“Where did you get this?” she said.
“It wasn’t great detective work,” I told her. “It’s a yearbook photo, that’s all.”
But I wanted to have a picture of her brother before her while we talked. It would remind her what this whole thing was about.
“I haven’t learned much,” I said. “I’ve talked to Deputy Fredericks and Pete Benjamin, and done what I can, but I’ve been kind of hobbled.”
“Because of the distance involved and the jurisdictional lines,” Marlinchen said.
“Partly,” I agreed, “but there are other problems, closer to home.”
“Like what?”
“The question I keep coming back to,” I said, “is why Aidan was sent away in the first place.”
Marlinchen shifted her weight. “It was an arrangement of convenience,” she said. “Dad just had his hands too full.”
“So you’ve said,” I told her. “So has Colm. And Liam. You’re all in agreement on this. Perfectly in agreement, as if you’d discussed it in advance.”
Marlinchen looked down, at a fingernail slightly discolored by grease from her bicycle chain. “Couldn’t that mean,” she said stiffly, “that it’s the truth?”
“Is it?” I said. “Did you know the author bio for A Rainbow at Night says that your father has four children?”
She knew, instantly, what I was talking about. “It says he lives in Minnesota with his four children,” she said quickly. “That’s technically true.” She meant that Aidan had been sent away by the time of Rainbow’s publication.
“It still makes it sound like your father has only four kids,” I said.
“Dad doesn’t even write those things,” Marlinchen said. “Somebody at his publisher does.”
“Based on information from who?” I said.
An outboard engine hummed on the lake in a bouncing rhythm, as though it were bucking waves.
“You and your brothers all say that you haven’t seen Aidan in five years,” I went on. “Not a phone call, not a letter, not a visit home for the holidays. That’s not an arrangement of convenience. That’s banishment, Marlinchen. Aidan hasn’t just been erased from your father’s bio. He’s been erased from your lives.”
Marlinchen’s color was still high, and I didn’t think it was left over from the exertion of her ride. “You’re making way too much of this,” she said. “Fostering out children used to be a common tradition. Your own father did it, you said.”
“My father was a truck driver. He was on the road the better part of the year. It’s not a comparable situation,” I said. “Did Aidan do something? Was there some reason your father thought he needed to be isolated in Illinois, and then Georgia?”
“No,” she said softly. “He didn’t do anything.” The sudden quietness of her voice was like barometric pressure dropping.
“What about your father, then?” I said. “If this wasn’t about Aidan, was it something to do with him?”
“No,” Marlinchen said, even more quietly.
“Okay, I get it,” I said. “Everybody loves everybody, and then suddenly Aidan’s sent away permanently to live with virtual strangers. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Marlinchen said, her voice rising at last. “You’re not supposed to be psychoanalyzing my family, you’re supposed to be finding Aidan. Instead you haven’t done anything except find a yearbook photo and cast slights on my brother’s character and my father’s!”
I sat back slightly. As long as I’d known her, Marlinchen had been almost achingly polite. Now the Marlinchen who was emerging from that shell wasn’t the one I’d expected: an imperious princess, giving orders to a member of the servant class.
“You know what?” I said. “I’ve done about as well as anyone could with the constraints you’ve put on me. You want to feed me half-truths and pretend it won’t impede my search for Aidan. You’re half interested in finding Aidan and half interested in protecting your father’s image. You’ve got one foot on each horse, and you’re trying to pretend they’re running in the same direction.”
I’d expected her anger to completely boil over, but that wasn’t what happened. Some women, particularly small ones, learn to wield exquisite courtesy like a weapon. Suddenly, she seemed to draw on a reservoir of poise. When she spoke, I heard a thousand closed doors in her voice.
“I know you’ve done everything you can, Detective Pribek, and spent more time than you can afford,” she said. “I’m sure my father will want to thank you, when he’s fully recovered.”
“Marlinchen, I’m not saying that-”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I really have to put the groceries away.”
Then she was gone, the French doors closing firmly behind her.
14
Marlinchen was the last person I should have come off second best to in an interview situation; she was just a kid. But she outclassed me; that was the problem. For all that I wore the authority of a county detective, I was still keenly aware of my rough edges when the job took me into the graceful homes and worlds of middle- and upper-class citizens, especially those like Marlinchen, who wore the intellect she’d inherited from her father as comfortably as she might have worn family jewels. She was the princess, in her shabby-elegant old castle on a shining lake, and I, a civil servant, was the commoner, feeling obligated to help her for reasons I didn’t fully understand.
A lot of cops profess a special concern and protectiveness for the young. Asked to explain, they’ll tell you, “Cops are moms and dads, too.” That wasn’t true with me. I alone among my peers in the detective division was childless. If anything, I was too close to my own youth. When Colm had made his dig at women and guns, I’d made my bitchy remark about the TV remote. When Marlinchen had attacked me on the issue of my professional abilities, I’d given it back to her, and twice as hard. I was acting less like a surrogate parent than an insulted sibling.
At 29, though I tried to cover up for it, I often felt raw and unfinished inside, psychologically colt-legged and wrong-footed. It was still too easy for me to reach out and touch the feelings of adolescence.
When I was 13, my mother’s aunt, Virginia, a waitress-bartender with long gray-streaked hair and my mother’s eyes, picked me up at the Greyhound station in Minneapolis. We’d driven three and a half hours to the Iron Range town in which she lived. Much of the year that followed was a blur.
I slept poorly and had bad dreams, all of which were set in my native New Mexico, the details of which were lost to me on waking. Memory, overall, was a problem that year; I was so forgetful that after a teacher conference, Ginny agreed to have me tested by the school psychologist, to see if something was seriously wrong.
The results were apparently inconclusive, but my memory did not immediately improve. I racked up several detentions for incomplete homework, not because I refused to do the assignments, but because I’d forgotten to bring home the textbook or write down the page and question numbers. I left the lunches I packed at home in the refrigerator. This was during the growth spurt that eventually took me to five-eleven, and the hunger pangs I experienced when I forgot to bring lunch to school crossed the line from unpleasant to painful. Once, after only having two sticks of chewing gum on lunch break, I grayed out in PE and ended up in the nurse’s office.
My father called twice a week to start, dropping back to once a week by mid-autumn. I used the word fine a lot. In early December, he asked if the weather was bothering me.
I’d experienced snow in the mountains of New Mexico, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened in northern Minnesota in January: the full-dark skies before even five in the evening, the warlike rollout of snowplows on the streets after every fresh snow, the eerie abandoned streets of a minus-thirty-degree morning. One day, wrapping myself in a scarf to walk home from school after detention in subzero weather, I commented to a janitor on the possibility of snow later.