Sympathy Between Humans

13

Last year, after his accident in Blue Earth, my husband had been missing for seven days. I’d exhausted my professional knowledge of missing-persons work in looking for him. I’d traveled and spoken to his family. Furthermore, as his wife, I’d had full access to Shiloh ’s accounts, his papers, his home. None of it had made any difference. It was as if he’d simply been erased.

With Aidan Hennessy, I was in the opposite situation. He should have been easy as hell to find. Aidan was an underage runaway, not a fugitive. The longer he spent on the road, the more likely it should have been that he’d be arrested for vagrancy or petty theft. He simply shouldn’t have been this hard to find.

Yet I’d spent three days working the various law-enforcement databases I had access to, and none of it was helping. Deputy Fredericks had e-mailed me Aidan’s last school-yearbook photo, but that didn’t count as an advance. Unless Aidan Hennessy fell into a drainage canal someplace near where I just happened to be, I didn’t think I was going to find him.

It was that frustration that drove me backward, on my next day off, to the elementary school where all the Hennessy children had received their early education, and which Donal still attended.

Marlinchen had mentioned her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hansen, in a brief phone conversation we’d had earlier that morning. Hansen had taught both Marlinchen and Aidan, although not in the same year, because Aidan had been held back to repeat the fourth grade. By my calculations, that made her the last teacher in Minnesota to be familiar with Aidan Hennessy, and the one most likely to remember him.

The school didn’t look impressive, given the relative wealth of the neighborhood it was in. It was an assortment of one-story redbrick buildings. Children swarmed around the play structures in the yard; it was their lunch recess.

On her lunch break, Mrs. Hansen was grading papers in her classroom. I stepped inside and immediately felt like a giantess as I walked up through the low desks toward the larger one where Mrs. Hansen sat. She was full-breasted for a woman otherwise slightly built- I gauged her at about five-one- and wore glasses on a gold chain over her off-white shell sweater. Her blond hair was shoulder-length, cut in a flattering way close around the face. Only by looking closely could you see she was nearing 50.

“Can I help you?” Hansen said.

“I hope so,” I said. “My name is Sarah Pribek. I’m a detective, and I wanted to talk to you about a runaway I’m looking for.” I laid Marlinchen’s old photo of Aidan on her desk.

Hansen took the photo and raised her eyebrows, then furrowed them in a slightly exaggerated show of scrutiny. “Oh, my goodness, yes,” she said. “Aidan Hennessy. His little brother Donal might have been one of my students last year, but he went to Ms. Campbell instead.” She frowned. “Aidan had a sister, too. I taught her the year before. They were…” Then she broke off.

“They were supposed to advance to your class together,” I finished for her. “They’re twins, but he was held back a year. You’re not revealing anything the family didn’t share with me.”

She nodded affirmation. “That’s correct. What was the girl’s name, again? Something unusual.”

“Marlinchen,” I said.

“He and his sister would be in high school now, correct?”

“She is,” I said. “He’s been a runaway for six months.”

“Oh, my,” Hansen said. “That’s too bad.” She exaggerated her facial expressions, like adults who deal with the young often do, but the feeling underneath seemed genuine.

“You liked him?”

“Yes, I did,” she said. “A sweet boy. Not a lot of self-confidence. Didn’t raise his hand or volunteer answers.” Then she seemed to realign herself behind the desk, as for a formal Q and A with me. “I don’t know how much I can help you. He was my student some time ago. Five years.”

There was no place for me to sit. In nearly every other situation, a person with a desk has a chair on the other side for visitors. Not so with schoolteachers. I leaned back against the nearest student desk and immediately thought better of it as it began to slide away from my weight.

“He’s been living out of state for those five years,” I told her. “You’re the last teacher in this district who would have taught him. I’m just curious about what you remember.”

Hansen frowned apologetically. “Not very much,” she said. “Aidan stands out in my memory mostly because of that missing finger. I used to see it whenever he was writing at his desk, and it always gave me a little bit of a turn.”

“You must remember something more,” I encouraged her. “You said you liked him.”

Hansen played with the glasses on her chain. “Sometimes you get a”- she waffled a hand in the air-“a feeling from students. Aidan seemed old beyond his years, but that might have been because he was older than his classmates, at least when I had him. And taller.” She paused, thinking. “But he seemed ill at ease sometimes, uncomfortable around adults.”

“Do you know why?” I asked.

“He wasn’t the ablest of students; often that erodes children’s self-esteem, particularly in front of grown-ups, who kids see as authority figures who judge them on classroom achievements.” She paused. “Aidan seemed more at ease on the playground. He was athletic and confident.”

“Did he get into fights?” I asked.

Hansen smiled. “Yes, he did. Aidan was very protective of his sister and two younger brothers. Particularly the one who was bookish.”

“Liam,” I said.

“Yes, Liam. He was a mark for bullies. Aidan crossed paths with some of them.” She paused. “I should say that Aidan probably fought on his own behalf, too; he wasn’t a saint. But he wasn’t… I don’t remember him as hostile. I find it impossible to like the bullies, and I liked Aidan.”

I nodded. “Were there behavior problems beyond fighting?”

She considered. “He didn’t always do his homework.”

“He’d forget?” I asked.

Hansen shook her head. “I think he just couldn’t grasp some of the material,” she said. “As I said, he wasn’t the best of students.”

“Neither was I,” I said, smiling wryly. “Thanks for your time.”

After work, I drove out to the Hennessy house. Marlinchen was out front when I arrived, standing astride a bicycle. She waved when she heard me approach.

I wasn’t a connoisseur of bicycles, but hers was lovely: a frame painted in a metallic-tangerine color, narrow tires for speed, and drop handlebars mounted upside down, so that they curved back like ram’s horns. The effect was ruined only by a pair of bulging saddlebags, one on each side of the front wheel, making the bike look like a racing Thoroughbred pressed into packhorse duty.

“Hi,” Marlinchen said. “I just got back from the store.” The color in her cheeks was high but healthy, and there was a sheen of sweat on her face.

“You know,” I told her, “the way you have those handlebars mounted may look sexy, but you’re not going to feel so good when the end of one of them is embedded in your kidney after an accident.”

Marlinchen made a little face at me. “Don’t be such a cop,” she said. “Did you know that a lot of bike messengers don’t even have brakes on their rides anymore?”

My first thought was, Cool. But I kept my disapproving look in place, saying instead, “That’s their problem. If I were you, I’d go to wherever you get this bike worked on and have the handlebars turned back around.”

“I work on it myself,” she said, sitting on her heels to unload one of the saddlebags. “Taking it to the shop is expensive, and Dad’s useless with tools.” She set a white plastic grocery bag on the ground, then crossed to the other saddlebag.

“So you took the handlebars off, disconnected and reconnected the brakes, and everything?”

A flicker of sadness crossed her face. “Aidan and I did the handlebars together,” she said. “Just before he left.” She picked up the grocery bags.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “I wanted to bring you up to date on Aidan. There’s not much new,” I added hastily, “but I’d like to talk about some things.”

I followed her inside and to the kitchen, where she set the groceries on the counter. “Want to go on the back porch?” Marlinchen asked. “It’s nice out.”

It was a pleasantly crisp day, with recent rains having cleared all the humidity out of the air. Somewhere a power mower droned, and dandelion and cottonwood fluff rode the breezes.

“I have something for you,” I said, and took out the photo of Aidan I’d printed from my e-mail, handing it across the wooden picnic table.

“Oh, my God,” Marlinchen said. She took the piece of paper from me by the edges, as though it might break. “You were right. He does look different.”

In the photo, Aidan’s face had gained some adult length of bone and thinned a bit; the main difference between this Aidan and the 11-year-old was that this one had hair pulled back, out of sight, suggesting length.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

“It wasn’t great detective work,” I told her. “It’s a yearbook photo, that’s all.”

But I wanted to have a picture of her brother before her while we talked. It would remind her what this whole thing was about.

“I haven’t learned much,” I said. “I’ve talked to Deputy Fredericks and Pete Benjamin, and done what I can, but I’ve been kind of hobbled.”

“Because of the distance involved and the jurisdictional lines,” Marlinchen said.

“Partly,” I agreed, “but there are other problems, closer to home.”

“Like what?”

“The question I keep coming back to,” I said, “is why Aidan was sent away in the first place.”

Marlinchen shifted her weight. “It was an arrangement of convenience,” she said. “Dad just had his hands too full.”

“So you’ve said,” I told her. “So has Colm. And Liam. You’re all in agreement on this. Perfectly in agreement, as if you’d discussed it in advance.”

Marlinchen looked down, at a fingernail slightly discolored by grease from her bicycle chain. “Couldn’t that mean,” she said stiffly, “that it’s the truth?”

“Is it?” I said. “Did you know the author bio for A Rainbow at Night says that your father has four children?”

She knew, instantly, what I was talking about. “It says he lives in Minnesota with his four children,” she said quickly. “That’s technically true.” She meant that Aidan had been sent away by the time of Rainbow’s publication.

“It still makes it sound like your father has only four kids,” I said.

“Dad doesn’t even write those things,” Marlinchen said. “Somebody at his publisher does.”

“Based on information from who?” I said.

An outboard engine hummed on the lake in a bouncing rhythm, as though it were bucking waves.

“You and your brothers all say that you haven’t seen Aidan in five years,” I went on. “Not a phone call, not a letter, not a visit home for the holidays. That’s not an arrangement of convenience. That’s banishment, Marlinchen. Aidan hasn’t just been erased from your father’s bio. He’s been erased from your lives.”

Marlinchen’s color was still high, and I didn’t think it was left over from the exertion of her ride. “You’re making way too much of this,” she said. “Fostering out children used to be a common tradition. Your own father did it, you said.”

“My father was a truck driver. He was on the road the better part of the year. It’s not a comparable situation,” I said. “Did Aidan do something? Was there some reason your father thought he needed to be isolated in Illinois, and then Georgia?”

“No,” she said softly. “He didn’t do anything.” The sudden quietness of her voice was like barometric pressure dropping.

“What about your father, then?” I said. “If this wasn’t about Aidan, was it something to do with him?”

“No,” Marlinchen said, even more quietly.

“Okay, I get it,” I said. “Everybody loves everybody, and then suddenly Aidan’s sent away permanently to live with virtual strangers. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” Marlinchen said, her voice rising at last. “You’re not supposed to be psychoanalyzing my family, you’re supposed to be finding Aidan. Instead you haven’t done anything except find a yearbook photo and cast slights on my brother’s character and my father’s!”

I sat back slightly. As long as I’d known her, Marlinchen had been almost achingly polite. Now the Marlinchen who was emerging from that shell wasn’t the one I’d expected: an imperious princess, giving orders to a member of the servant class.

“You know what?” I said. “I’ve done about as well as anyone could with the constraints you’ve put on me. You want to feed me half-truths and pretend it won’t impede my search for Aidan. You’re half interested in finding Aidan and half interested in protecting your father’s image. You’ve got one foot on each horse, and you’re trying to pretend they’re running in the same direction.”

I’d expected her anger to completely boil over, but that wasn’t what happened. Some women, particularly small ones, learn to wield exquisite courtesy like a weapon. Suddenly, she seemed to draw on a reservoir of poise. When she spoke, I heard a thousand closed doors in her voice.

“I know you’ve done everything you can, Detective Pribek, and spent more time than you can afford,” she said. “I’m sure my father will want to thank you, when he’s fully recovered.”

“Marlinchen, I’m not saying that-”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I really have to put the groceries away.”

Then she was gone, the French doors closing firmly behind her.