No offense, p.15
No Offense, page 15
And he was, twenty minutes later. Standing in what served as the maternity ward for the small island—four private rooms and a desk—he stood with his arms crossed in front of Nurse Dani, who seemed to have made a remarkable recovery from her inebriated state at the ball last night and was looking professional and alert in pink scrubs covered in purple teddy bears.
“Don’t you normally work in the ER?” he asked.
She smiled. “I do! Thanks for remembering. Couple of the nurses up here were out sick with that cold that’s going around, so I volunteered to fill in. What a week to be short-staffed! Ever since that news station showed us on TV, we’ve been getting calls around the clock from people begging us to let them adopt Baby Aphrodite. As if we have any say in the matter.”
John shook his head grimly. The same thing had been happening down at the station house, and probably, he suspected, at the library, too. He wondered if Molly regretted her well-intentioned but enormously ill-considered decision to go on TV with her story about finding the infant.
“Has Tabitha Brighton said anything to you?” he asked the nurse. “Anything at all about how she ended up here, who put the baby in the library, who the father might be?”
He’d noticed that women opened up more to other women than they did to men—and certainly to members of law enforcement—and Nurse Dani was the chatty type. If anyone could get a kid to talk, it would be her.
But she disappointed him by shaking her head.
“Sorry, no, nothing. She just lies there and cries and watches TV. Food Network, mostly, which is weird, because she won’t eat. We’ve got her on an IV for hydration, of course, but Dr. Nguyen says if she doesn’t eat soon, we might have to resort to a feeding tube. Which is terrible, but what else can we do?”
He shrugged. “If someone won’t help themselves, how can you help them?”
“Exactly. Honestly, I know what she did is awful, but I feel bad for her. You’re not going to charge her, are you? She’s just a kid.”
John was getting a little tired of everyone—mainly women, mainly Molly Montgomery—asking him this. Luckily, Marguerite chose that moment to come strolling up.
“What took you so long?” he asked. He didn’t want to do the interview without a female officer present, and he preferred Marguerite over his younger female deputies because the sergeant was both more experienced and possessed a mother’s radar for lying.
“Incentive.” She held up a white paper bag with a couple of golden arches on them. “I heard the kid wasn’t eating.”
John shook his head. “But fast food? I thought these eco-friendly hippie types stayed away from it . . . except for pizza, of course.”
“Trust me, when she gets a whiff of these fries, she’ll go to town on them. I remember not wanting to touch a thing they were serving in this place after I gave birth to my kids. It all looked like congealed mush. But this stuff? Manna from heaven. She’ll eat every speck.” Marguerite wasted no time throwing open the door to the girl’s room. “Hi, honey. Hope we aren’t disturbing you.”
They weren’t. At least John didn’t think they were. The pale, slightly doughy-faced girl was doing exactly what Dani had said she’d been doing—watching the Food Network, with tears streaming down her face.
“Oh,” she said when she saw them, looking startled but not wildly so. “Are you the police?”
“Sheriff’s office, honey,” Marguerite said, swinging the girl’s food tray around so it sat in front of her, and unpacking the white paper bag. “This is Sheriff John Hartwell, and I’m Sergeant Marguerite Ruiz. We brought you a little something to eat, just some fries and a couple of cheeseburgers. I already checked with your doctor, and she said it was okay.”
John knew this was a complete lie, but he didn’t imagine it could matter much. The girl’s nose was twitching like a hungry rabbit’s at the aromas coming out of the paper sack. “Are there any chicken nuggets?” she asked faintly.
“There are,” Marguerite said. “I didn’t know which dipping sauce you liked, so I brought them all. And a soda and a vanilla milkshake, too. You’ve been through a lot, so you really need to eat. I know, I’ve had three kids myself, right in this very hospital. I also know how bad the food is here. So try this instead.”
The girl, her gaze darting nervously between John and his sergeant, murmured a polite “Thank you so much,” even as she began discreetly shoveling fries into her mouth. Score one for Marguerite: the hospital food was why she hadn’t been eating. Though she probably had plenty of deeper trauma, too.
“So, Tabitha,” John said, lowering himself into the visitor’s chair by the window, which had a very stunning and healing view of the island’s garbage dump. “Your name is Tabitha, isn’t it? Tabitha Brighton of New Canaan, Connecticut, and you’re eighteen years old? Because that’s what it says here.”
The girl, who’d been taking a large slurp of her milkshake, stopped midswallow and stared owlishly at the driver’s license he’d pulled from his shirtfront pocket. She had mouse-brown hair that was currently parted in the middle and hung like curtains on either side of her face. It gave her an innocent and rather nunlike appearance.
And like a nun, she didn’t lie. Slowly, she nodded. “Yes,” she said in a tiny voice. “That’s me.” Then she burst into tears, this time noisily, with large, gulping sobs. “Are you going to arrest me?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Marguerite said, moving to wrap the girl in her arms. “Shhhh.”
John was more glad than ever that Marguerite had come along. He also wondered if Tabitha had noticed Marguerite had not said no.
“Well,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened first, starting with how you ended up here in Little Bridge to begin with.”
The girl gave a tiny shrug—all she could manage with Marguerite sitting beside her in the bed, her arms still around her. “I . . . I don’t know. I’d always heard Little Bridge Island was a nice place.”
“Right,” John said. He’d heard this a thousand times—maybe a hundred thousand times—in his lifetime. “Everyone thinks Little Bridge Island is a nice place. It’s one of America’s top tourist destinations. But usually when people come here they rent an Airbnb or a hotel room. They don’t break into a public building, squat in it, and then vandalize it with trash and graffiti.”
Tabitha’s eyes overflowed again. She looked as sorrowful as any human being John had ever seen. . . .
And yet he thought he saw a spark of indignation in her hazel eyes, as well.
“Just because some people reject societal norms and resist total assimilation to the dominant culture doesn’t mean our values don’t have worth,” she said in a shaky voice.
It was obviously something she’d learned by rote.
John didn’t have to ask where she’d learned it, either. He’d heard it—like he’d heard the thing about Little Bridge being nice—a thousand times.
But he’d only heard what Tabitha was spewing from one person . . . and that person’s followers.
He closed his notebook with a snap.
“Okay, Tabitha,” he said. “Where is he?”
She blinked several times. “What—who do you mean?”
“Dylan.”
“I—I don’t know any Dylan.”
“Oh, you don’t? Dylan Dakota?”
She shook her head. “N-no.”
“Never heard of him?”
“I t-told you. No.”
She was a very bad liar. Not only did she not make eye contact when she lied, but she did the same thing that Katie did when she lied, which was to glance up at the ceiling and far to the right, as if the way out of the difficult situation she suddenly found herself in might be found there.
This made John feel slightly more sorry for her, but he still had to do his job.
“Don’t give me that, Tabitha,” he said, sternly. “Only one person in this town goes around spewing that nonsense about societal norms and resisting total assimilation, and that’s Dylan Dakota—whose real name, in case he failed to mention it, is Lawrence Beckwith III. I know he probably told you some fanciful tale about being raised in an orphanage in Morocco, but guess what? Larry is from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where his father owns a very popular chain of tire stores, and his mother is a homemaker. Larry himself graduated from Ohio State—although I’m sure he wishes it was Brown or Dartmouth or some other Ivy League school so he could brag about how he dropped out because he was rejecting our society’s dominant norms. Maybe that’s where this sense of entitlement he has comes from—that he never got the fancy art degree that he feels he deserves from a top-tier school. Anyway, I don’t know about any of that, and I don’t care. I just want to know where I can find him so I can arrest him for what he did to you and your baby and Miss Montgomery’s library. Do you have any thoughts about that?”
She swallowed, her stare still glued to the ceiling. “I . . . I don’t know Dylan Dakota or this Larry Beckwith person. And I don’t know what happened to me. I gave birth, and it was beautiful, and then I fell asleep.” She finally brought her gaze back toward his. Now she was telling the truth. “When I woke up, the baby was gone, and some lady was there.”
Marguerite had drawn her arms away from the girl and slipped off the bed. “Is that what you’re going to tell your daughter about her birth when she’s older? How beautiful it was, giving birth to her on the dirty floor of an unfinished building surrounded by empty liquor bottles and pizza boxes and without an epidural or any medical aid?”
“And you didn’t fall asleep,” John added. “You passed out from blood loss. Your so-called friends abandoned you. Not one of them has come here to visit you or even called to see how you’re doing. And that lady was the children’s librarian, Miss Molly Montgomery. If she hadn’t found you, you’d be dead. Same with your daughter. Someone—I’m guessing it was your good friend Dylan—put her in an empty box of trash bags and dumped her in a bathroom at the library. She’d have frozen to death if Miss Montgomery hadn’t found her.”
“I—I don’t believe you.” Tabitha reached up to wipe her tears with one of the napkins Marguerite had given her. “This is what he said you people would do. Try to demonize us for rejecting the materialism and technology of today’s world.”
“No one’s demonizing you, sweetheart,” Marguerite said in a kind voice. “We’re trying to make you see common sense. Eat a chicken nugget.”
“Who’s he?” John asked. “Dakota?”
“You fear us, you know,” Tabitha said, her eyes still bright with tears, but also now with defiance. Nevertheless, she listened to Marguerite and nibbled on a nugget. “That’s what he says. He says you fear us because we reject your definition of happiness, finding fulfillment in a life without money, mortgages, material goods—”
“We found cell phone and laptop chargers all over that room.” John felt more sad than angry. “For a group that rejects material goods, you sure seem to enjoy going on Facebook.”
“Only so we can spread our message of peace and love.”
“You know, Tabitha, we’re on the side of peace and love as well,” he said. “Your side, and the baby’s. We know what happened to you was traumatic . . . probably so traumatic that you haven’t even been able to face it. At likely the most vulnerable moment of your life, you were left for dead by people you thought you could trust. Let us help you by finding these people and stopping them from ever doing this to anyone else. Because next time, there may not be a Miss Montgomery around to save them.”
Tabitha’s eyes went right back to the ceiling. “There isn’t going to be a next time.”
“What are you talking about?” He shook his head. “Are you telling me that Dylan Dakota isn’t going to take advantage of some other naive girl like you, get her pregnant, and then leave her and her newborn baby for dead somewhere?”
For the first time, she smiled at him. It was a wan and sickly-looking smile. But it was a smile just the same.
“Yes,” she said, looking him dead in the eye. “That’s what I’m telling you. Because Dylan loves me. He loves me and the baby. And he’s going to come back for us. Just you wait and see.”
Chapter Seventeen
Molly
“No, Miss Molly.”
Elijah leaned across Molly’s desk and pressed the receiver, ending her call to his mother before it had even connected. “Please. Please do not call my mom.”
Molly looked into his suddenly pale face and felt that she had no choice but to relent. He was her patron. More than that, he was a child.
“Fine, Elijah,” she said, slowly lowering her handset. “Then tell me the truth about where you got this camera . . . and why you don’t want your mother knowing about it.”
Elijah let out an exaggeratedly large sigh and slumped in the child-sized chair, which for him was not entirely too small. Like a puppy, his hands and feet were large, but the rest of him hadn’t quite caught up.
“Okay, look. I didn’t just find my dad’s camera. I found it a few days ago, and I got this idea: a lot of the girls in school—the Snappettes, especially—want headshots. Not selfies, but, like, real professional headshots. They have this cheer camp they all go to every summer, and there’s this parade in New York City. It happens around Thanksgiving—”
Molly tried to keep the impatience out of her tone. “The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. It’s this real big deal. They have to send in a headshot for it and also for the camp, or something. I don’t know. So when I found my dad’s camera, I thought, why not start my own business, offering to do headshots for the girls? I mean, I can do it way more cheaply than the regular guy they use. Plus, like, they know me. I’m not some creep—”
“Elijah. Is this story going anywhere?”
“Oh, yeah.” He reached into the pocket of his skinny jeans and pulled something from it. “Sorry. So, anyway, I started my own business. See?”
He passed Molly a stiff black business card that had the words ELIJAH TRUJOS, FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER embossed on it in elegant silver print. Beneath the words was his cell phone number.
“I handed those out at school, and you wouldn’t believe the number of Snappettes who started texting me, asking if I could do their headshots for the application thingie. So that’s where I was last night.”
“Where?” Molly was confused.
“At one of their houses,” he said, reaching for the Leica—but not to take it from her, only so that he could show her the photos he’d taken. There was a small display screen on the back of the camera. “Doing their headshots for the application. See?”
He switched some buttons, and photos began to appear on the tiny screen. Molly realized she was looking at the inside of a Little Bridge Island living room—she recognized the shiplap walls and nautical-themed décor—in which several girls wearing Snappette uniforms were posing for the camera, sometimes together, sometimes alone. She recognized John’s daughter, Katie Hartwell, right away. The other two girls were unfamiliar.
“See,” Elijah said, as he flicked through the photos. “It was hard to get the light right, because it was so dark in there.”
Molly could see that behind each girl was a bank of sliding glass doors—not unlike Mrs. Tifton’s French doors—leading to the backyard. Since the photos were taken at night (there was a digital date stamp on the top right-hand corner of the screen, indicating that the photos had been taken the evening before), the glass was dark, except for the girls’ reflection. Elijah had apparently realized this at some point and tried to get around it by having the girls pose in front of a white wall on the other side of the room.
“I really feel like I captured the essence of each girl’s personality,” he said as he showed Molly the photos of which he was most proud. “Like Katie, for instance? She’s really extroverted, so having her do that handstand was just a last-minute thing that I came up with, but I think works great.”
“Fine, Elijah,” Molly said. “But if this is all you were doing last night, why didn’t you want me calling your mom?”
“Oh, er, well, because I sort of lied about finding this camera in a box of junk my dad left behind.” Elijah had the grace to look embarrassed. “I mean, he did leave it behind—just like he left me, my mom, and everything else he should care about. But it turns out he wants the camera back. My mom’s been looking for it to send to him because he keeps asking for it. But I stole it and hid it in my room. I don’t feel like he deserves to have it back after leaving us like that.”
Molly frowned at him. “Elijah,” she said, in mock disapproval.
“I know. I know! But he doesn’t even send child-support payments. The guy’s a loser. I should get something from him. And, anyway, if my mom found out I had his camera and I was using it to take pictures of girls, she’d kill me.”
Molly actually thought that Mrs. Trujos would be relieved—at least about the girls—because it showed that Elijah was finally coming out of his shell and spending face time with people his own age.
But she didn’t say so because she sensed Elijah was getting a little bit of a thrill out of his disobedience. Instead, she kept looking at his photos, which weren’t bad—it would be difficult to take a bad photo with such a high-quality camera—until she saw something curious and cried, “Elijah! Stop!”
He stopped scrolling through the photos. “What? Why? What’s wrong?”
“Go back a photo or two. I thought I saw something—there!”
Molly took the camera from his hands. At first she thought she’d imagined it.
But as she looked more closely at one of his photos of the girls standing in front of the sliding doors, she saw precisely what she thought she’d seen.
And what she saw gave her goose bumps, even though she was wearing a cardigan, as usual, to guard against the chill of the library’s strong air-conditioning.
