Where They Found Her (7 page)

Barbara knocked once, then again, on the classroom door. When there was no answer, she opened it and slid quietly inside. She was just going to drop off the curriculum materials for Rhea and then slip back out. Barbara wanted to do it now, while there was time for her to stop at the dry cleaners and get back in time for Cole’s role as butterfly in
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
. He was so excited about wearing the wings Barbara had made for him. So she’d leave the pages for Rhea with a Post-it:
Something to consider?
She didn’t want to seem confrontational. It was only an educated suggestion,
not
a criticism.

Because Barbara liked Rhea. She was a perfectly nice woman and clearly a committed teacher. Otherwise, Rhea never would have spent all her spare time supervising the Outreach Tutoring at the high school. A little strange, if Barbara was completely honest, that Rhea didn’t have children of her own. She was married and had to be pushing forty. But that oddity notwithstanding, Rhea was consistently kind and supportive and warm, at least according to Barbara’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Hannah, one of Outreach’s volunteer tutors.

Barbara kept smiling—a smile could head off so many misunderstandings—as she watched Rhea and the assistant teacher at the far back of the room, surrounded by the children. Rhea’s long white-blond hair swung back and forth as she explained how they could put on their own coats by placing them on the floor, putting their arms inside, and pulling them capelike over their heads. As usual, Rhea was dressed in black leggings and a snug knit top that accentuated her toned, curvy figure and very muscular thighs.

Rhea loved to exercise. And she loved to talk about it with the children—the miles logged, the races registered for. Cole had told Barbara
all
about it. It was cute and inspirational for the children, if a tiny bit funny to hear Cole sounding as though he were Rhea’s workout partner instead of her student.

Barbara turned back to the children, with their puffy faces and awkward bodies, wide eyes locked on Rhea as though she were performing a magic trick. Barbara felt weepy watching them. She’d been that way ever since Steve had called to tell her about that poor baby. He didn’t know much yet, only that there was a baby. A little girl. Her tiny body left out there in the woods to rot away with the mulching leaves.

Steve had made clear there was no reason to suspect it was some random thing, a killer on the loose. There were no reports of missing pregnant women in the area, which meant the baby’s mother must—Barbara’s words, not his—be responsible. And in a place like Ridgedale, with all that money and all those endless options? Disgusting, really. Never mind that there was one surefire way to make sure you didn’t have a baby you couldn’t care for: Don’t have sex. Or, for heaven’s sake, why not use birth control?

Barbara thought of Hannah and Cole. How light they’d been as newborns. How breakable. The thought of a little baby like that out there alone, crying and crying until it could cry no more. Worse yet, what if someone had stopped her from crying on purpose? The thought made Barbara positively nauseated.

“Was she born alive?” Barbara had asked. “I mean, she wasn’t
killed
, was she?”

“We don’t know yet,” Steve had said, his voice rough.

“You mean it’s possible someone could have—”

“I sure hope not,” Steve said. “But with the condition of the body—let’s just say I think the medical examiner will have his work cut out for him.”

He was sparing her the most gruesome details. Ironic, given that, between the two of them, Steve was the far more sensitive.

“What do you mean, the condition of the body?” she asked.

“I don’t think—”

“Steve, please. I need to know.”

He was quiet for a minute. “The water and the cold, I guess they complicate things. Looks like the baby started out buried, and then the creek gave way in the rain. There’s a lot of damage to the body. Some of the bruising and lacerations look postmortem, that’s the one bit the ME could say for sure. But the broken bones and the fractured skull could be the cause of death. On that, the ME wouldn’t make a guess yet. Made clear he might never know. Sounds like that’s the way it can be with real little babies.”

Barbara winced. Newborn heads were so very soft. How many times had she feared crushing her own children’s heads, slipping down the stairs as she held them, and now someone could have done that on purpose?

There was a loud round of giggles at the back of the room. Barbara wiped her eyes, fully teary when she smiled up at the children. So precious. So little. So fleeting. They were kindergartners, but soon they’d have lengthened, lost their babylike lisps. They’d be full-fledged children with opinions and well-formed arguments, and they’d spend more time rushing away than snuggling close.

Barbara had already been through that with Hannah. It had been bittersweet, but healthy in its way. Especially for Hannah, who’d always needed to be a little more independent. Barbara still missed her daughter being a little girl, of course, would have kept her that way forever if she could have. Seventeen already, with friends Barbara didn’t love and fashion choices she would never understand—did Hannah really have to dress every day in yet another sweatshirt? She’d even be driving soon. But such was the nature of motherhood, holding them tight in order to let them go.

At least Barbara had time left with Cole, a good deal because of the gap between the children. After that early miscarriage before Hannah and then the years of trying to conceive again after she was born, Barbara had resigned herself to the reality that she would never have another baby. But then there she was, pregnant again. It had been something of a shock to have a newborn and a twelve-year-old, but Cole was always so easy. Food, sleep, cuddling, and he was the picture of contentment. So much easier than Hannah had ever been with all her “sensitivities”—the temperature, the tags in her T-shirts, the slightest change in Barbara’s tone of voice. With Hannah, Barbara could never do anything right.

Barbara spotted Cole at the far back of the group in his dark gray caterpillar-body sweatsuit, a hand cupped near his mouth, whispering to his friend Will. Whatever he said made Will giggle. It was nice, the boys’ friendship. And Will was very sweet. High-energy but very, very sweet. He wouldn’t necessarily be the boy Barbara would have chosen to be Cole’s friend, but that was more because of Will’s mother.

Barbara didn’t even dislike Stella, she just found her so confusing. It wasn’t simply that the two of them were different either. Despite what some people seemed to think, Barbara didn’t pick her friends based on whether they made the same life choices. She did tend to steer clear of women with “big” careers. But that was because they so often made her feel as though talking about her children meant she was a less worthwhile (and significantly more stupid) human being.

The worst part about Stella—who had said she used to be a stockbroker so many times that Barbara sometimes wondered if she had Tourette’s and waved her divorce around like a bra on fire—wasn’t her swollen résumé, it was her unpredictability. Stella could be blatantly inattentive in certain ways, wildly overprotective in others. It turned scheduling a simple playdate into a minefield. The latest was Stella’s claim that Will didn’t like going to other people’s houses, that it made him nervous. It was obviously a lie. Will was the least nervous child Barbara had ever encountered.

Barbara had always gone into every conversation with Stella hoping they would find common ground, only to walk away feeling as though she’d stepped on Stella’s toes again. It was silly, really. The fact that Stella and Barbara would never be friends—and there was no question about that—hardly seemed reason for them not to be
friendly
. These days, Barbara would have settled for civil.

When the children had gotten their coats on, Barbara watched them shuffle single-file toward the door. She wiggled her fingers in Cole’s direction, but he didn’t see her as he headed toward the steps to the side yard. Barbara drifted to the windows to watch them spill outside. Most of the children ran for the playground equipment, a few clinging to the edge of the building as if they’d been turned loose in an unfriendly prison yard. Cole moved fast, sprinting alone for the back fence. He didn’t stop until he’d reached it, linking his fingers through the wires as he stared across the empty, muddy fields that stretched behind the school. Watching him made Barbara’s heart ache.

She felt such love for both her children, but Cole was much more like Barbara: simple, straightforward. Her love for him was, too. Hannah was like Steve, a big bleeding heart. Between Hannah’s tutoring and Steve’s police work, it was as if they were trying to save the world one needy stranger at a time. Deep down, Barbara knew that their compassion was their strength. But in her experience, all that caring for strangers came at a cost. The only question was who would pay.

There were benefits to Hannah’s sensitivity though. She never wanted to disappoint. So she didn’t drink or do drugs or anything like that, and there were no tattooed older boys sniffing around. There were no boys at all to speak of yet. Barbara had made clear that girls who ran around having sex in high school had no self-respect. And Hannah, being Hannah, had listened without Barbara ever having to repeat herself.

Barbara squinted in the direction of Cole, still staring across the field. What on earth was he looking at?

“Oh, Barbara,” Rhea said, startling her from behind. “I’m so glad you’re here. I was going to call you later today.”

“Call me?” Barbara asked, feeling caught off guard. “Why?”

Rhea smiled and motioned toward two small chairs. “I was hoping we could match notes about Cole.”

“Cole?” Barbara pulled in some air through her nose, hoping it might slow her heart. Silly that it was already beating so hard when she didn’t know what was wrong. “He isn’t being picked on, is he? I’ve been worried about that ever since the class picnic. He doesn’t always hold his own around some of the higher-energy boys.” Barbara didn’t say Will’s name. She didn’t want to go that far, but that was whom she was thinking about. Inevitably, boys like Will had a dark side.

“No, Cole isn’t being picked on.” Rhea’s smile shrank. “I’m afraid he’s the one doing— But ‘picking on’ isn’t the term I’d use.”

“Excuse me?” Barbara felt her face flush. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“Well, there have been several things in the past couple of days.” Rhea’s tone was cautious now, which made Barbara more nervous. “Things that are totally out of character for Cole.”

Barbara dropped down hard onto a chair.
Don’t be defensive
, she told herself. Even if Rhea was wrong—which she was, Barbara had never been called in to speak about her children—she clearly believed what she was saying. She was trying to be helpful. And jumping on her wouldn’t be persuasive.

“I’m sorry, exactly what is it you think Cole did?” Barbara asked, trying to sound merely interested.

“Not listening, talking back, being disruptive.” Rhea ticked them off as though they were the tip of a much more ominous iceberg. “He wouldn’t sit for morning circle on Thursday, and then he left the classroom on Friday without permission. He was standing right outside the door when I followed him out, but it took several minutes to get him back inside. I got worried I’d have to physically carry him. With another child, I might not think much of any of it—at least not any one incident. But now it’s something of a pattern, and Cole is always so sweet and well behaved. He’s the one I count on being helpful when everyone else is falling apart.”

“That’s certainly the Cole I know,” Barbara said, glad they were in agreement on that point.

“Could there be maybe— Has there been, perhaps, something going on at home? A job change or a death in the family, some stressor of some kind?” Rhea’s mouth was open, her lips parted in an O. She blinked her doe eyes a few more times before looking down into her lap. “For someone as sensitive as Cole, I’m not sure it would take—”

“Cole’s not sensitive,” Barbara snapped. She couldn’t help it. What Rhea was suggesting sounded an awful lot like a personal attack. It would make anyone defensive. “Anyway, there’s nothing ‘going on’ in our home.”

The worst part was that there
could
be something: the bureau. More specifically, her and Steve’s silly fight about it a few weeks earlier.

“How could you just forget?” Barbara had shouted when Steve got home that night. Barbara’s dad, Al, had been threatening to move an old bureau on his own for weeks, and Steve was supposed to make sure that didn’t happen. “You promised, Steve. He’ll have another heart attack if he moves that bureau!”

Steve hung his head, eyes closed. “You’re right. I’m sorry,” he’d said quietly, hands raised in surrender. “It completely slipped my mind.”

Forgetful, that was her husband. Ever since Steve had taken over as chief of police six years earlier, things had been slipping his mind. Barbara sometimes even wondered if Steve was using the promotion to spend less time with her. He was always kind, and they rarely argued, but lately he was so much more passionate about his work than about Barbara.

Now, of course, Barbara worried that Steve’s distraction had nothing to do with his job. She was worried it was about
her.

Barbara had been sure she was imagining it the first time she’d spotted the woman downtown. Barbara had followed her for seven blocks to be sure she
was
imagining it. But no, Barbara wasn’t seeing things. It was definitely her, returned after all these years, still looking like an overused prostitute. And how long had she been back in Ridgedale? Weeks, months? Festering out of sight like a nasty staph infection. Barbara hadn’t mentioned her to Steve. Nothing good would have come of that. But it had been weighing on every interaction she’d had with him since.

“I sent you two texts today, reminding you about that stupid bureau!” Barbara had shouted, feeling angrier and angrier.

Even after twenty years of marriage, it was amazing how fiercely you could argue without having to admit what you were really angry about. And that was in a good marriage, with a husband you loved. Because Barbara did love Steve so very much. More than anything.