“No. She’s-” Angie pointed through the trees. “Haven’t you been watching? They’re good for her. They’re… Christ, Devin, they love her.”
“They kidnapped her,” he said. “Were you awake for that part?”
“Devin, no. She’s…” Angie lowered her head for a moment. “If we arrest them, they’ll give Amanda back to Helene. She’ll suck the life out of her.”
He stared down at her, peered into her face, a stunned disbelief in his eyes. “Angie, listen to me. That’s a cop in there. I don’t like busting cops. But in case you’ve forgotten, that cop engineered the deaths of Chris Mullen, Pharaoh Gutierrez, and Cheese Olamon, if not implicitly, then tacitly. He ordered Lionel McCready and the two of you probably to be murdered. He’s got Broussard’s blood on his hands. He’s got Pasquale’s blood on his hands. He’s a killer.”
“But…” She looked desperately toward the house.
“But what?” Devin’s features were screwed up into a mask of anger and confusion.
“They love that girl,” Angie said.
Devin followed her gaze to the house, to Jack and Tricia Doyle, each holding one of Amanda’s hands as they swung her back and forth in the kitchen.
Devin’s face softened as he watched, and I could feel an ache invade him as a cloud crossed his face and his eyes grew wide as if opened by a breeze.
“Helene McCready,” Angie said, “will destroy that life in there. She will. You know it. Patrick, you know it.”
I looked away.
Devin took a deep breath, and his head snapped to the side as if he’d taken a punch. Then he shook his head and his eyes grew small and he turned back from the house and pressed SEND on his phone.
“No,” Angie said. “No.”
We watched as Devin held the phone to his ear and the phone on the other end rang and rang. Eventually he lowered it from his ear and pressed END.
“No one there. Sheriff’s probably out delivering the mail, a town this size.”
Angie closed her eyes, sucked in a breath.
A hawk flew over the treetops, cut the cold air with its sharp call, a piercing sound that always makes me think of sudden outrage, reaction to a fresh wound.
Devin shoved the phone in his pocket and removed his badge. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”
I turned toward the house and Angie grabbed my arm, turned me back. Her face was feral, torn, her hair falling in her eyes.
“Patrick, Patrick, no, no, no. Please, for God’s sake. No. Talk to him. We can’t do this. We can’t.”
“It’s the law, Ange.”
“It’s bullshit! It’s…it’s wrong. They love that child. Doyle’s no danger to anyone anymore.”
“Bullshit,” Oscar said.
“Who?” Angie said. “Who’s he a danger to? With Broussard dead, no one knows he was involved. He has nothing to protect. No one’s a threat to him.”
“We’re a threat!” Devin said. “You on fucking drugs?”
“Only if we do something about it,” Angie said. “If we leave this place now, never tell anyone what we know, it’s over.”
“He’s got someone else’s kid in there,” Devin said, his face an inch from hers.
She spun toward me. “Patrick, listen. Just listen. He…” She pushed at my chest. “Don’t do this. Please. Please!”
There was nothing resembling logic in her face, nothing reasonable. Just desperation and fear and wild longing. And pain. Rivers of it.
“Angie,” I said quietly, “that child does not belong to them. She belongs to Helene.”
“Helene is arsenic, Patrick. I told you that a long time ago. She’ll suck everything bright out of that girl. She’ll imprison her. She…” Tears poured down her cheeks and bubbled in the corners of her mouth, and she didn’t notice. “She’s death. You take that child out of that home, that’s what you’re sentencing her to. A long death.”
Devin looked at Oscar, then at me. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”
“Please!” The word came out of Angie at the pitch of a kettle’s whistle, and her whole face sank around it.
I put my hands on her arms. “Angie,” I said softly, “maybe you’re wrong about Helene. She’s learned. She knows she was a lousy parent. If you could have seen her the night I-”
“Fuck you,” she said, with a steel chill in her voice. She pulled her arms out of my hands and wiped the tears violently off her face. “Don’t give me that you-saw-her-and-she-looked-sad shit. Where’d you see her, Patrick? In a bar, wasn’t it? Fuck you and this ‘people learn’ bullshit. People don’t learn. People don’t change.”
She turned away from us, to fish in her bag for her cigarettes.
“It isn’t our right to judge,” I said. “It’s not-”
“Then whose right is it?” Angie said.
“Not theirs.” I pointed through the trees at the house. “Those people have chosen to judge certain people on whether they’re fit to raise children. Who gives Doyle the right to make that decision? What if he meets a kid and doesn’t like the religion he’s being raised in? What if he doesn’t like parents who are gay or black or have tattoos? Huh?”
A squall of icy anger darkened her face. “We’re not talking about that, and you know it. We’re talking about this particular case and this particular child. Don’t give me all that pampered classroom philosophizing the Jesuits taught you. You don’t have the balls to do what’s right, Patrick. None of you do. It’s that simple. You don’t have the balls.”
Oscar looked up into the trees. “Maybe we don’t.”
“Go,” she said. “Go arrest them. But I won’t watch you.” She lit the cigarette, and her back stiffened against her crutches. She placed the cigarette between her fingers and curled her hands around the grips of her crutches.
“I’ll hate all three of you for this.”
She swung the crutches forward, and we watched her back as she carried herself through the woods toward the car.
In all the time I’ve been a private detective, nothing has ever been quite so ugly or exhausting as the time I spent watching Oscar and Devin arrest Jack and Tricia Doyle in the kitchen of their home.
Jack didn’t even put up a fight. He sat in the chair by the kitchen table, shaking. He wept, and Tricia scratched at Oscar as he pulled Amanda from her arms, and Amanda screamed and batted Oscar with her fists and cried, “No, Grandma! No! Don’t let him take me! Don’t let him!”
The sheriff answered Devin’s second call and pulled up the drive a few minutes later. He walked into the kitchen with a confused look on his face as Amanda lay limp in Oscar’s arms and Tricia held Jack’s head to her abdomen, rocked him as he wept.
“Oh, my God,” Tricia Doyle whispered, her eyes open to the end of their life with Amanda, the end of freedom, the end of everything.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered again, and I found myself wondering if He heard her, if He heard Amanda whimper against Oscar’s chest, Devin reading Jack his rights; if He heard anything at all.
EPILOGUE
The Mother and Child Reunion
The Mother and Child Reunion, as the headline of the News called it the next morning, was transmitted live at 8:05 P.M. EST, on all local channels on the evening of April 7.
