Mrs. Lewis grabbed the toy herself. “Jason, Vincent. Please be quiet. We have a guest.”

The kids froze as soon as they realized I was there. Even at this young age, these products of the Children Services system knew that I could be a person of authority, possibly someone who had the power to change their lives in the blink of an eye. I didn’t, but the way they shrank back reminded me of how I used to act when Dad came home after a long assignment. They clung to Mrs. Lewis, looking to her for protection and at the same time also offering her some.

The one who’d first had the toy, Jason, I guessed, was brave enough to speak. “Are we in trouble?” He didn’t look to be native, although I could have been wrong. The look on Janet Lewis’s face was loving yet heartbreaking. While she was trying to reassure the children, she knew how the system worked. While I wasn’t here to take these children away, one day someone could. “No. No,” she said. “Everything’s all right.”

“It’s Jennifer, right, she’s in trouble again,” whispered the other kid. This was probably Vincent, who with his dark skin, wide nose, and straight black hair was obviously native. Odds were that more than half of the kids who had come through this home were native.

“Shut up,” hissed Jason.

Vincent reddened but his foster mother gave him a squeeze. “Nobody in this house is in trouble and nobody is going anywhere,” she said. The firm tone of her voice seemed to help the kids relax. She took two cookies from our plate and gave each kid one. “But this gentleman is here about an important matter, so please go back to your room and play there. And be a little quiet.”

Vincent and Jason grabbed the cookies but left the room reluctantly. They walked out slowly, looking at the floor, but still stole a few looks at me. Once they reached the threshold of the hallway, they gave me one last look and dashed away, screaming the way kids do when they’re having fun.

Mrs. Lewis offered me an apologetic smile and the plate of cookies. I refused with a polite wave of my hands. “I’m sorry to do this at such a difficult time but I’m hoping to get as much information about Grace as I can. At the paper, we’re trying to move past her being a victim and to show she was a human being who had a life prior…”

Mrs. Lewis, who had been holding in her grief ever since I walked through the door, started to cry. Her sobs were deep and soul crushing. Vincent and Jason, and another foster child, a teenage girl about fourteen, must have heard the noise and appeared in the doorway. After a second, the girl stepped in and placed an arm around Janet but the two boys stayed back, shocked into immobility by the unexpected collapse of their foster mother. Vincent, the native boy, gave me a look of hatred and fear because he knew that I was the one who had caused this pain.

One of the more interesting features I had written in the past was a story about the employees of funeral homes, and how they dealt with death on a daily basis. Sure, I had seen death more often than the average person but it wasn’t a daily occurrence. In that short day or so I spent at the funeral home interviewing the workers as they prepared bodies and worked with their grieving clients, I learned that while it was human nature to try to make those suffering feel better, it was not the best thing to do. Grief was a natural process, not something you have to fix. So those funeral home employees taught me that it was best to be professional, but compassionate. Compassionate, but not cold. And silence, I learned, was the key. In times like this, it was best not to speak until spoken to. In order to get the full story on Grace’s life, I would have to wait.

13

Once Mrs. Lewis got herself together and again sent all the kids out of the room, she started to tell me Grace’s story. It was good for Grace in the beginning. Although her mother was a teenaged native girl, Grace was adopted by a loving couple. They raised her for several years, giving her the home that normal kids like me got. However, the relationship soured, and the couple split up. Instead of one of them taking custody of their little girl or at least sharing it, they sent her back into the system.

It was hard to imagine, being four years old and having the people you call Mom and Dad tell you that you are no longer important enough for them to take care of you, and you are now going to live with strangers.

For a few years, until she was about ten, it was a lot of strangers. Grace, not surprisingly, wasn’t the perfect child after this, and since there was a strong likelihood that her birth mother drank and took drugs during the pregnancy, it was also likely that Grace suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which meant she couldn’t really think about the consequences of her actions.

While most foster parents were decent enough folks who did their best for the kids they were given care of, it was a tough job, and some foster homes don’t always provide the best environment for these kids. There were the odd assholes who were only in it for the money or for the chance to exercise some weird psycho power over a bunch of vulnerable kids. Still, despite the problems, the system worked as well as it could and it was better than sticking kids in a bunch of run-down orphanages like they used to do in the old days.