Picture This (26 page)

He brushed her forehead with his lips. She smelled the night on his breath.

“Let's get to the ferry and redeem ourselves,” said Tess. If they left instantly, which was impossible, but if they could, they'd get to the ferry in thirty-eight minutes. Len had timed it, and all of Len's measurements were precise.

Chapter 47

Natalie

S
he hung up Rocky's landline. Then she grabbed her cell and thumbed in a number. “Franklin. Change of plans. Get to the ferry, park as close as you can. Yes, close to the cargo loading area. Have the van running. I'll be on the next ferry with the kid and the dog. I know, this is sooner than we'd planned. Yes. Okay. You can tell me about computer stuff later.” She hung up.

Natalie took a minute to do a slow turn in the kitchen. What did she need? The dog, who had been asleep on the kitchen floor, raised his head and looked at her. She grabbed a plastic bag and scooped kibble into it and placed a few in her pockets. Everything was falling into place with a kind of perfection that she could not have anticipated. The dog would ride trustingly in Rocky's truck, and Rocky always left the keys under the driver's seat.

What else? The statue, the one piece of art in the whole crappy cottage, was right there on the end table. That was what she needed—the saxophone player, the one that Rocky patted on the head, sculpted by her brother. Natalie picked it up. She hefted it in her hands as if measuring for accuracy. Most important, Rocky loved it, just like she loved Danielle and her dog and her whole made-up family.

Natalie opened the sliding glass door to the deck, keeping the dog inside. She held the statue over her head and walked to the edge of the deck, turned, and threw the statue at a large outcropping of rock ledge near the side of the house. It didn't shatter as completely as she had pictured, but it was damaged enough to leave a clear message. The arms broke off, along with the saxophone and one leg. Definitely not as satisfying as shattering it, but she had more important things to do.

Turning to go back in the house, she heard the crows, first one, then two, then, as if an alarm had gone out, she heard more crows in the distance. What was wrong with them?

Cooper was at full alert. Surely a dog wouldn't care about a statue. She picked up her canvas bag in the bedroom. On the way out the door she stopped and considered the cat, Peterson. A pity the cat was already out. Well, there was no need to exaggerate. The point would already be made, loud and clear.

“Let's go, Cooper. You'll have to miss your last class with Melissa today.” Natalie pictured Melissa's outrage when she arrived at Rocky's house to pick up Cooper for his final class that afternoon.

He tilted his head, one ear lifting higher. She stuck her hand into her pocket and extracted a kibble. “Come on, boy, let's go for a ride.” Cooper stood at the door and looked fully at Natalie, his dark eyes reading her. She felt an uncomfortable sense of nakedness. “Don't look at me like that,” she said, trying to keep her voice light.

The door to the truck groaned, the metal hinges abraded by years of salt air. When Rocky drove, Cooper always rode in the passenger seat, looking like her bodyguard.

“Come on, Cooper, that's it, hop in,” she said, holding the door open for him.

She had wanted to derail Rocky completely, and Cooper had been a part of the plan. She wasn't even going to hurt him, just drive him far away to Virginia or so, drop him off along the Blue Ridge Mountains, and wave bye-bye. That would destroy Rocky, unhinge her bone by bone.

Natalie pulled the truck into the line that formed for transport on the ferry. Perfect timing. There was little Danielle waiting at the front of the line to get off the ferry. Could she chance taking Cooper out of the truck right here? What if he ran off? No, the dog would help relax the kid; they were buddies.

“Come on, boy. Let's go get Danielle,” she said, letting her voice rise in the way she had heard trainers do on the Animal Channel. She and the dog walked to the end of the street, where islanders greeted passengers from the ferry. Natalie smiled and waved enthusiastically. “Hey, Danielle!”

She flipped open her cell and called Tess. “Danielle is jumping up and down waiting to run up the ramp to the ice cream shop. Take your time. No worries. Can we meet you at your house? See you then. No, go ahead, you have plenty of time to go grocery shopping. Bye.” The little girl bobbed up and down like a cork at sea, and the second all the cars and cargo were off she sprang forward and ran to Natalie.

Danielle reached her with a miniature body slam, throwing her arms around Natalie's waist. “I did it, all by myself! You brought Cooper! Where's Gramma?” asked Danielle as she released Natalie and transferred her hug to the dog.

“She forgot that she had something to do in Portland. She wants us to meet her. So you know what? We have to turn around and go right back on the ferry. How do you like that? Rocky said we could take her truck so that Cooper could ride with us,” said Natalie.

Danielle frowned. “Where's Rocky?”

“Rocky is working on the mainland,” said Natalie.

The girl pressed her lips together. “Where's Melissa?”

They walked up the incline to the truck. The child got in the passenger seat, and Cooper hopped into the back. “Melissa will meet us in Portland to take him to his therapy training classes. Today is his final class. Graduation and all that,” said Natalie.

Danielle had on her bright orange backpack, and she shifted it from one side to the other. “Where are we going to meet Gramma?”

“Do you know that big park in Portland? We're going to meet her there. She said something about a puppet show. Where's your favorite place to sit on the ferry?” Natalie drove the truck across the ramp, following the directions of the bored-looking boy who pointed her to a slot.

“On the very top, but we should stay on the lower deck for Cooper. He doesn't like the stairs,” said Danielle. “Are you sad today? You sound different. Aren't you supposed to be working on building Rocky's new house?”

Natalie had worked three days on the house with Russell and was glad to jettison the job. “You're much more important than the job.”

They sat on the lower deck, getting bits of sun, and even then, Danielle had to pull a jacket out of her pack. Natalie crossed her arms over her chest to warm her core.

If Tess was already at the dock in Portland, then everything was off. She would have gone too far to fake it, and she'd just get in the van with Franklin and they'd drive away. The deal would be off. Sometimes you had to take chances. As they slid into the dock in Portland, Natalie scanned the area for Tess. Nothing, no old lady with white hair. She saw Franklin, glowing white like a creature of the night, hunched over the steering wheel of the van. She patted Danielle's hand. “Oh great! My friend Franklin is here. He can drive us to the park. Let's park Rocky's truck, and we can all go together,” said Natalie.

Natalie pulled the truck off the ferry and swung by Franklin. She hung her head out the window. “I'll park this and we can all go together. Follow me.” Franklin swept his eyes over the young passenger. Natalie pulled the truck into the parking lot of a grocery store four blocks away. She unfastened Danielle's seat belt. Danielle looked small in Rocky's truck, smaller than Natalie had imagined.

“Everybody out,” said Natalie, feigning a kind of cheerfulness.

She opened the back of the truck, and Cooper jumped down. Danielle stood by him and draped her arm over his back. The dog stood angled between the child and the couple. He leaned his head toward Franklin and fluffed his nostrils. The fur on his back rose up.

Franklin took one step back. “He's big. I'm allergic to dogs.”

Natalie opened the side door of the van. “He can ride in the back. Danielle can ride in the front with us.”

As Natalie walked by a trash barrel, she stooped down to pick up a piece of the Portland newspaper, wadded it around the truck keys, and dropped the bundle into the barrel. That was minor mayhem. The major mayhem was yet to come.

Chapter 48

Melissa

M
elissa woke in the hot pink darkness that preceded dawn. She had left the window fan on, and the honeybee drone of it had seeped into her dreams and into the entire night. Her upstairs bedroom was the hottest place in the house. Could the fan have given her nightmares? Shrouded in rejection from Rocky's world, she had a feeling of dread that refused to leave. Once the sun was up, she hoped that the last tendrils of the feeling would be burned to ashes, like a vampire.

Melissa pulled on a pair of shorts, a tank top, and her running shoes. She timed her run around the island so that she'd finish on the east side of the island when the sun pushed up, puncturing the line between sea and sky. Did anyone else feel this fractured and crazy?

After her run, she decided to work on the photos from Chester Hill. The people in the decrepit Portland neighborhood already knew Cooper, and she'd only been there four times. That was four times that her parents didn't know about. Every homeless person she met told her a story about the dog they used to have, back before the accumulating disasters in their life landed them in the club no one wants to be in: the displaced people. Several days ago, she had discovered a new subgroup among the homeless—the guys who still had dogs. They lived in strategically located tents on public land that was scrubby with dense undergrowth and generally unused. Several lived on private land, a few acres behind a diner on the way to South Portland. The owner, a vet from Desert Storm, said that he had every right to let the guys set up their tents behind his diner, or at least that was the word on the street. Rumor was that all the guys back there were vets too.

Melissa knew more about the dogs than the men. There was one boxer and two very mixed-up breeds, as well as a dog that looked like a retriever mix. Not as big as a Lab, she was yellow and short-haired, and her name was Rosie. Cooper couldn't get enough of her. He held his tail high, ears alert, and stuck out his considerable chest. Rosie had dropped immediately to play position: rump up and head down. Rosie's man, still wearing desert combat boots, finally broke into a Cadillac-sized smile as the two dogs dashed around each other. He assessed Melissa, determining if she was friend or enemy. “Be careful around here, kid. You don't want to come up against crackheads. And I don't want to see you up here at night, not even with your dog.”

“Yes, sir. Cooper and I only come here during the day. It's for my photography class. I take pictures of the dogs of Portland. I've got some good ones of Rosie,” said Melissa.

“As long as Rosie and I are around, we've got your back,” he said. “Ryan,” he added, in reference to himself, not offering to shake hands, not offering to do anything more than nod.

“Melissa,” she said, attempting the same nodding formality. “Can I take your picture with Rosie?”

He knelt on one knee next to his dog. Dog and human looked straight at Melissa. He didn't smile, but Rosie did. Melissa took a quick round of shots.

After Cooper graduated from his therapy training class today, she might ask the homeless shelter if she could bring him in for visits after people were allowed back inside for the evening. They had to be out of the shelter from 8:00
A.M.
until 5:00
P.M
.

Melissa downloaded her photos. Cooper could make people laugh, and she had lots of pictures of people who wanted to pose with him. Cooper had a stately profile. One of the best shots of the day was a portrait of Cooper seated next to a man who had smelled pretty horrible and was missing several front teeth, but when he offered his profile next to the black Lab, the camera caught his essential dignity. Why hadn't she seen this when she talked with the man yesterday?

She highlighted the photo and enlarged it. The man's face was filled with creases and crinkles, surrounded by soft places, sadness and hope, a sense of humor. In one of his eyes, she imagined the part of him that had been a five-year-old boy, sweet and sticky. She'd seen none of this in him yesterday. He was like a painting. She couldn't wait to show Mr. Clarke this photo. She saved one version and began to Photoshop another version, cutting out distracting images in the background, like the old white van on the corner, paused at a stop sign.

It looked like the van that Natalie's guy friend drove. Melissa didn't yet have her driver's license, and her knowledge of the styles and years of cars was still vague. There were lots of vans in Portland: delivery vans, plumber's vans, florist vans. But how many vans were there with a fat red scratch on the driver's side? How did Natalie manage to infect everything that belonged to Melissa? Chester Hill and the dogs and the people and the streets were hers, not stupid Natalie's.

Could that really be the van that Natalie's friend drove? There in Chester Hill? Natalie was shoving Melissa out of every place she loved. If she could just hang on until it was time to take Cooper to the therapy training class, she might make it through the day.

Chapter 49

R
ocky turned the Honda's air-conditioning on high, and the small car quickly cooled down. The image of Natalie sitting with her dead mother had etched a horror show on the backs of her eyelids. Each time she blinked, she saw the toddler sitting with her dead mother for five days. She hadn't asked Ira Levine if it was summer when the mother died, if the apartment had been hot. She had to think that it was any season but summer, when sweltering temperatures would have escalated the decomposition. Would the child have adjusted so slowly to the smell that she would not have been sickened?

The troops of the Department of Children and Family Services would have pulled the child into the agency's flow, searching first for blood relatives because surely there was someone. There's always at least one person out there, a distant aunt, a cousin. Had Paulette Davis truly been a woman completely alone? Was this possible? Humans live in packs, like wolves. Addictions can be intractable; her connections to others must have been incinerated. Crack was one of the most addictive drugs on the planet, making even heroin look sunny. Had the woman been self-medicating a mental health disorder? Peel back addiction and an array of painful disorders pops up in a heart-stopping panorama. Heart-stopping indeed. Rocky would have given anything for just a five-minute phone conversation with Bob and she'd never ask again.
Bob, is this your child?
If Bob was the father, and if he sent Paulette money for rent, then Rocky wanted a divorce from her dead husband.

The girl would have been taken by ambulance to a hospital. She would have looked like a jaundiced gumdrop, propped up in a bed with saline drips in her dehydrated arms. Her hair, still baby fine, would have been filthy; the pediatric nurses would have cut away what they couldn't comb out. The girl would have followed the nurses with her huge eyes as they asked her questions, brought her stuffed toys, and smiled their best smiles, anything to wipe off the horror that stuck to the girl. Levine had reported that the girl would not speak until she was five. His report also noted that her ability to attach to others normally was severely impaired. Attachment disorder—never a good starting place.

The nurses and doctors would have woken up in the middle of the night in their own safe beds, thinking of the girl, crushed by her stubborn silence and by the image they all had of her in the apartment. If they had children themselves, they would have gotten up in the middle of the night to sit by their children's cribs and beds, watching them breathe, afraid to look away.

Why was Natalie searching for her biological father when she had been unable to form an attachment to anyone? Why would it even matter? Natalie had told Rocky an odd version of this story; little truths had appeared, but the girl had deliberately left out the part that showed the true train wreck. She had deliberately orchestrated the tale for a purpose.

Rocky hadn't expected to be sideswiped by Levine's information, which drew a portrait of how to turn a kid into a whack job by age eighteen. First, give a baby a crack addict mother, an unknown and absentee father, and chaos and malnutrition when she should have been eating snacks in preschool surrounded by primary colors splashed on the walls and teachers reading to her. Throw in witnessing a murder, sitting next to a dead body for five days, and then grinding through foster care.

Rocky suddenly pulled back. She didn't know what was true and what was not true about Natalie's foster placements. Levine had said that the first two families were no longer used as child placements after Natalie was taken from them, but that the rest of the placements had ranged from adequate to excellent. Except that Natalie didn't stick with any of them.

She could make the drive to Amherst in three hours. If the Honda had a memory for directions in one of its computer chips, it could have recalled each toll and turn on the road: the exit to 95 South, to 495 South into Massachusetts, then west on Route 2, the rolling Mohawk Trail, the exit 16 turnoff at Athol, then skirting the Quabbin Reservoir, the source of Boston's drinking water. The roads got smaller until she pulled into the lawyer's parking lot. This had better be important.

R
ocky waited in the car for her brother, Caleb. She jumped when he tapped the side of her car. If Cooper had been with her, no one would have walked up to the car unannounced. Why hadn't she brought him? She longed for his steady comfort right now. Oh yes, Melissa had to take him to his last class.

Caleb was midseason in house painting. His arms were golden, the hairs bleached by solar exposure from 7:00
A.M.
to three in the afternoon, his official stopping time. It was two o'clock, which meant he'd left a job early to meet her at the lawyer's office. Rocky pictured him driving full tilt from Leeds to Amherst, a good thirty-minute drive if traffic cooperated. From the look of his hair, swept into a horizontal arrangement, he'd had the window open with the breeze pounding on his head from the left. He was not an air-conditioning kind of man.

“Thanks for coming,” said Rocky as she slammed her car door.

The siblings fell easily into step with each other.

“Takes a lot to get you back to Massachusetts,” he said. “I'll have to tell this lawyer to give you a call more often.” Caleb smelled like family, a combination of salt and paint.

Attorney David Prescott's office was in a nineteenth-century house in Amherst that had been converted to offices. David's office dominated both signage and size, followed by a more modest certified public accountant on the second floor and a driving school in the back of the house. It was a full-service house.

Amherst was an academic town; dominated by the thirty thousand students at the university, the town had an over-educated, dressed-down air. Rocky was positive that the faculty could not possibly dress down any further. Full professors routinely arrived in class wearing ragged shorts and Tevas. David might have been the last man in town to wear a suit. Describing the lawyer, Bob had told Rocky, with a sense of incredulity, that some men actually like to wear suits, ties, and tight lace-up shoes shined to a blinking brilliance.

Rocky's foot caught on the threshold, and she stumbled into the lawyer's office, chilled to several degrees cooler than a day in November. She seemed doomed to sit in offices as cold as meat lockers. She cleared her throat once, then again, trying to dislodge the clot of trouble she had swallowed. Rocky hadn't seen David since the final settlement of Bob's estate.

“Good to see you, David,” she said, lying. It was not good to see him, which was why she had called Caleb, to somehow share the unpleasant sensation of sitting in the dark-paneled, freezing cold office that reminded her of the months after Bob's death.

Caleb sat facing David across the expanse of desk, kept tastefully clear of anything except his computer monitor and one file folder, which in this case was the Dead Husband File Folder. The lawyer patted the file folder with his fingers spread wide.

“Assets have recently been directed to Bob's estate that went undetected until very recently. They are considerable.”

This was not what Rocky was expecting, and she tilted her head hard to one side. “Say again, please.”

He slowly opened the file. “I was surprised too. Your husband was a pretty straightforward investor. He had basic life insurance, a basic pension plan, and a very basic will. His parents, whose estates I handled as well, were the same way. When this turned up, I have to admit I was stunned.”

Caleb sat forward in his chair. “Why didn't we know about this sooner? Bob died over a year ago. Fifteen months to be exact. What was this, his backup life insurance?” Caleb's voice shook.

This was the first time Rocky fully considered that Caleb marked time by Bob's death, just as she did. It had never occurred to her that anyone else worked off the Dead Bob Calendar. Bob had been Caleb's big brother, friend, Celtic music buddy. Rocky readjusted the band that held her stub of a ponytail together. She had cut off her long dark hair when Bob died, and only now could she finally coax all of it into one fat circle of coated elastic.

Rocky's chest felt hollow. “Wait a minute. We're leaping too quickly into financial and lawyer talk. I miss Bob so much that there are days when I still think that I won't make it without him. Caleb misses him. Please proceed with tender awareness that given a choice of whatever assets you are about to divulge and the chance to have my big, flea dip–smelling husband back right now, I'd choose him every time. We are still missing him.”

Caleb's eyes went bloodshot for a moment, not long enough for tears to make it over the bottom edge, but long enough to make him turn his face away. Rocky was flooded by the thought of all the ways Caleb had cared for her since Bob died. He had become the landlord for her house and nursed along renters who couldn't figure out what a fireplace flue was for; he called her at all the right times; he yelled at her when she took a job that made him worry that rabid raccoons might bite her; and he had left work early to sit in a lawyer's refrigerated office in his sweat-stained shirt. If she said a kind thing to him right now, he might kill her, so she waited until he was ready to be back in the game again. He uncrossed his legs and spread them wide, his work boots dropping clods of dirt on the polished floors. There, ready.

Rocky crossed her arms in front of her chest and watched the skin on her forearms pucker into gooseflesh. “We settled Bob's estate issues, including the insurance policy, his 401(k), the sale of his practice, and everything that was jointly held,” said Rocky. She had not mentioned the arrival of Natalie. She dreaded embarrassing Caleb by dropping the bomb in front of the lawyer. Rocky turned her head one notch to catch Caleb's attention. As brother and sister, they were an evolving unit. She was the big sister by two years, and she had been his roughneck protector throughout their grade school years. The siblings had drifted apart when Rocky was in high school, a time when the two-year difference took its biggest toll. Now that they were both in their thirties, Caleb had stepped in like an armed guard to protect his newly widowed sister, as much as Rocky would allow.

The lawyer continued. “I apologize. My wife tells me that I have terrible people skills, and she can't understand why anyone hires me at all. Let me start again. I called you because I was contacted by the attorney of Richard Tilbe. He recently died and left a considerable amount of money to your husband.”

Rocky was sure that David kept talking and even said an amount after this. She put one elbow on an arm of the chair and set her chin in it. She did not want her mouth to hang open. She primarily wanted support, and she wanted it to be physical.

Rocky and Caleb did not speak, but if the lawyer had held up a thermometer to the pair, their joint temperature would have sent the mercury shooting skyward. Nothing that the lawyer had just said could find a connection in the brain of either the widow or the widow's dazed brother. Rocky's brain sputtered and churned, searching for similarities, past events that could account for the lawyer's stunning news.

Rocky pulled one knee up and placed the heel of her foot on the chair. “Tell me the figure again,” she said, reaching for a glass of water.

“Two point three million,” said David. “I know, believe me. I was shocked when I first read the document.”

“And tell me again where the check came from,” said Rocky. “No, start from the beginning. I don't remember anything that you said except Richard Tilbe.”

David bracketed the folder with his hands like ten fingered guards. “Bob had a paternal uncle in the Dalles of Oregon. Richard Tilbe, who was eight years younger than Bob's father. Richard had a falling-out with Bob's parents when Bob was in college and moved to points unknown until he finally settled in Oregon fifteen years ago. According to the attorney I contacted, Richard Tilbe was an alcoholic as well as being on a first-name basis with a great many street drugs. He had no contact with his family after a cataclysmic breech eighteen years ago.”

Caleb still had not moved in his chair. He rotated his head in Rocky's direction. “Do you have any idea what he's talking about? I am so lost here,” said Caleb.

Something about her brother's uncharacteristic shock comforted Rocky. He was a gauge for her reality. If Caleb was nearly speechless and immobile, then she had a mile marker.

“Bob's parents were dead by the time Bob and I met in grad school. I only heard Bob mention an uncle once or twice, and I think all he said was ‘asshole.' No. Bob used his favorite Irish expression, ‘a fecking asshole.' I figured every family has one,” she said.

David flicked his eyes from Rocky to Caleb. “Mr. Richard Tilbe died three months ago at the age of sixty-two. Bob is—was—the heir, which makes you the heir in this case. The will was specific: ‘to Robert Tilbe, his wife, and/or their children,' ” he said, reading from a page in the folder.

“So I'm the only person left in this Tilbe family disaster, the nonblood relative?” asked Rocky.

David flipped to another page. “Richard suspected that he had a child. Through a miracle of addiction counseling, Mr. Tilbe gained sobriety ten years ago, dusted off his electrical engineering degree, and worked at the Department of Defense of all places. And he invested with genius.”

If it were possible for a brain to explode, Rocky's would have splattered. She rubbed her temples. “Before you go any further, I think you should know something. A kid, a girl, came searching for her biological father.” She looked at Caleb and said, “Yell at me later for not telling you.”

Caleb opened his mouth to say something and stopped.

“She's convinced that Bob was her father. We've been trying to do DNA testing, but it's been impossible to find genetic material from Bob. We have a DNA swab from the girl.”

Every muscle in the lawyer's face froze. On a good day, he was not a hugely expressive man, but now he looked like he had been flash-frozen, dropped in liquid nitrogen. He blinked once and started his engine again.