“Was the casket—”
“Closed. But there were pictures. And a lot of people. More people loved him than he’ll ever know.”
“I know,” she whispers.
There’s silence. More silence than I can take. I dry my hands on the seat of my pants. When I peer into the family room, I see that Gabe is sitting close, right beside Mia, and that she has allowed her head to droop to his shoulder. His arm is draped around her back and she cries.
I want to intrude, to be the one whose shoulder she cries upon, but I don’t dare.
“Ms. Thatcher is living with her sister Valerie now. She’s fully medicated and better able to manage the disease.”
I hide in the kitchen pretending not to listen.
“The last time I saw her,” Gabe says, “there was...hope.
“Tell me how you ended up in that cabin,” Gabe asks.
She says that these are the things that are easy to explain.
I hold my breath. I don’t know if I want to hear this. She tells Gabe what she knows, that he was hired to find her and turn her over to a man she’d never heard of. But he couldn’t do it, and so he brought her to a place where he believed she would be safe. I take a deep breath. He brought her to a place where he believed she would be safe. Maybe he wasn’t a madman after all.
She says something about a ransom. She says that it has something to do with James.
I’ve stepped into the family room, where I can listen. At the mention of James’s name, Gabe stands heatedly from the futon and begins to pace the room. “I knew it,” he says over and over again. I watch my baby sitting on the futon and think that her father had the ability to protect her from this. I leave the apartment, finding solace in the freezing winter day. Gabe watches me leave, knowing he cannot console us all at once.
When she goes to bed at night, I hear her toss and turn. I hear her cry and call his name. I stand outside her bedroom door, wanting to make it go away, but knowing I cannot. Gabe says that there isn’t anything I can do. Just be there for her, he says.
She says she could drown herself in the bathtub.
She could slice an artery with a kitchen knife.
She could stick her head into the stove.
She could jump from the fire escape.
She could walk onto the “L” platform at night.
Gabe
After
I get a warrant and conduct a search of the judge’s chambers. He’s beside himself. The sergeant comes along and tries to smooth things over, but Judge Dennett doesn’t give a crap. He says when we turn up empty-handed, we’re both going to find ourselves out of a job.
But we don’t come up empty-handed. As it turns out, we find three threatening letters hidden among Judge Dennett’s locked, personal files. All ransom demands. The letters say that they have Mia. In return for her release, they demand a shitload of money, or they’ll disclose the fact that Judge Dennett accepted $350,000 in bribes in 2001 for a lenient sentence in a racketeering case. Blackmail.
It takes some time, interviews and my superior detective work, but we’re able to identify key players in the failed ransom plot including Dalmar Osoma, a Somali man who helped carry out the plan. We have a task force assigned to tracking Osoma down.
I’d pat my own back if I could reach that far. But I can’t. I let the sergeant do it for me.
As for Judge Dennett, he’s the one who finds himself out of a job. He’s disbarred. But that’s the least of his concerns. He has evidence tampering and obstruction of justice to think about while he awaits his own trial. An inquest is made into the bribery charges to see if there’s any merit there. I’d bet my life there is. Why else would Judge Dennett sandwich the letters between file folders, never imagining someone would see?
I question him before he’s sent to prison. “You knew,” I say with utter disbelief. “All along. You knew she’d been abducted.”
What kind of man would do that to his own child?
His voice still brims with egotism, but for the first time ever, there’s an ounce of shame mixed in. “At first, no,” he says. He’s in a holding cell at the precinct. Judge Dennett behind bars: an image I’ve dreamed of since our paths first crossed. He sits on the edge of the bed staring at the public toilet, knowing that sooner or later he’ll have to piss in front of us all.
It’s the first time I’m sure Judge Dennett is being sincere.
He says that at first, he was certain Mia was off doing something stupid. It was in her nature. “She’d run off before.” And then the letters began to arrive. He didn’t want anyone to know he was corrupt, that he’d accepted the bribes all those years ago. He would have been disbarred. But, he admits and for a split second, I believe him: he didn’t want anything to happen to Mia. He was going to pay the ransom to free her, but also so they’d shut up. He demanded proof of life; there was none.
“Because,” I say, “they didn’t have her.” Colin Thatcher had her. Colin Thatcher had presumably saved her life.
“I assumed she was dead,” he says.
“And?”
“If she was dead, then no one needed to know what I’d done,” he admits with a modesty I never ever expected from Judge Dennett.
Modesty and remorse? Was he sorry for what he’d done?
I think of all the days that he sat in the same room with Eve, of all the nights he shared the same bed, believing that their daughter was dead.
Eve files for divorce, and when it’s granted, she’ll take half of everything Judge Dennett owns. That’s enough money to buy a new life for her and Mia.
Epilogue
Mia
After
I sit in the opaque office across from Dr. Rhodes and tell her about that night. The rain was pouring down, thick and heavy, and Owen and I sat in the dark room listening to it batter the roof of the log cabin. I tell the doctor how we’d been outside, collecting firewood, and how the rain saturated us before we could make it inside. “That,” I tell her, “was the night something changed between Owen and me. That was the night I understood why I was there, in that cabin, with him. He wasn’t trying to hurt me,” I explain, recalling the way he looked at me with those dark, austere eyes and said, No one knows we’re here. If they did, they’d kill us. Me and you, and suddenly I was part of something, no longer alone as I’d been my entire life. “He was saving me,” I say. And that’s when everything changed.
It was then that I wasn’t scared anymore. That’s when I understood.
There are things I tell Dr. Rhodes, about the cabin, about our lives there, about Owen. “Did you love him?” she asks, and I say that I did. My eyes fill with sadness and the doctor stretches a tissue across the coffee table that separates us, and I hold it to my face and cry.
“Tell me what you’re feeling, Mia,” she prompts, and I tell her how I miss him, how I wish the memories hadn’t returned so that I could remain in the dark, completely unaware of Owen’s passing.
But, of course, it is much more than that.
There are things I can never tell the doctor.
I can tell her how the sadness haunts me day in and day out, but I can never tell her about the blame. The knowledge that I put Owen in that cabin, that I put the gun in his hands. If I had told him the truth, we could have come up with a plan. We could have figured it out together. But in those first minutes, in those first days, I was too terrified to tell him the truth for fear of what he might do to me, and later, I couldn’t tell him the truth for fear of how it would change things.
He wouldn’t be the one protecting me from my father and Dalmar, even if it was all bogus, all a sham.
I spent my entire life desperate for someone to take care of me. And there he was.
I wasn’t about to let that go.
I rub a hand over an e
ver-growing midsection and feel the baby kick. Out the hazy windows, summer has come, the heat and humidity that make it hard to breathe. Soon the baby will arrive, a keepsake from Owen, and I will no longer be alone.
* * *
There’s an image I carry in my mind. I’m in junior high when I proudly carry home an A-book report that my mother hangs to the refrigerator door with a lame Bee Happy magnet I’d gotten her for Christmas that year. My father comes home and sees the assignment. He gives it a quick once-over, and then says to my mother, “That English teacher should be fired. Mia is old enough to know the difference between there and their, don’t you think, Eve?” He uses the paper as a coaster, and before escaping the room, I watch the water stain seep into the fibers of the report.
I was twelve years old.
I think back to that September day, as I walked into the gloomy bar. It was a beautiful Indian summer day but inside the bar it was dark, nearly vacant, as a bar should be at two in the afternoon, just a handful of patrons sitting quietly at their own tables, drowning their sorrows in straight-up bourbon and whiskey shots. The place was a hole in the wall, the corner unit of a brick building with graffiti on the side. Music played in the background. Johnny Cash. I wasn’t in my own neighborhood, but farther south and west, in Lawndale, and as I looked around the bar, I saw that I was the only one who was white. There were wooden barstools pulled up to the bar, some cracked along the seat or missing spindles, glass shelves of alcohol lining the back wall. Smoke infused the air, drifted to the ceiling, making the place hazy, opaque. The front door was propped open with a chair, but even the fresh fall day—the sunlight and warm air—was hesitant to enter. The bartender, a bald man with a goatee, nodded to me and asked what he could get me to drink.
I asked for a beer and made my way to the back of the bar, to a table closest to the men’s bathroom, where he told me he’d be. When I saw him, my throat rose up inside me and I found it hard to breathe. His eyes were black, like coal, his skin dark and rubbery, like tires. He was sunken in a slat-back chair, leaned over a beer. He wore a camouflage coat, which he didn’t need on a day such as that, my own coat removed and tied around my waist.
I asked if he was Dalmar and he watched me for a minute, those anthracite eyes perusing my wayward hair, the conclusiveness in my eyes. They drifted down my body, down an oxford shirt and jeans; they appraised a black bag crisscrossing my body, the parka tied around my waist.
I’d never been so sure about anything as I was of this.
He didn’t say if he was or wasn’t Dalmar, but asked what I had for him instead. When he spoke, his voice was a low, bass voice, one which held on to its African enunciation for dear life. I invited myself into the chair opposite him and noted that he was big, much bigger than me, each of his hands, as he groped the envelope that I removed from my bag and set on the table, twice as big as my own. He was black, like the blackest of black bears, like the blubbery skin of the killer whale, an alpha predator with no predators of their own. He knew, as he sat across from me at the unpretentious table, that he was at the top of the food chain and I was mere algae.
He asked why he should trust me, how he could know for certain he wouldn’t be played for a fool. I gathered what courage I could possibly muster, and replied, unblinkingly, “How do I know that you won’t play me for a fool?”
He laughed audaciously and in a somewhat deranged manner, and said, “Ah, yes. But there’s a difference here, you see. Nobody plays Dalmar for a fool.”
And I knew then, that if anything went wrong, he would end my life.
But I would not let myself be scared.
He removed papers from the envelope: the proof, which I’d had in my possession for six weeks or more, until I knew what to do with it. Telling my mother or going to the police seemed too easy, too mundane. There needed to be something more, a gruesome punishment to fit a gruesome crime. Disbarment does not offset being a lousy father, but the loss of a hefty sum of cash, the shattering of his splendid reputation, that came close. Closer at least.
It wasn’t easy to find. That’s for sure. I stumbled across some papers in a locked filing cabinet, late one night when he dragged my mother to a benefit dinner at Navy Pier, paying $500 a piece to support a nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve the educational opportunities for children living in poverty, which I found to be absolutely absurd—ludicrous—seeing as how he felt about my own career path.
I came to their home that night, took the Purple Line out to Linden and, from there, a cab. I came under the guise of a crashed computer. My mother, offering her own old, slow one, suggested I pack a bag and stay for the night, and I said okay, but of course I wouldn’t stay. I packed a bag anyway, for appearance’s sake, the perfect way to stow away the evidence, hours later, after a complete dissection of my father’s office, as I called for a cab and returned home to my own apartment, to a fully functioning computer where I researched private investigators to turn my suspicion into full-fledged proof.
It wasn’t extortion I was looking for. Not exactly. I was searching for anything. Tax evasion, forgery, perjury, harassment, whatever. But it was extortion that I found. Evidence of a $350,000 transfer into an offshore account that my father kept in a sealed envelope in a locked file cabinet and I, as luck would have it, found the key, tucked inside an antique tea tin given to my father by a Chinese businessman a dozen years ago, lost in the midst of loose tea leaves. Small and silver and sublime.
“How does this work?” I asked the man across from me. Dalmar. I didn’t know exactly what to call him. A hitman. A contract killer. That is, after all, what he does. I was given his name by a shady neighbor who’s had more than one run-in with the law, police showing up at his apartment in the middle of the night. He’s a braggart, the kind of man who just loves to ramble on about his faux pas while climbing the stairs to the third floor. The first time Dalmar and I spoke on the phone—a brief call from the payphone on the corner to arrange this meeting—he asked how I wanted him to kill my father. I said no; we weren’t going to kill him. What I planned for my father was far worse. Being of ill repute, vilified, his reputation blackened, living amongst the lowlifes he sentenced to jail; that, for my father, would be worse, like purgatory: hell on earth.
Dalmar would take sixty percent. I would take forty. I nodded, because I wasn’t in the position to negotiate. And forty percent of the ransom demand was a lot of money. Eighty thousand dollars to be exact. An anonymous donation to my school was what I had in mind, what I planned to do with my share of the money. I’d outlined the details in my mind, made preparations in advance. For the sake of authenticity, I would not simply disappear. There needed to be proof, in the event of an ensuing investigation: witnesses, fingerprints, videotapes and such. I wouldn’t ask who, what or when. There needed be a surprise factor so that, in the moment, my own behavior was legit: a terrified woman in a kidnapping plot. I discovered a derelict studio apartment on the northwest side, in Albany Park. This is where I would hide while the professionals, Dalmar and his associates, did the rest. This was the plan, at least. I paid, in advance, three months of rent from a cash advance I received from Dalmar, and squirreled away bottles of water, canned fruit, frozen meats and breads, so that I would never need to leave. I purchased paper towel and toilet paper, art supplies en masse so that I wouldn’t risk being seen. Once the ransom was paid, and yet, my father’s dirty deeds discovered, it would be from this crippled little apartment in Albany Park where my rescue would ensue, where the police would find me, bound and gagged, my abductor still at large.
Dalmar wanted to know who he was to take hostage, who he was to hold for ransom. I looked into his black serpentine eyes, at the shaven head and a scar, three inches or more, running vertically down the length of his cheek, a rivet in his skin where I imagined some kind of blade—a switchblade or a machete—sliced through the vulnerable exterior, creating a man untouchab
le on the inside.
My eyes circled the bar, to make sure we were alone. Nearly everyone there, except for a twentysomething waitress in jeans and a too-tight shirt, was male; all, besides me, were black. A man perched at a barstool before the bar slipped clumsily, drunkenly, from the stool and fishtailed his way into the men’s room. I watched him pass, watched him push his way through a bulky wooden door, and then my eyes returned to Dalmar’s serious, unforgiving black eyes.
And I said, “Me.”
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, a huge thank-you to my amazing literary agent, Rachael Dillon Fried, who had enough faith in The Good Girl for the both of us. I can never thank you enough, Rachael, for all the hard work and unending support, but most of all, for your firm belief that The Good Girl would be more than just another file on my computer. If it wasn’t for you none of this would have happened!
My editor, Erika Imranyi, has been absolutely incredible throughout this process. I could not ask for a more perfect editor. Erika, your brilliant ideas have shaped The Good Girl into what it is today, and I’m so proud of the finished product. Thank you for this amazing opportunity, and for encouraging me to do my absolute best.
Thanks to all at Greenburger Associates and Harlequin MIRA for helping along the way.
Thanks to family and friends—especially those who had no idea I’d written a novel, and responded with nothing but pride and support, especially Mom and Dad, the Shemanek, Kahlenberg and Kyrychenko families, and to Beth Schillen for the honest feedback.
And finally, thank you to my husband, Pete, for giving me the opportunity to live my dream, and to my children, who are perhaps the most excited that their mommy wrote a book!