After escorting their new interview subject into Charles Butler’s private office, Riker sat down in an armchair beside the librarian from Maine.
Mallory regretted agreeing to second chair in this interview. Out in the hallway, her partner had argued that little old ladies were his forte, that they loved him on sight. This might well be true, but Susan McReedy was not little, nor did she look all that old, and she could probably take Riker down in two falls out of three.
Riker began with small talk and offers of coffee or tea. The woman from Maine tapped one shoe, barely tolerating this waste of her time. Off his game today, he had missed the other signs of her fidgeting fingers and lips pressed tight. He compounded his error by pausing a beat too long to allow her the full impact of his widest smile. Miss McReedy did not respond in kind. Her mouth dipped down on one side, and now both shoes tapped the floor with irritation. This baffled him. He must wonder what foot he had put wrong.
So obvious.
„You’re sure I can’t get you a cup of coffee?“
The woman only glared at him, finding him suspicious because of his engaging grin – too quick and easy, too professionally charming.
Mallory had a cure for excess charm.
She rose from the couch and moved into that narrow area between their chairs, too close to allow this woman any personal space – and closer. She put her hands on the arms of Miss McReedy’s chair and bent low until their eyes were level. Closer. „So your father was a cop? Was he a lousy cop? Didn’t he raise you right?“ Every inflection dropped out of her tone, and each word had equal weight when she said, „I – am – the – law. I don’t have time to mess with you. Start talking.“
Though Susan McReedy never twitched or blinked, she did smile in approval. „You want the whole story, or just the salient points?“
Riker stood up, conceding his chair to the new champion of senior-citizen interviews, and Mallory sat down, saying, „I want everything you’ve got on the red-haired girl. Don’t leave anything out.“
„All right. The girl’s hair wasn’t red the first time I saw her. It was shoe-polish black – dyed and cut real short.“ Miss McReedy had lost her edge, almost mellowing as she described the night, fifty-eight years ago, when two local boys had seen the yellow stalks of headlights beaming up beyond the rim of a bottomless quarry pool. „The car was hung up on an outcrop of rocks twenty feet below the rim, just hanging there, smashed to bits, all turned around and ready to fall another fifty feet to the water. When Dad and the neighbors got to the lip of the quarry, it looked like it was going down any second. There were six flashlights altogether, all aiming straight down through a broken windshield, and they could see the girl plain as day. So much blood. The twisted metal pinned her down on the passenger side. It was a sheer drop between the edge of the rock face and that car.“
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.“