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The shack had slumped over time, sagging as surely as Cyrus’s shoulders had. Nancy hesitated at the foot of the hill, just as she had once before. Perhaps her young self had understood, in its dim subconscious way, the consequences of walking up the hill, of finding what she found. Would there be newer, harsher consequences if she walked up to that threshold again? But she had come all this way in the dark. She had to look.
Her flashlight found Ro
23.
“She in there?” Infante asked when he returned to the tenth floor about 2 A.M., summoned by Nancy ’s page.
“Yeah,” she said, drinking a cup of coffee she had just brewed, although she didn’t really need the caffeine. Adrenaline was more than doing its job, keeping her alert and sharp, impervious to sleep.
“You talk to her?”
“We chatted, about nothing in particular. But once I got her in there and went down to the machines to get her a soda and a candy bar, she fell asleep.”
“And you let her?”
Nancy knew Infante didn’t mean his question to land like a rebuke, but it did.
“It’s weird, I couldn’t wake her for anything,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “I shook her arm, I all but yelled in her ear, but she kept sleeping all along.”
“Sleeping all along,” Infante repeated. “Well, then, let her sleep. And you, too. Squeeze in a catnap, and I’ll keep watch in case she wakes up, and then I’ll jump in there. Hey, how’d you know where to find her?”
“Hunch.” An honest answer, Nancy told herself, just not a complete one. She would tell Infante the whole story in detail one day. One day, not tonight. Tonight, she found herself saying what she had said to Cyrus, her classmate, all those years ago. “I remembered this shack in Leakin Park from when my family used to go to the Millrace for crabs.”
“No sign of the missing girl, though.”
“None.”
“Did she try to run again?”
“No. She seemed almost happy to be found. It’s a scary place at night. It scared me.”
The girl had, in fact, lifted her arms to Nancy, taking on a supplicant’s posture that confused her. Then she realized: Ro
Nancy had not given any thought to the challenge of leading someone back along the dark, bumpy trail, much less a person in cuffs. She had assumed she was on a wild-goose chase for Brittany Little’s body. Did she have to use the cuffs? The fact that Ro
But what if she did run, once back to the street? What if, once free of the dark, inexact shapes here in the woods, she pushed Nancy down, took her gun, or stole her car? There’s good Ro
She had helped Ro
“Is this a cop car?”
“It’s my personal car.”
“Oh.” And then, as if it were a social situation and she had to say something, anything: “It’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
Ro
“Where’s Brittany Little?” Nancy asked once they were on their way.
“Who?”
“The girl taken from Value City.”
“A girl was taken from Value City?”
“C’mon Ro
“Because you’re a cop, right? You’re the cop.”
“I’m a detective who’s investigating the disappearance of a three-year-old girl not even two hundred yards from where you work.”
“No, I mean, you’re the cop.” She waited for Nancy ’s confirmation. “The one who found the baby. I didn’t recognize you at first, but when I thought about it, I knew where I had seen you before. You don’t look much different. You wear your hair the same way.”
“How did you know what I look like?”
“My mom…” The word made Ro
“Yeah,” Nancy confessed. “Yeah.”
They rode in silence for a while. Without the opportunity to make eye contact, Nancy didn’t want to go too far into the subject of Brittany. But she could ask about Olivia.
“Why pudding, Ro
“What?”
“You fed Olivia Barnes pudding. We found these little pop-top single servings of pudding all over the shack. But if you bought pudding, you could have bought baby food. Didn’t you know you should give her baby food?”
“We didn’t buy anything. I took those puddings from my house.”
“Oh.” Nancy thought about this. Until asked and answered, the question had seemed portentous. All these years, she had been thinking about the pudding cups, and the explanation was so simple. Were all the answers as simple as this? If so, she might as well jump ahead, ask the only thing that mattered.
“Why did you kill her?”
“The baby, you mean?” Would Ro
“Yes. Olivia Barnes. The baby.”
Nancy could see Ro
“She was sad. She was very, very sad.”
Was Ro
“How did you know the baby was…sad?”
Again, a long time passed before there was any sound from the backseat. “It’s complicated,” Ro
She did not speak again for the duration of the ride. And now she was sleeping. Infante and Nancy studied her through the glass. In her T-shirt and jeans, she looked younger than she was. Yet she could have looked much older with minimal effort-a short skirt, a little makeup. That was the odd trick of eighteen, Nancy remembered. You could turn the clock forward or backward, be a kid when it suited you, or fool the world into thinking you were a woman. It was a time filled with promises. She had broken up with Andy the summer she was eighteen, taken a chance on the world at large. Then she ran back to him, realizing she shouldn’t reject the great luck of meeting her soul mate at age fourteen.
“First she runs, now she sleeps,” Infante said. “She’s like a textbook example of guilt.”