Spilled Blood (13 page)

‘I tried to help,’ he said. ‘You sent the checks back.’

‘I don’t want your money, Chris.’

‘It was just money. No strings attached.’

‘There’s no such thing.’

He wondered why she was afraid of his help. ‘I wasn’t trying to buy my way back into your life,’ he told her, but he knew he was lying to both of them. ‘Oh, hell, maybe I was.’

Hannah was quiet. ‘The truth?’

‘Sure.’

‘I was a little scared of letting you back in.’

He thought that he might as well say it. It was as good a time as any. ‘You cut my heart out when you left, Hannah. I’ve been dead ever since.’

His ex-wife closed her eyes. She started to speak, and then she stopped. When she opened her eyes again, she brushed away tears. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s been three years, but it still hurts to think that you stopped loving me.’

Hannah looked genuinely upset to hear him say those words. ‘Chris, that is not true. That was never true.’

‘Then why?’

She put her glass down and swung sideways on the chair. She leaned forward, her hands lightly on his thigh. ‘I wanted something else out of life. I wanted
this
.’

‘What is this?’ he asked, because he really didn’t know.

‘This is a place where I matter.’

‘You mattered to me.’

‘I know you think so, but I’d become an afterthought to you. Olivia, too. You thought you were working for us, but you were working for yourself. It’s not sports or sex for men like you. It’s the code. Accomplishment. Success. Duty.’

‘Those are bad things?’

‘If you forget why you’re doing it, yes.’ She went to the edge of the porch, where she gripped the railing. The town of St. Croix was framed behind her in the dotted lights of the houses. ‘Do you know why I love being here? It’s not because it’s an easier way of life. It’s harder. It takes more self-reliance. There’s no safety net. But you know what, Chris? We’ve got our priorities straight. Relationships matter here. God matters. Time matters. I’m not just a mouse running in a Habitrail.’

‘Is that how you felt with me?’ he asked. ‘Really?’

She didn’t look at him. ‘Sometimes.’

‘You know that’s the last thing I ever wanted.’

Hannah turned around. He realized they were both older; they’d both walked through fire and learned that burn marks don’t heal. They just toughen into scars, like permanent reminders. ‘I don’t blame you, Chris. If anything, I blame myself for what happened between us. Here I am, talking about relationships, and I walked away from the one that meant the most to me. I’m not proud of that. I’ve obviously screwed up with Olivia, too.’

‘Not true.’

‘I can’t get her to open up to me. I’ve watched her drift further and further away. Now look at where she is. She’s sixteen, and her life may be over.’

She was giving him a chance to move to safer ground, and he took it. It was easier to talk about Olivia than to reopen the locked room where they kept their pasts. ‘Her life isn’t over, but I can’t help her unless I know what she’s hiding.’

‘You’re looking at the wrong woman. I’m the last person she’d tell if she had secrets.’

‘Then who?’

Hannah shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know. She’s a closed book.’

‘Tanya Swenson said there was something personal going on between Ashlynn and Olivia. Do you know what it could be?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Did Olivia ever talk about Ashlynn?’

‘Not in front of me. Not unless it was about Mondamin.’

Chris was frustrated. ‘Something strange was going on with Ashlynn, too,’ he said. ‘She was missing for three days before Friday. Either Florian didn’t know why, or he was covering for her.’

Hannah turned away.

‘What is it?’ Chris asked.

‘Nothing.’

Chris pushed himself out of the chair. On the street, he saw the
retired policeman climb out of his Thunderbird. The man checked the gun in his shoulder holster and wandered onto the lawn to patrol the perimeter of the house. He was built like the trunk of an oak tree, weathered and tough. Chris nodded at him, and he waited silently while the ex-cop disappeared between the rear of the house and the bank of the river.

‘What’s going on, Hannah?’ he repeated. ‘I don’t need you keeping secrets from me, too.’

‘Please, Chris, I can’t talk about this.’

‘Do you not understand what’s happening here? Olivia is facing first-degree murder charges.’

‘Believe me, I understand.’

‘Then talk to me.’

‘I’m telling you, I have no idea what Tanya meant. As far as I know, Olivia thought Ashlynn was the enemy. There was no relationship between them.’

‘You know something,’ Chris persisted. ‘What secret could possibly be so important when Olivia’s life is at stake?’

Hannah folded her arms together and breathed heavily. She looked to be in physical pain, and maybe she was. Maybe it was the cancer. He softened and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’

She spoke so quietly that he could barely hear her. ‘When a girl comes to me, I take an oath to uphold her privacy.’

‘When a girl comes to you? What are you talking about?’ Then he understood. ‘Oh, son of a bitch. Ashlynn.’

Hannah said nothing.

‘Ashlynn came to you at the Center, didn’t she? What was happening to her?’

‘I can’t say anything.’

‘Hannah, please,’ Chris pressed her. ‘Whatever was going on in her life, it could be the reason she was killed.’

‘I won’t betray her trust.’

‘You’re betraying her trust by staying silent,’ Chris insisted. ‘Ashlynn has no privacy anymore. She’s dead. Someone shot her in the head. She’s been cut up by a pathologist. They put her on a slab for an autopsy. She has no secrets.’

‘An autopsy?’

‘Of course.’

Hannah cupped her hands in front of her mouth. ‘They know.’

‘Know what?’

He waited for her to answer, but as the question hung in the air, he realized he already knew the truth. Three days. She’d been gone for three days. Alone. Depressed. He thought about what Maxine Valma had said.
I saw her crying. If you told me she committed suicide, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
He knew why a seventeen-year-old girl would go to see Hannah. Why Hannah would do almost anything to protect the girl’s confidences.

Because she was pregnant. And because she’d made the decision not to be pregnant anymore.

‘Where did you send her?’ he asked softly.

Hannah stared at him, stricken. He saw in her face what it was like to be in her office every day. To hear the stories. To feel the pain. ‘There’s a doctor I know in Nebraska,’ she said.

‘She’s discreet and professional. Ashlynn didn’t want her parents to know about it. She didn’t want to go to court to get permission.’

‘Who’s the doctor?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t say. She’s operating outside the law, ignoring parental notifications. She could be in mortal danger if people knew what she was doing. If they make her stop, some desperate girls will have no options. I won’t allow it.’

‘Who else knew?’ he asked.

‘As far as I know, nobody. Me and Ashlynn. That’s all.’

‘Olivia?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Who was the father?’

‘Ashlynn didn’t say. I don’t think he knew.’

‘Did she say if it was consensual?’

‘She didn’t mention rape. I didn’t pursue the circumstances, but I don’t think that’s what happened.’

‘Olivia knows more than she’s telling us,’ Chris said. ‘I don’t know if it’s about the pregnancy or the abortion, but something else is going on here, and I want to know what it is.’

‘She won’t open up to me.’

‘Maybe she’ll open up to both of us.’

‘I wish that were true,’ Hannah said, ‘but you’re better off talking to her alone.’

‘You can read her better than me,’ he said.

‘She’s just like you. Come with me.’

Instinctively, he did what he’d always done in the past. He reached out to take Hannah’s hand.

That had been a ritual of their marriage. They would sit on the porch overlooking the lake. Talk. Laugh. Cry sometimes. When it was time to go inside, he would hold out his palm, and she would take it, and they would head upstairs hand in hand. There was a sacredness about the gesture that they both recognized. To hold hands was to be in love.

She flinched, and he pulled his hand back like touching a hot stove. He knew he’d made a mistake. You didn’t intrude on certain memories. You left them the way they were.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Hannah said nothing, but she came with him into the house.

The uncarpeted stairs to the second floor were on his left. He let Hannah go first, and he followed. Upstairs, the hallway was dark. He recognized the lingering aroma of Hannah’s perfume. Everything here smelled like her, and it was disorienting, as if they were back in the past. She knocked on the first closed door on their left.

‘Olivia?’

There was silence from their daughter’s bedroom. Hannah knocked again, but there was no answer. She put her ear to the door, listening for Olivia’s voice on the phone or the noise of the television. They heard nothing.

‘Olivia,’ she repeated, her voice sharper.

She turned the knob to go inside, uninvited. The door was open. The two of them entered Olivia’s room, and Chris felt as if he were trespassing. With a sweep of his eyes, he recognized souvenirs from her childhood – the stuffed Gund bears on her dresser, a stone Aztec calendar on the wall from a family vacation to Acapulco – but most of the bits and pieces in the messy room revealed a girl he didn’t know.

The room was empty. The window overlooking the river, above the muddy rear yard, was open.

Olivia was gone.

When the ex-cop patrolling their house disappeared, Olivia opened her window and squeezed her body through the frame. She lowered herself slowly, clinging to the peeled paint of the window ledge with her fingers. The drop from the soles of her sneakers to the wet ground was only eight feet. She let go and landed with a hard, heavy splash. She waited, making sure that no one had heard her, before she headed for the river.

She ducked under the spindly branches of the oak trees behind the house and pushed through the dead brush. Foliage above the water was dense, but the weeds on the river bank had long since been beaten down into a path. She picked her way through black puddles that had gathered in the craters of the dirt. Wild brown grasses tipped with fur brushed against her skin on either side of the trail. Below her, no more than ten feet down the slope of the bank, she could hear the noisy slurp of the river.

Through the trees, she saw lights glowing in the houses of St. Croix. She recognized the voices of neighbors through open windows. She moved as silently as she could, like a deer, to avoid arousing suspicion. It was a small town. Everyone knew everyone else, and everyone knew everyone’s business. Keeping secrets meant not being seen, and she’d had plenty of practice slipping away.

Two hundred yards down the river bank, she reached the railroad tracks that paralleled the highway. Trains rarely passed here in this season. She stepped over the rail and stood on the crushed gravel in the center of the tracks. In the early days, when she’d first arrived in St. Croix, she’d wandered down here and thought
about jumping onto a slow-moving train as it rattled south. She’d imagined lying on top of the cool steel of the freight car, watching the clouds and stars above her, feeling the jolts and vibrations and screech of the train wheels. She’d wanted to travel far away until home was a memory.

Back then, it had been Kimberly who talked her into staying. Running away was for cowards, she said.

Olivia followed the railroad tracks onto the bridge over the river. The criss-cross beams of gray steel made giant X’s on either side of her. Halfway between the banks, she stepped off the tracks and climbed onto the rigid frame above the water. She leaned against one of the diagonal steel beams. The deep water had a wormy smell, dank and dead.

She heard footsteps. He’d heard her coming. She saw a silhouette, and even without lights, she knew it was him. She felt a rush of joy that made her forget everything else. She climbed down and ran. He was twenty yards away, but she felt as if she covered the distance in two steps, and then she threw her arms around his neck and held on. She remembered how her face felt against his and how his skin smelled. It had been months since she’d touched him.

‘
Johan.
’

He stood stiffly as she embraced him. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t look into her eyes. He studied the darkness on the river banks as if it held threats.

‘We shouldn’t be here,’ he murmured.

‘I know, but I had to see you.’

‘What do you want, Olivia?’

‘What do I want?’ she asked, mystified. ‘How can you say that? We need to talk.’

Johan turned toward the far bank of the river. She walked beside him, feeling his distance. She brushed his fingers, expecting him to hold her hand. When he didn’t, she felt rejected and shoved
her thumbs in her pockets. Her mother always said you could tell a man’s love by how he holds your hand like he never wants to let go.

They crossed the bridge to a wide-open expanse of fields that would be thick with corn in another few weeks. In the warm summers, you could get lost in the head-high stalks like a maze. This was their place. They’d played hide and seek here like children. They’d cried over Kimberly. They’d kissed. Later, during a hot August, she’d let him be the first and only boy to make love to her.

Now he was far away. Remote. Angry.

‘No one knows what really happened,’ she said.

‘Not my dad, not anybody. I didn’t say a word. Honestly. You’re safe.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I still love you, no matter what you’ve done.’

‘What
I’ve
done? Olivia, are you crazy?’

He kicked angrily at the dried, broken remnants of last year’s crop. Forgotten ears lay rotting in the rows. She wondered if he was remembering the previous summer. When they were in love. Before Ashlynn. Instead, his words dashed her heart.