The Good Girl (9 page)

Gabe
Before

I’m standing in the midst of the Dennetts’ kitchen. Mrs. Dennett hovers over the sink, scraping away the remains of a pork dinner. I see the judge’s plate licked clean, and hers still sports a tenderloin and a pile of peas. The woman is wasting away before my very eyes. The water runs hot, steam spewing forth into the room, though her hands are immersed in it and seem blind to the heat. She scrubs at the china with a ferocity I’ve never seen in a woman washing dishes.

We stand before the island in the center of the kitchen. No one offers me a seat. It’s a swank kitchen with walnut cabinets and granite countertops. The appliances are all stainless steel, including
two
ovens for which my Italian mother would give an arm and a leg. I imagine Thanksgiving without the drama of how to keep everything warm until dinnertime, no tears when my dad mentioned the potatoes were a tad bit cold.

There’s an image of a man set on the island before the judge and me. It’s a forensic sketch, one that our artist down at the station constructed with the help of that waitress.

“So this is the man? This is the man who has my daughter?” Eve Dennett had cried as I slipped the sketch from a manila folder. Already she was in tears. She turned her back on the conversation and tried to lose herself in washing the dishes, crying quietly over the sound of running water.

“Mia was seen last Tuesday night with this man,” I respond, though by that time her back is facing my direction. The image before us is one of a rough man. His appearance makes him seem lowbred, but it’s not as though he resembles the masked men in horror films. He’s just not of Dennett stature. Neither am I.

“And?” Judge Dennett implores.

“And we think he might be involved in her disappearance.”

He stands on the opposite side of the island, sporting a suit equal in value to two or three months’ worth my salary. His tie is undone and tossed over a shoulder. “Is there any proof Mia didn’t go willingly with this man?”

“Well,” I say, “no.”

The judge is drinking already. Tonight’s drink of choice: scotch on the rocks. I think he might be drunk. There’s a slight slur in his speech and he has the hiccups.

“Suppose Mia is just off monkeying around with him. What then?”

He talks to me like I’m an idiot. But I remind myself that I’m the one in charge. I’m the one with the shiny badge. I’m leading this investigation. Not him.

“Judge Dennett, it’s been eight days since the investigation began,” I state. “Nine since Mia was last seen. According to co-workers, she rarely missed work. According to
your
wife, this behavior—shiftlessness, irresponsibility—is not in sync with Mia’s character.”

He sips from the scotch and sets it down too quickly on the island. Eve jumps from the sound. “Of course, there’s the disorderly conduct. Trespassing and vandalism. Possession of marijuana,” he says and then, to piss me off, adds, “to name just a few.” The expression on his face is complacent, holier-than-thou. I stare at him, unable to comment. I despise his bravado.

“I checked the police records,” I say. “There was nothing on Mia.” In fact her record was squeaky clean. Not even a speeding ticket.

“Well, there wouldn’t be, now would there?” he asks and I understand: he made them disappear. He excuses himself long enough to get a refill. Mrs. Dennett is still scrubbing away at the dishes. I stray to the sink and nudge the faucet toward cold so the poor woman’s hands will no longer burn.

She glances at me, taken aback, as if she just caught the first whiff of burning flesh and whispers, “I should have told you,” her eyes filling with sadness.
Yes,
I think,
you should have told me,
but I bite my tongue as she goes on. “I wish I could say he was in denial. I wish I could say he was so overcome with grief that he’s refusing to believe Mia is really gone.”

Judge Dennett returns just in time to overhear the last few words of his wife’s confession. It’s quiet in the room and for a split second I brace myself for the wrath of God. But there’s none of it; it doesn’t come.

“This behavior of Mia’s isn’t as unexpected as you’ve led the detective to believe, now is it, Eve?” he asks.

“Oh, James,” she cries. She’s drying her hands on a tea towel when she says, “That was years ago. She was in high school. She made her fair share of mistakes. But that was
years
ago.”

“And what do you know of
this
Mia, Eve? It’s been years since we’ve had a relationship with our daughter. We hardly know her anymore.”

“And you, Your Honor,” I say, to take Mrs. Dennett off the hot seat. I hate the way he stares at her, his eyes making her feel stupid. “What do you know of this Mia? Any misdemeanors that have recently been expunged from her record?” I ask. “Traffic citations? Prostitution? Public intoxication?” I don’t have to think twice as to why her youthful transgressions disappeared from the record. “That wouldn’t look good for the Dennett name, now would it? And this whole thing—
if
Mia is out there screwing around at the end of the investigation,
if
she’s perfectly fine and just out for a good time, that doesn’t look good, either, does it?”

I watch the news; I’m generally up on politics. This November Judge Dennett is up for reelection.

And yet I find myself wondering if Mia’s misconduct is limited to her youth alone, or if there’s more to it than that.

“You’d better watch yourself,” the judge warns, but in the background, Eve whimpers, “
Prostitution?
James?” Though it was never anything more than a hypothetical.

He ignores her. I suppose we both do.

“I’m just trying to find your daughter,” I say. “Because maybe she is off doing something stupid. But consider for a minute that maybe she’s not. Just think about it. What then? I’m certain you’ll be asking for my badge if she winds up dead.”

“James,” his wife hisses. She’s nearly in tears from my use of
daughter
and
dead
in the same sentence.

“Let me get this straight, Hoffman,” he says to me. “You find my daughter and you bring her home. Alive. You just make sure you cover your bases because there’s more to Mia than meets the eye,” he concludes and, with that, takes his scotch and walks out of the room.

Colin
Before

I catch her staring at herself in the bathroom mirror. She doesn’t recognize the reflection: the wiry hair and dowdy skin, the bruises that are beginning to heal. They’re yellow now with gaps between instead of bulging and purple.

When she comes from the bathroom, I’m waiting for her. I’m leaned against the frame of the door. She steps out and bumps into me, staring at me, like some beast hovering over her, stealing her air. “I wasn’t going to hit you,” I say, reading her thoughts, but she doesn’t speak.

I brush a cold hand across her cheek. She winces and pulls back, away from my touch. “It’s better,” I say about the bruises.

She moves past me and walks away.

I don’t know how many days we do this. I’ve lost track. I tried to remember when it was Monday and when it was Tuesday. Eventually the days began to blur. Every day is the same. She lies in bed until I make her get up. We force down breakfast. Then she sits on a chair she pulls up to the window. She stares outside. Thinks. Daydreams. Longs to be anywhere but here.

I’m thinking all the time about how to get out of here. I’ve got enough cash to catch a flight somewhere and then it will be gone. But of course I don’t have a passport on me, so the farthest I can go is Tecate or Calexico, California, but the only way I’m getting out of the country is if I hire a coyote or swim across the Rio Grande. But getting myself out of the country is only half the problem. It’s everything else I can’t quite figure out. I pace the cabin, wondering how in the hell I’m gonna get myself out of this mess, knowing I’m safe here, for now, but the longer we hide out, the longer
I
hide out, the worse it’s gonna be.

We have rules, spoken and unspoken. She’s not to touch my shit. We use only one square of toilet paper at a time. We air-dry when at all possible. We use as little soap as possible so we don’t reek of B.O. We can’t let things go to waste. We don’t open windows. Not that we can anyway. If we run into someone around the cabin, she’s Chloe, I tell her. Never Mia. In fact she might as well forget that was ever her name.

She gets her period and we learn the literal interpretation for being
on the rag.
I see the blood in a garbage bag and ask, “What the fuck is this?” I’m sorry I ask. We collect our garbage in some white plastic bags that got left behind. From time to time we drive and drop them off in a Dumpster behind some lodge, late at night when we’re certain no one will see. She asks why we don’t just leave them outside. I ask if she wants to be eaten by a fucking bear.

There’s a chill from the window, but the heat from the stove helps keep us warm. The days are getting shorter. Night falls earlier and earlier until darkness takes over the cabin. There is electricity, but I don’t want to draw attention to us. I only turn on a small lamp at night. The bedroom becomes nothing but blackness. At night, she lays and listens to the silence. She waits for me to appear from the shadows and end her life.

But during the day she sits beside the drafty window. She watches the leaves tumble to the ground. Outside the earth is covered in decaying leaves. Nothing remains to block the lake’s view. Fall is almost over now. We’re so far north we can touch Canada. We’re lost in an uninhabited world surrounded by nothing but wilderness. She knows it as well as I do. That’s why I brought her here. Right now, the only thing of concern is bears. But then again, bears hibernate in the winter. Soon they will all be asleep. And then the only concern will be freezing to death.

We don’t talk much. It’s all of necessity—
lunch is ready; I’m taking a bath; where are you going? I’m going to bed.
There are no casual exchanges. Everything is mute. We can hear every noise for lack of conversation: a stomach growl, a cough, a swallow, the wind howling outside the cabin at night, deer passing through the leaves. And then there are the imagined sounds: car tires on gravel, footsteps on the stairs leading up to the cabin, voices.

She probably wishes they were real so she didn’t have to wait anymore. The fear is certain to kill her.

Eve
Before

The first time I laid eyes on James, I was eighteen years old, in the United States with some girlfriends. I was young and naive, and mesmerized with the enormity of Chicago, the sense of freedom that had crawled under my skin the moment us girls boarded the airplane. We were country girls, used to small villages of only a few thousand people, an agrarian lifestyle, a community that was generally narrow-minded and conventional. And suddenly we were whisked away to a new world, dropped in the middle of a roaring metropolis, and at first glance, I was swept off my feet. I was in love.

It was Chicago that first seduced me, all the promises it had to offer. These immense buildings, the millions of people, the confidence they carried in the way they walked, in the steadfast expressions on their faces when they strut across the busy streets. It was 1969. The world as we knew it was changing, but truly, I couldn’t have cared less. I wasn’t caught up in all that. I was enraptured with my own existence, as is to be expected when one is eighteen: the way men would look at me, the way I felt in a miniskirt, much shorter than my mother would have ever approved. I was dreadfully inexperienced, desperate to be a woman and no longer a child.

What waited for me at home, in rural England, had been fated by my birth: I’d marry one of the boys I’d known my entire life, one of the boys who, in primary school, pulled my hair or called me names. It was no secret that Oliver Hill wanted to marry me. He’d been asking since he was twelve years old. His father was a rector in the Anglican Church, his mother the kind of homemaker I vowed never to be: one who obeyed her husband as if his command was the word of God.

James was older than me, which was exciting; he was cosmopolitan and brilliant. His stories were impassioned; people hung on to every last word out of his mouth, whether he was talking about politics or the weather. It was summer where I first saw him at a restaurant in the Loop, sitting around a large circular table with a group of friends. His voice boomed over the sounds of the restaurant, and you couldn’t help but listen. He drew you in with his poise and presumption, with his vehement tone. All around him, eyes waited expectantly for the punch line of some joke, then everyone—friends and strangers alike—laughed until they cried. A few broke out in applause. They all seemed to know his name, those dining at other tables, the restaurant staff. From across the room, the bartender called out, “Another round, James?” and within minutes, pitchers of beer filled the table.

I couldn’t help but stare.

I wasn’t alone. My girlfriends, too, ogled him. The women at his table weren’t hesitant to touch him when they could: a hug, a pat on the arm. One woman, a brunette with hair that stretched to her waistline, leaned close to share a secret: anything to be close to him. He was more confident than any man I’d ever seen.

He was in law school at the time. That I’d later learn, the following morning when I woke up beside him in bed. My girlfriends and I weren’t old enough to drink, and so it was apparently my infatuation that was responsible for my reckless abandon that night: the way I found myself sitting beside him at his round table; the gluttonous expression on the woman with the long hair as he draped an arm around my shoulder; the way James fawned over my British accent as if it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

James was different then, not the man he’s become over time. His faults were much more endearing, his bravado charming instead of the unpleasant way it’s grown to be. He was a master at flattery long before his choice words became insulting and ugly. There was a time in our lives when we were happy, completely bewitched by the other, when we couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves. But that man, the one I married, has completely disappeared.

I call Detective Hoffman first thing in the morning, after James has left for work. I waited, as I always do, until I heard the garage door close, his SUV make its way down our drive, before emerging from bed, where I stood in the midst of our kitchen with my mug of coffee, the face of that man who has Mia engraved in my mind’s eye. I stared at the clock, watched as the minute hand crawled its way around the circle and when 8:59 gave way to nine o’clock, I dialed the numbers that are becoming more familiar with each passing day.

He answers the phone, his voice professional and authoritarian as he announces, “Detective Hoffman.” I imagine him at the police station; I hear the bustle of people in the background, dozens of officers trying to solve other people’s problems for them.

It takes me a moment to gather myself and I say to him, “Detective, this is Eve Dennett.”

His voice loses its edge as he says my name. “Mrs. Dennett. Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

I envision him standing in our kitchen last night; I see the vacant look on his kindhearted face when James told him about Mia’s past. He left in a hurry. I hear him slam the front door over and over again in my mind. I hadn’t attempted to withhold a thing about Mia from Detective Hoffman. To me, in all honesty, her past behavior didn’t matter. But the last thing I need is for the detective to have misgivings about me. He’s my only link to Mia.

“I had to call,” I say. “I had to explain.”

“About last night?” he asks and I say yes.

“You don’t need to.”

But I do anyway.

Mia’s teenage years were difficult, to say the least. She wanted so desperately to fit in. She wanted to be independent. She was impulsive—driven by desire—and lacking in common sense. Her friends made her feel accepted, whereas her family did not. Amongst her peers, she was popular, she was
wanted,
and for Mia, this was a natural high. Her peers made her feel like she was on top of the world; there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her friends.

“Maybe Mia fell into the wrong group of friends,” I say. “Maybe I should have been more vigilant about whom she was spending her time with. What I noticed was that B-plus book reports more commonly became C-minus papers, and she no longer studied at the kitchen table after school, but retreated to her bedroom, where she shut and locked the door.”

Mia was in the midst of an identity crisis. There was a part of her desperately yearning for adulthood, and yet the rest of her remained a child, unable to think and reason like she would later in life. She was often frustrated and thought little of herself. James’s insensitivity only made things worse. He compared her to Grace relentlessly, about how Grace, now in her twenties and away at college—his alma mater, of course—was going to graduate magna cum laude; about how she was taking courses in Latin and debate in preparation for law school, to which she’d already been accepted.

Initially her misbehavior was typical teenage slips: talking out in class, not completing her homework. She rarely invited friends to our house. When she was picked up by friends, Mia would meet them on the drive and when I peeked out the window for a glance, she’d stop me.
What?
she’d ask with a harsh tone that had once belonged only to Grace.

She was fifteen when we caught her sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. It was the first of many escapes. She’d forgotten to turn off the house alarm and so, in the midst of her escape, the house began to scream.

“She’s a juvenile delinquent,” James said.

“She’s a teenager,” I amended, watching as she climbed into a car parked at the end of our drive, not bothering to look back as the alarms blared and James cursed the darn thing, trying to remember our password.

Image meant everything to James. It always had. He’d always been worried about his reputation, about what people would think or say about him. His wife had to be a trophy wife. He told me this before we were married, and in some crooked way, I’d been happy to fill that role. I didn’t ask what it meant when he stopped inviting me to work dinners, when his children no longer needed to attend firm Christmas parties. When he became a judge it was as if we didn’t exist at all.

So one can imagine the way James felt when the local police dragged a sloppy, drunken sixteen-year-old girl home from a party, and he, in his robe, stood at our front door all but begging the police to keep this under wraps.

He screamed at her even though she was so sick she could barely hold her own head over the toilet while she vomited. He bellowed about how insatiable reporters
love
this kind of thing: Teenage Daughter of Judge Dennett Cited with Underage Drinking.

Of course it never made the paper. James made sure of that. He spent an arm and a leg making sure that Mia’s name never graced the pages of the local paper, not this time or the next. Not when she and her unruly friends attempted to steal a bottle of tequila from the local liquor store, not when she and these same friends were caught smoking pot in a parked car behind a strip mall off Green Bay Road.

“She’s a teenager,” I said to James. “This is what they do.”

But even I wasn’t so sure. Grace, with all her difficulties, had never been in trouble with the law. I had never had so much as a speeding ticket, and here was Mia, spending time in a holding cell at the local precinct while James begged and blackmailed local law enforcement not to press charges or to have allegations removed from her record. He paid off parents not to mention Mia’s misadventures with their similarly disobedient children.

He was never worried about Mia and the source of her discontent and, therefore, misbehavior. He was only worried about what impact her actions would have on
him
.

It didn’t occur to him that if he let her pay the consequences like any
normal
child, Mia’s havoc might cease. As it was, she could do anything she liked and not suffer the consequences. Her misdeeds irked her father like nothing else; for the first time in her life she had his attention.

“I overheard telephone conversations between Mia and her friends about earrings they’d stolen from the mall—as if we couldn’t have just
paid
for them. My car would smell of cigarette smoke after Mia had borrowed it for this or that, but, of course,
my
Mia didn’t smoke. She didn’t smoke or drink, or—”

“Mrs. Dennett,” Detective Hoffman interrupts. “Teenagers, by definition, are in a class all of their own. They give in to peer pressure. They defy their parents. They talk back, and experiment with anything and everything they can get their hands on. The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage. Your description of Mia is not that far from normal,” he admits.

Though I sense he’d say anything to make me feel better.

“I can’t tell you how many stupid things I did when I was sixteen, seventeen,” he concedes. He rattles them off: drinking, fender benders, cheating on a test, smoking
pot,
he whispers into the telephone’s receiver. “Even the good kids have the urge to lift a pair of earrings from the mall. Teenagers believe they’re invincible—nothing bad can happen. It isn’t until later that we realize that bad things do, in fact, happen. The kids that are flawless,” he adds, “those are the ones that worry me.”

I assure him that Mia has changed since she was seventeen, desperate for him to see Mia as more than a teenage delinquent. “She’s matured.” But it’s more than that. Mia has blossomed into a beautiful young woman. The kind of woman that, as a child, I’d hoped to one day be.

“I’m sure she has,” he says, but I can’t leave it at that.

“There were two, maybe three years of utter carelessness, and then she turned herself around. She saw a light at the end of the tunnel—she would be eighteen and could be rid of us once and for all. She knew what she wanted. She started making plans. A place of her own, freedom. And she wanted to help people.”

“Teenagers,” he says and I’m silenced because, without having ever met her, I see that he knows my daughter more than me. “Those who were troubled and feeling misunderstood. Like herself.”

“Yes,” I whisper. But Mia never explained it to me. She never sat me down and told me how she could relate to these children, about how she, more than anyone, knew the difficulties that juveniles faced, all those mixed-up emotions, about how hard it was for them to swim to the surface to breathe. I never understood. To me it was all skin-deep; I couldn’t fathom how Mia could communicate with
those
kids. But it wasn’t about black and white, rich and poor; it was about human nature.

“James has never gotten that image out of his mind—his daughter in the holding cell at the local precinct. He dwells on all those years he fought to keep her name out of the paper, about how disappointed he was in her. How she wouldn’t listen. The fact that she refused law school was the icing on the cake. Mia was a burden for James. He’s never gotten past that fact—he’s never accepted her for the strong independent woman she is today. In James’s mind—”

“She’s a screwup,” Detective Hoffman remarks, and I’m grateful the words came from his mouth and not mine.

“Yes.”

I consider myself at eighteen, the emotions that overcame all common sense. What, I wonder, would have become of me if I hadn’t been in the little Irish pub in the Loop that July night in 1969? What if James hadn’t been there, hadn’t been giving a soliloquy on antitrust law, if I hadn’t hung on desperately to every last word, if I hadn’t been so consumed when his eyes turned to me, not only with the Federal Trade Commission and mergers and acquisitions, but also with the way he could make something so mundane sound arousing, the way his mahogany eyes danced when they met mine.

Without a mother’s instinct to tell me otherwise, there’s a part of me that could see James’s point of view.

But I’d never admit it.

My intuition, however, tells me something has happened to my daughter. Something bad. It screams at me, awakens me in the middle of the night: something has happened to Mia.