“What do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t need to wait for the official ID. I know it’s her. Girls like her often end up floating in ponds like that. Or hidden in the woods. Or thrown in a ditch. It’s the lucky few who don’t.”
Like Caitlin, she meant. The lucky one.
“I’m going to go sit with her mother,” she said. “Call me if anything else changes. Like your mind.”
She left me there, still smearing the coffee around like a troubled, distracted child.
Chapter Fifty
I was still at the table when Abby came down. I refilled my mug, stared at the dark liquid, and thought of Tracy’s body facedown in the cold water of some country pond.
“What did Liann want?” Abby asked.
As I told her, Abby slid into a chair, her body seeming to lose weight and almost crumple. She raised her hand to her chest, her eyes unfocused.
“He killed her,” she said. “They’ll arrest him for that, too.”
“Maybe. How do we know they can prove it? A girl like Tracy, someone with those kinds of problems.”
I could hear Liann’s voice in my head: Criminalization of the victim . I used to judge and blame parents with wild, uncontrollable children. Now I lived with a child I couldn’t control. Who was to blame?
Colter.
“I was going to go to church,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t . . .”
“You can go. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” She waited for more of a response. I didn’t offer one. Our marital standoffs could be like this. Abby probing, pushing; me resisting. Caitlin came by it honestly, the ability to wall out even those who could most do well by her. “Tom, I’m scared. He’s out there. He’s free. And he killed another girl. What are we doing here?”
“Waiting, I guess.”
“What if he wants to hurt Caitlin? What if he comes here . . . ?”
I shook my head. “He won’t hurt her,” I said.
“How do you know that?”
“He thinks he loves her. And she thinks she loves him.”
I felt her gaze. She studied me. “How do you know that, Tom? Do you know something I don’t know?”
I waited. I shook my head again. “I think you should go to church today, if you want. I’ll stay here with her.”
“I can take her with me—”
“No. I want Caitlin to stay here. With me.”
She studied me more; then she nodded. “Okay. If you change your mind, let me know. I can come right home.” She squeezed my hand when she stood up.
When she’d said her good-byes and left the house, I went to the foot of the stairs and called Caitlin.
We sat across from each other at the dining room table. My chest felt buoyant, like the ballast tank on a submarine.
Caitlin didn’t look at me. She held her right hand near her mouth, her teeth working on a piece of loose skin around her thumb. I didn’t bother to tell her to stop. She’d never stop the chewing, the cursing, the poor hygiene habits. All the things we could have helped, the disciplinary battles we could have fought, were lost. What was left?
“What do you want to know?” Caitlin asked. A large glass of water sat in front of her, and she took a drink.
“I want to know what happened in the park that day. I want to know how he got you to go with him.”
Her brow wrinkled as though she were thinking hard. Four years. I’d assumed the facts would be right at her command.
“I was walking Frosty,” she said. “He wasn’t very good on a leash, you know. He used to tug and strain and make that weird hacking noise because the collar choked him. You know what I’m talking about?”
I did.
“Really, I was too small to be walking him. He wasn’t trained well enough. So he was pulling me along and pulling me along, and I was holding on as best I could, but the leash started digging into my hands, deep into my hands. My fingers were all smashed together, the knuckles rubbed against one another. It hurt, really hurt. I tried to shift the leash from one hand to the other so it wouldn’t hurt so much, but when I tried, Frosty took off. He just bolted through the park, toward the cemetery. He was gone, just gone.” She gave a pained, almost wistful smile at the memory. “Anyway,” she said, “I freaked out. I was scared. If something happened to him, I knew I’d be in trouble, and I knew you’d never let me walk him in the park again.”
“That would have been your mom’s reaction,” I said.
“Whatever. I ran after him as fast as I could, but by the time I got to the cemetery, he was gone. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I looked around. I called his name. Nothing. He was gone. I started to cry. I didn’t like to cry—I thought I was too old for that, but I couldn’t help it. I felt the tears burning my eyes, and I knew I was losing it.”