He knew he was giving her something to ridicule, with that postprandial bit. She would probably repeat that around the department later. “He couldn’t say ‘after lunch’ like a normal person-he had to say ‘postprandial.’” But that had always been part of his police persona. He had deliberately allowed other police to take the piss out of him every now and then, to give them reasons to mock his grandiosity, his manners.
Their hostility to him, their suspicion of his motives in being a police, had always puzzled him. The best detectives loved what they did and were proud of it. They, too, could make more money doing other things, but they had chosen police work. Chet was simply doing the same thing, and his love was purer still. Yet they never got that. In the end they just couldn’t trust the guy who didn’t need the paycheck. This red-cheeked girl was no different. Right now she required his help, or thought she did. But when it was all over, she’d mock him behind his back. So be it. He would do this for Dave-and Miriam.
He wondered how she had aged, how much gray was in her dark hair, if Mexico had weathered that lovely olive skin.
CHAPTER 29
The blankness of her passport reminded Miriam how immobile she had been for the last sixteen years, barely moving out of San Miguel, much less traveling beyond Mexico ’s borders. She hadn’t, in fact, flown since long before 9/11, but she wasn’t sure she would have noted the changes if she had not been primed to look for them. Customs in Dallas-Fort Worth had probably never been a particularly pleasant experience in the most hopeful of times. She wasn’t surprised at how rudely she was treated, or how they peered at her, then the photo on the passport, which was due to expire in a year. She had become a U.S. citizen in 1963 because it simplified everything. Contrary to what people thought, citizenship wasn’t conferred automatically upon marriage. If it hadn’t been for the girls, she might never have changed her citizenship. Even in 1963 she had a sense that she wasn’t meant to be an “American,” as residents of the United States so blithely called themselves, as if no other country in the hemisphere existed. But she took on that identity for her family’s sake.
“What’s the nature of your visit in the United States?” the immigration agent asked in a rapid monotone. She was black, forty-something, and so bored by her job that it seemed an enormous effort for her to rest her considerable bulk on the high, padded stool afforded her in the little booth.
“Uh…” It was only a split second of hesitation, but it seemed to be the excitement the immigration official had been longing for, the off-kilter answer that her ears were trained to pick up. Suddenly the woman’s spine was straight, her eyes sharp.
“What’s the nature of your visit?” she repeated, her voice now inflected. Vi-sit.
“Why, I-” Miriam remembered just in time that she was not required to tell the story of her life, standing here in immigration. She did not have to tell this woman that her children had been missing and presumed murdered for thirty years, much less that now, against all hope, one of them might be alive. She did not have to tell her about the affair with Baumgarten, the divorce, the move to Texas, the move to Mexico, Dave’s death. She did not have to explain why she became a U.S. citizen, or why she had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, or even why she had chosen to settle in San Miguel de Allende. Her life belonged to her still, at least for now. That could change, in the next twenty-four hours, and she could become public property once again.
All she had to say was, “Personal. A family matter. A relative was in a car accident.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “That’s awful.”
“It’s not serious,” Miriam assured her, gathering her bags and moving on to the domestic terminal, where she had a numbing four hours to kill before the flight to Baltimore.
“IT’S NOT SERIOUS,” the sergeant had told her the evening before, when she had recovered from the shock. Like someone thrown into deep, cold water, Miriam had been disoriented and stunned, her instincts overwhelmed. It had taken several moments for her to center herself, to do the natural thing and head for the surface, to break through to the place where she could breathe again. “The car accident, I mean,” the man clarified. “Obviously, the claims she’s making are very serious.”
“I’ll have to fly all day, but I could be back there by tomorrow night if I leave first thing,” she said. She was weeping, but it was the kind of crying that didn’t impede her voice, her thoughts. Her mind was flipping through her contacts in San Miguel, people who could and would do her favors. There was one particularly good hotel where the management was used to catering to rich types, with their sudden whims. They could probably book her ticket. Money was no object.
“It really would be better if you waited…We’re not sure, in fact-”
“No, no, I could never wait.” Then she got it. “You think she might be a liar?”
“We think she’s damn odd, but she knows some things that only someone with intimate knowledge of the case could have, and we are developing some new leads, but it’s all very tentative.”
“So even if she’s not my daughter, she almost certainly knows something about her. And what of Sunny? What has she said about her sister?”
A pause, the kind of grave pause that told her the man on the other end of the phone was a parent. “She was killed soon after they were taken. According to this woman.”
In sixteen-plus years of living in Mexico, Miriam had never once suffered a stomach ailment. But at that moment she felt the sharp, stabbing gut pain that was the hallmark of turista. Of all the things she had allowed herself to imagine for thirty years-the discovery of a grave, an arrest, the end of the story and yes, in some secret chamber of her heart, the impossible possibility of reunion-this had never occurred to her. One, but not the other? She felt as if her body might break down under the strain of trying to harbor such polarized feelings. Heather, alive, and the promise of answers after so many years. Sunny, dead, and the horror of answers after so many years. She glanced at her expression in the tin-framed mirror over the primitive pine buffet, expecting to see it bifurcated, the mask of comedy and tragedy combined in one face. But she looked as she usually did.
“I’ll be there. As soon as humanly possible.”
“That’s your choice, of course. But you might want to let us check out a few of these leads. I’ve got a detective in Georgia, working on something. I’d hate for you to come all this way-”
“Look, there are only two possibilities. One is that this is my daughter, in which case I cannot get there soon enough. The other is that this is someone who knows something about my daughter and is exploiting the knowledge for whatever reason. If that’s so, I want to confront her. Besides, I’ll know. The moment I see her, I’ll know.”
“Still, a day won’t change much, and if we should discredit her…” He didn’t want her to come, for whatever reason, not yet, which only strengthened Miriam’s resolve to be there as soon as possible. Dave was dead, she was in charge. She would behave as he would, if he were still around. She owed him that much.
Now, not even twenty-four hours later, wheeling her luggage past the hideous shops in the airport, Miriam was rethinking her certitude. What if she didn’t know? What if her desire to see her daughter alive tainted her maternal instinct? What if maternal instinct was bullshit? There had always been those eager to disavow Miriam’s motherhood, people who unthinkingly and unfeelingly demoted her because she had no biological claim on the children she was raising. What if they were right and Miriam was missing some key sense? Did the very fact that she had bonded so thoroughly with children who were not her biological kin prove how suggestive she was by nature? She remembered a cat they had owned, a superb calico mouser. Spayed, the cat had never thrown a litter. But one day she had discovered a little stuffed seal of Heather’s, a repulsive thing made of actual seal fur, a gift from Dave’s clueless mother. If the seal hadn’t come from his mother, Dave never would have allowed Heather to keep it; he had made Miriam get rid of her beaver coat, a remnant of her Canadian life, passed down from her grandmother, and far more defensible. But all sorts of exceptions were made for Florence Bethany. The cat, Eleanor, discovered the seal and adopted it, dragging it around by the neck as she might have carried her own kitten, endlessly washing it, hissing at anyone who tried to take it from her. Eventually, of course, she ruined it, her wet, rough tongue removing all the hair until it was something truly hideous, a fetal bit of canvas.