IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the petition of Gary and Lydia Murphy, for the adoption of Baby Girl X, a person born on a date unknown, at a location unknown, is allowed and approved; and it is further ORDERED that the name of the adoptive child shall be JENNA ROSE MURPHY, and that the adoptive child shall hereafter be known by that name.
I can picture her. Of course I can’t in reality, but my brain isn’t tracking reality now — I can picture my mother, visiting Uncle Lang like they did every summer, taking me from Lang, holding me in her arms and saying, I’ll love her. I’ll love this child.
A single tear, falling onto the page, a thick circular stain in the corner.
Still unable to believe it, though it makes all the sense in the world.
My physical differences from my parents and brother, especially the red hair. My nickname, the red sheep of the family.
Never quite feeling like I fit in.
Sometimes we tell our children little white lies, Chloe said to me.
She didn’t tell me — none of them told me, not Mom, not Dad, not Lang, not Chloe. They kept me in the dark to protect me. Protect me from whom, they didn’t know.
A little white lie.
And here I thought it was random — I thought I was a random victim at that house that day. When in reality, Holden was trying to kill me to end the Dahlquist bloodline. First he ran down Aiden’s mother — my mother — with a car, then he had Justin scoop me up and bring me to the house to finish the job.
I would’ve died in that house if it weren’t for Aiden, coming to avenge his mother’s death.
Chief Isaac Marks pops his head in the door, measuring the look on my face before deeming it safe to enter.
“Murphy,” he says. “We’re done with Noah’s interview. So you two are free to leave.”
I nod and push myself out of the chair, my legs uncertain.
“Murphy, I–I’m sorry,” he says. “I was a jerk. And I had you all wrong. I thought you were a loose cannon hassling poor Aiden for no reason. And then I — well, I admit for a time there, I—”
“You thought I was a serial killer.”
He throws up a hand.
“That’s okay,” I say, “for a time there, I thought you were, too.”
He laughs, which might, under the circumstances, be the best response of all.
“When Noah showed me those investigative records,” he says, “and it turned out you were the daughter of — I mean, I thought you’d been playing me all along.”
That’s what Noah thought, too.
“Plus, your fingerprints on that knife—”
“I got it,” I say. I may not like it, but I have so much emotion stirred up inside me right now, I don’t have room for anger.
“Justin’s spilling like a volcano,” he says. “Now that we have him in custody, he won’t shut up. He’s proud of it. He says he’s part of the legacy now, he’ll go down in history, et cetera.”
“I’m sure he feels that way.”
“He told us about everything in 1994, too. Apparently, Holden saw you and your family walking to the beach one day, right past his house. He got one look at you and — I guess there’s a strong resemblance to your biological mother. He followed you around the beach all day, then he hired an investigator, and — well, you know the rest. You got the investigator’s file right there. Then he had Justin snatch you up and bring you to the house—”
“Isaac,” I say, raising a hand. “I don’t want to know the details. I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember.”
“Sure. Yeah, sure, Murphy. Well, I’ll see you next week, then. If you’re ready.”
I shake my head. “You need me to testify at the prelim?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He places my badge and my gun on the table.
“You don’t think I’m going to lose my best cop, do you?” he says. “I may be a horse’s ass on occasion, but I’m not stupid.”
122
I walk to the cemetery on Main Street, the cemetery where Winston Dahlquist and his descendants are buried. The afternoon air is mild and smells of the rain this morning.
Just down from the Dahlquist plot, Aiden Willis is busy planting flowers in a vase by some tombstone. Back at work already. Always the same, the raggedy shirt, the baseball cap turned backward, the scarecrow hair. He surely takes after his father, not his mother.
Yesterday, the DA’s office officially announced that it had no basis to proceed with murder charges against Aiden for the death of Holden VI. Aiden was too young at the time to have been charged as an adult, and the circumstances, they said, “strongly suggest that his use of force was justified.”
That might be the understatement of the year.
Aiden stops what he’s doing when he sees me approach, squints at me.
I don’t really know what to say to him. I have no sense of family with him. We couldn’t be less alike. We’ve never known each other. We’ve never shared a single thing, other than a mother.
“Hey,” I say.
His eyes scatter about, as always, never holding a gaze.
“You doin’ okay?” he asks me.
“Me? Yeah, sure. Listen, Aiden, I’m sorry for the way I treated you. I thought — I thought you were a part of this. I had no idea it was Justin.”
He nods, his eyes roaming around the ground at my feet.
“Did you?” I ask, uncertain if I should even ask. “All these murders? Did you know it was him?”
His eyes go blank a moment, as if he’s lost in a thought — more accurate, probably, to say lost in a feeling. “Didn’t know for sure,” he says. “Couldn’ta ever proved nothin’. Who’d believe me, anyhow? I’m just a ditch-digger. He’s got all that money and shit.”
“And he had the knife you tossed out the window,” I add.
For a moment, Aiden’s eyes focus, though not on me, looking off in the distance, his mouth forming a small o. “He said he kept it somewheres for safekeepin’. Case I ever got any ideas, he said.”
A not-so-subtle threat. Don’t mess with me, Justin was saying to Aiden, or the cops will suddenly find this bloody knife. Fuck with me and I’ll send you to prison.
He tortured Aiden. He made Aiden shoot up the school yard with him a year after Holden’s death — one of the many things Justin has bragged about to the police — and who knows what else he said and did to him over the years.
“What about me?” I ask. “Did you know who I was?”
His eyes are still darting around, but a sheen of tears covers them. He shakes his head. “When you first came back to town, first time I saw you — you looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure it. Then I finally ’membered where I’d seen you, from all that time ago when we was kids, that day at the Dahlquist house. I didn’t know why you’d come back. Couldn’t figure. But I didn’t know that you were my — that we was—”
The flowers, halfway in the vase, start to tip over. Aiden reaches for them.
“You should probably get back to your work,” I say.
Aiden fixes up the flowers, sets them down firmly, turns to me in his indirect, no-eye-contact way. “I’s too young to know ’bout you at the time. I’da been only little when you was born. One time, when I’s older, I saw a picture of her, with her belly.”
I saw it, too. The photo from the scrapbook, with the baby bump.
“She said the baby didn’t live. She got real sad.”
Probably the same thing that she told Holden VI, that I didn’t live, that I was stillborn.
A little white lie. To protect me, so Aiden wouldn’t look for me. So Holden wouldn’t look for me. So nobody would ever look for me.