Whoa. That’s old even for Mattie. Hoarding must run in the family. I pick up one of the legal documents and check out the judge’s name. The Honorable Matthew T. Lane. I bet that was Mattie’s father. No wonder they had this big old house; he was a judge.
Something moves behind me and I spin around, my heart in my throat, picturing Davis. But it’s only a stack of newspapers sliding down from the top of the filing cabinet. I must have jarred it when I opened the drawer. The avalanche of papers reaches my feet, one paper lapping up over the toe of my boot like an overfriendly lapdog. I reach down and pick it up. It’s a Poughkeepsie paper, yellow, from the eighties. On the front is a picture of an old man in a judge’s robes, looking smug and pleased with himself the way judges do, like he’s won an award for something or he just sent some lowlife scum to juvie because she stole a couple of dollars from her cheap-ass foster parents. I recognize that look—and I recognize that face. He looks just like Mattie.
I start to kick the paper away—I don’t need to read about how great Mattie’s family was—but then I catch a bit of the caption. “Respected judge dies . . .”
I snatch up the paper and read the story.
Judge Matthew T. Lane was found dead in his home in Delphi, New York, along with his wife and ten-year-old son. Police suspect accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. The only remaining family member, Judge Lane’s 25-year-old daughter, Mattea Lane, discovered the bodies when she came home—
“If you wanted some reading material there’s plenty in the house.”
I nearly piss my pants, she startles me so bad. Mattie is standing not three feet from me, arms folded over her ample chest, with that same smug look on her face as her father’s.
I toss the newspaper onto the pile at my feet. “I thought I saw someone out here and I came to check it out. A bunch of newspapers fell over and I was just picking them up.”
My hand itches to grab the knife, but if I do Mattie could say I was threatening her, so I don’t. Mattie smirks and looks around the barn. “Because you wanted to leave things neat?”
“Yeah, it’s a mess in here. A fire hazard. You really should clear it out . . . and what the hell is that hook for? It looks like something out of a horror movie.”
She gives me a look like I’m an idiot, the way that Lisa used to look at me when I didn’t know something about living in the country. City kid, she’d call me, even though I’d spent most of my childhood in foster homes in upstate New York. “It’s a hay pulley that was used for lifting hay bales into the loft,” Mattie says, then she points at the knife I laid on the filing cabinet. “Did you scare off the intruder with that?”
“There wasn’t anyone out here, but they could have gotten away before I reached the barn.” I suddenly remember that Oren’s alone in the house.
Mattie must realize the same thing. “Let’s get back,” she says, reaching past me to pick up the knife. “We shouldn’t leave Oren alone.” She puts the knife in the pocket of her baggy old cardigan, like she’s used to carrying weapons in there, and turns around. But then her eyes snag on the newspaper I let drop to the floor and she flinches like someone’s hit her. She walks out of the barn quick then, like she doesn’t even have to check on whether I’m following her.
I hurry to catch up with her, stopping only to pick up the newspaper and stuff it in my coat pocket. Mattie’s a pretty cool customer. I’d like to know what made her flinch like that.
Chapter Eighteen
Mattie
I DON’T STOP until I reach the back door. Why that newspaper, out of all the trash out there? (My archives, my father called them.) I didn’t even read the local papers after my family died. But they came to the house anyway—the judge subscribed to four daily papers—and at some point after I’d let them stack up on the front porch, one of the well-meaning church ladies who came by to straighten up after the tragedy must have decided they belonged in the old barn with the other junk.
Unless Alice was snooping around trying to find out more about me. To blackmail me or commit identity theft. One of our volunteers, a sweet man getting his MSW in Albany, gave his credit card to a woman to buy groceries. Big surprise, he had more than a thousand dollars in fraudulent charges on his next statement. What had seemed to bother him the most was the frivolous nature of the charges—an Xbox at Best Buy, a case of beer from the Beverage Barn—as if the poor didn’t want the same things everyone else did.
I turn to watch Alice making her way across the snow, bare head bowed, arms wrapped around her skinny chest, face pinched and intent. Her hair is plastered against her head and without its soft fall around her face she looks much older than I first took her for. Early thirties, Frank had said. More like mid-thirties, I’d say now. She’s not the poor teenage mother I’d first taken her for and sympathized with. How much else about her have I missed?
She looks up when she reaches the shelter of the porch, and there’s so much anger and resentment in her eyes that I flinch. I’ve seen that look before in abused women, that look that doesn’t just expect the next blow but says, I know I deserve it. But I’ve never gotten used to it, or liked how it made me feel, that little split-second flicker of Maybe you do.
Most of the people who come before my bench have done something to get themselves there, my father used to say. You’re not doing them any favors by feeling sorry for them and not holding them accountable.
“What?” Alice demands like a surly teenager. “What are you waiting for?”
“You,” I say. “I wanted to make sure you made it.”
“You should have gone right in to check on Oren. He doesn’t like being alone.” She pushes past me into the mudroom and then stops, listening to something. I close the door behind me and listen too. It’s Oren, talking, but to whom?
Alice rushes into the kitchen and I follow, my hand on the knife. When I reach the kitchen, though, I see that except for Dulcie, who’s sleeping under the table, Oren is alone. He’s standing at the stove stirring the chili with one hand and holding one of the empty tin cans to his ear with the other. A six-inch-tall shaggy figure stands on the counter.
“Who are you talking to?” Alice demands.
Oren rolls his eyes and holds up the empty tin can. “I’m listening to orders from the rebel base and relaying them to Chewbacca, of course. Who were you talking to out in the barn?”
Alice blanches like he’s caught her at something. Was there someone out there? Maybe an accomplice I don’t know about? “No one. There was no one out there. Hey, didn’t you lose your Chewbacca?”
“This is one of Caleb’s,” Oren answers. Hearing Caleb’s name drop so casually out of his mouth gives me a chill.
“Where’d you find it?” Alice asks.
When he doesn’t answer right away I suggest, as gently as I can, “Maybe you found them in the Star Wars lunch box upstairs. I don’t mind, buddy. I was going to give them to you anyway.”
Oren shakes his head. “That’s not where I found him. He showed up right here in the kitchen to remind me to stir the chili. It was going to burn otherwise, Mattie.”
“Toys don’t just show up out of nowhere,” Alice says, an edge in her voice as if Oren has made this claim before. “Did you go into that boy’s room and take his toys?”