She surprised him.
“Look, I was screwed up, okay? My mom was killed when I was eleven. For the next few years, I bounced around the city in foster homes. I was an angry girl. I felt homeless. I don’t blame it on any of my foster parents. They did their best, and I didn’t make it easy for them.”
“What about your father?” Stride asked.
“He wasn’t in the picture. Mom got pregnant when she was only twenty-two. She sold perfume in a department store back then, so she met a lot of married men. When I was a kid, she told me that she dated a handsome Finnish sailor who came to the city one day on an ore boat. To me, that sounded romantic. She didn’t bother explaining the truth. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what a coward I had for a father.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry for me,” Tish said. “Mom was the one who had it tough. Being single and pregnant in the 1950s was like having the plague. She got run out of her church. Got fired from her job. She was out of work for months before she landed a teller position at a bank. We were always scratching to make ends meet. But she was great. Very proud. Very independent.”
“I’m sure it was hard to lose her.”
“It was.”
Stride knew a little of how she felt. He had felt homeless himself when his father died. He was sixteen. If he hadn’t been rescued when he met Cindy a few months later, he might have wound up a lost child, like Tish. Bitter. Lonely. Looking for escape.
“Anyway, I try not to dwell on it,” Tish said. “That’s just how it was. I’ve lived a pretty amazing life, and that wouldn’t have happened if I had had a normal childhood. We all pay our dues.”
“What did you do after you left the city?” Stride asked.
Tish leaned on the wall of the pier and stared down into the chocolate brown water. “If you’re running away from Duluth, St. Paul isn’t far enough to get away, so I decided to go someplace warmer. I went down to the Caribbean and did odd jobs, buzzing from island to island. Eventually, I wrote an article about my experiences, and I sold it to a travel magazine in the UK. That was what got me started. I began to do more articles, and I built relationships with other magazines around Europe. They started paying me to go all over the world, so I did.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It was. I did it for a long time. Then I met someone, a photographer who worked with me on a piece from Tallinn in Estonia. We fell in love. That was how I wound up in Atlanta. We both got jobs at the Journal-Constitution. It was great for a while, but it didn’t work out. I mean, we’re still friends, but we realized after several years that we weren’t going to make it as lovers. So I started traveling again, but my heart just hasn’t been in it. That was when I decided to take some time off. When I did, I realized I was thinking a lot about Laura.”
“Laura died a long time ago,” Stride said.
“I know, but some wounds never really heal.” Tish slid a silver chain away from her neck and let it swish against the white silk of her blouse. She fingered a slim ring that dangled on the end of the chain. “See this ring? Laura had one just like it. We got them together at the Grandstand at the State Fair. That was the summer before she died. It’s cheap, but I like to keep it with me.”
“You two were close?”
Tish nodded. “Inseparable.”
“So how come I don’t remember seeing the two of you at Cindy’s house?”
“Oh, that. You were never a teenage girl.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we had a fight. That was probably around the time you and Cindy got together. We didn’t talk to each other for a few weeks. It was May, not long before school let out. I went to the Cities right after that.”
“What was the fight about?”
“I don’t remember. Something stupid.”
This time, Stride thought she was lying.
“How did the two of you meet?” he asked.
“We were both in Rikke Mathisen’s geometry class in our junior year,” Tish said. “Laura and I sat next to each other. It was like we were kindred spirits. Laura was restless, like me. She had lost her mom, too, and her dad was a piece of shit, so she could relate to what I was going through.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry, I guess I shouldn’t have said that. He was your father-in-law.”
Stride shrugged. He and William Starr had never been close. The man had dealt with the tragedies of his life by taking his anger and his Puritan guilt out on everyone around him. Except Cindy. He knew better than to tangle with his youngest daughter. Cindy had pretty much run her dad’s life for the next fifteen years after his wife’s death, until William Starr succumbed to cancer. Just as Cindy would do ten years later. Stride finally understood how easy it would have been to end up like his father-in-law, when he lost his own wife in the prime of her life.
“I think Cindy was a little jealous of me in those days,” Tish said. “You know as well as I do that Cindy and Laura were never really the same after their mom died. Cindy took over, and Laura let her, but that’s not the same as being sisters. So when I came along, it was like I was the sister Laura had been looking for. Cindy never said anything, but I don’t think she liked it. I was always there. I slept over a lot. Laura and I shared everything. We were going to run away from Duluth together, see the big wide world, you know?”
“Except you moved away, and Laura didn’t,” Stride said.
Tish’s face clouded over. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I told you, it wasn’t important.”
“No, you told me you didn’t remember,” Stride said.
Tish looked at him. “You’re right, I don’t.”
She was still lying.
“Anyway, we were past it,” Tish went on. “I wrote to her when I moved to St. Paul, and she wrote back, and we became friends again, just like before. Laura was going to join me in the Cities. She never got the chance, though. She was killed before she could get away. I guess that’s why it’s gnawed at me all these years. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. She and I were supposed to escape together. Instead, we let some silly argument come between us, and she stayed behind. And she never made it out.”
She made it sound as if Duluth were a war zone, and Laura had been a soldier trapped behind enemy lines.
“When did the stalking begin?” Stride asked.
“During the spring. Late April, early May.”
“Did Laura have any idea who was doing this to her?”
Tish shook her head. “No, but it must have been someone at school. Most of the notes wound up in her locker. She thought it would all go away after graduation.”