Over the years, in case after case, Dr. Birdy Waterman would hear similar statements from the convicted, but never would they be so personal, so directed at her ears. Tommy had been family. When he went away to Walla Walla, his disappearance caused a rift between sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. No one who lived on that part of the Makah reservation was ever the same. People didn’t talk about it. Ever.
Birdy watched a squirrel as it zipped up the craggy bark of a towering Douglas fir. A hawk flew overhead. The wind found its way through the evergreen canopy. The land all around her was as it had been when she was a girl. The place, she knew, should feel like home. But it didn’t. It never could. A place where one feels unwelcome can never feel like home. Thinking of Tommy, Anna Jo, the trial, her mother, she wondered if there would ever be a way to fix any of it.
She walked back to her car and drove over to her sister Summer’s brand-new mobile home, but no one was there. Same at her brother Ricky’s place-a small wood frame house that he’d built himself. She decided not to let it pass through her mind that they’d avoided her on purpose. She was their sister-their blood. They had to love her too, didn’t they?
It was dark when she returned to the bungalow on Beach Drive. Birdy had driven all the way through with only a single stop for gas in Port Angeles. It was after nine when she finally pulled up. Too dark, she thought, to feed the neighbor’s cat as she’d promised to do while they were away in Hawaii downing rum-infused tropical drinks-a prospect that seemed more than appealing right then. Birdy made a mental note to get up extra early to feed Jinx before the Coopers got home and found out that their next-door neighbor was an untrustworthy cat sitter.
Knowing Pat and Donna Frickey, there could be no crime worse.
Birdy took a beer from the refrigerator and a package of chicken-flavored Top Ramen from the cupboard. She took a drink from the bottle and unwrapped the ramen with no intention of cooking the noodles. She ate it dry, like a big fat brick of crispiness-a habit she’d acquired growing up on the reservation and having to make do with a package of the Asian dried noodles for two out of three meals of the day.
The message light on her answering machine caught her eye. There were three messages. She pushed PLAY.
Birdy sighed and pushed DELETE.
Then next message came from her mother, probably just after her visit.
The word “love” came out of her mother’s mouth in a cough. The voice message was so like her mother that it brought a smile to Birdy’s face. While Natalie Waterman hadn’t invented passive-aggressive behavior, few would dispute that she had perfected it.
The last message sent a chill through Birdy’s bones.
The voice was unfamiliar. Birdy played it again. It was hard to determine if the caller was male or female. It was breathy and soft, the kind of voice that required concentration in order to fully comprehend.
She scrolled back on the caller ID function of her machine. The call had come from a pay phone at the tribal center-which wasn’t much of a surprise. After telegraph, tele-native was the fastest mode of communication known to man. Someone from the Makahs had heard from her mother that she was going to see Tommy, and not only that, they didn’t want her to.
Not at all.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tommy was barely forty, but he looked closer to sixty. Maybe even older. If DOC Inmate 44435-099 had once been the most handsome boy on the reservation, years behind bars-more years than he’d lived free-had stolen that from him. It wasn’t merely that his jet-black hair had receded or that his once-clear skin was now loose and somewhat sallow. His eyes nestled in dark hollows. It was also obvious from across the poorly lit visitation room that whatever charisma he’d had, whatever inner light had radiated through him, was gone.
Birdy Waterman almost had to steady herself when she saw Tommy. While she realized that two decades had come and gone, she hadn’t expected Tommy to look so old. Certainly in her job, she’d been around prisons and jails all her adult life. Most inmates seemed to make the best of their time on the inside by pumping iron in the yard. There wasn’t much else to do. They looked like health-club regulars. Tommy, by contrast, seemed alarmingly frail.
She walked toward him, quickly so as not to show any hesitation. He was, after all, family.
Tommy, in a dingy gray T-shirt and off-brand dungarees that seemed a size too big for him, stood to greet her. “You look almost the same,” he said, a broad smile of recognition coming over his face. It was disarming, the way she remembered Tommy Freeland could be.
Tommy nodded for her to sit, and Birdy slid into a bolted-to-the-floor steel frame chair. “You too. But you’re a liar,” she added, trying to hide her obvious surprise.
Tommy eyed her, taking in everything. It was a fast and unequivocal search, the kind of once-over that an inmate might employ to figure out that instant of life or death in the laundry room, in deciding who to trust.
“Well, you have filled out,” he said. “Not in a bad way. But you know, you’re no longer Birdy Legs.”
Birdy’s face reddened. No one had called her that in eons, and it made her feel good. It was funny how the mention of a once-hated nickname elicited fond memories. Back on the reservation it had been a nickname meant to torment her. Time changes everything.
“Thanks,” she said, changing the subject. “I’m glad you asked me to come.”
He frowned slightly. “You were never
“That isn’t fair,” she said.
“Well, from my knothole, there isn’t anything about the last twenty years that has been particularly fair.”
Birdy nodded. There was no arguing that.
“Do you want a pop or something? I brought quarters,” she said offering up her Ziploc bag of quarters.
Tommy smiled. Actually, it was not really a smile, but a kind of grimace. “No. I’m good. I’ve learned to do without. You know, without friends, family. Pretty much without a life. A lot of people played a part in making that happen.”
He left those words to dangle in the air of the visiting room.
“I didn’t lie,” Birdy said, her tone more defensive than she’d intended.
Tommy leaned back and crossed his arms. As he did, Birdy noticed a series of jagged scars, some faint, others far more recent. Her eyes hovered over the scars, but she didn’t remark on them.
“No,” he said, biting off his words. “You saw what you saw, but God, Birdy, you know
“Why didn’t you say so?” she asked, though she knew he had. At least to her. He had told her on that sodden trail just after it happened.
“You mean take the stand to testify? Like anyone would believe an unemployed drug user like me? That would have been pretty useless, don’t you think?”
