Heart of Ice

Chapter Fifty-four

It felt like a small betrayal, but Olivia Barton had good reason for it. As the highway to Acton unrolled in front of her in a seemingly endless belt of blacktop and skid marks, she told herself that Michael would see that she loved him—if he ever found out what she had done. She planned to be careful, of course, so that they’d never have that conversation.

She couldn’t come up with any other way to ferret out her troubled husband’s past. State records for juveniles were sealed. She’d tried the “I’m a family member desperate to find my brother” ploy on a records clerk who snapped gum and told her that “they’re sealed for a reason and the reason is they don’t want anyone in those records.” She tried talking to Michael about his past, but he was evasive. Sometimes even dismissive, as if there was nothing there to really tell. He’d told her time and again that he’d moved on. She knew that to find out about his past, the time to do so was when they were first together.

Only in the beginning of a relationship, she thought, can a woman make a stand and rummage around, gently of course, in the past of the man she loves.

When you marry him, you unwittingly shut the book and you accept him for all that he is. All that comes with him. His past. His family.

Two days before the drive from Garden Grove, she found Gwen Trexler’s phone number on an online phone directory. She took a deep breath and made the call.

“Ms. Trexler?”

“Yes. Who’s calling?”

“Did you used to be a reporter for the Sea Breeze?”

There was a short silence. Olivia could hear Etta James wailing “At Last” in the background.

“Yes, I was.”

“I’m calling about my husband, Michael Barton.”

“Come again? Barton? The name doesn’t ring a bell. I haven’t been down in Orange County for years. Finally wised up and got into PR.”

“He was the little boy you wrote about. They found him at Disneyland with his sister.”

Another short silence came from Gwen Trexler’s side of the line, but this one had more to do with instant recognition of the sad story of the two little kids, dumped by their mother.

“I’ve thought of those children forever. I wish I could have done more for them. Especially the boy, he was so messed up. I wish I could have helped more.”

Olivia wondered what the former reporter meant by that, but she let it slide. Over the phone wasn’t the venue for what she was after.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to talk to me?” Olivia asked. “You might be able to help now. I think he’s having problems. It might be related to what happened to him back then.”

“All right. I’m up in Acton. Got a pencil? I’ll give you an address.”

Olivia looked at the computer screen. “You still on Antelope Way?”

“Yes, I am. Nice work. You should be a reporter. That is if you want to give up your life for meetings, breathe in everyone’s smoke, have no money, get no respect…don’t I sound bitter?”

Olivia laughed. It was a break in the tension of making the call that she needed.

“Just realistic, I guess. Thanks, Ms. Trexler. See you tomorrow afternoon.”

The conversation played in her head after she dropped off the kids with her mother and headed north. Olivia told her mom she was going to have lunch with friends and spend the day on Melrose, then the Beverly Center. She couldn’t explain why her husband wouldn’t talk about his past. She loved him so much, but there was a stinging hurt over being with a man who had no connection to anyone from a past longer than a couple of years.

If there had been an easier way, one that hadn’t required deception, she would have gladly gone that route. But the Sea Breeze had been purchased by a major newspaper chain in the late 1980s. The archives were summarily dumped by the new owners. So much for history. The only saving grace was that Gwen Trexler was still alive and very much willing to help.

Now almost seventy, Gwen Trexler was living in a duplex in Acton, her PR firm having given up the ghost. It was a spotless place, with a manicured flowerbed that in a month or so would be the envy of any garden magazine. The duplex was painted a bronze tone with orange trim that while strange, somehow worked. It was clear coming up to the front door that Mrs. Trexler likely lived alone—everything was in perfect order. Next door was another matter. A swing set and a debris field of toys indicated that a family with kids had taken up residence on the other side. It was order vs. chaos. Family vs. alone.

Gwen Trexler was a tall woman, at almost six feet, with a slim and muscular build. Her features were angular, almost Cubist. She wore a cotton blouse and a denim skirt that almost touched the floor. Her eyes matched the jade on the pendant that swung around her neck.

She opened the screen door and ushered Olivia inside.

“I made some mango smoothies,” she said. “No sugar. I use honey and whey powder to give me a little pick-me-up in the afternoons.”

Olivia thought it sounded awful, but her mother taught her to take a sip and “pretend to enjoy because that makes the host happy.”

It was a rule she lived by.

“Sounds delicious,” she said, taking a glass.

The living room was surprisingly large, facing out to a valley view that held several hundred head of cattle. There were so many that it was hard to see where one animal ended and another began.

“Seems like a stockyard, I know,” Gwen said, regarding the sea of black and brown undulating less than a mile away. “The wind’s in my favor today. Thank God.” She set down a pale yellow smoothie, complete with a straw.

“Delicious,” Olivia said, only half-lying. She’d tasted worse.

“I know you want to know more about your husband, so why don’t you just ask him?”

Olivia sipped on the drink, buying time and trying not to feel embarrassed because she’d been shut out of Michael’s life.

“He won’t talk to me. It really is that simple, Ms. Trexler. He has nothing to say.”

She brushed away several strands of white hair from her eyes. “Have you ever heard of letting sleeping dogs lie?”

Olivia had. Her own mother was a major purveyor of homespun advice like that. “Believe me, I’ve thought of that. Maybe there’s something so deep, so dark, that he just can’t go there and get it. I understand that. But…”

“But there’s something that’s propelled you here today.” Gwen Trexler glanced out the window, noticing Olivia’s car. “I see from the fingerprints on your windows that you have kids. Is that it?”

“A boy and a girl. And, no, that’s not it. He’s just been so distant lately and he’s lied a couple of times about small things.”

“Like what?”

“Where he was, nothing big.”

“This isn’t about an affair?”

Olivia shook her head emphatically. The idea of an affair was ludicrous. “No. Not at all. Just lately, he’s been crying in his sleep.”

Gwen narrowed her gaze at the pretty young woman. An affair had been a stupid suggestion. “I see,” she said.

“I just have a feeling that he’s trying to deal with all that happened to him, and if I knew, I’d be able to help.”

Gwen looked over at the file. She tapped her opalescent nails on a yellowed folder she retrieved from a side table. “What little I have is right here.”

“Do you keep copies of all the stories you write?” Olivia asked.

“Heavens, no.” Gwen swished the spoon in her drink to loosen the frozen concoction. “Only what interests me.”

There was something foreboding in the former reporter’s tone and Olivia let it pass.

Gwen opened the file and spread out the clippings on the coffee table. The one on top was the one that Michael had kept.

“I wasn’t sure there would be more than the one I’d already seen,” Olivia said. “May I?”

Gwen watched as Olivia reached over to pick up the brittle stack of clippings, preserved like pressed flowers from a young girl’s high school prom.

“Help yourself. I won an award for it. Best spot news reporting for a paper in the lowest circulation category for a daily newspaper.” She laughed. “Back then, I was young enough to think that you could actually get somewhere in the newspaper business by being good. What a joke.”

There were three stories, including the original with the photo. The headline on the second clipping almost made her gasp.

Disney Kids Mother Found?

The article detailed how the body of a woman had been found in a bed at the Igloo Motel on Katella Avenue, across from Disneyland three days after Michael and Sarah Barton had been found.

“I don’t understand,” Olivia said, looking up. “What happened to her?”

A gray tabby cat jumped up into Gwen’s lap and she inattentively started to rub its ears.

“Good question. We really don’t know. There were no signs of a struggle. There were no obvious injuries. Mrs. Barton checked into the motel the same day that her children spent in the park. She paid for three days in advance. It was all she had.”

She added: “I thought the headline was irresponsible. We didn’t have any connection to those kids.”

“What do you mean?”

“All we had was a dead woman. No drugs. No signs of violence. Nothing.”

“Who was she?”

“Who knows? Coroner said she’d given birth to at least one child, maybe more. We never made an ID. No one could. She paid cash. No purse. Nothing. They even showed a ghoulishly retouched photo of her to the boy, but he couldn’t ID her. “

Olivia looked back down at the clipping. “Then how did she die?”

“The coroner thought she died, possibly, of asphyxiation. But I think that a mom who would dump her kids like that maybe died of a broken heart.”

Olivia could scarcely think of any reason a mother would leave her children. She would die before she allowed anything to happen to her own. She knew most mothers were that way. But not, it seemed, Michael’s mother.

“What has your husband told you about his family?” Gwen asked.

Olivia felt a flush of defensiveness take over and it bothered her. It was as if the reporter was challenging her on the closeness of her marriage to Michael. She wanted to tell her that she knew everything, but it would be an obvious lie. The reason she’d come up to Acton was for a little piece of the puzzle, a piece that would bring her closer to the man that she loved.

“I don’t mean to be too nosy,” Gwen asked. “Would you mind answering some questions?”

“That seems a little formal. You’re not writing about it, are you?”

“Of course not. Like I said, I’ve often wondered about your husband and his sister.”

“Well, all right. What?”

“The articles don’t mention it, but your husband had been severely abused by someone.”

“What do you mean, abused?”

“Physically abused.” Gwen searched the younger woman’s eyes. “Does he still have the scars on his neck? The little round scars?”

Olivia remembered seeing them for the first time. She was helping him put on a tie for one of those awful company events he had to attend. It was an almost perfect row of small circular scars faded by time, hidden by the hair that brushed against his collar.

“What’s this?” She asked, looking at his face in the bathroom mirror.

“What?”

“These little scars, Michael. What are they?”

His eyes narrowed and he shrugged off her inquiry. “Oh, those. Bad acne. I scarred up pretty bad on my shoulders and neck.”

“Scars from acne, he told me,” Olivia said.

Gwen set her cat on the floor. She touched her fingertips to her lips and shook her head.

“That wasn’t from acne. When we found Michael and Sarah, the back of his neck was still scabbed over from the burns. On his hand, too. Some, it seemed, had been quite recent.”

Olivia felt her stomach turn. Burns? What she was hearing was beyond anything she could have imagined. Who burns the neck of a child? “You mean, burned flesh?”

The horror of the scenario welled up in the younger woman’s pretty dark eyes.

“Yes,” Gwen said, softly, taking her questioning tone down a notch. “It appeared to us at the time that he’d been tortured with a cigarette.”

Olivia couldn’t help herself. She started to cry. She had come there for answers, not tears.

“Look, I know this is hard.” Gwen got up and looked for a tissue, finally producing one from a crocheted dispenser on the top of her upright piano. “I’d never seen a kid more abused than Michael. He could barely speak to us. He was a wreck. His sister, being younger, I always felt had a fighting chance. But Michael….” her voice trailed off as she handed the tissue box to Olivia. “Well, you brought me a bit of a miracle today.”

Olivia dabbed at her eyes and looked up. “What? How?”

“He has you. He has two children. That poor little boy has survived and made a life out of what was handed to him. I thought for sure he’d end up in the system somewhere, giving back to the world what his mother and father had given to him.”

As she got up to leave, she offered to take the empty glass into the kitchen, but Gwen waved her away.

“Ms. Trexler,” Olivia said her voice slightly tentative, “one thing I don’t understand.”

The older woman put her hand on Olivia’s shoulder, a gesture meant to comfort. It did.

“What is it?” she asked.

“How come you thought the woman was Michael and Sarah’s mother? Did she look like them?”

Gwen looked out the window. “It wasn’t that. I mean, there was a resemblance, of course. It was something else.”

“What?”

She returned her gaze to Olivia. Her face was full of regret and worry. “She’d been burned on the nape of her neck, too. She had a row of scars that matched what he had.”

Olivia felt sick. It was more than the smoothie and she knew it. “Sarah?” she asked.

“None there. Her neck was flawless.”

“Was the body ever claimed?”

“No. Buried in the Potters Field behind the old Westward Ho Motel and Casino.”

“Thank you,” she said, tears running down her face. Olivia turned on her heels and headed for the door.

“I wish I could have been more helpful. I’m glad to know your husband’s a survivor. The girl, too?”

“We don’t know,” Olivia said, without looking back. “They’ve lost touch.”

As Olivia drove, the Etta James song that had been playing in the background when she called Gwen Trexler kicked back into her consciousness.

Yes, at last.

When Olivia and the children arrived home around 7 P.M., the house was still. She found Michael in the bedroom dressing to go running. He sat on the edge of the bed.

“How was your mom?” he asked, lacing his shoes and not looking up.

“Oh you know my mama—a little good, a little bad.”

“I guess so. You can always count on that with her. Thought you’d be home earlier,” he said.

“Traffic was worse than usual. I don’t even know if there is a usual anymore.”

“You three had a good time?”

“Yeah, nothing exciting. I managed to break away for about an hour. I got you a shirt from the Gap. On sale.” She smiled.

He looked up and returned the smile. “Great. I’ll try it on when I get back from my run.”

“All right, baby. See you in a bit.”

Michael took off and Olivia went into the kitchen. The message machine had already been played. But there was a new message on it, so she hit the button.

Her mother’s voice came on the line: “Hi Michael. The kids want me to take them for ice cream to their favorite place. For the life of me, I can’t remember what that place is called. Neither can they! Oh dear. I know you’re working at home today, but Olivia’s cell must be off and she’s not expected back for the rest of the day.”

Olivia felt a chill run down her spine. She had no real way of knowing what her husband had thought of the message and her obvious lie. He might have thought the very worst; that she’d been cheating on him or something crazy. All she had been doing was seeking the truth. She felt the truth would set him free from his torment.

That was about to change.

Olivia, stop. Olivia, please.

Michael Barton, running around the Rancho Alamitos High School track, used the speed and repetition of doing laps to focus his thoughts. Why was it that she seemed to think that her digging into his life was something that would benefit him? He’d loved her so much. He thought that she and the children had been the cure for the disease that ravaged him since he was a little boy. Her big brown eyes looked at him with nothing but love when they were first together. Now, all he saw was the reflection of her suspicion.

Olivia, stop. Don’t make me stop you.

He saw a young woman doing stretches by the long-jump pit and he looked around. The parking lot was empty, save for his car and a blue Mazda, which he assumed was the woman’s. She wore green sweats with a big gold and green V on the back of her jacket, a nod to the Vaquero, the school mascot. A student. He ran past her, his heart pumping blood and adrenaline like a fire hose.

Olivia, I want to love you. I want to know what it is to be normal. Stop. Stop. Don’t make me do this.

He moved closer to the girl as he turned toward the stretch in front of the bleachers.

She reminded him of his wife a little, small-framed, with dark hair that she held out of the way in a loose clip. Her brown eyes held his for a second. She turned away as he ran past. His running shoes pounded the spongy black track, and he fought the urge.

She’s not on the list. Got to stop. Can’t keep doing this. No. Olivia, please don’t make me angry.