The Good Girl

  “Can I help you?” she asks, startled when I show her my badge.

  “Is your mother Ruth Baker?” I ask before I ever say my name.

  She says that she is. Anytime a cop shows up at your door, the first thing you wonder is: What’s wrong?

  I forget to tell her that I’m sorry for her loss. I jump right in, with only one thought on my mind: finding Mia. “I believe your mother might have been collecting the mail from a neighbor of hers. Kathryn Thatcher,” I say and a wave of guilt and embarrassment washes over the woman. She begins to apologize up and down. I know she’s sorry, but I think she’s also worried she might be in trouble. Mail theft is, after all, a felony, and here I am, a cop standing at her front door.

  “It’s just...it’s been so busy,” she says. “With all the arrangements...the funeral and packing up her home.” She saw the mail. In fact she’s walked past it about a million times, every time she goes into or comes out of her mother’s home, stacked on a wooden end table beside the front door. She just never got around to returning it to its rightful owner.

  I follow the lady in her minivan back to the street on which Kathryn Thatcher lives. We pull into the drive of Ruth Baker’s house and the woman runs in to retrieve the mail. I thank her and snatch it from her hand, and there, in the driveway, I scramble through the mail. Chinese takeout menu, a water bill, grocery store ad, more bills and a pudgy envelope made out to Kathryn Thatcher with no return address. The handwriting is sloppy. I rip open the envelope and find, tucked inside, a crapload of cash. No note, no return address. I turn it over and over in my hands. I read the postmark. Eau Claire, WI. I toss the mail in the passenger seat of my car and speed away. Back at the station I pull up a map online. I track the route from Chicago to Grand Marais. Sure enough. Right where I-94 heads west to St. Paul/Minneapolis and U.S. Highway 53 heads north and then west into northern Minnesota is the Wisconsin town of Eau Claire, just about five hours shy of Grand Marais.

  I contact an Officer Roger something-or-other from northeastern Minnesota. He assures me I’m barking up the wrong tree, but he says he’ll look into it nonetheless. I tell him that I’m faxing a sketch, just in case. Colin Thatcher’s face has made the news only in the tri-state area. TV stations throughout Minnesota and the rest of the world don’t have a clue who he is. But they will.

  Colin

  Before

  The antibiotic kicks in and she starts to feel better overnight. While the cough continues to rage, the fever drops significantly. She looks alive, no longer a zombie.

  But as she feels better, something begins to change. I tell myself that it has to do with the antibiotic. But even I know that’s not true. She’s quiet. I ask if she’s okay and she says she still doesn’t feel good. She doesn’t want to eat. I try and convince her to take a few bites, but she sits and stares out the window. Silence fills the cabin, uncomfortable silence, bringing us back to a place we used to be.

  I try to make small talk, but her only responses are one-word answers. Yes, no, I don’t know. She says we’re going to freeze to death. She says she hates the snow, that if she has to eat chicken noodle soup again she’ll vomit.

  Generally I’d get pissed. I’d tell her to shut up. I’d remind her how I saved her life. I’d tell her to eat the damn soup before I shove it down her throat.

  She wants nothing to do with drawing. I ask if she wants to go outside—the day is nicer than we’ve seen for a while—but she says no. I go anyway and she doesn’t move an inch while I’m gone.

  She can’t make a decision. She doesn’t want the chicken noodle soup. I know that. So for dinner I give her the option. I rattle off the name of everything in the cabinet. She says she doesn’t care. She’s not hungry anyway.

  She says she’s tired of shaking all the time. She’s tired of the crap we eat, cans of glop masquerading as food. Just the scent of it makes her want to vomit.

  She’s tired of the boredom. She’s tired of having absolutely nothing to do for hours on end, day after day after unending day. She doesn’t want to go for another walk in the godforsaken cold. She doesn’t want to draw another picture.

  Her nails are a jagged mess. Her hair is greasy from the inside out, a tangle that will never come undone. We can’t escape our own smell, though we force ourselves to bathe nearly every day in that dirty tub.

  I tell her that they’d send me to jail if I was ever caught. I don’t know how long. Thirty years? Life? It’s not about this, I tell her. But the number of years mean nothing. They’re pointless. I’d never live to see them. Every criminal knows someone on the inside. I’m as good as dead inside the pen. They’d make sure of it.

  It isn’t a threat. I’m not trying to make her feel guilty. That’s just the way it is.

  I don’t want to be here, either. I spend every waking moment wondering when Dan is gonna come through with the passports, how I’m gonna get them without the cops finding me. The food is always sparse, the nights getting colder so that one morning we won’t wake up. I know that now is the time to go. Before the food runs out, before the money runs out. Before we freeze to death.

  She lets me be the one to worry. She says there’s never been someone to worry about her before.

  I think of all the things that could go wrong. Starving. Freezing. Being found by Dalmar. Being found by the police. There’s danger in returning home. There’s danger in staying here. I know it. She knows it. But my bigger concern now is not having her with me.

  Gabe

  After

  Believe it or not, they find the damn cat. The poor little guy was hiding out in some shed behind the cabin, freezing his little ass to the verge of death. There wasn’t a thing to eat so he was quite taken with the Kibbles ’n Bits the cops brought. But he sure as hell didn’t like their cage, or so they said, and fought tooth and nail to get out of it before they fastened the lock. The feline took a turbo prop down to Minneapolis, then a commercial airliner into O’Hare. Little guy gets around more than me! I picked him up this morning and took him over to the Dennetts when—lo and behold—I find out Eve and Mia have moved out.

  I make the jaunt to Wrigleyville and surprise the women at 10:00 a.m. with a dozen donuts, café mochas and a malnourished tabby cat. They’re both in their pajamas, watching TV.

  I catch the door as someone is leaving so I don’t have to wait to be buzzed in. I like the surprise of it.

  “Good morning,” I say when Mia opens the door.

  She wasn’t expecting me. Eve rises from the couch and pats at her untidy hair. “Gabe,” she says. She pulls on her robe to make sure nothing is exposed.

  I attempt to leave the cat in the hall but so help me, all it takes is a “thank you” from Mia, in response to my “I brought some donuts and coffee,” and the cat goes absolutely berserk, clawing at the bars of the cage and making noises I’ve never heard a cat make before. So much for my grand entrance.

  Eve turns white. “What is that noise?” she asks and so I bring the little guy in and close the door.

  According to research, people who live with animals have decreased anxiety and lower blood pressure. They have lower cholesterol. They are more relaxed and less stressed and are, overall, in better health. Unless of course you have a dog who pees uncontrollably wherever it wishes or eats your furniture to shreds.

  “What are you doing with that cat?” Eve asks. She’s clearly at a loss and thinks I’m off my rocker.

  “This little guy?” I ask. I play dumb. I squat down and open the cage and take the cat into my arms. He claws me with his back claws. Shit! “I’m watching him for a friend of mine. I hope you don’t mind. Is anyone allergic to cats?” I ask, setting him on the ground and standing to meet Mia in the eye.

  The fur-ball jaunts over to her and does about a thousand figure eights around her legs. He’s meowing. His insides purr.

 
Eve laughs. She runs a hand through her hair. “Looks like you have a friend, Mia,” she says.

  The girl is muttering something under her breath, as if trying a new word on for size before she blurts it out and astounds us all. She lets that cat grope her for I don’t know how long as we listen to Eve go on and on about how taken the little guy is with Mia’s feet.

  “What’s that you said?” I ask, stepping forward as she leans down and scoops the cat into her arms. He doesn’t scratch her. They nuzzle noses and he bumps into her face with his head.

  “I always told her she should get a cat,” Eve continues to babble.

  “Mia?” I say.

  She looks at me with tears in her eyes. She knows that I know and that I did this for a reason. “Canoe,” she whispers to me. “I said Canoe.”

  “Canoe?”

  “It’s his name.”

  What ever happened to Max or Fido? Canoe? What kind of name is that?

  “Mia, honey...” Eve comes to her side, aware, for the first time, that something is happening here. “Whose name is Canoe?” she asks. Her voice is dumbed down, as if she’s talking to a mentally challenged child. She’s certain Mia is talking gibberish, a side effect of the ASD. Except this is the first time I’ve ever seen Mia say something that makes sense.

  “Eve,” I say, ever so gently prying her hand off Mia’s arm. I reach into my coat pocket and pull out the fax I sent to the cops in Grand Marais and unfold it to reveal a perfectly sketched image of little Canoe. “This,” I say, holding it out to her, “is Canoe.”

  “Then he isn’t...”

  “There was a shed,” Mia is saying. She doesn’t look at us. Her eyes are lost on the cat. Eve takes the drawing from my hand. She knows now. She’s seen the sketchbook, every last image down to the drawing of Colin Thatcher that she told me kept her awake at night. But she had forgotten the cat. Eve sinks into the couch. “There was a shed behind the cabin. He was living in there. I found him sleeping in an old rusty canoe. I scared him the first time. I just threw open the door to have a look around and scared him half to death. He ran away, out a small hole in the shed, and flew like a bat out of hell through the woods. I never thought he’d come back. But he was hungry, and I’d left out food. He said there was no way in hell a cat was staying with us. No way in hell.”

  “Who said that, Mia?” I ask. Of course I know. I should have been the damn shrink. But her answer is unexpected.

  “Owen,” she says and then she begins to sob, laying a hand on the wall to steady herself.

  “Mia, honey, who is Owen? There is no Owen. The man in the cabin? That man? That man is Colin Thatcher.”

  “Eve,” I say. My self-worth is increasing by the second. I managed to do what a Ph.D. couldn’t. I’ve got Mia placing herself in the cabin with a man named Owen and a cat named Canoe. “He went by a number of aliases. Owen is probably just another one of them.

  “Is there anything else you remember?” I ask. “Can you tell me anything else about him?”

  “We should call Dr. Rhodes,” Eve interrupts. I know she means well—she has Mia’s best interest at heart—but I can’t let that happen. She reaches into her purse and I say her name. Enough has passed between us that Eve knows she can trust me. I won’t let anything happen to Mia. She looks at me and I shake my head. Not now. This is getting good.

  “He said that he hated cats. And that if he saw it in the cabin he’d shoot it. He didn’t mean it. Of course he didn’t or I wouldn’t have let the cat in.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course he did. I know he did.

  “Were you afraid of him, Mia? Did you think he might shoot you?”

  She’s nodding. “Yes.” But then she stops. “No.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Well, of course you were, honey—he had a gun. He kidnapped you.”

  “Did he threaten you with the gun?”

  “Yes.” She’s thinking. She wakes up from a dream and tries to remember the details. She gets bits and pieces, but never the whole thing. We’ve all been there. In a dream, your house is a house but it’s not your house. Some lady doesn’t look like your mother, but you know that she is your mother. In the daytime, it doesn’t quite make as much sense as it did during the night. “He held me down. Outside. In the woods. He pointed the gun at me. He was so mad. He was screaming.” She’s shaking her head vigorously. Tears fall freely down her cheeks. It’s making Eve a nervous wreck. I have to step between the women to keep Eve back.

  “Why?” I ask. My voice is calm, subdued. Maybe I was a shrink in a former life.

  “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

  “What’s your fault, Mia?”

  “I tried to tell him.”

  “Tried to tell him what?”

  “He wouldn’t listen. He had the gun. He kept pointing it at me. I knew if anything went wrong, he was going to kill me.”

  “He told you that?” I ask. “He said if anything went wrong, he would kill you?”

  No, no, she shakes her head. She looks me right in the eye. “I could see it in his eyes.” She says that she was scared that day in the bar. She tried not to be, but she was scared. My mind does an about-face to the jazz bar in Uptown, the balding proprietor and fancy green candle. This is where Mia first encountered Colin Thatcher, aka Owen. From the waitress’s testimony, Mia left in a hurry, of her own free will. I think back to the waitress’s words: Seemed to me she couldn’t wait to get out of here. Doesn’t sound like fear to me.

  “And then,” Mia cries, “everything was going wrong. I tried to tell him. I should have just told him. But I was scared. He had the gun. And I knew that if anything went wrong he’d kill me. I tried to—”

  “Colin Thatcher,” I interrupt, “Owen. Owen would kill you if anything went wrong?”

  She nods, then quickly shakes her head. “Yes. No.” She’s frustrated. “I don’t know,” she splutters.

  “What did you try to tell him?” I ask instead but her mind does a 180 and she shakes her head, stymied, frustrated; she can no longer remember what she was about to say.

  Most people think there are two natural responses to fear: fight or flight. But there’s a third reaction to a bad situation: freeze. Like a deer in headlights. Play dead. Mia’s words—I was scared; I tried to tell him—prove just that. There was no fight-or-flight response. She froze. There she was: on high alert, adrenaline pumping, but unable to do anything to save her life.

  “It’s all my fault,” she says again.

  “What’s your fault?” I ask, expecting a replay of the same conversation.

  But this time she says, “I tried to run away.”

  “And he caught you?”

  She’s nodding.

  I recall her earlier admission. “Outside, in the woods?” I ask. “And he was mad at you for trying to run away. So he pointed the gun at you. And told you that if you ever tried that again...”

  “That he would kill me.”

  Eve gasps. She covers a gaping mouth with her hand. Of course he threatened to kill her. That’s what they do. I’m sure it happened many times.

  “What else did he say?” I query. “What can you remember?” She’s shaking her head; she comes up with nothing. “Canoe,” I prompt, “you said he’d shoot him if he saw him in the cabin but he didn’t. You remember that the cat was in the cabin?”

  She strokes the cat’s fur. She doesn’t look at me. “He said he laid by me for days. He never left my side.”

  “Who didn’t?” I ask.

  “He said no one had ever loved him as much in his life. No one had ever been as devoted.”

  “As who?”

  She looks at me. Duh, her eyes say. “Canoe.”

  And that??
?s when it hits me: if seeing the cat brought this much back to life, what memories could we exhume if we placed Mia back in the homely log cabin? I have to find the person that did this to her, before I know for sure that she, and Eve, are safe.

  Colin

  Before

  I tell her we’re going for a walk. It’s dark outside, after 10:00 p.m.

  “Now?” she asks. As if we have something better to do.

  “Now.”

  She tries to argue but I won’t have it. Not this time.

  I help her into my coat and we head outside. The snow is falling lightly and the temperature hovers right around thirty-two degrees. The snow is light. It’s perfect for a snowball fight. It brings me back to the trailer park, tossing snowballs with the other trailer trash kids before Ma bought a home that wasn’t mobile.

  She follows me down the steps. At the bottom she stops to take it all in. The sky is black. The lake is lost to oblivion. It would be dark—too dark—without the brilliance of the snow. She catches it into her hands and the snow collects in her hair and on her eyelashes. I stick out my tongue to taste it.

  The night is silent.

  Out here, the snow makes everything glow. It’s brisk outside, not cold. One of those nights that the snow somehow makes you feel warm. She’s standing at the bottom of the steps. The snow is up to her ankles.

  “Come here,” I say. We trudge through the snow for the crappy little shed out back. I pry the door open. I have to force the damn thing through the snow to get inside. It isn’t easy.

  She helps me pull, and then says, “What are you looking for?” when we’re inside.

  “This,” I say, holding up an ax. I thought I’d seen it in here before. Two months ago she would have thought the ax was meant for her.

  “What’s that for?” she asks. She isn’t scared.