Authors: Shelley Bates
Laurie bit into her sandwich to avoid saying something really stupid, such as, “No one calls Tanya except for us, do they?”
When she could speak, she said, “I hope this doesn’t sound ridiculous, then, but did Kyle happen to mention whether Anna was
there?”
“He says not, but I’ve since heard from at least two sources that she was.”
Auto reflex kicked in. “She was at home, in bed.”
Janice’s lashes lifted. “Famous last words. Do you believe that?”
“Of course. I was there. We watched TV together and then she went up to her room.”
“She could have gone out after that.”
“You’ve been to our house. The living room has a direct view of the front door. And the back door squeaks, so we’d have heard
it if she’d gone out that way.”
Janice dropped her gaze and bit into a cherry tomato. “There are more ways of getting out of a house than through its doors,
I’ve discovered.”
“What, are you suggesting she could go out a window?” She and Colin hadn’t raised a cat burglar, for Pete’s sake. And they
hadn’t raised a girl who would deceive her parents by sneaking out late at night, either. “Why on earth would she do that?”
Janice nibbled a spinach leaf before she answered. “I think Kyle has a girlfriend.”
It took her a second to catch up. “Anna did not sneak out to see a boy. And even if she did, why would she be on the bridge?”
The other woman shrugged. “Who knows why teenagers do the things they do? But Kyle’s room is on the ground floor. Getting
out is obviously so simple that both his parents and his sister have been blissfully unaware of it all this time.”
“All what time? How long do you think this has been going on?”
She shrugged. “A couple of months, maybe. Not because I’ve been hearing strange sounds at night, but because he’s been so
dozy in the mornings. And distracted. And irritable.”
“Anna is all those things, too. I read in a magazine at work about how much sleep teenagers need, and how few of them actually
get it. Anyway, she doesn’t have a boyfriend. She’s just that way because she’s fourteen.”
“That you know of.”
Laurie shook her head. “She doesn’t. I know where she is practically every minute. And when I don’t, I call her cell and find
out.”
“Mm.”
Laurie didn’t like the sound of that noncommittal little noise. “I trust her.” She hoped she sounded as positive as she’d
once felt. But ever since last Wednesday, doubt had been nibbling at the edges of her confidence. She could deal with nibbles.
It was the big bites of uncertainty she was afraid of.
“I trusted Kyle, too. Now it’s more difficult. Every time he opens his mouth, I’m looking for corroborating evidence.”
“You sound like Nick.”
“I’m more familiar with him than I ever want to be.” She glanced up. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But I have to tell you, Laurie—he says that at least two of the kids who were there that night are insisting Anna was in
that crowd.”
Laurie shook her head. “Of course they’d say that, for the same reason they say Kyle was there. Anna is a bigger target. She’s
a Hale. There are people in this town who would love to see us discredited over something like this.”
“But in the case of Kyle, they’re right. He admitted everything to us while Nick was at the house. And if these kids were
right about him, they could be right about Anna. You just don’t know it yet.”
Laurie shook her head. “Nope.”
“I wish I had the luxury of certainty.” Janice finished her salad and glanced up for the waitress.
Laurie still had half a sandwich. She looked down at her plate, at the crisp, hot batter and melted cheese. The thought of
taking one more bite made her feel sick, and she pushed her plate away.
All the way home, she fought with herself. She needed to trust her daughter. Sure, Anna was going through a rough patch, and
she struggled with all the things teenagers struggle with—being cool versus making her parents happy and getting good grades,
learning that fine line between independence and disobedience, finding her own style without offending her mother’s sense
of modesty.
But despite all this, she was fundamentally a good kid. And good kids didn’t sneak out of bedroom windows late at night.
Laurie managed to hang on to her confidence as she pulled into the garage and shut off the minivan’s engine. When she stepped
into the house, the familiar smell—a mixture of furniture polish, laundry, and firewood—was like a balm. It was the smell
of normalcy, of a happy family without—
thank you, Lord
—major problems.
She hung up her coat and toed off her shoes by the door, then padded upstairs and into the master bedroom, stopping by the
bed. What had she come up here for? There were a zillion things to do downstairs, like looking through the mail, doing the
laundry, cleaning up the breakfast dishes, picking up the living room.
The silence breathed, suggesting she act while she had the house to herself.
Go look at the window. Just to see.
No, she couldn’t do that. That was as good as saying she didn’t trust Anna’s word.
Yes, she could. She needed to make sure that Anna was where she said she’d been, and that she couldn’t have been on the bridge
or under it or anywhere near it. She needed to close any loopholes for the gossips in this town.
She marched down the hall, her stocking feet quiet on the runner that covered the hardwood. Anna’s door was closed, as usual,
but she pushed it open and walked straight over to the window.
The sash didn’t stick at all, which was the first thing she noticed.
The second thing she noticed was the fact that Anna’s window looked out on the roof over the garage. The distance between
the sill and the roof was just two or three feet. So swinging your legs out and stepping onto the shingles would be easy.
Okay, but getting down off the roof is the hard part. The impossible part, I would say.
Just to be sure, she headed downstairs again, grabbed her coat, and jammed her feet into her shoes. She went through the garage
and out the side door onto the lawn.
“No way.”
Talking to yourself was a sign of impending dementia. But maybe she was talking to Janice. Or Anna. Or God.
On one side of the garage door stood the clematis trellis—and it was made of wrought iron. No flimsy wood pickets for Colin.
He’d brought the trellis home from the store last fall when she’d talked about training a clematis vine over the door. When
Colin installed something, he did it right. A platoon of marines could go up and down that trellis, and it wouldn’t even quiver.
Closer inspection of the base of the trellis revealed a deep footprint in earth that had thawed and then frozen again. A footprint
that Laurie would bet was a size five. She took a couple of steps backward and traced the escape route out the window, over
the roof, and down the trellis. Thirty seconds, tops. And in sneakers a person could be both fast and quiet.
The cold seeped through her feet and hands, washing down into the collar of her coat, sinking through her skin and into her
heart. It wasn’t possible that Anna could have lied to them all. It wasn’t possible that she had raised a daughter who was
so good at deceit.
And it really wasn’t possible that Vanessa was right, that Anna really had been among those kids on the bridge. That Anna
could have stood by and done nothing while someone pushed Randi Peizer to her death.
Hot tears of denial and grief welled into Laurie’s eyes. Their Anna was no coward. Vanessa had said she was off in the trees,
too far away to save Randi from going over. But what about before that? Couldn’t she have come to Randi’s defense somehow?
Could she have stepped up to defuse a situation that was clearly getting out of control?
What kind of a child had she raised? She and Colin had taught the kids that you put others before yourself, that you show
people the love of God in your life. Had they failed where Anna was concerned?
No, she couldn’t believe that. She knew her daughter. Anna would never have let Randi get herself into such danger if she
could help it. The softhearted, loving girl she and Colin had raised wouldn’t lie and deceive and put her family in jeopardy
like this.
And yet . . . Laurie looked down at that footprint, frozen into the earth. Waiting for someone to notice its silent contradiction
of everything she wanted to believe.
N
ick informed the
dispatcher over the radio that he would be out of service for the next hour and pulled into the parking lot of the Split
Rail. He came here because the service was fast—his only requirement in a restaurant.
He always sat at the same booth by the window, with his back to the wall that backed onto the men’s room, near the cashier.
As a result, he always had the same waitress, a girl named Vanessa who never seemed to wear her hair the same way twice. Tonight
she’d put it into cornrows and wrapped all the little braids into a ponytail with a scarf.
“Hey, Vanessa. I’ll have the usual.”
He didn’t bother to look at the menu. She didn’t bother to write down his order. But instead of pouring his coffee and sashaying
back to the kitchen the way she usually did, she hesitated at his elbow.
“Can I help you?”
She was frowning, as though she didn’t want to say something, yet felt compelled to. He’d interviewed many a witness with
the same look.
“Yeah.” She glanced in the direction of the cashier, who doubled as hostess and manager. “I get my break in twenty minutes.
Can I talk to you then?”
“Sure. I’ll eat slowly.”
She made sure he did. His Reuben took about ten minutes longer to arrive than usual, but when she brought it, Vanessa also
carried two slices of blueberry pie.
“You going to eat both of those?” He never ordered dessert. There wasn’t time. But it sure looked good.
“No. One’s for you.” She pushed it across to him. “It’s on me.”
“So.” When she hadn’t said anything after three bites of pie, he spoke up. “What’s going on?”
“Mrs. Hale says you’re investigating how that girl died. The one she found in the river.”
“That’s right.”
“If I tell you something, will you get me and my family in trouble?” Her gaze was an uneasy cross between distrust and pleading.
“Mrs. Hale said I should come to you, but it don’t mean nothing to me. I can go either way.”
“Have you or a member of your family done something they want to hide?” he asked gently.
She shook her head, and the scarf slid off her ponytail and onto the seat beside her. She didn’t notice. “But I saw something,
and Mrs. Hale said you should know. I want your word you won’t get anybody in trouble.”
“If someone did do something wrong, it’s my job to see they pay for it,” he said, “but if no one did anything, it should be
okay. What did you see?”
In a low voice that hurried like a current rushing with winter rain, she told him what she’d seen at twenty past ten last
Wednesday night. Halfway through, he pushed his unfinished sandwich to one side, pulled his notebook out of his pocket, and
began to take notes in his peculiar shorthand.
“You distinctly saw someone push her over the rail?”
She nodded. “It was dark, but from the parking lot of the Stop-N-Go you can see the bridge.”
“But you couldn’t see who it was.”
“No. Just that she was tall.”
“She? You think it was a girl?”
Vanessa frowned and poked at the crust of her pie. “I had the impression it was a girl. The way she pushed. It wasn’t how
guys do it, like they’re poking at you to bug you or make you respond. This was a ‘Get away from me’ push. Or maybe ‘You’re
not good enough to get near me.’ Like that. And over she went.”
Which fit the evidence exactly.
“Did you see her hit anything on the way down?”
“No. The streetlights don’t shine under there. Well, unless you mean the water. There was this big splash, and then Anna Hale
went running past my car like a bat out of you-know-where.”
“Anna?”
Never mind, just go with it.
“Running from where to where?”
“She was on the grass, you know, where it slopes down to the water. She came out of the trees and ran under the bridge, and
after that I didn’t see what happened.”
The Reuben turned over in his stomach. “Anna Hale. You’re sure.”
She gave him one of those “I’m not stupid, Stupid” looks. “I’ve known Anna Hale since she was a bitty baby. I babysat her.
I know what that girl looks like. I know how she looks when she runs the hundred-yard dash, the way her arms go, like this.”
She demonstrated. “It was her running under the bridge.”
“Do you think she meant to help the girl who fell?”
Vanessa shrugged. “Don’t know. I pulled out and got my sister and we beat it home before I had to go pick up Mama.”
He put his notebook down and picked up the second half of his sandwich. “I appreciate you coming to talk to me, Vanessa. You’ve
been a huge help.”
“Are you going to get Kelci in trouble for being there?”
“No,” he said around a bite that had lost its flavor. “But I wouldn’t mind talking to her again. If she was close enough to
see who did the pushing, I’d be real interested in knowing who it was.”
“You already talked to her.”
“Yes, but she omitted a couple of important facts.” As had everyone on his mental list.
“Mama probably won’t be too happy about you coming back. She about blew a gasket the last time. Kelci got grounded just for
giving the police more work.”
“Kelci has nothing to worry about as long as she tells me the truth. I’ll come by after school tomorrow, okay?”
“Mama will be at work. She ain’t gonna like you being there without her there too.”
“Then how about I meet the two of you here tomorrow in the parking lot? Your mama won’t mind so much if you’re here. I only
have a couple of questions, but I don’t want Kelci catching any heat from her classmates about it.”
She was starting to look a little cornered.
“Vanessa, this is important. If Kelci knows who pushed that girl, then she needs to come forward and tell me. We have to do
something about it.”