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“He’d show up here in a rage and scream at her, ‘You can’t be a lesbian, Cheryl. I won’t accept it.’ ”

  “He wouldn’t accept it,” Angie said, “so it must not be true.”

  “Exactly. Once it finally got through to him that not only was Cheryl not going back to him but that she was, in fact, very much in love with me and this wasn’t some identity-crisis fling? Well . . .” She blew air out of her mouth, her cheeks puffing and unpuffing. “All Brian’s rage, all his feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, which had probably been eating at him since, I dunno, birth—guess what form they took? A moral crusade to rescue the daughter he’d never known from the clutches of an immoral lifestyle. From there on, when he’d come to pick up Sophie, he’d wear T-shirts that said charming things like GOD MADE ADAM & EVE, NOT ADAM & STEVE, or the word DE-EVOLUTION over a drawing of a man lying with a woman, followed by a man lying with a man, followed by a man lying with—wanna guess?”

  “I’m betting some type of livestock.”

  She nodded. “A sheep.” She wiped the corner of one eye. “He wore that around a child, and then he preached to us about sin.”

  A large dog—part collie, part who-knew—wandered into the converted barn from a dog door in the back. It ambled between the sculptures and put its chin on Elaine’s thigh. She scratched the side of its face and ear.

  “In the end,” she said, “Brian threw everything at us. Every day was a pitched battle. Every morning, we opened our eyes and our hearts filled with dread. Just . . . dread. Would he show up at one of our jobs with a picket sign filled with biblical verse and calling us child abusers? Would he file some ridiculous order with the court based on alleged conversations he’d had with Sophie about our drinking or pot smoking or having sex openly in front of her? All it takes to turn a custody battle into—I dunno, carnage?—is someone with no love for the actual child involved. Brian would make any claim, no matter how outlandish, invent ridiculous lies and put them in Sophie’s mouth. She was seven when this started. Seven. The court costs drained us financially, his ridiculous lawsuit, which he’d been told from the start didn’t have a chance. I—” She realized she’d been scratching the dog’s ear a little too hard. She took her hand back and it was shaking.

  “Take your time,” Angie said. “It’s okay.”

  Elaine nodded her thanks and closed her eyes for a moment. “When Cheryl first complained about acid reflux, we thought, ‘It figures,’ given all the stress we’d been under. When she was diagnosed with stomach cancer, I remember standing in that doctor’s office and picturing Brian’s smug, dumb fucking face and thinking, ‘Wow. The bad guys really do win.’ They do.”

  “Not always,” I said, though I wondered if I believed it.

  “The night Cheryl died, Sophie and I were with her until the last breath left her body. We finally leave the hospital, and it’s three in the morning, it’s damp and raw out, and guess who’s waiting in the parking lot?”

  “Brian.”

  She nodded. “He had this look on his face—I’ll never forget it—his mouth was turned down, his forehead furrowed so he looked contrite. But his eyes? Man.”

  “They were lit up, huh?”

  “Like he’d just won the fucking Powerball. Two days after the funeral, he showed up here with two state policemen and he took Sophie away.”

  “Did you stay in contact?”

  “Not at first. I’d lost my wife and then I lost the child I’d come to think of as my daughter. Brian forbade her to call me. I had no legal rights with regard to her, so after the second time I drove to Boston to visit her at her school during recess, he filed a restraining order.”

  “I changed my mind,” Angie said. “I wish I’d been more judgmental on this asshole. I wish I’d kicked in his larynx.”

  Elaine’s face cracked around a smile. “You can always make a second trip.”

  Angie reached out and patted her hand and Elaine squeezed my wife’s fingers and nodded several times as tears fell to her jeans.

  “Sophie began contacting me again when she was fourteen or so. By that point she was so confused and filled with rage and loss, it was like talking to somebody else. She lived with an asshole faux father, a trophy wife faux mother, and a spoiled prick of a half brother who hates her. So, in the logic of human nature, I was one of her favorite targets—Why’d I let her go? Why hadn’t I done enough to save her mother? Why hadn’t we moved to a state where Cheryl and I could have legally married, so I could have adopted her? Why were we fucking dykes in the first place?” She sucked a clogged breath in and let a clogged breath out. “It was brutal. All the scabs got torn off. After a while, I stopped answering her calls because I couldn’t stomach the rage and recrimination for crimes I hadn’t even committed.”

  “Don’t blame yourself on that one,” I said.

  “Easy to say,” she said. “Hard to live.”

  “So you haven’t heard from her in a while?” Angie asked.

  Elaine patted Angie’s hand one last time before letting it go. “A couple times in the last year. She was always high.”

  “High?”

  She looked at me. “High. I’ve been in recovery ten years. I know when I’m talking to somebody who’s fucked up.”

  “On what?”

  She shrugged. “I’d guess a hard upper. She’d get that edgy motormouth vibe cokeheads get. I’m not saying it was coke, but it was something that jacks you up.”

  “She ever mention Zippo?”

  “Boyfriend, yeah. Sounded like a beaut. She was very proud of his connections to some Russians.”

  “As in the Russian mob?” Angie asked.

  “That was my inference.”

  “Joy,” I said. “How about Amanda McCready? She ever mention her?”

  Elaine whistled. “The goddess? The idol? Everything Sophie wanted to be? Never met her, but she sounds . . . formidable for a sixteen-year-old.”

  “That’s the impression we get. Sophie the type of girl who looks for a leader?”

  “Most people do,” Elaine said. “They wait their entire lives for someone to tell them what to do and who to be. It’s all they want. Whether it’s a politician they’re waiting for or a spouse or a religious leader, all they really want in life is an alpha.”

  “And Sophie,” Angie said, “found her alpha?”

  “Yup.” She stood from her chair. “She sure did. She hasn’t called me in . . . Since July, maybe? I hope I was some help.”

  We assured her she was.

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “Thanks for talking to us.”

  We shook her hand and followed her and the dog out of the barn and down the dirt path to our car. Dusk was settling into the bare treetops and the air smelled of pine and damp, decaying leaves.

  “When you find Sophie, what will you do?”

  I said, “I was hired to find Amanda.”

  “So you won’t feel obligated to bring Sophie home.”

  I shook my head. “She’s seventeen now. I couldn’t do anything if I wanted to.”

  “But you don’t want to.”

  Angie and I spoke at the same time. “No.”

  “Would you do me a favor if you do find her?”

  “You bet.”

  “Tell her she has a place to stay. Any hour of the day. High or not. Angry or not. I don’t care about my feelings anymore. I only want to know she’s safe.”

  She and Angie hugged then in that unforced way women can pull off that eludes even those men in the world who are at ease with the bro clench. Sometimes, I give Angie shit about it. I call it the Lifetime Hug or the Oprah, but there was no easy sentiment powering this one, just a recognition, I guess, or an affirmation.

  “She deserved you,” Angie said.

  Elaine wept silently into her shoulder and Angie held the back of her head and rocked her a bit the way she so often does with our daughter.

  “She deserved you.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  We met Andre
Stiles out front of the DCF offices on Farnsworth Street and the three of us walked down along the Seaport in a light flurry to a tavern on Sleeper Street.

  Once we were settled in our seats and the waitress had taken our orders, I said, “Thanks again for seeing us on such short notice, Mr. Stiles.”

  “Please,” he said, “don’t call me ‘Mister.’ Just call me Dre.”

  “Dre it is.”

  He was about thirty-seven or thirty-eight, brown hair cut short, the gray just finding its way along the temples and along the edges of his goatee. Well-dressed for a social worker—black cotton crewneck and dark blue jeans far nicer than anything you’d find at The Gap, black cashmere overcoat with red lining.

  “So,” he said, “Sophie.”

  “Sophie.”

  “You met her father.”

  “Yup,” Angie said.

  “What’d you think?”

  The waitress brought our drinks. He plucked the lemon wedge out of his vodka tonic, stirred the drink, and then placed the stirrer beside the lemon wedge. His fingers moved with the confident delicacy of a pianist.

  “The father,” I said. “Piece of work, isn’t he?”

  “If by piece of work you mean douche bag, yeah, he’s that.”

  Angie laughed and drank some wine.

  “Don’t sugarcoat it, Dre.”

  “Please, don’t,” Angie said.

  He took a sip of his drink, chewed a chip of ice. “So many of the kids I deal with, the problem’s not the kid. It’s that the kid drew an asshole in the parental lottery. Or two assholes. I could sit here and be all PC about it, but I do that enough at work all day.”

  “Last thing we want is PC,” I said. “Anything you can tell us would be greatly appreciated.”

  “How long you two been private investigators?”

  “I’ve been on a five-year sabbatical,” Angie said.

  “Until when?”

  “This morning,” she said.

  “You missed it?”

  “I thought I did,” she said. “Not so sure anymore, though.”

  “You?” he asked me. “How long have you been at it?”

  “Too long.” It unsettled me how true those words felt. “Since I was twenty-three.”

  “You ever think of doing anything else?”

  “More and more every day. You?”

  He shook his head. “This is my second career.”

  “What was your first?”

  He finished his drink and caught the waitress’s eye. I still had half my scotch and Angie still had two-thirds of her wine, so he pointed at his own drink and showed her one finger.

  “My first career,” he said. “I was a doctor, believe it or not.”

  Suddenly the delicate grace of his fingers made sense.

  “You think it’s going to be about saving lives but you find out quick it’s about turnover, just like any other business. How many services can you deliver at a premium price with the lowest expenditure on supplies and labor? Treat ’em, street ’em, and upsell ’em when the opportunity presents itself.”

  Angie said, “And you weren’t any more PC then, I take it?”

  He chuckled as the waitress brought his drink. “I was fired from four hospitals in a five-square-mile area for insubordination. It’s a record of some kind, I’m pretty sure. I suddenly found myself unhireable in the city. I mean, I could have moved to, I don’t know, New Bedford or something. But I like the city. And I woke up one day and realized I hated my life. I hated what I was doing with it. I’d lost my faith.” He shrugged. “A couple days later I saw an ad for a human services position with the DCF, and here I am.”

  “You miss it?”

  “Sometimes. More often than not, though? Not so much. It’s like any dysfunctional relationship—sure there were good things about it or else how would you get into it in the first place? But for the most part, it was killing me. Now I have regular hours, I do work I’m proud of, and I sleep like a baby at night.”

  “And the work you did with Sophie Corliss?”

  “Confidential mostly. She came to me for help, and I tried to help. She’s a pretty lost kid.”

  “And the reason she dropped out of school?”

  He gave me an apologetic grimace. “Confidential, I’m afraid.”

  “I can’t really get a clear picture of her,” I said.

  “That’s because there isn’t one. Sophie’s one of those people—she entered adolescence with no real skills, no ambition, and zero sense of self. She’s smart enough to know she has deficiencies but not smart enough to know what they are. And even if she did, what could she do about them? You can’t decide to be passionate about something. You can’t manufacture a vocation. Sophie’s what I call a floater. She bobs along waiting for someone to come along and tell her where to go.”

  “You ever meet a friend of hers named Amanda?” Angie asked.

  “Ah,” he said, “Amanda.”

  “You’ve met her?”

  “If you meet Sophie, you meet Amanda.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  “You met Amanda?”

  “I knew her a long time ago when she was—”

  “Ho,” he said, pushing his chair back a bit. “You’re the guy who found her back in the ’90s. Right? Jesus. I knew the name sounded familiar.”

  “There you go then.”

  “And now you’re looking a second time? A bit ironic.” He shook his head at that irony. “Well, I don’t know what she was like then, but now? Amanda’s a real cool kid. Maybe too cool, you know? I never met anyone of any age so self-possessed. I mean, to be comfortable in your own skin is a rare quality in a sixty-year-old, never mind a sixteen-year-old. Amanda knows exactly who she is.”

  “And who is that?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “We’ve heard about Amanda’s cool from a lot of people, and you describe her as knowing exactly who she is. My question is—who is she?”

  “She’s whoever she needs to be. She’s adaptability personified.”

  “And Sophie?”

  “Sophie is . . . pliable. She’ll follow any philosophy if it brings her closer to the group-think of the room. Amanda adapts to whatever the group thinks it wants. And she sheds it as soon as she leaves that room.”

  “You admire her.”

  “ ‘Admire’ is a little strong, but I’ll admit she’s an impressive kid. Nothing affects her. Nothing can change her will. And she’s sixteen years old.”

  “That’s impressive,” I said. “I wish, though, that just one person I talked to mentioned something about her that was goofy or warm or, I don’t know, messy.”

  “That’s not Amanda.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “What about a kid named Zippo? You ever hear of him?”

  “Sophie’s boyfriend. I think his real name is, like, David Lighter. Or Daniel. I can’t be positive on that one.”

  “When’s the last time you saw Sophie?”

  “Two weeks ago, maybe three.”

  “Amanda?”

  “Around the same time.”

  “Zippo?”

  He drained his drink. “Christ.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been three weeks on him, too. They all . . .” He looked at us.

  “Vanished,” Angie said.

  • • •

  Our daughter climbed the jungle gym in the center of the Ryan Playground. It had been snowing since sundown. There was a foot of sand below the jungle gym but I kept my hand nearby anyway.

  “So, Detective,” Angie said.

  “Yes, Junior Detective.”

  “Oh, I’m Junior Detective, huh? Wow, there really is a glass ceiling.”

  “You’re Junior Detective for one week. After that I’ll give you a promotion.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Solid casework and a certain nocturnal inventiveness after lights-out.”

  “That’s harassment, you cad.”

&nb
sp; “Last week that harassment made you forget your name.”

  “Mommy, why would you forget your name? Did you hit your head?”

  “Nice,” Angie said to me. “No, Mommy didn’t hit her head. But you’re going to fall if you don’t pay attention. Watch that bar. There’s ice there.”

  My daughter rolled her eyes at me.

  “Listen to the boss,” I said.

  “So what’d we learn today?” Angie asked me as Gabby went back to climbing.

  “We learned that Sophie is probably the girl who talked to the police and said she was Amanda. We learned Amanda is very cool and collected. We learned Sophie is not. We learned five people walked into some room, two died, but four walked out. Whatever that means. We learned that there’s a kid in this world named Zippo. We learned it’s possible Amanda was abducted, because no one thinks she’d run away with so much to stay in school for.” I looked over at Angie. “I’m out. You cold?”

  Her teeth chattered. “I never wanted to leave the house. How’d we get Edna the Eskimo for a kid?”

  “Irish genes.”

  “Daddy,” Gabby said, “catch me.”

  Two seconds after she said it, she pitched herself off the bar and I caught her in my arms. She wore earmuffs and a hooded pink down coat and about four layers of underclothing, including thermal leggings—so much clothing the little body wrapped inside felt like a snap pea in its pod.

  “Your cheeks are cold,” I said.

  “No they’re not.”

  “Uh, okay.” I hoisted her up onto my shoulders and gripped her ankles. “Mommy’s cold.”

  “Mommy’s always cold.”

  “That’s because Mommy’s Italian,” Angie said as we walked out of the playground.

  “Ciao,” Gabby chirped. “Ciao, ciao, ciao.”

  “PR can’t take her tomorrow—dentist—but she can take her the next couple days.”

  “Cool.”

  “So what’re you going to do tomorrow?” Angie asked me. “Watch that ice.”

  I stepped over the ice patch as we reached the crosswalk. “You don’t want to know.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Helene McCready’s current abode was, on the surface, a hell of a step up from the Dorchester three-decker apartment where, until recently, she’d seen fit to poorly raise her daughter. She and Kenny Hendricks lived at 133 Sherwood Forest Drive in Nottingham Hill, a gated community two miles off Route 1, in Foxboro. All I knew about Foxboro was that the Patriots played there eight times a year and it wasn’t too far from the outlet mall in Wrentham. After I accessed those two factoids, I was out. End of list.