The Silent Girls (19 page)

“Lame,” Ichabod said, and picked up his cap and batted snow from it.

“
Grow up,
” Rachel hissed.

“This is a sweet opportunity to
do
something,” Ichabod said.

“
No,
” Rachel said.

“Listen,” Rath said, rocking from one frozen foot to the other and stuffing his hands in his jacket pockets to emphasize the cold. “How about dinner?”

“I’ll take a rain check,” Rachel said, distracted now. Lost to him. “I got a lot of cramming to do.”

“Sure,” Rath said. He moved in for a hug and felt his daughter flinch the slightest before she pulled away.

Rath nodded and set off toward the Scout with the soaked gift box falling apart beneath his arm. He looked back once, to wave bye. But Rachel had already vanished.

Chapter 41

R
ACHEL SAT ON
the toilet in Felix’s apartment as Felix pleaded through the door. “Why don’t you want to do this?”

“Why do you
think
?” Rachel said, peeing.

“Because of—”

“Yes,
because of—what the hell else? Because of—
”

“But that’s
why
we should do it.”

Rachel heard him slump against the door. “I’ll
help
you,” he pressed. “I know it’s still raw—”

“You don’t have to tell
me.
”

“I know. But all of that is the very reason you should do it.”

“I
know,
” Rachel shouted, her patience frayed. “I know! OK!” She dabbed herself with toilet paper and tugged up her panties and jeans. She took the crumpled list from her pocket. The girl’s photo. Considered them. Felix had a point. As if what they’d been through the last two weeks hadn’t been traumatic enough, the protestors outside Family Matters had made it worse. Monsters. Her father had never been able to slip a lie past her. He’d visited because he’d been worried about her, and she’d caught him off guard; so he’d offered a way to bond, but had no intention of ever letting her actually do it. She knew that. She’d seen the relief on his face when she’d said no. But. Felix was right, what better reason to investigate than what had happened?

“Well?” Felix said, breaking the silence.

Rachel opened the bathroom door. “OK.”

Chapter 42

R
A
TH ARRIVED HALF
an hour early and parked across the street from Bistro Henry. He could not recall the last time he’d been so anxious with anticipation. He checked his teeth in the rearview, unable to tell if the whitening strips had lightened them. He thought maybe a little, then thought that was the psychological response the marketers counted on. Sucker.

He buttoned the top button of his only dress shirt, unbuttoned it. Took out his wallet and thumbed through his cash. A hundred bucks, fresh bills from the ATM as stiff as his starched collar. He hoped it was enough. What if she ordered a bottle of wine? Did she expect him to pay? He wanted to. Should he insist on it?
Christ.

A tap at his window startled him, and he turned to see Madeline winking at him. As he got out of the Scout, he caught a whiff of her clean, fresh fragrance. Her hair was a spill of curlicues bouncing at her shoulders. She corkscrewed a finger at him. “Ready?”

No,
he thought,
I’m not.

The restaurant was all dark woodwork and brass and low lighting in a way that he would have found romantic if it had not reminded him of Dr. Langevine’s library. A patter of voices and soothing string-instrument music floated around them.

The host, a doughy, middle-aged man who reminded Rath of an old biology teacher, saw them to their table near the fireplace, but not too near. The fire was propane flames and ceramic logs, the temperature even and relaxing. The host pulled out Madeline’s chair and asked if either of them cared for a drink. Rath nodded in deference to Madeline, who said, “Your house red is fine.”

“Molson. Golden,” Rath said.

Madeline sipped her ice water as Rath looked around the restaurant. “I’ve never been here,” he said.

“Really?” Madeline said, and set her water glass down and propped her chin on her palm.

“I don’t get much chance to hit the new spots.”

“It’s been here almost a year.”

He supposed it had. “Well. I never had the occasion.”

“That
is
rusty.”

“As an old farm gate.”

“I’ll go easy on you then,” she said, and gave a slow grin. She liked to tease. It was subtle, but it was there. “Listen to me,” she said. “Sounding like I’m out on the town all the time.”

“You’re not?”

“A divorced mom with two teenage girls and a full-time job? All I want to do by eight o’clock is crawl in bed and zone out to the tube with a glass of wine. Unless the spirit moves me.”

The waiter set their drinks down and, seeing they’d not opened their menus, said, “Take your time.”

Madeline glimpsed the menu fleetingly and snapped it shut. She comes here often, Rath thought.

“Cheers,” Madeline said, and raised her wineglass.

Rath lifted his beer bottle, not bothering to pour it in the glass provided, and tapped it against her glass.

He took a long drink to cover for the stunned feeling he suddenly had of not knowing at all what to say.

He set his beer down and swallowed.

“So,” he said.

“So.” Madeline stared at him as she sipped her wine. “I knew your sister.”

Rath stared at her, shocked by this revelation. His muscles tightening.

“Laura Rath, right?” Madeline said.

Rath had not heard anyone speak his sister’s maiden name in decades, and though Madeline spoke it with a warm regard, the old, deep sorrow cracked open along an emotional fault line within him to hear it.

“She’s my sister,” he said. Nothing Preacher had done would ever change that.

“I wondered,” Madeline said. “When I saw the name on your credit card. I read about you back then. Like everyone else. About that whole thing. I’m sorry.”

She cupped her wineglass and looked around the restaurant, embarrassed.

“So,” Rath said. “You knew Laura?” Though he’d thought about his sister every day, he hadn’t spoken her name in years, and it sounded alien to him, as if he were trying to speak an extinct language.

“In high school,” Madeline said. “We were on the field hockey team together. We weren’t too close outside that. I invited her to our house once or twice, but I never came over to your house.”

No one came to our house, Rath thought. Not with my old man. We never risked it.

“But I considered her a friend,” Madeline said. She glanced over his shoulder briefly. “We lost track when she went to Tufts. When I learned she’d moved to southern Vermont, I thought about getting in touch, but by then I was married with one daughter. And. Well. That’s life. I wish I had.” She traced a slender, smartly manicured finger along the rim of her wineglass. “Your daughter, is she—”

“Yes,” Rath said quickly. “I adopted her. My parents were dead by then. And only her father’s mom was alive, in a nursing home. Rachel’s father had no siblings. So.” He shrugged. “She was seven months old when—”

Madeline placed her hand on his, and he could feel her blood beating beneath her smooth, warm skin. Or was it his own blood beating? “That’s admirable,” she said.

“I was all she had.”

“Still. You were young, probably single.”

“She was all
I
had,” Rath said. “This is the only life I can imagine. Being a father. Her father. The life I had before was meaningless. She’s gone now. College.” The lonesomeness he’d felt all fall burrowed more deeply than ever into his heart, his marrow, perhaps partly from seeing her just recently. Seeing how much she’d already changed while away so briefly.

“She’s lucky to have you.” Madeline squeezed his hand. “I never knew you then. The little brother. Funny how just two years makes such a difference at that age.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t make much difference now.” Her eyes flitted to a point behind him again.

“No,” he said.

The waiter returned, and Madeline ordered the lobster roll and Rath ordered a steak au poivre, and they agreed to share an appetizer of calamari.

Rath polished off a third beer, feeling vulnerable and exposed at having spoken of Laura. He’d almost told Madeline about Preacher’s parole hearing. But had refrained. The restaurant had grown crowded. The dining area bubbled with conversation punctuated with eruptions of laughter and the clank of utensils on plates. A party at the front of the restaurant was involved in a celebration. The diners were clearly family, with their similar blocky heads, sandy, tousled hair, and ruddy complexions.

Rath waved at the waiter. He should stop at three beers, he knew. But he had an urge to blot out the image of Laura lying at the foot of the stairs. “More wine?” the waiter said to Madeline as he arrived at their table.

“I’m fine,” Madeline said.

“Beer here,” Rath said to the waiter, feeling Madeline eyeball him. “A pint.”

The waiter wandered away.

“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Madeline said. “It’s not exactly a first-date topic.” A smile glimmered on her face, then quickly faded.

The waiter returned, and Rath took his pint from him, his hand trembling and foam sliding down the outside of the Shaker glass onto his fingers.

“You probably hate talking about it,” Madeline said. She was regretful now, he saw. The mood soured from cheery and expectant to morose.

“I’ve never talked about it,” he said, and sipped his beer, resisting the urge to gulp at a go.

Madeline’s face was trapped between a look of disbelief and suspicion. “You
must
have talked about her at some time,” she said.

Rath drank. “Never.”

“But. It’s been seventeen years.”

“I
know
how long it’s been,” Rath said, more harshly than he’d intended.

“Of course. Sorry.”

“For what?” He felt himself winding tight. He took a drink, spying the clear bottom of his pint glass already. When it came to booze, if he had too much, too quickly, his reaction to it was the opposite of what the old man’s had been. He retreated, became closed off. Defensive. Mean.

He set the glass down with a
thock.

Madeline blinked rapidly.

In the early days, when people had tried to speak of Laura to him, it was either with the dumb pity reserved for an orphaned puppy or with guardedness, as if his proximity to evil had infected him. And it had. Laura’s slaying had altered his belief in goodness. He lived in the shadow of violent death. And Preacher—

“You OK?”

His vision fogged, Rath blinked Madeline into focus, smiled as a shiver of remorse ran through him.

“Why have you never talked about it?” Madeline said, her eyes bright now, voice clear. She was making an effort, he saw. Doing her best. What had she expected, bringing up a raped and murdered sister? Just what the fuck had she expected?

“Because I never wanted to talk about it,” Rath said.

“I shouldn’t have—”

“I never wanted to talk about it, before now.” He finished his beer. “So, how are your daughters?” he said, wanting to keep himself from falling off into a darker place, to salvage the evening.

Madeline glanced behind him again.

“What’s back there?” Rath said.

“Hmm, where?”

“Behind me, you keep glancing over my shoulder, am I missing something?”

“It’s just those lunatic protestors going by with their signs for their nightly vigil.”

Rath turned around to see two women march past, signs thrust in the air, as if they were carrying the flags on the front lines to battle.

A waitress brought over their basket of calamari and swept away. Rath ignored it, staring out toward the sidewalk, his heart galloping.

“They’re always up there,” Madeline said. “At the top of the street at the Church of Unity. Raging on about the evils of man, of
women,
to be more accurate.”

Rath thought back to when he’d stood out on the street trying to imagine what Mandy had seen that day to change her mood so quickly. The protestors had not been out that day, but they’d been out the time he’d stopped later to see Madeline. He’d been unable to read their signs. Is that what Mandy had seen, women walking up to the church with their horrendous signs? Had she seen someone she knew with a sign?

Rath turned back to Madeline.

“These are not hobbyists.” A storm of emotion darkened Madeline’s face. “They’re organized thugs. The Better Society, my ass. They think a woman’s body is God’s Body and her child is God’s Child. And, since their ilk is God’s Chosen, they have a right to terrorize girls. And bring in that psycho presidential candidate to talk.”

Rath’s blood crackled. He reached his hand in his jacket pocket for his cell phone.

“
Renstrom,
” Madeline continued, foaming, nearly oblivious of Rath now. “Do you
know
he headed some extreme religion, cult Id call it, a long time ago; and he told a single struggling mom of who was a member, who was pregnant again and thinking of abortion, that she would not be welcome in his congregation even if she had the child and kept it
.
He told her she had to give the baby up, and give up her two other kids, to two parents, a
real
family, or she’d be excommunicated. He denies it, but she’s adamant. It’s sick. Those people are sick.”

Rath felt stricken, trying to focus his frenzy of thought and form a clear sentence from them. “These protests, would there have been one the day Mandy came into the store?”

Madeline thought a moment. “Yes, they’d have been there.”

Rath pushed up from the table, the room spinning away from him.

“You OK?” Madeline said.

“If the check comes,” Rath said. He plucked the hundred bucks from his wallet, the bills sticking together, and dropped them to the table.

“What—” Madeline said.

Rath strode outside, dialing on his cell, nearly knocking down the patriarch from the table of redheads as the man stood up to make a toast.

Rath pushed through the door, dialing Sonja.

Sonja answered. “You’re home early from your date.”

“How do you know I’m on a date?”

“I’m a cop.”

“I think I know who Mandy saw, or
what
she saw, out in front of the Dress Shoppe. And I think, somehow, it had something to do with her disappearance.”

“What?” Sonja’s voice sang. “So, are we thinking suspect here, or victim again?”

“I—” Rath’s brain churned in its beery murk. “I don’t
know.
Maybe both?” He stalked up the street past the firehouse, a sandwich board out front announcing bingo night and last chance for raffle tix. A sign out front of the church was lit boldly by flood lamps:
SENATOR R
ENSTROM SPEAKS! SOLD
OUT! PRAISE GOD! MA
NY THANKS TO THE BET
TER SOCIETY
!

“Meet me at the station. Call Grout. And Larkin. And have Larkin check into an organization called The Better Society. I’ll see you in an hour.”

“What’s happened?”

“One hour.” He ended the call.

He raced back down the street and burst into the restaurant, jostled against the patriarch redhead, who was still giving his toast and who only laughed garrulously at Rath, as if he were part of an interactive comedy troupe.

At the table, Madeline tried to conceal her irritation and disappointment, but failed, her face all sharp edges.

The bill sat unpaid.

“No dessert?” she said.

“Rain check?”

“Is everything all right?”

“I hope.” Rath glanced at his watch.

“Of course,” Madeline said, and stood. She made a movement with her hand. She might have been leaning in to touch his arm or to take his hand, or she might have only been reaching for the check. Rath was unsure, because he had turned away just as she’d done it, and was already halfway across the dining room to the door. This time, he gave the redhead a wide berth.