I pictured a girl in a trench coat and crooked beret. Felt sorrow clot any response I might have offered.
I knew the drill. So did Hull. McGee’s mental competence would be determined by pretrial motions and hearings and judges and lawyers.
Sane. Insane. Either finding would result in Tawny McGee’s worst nightmare, one she’d already endured. A life in one type of prison or another.
It had to be.
Even the damaged cannot be allowed to damage.
CHAPTER 44
THE NEXT MORNING I drove to Heatherhill Farm. Like the magnolia at Sharon Hall, the azaleas and rhododendron winked both waxy green and dull brown. I imagined the upside-down leaves, startled by the warm spell, turning for instruction from their roots.
River House itself was half in shade and half in bright sun. Its windows also looked confused, undecided between reflecting and ingesting light.
Mama was on the back deck, bundled in a parka and scarf, stretched out on the same chaise she’d occupied Thanksgiving week. As I had then, I paused a moment to study her. Perhaps to fix her image forever in my memory.
She’d lost weight, though the bulky jacket made that appraisal difficult. Her hands were chapped, the treasured hair a bit dull. Still, my mother looked beautiful.
It was a pleasant visit. No rancor. No resentment. I didn’t bring up chemo. She didn’t correct my manners or dress.
I told Mama about the arrest of Tawny McGee. About the CAIS. About the psychopathology of hatred and love. She called it Pomerleau’s legacy of madness.
I thanked Mama for her input. Said the YouTube cycling video had been the big break in the case. Ryan’s big bang.
She asked if I’d seen Ryan. I said not for a while. She didn’t persist.
Then I told her the good news. The police had located Kim Hamilton’s brother, now living in Miami. He was saddened to learn of his sister’s death and troubled by not knowing the location of her remains. Mostly, he was comforted by confirmation of a truth he’d always felt in his soul. Kim hadn’t turned her back on her family by running away.
At noon Mama and I shared a lunch of avocado salad and grilled chicken breast. At one Goose trundled Mama off for her nap.
That evening I turned in early. As was common since I’d met Umpie Rodas two months earlier, memories bombarded me the instant I closed my eyes. Unbidden apparitions involving bones and corpses and children.
I had no say in the order or arrival times of these sad visitations. Only in their duration. As soon as a reel began to play, I’d shut it down.
For some reason, that night I let my mind roll.
I saw Nellie Gower pedaling her bike, brown hair flying and catching the sun. Tawny McGee tightening the drawstring of a plastic bag under her chin.
Lizzie Nance practicing pliés and arabesques at a ballet bar. McGee closing her lifeless little fingers around a bunched white tissue.
Tia Estrada walking hand in hand with her mother. McGee tucking long blond hairs deep into her throat.
Shelly Leal tapping a keyboard, face radiant in the glow of the screen. McGee arranging her still body on a highway embankment.
I imagined the girls at the moment their worlds halted forever. Did they know death was at hand? Did they ask why?
In addition to the ballet slipper and clippings, McGee’s souvenir box had contained a yellow ribbon identical to the one found in Hamet Ajax’s trunk. Avery Koseluk’s mother didn’t recognize the ribbons. Laura Lonergan said they had not belonged to Colleen Donovan. Neither had yielded DNA.
I pictured those ribbons, wondered if they’d once bound the hair of my Jane Doe skeleton. Of another little girl as yet unknown to us. Though we might never learn for certain if there had been other victims, Barrow and Rodas would investigate on the U.S. end, Ryan in Canada.
I saw my Jane Doe, a sad collection of bones labeled ME107-10. Wondered if somewhere a family was searching.