Funeral for a Friend

41

“A baby?” Denise said. “No, that’s not right. That’s impossible. My sister never had a baby.”

Serena and Maggie exchanged a glance with each other, because that was the reaction they’d expected. Denise didn’t know. No one knew. It had been the secret of Andrea’s life.

“I’m sorry, but the evidence is conclusive,” Maggie told her. “I checked with the medical examiner again to make absolutely certain there was no mistake. She told me that her analysis of the pelvic area during the autopsy left no room for doubt. Andrea had gone through childbirth. If it wasn’t with Stride or Robin, then when did it happen?”

Denise got up from the kitchen chair in Andrea’s house with a start. Her fingers twitched. She went to the back door, opened it, and lit a cigarette from the pack in her pocket. After she inhaled, she tilted her head and blew smoke into the air. Her chest rattled with a cough. “I can’t believe this.”

Maggie joined her in the doorway and waited as Denise tried to process the shock. “She never said a word about it? She never gave you any hint?”

“None.”

“What about your parents?”

“They didn’t say a thing to me. But I don’t suppose they would.”

Serena got up, too, and looked around the kitchen. She saw it in a new light, now that Andrea was gone. She always felt a keen sense of loss when she entered the house of someone who had recently died. Everything still spoke of their presence. The food in the refrigerator. The mail on the counter. The coffee cup in the sink. The house still acted as if someone would be coming back soon and picking up where they left off. Knowing the truth about Andrea’s life made it even worse.

She wandered to the window, where Andrea had kept her array of suncatchers. She spotted the one that Stride had remembered, the one he’d seen Andrea holding in his dream while under surgery. The sun catcher had been sending him a message.

The stained glass, molded in chips of blue and red, showed a mother holding a baby.

“You said Andrea didn’t know where these sun catchers came from?” she said to Denise.

“No. She said a secret admirer sent them to her. Apparently, it had been happening for years.”

“We’re going to have to take them with us,” Serena said.

“Why?”

“To look for prints. To see if we can figure out who sent them.”

“Why does that even matter?” Denise asked.

“Because there was someone in Andrea’s life that no one knew anything about. It’s important that we find out who it was. Particularly if it’s possible that it was her child.”

A flood of emotions crossed Denise’s face. Confusion. Anger. Regret. And ultimately grief. “My whole life, Andrea and I only saw each other every couple of years. When we did, we had practically nothing in common. I thought when I came back to Duluth, we’d find a way to be sisters again. These last few months, I was hoping we were finally getting closer. Now I realize I didn’t know a thing about her.”

“When did that start?” Serena asked. “When did the two of you begin to grow apart?”

Denise threw down her cigarette and began to cry. “After that fucking party.”

They waited for Denise to get control of herself. She stood outside for a while, staring at the lake on the horizon, her lips pushed together in a hard line. Then she came back inside and slammed the door, and she sat down at the kitchen table again.

“We need to know what really happened, Denise,” Serena said. “Is it possible that Andrea ended up pregnant after the rape?”

Denise gave a long sigh. “Possible? I suppose so. I left town a couple of days later. It was probably two years before I came back for a visit. I’m not the nostalgic type, and I was looking to get out of Duluth. I called home every few weeks, but nobody said a thing. That doesn’t surprise me. This would have been horrifying for my parents. Their little angel getting pregnant? They would have kept it a secret any way they could. But I do remember one thing—”

She stopped.

“What is it?” Serena asked.

“I remember they pulled Andrea out of school in the second semester that year. After Christmas. They told me it was mono. She finished the year at home.”

Serena did the math in her head. “She would have been starting to show.”

“We know she carried the baby to term,” Maggie said. “Assuming the child survived, it seems likely that the baby was adopted. Do you remember any relatives, cousins, neighbors, who had a baby around that time? Someone who might have taken custody of Andrea’s child?”

Denise shook her head. “No. You have to understand what my parents were like. They wouldn’t have wanted that baby anywhere close to the family. They would have acted as if it had never existed. Hell, to me, the baby never did. They never even told me that I had a niece or nephew. So whoever took it, I doubt they were in Duluth, and I doubt they let Andrea knew who it was.”

“We’d like to search the house,” Maggie said. “She must have kept something from back then. Something that would give us a clue what really happened. And maybe where the baby went.”

“Go ahead, search all you want,” Denise replied. She gestured toward the stairs. “Andrea has a spare bedroom that she used as an office. If she kept anything, it’s probably in there.”

Serena and Maggie made their way to the stairs together. They found Andrea’s office in a small bedroom that faced the basketball courts beside the house. She had a wall of built-in bookshelves, mostly filled with science textbooks, three steel file cabinets on the adjacent wall, and a weathered oak desk in front of the bedroom’s small window. When Andrea sat at the desk, she could turn around and stare outside at the park next door.

“She used to watch the kids playing,” Serena murmured. “Stride said she did that all the time. Imagine spending every day of your life thinking about the child you gave up.”

“Do you think Steve Garske knew?” Maggie asked.

“He was her doctor. I’m sure he did. He would have been talking to her about secondary infertility when she couldn’t get pregnant again. So he knew why the threat of exposure was so traumatic to her. He wasn’t just protecting Stride by hiding Ned Baer’s body. He was protecting Andrea, too.”

Maggie began opening drawers in the desk. “I confess I never liked her. I said some pretty mean things about her to Stride. Now I feel a little bad about that.”

“Take a number,” Serena replied. “I’m the one who broke up their marriage.”

Maggie stopped and looked up. “Don’t put that on yourself. Their relationship was broken long before you came to town. She and Stride were wrong from the beginning.”

“I know, but still, it’s a little weird being here,” Serena admitted, opening a drawer in the first filing cabinet and pawing through the contents, which were mostly biology quizzes and tests that Andrea had prepared for her classes over the years. “I feel strange trying to find secrets about my husband’s ex-wife.”

“I’m sure.”

She noticed that Maggie had stopped searching and was staring out the window instead. “You okay? Is something wrong?”

Maggie didn’t look at her. She had her badge in her hands and began turning it over in her fingers. “Do you think Stride will ever come back?”

“I have no idea. I hope so.”

“K-2 wants me to take over while he’s gone.”

“Of course, he does. You’re the natural choice.”

“He already made the promotion official. I’m Lieutenant Bei now.”

“Congratulations.”

Maggie kept rubbing her badge in her hands. “I know we’ve had our problems. Me being a cheating whore. You being an ice-cold bitch. That sort of thing. How is it going to work with you reporting to me?”

Serena chuckled softly. “We’ll be fine, Maggie.”

“I need a partner, and I know who I want,” she said.

“I’ll think about it.”

“You know, as soon as Stride wants the job back, it’s his,” Maggie went on. “I’d never stand in the way.”

“I guess we’ll all cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Maggie chewed on her lip. Serena knew that, in her heart, Maggie was a more vulnerable person than she let anyone else see. Her prickly sarcasm was a shield. “If Stride had died, I’m not sure what I would have done.”

“Me neither,” Serena replied. “I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.”

They kept searching in silence. Maggie went through all of the desk drawers, finding nothing. Serena did the same with the filing cabinets. They had no luck. Everything that Andrea kept in the office was related to her work at the high school, or to her financial records, but there was nothing personal about any of it. It was as if her distant past had been completely erased and she didn’t want to remember anything from her earlier life.

“If Andrea didn’t keep records from back then, it’s going to be difficult to find what we need,” Maggie said. “We have no idea what hospital she would have used, if they used a hospital at all. Or when the actual birth was. Or what adoption agency they used. We’re looking for a needle in a haystack after thirty years.”

Serena shook her head. “Something’s here.”

“You sound pretty sure. This was a child of rape. Maybe she wanted to forget what happened.”

“No way.”

“Okay. Where do we look? A safe deposit box?”

Serena stood in the middle of the office and thought about it. “No, let’s check her bedroom. She would have kept the memories of her child there. Not in the office. She would have kept it close to her.”

“You think so?”

Serena didn’t answer. Instead, she continued down the hallway to the master bedroom that overlooked the lake, and she went directly to the nightstand next to Andrea’s bed. When she opened the top drawer, the first thing she found was a stack of folded white cards made of heavy stock. She pulled them out and opened the first card. Inside was a handwritten message in block letters.

She opened the other cards one by one and found the same message inside each of them.

“‘Forgive every sin,’” Serena murmured.

“Devin Card used the same phrase a couple of days ago,” Maggie said. “He was assaulted seven years ago when the accusations came out. Somebody jumped him on the street one night and beat the hell out of him. He said that’s what the man told him as he did it. ‘Forgive every sin.’”

“I think these notes came with the suncatchers,” Serena said. “There’s a box in here from one of the suncatchers and another of the cards inside.”

“So what sin?” Maggie asked. “The sin of rape?”

“Or the sin of giving away your baby.”

“You think these came from Andrea’s child?”

Serena stared at the neat stack of notes that had kept in the nightstand. “I think Andrea thought so. She kept every one.”

“Is there anything else in there?”

Serena dug into the nightstand again and found a handgun in the top drawer, but nothing else of interest. As soon she opened the second drawer, she discovered a metal lock box, which she removed and placed on the bed. The box was secured with a combination lock, but when she pushed the latch aside, she found that the numbers on the lock had been left at the correct combination.

She opened the lid.

“Oh, hell,” Maggie said. “Look at that.”

Inside, they found dozens of photographs, the brightness of their color fading after decades had passed. All of the pictures showed the same thing: Andrea as a teenager, holding a newborn baby in her arms. A boy. The photos showed her feeding her child. Changing him. Grinning as she held her son in the air. The two of them asleep on a blanket in the grass. Serena didn’t think she’d ever seen such happiness and love on a face as she saw in Andrea in those pictures. And it occurred to her that Andrea probably hadn’t had that look of happiness on her face again in the decades since then.

“She didn’t want to give him up,” Maggie said.

“No. That’s obvious.”

“I wonder how long she kept him before her parents made her let him go.”

Serena turned over the pictures and saw dates written in ink on the back. “The photo of her with the newborn is in May. May 14. This one here in the grass is late July.”

“Two months with a child, and then you have to give him up?” Maggie said.

Serena shook her head. “I can’t imagine it.”

“Is there anything about the adoption? The name of the agency? Anything about where the boy went?”

“No. I wonder if her parents even told her. I wonder if they just took him away.”

“Oh my God.”

Serena dug down to the bottom of the lock box. Amid the memorabilia of the few weeks that a young mother had shared with her son, she found a birth certificate. She pulled it out and examined the text. She didn’t notice the hospital, or the doctor, or the time of birth.

Instead, she focused on the one detail that told her everything she needed to know.

“Andrea gave him a name,” Serena said.

Maggie looked at the faded print on the birth certificate where Serena was pointing. “Son of a bitch,” she gasped. “Brayden.”