Binds that tie, p.27
Binds That Tie, page 27
“Janice knows this, her boss knows this, and frankly, no one is pressuring the D.A.’s office to find justice for Logan May. People have moved on. I can’t see anyone forking out money into looking for your wife. The FBI won’t even get involved because there’s enough evidence to suggest she left. Do you know an acquittal still counts toward the P.D.’s case closure rates?” She shrugged. “It’s all politics at this point. I’ll help you though, if I can.”
“I guess I don’t blame her for splitting. But still, it’d be nice to know she was okay. Or that she cared if I was okay?” He felt foolish admitting it.
“Well, to be honest…” Stephanie sounded uncertain about whether to continue or not. “Probably the reason you’re here is because she left. Had she stayed and confessed, Janice would have turned it into a three-ring circus and called her a liar who was ‘defending’ you. I saw that done once. Worked, too. The jury thought the wife was lying at the last minute to save her husband.”
“What happened?”
“The D.A. did a good job with it, and the husband was found guilty. Later they discovered her fingerprints on the bullet with new technology, and that was the end of that. Anyway, my point is, I started coming around to your way of thinking around the time she skipped town. It didn’t sit right with me. The only way it made sense was if you were telling the truth.”
“I wish Janice thought that way,” Chris said. “My life would have been so much simpler these past few months.”
“Oh I’m sure she does. Not that she’d admit it. You’d find Maggie before Janice did, trust me.”
“I have no idea where to start. She’s probably halfway to Mexico.”
“I was married for ten years,” Stephanie said. “I’m willing to bet if you think about it hard enough, you’ll come up with something. At least a starting point.”
Chris thought about that as he chewed. About five years earlier, they watched a show about the capture of a then-famous serial killer who had been hiding out in Los Angeles under an alias. While walking down the street, he’d been caught on film during the recording of a documentary on the homeless population in America. A film editor who had a special interest in wanted serial killers made the connection and called the crime show before he even called the police.
Maggie had clucked her tongue, gesturing toward the television with the remote. “That’s the problem with these guys. They gravitate toward the bright lights, big cities. There’s a populated city in almost every state in this country, but everyone thinks they can hide in New York or L.A., where every other person is filming some movie or documentary. But what happens in, say, Minneapolis or Jacksonville, Florida? Still plenty of people, but no one will look there. It’s anonymously low profile.”
Chris gave Stephanie a grin, his first real grin in what seemed like years, and passed her another beer. “You know, I bet I could come up with something.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Maggie
Six Months Earlier
Maggie pressed her forehead against the window. She smelled the city before they crossed the bridge. It was the odor of garbage and fast food, a beacon of opportunity.
They’d stopped in Hoboken, and her silent seatmate, a sullen teenager plugged in at the ears, had gathered his things and exited. Only after she was certain no one would take his place did she pull a small envelope from the front pocket of her backpack. She examined the seal—it was intact, the stamp over the seam unbroken—and thought of that skittish kid at the diner. She ran one lacquered fingernail under the flap, the paper tearing easily along the fold. Not that she was that concerned about the tweaker. She doubted he even remembered her name. Meth ruins the mind and the body. She remembered his name, though: Smith Hamilton. The man with two last names.
She felt some guilt about setting up Chris. Had they just called the police that night, none of this would have happened, and if someone had to pay, Chris would point to her. But the moment she’d sat in the bathroom, staring at that purple positive sign, something inside of her had snapped into place. The concept of running away, once the idea occurred to her, stuck in her mind like a briar bush, needling and intrusive. She imagined the baby tightly ensconced in the red, pulsing cushion of her abdomen. She felt certain that the baby would live. She heard Chris’s voice in her mind. You always think that.
That had been true. With every positive test, she’d told Chris, “This time will be different.” A never-ending hope.
When she flipped through Jake’s files, Smith’s name had leapt off the page. It hadn’t been difficult to find Smith. She’d met him at the diner and given him a thousand bucks and the location of the body. He’d grinned with his furry, green teeth and taken the envelope of cash with greasy hands. He smelled like dirty hair. She needed Smith twice, once to testify and once to point her in the direction of a new identity. As tenuous as it was, he was her only connection to the criminal world. Yeah, I know a guy that could help.
Chris would be fine. Jake was a smart, capable lawyer who was pointing the finger at her. He would pace the judge’s chambers, declaring that her disappearance was indicative of guilt. They could come after her. Her heart galloped at the thought.
Maggie scrunched down in the bus seat and removed each item from the envelope. A dark blue, leathery book, her picture embossed on the inside, was stamped with the U.S. seal. A plastic card with a different picture and the word Minnesota across the top. A dog-eared two-by-four-inch piece of card stock, directly from the department of Social Security, with an unrecognizable nine-digit number. All with the name of a stranger. She studied the name, rubbing each item like a toddler rubs the silk on the edge of a blanket for comfort. I am invisible.
How long until they noticed she was gone? A day? Maybe four? She catalogued all the things that would tip them off. The depleted bank account, gone from twenty-five thousand dollars down to a hundred bucks in a single day. The picture in the Maggie College box—if they even noticed that. The only person who might pick up on that would be Chris, and she doubted he knew her well enough to even think twice about how the picture had ended up there. If Jake came back to their house, he would notice she had not. Would he care? Unlikely. She’d left the house in the early morning, skimming the shadows, and called a cab from a disposable cell phone, eleven blocks from her house.
The loudspeaker crackled an unintelligible message, followed by a deafening squeal of brakes. She stuffed the items back in their envelope, back into her backpack, and filed out of the bus. Port Authority was hub of activity, and the heat from the sidewalk swallowed her with a fetid gulp. She started sweating as soon as she hit the street.
“Luggage, ma’am?” the driver had the luggage compartment open.
She shook her head, turned, and faded into the bustling crowd. Everyone, it seemed, was going the opposite way. She swam upstream. There were eight blocks between Penn Station and Port Authority. Maggie walked six of them before she felt fatigued. She leaned against a corner post, her shoulder digging into the Press to cross button.
Under an abandoned storefront, a homeless woman arranged a selection of glass bottles—purples and greens and blues, wine bottles whose labels had been painstakingly removed, square amber whiskey bottles, chipped and broken beer bottles, a glittering rainbow city within a city. Maggie watched her arrange, then rearrange, then reflect on her placements. With only the vague notion of an idea, she unzipped her backpack and removed the Lennox vase. She’d bleached it and scrubbed it clean of blood and fingerprints, and she gripped it with the corner of her T-shirt. Keeping her head low, she set the vase down in front of the woman, who had slunk down against the soaped up windows. She offered it to the woman without speaking, only a general gesture of giving. Without making eye contact, she scurried away, hitting the cross button with purpose.
“Oooeee, child, this is ’spensive! You wanna trade me for somethin’? I gots a pretty purple one yas can have!”
But the walk sign lit up, and Maggie hurried across Eighth Avenue as though she was being chased.
At Penn Station, Maggie boarded a bus to LaGuardia Airport, and at LaGuardia, she bought a Delta ticket to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. No one glanced twice at her new shiny license. The only small hiccup was when the attendant behind the ticket counter called her Ms. McKinnon. Maggie turned around, looking behind her for someone else. She laughed it off with a wave. “Just married, takes forever to get used to!”
The attendant looked at her strangely because what kind of newlywed buys a one-way ticket to Minnesota?
After boarding and finding her seat, Maggie’s fatigue consumed her, and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She drifted to sleep before the plane took off, her chin resting on her clavicle. Even in sleep, she was careful to remain self-sufficient—she wouldn’t be one of those lean-on-the-shoulder-of-the-guy-next-to-you passengers. She dreamt of Tiny’s gleaming head.
She jerked awake hours later, convinced she’d forgotten something. She stood and looked around the cabin, certain she’d see Detective Renner or Small. When she sat, sighing, her heart pounded too hard to drift back to sleep. She cracked the window shade. The clouds rolled by like billowing white sheets taken straight from the dryer, and she wanted to wrap herself in them, smother the guilt with something clean and fresh.
She thought of Isaac and Rebecca, their small cherubic faces, asking for her at Christmas, and she felt the only stab of regret. She thought of Charlene and Phillip or Miranda and Jake and felt nothing. She closed her eyes and tried to summon some emotion. She imagined her mother crying and wiping thick streaks of mascara from underneath her eyes with red acrylic nails.
Phillip would stand behind her, patting her shoulder. “It’s so typical of Maggie, Charlene. She’s never cared about anyone but herself. Are you surprised? She’ll come back when she needs money.”
If Charlene cried, it would be for Chris. “How could she leave him right now?”
Miranda would play the part of the “good daughter,” stopping to check in on broken-hearted Charlene. Maybe she’d bring a casserole that no one else would eat. She’d cluck and clean Charlene’s immaculate kitchen, and they’d speculate how far Maggie could get on Phillip’s twenty-five thousand dollars.
Maggie felt nothing but ice-cold relief.
In Minneapolis, Maggie found an apartment in a converted Victorian, a bit southeast of Lowry Hill. At the end of the summer, the temperatures plummeted to the thirties, breaking all records, and Maggie invested five hundred dollars in a winter wardrobe. She was careful with her money. Twenty thousand dollars would help, but it wouldn’t last forever. She cut her hair into a nondescript bob, a plain Jane in a busy, unremarkable city where no one would think to look. I am invisible.
She followed the trial obsessively, scouring the Internet for any mention of Chris Stevens or Jake McHale. Most days, Chris was on the front page of the local section of the Harrisburg Sentinel. He looked good, his dark curly hair cut short for the trial. He’d grown gray at the temples, and Maggie touched the computer screen. Then, like a defense mechanism, she’d think of Chris, his head tilted back and his mouth open, with Tracy splayed on his lap. She’d think of his eyes, glittering and angry, when she insisted on calling the police. Then she’d remember his face when he grabbed her arm and said, “This is all your fucking fault.”
That Small cop, the pretty one, testified on Chris’s behalf, and Maggie wondered if he was sleeping with her. She imagined the two of them in her old bed, but the picture slid from her mind. She tried to conjure jealousy and found she couldn’t care.
Janice, that wiry woman-child of an A.D.A., had it out for him, her frizzy red hair and pinched face splashed on every article about the trial. The article about Chris’s testimony showed her close to the witness box, pointing at Chris, her lips pressed in reproach.
Maggie functioned on autopilot. In the mornings, she’d walk around Loring Park, circling the pond sometimes two or three times. Her stomach was permanently twisted in some combination of dread and guilt, and her appetite dwindled down to nothing. She’d gnaw on dry toast in the morning and force down a frozen dinner at night. Her weight plunged to the lowest it had ever been, despite the pregnancy. How could she raise a child when she couldn’t even seem to be pregnant properly?
She spent the evenings online, searching for anything related to Chris or Jake or the trial. On one of these nights, at two a.m., she saw it. On findthemissing.org was her name, her picture. She scrolled down to a snapshot of her laughing into the camera. Bright pink and purple balloons floated behind her at Rebecca’s fourth birthday party. For information, contact CJS95@gmail.com. Ninety-five had been Chris’s lacrosse number in college. He was looking for her.
When the verdict was announced, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, guilty (for the one and only thing he was truly guilty of), Maggie struggled to right her spinning head. She felt an initial stab of fear. Would they find her? Possibly. All she could do was hope. She was truly relieved. She hadn’t wanted Chris to spend his life in prison. Then again, he’d gotten them into that mess. The guilt washed off of her, easy and loose. She was free.
Maggie grew round, her belly taking the shape of a beach ball. Her face filled out and freckled. She doubted that Miranda could have picked her out of a crowd. She daydreamed about Jake, ways she could initiate contact: surreptitious notes from a post office box or a call from a disposable cell phone to his office. It was never a real idea; she’d come too far for that. Jake would remain in Philadelphia, miles and light-years from her present life. When the pregnancy brought surging hormones, she thought of little but touching his bare back again. Every second of their last night together was burned in her memory, and her fingertips buzzed with the desire to touch hot flesh. Jake was a real regret.
Around six months, she started to believe it was real, that she might actually carry the baby full term. She consulted a midwife, a superstitious departure from her previous pregnancies fraught with medical monitoring. Luna was an ample, wobbling woman with a long gray braid, thickset cheeks, and large, capable hands. Luna carted a portable Doppler and a stethoscope in an oversized quilted bag to Maggie’s house twice a month. Her appointments all ended with a massage. Maggie had never felt so loved.
Maggie waited for the inevitable cramping and blood, the searing pain and the trip to the emergency room. With every ache and stab of discomfort, she held her breath, knowing that could be the moment, just like with all the other babies. But it never came. Sometimes the body just figures it out.
Quinn Aurora arrived one cold night in March, and Maggie pushed through the birth alone. When Luna quietly asked if she could call someone for Maggie, Maggie just shook her head. Luna gaped at her with raw pity, and Maggie looked away. Outside her window, snow fell in round, chunky snowflakes, like pennies from heaven.
Later, Maggie traced the features of little Quinn’s face, her perfect mouth, button nose, her gassy smile, and sea-green eyes. Maggie felt whole for the first time in her life. She felt warm. She felt needed. She felt human.
I am no longer invisible.
Epilogue
May 1st
Five Years Later
The warm spring breeze lifted the sheers, bringing in the light, sweet fragrance of blooming peonies. Lucy Westing fidgeted with the cut daisies in the ceramic vase on the table. The sunroom was her favorite room, a bright welcoming committee first thing in the morning or a light airy retreat as the sun dipped low on the horizon. She ambled around the house, her heart thumping in her throat. She checked the time. Two hours! What could she possibly do for two hours?
“You need to relax is what.” Clive appeared behind her, reading her mind. His arm snaked around her burgeoning middle, the baby giving a blunt kick in protest.
She closed her eyes and leaned back into him, letting his solid frame absorb her worry. She turned to study his ruddy complexion, stubbled cheeks, floppy strawberry blond curls, and deep brown, heavy-lidded eyes. On impulse, she kissed him, her tongue running along his bottom lip.
He laughed. “This is how you want to kill the next two hours?” His faded Irish lilt was sexy as hell.
“Can we? Call it stress relief.”
He held her out at arm’s length, gripping her shoulders. “Relax, darlin’. This is no big deal. Quinnie will love it. Look at all this purple! For God’s sake, I’ve never seen so much damn purple. It’s like we’ve literally moved into the belly of that dinosaur thing.”
“It’s her favorite color…” Maggie had to admit Clive was right. The entire house was covered in purple balloons, purple streamers, purple plates and forks and napkins, purple, purple, purple.
“It’s not like she’s expecting a birthday party months after her birthday.”
They’d planned a surprise party to celebrate Quinn’s fifth birthday two months after her real birthday so that she could celebrate with Clive’s family. His parents, sister, and brother were visiting from Ireland for a cousin’s wedding. She and Quinn had been so lucky that Clive’s family accepted them as their own. Initially Lucy had been protective of her heart, but the Westing clan acted as though love was bottomless, and they forced their love on her like a pack of unruly wolves. In the beginning, their loud bickering and laughter, their singing, and his mother’s constant need to touch had terrified her. She felt consumed by them, all of their emotions out there for the world to have.
