“Twice in one week?” Daniel said, opening the door to find Detective Bartholemew standing on the porch again. “I must have won the lottery.”
Daniel was still wearing his button-down shirt from the funeral, although he'd stripped off the tie and left it noosed around one of the kitchen chairs. He could feel the detective surveying the house over his right shoulder.
“You got a minute, Mr. Stone?” Bartholemew asked. "And actually
... is Trixie here? It would be great if she could sit down with us."
“She's asleep,” Daniel said. “We went to Jason's funeral, and she got pretty upset there. When we got home, she went straight to bed.”
“What about your wife?”
“She's at the college. Guess I'm it for right now.” He led Bartholemew into the living room and sat across from him. “I wouldn't have expected you to attend Jason Underhill's funeral,” the detective said.
“It was Trixie's idea. I think she was looking for closure.”
“You said she got upset during the service?”
“I think it was too much for her, emotionally.” Daniel hesitated. “You didn't come here to ask about this, did you?” The detective shook his head. “Mr. Stone, on the night of the Winterfest, you said you never ran into Jason. But Trixie told me that you and Jason had a fistfight.”
Daniel felt the blood drain from his face. When had Bartholemew talked to Trixie?
“Am I supposed to assume that your daughter was lying?”
“No, I was,” Daniel said. “I was afraid you'd charge me with assault.”
“Trixie also told me that Jason ran off.”
“That's right.”
“Did she follow him, Mr. Stone?”
Daniel blinked. “What?”
“Did she follow Jason Underhill to the bridge?” He pictured the light of the turning car washing over them, and the minute Jason wrenched away. He heard himself calling for Trixie and realizing she wasn't there. “Of course not,” he said.
“That's interesting. Because I've got boot prints, and blood, and hair that puts her at the crime scene.”
“What crime scene?” Daniel said. “Jason Underhill committed suicide.”
The detective just lifted his gaze. Daniel thought of the hour he'd spent searching for Trixie after she'd run away. He remembered the cuts he'd seen on Trixie's arms the day she was washing the dishes, scratches he'd assumed had been made by her own hand, and not someone else's, trying desperately to hold on. Daniel had bequeathed Trixie his dimples, his long fingers, his photographic memory. But what about the other markers of heredity?
Could a parent pass along the gene for revenge, for rage, for escape? Could a trait he'd buried so long ago resurface where he least expected it: in his daughter?
“I'd really like to speak to Trixie,” Bartholemew said.
“She didn't kill Jason.”
“Terrific,” the detective replied. “Then she won't mind giving us a blood sample to compare with the physical evidence, so that we can rule her out.” He clasped his hands together between his knees. “Why don't you see if she's about ready to wake up?” Although Daniel knew life didn't work this way, he truly believed that he had the chance to save his daughter the way he hadn't been able to save her the night she was raped, as if there were some running cosmic tally of victory and defeat. He could get a lawyer. He could spirit her away to Fiji or Guadalcanal or somewhere they'd never be found. He could do whatever was necessary; he just needed to formulate a plan.
The first step was to talk to her before the detective did. After convincing Bartholemew to wait in the living room Trixie was, after all, still scared of her own shadow half the time - Daniel headed upstairs. He was shaking, terrified with what he would say to Trixie, even more terrified to hear her response. With every step up the stairs, he thought of escape routes: the attic, his bedroom balcony. Sheets knotted together and tossed out a window.
Daniel decided he'd ask her point-blank, when she was too wrapped in the silver veil of sleep to dissemble. Depending on her answer, he'd either take her down to Bartholemew to prove the detective wrong, or he'd carry Trixie to the far ends of the earth himself.
The door to Trixie's room was still closed; with his ear pressed against it, Daniel heard nothing but silence. After they had come home from the funeral, Daniel had sat on Trixie's bed with her curled in his lap, the way he had once held her during bouts of stomach flu, rubbing her belly or her back until she slipped over the fine line of sleep. Now he turned the knob slowly, hoping to wake Trixie up by degrees.
The first thing Daniel noticed was how cold it was. The second was the window, wide open.
The room looked like the aftermath of a tropical storm. Clothes lay trampled on the floor. Sheets were balled at the foot of the bed. Makeup, looseleaf papers, and magazines had been dumped - the contents of a missing knapsack. Her toothbrush and hairbrush were gone. And the little clay jar where Trixie kept her cash was empty.
Had Trixie heard the detective downstairs? Had she left before Bartholemew even arrived? She was only a teenager; how far could she get?
Daniel moved to the window and traced the zigzag track of her flight on the snow from her room to the sloped roof, to the maple tree's outstretched arm, across the lawn to bare pavement, at which point she simply disappeared. He thought of her words to him, a day before, when he'd seen the cuts on her arm: It's how I run away.
Frantic, he stared at the icy roof. She could have killed herself.
And on the heels of that thought: She still might.
What if Trixie managed to get someplace where, when she tried to swallow pills or cut her wrists or sleep in a cloud of carbon monoxide, nobody stopped her?
A person was never who you thought he was. It was true for him; maybe it was true for Trixie too. Maybe - in spite of what he wanted to believe, in spite of what he hoped - she had killed Jason.
What if Daniel wasn't the first one to find her?
What if he was?
6
It was late enough in December that all the radio stations played only Christmas carols. Trixie's hiding place was directly over the driver's seat, in the little jut of the box truck that sat over the cab. She had seen the truck at the dairy farm just past the high school athletic fields. With the doors wide open and no one around, she had climbed inside and hidden in that upper nook, drawing hay over
herself for camouflage.
They'd loaded two calves into the truck - not down in the bottom, like Trixie had figured, but nearly on top of her in the narrow space where she was curled. This way, she supposed, they wouldn't stand up during the trip. Once they'd started under way, Trixie had poked her head out from the straw and looked at one calf. It had eyes as large as planets, and when she held out her finger, the calf sucked hard on it.
At the next stop, another farm not ten minutes down the road, an enormous Holstein limped up the ramp into the back of the truck. It ^tared right at Trixie and mooed. “Damn shame,” the trucker said, as the farmer shoved the cow from behind.
“Ayuh, she went down on some ice,” he said. “In you go, now.” Then the door swung shut and everything went black. She didn't know where they were headed and didn't particularly care. Prior to this, the farthest Trixie had ever been by herself was the Mall of Maine. She wondered if her father was looking for her yet. She wished she could phone him and tell him she was all right but under the circumstances, she couldn't call. She might never.
She lay down on one calf's smooth side. It smelled of grass and grain and daylight, and with every breath, she felt herself rising and falling. She wondered why the cows were in transit. Maybe they were going to a new farm for Christmas. Or to be part of a Nativity play. She pictured the doors swinging open and farmhands in crisp overalls coming to lift down the calves. They would find Trixie and would give her fresh milk and homemade ice cream and they wouldn't even think to ask her how she'd wound up in the back of a livestock truck.