seem as frightening as men’s prison. But still… she was a criminal now. There was no changing that. Even if she were never a suspect, she would always be a fugitive.
A seven-minute walk from her condo to the beach. It wasn’t getting cold anymore, it was cold, especially after dark, but people were still here, walking north and south along the waterline. Older couples – empty-nesters – and because it was Friday, teens. Underdressed high school kids with their hands in each other’s back pockets. Rollerbladers. Desperate dogs and their owners, home late. Northwestern students up the shore a few miles from campus for who knows why, sneaking beers, tossing Frisbees.
Sitting in the hard, damp sand in a pair of old jeans and a heavy Cal Bears sweatshirt to pull over her knees, Joan felt safe here. Anonymous. No one could call her with bad news or knock on her door. When she was here, alone as far as the rest of the world was concerned – the police, Davis Moore, the Congressional Board of Oversight – Joan Burton didn’t exist.
She was angry with Davis for keeping the truth about Justin from her, and then she was mad at him for telling her. For involving her. But she was doing the right thing, she knew. Davis should never have done what he did – it was an inexcusable breach of ethics, honestly – but she could only deal with the situation as it was. What did the army call it? The facts on the ground. That’s what she was working with, the facts on the ground. Nothing would be served by sending Davis to prison and endangering Justin’s life. What else could she do but look after the welfare of the child? Her patient.
Joan had another reason to do everything she could to find AK’s killer: she might have been able to prevent her murder.
“Hey.”
A pair of guys, boys actually, were standing over her, but at a respectful distance. She guessed they were college kids, but it was getting harder to tell. They looked so young. They could be in high school for all she knew.
“Hey,” she said.
One of the boys said, “I dropped my keys. We were just looking for them.”
They were good-looking, broad-shouldered, and square-jawed – athletes, she guessed. But they hadn’t lost their keys. They were flirting.
“You haven’t seen them anywhere, have you?”
She laughed. “In the sand? In the dark?”
“We’re pretty much screwed, aren’t we?”
She nodded. They paused. She wondered if they knew how old she was. If they were as bad at gauging her age as she was at guessing theirs. If in the dark she looked good enough to be a student. A hot college girl. Maybe. In the dark. Joan didn’t say anything.
“We’ll see you around,” one of the boys said finally, and they moved on down the beach, pushing each other, joshing with each other, not looking for their keys.
As brief as it had been, as inconsequential, the attention should have made her feel better. It would have before all this. It didn’t.
A few months before she died, Anna Kat had come to see Joan at the office. Her father was away at a conference, preaching to the converted on the virtues of new fertility techniques.
“I have a problem,” AK said. “About a boy.”
She didn’t call him by name, although Joan knew AK had been seeing a kid named Dan. He’d dropped by with her one day to see her dad, and Joan, never missing a vicarious opportunity to relive her mostly enjoyable high school days, snuck a peek and found him, well, okay, she supposed. He was a little on the thin side, a little bit smug, a little heavy-lidded, a little ordinary. Joan didn’t know what the selection was like at Northwood East, but she was pretty sure AK should have been out of Dan’s league.
“He hurts me,” Anna Kat told her. “And I’m afraid I like it.”
“Like it?” Joan asked.
AK put her hands over her eyes. “No. Not exactly. God, this is embarrassing. I mean, I don’t enjoy it. But the fact that I don’t enjoy it doesn’t keep me away.”
“Is he really such a prize?” Joan asked.
“That’s just the thing. No. I don’t even like him, really. It’s so hard to explain.” When Joan at last looked into AK’s red eyes she understood how desperate she really felt. “It’s like, a few months ago I went to this party and got pretty smashed-”
Joan painted her a requisite but unconvincing frown.
“Whatever. I don’t even drink that much,” AK said. “In fact, the morning after that party I swore I was never going to drink again. Two weeks later, though… somebody offered me a beer and it was as if I forgot it ever happened. Things with… with this guy, it’s kind of like that. I tell him things have to change, they don’t change, but I act like I don’t care.”
Joan had wondered why AK had come to her, given all the things her mother had no doubt been saying about her around their house. Jackie had made it very clear to Joan’s face that she didn’t like her. She could only imagine what was said behind her back. Joan supposed she was younger than a lot of adults AK knew. And she was single. And a doctor. Maybe that still counted for something with some people.
And maybe, just maybe, someone else in the Moore house had been painting a different picture of her. One could hope.
On the beach, nine years later, she was disappointed in her advice to Anna Kat. She hadn’t had the guts to tell her own story of sexual assault, and since the day AK was killed, Joan had wished that she had. Instead, she told her to be true to herself. The fact that AK was coming to her at all was evidence that something wasn’t right about her relationship with D – with this guy. More than anything, Joan said, think about what your dad would want for you. He loves you so much, AK. And even if this isn’t something you can talk to him about – and no, I don’t suppose it is – keep his counsel close. Keep his love in your heart always.
“But you won’t tell him?”
“No, I won’t tell him.”
“No matter what happens?”
More than any other, that remark had haunted Joan. No matter what happens? From the moment she said it, Joan wondered what AK could have meant, and when she heard the news of her murder, Anna Kat’s plaintive voice came tumbling back into the fore of her mind and she was sick, just sick about it. Had AK really known she was in danger? Was she begging Joan to rescue her? Joan didn’t see Davis in the days after the murder and was going to tell him about their conversation as soon as she could, but then she heard the police had cleared Dan, the ordinary boyfriend, with a DNA test, and she decided to keep her pact of silence. For almost a decade, AK’s words had been a mystery, and Joan still wondered if there wasn’t something she could have done to protect her. If only she hadn’t kept the promise she’d made to Anna Kat that day.
“No matter what happens,” Joan had said.
So there was more than one kind of guilt gnawing away at Joan as she sat on the dark, wet beach, indifferent to coy come-ons from college boys feeling out a North Shore Friday night.
Of course, there might have been an explanation other than guilt for her sleeplessness, her nervousness, her uneasiness, her sweatiness .
She was in love.
Justin at Seven
– 26 -
Justin let himself in with the key the Barkers had given his parents before leaving for Spain. The Barkers’ dog, Austin, three quarters as high as Justin was tall, padded silently to him, and Justin consumed a few minutes petting him in a gentle, repetitive motion between his neck and the curve of his back, with the hand that was not holding the gray plastic bucket. Austin probably spent as much time in Justin’s yard as he did in his own, and although this was the third time the boy had been in the house when the Barkers were away, it never occurred to the dog to bark
