We were in the spare bedroom/closet where we keep the home office desk. It was a little past nine and Gabby had dropped off around eight. Since then, we’d been digging deeper into Kenny Hendricks’s history.
“So this is Helene’s boyfriend.”
“ ’Tis.”
“Oh, well, it’s all fine, then.”
She sat back and blew air up at her eyebrows, a sure sign she was about to pop.
“God knows I never expected Helene to be a good parent,” she said, “but I didn’t expect even that crack whore to be this retarded with her child.”
“There, there,” I said, “she strikes me more as a tweeker than a crackhead. Technically that would make her a meth whore.”
Angie shot me the darkest look she’d shot me in months. Playtime was over. The elephant in the middle of our relationship that neither of us talked about was the actions we’d taken back when Amanda McCready disappeared the first time. When Angie was faced with choosing between the law and a four-year-old’s well-being, her reaction at the time could be summed up thusly: Fuck the law.
I, on the other hand, had taken the high road and helped the state return a neglected child to her neglectful parent. We broke up over it. Went nearly a year without speaking. Some years are longer than others; that year was about a decade and a half. Since we’d reconciled, we hadn’t said the names Amanda or Helene McCready in our home until three days ago. In those three days, every time one of us mentioned one of those names, it felt like someone had pulled the pin from a grenade.
Twelve years ago, I’d been wrong. Every day that had passed since, roughly 4,400 of them, I was sure of that.
But twelve years ago, I’d been right. Leaving Amanda with kidnappers, no matter how vested they were in her welfare, was leaving her with kidnappers. In the 4,400 days since I’d taken her back, I was sure this was true. So where did that leave me?
With a wife who was still certain I’d fucked up.
“This Kenny,” she said, tapping my laptop, “do we know where he lives?”
“We know his last known address.”
She ran her hands through her long, dark hair. “I’m going to step out on the porch.”
“Sure.”
We put our coats on. Out on our back porch, we carefully closed the door and Angie opened the top of the barbecue grill where she kept a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She swore she only smoked a couple a day, but there were days I’d noticed the pack was a lot lighter than it should have been. So far she’d kept evidence of the vice from Gabby, but the clock was ticking and we both knew it. Yet as much as I’d love my wife to be vice-free, I normally can’t stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party. Angie knows I’d love it if she didn’t smoke, and Angie would love it if she didn’t smoke. But, for now, she smokes. I, for my part, deal with it and stay off her ass.
“If Beatrice isn’t crazy,” she said, “and Amanda really is missing again, we’ve got a second chance.”
“No,” I said, “we do not.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“Yes, I do. You were going to suggest that if we somehow manage to locate Amanda McCready, then this time we can make up for the sins of the past.”
She gave me a rueful smile as she blew smoke out over the railing. “So you did know what I was going to say.”
I took a vicarious whiff of secondhand smoke and planted a kiss on my wife’s collarbone. “I don’t believe in redemption.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in closure.”
“That either.”
“So what do you believe in again?”
“You. Her. This.”
“Babe, you’ve got to find more balance.”
“What’re you, my sensei?”
“Hai.” She gave me a small bow. “I’m serious. You can either sit around the house brooding on what happened to Peri Pyper and how you helped a classic d-bag like Brandon Trescott avoid any responsibility for his actions, or you can do some good.”
“And this is good, uh?”
“You’re damn right it is. Do you believe a guy like Kenny Hendricks should be around Amanda McCready?”
“No, but that’s not enough to go mucking around in people’s lives.”
“What is?”
I chuckled.
She didn’t. “She’s missing.”
“You want me to go after Kenny and Helene.”
She shook her head. “I want us to go after Kenny and Helene. And I want us to find Amanda again. I might not have much free time.”
“You don’t have any.”
“Okay, any,” she admitted, “but I still have mad computer skills, m’ man.”
“Did you say mad computer skills?”
“I’m reliving the early aughts.”
“I remember the early aughts—we made money then.”
“And we were prettier and your hair was a lot thicker.” She put both palms on my chest and stood on tiptoe to kiss me. “No offense, babe, but what else are you doing these days?”
“You’re a cold bitch. I love you. But you’re a cold bitch.”
She gave me that throaty laugh of hers, the one that slides through my blood.
“You love it.”
• • •
Half an hour later Beatrice McCready sat at our dining-room table. She drank a cup of coffee. She didn’t look quite as broken as she had the other day, quite as lost, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t.
“I shouldn’t have lied about Matt,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
I held up a hand. “Beatrice, Jesus. No apology necessary.”
“He just . . . It’s one of those things you know you probably won’t get over but you still got to function, go about your day. Right?”
“My first husband was murdered,” Angie said. “That doesn’t mean I know about your grief, Bea, but I did learn that having one moment in a given day, just one second, when you’re not grieving? That’s never a sin.”
Beatrice gave that a soft nod. “I . . . Thank you.” She looked around our small dining room. “You have a girl now, uh?”
“Yes. Gabriella.”
“Oh, that’s a pretty name. Does she look like you?”
Angie looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded.
“More me than him, yeah,” she said. She pointed to a picture of Gabby that sat atop the credenza. “That’s Gabby.”
Beatrice took the photo in and eventually smiled. “She looks feisty.”
“She’s that,” Angie said. “They say the terrible twos?”
Beatrice leaned forward. “Oh, I know, I know. It starts at eighteen months and it goes until they’re three and a half.”
Angie nodded vigorously. “She was a monster. I mean, God, it was—”
“Awful, right?” Beatrice said. She looked as if she were about to tell us an anecdote about her son but caught herself. She looked down at the table with a strange smile on her face and rocked a bit in her chair. “But they grow out of it.”
Angie looked at me. I looked back at her, clueless about what to say next.
“Bea,” she said, “the police said they investigated your claim and found Amanda in the house.”
Beatrice shook her head. “Since they moved, Amanda calls me every day. Never missed until two weeks ago. Right after Thanksgiving. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“They moved? Out of the neighborhood?”
Bea nodded. “About four months ago. Helene owns a house in Foxboro. A three-bedroom.”
Foxboro was a suburb, about twenty miles south. It wasn’t Belmont Hills or anything, but it was a tall step up from St. Bart’s Parish in Dorchester.
“What’s Helene do for work these days?”
Beatrice laughed. “Work? I mean, last I heard, she was working the Lotto machine at New Store on the Block, but that was a while ago. I’m pretty sure she managed
to get fired from there just like every other place. This is a woman who managed to get fired from Boston Gas back in the day. Who gets fired from a utility?”
“So, if she’s not working much . . .”
“How’s she afford a house?” She shrugged. “Who knows?”
“She didn’t get anything from the city in those lawsuits, did she?”
She shook her head. “It all went into a trust for Amanda. Helene can’t touch it.”
“Okay,” Angie said. “I’ll pull the tax assessment on the property.”
“What about the restraining orders against you?” I asked as softly as I could.
Beatrice looked over at me. “Helene works the system. She’s been doing it since she was a teenager. Amanda was sick a couple years ago. The flu. Helene had some new guy, a bartender who fed her free drinks, so she kept forgetting to check on Amanda. This is when they were in the old place by Columbia Road. I still had a key and I started letting myself in to care for Amanda. It was either that or let her catch pneumonia.”
Angie glanced at the photo of Gabby and then back at Bea. “So Helene found you there and filed the restraining order.”
“Yeah.” Bea fingered the edge of her coffee cup. “I drink more than I used to. Sometimes I get stupid and drunk-dial.” She looked up at me. “Like I did with you the other night. I’ve done it with Helene a few times. After the last time, she filed for another restraining order. That was three weeks ago.”
“What made you, I don’t want to say ‘harass’ her, but . . . ?”
“ ‘Harass’ is okay. Sometimes I like harassing Helene.” She smiled. “I had talked to Amanda. She’s a good kid. Hard, you know? Way older than her years, but good.”
I thought of the four-year-old I’d returned to that house. Now she was “hard.” Now she was “way older than her years.”
“Amanda asked me to check the mail at the old place, just some stuff that the PO forgot to forward. They do that all the time. So I went by there and it was mostly junk mail.” She reached into her purse. “Except for this.”
She handed me a piece of ivory paper: a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Birth Certificate, Suffolk County, for Christina Andrea English, DOB 08/04/93.
I handed it to Angie.
“Similar age,” she said.
I nodded. “Christina English would be a year older.”
We were thinking the same thing. Angie laid the birth certificate beside her laptop and her fingers danced across the keyboard.
“How did Amanda react when you told her you’d found this?” I asked Bea.
“She stopped calling. Then she disappeared.”
“So you started calling Helene.”
“And demanding answers. You’re fucking right I did.”
“Good for you,” Angie said. “I wish I’d been with you.”
I said, “So you called Helene?”
She nodded. “A bunch. And left several angry messages.”
“Which Helene saved,” Angie said, “and brought before a judge.”
Beatrice nodded. “Exactly.”
“And you’re sure Amanda is not at the Foxboro house.”
“Positive.”
“Why?”
“Because I staked it out for three days.”
“Staked it out.” I grinned. “With a restraining order on you. Damn. You’re hardcore, Bea.”
She shrugged. “Whoever the police talked to, it wasn’t Amanda.”
Angie looked up from the computer for a second, her fingers still hitting the keys. “No local grammar school records on Christina English. No social. No hospital records.”
“What’s this mean?” Bea asked.
“It means Christina English could have moved out of state. Or—”
“I got it,” Angie said. “DOD 9/16/93.”
“—she’s dead,” I finished.
“Car crash,” Angie said. “Wallingford, Connecticut. Both parents deceased same date.”
Bea looked at us, confused.
Angie said, “Amanda was trying to assume Christina En-glish’s identity, Bea. You interrupted. There’s no Massachusetts death certificate on file. There might be a Connecticut death certificate—I’d have to dig deeper—but there’s a solid chance someone could pretend to be Christina English and the state would never be the wiser. You could get a social security card, forge an employment history, and someday, if you felt like it, fake an injury at your nonexistent job and collect state disability.”
“Or,” I said, “she could wrack up six figures on multiple credit cards in a thirty-day period and never pay them off because, well, she doesn’t exist.”
“So either Amanda’s working for Helene and Kenny in a fraud operation . . .” Angie said.
“Or she’s trying to become someone else.”
“But then she’d never get the two million the city owes her next year.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Though,” Angie said, “just because she assumes a new identity doesn’t mean she forfeits her authentic one.”
“But I intercepted the birth certificate,” Bea said, “so she can’t be anyone but herself anymore. Right?”
“Well, the Christina English identity is probably done for,” I said.
“But?”
“But,” Angie said, “it’s like avatars in computer games. She could have several if she’s really smart. Is Amanda really smart?”
“Off the charts,” Bea said.
We sat in silence for a minute. I caught Bea staring at the photo of Gabriella. We’d taken it last autumn. Gabby sat in a pile of leaves, arms stretched wide as if posing for the top of a trophy, her megawatt smile as big as the leaf pile. A million pictures just like it adorned mantels and credenzas and buffet tables and the tops of TVs across the globe. Bea kept staring at it, falling into it.
“Such a great age,” she said. “Four, five. Everything’s wonder and change.”
I couldn’t meet my wife’s eyes.
“I’ll take a look,” I said.
Angie gave me a smile bigger than Suffolk County.
Bea reached her hands across the table. I took them. They were warm from the coffee cup.
“You’ll find her again.”
“I said I’ll take a look, Bea.”
The gaze she fixed on me was evangelical. “You’ll find her again.”
I didn’t say anything. But Angie did.
“We will, Bea. No matter what.”
• • •
After she left, we sat in the living room and I looked at the photo of Bea and Amanda in my lap. It had been taken a year ago at a K of C function hall. They stood in front of a wood-paneled wall. Bea looked at Amanda and love poured out of her like a flashlight beam. Amanda looked right at the camera. Her smile was hard, her gaze was hard, her jaw slightly skewed to the right. Her once-blond hair was a cherry brown. She wore it long and straight. She was small and slim and wore a gray Newbury Comics T-shirt, a navy blue Red Sox warm-up jacket, and a pair of dark blue jeans. Her slightly crooked nose was sprayed with a light dusting of freckles, and her green eyes were very small. She had thin lips, sharp cheekbones, a squared-off chin. There was so much going on in her eyes that I knew the picture could not do her justice. Her face probably changed thirty times in fifteen minutes. Never quite beautiful but never less than arresting.
“Whew,” Angie said. “That kid is no kid anymore.”
“I know.” I closed my eyes for a second.
“What’d you expect?” she said. “Helene for a mother? If Amanda avoids rehab until her twentieth birthday, she’s a raging success.”
“Why am I doing this again?” I asked.
“Because you’re good.”
“I’m not this good,” I said.
She kissed my earlobe. “When your daughter asks what you stand for, don’t you want to be able to answer her?”
“That’d be nice,” I said. “It would. But this recession, this depression, this whatever the fuck—it’
s real, honey. And it’s not going away.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “It is. Someday. But where you stand, right here, right now? That’s forever.” She turned on the couch, brought her legs up and held them by the ankles. “I’ll join you for a couple-three days. That’d be fun.”
“Fun. How you going to—?”
“PR owes me for last summer when I watched the Beast. She’ll watch Gabby while I gallivant with you for a couple days.”
The Beast was the son of Angie’s friend Peggy Rose—or PR. Gavin Rose was five years old and, to the best of my knowledge, never slept and never stopped breaking shit. He also enjoyed screaming for no good reason. His parents thought it was cute. When PR’s second child was born last year, the birth coincided with the death of her mother-in-law, which is how Angie and I ended up with the Beast for five of the longest days known to man.
“She does owe us,” I said.
“Yes, she does.” She looked at her watch. “Too late to call now, but I’ll try her in the morning. You can check back in during the afternoon, see if you got a partner.”
“It’s sweet of you,” I said, “but it’s not going to bring in any more money. And that’s what we need. I could find day labor. There’s always ways to scoop up, I dunno, something. The docks? I could unload cars from the ships over in Southie. I could . . .” I stopped talking, hating the desperation I heard in my own voice. I leaned back on the couch and watched wet snow spit against the window. It eddied under the street lamps and swirled along the telephone lines. I looked over at my wife. “We could go broke.”
“It’ll take you a couple days, a week tops. And if, in that time, Duhamel-Standiford calls and offers you another case, you walk away. But for now, you try to find Amanda.”
“Soup-kitchen broke.”
“Then we eat soup,” Angie said.
Chapter Ten
Until three weeks ago, Amanda McCready had attended the Caroline Howard Gilman School for Girls. The Gilman was tucked on a side street just off Memorial Drive in Cambridgeport, a few oar pulls up the Charles River from MIT. It had started out as a high school for daughters of the upper crust. Its 1843 mission statement proclaimed, “A necessity in confounding times, the Caroline Howard Gilman School for Girls will turn your daughter into a young lady of impeccable manners. When her husband takes her hand in marriage, he will shake yours in thanks for providing him with a wife of unparalleled breeding and substance.”