Together Alone (41 page)

“Like an adult. Tell her what it was like raising her. Tell her about the fears. She should know.”

Celeste pictured Dawn, back in that bed, with the covers to her chin. “When? Do you think she’ll come home after this?”

“Where else would she go? You’re her mother. You made a mistake. So did she. You can learn from it. Maybe together.”

Celeste felt a flash of the old fear and insecurity that she had lived with during those years of raising Dawn. “God,” she murmured, “I’m not good at this.”

“You’re better than me,” Jackson said. “And you’re better than lots of other mothers. Look at it this way. You didn’t have to bail her out of jail. You didn’t have to pick her up off the sidewalk. You didn’t have to sleep with the president of the college to get her accepted there.”

“For
God’s
sake, Jackson.”

“See? You’re not all bad.”

Celeste grunted again, but the truth was that her stomach had begun to relax for the first time in a very long twenty-four hours. That Jackson was instrumental in it was remarkable. Then again, not so. As Dawn’s father, he was the only one who could have helped quite that way.

She sighed. “You’re as good for me now as you were in my wild child days. What happened to us, Jack?”

“We’re good in a crisis. That’s about it.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah.”

“So. What do we do about Dawn?”

His voice thinned. “Let the cop drive her wherever she’s going—home, school, she’ll decide. Or she can take a cab. She has money. If she hasn’t, it’s because she spent it on the motel room, because Cassanova there forgot his wallet. It won’t hurt her to sweat it a little.”

“I have to talk with her, don’t I?” Celeste asked, but she wasn’t eager for it just then. She was too angry. Besides, she refused to go running after Dawn. Dawn was, by her own declaration, an adult. She could come to Celeste.

“You’ll talk with her at some point,” Jackson assured her.

“So what happens now?”

He checked his watch. It was the oversized kind that offered all sorts of information above and beyond hour, minute, and second. “It’s past lunchtime. We’ll stop for something. Maybe the answers will come while we eat.”

T
HANK HEAVENS SHE’S ALL RIGHT,” EMILY TOLD
Brian after they had dropped Dawn at her dorm and set out for China Pond Road. She shifted under her seat belt to face him. “I wish she would have let us drop her home. Do you think Carter will go back for her?”

“Not if he has any brains. He knows we’re on to him. I’ll write up a formal report to have on file in case he shows up again, but he isn’t the type to take risks. He’ll just go find another woman to latch on to.”

“Think he’s married?”

“I plan to check.”

“Think he’s an architect?”

“Possibly. But if so, he isn’t as successful as he lets on. He doesn’t have any fancy office in Cambridge, or, I’d wager, half the clients he told Celeste about, and if he travels around, like he said when he answered her ad, it’s to skip out when women catch on to his game. He carries a Minnesota driver’s license. The BMW belongs to a friend.”

Much as Emily had been against Celeste’s ad, much as she wanted to say, “I told you so,” she couldn’t. “Poor Celeste. Her heart’s in the right place. I often wonder what she would have done with her life if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so soon. Maybe had a career. Maybe divorced Jackson and married someone she was more compatible with and had a child by him, who knows.”

“Who knows about life, period. What ifs can drive you crazy.”

If they had to do with the past, they could. How well Emily knew that. On the other hand, if they had to do with the future, they would offer up interesting possibilities.

What if she were to write her book and it was published? What if she were to establish a name for herself as an author? What if she were to become self-supporting?

But what if Daniel kept haunting her?

No. What if
Brian
kept
wanting
her? What if she moved in with Julia and him, or they moved in with her? What if she became a wife and mother for a second time? What if Brian wanted
more
kids?

Would she write, too? Would she have the time and energy for it, after giving of herself to a husband and child? Did she
want
to be a full-time wife and mother again?

She had been looking at nothing in particular. Then the Jeep went far enough down China Pond Road for the house to come into view, and she straightened. “Oh, dear.” Myra was standing all bundled up at the white picket fence, waving an eager hand as they approached. She was crowding in on Brian even before he opened his door.

“Getting later,” Emily heard, “and you said we would do it around midday, so I decided to wait right here until you got back. Now? Can we now?”

Brian had climbed from the Jeep. Holding her shoulders to keep her still, he said, gently, “We found her, Myra. Dawn is safely back home.”

Myra looked stricken.

Emily tried to soothe her. “She’s with Celeste, and she’s fine. It was something of a false alarm.”

“No false alarm,” Myra cried. “I
saw.
”

“Dawn thought she was in love,” Emily explained. “Eighteen-year-olds do that. After Celeste dropped her at the dorm last Sunday, she turned around and left again.”

Myra wasn’t listening to her. She was clutching Brian’s hand, trying to draw him down the driveway. “You have to look under the willow. You promised.”

Emily felt a rush of sorrow. Poor Myra.

“But we found her,” Brian repeated. “The case is solved.”

“It
isn’t
solved, no, it isn’t!” Myra’s voice rose. “You have to look in my yard!”

Emily moved to free Brian by unclamping Myra’s hand and found startling strength in her hold. “It’s all right,” she said softly, steering Myra home. “It’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t, and I can’t wait much longer, I can’t, and no one listens. You have to look under the tree.
Under
the
tree!
”

Emily shot a worried look at Brian. She had never understood Myra’s obsession with the willow. It might have been understandable if Frank had adored the tree. But he hadn’t. He had cursed it like he cursed everything else, cursed it for the mess it made in the yard and the work it caused.

Brian was looking puzzled. “Myra, what, exactly, is under the tree?”

Myra shook her head. “I never said anything was under it.”

“But you want us to take a look.”

“You think I’m crazy,” she cried. “I know. My children think it, too, but I’m not. They want to stash me away like old clothes, but there’s nothing wrong with me, I swear, there
is not.
”

Emily wanted to believe that. She couldn’t see Myra in a nursing home, not when she so desperately wanted to stay here at the house—not that Emily understood why she did. The place was bigger than she needed, and more work to keep up, and she was alone here, with nothing for company but Frank’s ghost.

Then again, Emily wasn’t one to talk. She couldn’t leave China Pond Road, either. But Daniel was unfinished business. Frank was not.

She had one odd thought, then several more in quick succession. All involved Daniel and Frank. Frank and Daniel. In the post office parking lot at the very same time. Under the willow.

She choked on a stray breath, coughed, put a shaky hand to her chest. She didn’t like what she was thinking at all.

“Uh, I think I need to go inside for a minute,” she said when the thoughts kept coming. Dropping her hold of Myra, she turned and half-walked, half-ran back across the cul-de-sac, but not to her house. She didn’t want to see the backyard, didn’t want to see where it bordered on Myra’s, didn’t want to see
anything
of the stringy winter willow. She ran to the far side of the garage, past the door to Brian’s place, and slid down the clapboards to the ground.

Brian was there in seconds, squatting before her. “What, Em?”

She locked her arms around her knees. Her voice came out high and wavery. “Weird thoughts. Weird thoughts.”

“About Frank Balch.”

She nodded. Frank Balch and Daniel. It couldn’t be. Not right next door. Not all these years. “He was questioned. His story checked out. But Myra. Myra.”

“Stick to Frank. What do you know about him?”

“He was the kind of man one avoided at all costs.”

“Mean.”

“What do
you
know about him?” she shot back.

“Only that people keep mentioning his name when we ask them about Daniel. I’ve been trying to get more, but I can’t.”

She put her chin to her knees. Her stomach had started to roll. She rocked to counter that movement, welcoming the bang of her back on the wood.

“Myra’s obsession with the willow,” Brian asked, “how long has it been going on?”

“As long as I can remember. It got worse after Frank died. That was when she started picking the lint up by hand and planting flowers nearby. That was when she put the bench there.
Oh God
. I always just assumed that she was a little nuts when it came to the yard, but the persistence of it, the way she said, so clearly just now, that she wasn’t crazy—” her voice was rising, rising on a wave of hysteria, “I believe her, so I ask myself why she keeps trying to drag us over to see what’s under that tree.”

Emily rocked harder against the wood. She wanted to think
she
was the crazy one entertaining mad thoughts, only they didn’t sound mad but like the answer to the puzzle, making horrible sense in the same way as Doug’s other life had.

Brian took her face in his hands. He wasn’t talking to her, as much as speaking his thoughts aloud. “A method to madness. People do things that seem crazy, only they aren’t. Like Richie, needing to get away from his father. Like Leila, needing help in caring for her kids. Even like Dawn, needing to let Celeste know that she wants love or attention or recognition or whatever. Cries for help.”

Emily’s chest felt ready to explode. She straightened her back against the clapboards and took several deep breaths, but they didn’t help.

Brian’s hands were a link of warmth when all else was cold. They balanced the urgency in his voice. “Frank and Myra were interviewed at the time. Frank said he didn’t see a thing. John grilled the guy. He had his story down pat. So did Myra.”

“What if…” She couldn’t put the thought into words. It was too hideous.

“Frank was finishing up in the post office when you arrived. He went to his car and drove home. Witnesses corroborated that.”

“What if…”

“They heard his car leave the parking lot. Big car, lousy muffler, lots of noise. But no one actually saw him get into the car. The noise was the thing that made them look, and he was driving off by then.”

She forced her eyes to Brian’s. “It
can’t
be. He wouldn’t have been able to live across the street from me all those years if he’d been lying. Neither would Myra.” She swallowed down a fast-rising bile. “Tell me we’re wrong, Brian, it’s too awful, there isn’t any why to it.”

Quietly, he said, “I need to look there.”

“Dig, you mean.” She started to cry. They were going to dig for her baby. “Don’t you need—need—warrants—or something?”

“I’ll get one just in case. I should have weeks ago.”

“You had—no cause.”

“I still don’t, not really.” But he was as convinced of it as she was. The gravity of his voice told her so. “I have to alert John. And Sam. He’ll help. Want to go to Kay’s for a while?”

But Emily wasn’t budging. She was Daniel’s mother. She was the one who had left him alone in the car, rather than unbuckling him and carrying him into the post office that day. She wasn’t making the same mistake twice, wasn’t walking away from him now.

Sam and several others from the department came with shovels. Kay was already there, holding Emily, who shook in spite of a parka, gloves, and a hat. Myra was huddled on the back steps, her eyes riveted on the widening hole.

They started digging directly in front of the scrolled wrought iron bench. Once past the brittle top layers, the earth was more pliable. They dug down two feet, but found nothing.

Brian had expected something shallow. He couldn’t imagine Frank digging six feet down without arousing suspicion. There had been cops all over the place in the hours and days immediately after the disappearance.

Granted, the backyard couldn’t be seen from the street. Granted, the Balch sons had all left home by that time. Granted, Frank would have dug at night.

Brian went to Myra. His breath wisped white in the cold. “Is this the right place?”

She looked as frigid as those top layers of soil, but she had resisted Brian’s suggestions that she wait inside. Now she said, “I didn’t say anything was here.”

“Should we be digging closer to the pond?”

Her eyes glanced over the water. “You don’t know Frank, or you wouldn’t be asking. He can dig a hole four, five feet deep without breaking a sweat. He chops wood. It’s the same kind of work.”

They dug until the hole was three by three, then four by four. The light of day was beginning to fade, the temperature to drop, when they headed for five by five.

Then they hit it, a small disk covered with dirt and rust, that turned like a stone but made a more shallow sound against the tip of the shovel. Brian picked it up, removed the dirt with his thumb. It was a pin, like the kind affixed to a lapel, or a child’s hat.

DADDY’S BOY,
he read and felt a thickening in his throat. His chin fell to his chest, dragged down by dismay and an overwhelming sense of grief. Only with the greatest effort, knowing that he wore that sorrow on his face but unable to hide it, did he raise his eyes to Emily.

She shook her head, backing away as he approached. She didn’t want to see what he held, didn’t want to believe Daniel was there…there…under…dead…all this time.

“Emily,” he said, reaching for her.

“No-o.”

He drew her close and held her as if he could protect her from something, but the something was within. All the cushioning in the world couldn’t keep her safe. Nineteen years—months of fruitless investigation—dozens of possible scenarios packed into innumerable nightmares and daydreams—all wrong and the truth too cruel to bear. Her baby.

“Right next door!” she wailed against his chest.

“Kay’s taking you home.”

“No! I’m staying!”

“Em, Em.” He held her tightly, moved his hands on her back in an attempt at comfort, but comfort wasn’t possible, not then, not yet. In a voice by her ear, he said, “This could go on for a while.”

“I know.” They would be looking for bones, bits of clothing,
Oh God
, the remains of her baby. “I’m staying.”

She watched from the side, again with Kay, waiting for the cold to numb her, in vain. The pain was as raw as it had ever been, grated now by the horror of the truth.

Right next door. It was unthinkable.

The digging went on for another hour. Between dusk and the ten long feet between her and the hole, Emily couldn’t see what they were placing in their bags, but her mind saw. She was there with Daniel, remembering the last time she had held him as though it were hours before, smelling the Sugar Smacks he’d had for breakfast, feeling the silk of his hair, the baby butter of his skin.

“We’ve done as much as we can now,” Brian said, coming up. “We’ll take another look in the morning, but I think we’re finished.”

Finished. Daniel was found. Emily pictured a tiny coffin, pictured a tiny grave with a marker on top, and felt the tiniest inkling of comfort in a world of lies.

Brian took her in his arms and turned her away. “Will you go home now?”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to talk with Myra.”

To ask why. To ask how. Questions she had been agonizing over for nineteen long years. Her baby, dead and buried in her neighbor’s backyard. “I’m coming.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I’m coming.”

His eyes said he feared for her emotional state. Her eyes said she wasn’t leaving his side.

He sighed and looked at Kay. “We’ve been through this before, Em and me. She always wins.”

It was a light touch, a little reference to their everyday lives, so much kinder than Daniel’s fate that, absurdly, Emily started to cry again.