Senseless Acts of Beauty (7 page)

“I remember a time when everyone told me that
you
were trouble.”

“Hell, I was trouble.”

“Not while you were here eating gingersnaps.”

That much was true. And she would have loved to have stayed here, instead of crawling back to the dirty house in Cannery Row where her mother promised to get better and then pretended she wasn’t drinking cheap vodka for breakfast.

Sometimes loyalty was a bitch.

“I was trouble, yeah,” Tess agreed, “but Bud and Mary knew my name, where I came from, and why I was here, and so did the cops. But you,” she said, pointing a finger in her direction, “are currently harboring a minor—a stranger—a runaway. It could get you in loads of hot water.”

“Getting in trouble might be a nice change from following the straight and narrow path and disappointing everybody, anyway. And I can’t exactly envision a Pine Lake police officer breaking down the door to slap handcuffs on Sadie or me.”

Tess had seen Officer Rodriguez break a door down in the Cannery. She’d seen him come busting through and then seize her by the coat, throw her against the wall, and slap a cold set of handcuffs across her wrists. She’d had a bruise on her cheek for weeks.

“Unfortunately, it could happen.” Tess figured if you’re always staying on the right side of the law, you don’t learn these things. “Depending on what this Sadie’s
real
story is, her guardians could send the cops here and charge you with endangering a minor, even kidnapping.”

“For giving a kid hot chocolate, a library card, and the loan of a bike?”

“Sounds like aiding and abetting, or it would, in the hands of any two-bit lawyer.”

“I just keep thinking,” Riley said, “that maybe Sadie is running away from a bad home life. Maybe she needs sanctuary. Like you did.”

“All the more reason to get this kid the help she needs right now, before she learns how to jump railway cars, beg for change, and hustle more soft-hearted Good Samaritans like you, Riley Cross.”

Riley frowned at her. “I can’t believe I’m hearing you say all this.”

“I’ve learned a lot from my bad choices. The juvenile delinquent you remember from Pine Lake is long gone.”

“So much so that Tess Hendrick advocates for handing a runaway over to the police?”

Tess felt the twitch in her jaw, the one thing she couldn’t suppress. She remembered her own wayward travels: Cleveland in the summer, Chicago in the early fall, St. Louis in the winter, back north in the spring, every day the same—wake up, beg, buy food, smoke, hang out, dodge the cops, move on. And she thought, yes,
yes
, she’d do anything—quit her job, drive eighteen-hundred miles, even call the cops on her daughter—to prevent Sadie from going down that same road.

She’d do anything except tell Sadie the truth.

“Hey, if you can get your runaway to go home without calling the authorities, that’d be great,” Tess said, forcing her stiff shoulder muscles to mimic a careless shrug. “But knowing what I do about the mind-set of a rebellious teenager, I don’t think you’ll have much luck with that.”

Riley chewed on her lower lip. Tess knew she was wavering. So she nudged herself off the butcher-block table, strode across the kitchen, and took the phone receiver off the wall. It was tethered, so she stretched it to the end of its springy cord. “You want me to do it? If I make the call, then Sadie can’t blame you.”

Tess hesitated as she heard a hiss from nearby. She glanced at the kitchen door, now rocking gently on its hinges. Riley must have heard it, too, because she clattered her coffee cup on the counter and shot over to the window by the sink.

Riley said, “Damn it.”

“What?”

“She heard you.” Riley pushed past her. “She’s running.”

S
adie just ran.

She flew into the pine woods. She kept her eyes on the ground, watching the needles she was kicking up, seeing her half-tied laces, the leaf that had gotten stuck between the rubber sole where it separated from the canvas. The word
police
rang in her ears.

The first time she saw the police she’d been sitting in Izzy’s house in her penguin pajamas watching Japanese cartoons. Her mom and dad hadn’t picked her up that morning like they’d said they were going to. She’d liked staying at Izzy’s house, which was messy in a pillows-on-the-floor kind of way, but she’d spent a whole weekend there and Izzy’s brother was annoying and Sadie really wanted to go home. When the doorbell rang, she’d leaped up to greet them—but her parents weren’t there. Instead, two policemen blocked out the sunshine, talking to Izzy’s mom, and then those two policemen looked at her.

She’d had a box of cereal in her hand, she remembered, and then suddenly it wasn’t in her hand and little oat pieces pinged and bounced and scattered all over the hall. Later—much later—she’d found a heart-shaped marshmallow in the pocket of her pajamas, sticky and covered with lint.

Now Sadie rounded a tree to catch her breath and squeeze the memory away. She’d made it to the marshy part of the lake near the beaver dam. She realized she should have taken the bike. She could have gotten away faster. That was the problem with panicking. You get that squishy feeling in the middle of your gut, like the floor just disappeared, and then your stomach is in your throat and the two bagels and orange juice with it.

Think.

She bent in two to ease the pain shooting between her ribs. Her backpack shifted, tugging her tank top. She told herself she had been lucky. If she hadn’t decided to go back to the lodge before leaving for the library, to dump out the two survival books in her backpack and stash them in her room at Camp Kwenback, she would have never heard Riley and her friend talking about her in the kitchen.

That Tess-woman had been doing most of the talking. It was hard to believe that skinny, tatted-up, hard-faced woman was a friend of Riley’s. She looked like she had a getaway motorcycle idling outside. Or a pack of lock picks in her back pocket. Sadie hadn’t liked the way that woman skewered her with one look from under those silly bangs. Social workers gave her that kind of piercing look. Like they could, with one glance, see right through Sadie’s head to all the lies she’d worked hard to keep hidden.

She leaned over even further. Her heart was battering the inside of her chest. One thing was for sure: No way,
no way
was she going to the police. She knew what would happen then. They’d put her in a room and talk to her—
talk, talk, talk
—and then send in social workers who knew how to get information out of you like they had psychic powers. You go in and they ask questions about your whole family, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, neighbors, and all that information comes right up to the front of your brain whether you want to tell them or not. And if you don’t tell them what they want to know, then they’ve got to find another way to get rid of you, so the next thing you know, you’re on your way to some group foster home. Then you’re sleeping in the lower bunk while the kid on the top tells you he’s got a dead gerbil in his pocket that he stabbed with a stolen knife.

A branch cracked. She straightened like a shot. Peering around the tree, she squinted through the woods to see a woman jogging in her direction. The sun hit the woman’s hair, and that’s when Sadie knew it was Riley.

“Sadie, I know you’re out here.”

Riley approached closer, close enough that Sadie could see she was sweeping the whole forest with her gaze. Sadie fumbled for the binoculars around her neck and scanned the woods behind Riley, looking for a herd of blue uniforms, seeing nothing but trees.

Riley said, “I just want to talk, okay? Just talk.”

Talk, talk, talk.

Sadie dropped the binoculars to her chest and stepped out from around the tree. “I’m not hanging around here if you plan to call the police.”

Riley’s whole face softened. “I’m so glad you’re still here.”

“For now.” Sadie looked Riley straight in the face because grown-ups always thought you were telling the truth when you did. “All that stuff your friend was saying—she’s wrong. There is no one who cares enough about me to show up, drag me away, and charge you with endangering or kidnapping or abetting or any of those other stupid things that Tess-woman said.”

That woman was messing everything up. And Sadie was so close. Just a few more days and maybe Sadie would have found someone in the high school yearbooks whose face looked like hers. A few more days and maybe she would have found the one woman in the world who
would
give a damn.

“Try to understand.” Riley wandered toward a fallen log and sat down. “Tess got a shock today when she saw you. You’re like a ghost from her past. She was a runaway, too. She ended up right here in Camp Kwenback, sleeping in one of those outdoor cabins.”

“You told me that you knew her from high school.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. Little tiny town with itty bitty problems. “It’s not ‘running away’ if you end up a few houses over.”

“Those two trips were tests. Later she took off for good. That’s why she looks like she eats nails for breakfast.”

“Ex-runaway, ex-con, I don’t really care who she is. She shouldn’t be sticking her nose in this.”

“That’s true. But for some reason, people stick their noses in my business all the time.” Riley squinted off in the distance. “And I can’t seem to help myself—I always listen. Which is why one day I woke up and realized I was living in an apartment that someone else decorated, working a job that I hated, and married to a man I couldn’t possibly make happy. Go figure.”

Sadie’s jaw hardened. She didn’t need the sticky mess of someone else’s problems. She had plenty of her own. “Well, I can take care of myself, as long as the police aren’t interfering.”

“Good for you. Me, I seem to give off a perfume of desperation. But I’m trying to change that.”

“So are you going to call the cops on me or what?”

“No, I’m not.”

Sadie’s heart leaped. “What about your Tess-friend?”

“Tess will keep her mouth shut if I ask her to. She owes me.”

“You’re not worried about being arrested if you let me stay?”

“Not if you tell me the truth.”

Sadie took a step back, hesitating. “I never lied to you.”

“I believe you. But Tess made one good point back there. You never told me where you came from and who might be waiting for you back home.”

Sadie stilled. Her ribs tightened. She cast about for some half-truth that would satisfy Riley’s curiosity. Half-truths were always better, and a lot easier to remember, but her mind kept stumbling over what she couldn’t reveal. No, she couldn’t tell Riley
that.
She just…couldn’t. But she’d risked so much already—stealing books from her hometown library, using Nana’s ATM card, traveling five hours away from home, telling so many half-truths to this one, kind stranger.

“I think you owe me this, Sadie.”

Sadie closed her eyes against the kick of guilt. Then she whispered what she knew she shouldn’t.

“I lived with my grandmother.” She crouched down and plucked at a pinecone with a fingernail. Stupid tears prickled at the backs of her eyes. She blinked fast to keep them there. She wasn’t supposed to talk about this. She’d kept all this inside of her for so long, clamping her teeth together when she was tempted, and now she felt her throat close so tightly she could barely breathe.

Riley asked, “Is your grandmother missing you now?”

She curled her hand around the sticky pinecone. If she just hadn’t been in such a hurry that day. She’d had an algebra test and she hadn’t been able to think of anything else. She knew she had to eat a good breakfast that morning, but that meant making more dishes to wash, less time to do it in. So she didn’t have time to comb Nana’s hair, make sure she was dressed properly. She remembered thinking what difference did it make anyway? What was one day wearing slippers and a bathrobe? It wasn’t like they were going to have visitors or anything, and she could always take care of Nana once she got back home.

Sadie whispered, “I forgot to bolt the door.”

One stupid mistake. All her fault. One stupid mistake and the whole world turned upside-down again.

“Sadie?” Riley stood close beside her, watching her, all gentle brown eyes.

“The police found her before I did,” Sadie said. “Nana was wandering in the middle of Skillman Avenue. All she was wearing was a bathrobe and one shoe.”

I
t felt odd to be approaching the Pine Lake police station in broad daylight. Without wearing handcuffs, that is.

Tess dropped into her strut like fifteen years hadn’t passed since she’d rolled over these sidewalks. She knew the exact distance between trees boasting little wooden signs admonishing people to curb their dogs. She knew the angle of the summer light, the air that smelled like maple syrup, the temptation of freedom provided by the thin alleyway between the yarn shop and the station. With her hands in her back pockets, she braced herself to enter the booking room of the police station without Officer Rodriguez nudging her ahead of him, pushed beyond all levels of tolerance, his overdeveloped neck muscles twitching.

No, this time she was heading into the belly of the beast on her own. This time she was acting like a good citizen, an upstanding, taxpaying member of decent society. Though if she thought about it for more than a minute, she knew she was riding a thin moral line between getting a runaway back to her family and ratting out Riley, a woman to whose family she owed a great debt. Just the thought of it made her twitchy for nicotine.

She pushed through the revolving door nonetheless. Her nostrils flared as she entered the old room. It smelled of mold and humidity, tinged with testosterone with a top note of dirty socks. The place was locked into the mid-twentieth century, with the same linoleum floors, the same old oak information desk, the same Plexiglas shield with the circular cutout, and maybe even the same female cop behind it.

The cop didn’t turn away from her computer screen as Tess approached.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah, I was driving over on River Road just off I-90 a couple of days ago, and I saw this kid wandering on the side of the road.” Tess pushed away the memory of Riley demanding Tess respect her wishes and not report Sadie to the police. Technically Tess wasn’t reporting her at all. “She was a young girl, fourteen or so, skinny, alone in the rain with a backpack.”

“Yeah?”

The policewoman jiggled her mouse and kept reading something on her monitor. Tess wondered what kind of hot crime wave was going on in Pine Lake that the report of a runaway elicited such a dull response. Was the town secretary skimming from the city budget? Had someone set up a meth lab in the woods? Back when she was raising hell, the toughest thing the cops did in any given year was to bust a bunch of pot-smoking kids spray-painting the inside walls of the old cannery.

“She was a runaway,” Tess said. “I’m here to see if there are any alerts.”

“We haven’t gotten any reports lately.” The woman stretched back to pull some flyers from a pile. “The NCMEC keeps an updated list of runaways you can search online state by state.” She slid the flyers through the slot in the Plexiglas. “You can also try the Polly Klaas Foundation—”

“Done both of those.” Tess ignored the flyers. “I’ve also checked the FBI list of missing persons. I’m here to see if you’ve got a better, more up-to-date database.”

The policewoman lifted her head. Tess felt the woman’s gaze pass over her butch-cut hair, her shoulder tat, and her black ribbed tank. Tess didn’t recognize the cop, but Tess could see the officer’s mind working, flipping through some mental Rolodex. Somewhere in the basement storage of this very building there was probably a nice fat file on Theresa Hendrick, the edges of the pages yellowing, the paper spotted black with mildew.

The policewoman picked up a phone. “Have a seat. I’ll send someone out to write up a report.”

Her butt remembered the wooden bench sitting like a pew against the front wall. She slipped right into place. She ran her hand over the finish, worn in places where many a soul had languished. She wondered if she ran her fingers just underneath the edge she would find layers of ossified gum stuck there in youthful protest. All she needed to make this picture complete was that hard-nosed cop, Officer Rodriguez, walking through the door.

Then the far door swung open and a cop rolled out.

Sweet Jesus, no.

Rodriguez still had the same musculature that got him mocked as “Rod the Bod” by the late-night cannery crowd. The years had filled him in so he looked less like an obsessive gym rat and more like a fitness acolyte who liked to play tag football on the weekends. Or like one of those militant, angry fathers who beat the spine out of their kids.

Instinct kicked in. She rolled up out of her seat and slipped her hands in her back pockets. What the hell was he doing in Podunk Pine Lake? He should have blown this small-town police station a long time ago. He should have climbed his way up the ladder to Albany, where he’d have something better to do than harass teenagers. Or he should be living off a city pension somewhere, fishing and hunting his way through his forties. He’d certainly put in his twenty years. She hadn’t even considered he’d still be kicking around, an ugly reminder of everything she’d left Pine Lake to forget.

He stopped square in front of her and gave her a hard-eyed glare. “Well, if it isn’t Theresa Hendrick.”

“Rodriguez.”

“I called Gloria a liar when she told me you were sitting out here. You just cost me twenty bucks.”

It wouldn’t be the first time she’d cost him money. He’d once thrown ten bucks on a shopkeeper’s desk to pay for the tampons she’d stolen by stuffing them in her coat.

“You shouldn’t be gambling, Rod.” She tried to raise her gaze above his chest, but it got caught on the regalia. “A guy with that much brass should know gambling is illegal in Pine Lake.”

Rodriguez shoved his hands under his biceps so they bulged even more. “Blond suits you.”

“I’ll take the compliment.” She squinted at his salt-and-pepper head. “But I’m just not feeling the gray, Rod.”

“Blond is better than that goth thing you once had going. You know how many times I wanted to take a scrub brush to your face?”

“A scrub brush? And I pinned you for a whips-and-handcuffs man.”

“You always did pin me wrong.” He gestured to the tat covering her left arm. “I see you’re still committing ritual, socially sanctioned self-abuse.”

“That’s a lot of big words.”

“Still the smart mouth.”

“You’re looking pretty smart, too.” She nodded to his uniform, crisp and blue as always. “You’ve earned a few more patches for your sash, Girl Scout.”

“That’s Captain Girl Scout to you.” A muscle flickered in his cheek. “So what the hell brought you back to Pine Lake?”

“I’m visiting friends.”

“And I thought I’d put all of them in jail.”

She tried to straighten up like the adult she was, but all she managed to do was swivel from one hip to the other, regressing from thirty-something to a teenager in one minute flat. She seemed to be having no effect on him, as usual. He glared down from his six-foot-three-or-so, sporting the cop stone face, his lips pressed in a slashing line like an Old Testament god.

Well, she didn’t owe anyone an explanation for why she was back in Pine Lake, least of all this cop who’d all but driven her out with his harassment. She was tempted to ask him if he was still throwing hungry teenagers in jail for shoplifting at the Food Mart. She wanted to ask him if he still did nightly drive-bys to harass the good folks of the Cannery. She was tempted to ask him if he was still working that battered wife case, the one when he helped the father retain custody of his biological children.

But if she gave in to the powerful urge to turn on a heel and leave the station, she’d only trigger Rodriguez’s cop intuition. The last thing she wanted him to do was dig into the archives and investigate.

She steeled herself for the inevitable mockery. “Believe it or not, Rodriguez, I’ve come to ask for your help.”

He turned his head. “Come again?”

“I saw a kid on the side of the road a couple of days ago.”

“Did you just ask for my
help
?”

“Don’t be a prick.”

“For a decade of your young wasted life, I tried to give you help.” He rocked back on his heels. “And here you show up fifteen years later asking for it.”

“It’s not for me. I need to see the most recent list of missing children and runaways.”

“Gloria said you mentioned something about a girl walking alone on a county road.”

“A runaway.”

“Or a local kid coming back from some pickup soccer game—”

“I know a runaway when I see one. You think I’d drag my ass into this police station because I’ve got nothing better to do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you came here to get fingerprinted again, just for old-time’s sake. Or to check on outstanding warrants.”

“You told me that you buried all of those.”

“The juvenile delinquent I remember never believed anyone’s word.”

“Are you going to help me with this runaway? Or are you going to harass me for old-times’ sake?”

“You could have looked up this stuff online yourself.”

“Sorry, I left my tricked-up laptop back in my eighteen-wheeler, and, geez, I must have misplaced my library card.”

“So it didn’t work out so well for you then.”

“What?”

“Running away.”

Tess’s jaw hardened. She wished she could excise that terrible year from her brain and stitch the edges back together so it didn’t include the cold, the damp, the sick, the lonely realization that no one in the whole wide world gave a shit about Tess Hendrick, least of all herself.

Her jaw had turned to stone so she just looked at him from beneath the swoop of her bangs, looked at him with all their conflicted history rolling between them, and waited for him to make the next move. She could see his cop mind working overtime. She could see him wondering what game she was playing. But she wasn’t playing a game—not this time—so she didn’t have to school her face. She’d come here for one reason alone: To ferret out some kind of proof that Sadie was lying to Riley—that Sadie’s relatives
did
care that Sadie was gone. By now Sadie’s Nana or aunt must have sent out an APB for a missing child. Finding that proof was the only way Tess could think of to shake Riley’s all too trusting nature and get Sadie back where she belonged.

He unknotted his arms and said, “Freddie Taylor’s got an autistic boy who wanders off sometimes, but we always find him splashing around at Bay Roberts. We haven’t gotten any other local notices of runaways or missing children.” He walked toward the door to the inner station, talking all the way. “You’ll want a statewide database. If that doesn’t work, I can get you access to the Canadian records. If the kid was that close to the highway, she could have hitched, she could have come from anywhere, and you know that, right?”

“I’ve ridden a few circuits.”

“How good a look did you get of her?”

Tess thought of Sadie’s bright red hair, the dimple in the lobe of her left ear, the alfalfa green eyes.

“Good enough.”

Rodriguez led her into the main room of the precinct. He wove through the desks, past a few officers in uniform and a few without. The room had the kind of hush that came when everyone had just stopped whispering. She forced herself not to dodge eye contact. She wasn’t being dragged in in handcuffs now. She wasn’t being put in a holding cell until the cops could rouse her mother out of a drunken stupor long enough to sign her out. And a quick scan of the room didn’t register any recognizable cop faces, although that husky guy in the corner with the thinning hair could be Officer Casey.

Rodriguez led her all the way to the back office, the one with his name stenciled on it, Captain Jorge E. Rodriguez.

“All the years of working here,” she said, as she entered the one-windowed office, “and now you’re den mother.”

“It’s almost as shocking as finding you alive.”

“I’d imagined you’d be in Albany or New York City, capturing the real bad guys, instead of here harassing the stoners.”

“I did five years in Albany.”

She snorted. “You make that sound like a prison sentence.”

“I worked homicide.”

He didn’t elaborate. He leaned over his desk, flattened his palm on a pile of papers, and with the blue glow of the computer screen lighting his face, he tapped the keyboard one-fingered. A diploma from the police academy was the only thing hanging on the walls. On top of a file cabinet stood a picture of two young boys and a dog frolicking in autumn leaves. No pictures of a wife, she noted. Next to the picture was some sort of blocky plastic award whose brass placard she couldn’t read.

“Come around here,” he said, “and I’ll show you what’s what.”

She rounded the desk and saw a screen full of computer files. He hesitated for a moment, his finger hovering on the mouse, before he finally clicked a window and a database popped up. It was set on the most recent missing child report, only a day old. The missing kid was a six-year-old Vietnamese boy from Riverdale.

“It’s set up by descending date,” he explained, “so this listing is the latest. Clearly he’s not your runaway. Click here and then you can go and see the main list and choose only the reports for female minors. Be patient. I’m fighting with city hall to approve an upgrade to the wi-fi so it’s going to take a while to load each listing.”

She glanced around the small office. “You want me to do this right here?”

“You wanted access.” He nudged a coffee cup that said
World’s Best Dad
. “There’s a coffee maker in the break room. It’s pure industrial sludge, but you know what they say about beggars and choosers.”

“So you’re going to let an ex-delinquent rifle through all those files of yours.”

“All my files are password protected.”

“I don’t want to tie up your computer.”
Or have you watch what I’m doing.
“I could be hours at this.”

“You’ve got one hour. I’m going to lunch with Gloria.”

“All right then.” An hour would do it. “You girls take your time.”

“There’s hot chocolate in the break room, too,” he said as he paused at the door, patting the frame. “I remember how much you loved hot chocolate.”

Heat rose to the roots of her hair. The first time she’d been dragged into the police station, barely fourteen, when she’d been caught smoking pot with her new friends at the Cannery, Rodriguez had separated her from the others. He’d taken her into the break room and offered her hot chocolate. It was instant, watery, and served in a Styrofoam cup. It was the best thing she’d tasted since her father had dumped her and her mother gave up parenting.