Marlinchen finger-combed Donal’s hair until a half inch stuck out at the ends, then cut. “Dad is a widower. He was raising five small children. That was just too many,” she said. “Aidan was the oldest, and the best suited to adapt to life away from home.”
“I thought Aidan was your twin,” I said.
Marlinchen smiled. “I make that mistake a lot, calling Aidan ‘the oldest.’ I don’t know why I do that, he was only born fifty-seven minutes before me.” She smoothed Donal’s hair down over his ear, then took up another thick strand and trimmed the end. “It’s ironic, too, because Aidan was held back to repeat the fourth grade, so after that, a lot of people assumed he was younger than me.”
That didn’t really tell me anything; I tried to get back on track. “That was the only reason Aidan was sent away?” I reiterated. “Your father just had too many kids?”
“Do you have children, Detective Pribek?” Marlinchen asked. Her voice had that faint shimmer of patronization that mothers have when asking single friends this question.
“No,” I admitted.
“Of course, I don’t either,” she said, “but I know it’s very, very difficult raising five kids on your own. Dad tried, but he just had his hands too full, with his teaching and his writing. He also had pretty severe pain sometimes, from a degenerative disk. There were episodes where it was almost disabling.” More hair fell. “Later, he developed an ulcer, I think from the pressure of working and raising a family on his own.”
“Mmm,” I said, noncommittal. “When was the last time you heard from Aidan?”
“We don’t really hear from him,” Marlinchen said. Her eyes were down, on her work. “The last I saw him was when he left for Illinois.” Another tiny sheaf of light-brown hair fluttered to the floor.
“ Illinois?” I said.
“Before he went to Georgia, he lived with our aunt, Brigitte, outside of Rockford, Illinois,” Marlinchen explained. “He would have stayed there, but Aunt Brigitte died five months later, and that was when Pete Benjamin offered to let Aidan live on his farm.”
“How did your aunt die?” I asked.
“A car accident,” Marlinchen said.
“How did your father and Pete Benjamin know each other?” I said.
“They grew up in Atlanta together,” she said. “Pete inherited a lot of land and went to farm it. Dad went to college, and the rest was history.” She paused to concentrate, lining up hair. “I think Dad thought Aidan would learn a lot from living on a farm. Dad left college at 19 and traveled through America, and he worked a lot of manual jobs, like farm labor. He said he learned more about life working on the road than in any classroom.”
Marlinchen tugged at the hair on either side of Donal’s ears. “Does this look even to you, Detective Pribek?”
I studied her handiwork. “Yeah,” I said. “I think it does.”
Marlinchen pulled back the beach towel. “Off you go, sport,” she said.
“Finally,” Donal said. “Can I have a Popsicle?”
“I guess that’d be all right,” Marlinchen said.
As Donal raided the refrigerator and left, I asked, “Do you know anything about Aidan’s friends in Georgia, his interests, where he might have gone?”
Marlinchen shook her head. “I wish I did. Maybe Mr. Benjamin can help you with that.”
“That’s a good point,” I said. “I’ll need his phone number. And I could use a picture of Aidan.”
Upstairs, the first doorway was Marlinchen’s. Inside, she almost immediately folded her legs underneath her and sank to a cross-legged position beside the bed. Reaching underneath the dust ruffle, she pulled out a wooden box and opened the lid. “This’ll take me just a minute,” she said.
While Marlinchen riffled through her box, I looked around at her bedroom. It was orderly and clean; I wouldn’t have expected otherwise. The twin bed was neatly made, covered in cream-colored eyelet. Her desk faced the window, likewise painted cream, and at its edge a pen with an old-fashioned ostrich-feather plume stood at the ready. It was charming, but the real work undoubtedly was done on the laptop that sat, jarringly modern, at the desk’s center.
“Do you write?” I asked her. “I mean, outside of school?”
Marlinchen shook her head, still looking down into the box. “Liam does,” she said.
Atop the dresser were two photos in frames. One was a snapshot of Marlinchen among classmates on what looked like a class trip to a Twins game, another of Marlinchen and her three younger brothers on the bank of a creek. For the bedroom of a middle-class teenage girl, it was a surprisingly small amount of sentimentalia. In doing missing-persons work, I’d been in a few adolescent girls’ rooms, and I’d seen displays that made me wish I owned stock in Kodak: dates, proms, class trips, sleepovers, all memorialized in pictures.
“Here,” Marlinchen’s voice interrupted me, “while you’re looking at photos, here’s one of Aidan.”
The Polaroid showed a boy of perhaps 11, standing next to a tire swing, which dangled from the willow I’d seen on the far side of the house. The boy in the photo clearly was going to be tall, taller than Hugh Hennessy, I thought. And, though the detail didn’t leap out, when you looked at the hand on the rope, you could see the nub of dark pink flesh where the smallest finger should have been. Otherwise, Aidan Hennessy was pleasant-looking, serious in expression, blond and blue-eyed like his sister.
“Listen,” I said, “do you have a photo of Aidan that’s more recent?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Is that a problem?”
“Yes,” I said. “The years between 12 and 17 are important ones. Kids change a lot. Hair gets darker, and faces change shape as they lose baby fat. Or sometimes kids gain weight. And they pierce and bleach and dye, too.”
“I don’t think Aidan would do that,” she said. “Besides, he won’t be hard to identify. You really can’t miss the hand,” she said.
“No, I suppose not,” I said. “How’d that happen, anyway?”
“A dog,” Marlinchen said. “He was bitten.”
“Ouch,” I said. “How old was he?”
“Three, maybe four,” Marlinchen said. “I really don’t remember it, except he was in the hospital a long time, and when they brought him back, I was scared of him, because of his hand. I started crying, and wouldn’t play with him.”
“Really?” I said. But maybe it wasn’t so strange, that a little girl would be so rattled by her brother’s frightening injury. “Tell me something else: How did you find out Aidan had run away from the farm in Georgia?”
Marlinchen nodded. “Oh, that. E-mail,” she said. “After Dad had his stroke, for a few days I spent a lot of time in here, looking through all his papers and financial records and so on. I read his e-mails on the computer, and at the bottom of the list were the old ones. You know, the ones you don’t delete?”
“You have his password?”
“No, the password automatically comes up when he logs in, as asterisks, you know?”
I nodded.
“So I just had to hit Return.” Marlinchen untucked a leg that had been crossed under her other thigh. “I wasn’t reading all the messages, but this one said, ‘Re: Aidan,’ so it caught my eye. I opened it and I saw Pete’s message to my dad, and under that, my dad’s original message to him.”
A farmer with e-mail? Well, why not?
“The messages were both about Aidan having run away. I guess there was a miscommunication about who’d report it to the police. I was afraid that neither one had, so I called Deputy Fredericks in Georgia.”
According to what Fredericks had told me, the communication between Pete Benjamin and Hugh Hennessy had been quite clear: that Hugh would deal with Aidan’s having bolted from the farm. But I didn’t want to get into that issue at the moment. I said, “Marlinchen, Deputy Fredericks told me that Aidan had run away to Minnesota once before.”