“What is it, exactly, that you do for a living?” Bill asks.
“I’m not sure there’s a name for it. I’m a… problem solver, I guess. People imagine something they’ve never seen before, and I make it. It can be little, like designing a wedding crown embedded with jewels from a grandmother’s ring, or big, like a floating staircase I built for a hotel in Santa Fe. Sunday Morning did a piece on the staircase in a series on female craftswomen, which has really helped. The host was classy enough not to mention the Black-Eyed Susan… thing. I can pick and choose now. Charge more.”
“Is that your favorite thing you’ve built so far? The staircase?”
“No. Hands-down my favorite thing is the pumpkin catapult for Charlie’s Field Day competition last year. We beat the school’s record by sixty feet.” I take another drag on my beer. “My father had a minor in physics and taught me a few things.” I should have eaten more than two crackers with pimiento cheese for lunch. Bill is looking more boyish than usual in a soft gray T-shirt that clings to taut muscle. I wonder whether he and Swedish Girl have hit it off officially yet.
I decide to shift the spotlight off of me, where it always feels too hot and too bright. I debate whether to ask if they’re getting me drunk to deliver bad news. My eyes linger on Jo. She could be anybody tonight-a housekeeper, a bank teller, a first-grade teacher. Her daily relationship with horror is well hidden under that Sooners T-shirt and clear blue eyes that indicate she sleeps pretty well. No one would ever pick her out as the scientist who stood in the middle of hell, running mathematical equations in her head, while the Twin Towers smoked.
“Jo, how do you keep doing what you do… day after day?” I ask. “Not letting it affect you.”
She sets down her beer. “My gift from God is that I can look at the grotesque and not be grossed out by it. The finger. The guts. But I’m not going to tell you that I don’t go home and think about the semen on the Little Mermaid nightgown. Or the bullet in the jaw of the POW that didn’t kill the guy. How he must have been tortured. I wonder things like, ‘Did this young mother live through the airplane crash or did she die right away?’ I think about who these people are. When I stop doing that, it’s the day I should quit this job.”
The last part sounded a little drunk and also like the most sincere thing I’d ever heard.
“This is the only thing I’m good at,” she says. “I’m a forensic scientist. It’s all I know.”
“You are just too damn nice.” Bill clinks her mug with his. “I spend most days wanting to punch someone in the face.”
She grins and toasts the air. “I’m from Oklahoma. We’re the nicest people in the world. And we also love to punch people in the face. And, now and then, I have a day like today.”
“If you hadn’t noticed, Jo and I are celebrating,” Bill tells me. “We just wanted to give you a chance to catch up first.”
“And?” I ask. Jo gives him a nod, the OK sign.
“We got a match on one of the DNA samples.”
His words aren’t registering. He can’t be talking about the Susans. Not this soon.
“We’ve made an ID on one of the Black-Eyed Susans through the national missing persons database,” Jo confirms matter-of-factly. “One of the femur extractions.”
“Are you OK, Tessie?” Bill’s face is twisted in concern. I don’t know if he’s realized what he’s done. Called me Tessie. This time his hand covers mine and doesn’t let go. It stirs yet another feeling I’m not prepared for at the moment. I snatch my fingers away and tuck a wet strand of hair behind my ear.
“I’m… fine. Sorry. It’s just a shock. After all this time. After everything you said about statistics, I just didn’t expect it. Who… is she?” I need to hear her name.
“Hannah,” Jo says. “Hannah Stein. Twenty years old. She disappeared from her job as a waitress in Georgetown twenty-five years ago. Her younger brother’s a Houston cop now. We got lucky. He insisted that his family enter DNA into the CODIS database a few months ago after he took a required course on missing persons investigations. Hannah’s mito-DNA is a match to Rachel and Sharon Stein. Her mom and her sister. Remember, mitochondrial DNA is one hundred percent from the maternal side.”
“If I can prove Terrell was nowhere near Georgetown the day she disappeared… well, it will help.” Bill’s voice carries a triumphant note.
“There’s one thing.” Jo’s eyes rest on me carefully. “The mother wants you to be there.”
“Be where?” This Susan is no longer a pile of teeth and bones and a disembodied voice in my head. Her name is Hannah. She’s a shadow darting out into the lightning, about to let me see her face.
“The mother is driving in from Austin with her son so we can formally give the family the ID. She specifically asked to meet you. She always suspected a cousin of theirs had something to do with Hannah’s disappearance. She… we… the cops… want to know if you recognize him.”
“The thing is,” Bill says. “He’s dead.”
Tessie, 1995
Two of them show up in the doctor’s office. A man and a woman.
The man is the prosecutor. Mr. Vega. Short, compact, around forty. Firm handshake, direct eye contact. Lots of Italian machismo. He reminds me of the football coach who hurled half our school into the gym during an impromptu tornado last year. He walks down the hall, and you know it.
The woman could pass for a high school senior. She seems like she’d be way more at home in something less uptight than whatever Ann Taylor thing she has on. I’m on the couch, and she’s sitting where the doctor usually does, tapping her left heel, nervous, like maybe I’m her first big case. She says she’s here as a child advocacy therapist, but I’m pretty sure she is mostly a chaperone to make sure I don’t accuse the prosecutor of anything creepy.
I’m feeling remarkably who-cares about all of it, because I took two Benadryl an hour ago. This is generally not my thing, but Lydia suggested it when she heard I was meeting the prosecutor for the first time. She pokes down a couple when her parents light off into one of their three-day screaming matches. Once more, Lydia has made the right call. The air is tense and thick, but I’m drifting through it in a cushy bubble.
The doctor isn’t happy. First, I haven’t begged him to stay. It just doesn’t seem to matter much at the moment and would require some energy on my part to make happen. Mr. Vega most definitely wants him out of the room. I am impressed that he has so quickly manipulated the doctor all the way to the doorway of his own office, because the doctor’s no slouch in the manipulator department himself.
They are talking in low, urgent tones that carry. The woman, Benita, and I can overhear every word. It’s awkward. I can tell she isn’t sure what to do, because she’s already told me we don’t have to talk. I feel sorry for her.
“I like your hair,” I say, because I do. It’s black with a few shiny red streaks. I wonder if she does it herself.
“I like your boots,” she says.
It’s not like we still aren’t listening to every word they’re saying.
“Don’t ask her any questions that begin with why,” the doctor is instructing the lawyer.
“Just give us about thirty minutes, sir. You have nothing to worry about.” This is the kind of “sir” that Mr. Vega probably also uses with judges and hostile witnesses. I’ve seen enough of Christopher Darden and Johnnie Cochran at this point.
I feel kind of sorry for the doctor now, too, being tossed out of his own space.
The Benadryl is making me so freaking nice.
While this tussle is going on at the door, I decide to give Benita her first test. She’s already announced that she’s here just for me and to ask her anything. Or ask her nothing. It’s entirely up to me. Of course, I’ve heard this so many times at this point I could vomit. It must be, like, Chapter One in the dysfunctional witness/victim textbook.
“Why is there a problem with asking me questions with the word why?” I ask her.
She glances at the prosecutor, who isn’t paying attention to us at all. I’m sure she’s worried about delivering inside information to a teen-age subject. Probably not addressed in the textbook at all.
“Because it implies that you are to blame,” she answers. “You know, like ‘Why did you do such and such?’ Or ‘Why do you think this happened to you?’ Mr. Vega would not ask you a why question. You are not to blame for anything.”
This interests me. I try to remember if the doctor has ever asked me a why question and decide he hasn’t. It never occurred to me that there is doctoring going on by omission, which is bothersome, and a whole new thing to worry about.
The door shuts with a crisp click, and the doctor is on the other side of it. The prosecutor rolls over the doctor’s desk chair, facing me intently.
“OK, Tessie. Sorry about that. I am not at all interested in discussing the case today, so you can relax if that’s on your mind. We probably won’t discuss it next time, either.” He nods at Benita. “Neither of us believes that it’s a good idea to ask you questions about something this traumatic and deeply personal when we have no relationship whatsoever with you yet. So first, we’ll get to know each other. I also want to assure you that I am completely prepared to go into court with your memory exactly as it is.”
This is not the impression I have from the doctor at all. He’s a seesaw, for sure, but always subtly pushing. Sometimes I think he is purposely trying to confuse me.
Now I have to wonder who is telling the truth. It makes my head hurt. I decide to turn the tables and ask Mr. Vega a question. He’s clearly a control freak, too.
The Benadryl has set me free. I just don’t care.
“Why,” I ask, “are you so sure this man is guilty?”