“No. But if they had found the right activist judge? And that’s not hard around here. Who’s to say they couldn’t have turned my attempt to regain custody into a test-case to overturn the entire idea of biological parental rights?”
Angie gave me another careful look. “That seems a bit of a stretch, Brian.”
“Does it?” He twisted the cap off his water. He took a long swig. “Well, not to me. And I lived it.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So once Sophie came to live with you and you two ironed out the bumps, things were good?”
“Yeah.” He placed the water bottle on the coffee table and for a moment his face glowed with some distant memory. “Yeah. For about three years, things were very good. Sure, she had some issues over the passing of her mother and the move from New Hampshire, but generally? Things were very fine between us. She was respectful, she made her bed every morning, she seemed to take to Donna, she performed well in school.”
I smiled, feeling the warmth of his memories. “What’d you guys talk about?”
“Talk about?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My daughter and I, we both like cameras, you know? I got this black SLR and she’s got this pink baby-digital and we—”
“I mean”—he shifted a bit on the couch—“we were more about doing things together. Like, well, I got her jogging and doing a yoga-Pilates fusion with Donna that really helped them bond. And she used to come to the fitness center I run in Woburn. The one that started my company? That’s where we broadcast our Sunday-morning show and do the mail order. She was great helping out. Just great.”
“And then?”
“War,” he said. “One day, no rhyme or reason to it. I’d say black, she’d say white. I’d serve chicken for dinner, she’d tell us she’d become a vegan. She started doing her chores sloppily or not at all. Once BJ was born, it got out of control.”
“BJ?”
He indicated the small boy in the photos. “Brian Junior.”
“Ah,” I said. “BJ.”
He turned to face me, his hands clasped at his knees. “I’m not a taskmaster. I only have a few rules in this house, but they’re firm rules. You understand?”
“Of course,” I said. “With a kid, you’ve got to have rules.”
“So, okay.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “No profanity, no smoking, no boys over when I’m not home, no drugs or alcohol, and I’d like to know what you’re doing on the Internet.”
“Perfectly reasonable,” I said.
“Plus, no dark lipstick, no fishnet stockings, no friends with tattoos or nose rings, no junk food, processed food, or sodas.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Right,” he said, as if I’d said “Atta boy.” He leaned forward a bit more. “The junk food contributed to her acne. I told her that, but she didn’t listen. And all the sugar contributed to her hyperactivity and inability to concentrate in school. So her grades went down and her weight went up. It was a terrible example for BJ.”
“Isn’t he, like, three?” Angie asked.
Wide eyes and rapid nodding. “A very impressionable three. You don’t think this starts early, the national obesity crisis? And then let’s consider the national learning crisis we have. Angela, it’s all connected. Sophie, with her self-indulgence and her constant fits of drama, was setting a terrible example for our son.”
“She’d entered puberty, though,” Angie said. “And she was in high school. Everything that does a number on a girl’s head.”
“Which I appreciated.” He nodded. “But plenty of recent studies have shown that it’s our coddling of pubescent children in this country that contributes to an extended adolescence and arrested development.”
“I still can’t believe they canceled that show,” I said. “It was genius.”
“What?”
“My bad,” I said. “I was thinking of something else.”
Angie would have shot me if she could have cleared the room of witnesses.
“Go on,” I said.
“So, yes, Sophie was going through puberty. I get that. I get it. I do. But there are still rules to adhere to. Yes? She refused. I finally drew a line in the sand—lose ten pounds within forty days or leave the house.”
Something groaned below us, something mechanical, and then we heard the heat begin venting from the baseboards.
“I’m sorry,” Angie said. “I missed something. You made your daughter’s food and shelter conditional on her going on a diet?”
“It’s hardly that simple.”
“Then I’m missing a complicated wrinkle?” Angie nodded. “So, okay, what is that wrinkle, Brian?”
“The issue was not whether I would withhold certain things if—”
“Food and shelter,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It was not about withholding those things if she refused to diet. It was about threatening to withhold those things if she didn’t regain her self-respect and live up to our expectations. It was about turning her into a strong, proud, American woman with worthwhile values and authentic self-esteem.”
“How much self-esteem do you gain living on the streets?” Angie asked.
“Well, I didn’t think it would come to that. Obviously, I was wrong.”
Angie looked off at the kitchen, then to the foyer. She blinked several times. She slipped her bag strap back over her shoulder and came off the couch. She gave me a helpless smile, her lips tight against her teeth. “Yeah, I just can’t. I can’t sit here anymore. I’m going to go out front and wait for you. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She offered her hand to a baffled Brian Corliss. “A pleasure meeting you, Brian. If you see smoke floating past your window, don’t call the fire department. It’s just me having a cigarette in your driveway.”
She left. Brian and I sat in her wake, the heat hissing its way into the house.
“She smokes?” he said.
I nodded. “Loves cheeseburgers and Cokes, too.”
“And she looks like that?”
“Like what, dude?”
“That good? She’s, what, mid-thirties?”
“She’s forty-two.” I won’t deny I enjoyed the look of shock on his face.
“She’s had some work done?”
“God, no,” I said. “It’s just genes and a shitload of nervous energy. She bikes a lot, too, but she’s no fanatic.”
“You’re saying I’m a fanatic.”
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s your job and it’s your life choice. Good for you. I hope you live to a hundred and fifty. I just notice people sometimes mistake their life choices for their moral ones.”
We said nothing for a moment. We each took a drink of water.
“I kept thinking she’d come back.” His voice was soft.
“Sophie.”
He stared at his hands. “After a few years of her acting up while we tried to raise a toddler? I just thought, you know, I’d get back to old-school logic. In the old days, kids didn’t have eating disorders and they didn’t have ADHD and they didn’t talk back or listen to music that glorified sex.”
I gave that a bit of involuntary frown. “I don’t think the old days were all that, man. Go listen to Wake Up, Little Susie or Hound Dog and tell me again what they were singing about. ADHD, eating disorders? Do you remember eighth grade? Come on, Brian. Just because it wasn’t treated doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”
“Okay,” he said. “What about the culture? You didn’t have all these magazines and reality TV shows that glorify the stupid and the craven. You didn’t have ’Net porn and instant, viral communication—without any context whatsoever—of the most insipid ideas. You weren’t sold the concept that not only could you become a superstar of something, but you were entitled to. Forget the fact that you have no idea what that something is, and shelve the uncomfortable fact that you possess no talent. So what? You deserve everything.” He looked at me, suddenly forlorn. “You have a daughter? Well, let m
e tell you something, we can’t compete with that.”
“That?”
“That.” He pointed at his windows. “The world out there.”
I followed his gaze. I considered mentioning that the World Out There didn’t kick her out of her own home, the World In Here did. But I said nothing instead.
“We just can’t.” He let loose another gargantuan sigh and arched his back against the couch cushion to reach for his wallet. He rummaged around in it and came out with a business card. He handed it to me.
ANDRE STILES
Caseworker
Department of Children & Families
“Sophie’s DCF worker. He worked with her up until recently, I think, when she turned seventeen. I’m not sure if she still sees him, but it’s worth a shot.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you absolutely, positively had to guess.”
He gave it some thought as he returned the wallet to his back pocket. “Where she always is. With that friend of hers, the one you’re looking for.”
“Amanda.”
He nodded. “I thought, at first, she was a stabilizing influence on Sophie, but then I discovered more about her background. It was pretty sordid.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it was.”
“I don’t like sordid. There’s no place for it in a respectable life.”
I looked at his white-on-white living room and his white Christmas tree. “You know anyone named Zippo?”
He blinked a few times. “Is Sophie still seeing him?”
“I don’t know. I’m just compiling data until it makes sense.”
“That’s part of your job, eh?”
“That is my job.”
“Zippo’s name is James Lighter.” He turned his palm up toward me. “Hence the nickname. I don’t know anything else about him except that the one time I met him he smelled of pot and looked like a punk. Exactly the type of boy I would have hoped would never enter my daughter’s life—tattoos everywhere, droopy pants with the boxers exposed, rings in his eyebrows, one of those tufts of hair between his bottom lip and his chin.” His face had torqued into a fist. “Not a suitable human being at all.”
“Do you know of any places your daughter and Amanda, and maybe even Zippo, any places they hang out that I might not know about?”
He thought about it long enough for us both to drain our water bottles.
Eventually, he said, “No. Not really.”
I flipped open my notepad, found the page from earlier in the day. “One of Amanda’s and Sophie’s schoolmates told me Sophie and four other people went into a room. Two people in the room died, but—”
“Oh, dear God.”
“—four people walked back out. Does this make any sense to you?”
“What? No. It’s gibberish.” He came off the couch, one hand jiggling the keys in his pocket as he rocked back and forth against his heels. “Is my daughter dead?”
I held his desperate gaze for a moment.
“I have no idea.”
He looked away and then back again. “Well, that’s the problem when it comes to kids, isn’t it? We have no idea. Not one of us.”
Chapter Twelve
While she’d been smoking her cigarette, Angie had called 411 for the phone number of Elaine Murrow of Exeter, New Hampshire. She’d then called Elaine, who agreed to see us.
We spent the early portion of our thirty-minute drive to the Granite State in silence. Angie looked out the window at the bare brown trees along the highway, the cake frosting of last night’s snow hugging the ground in quickly balding patches.
“I just wanted to go over that coffee table,” she said eventually, “and gouge his fucking eyes out of his head.”
“Amazing you never got invited to the debutantes ball,” I said.
“Seriously.” She turned from the window. “He’s sitting there talking about ‘values’ as he sends his daughter to sleep on some bench in some bus station. And calling me ‘Angela’ like he fucking knows me. I hate, hate, fucking hate when people do that. And, Jesus, did you hear him ranting on about the dead mother’s ‘wholly unfit environment’? Because, what, she liked granola and watching The L Word?”
“You done?”
“Am I what?” she said.
“Done,” I said. “Because I was there to get information on a missing girl who can lead me to another missing girl. I was doing, ya know, my job.”
“Oh, I thought you were shining his shoes with your tongue.”
“My other option was what? To get all self-righteous and blow up at him?”
“I didn’t blow up at him.”
“You were unprofessional. He could feel you judging him.”
“Isn’t that what they say about you at Duhamel?”
Damn. Not bad.
“But I was never a tenth as bad as you were in there.”
“A tenth, huh?”
“A tenth.”
“So, I’m just supposed to sit back and let an emotionally abusive parent swim in his own self-righteousness?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t.”
“I noticed.”
“I mean, is this it?” she said. “Is this the job? Did I forget it’s just talking to people who make you want to scour your skin with a Brillo pad?”
“Sometimes.” I looked over at her. “All right—most times.”
Traffic thinned as we neared the New Hampshire border. I picked up enough speed so that the trees along the highway turned into a brown blur.
“Trying to close out the year with one final speeding ticket?” Angie asked.
As long as my daughter wasn’t in the car, I always drove fast. And Angie had long ago accepted it the way I accepted her smoking. Or so I’d thought.
“What,” I said, “the fuck crawled up your ass this morning, babe?”
The silence that followed got thick enough to make me consider rolling down the windows, but then Angie slammed the back of her head against the headrest and slapped the soles of her shoes against the glove compartment, and let loose a long “Arrgggghhh.” She followed it with, “I’m sorry. Okay? I truly am. You were right. I was unprofessional.”
“Could you repeat that into my tape recorder, please?”
“Seriously.”
“I am serious.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Apology accepted. And greatly appreciated.”
“I really did blow it back there.”
“No, you didn’t. You almost did. But I smoothed it over. It’s all cool.”
“It wasn’t, though.”
“You haven’t done this in a while. There’s bound to be rust.”
“Yeah.” She ran her hands back through her hair. “And I’m covered in it.”
“You still got those, uh, mad computer skills, though.”
She smiled. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Think you could hop on your BlackBerry and Google James Lighter?”
“Who’s . . . ?”
“Zippo. Let’s see if he shows up anywhere.”
“Ah.” She tapped the keys for a bit and then said, “Oh, he shows up all right. Shows up very dead.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. He’s positively ID’d as a corpse found in Allston about three weeks ago.” She read it aloud to me. The body of James Lighter, 18, had been found in a field behind a liquor store in Allston the weekend after Thanksgiving. He’d been shot twice in the chest. Police had no suspects and no witnesses.
Midway through the article, his predictably shitty back story appeared: when he was six years old, his single mother gave him to a friend to babysit and never came home again. To this day, the whereabouts of Heather Lighter were unknown. Her son, James, grew up in a series of foster homes. His last foster parent, Carol “Weezy” Louise, was quoted as saying she’d always known he’d end up this way, ever since he’d stolen her car when he was fourteen.
> “Steal Weezy’s car,” I said, “and you apparently deserve two in the chest.”
“What a waste,” Angie said. “A whole life adds up to . . .” She searched for the word.
“Zip,” I said.
• • •
“I’m not going to claim Sophie was some perfect kid until her father came along and destroyed everything.” Elaine Murrow sat on a red metal couch without cushions in the center of the converted barn she used as a studio for her sculpture. We sat on red stools across from her. They were metal, too, and cushionless and about as comfortable as sitting on the mouth of a wine bottle. The barn was warm, but the sculptures kept it from being cozy; they were all metal or chrome and I wasn’t sure I could recognize what they were supposed to represent. If I had to guess, I’d say most were supposed to be oversize fuzzy dice. Without the fuzz. And there was a coffee table (I think it was a coffee table) in the shape of a chain saw. Which is to say, I don’t understand modern art and I’m fairly certain it doesn’t understand me, so we leave it at that and try not to bother each other.
“She was an only child,” Elaine said, “so she was a bit bratty and self-centered. Her mother had a flair for the dramatic, so Sophie did, too. But Brian, believe me, never gave a shit about his daughter until her mother left him. And even then, what he cared about most was getting Cheryl to return to him so he wouldn’t have to live with what her rejection said about him.”
“When did he begin showing serious interest in gaining custody?” I asked.
She chuckled. “When he found out who Cheryl left him for. He was clueless for a good six months. He thought she was living with a girl friend, not a girlfriend. I mean, look at me—do I look like I ever lived a straight day in my life?”
She had heavily gelled spiked hair the white of Liquid Paper. She wore a sleeveless plaid work shirt over dark jeans and brown Doc Martens. When it came to Elaine Murrow, if we were operating under the policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, no one would need to ask.
“Not to me,” I said, “no.”
“Thank you. But dipshit Brian? He didn’t pick up on it at first.”
“And once he finally clued in?” Angie asked.