Riker interrupted her, leaning in, asking, „How did your dad read the scene that night? Did he take it for an accident?“
Susan McReedy turned to Mallory with a raised eyebrow to ask if this interruption was necessary. Mallory only stared at her in silence, and the woman took this for an affirmative.
„My father had two different theories, two years apart. That night, he figured it for an accident. The quarry pool was a good place to lose a car – a body, too – but leaving the headlights on would defeat that purpose, wouldn’t it? Now the door on the driver side hung open and angled down toward the water. So he figured the driver – Dad was guessing a teenage boy – ten wrecks out of ten were teenagers – well, he thought the driver must’ve dropped into the pool and drowned. That was assuming the crash didn’t kill him first. You could expect a corpse to bloat up with gas and rise to the surface after a while, but that one never did.“
Mallory made a rolling motion with one hand to move the story back on track.
„Well, a sheer drop like that one, you’d need a rope to get down to where the car was. Dad and my uncle were rock-climbing fools. They had all the gear in the trunks of their cars, and pretty soon, both of them were rappelling down that rock wall by the light of the neighbors’ flashlights. They worked for hours to free the girl from that car. One wrong move, the car would drop and the girl would be lost. Nothing has ever come out of that pool – except bloated dead bodies, animals mostly, and a few suicide jumpers.“
„All the while they worked, they did a balancing act to keep the car from teetering off that outcrop of rock. Hooked their own lifelines onto the metal. They could’ve died that night. They didn’t care. They were going to carry that girl out if it killed them both to do it.“
„So the ambulance crew lowered the stretcher, then Dad and Uncle Henry strapped her in. After they hauled her up, the ambulance driver took one look at that poor broken girl and told my dad she’d never make it. Well, Dad climbed into that ambulance and rode with her to the hospital, talking to her all the while, demanding that she survive. And she did. But it was a few years before she was mended. It was one operation after another. She was real brave – all that pain – years of it.“
Riker asked, „What about the car?“
„It fell into the quarry pool. Dad and his brother were on the way up when the car went down. It was that close.“
„So your dad never traced the car?“
„No need. He knew whose car it was while he was still up on the rim. It was stolen from my uncle’s parking lot. Uncle Henry had a little restaurant, the only one for miles around.“
Riker exchanged looks with Mallory.
„I know what you’re thinking,“ said Miss McReedy, „but you’re getting ahead of the story. You said every detail, right? Well, Dad figured the girl was at least eighteen if not older, full grown. She was a tall one. So that’s what he put in his report. If the doctors thought different they never said, or maybe they just couldn’t tell. She was so smashed up, poor thing. No part of her was whole. And she could never tell Dad anything helpful, not her name or who the driver was, nothing at all. The hospital called her Jane Doe. We called her our Jane. She lived at our house between hospital stays. Dad could never quite let go of that girl until the day he died, and his brother felt the same way. The three of them were forever tied together in a way that wasn’t quite like family. In some ways, it was a closer bond. I know that sounds odd.“
„I understand it,“ said Riker.
Mallory knew she had missed something important here, but she let it slide away, for it had nothing to do with her case.
Susan McReedy was less annoyed with Riker when he asked about her father’s second theory. „I’m getting to that,“ she said. „The poor girl had gone through four operations before she was off the crutches for good. Then she wanted to earn her own keep. Two years had gone by. We thought she was at least twenty years old by then.“
The woman reached down and pulled a paperback book from the carpetbag at her feet. „But I guess we all know better now. She was only twelve when we found her. Isn’t that right?“ Miss McReedy turned from Mallory to Riker. Her expression was almost a challenge to contradict her. She was satisfied by their silence and continued. „So she was just fourteen years old when my uncle gave her that little apartment over the restaurant. I wish that we had known she was just a little girl.“
The woman stared at her shoes, overcome by sadness. Mallory and Riker kept their silence.
„Everyone admired our Jane for working in the restaurant – so public and all. Customers tended to stare at her in all the wounded places that showed, but she soldiered on. Looked them all right in the eye as if her face were normal, good as theirs. That’s when we came to believe she was really on the mend.“
Mallory stared at the cover illustration of the book in the woman’s hand. It was a reproduction of the Red Winter painting. A store receipt stood for a bookmark. This woman had only recently worked it all out.
„I guess,“ said Susan McReedy, „I can put one thing and another together pretty well. First that New York author calls me a few years back. And then Mr. Butler – the same questions.“ The librarian held up the book when she said, „I’m sure you guessed – our Jane didn’t look anything like this on the night of the accident – or anytime after that. Her face was broken, nose, cheekbones, her jaw – and that child’s legs. Oh, Lord. They rebuilt her with steel pins and sewing needles.“
Susan McReedy paused, but not to any dramatic effect. She was having difficulty going on with her story, and she had not yet come to the most important part. Riker was leaning forward to interrupt one more time. Mallory glared at him to warn him off.
„So one day, all of us were going up to Bangor to see my grandma. But Jane wanted to stay behind. Well, my uncle closed the restaurant that weekend, and he guessed the girl wanted to spend her free time reading. Always had her nose in a book, that one – a habit she picked up in the hospital, I guess.“
„Two days later, we came home and found her in that little apartment over the restaurant. She was sitting on her bedroom floor beside a dead body – a man with an ice pick in his chest. Flies everywhere, but our Jane didn’t seem to notice them – or him, either. She ‘d gone all the way crazy. Just rocking back and forth. I don’t think she could hear us when we spoke to her.“
It was all too clear that Miss McReedy was seeing that tableau again, fresh as yesterday’s blood and blowflies.
„And your dad,“ said Riker, „how did he read that crime scene?“
„It was obvious. The man she’d killed – he’d broken into her place. No doubt about it. He broke down the bedroom door to get at her. It was off its damn hinge. She must’ve been so frightened.“
„And,“ said Mallory, „she just happened to keep an ice pick in her bedroom.“
„Yes, and that was the saddest part. That nearly killed my father. And that’s how he put the whole thing together.“ She fell silent for a moment.
„So that’s when he worked out his second theory,“ said Riker, gently prompting her.
Susan McReedy nodded. „It was an old ice pick he found in the dead man’s chest. The painted handle was flaking. It used to be in Uncle Henry’s restaurant. He told Dad he tossed it out just after our Jane moved in upstairs. The girl must have found it in the trash and kept it all that time. Dad saw flakes of that same color paint on the underside of her pillowcase. And that’s how he knew, for all that time, she’d gone to sleep every night with that pick underneath her pillow. All that time she’d been waiting for that man, the one who’d left her for dead at the quarry. She’d been waiting for him to come back and finish her off.“