They waited for Denise to get control of herself. She stood outside for a while, staring at the lake on the horizon, her lips pushed together in a hard line. Then she came back inside and slammed the door, and she sat down at the kitchen table again.
“We need to know what really happened, Denise,” Serena said. “Is it possible that Andrea ended up pregnant after the rape?”
Denise gave a long sigh. “Possible? I suppose so. I left town a couple of days later. It was probably two years before I came back for a visit. I’m not the nostalgic type, and I was looking to get out of Duluth. I called home every few weeks, but nobody said a thing. That doesn’t surprise me. This would have been horrifying for my parents. Their little angel getting pregnant? They would have kept it a secret any way they could. But I do remember one thing—”
She stopped.
“What is it?” Serena asked.
“I remember they pulled Andrea out of school in the second semester that year. After Christmas. They told me it was mono. She finished the year at home.”
Serena did the math in her head. “She would have been starting to show.”
“We know she carried the baby to term,” Maggie said. “Assuming the child survived, it seems likely that the baby was adopted. Do you remember any relatives, cousins, neighbors, who had a baby around that time? Someone who might have taken custody of Andrea’s child?”
Denise shook her head. “No. You have to understand what my parents were like. They wouldn’t have wanted that baby anywhere close to the family. They would have acted as if it had never existed. Hell, to me, the baby never did. They never even told me that I had a niece or nephew. So whoever took it, I doubt they were in Duluth, and I doubt they let Andrea knew who it was.”
“We’d like to search the house,” Maggie said. “She must have kept something from back then. Something that would give us a clue what really happened. And maybe where the baby went.”
“Go ahead, search all you want,” Denise replied. She gestured toward the stairs. “Andrea has a spare bedroom that she used as an office. If she kept anything, it’s probably in there.”
Serena and Maggie made their way to the stairs together. They found Andrea’s office in a small bedroom that faced the basketball courts beside the house. She had a wall of built-in bookshelves, mostly filled with science textbooks, three steel file cabinets on the adjacent wall, and a weathered oak desk in front of the bedroom’s small window. When Andrea sat at the desk, she could turn around and stare outside at the park next door.
“She used to watch the kids playing,” Serena murmured. “Stride said she did that all the time. Imagine spending every day of your life thinking about the child you gave up.”
“Do you think Steve Garske knew?” Maggie asked.
“He was her doctor. I’m sure he did. He would have been talking to her about secondary infertility when she couldn’t get pregnant again. So he knew why the threat of exposure was so traumatic to her. He wasn’t just protecting Stride by hiding Ned Baer’s body. He was protecting Andrea, too.”
Maggie began opening drawers in the desk. “I confess I never liked her. I said some pretty mean things about her to Stride. Now I feel a little bad about that.”
“Take a number,” Serena replied. “I’m the one who broke up their marriage.”
Maggie stopped and looked up. “Don’t put that on yourself. Their relationship was broken long before you came to town. She and Stride were wrong from the beginning.”
“I know, but still, it’s a little weird being here,” Serena admitted, opening a drawer in the first filing cabinet and pawing through the contents, which were mostly biology quizzes and tests that Andrea had prepared for her classes over the years. “I feel strange trying to find secrets about my husband’s ex-wife.”
“I’m sure.”
She noticed that Maggie had stopped searching and was staring out the window instead. “You okay? Is something wrong?”
Maggie didn’t look at her. She had her badge in her hands and began turning it over in her fingers. “Do you think Stride will ever come back?”
“I have no idea. I hope so.”
“K-2 wants me to take over while he’s gone.”
“Of course, he does. You’re the natural choice.”
“He already made the promotion official. I’m Lieutenant Bei now.”
“Congratulations.”
Maggie kept rubbing her badge in her hands. “I know we’ve had our problems. Me being a cheating whore. You being an ice-cold bitch. That sort of thing. How is it going to work with you reporting to me?”
Serena chuckled softly. “We’ll be fine, Maggie.”
“I need a partner, and I know who I want,” she said.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You know, as soon as Stride wants the job back, it’s his,” Maggie went on. “I’d never stand in the way.”
“I guess we’ll all cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Maggie chewed on her lip. Serena knew that, in her heart, Maggie was a more vulnerable person than she let anyone else see. Her prickly sarcasm was a shield. “If Stride had died, I’m not sure what I would have done.”
“Me neither,” Serena replied. “I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.”
They kept searching in silence. Maggie went through all of the desk drawers, finding nothing. Serena did the same with the filing cabinets. They had no luck. Everything that Andrea kept in the office was related to her work at the high school, or to her financial records, but there was nothing personal about any of it. It was as if her distant past had been completely erased and she didn’t want to remember anything from her earlier life.
“If Andrea didn’t keep records from back then, it’s going to be difficult to find what we need,” Maggie said. “We have no idea what hospital she would have used, if they used a hospital at all. Or when the actual birth was. Or what adoption agency they used. We’re looking for a needle in a haystack after thirty years.”
Serena shook her head. “Something’s here.”
“You sound pretty sure. This was a child of rape. Maybe she wanted to forget what happened.”
“No way.”
“Okay. Where do we look? A safe deposit box?”
Serena stood in the middle of the office and thought about it. “No, let’s check her bedroom. She would have kept the memories of her child there. Not in the office. She would have kept it close to her.”
“You think so?”
Serena didn’t answer. Instead, she continued down the hallway to the master bedroom that overlooked the lake, and she went directly to the nightstand next to Andrea’s bed. When she opened the top drawer, the first thing she found was a stack of folded white cards made of heavy stock. She pulled them out and opened the first card. Inside was a handwritten message in block letters.
Forgive every sin.
She opened the other cards one by one and found the same message inside each of them.
“‘Forgive every sin,’” Serena murmured.
“Devin Card used the same phrase a couple of days ago,” Maggie said. “He was assaulted seven years ago when the accusations came out. Somebody jumped him on the street one night and beat the hell out of him. He said that’s what the man told him as he did it. ‘Forgive every sin.’”
“I think these notes came with the suncatchers,” Serena said. “There’s a box in here from one of the suncatchers and another of the cards inside.”
“So what sin?” Maggie asked. “The sin of rape?”
“Or the sin of giving away your baby.”
“You think these came from Andrea’s child?”
Serena stared at the neat stack of notes that had kept in the nightstand. “I think Andrea thought so. She kept every one.”