Page 29

19

My appointment with Karen isn’t until eleven, but I’m out the door by eight. After reading the manual, I’m pretty sure my car doesn’t come with four-wheel anything, so the plan is to drive slowly and hope for the best. But first, I fortify myself with coffee and an egg sandwich from the corner store.

In line to pay, I text Stedsan to reschedule tomorrow’s meeting, tell him I have a promising interview and need a few more days. I’d already been dreading our check-in since the outline was nowhere near ready, but now I don’t know how I can sit across from him knowing he might have colluded with Bill Campbell to settle the case. My poker face isn’t that good. Stedsan writes back immediately, saying great, just let him know.

I eat with the heat blowing full blast to melt the rime of frost coating the windshield. My fingers itch to text Parker for an update: Did he call Xander about the canoe? What’s going on with Rooney? But I don’t want to hear that he can’t discuss an active case. The grease from the sandwich turns to jelly as it goes cold. I wrap the rest in foil. Time to get going.

Westfield doesn’t look far on the map, but my route follows a snaking maze of country roads into an area called the Northeast Kingdom. The name conjures enchanted castles, but an hour into the drive, I’ve only seen barns that fill my car with the animal tang of livestock.

My phone loses service, so I pull over at a crossroads to scan the map. Fields of snow stretch in all directions. Not a car or house in sight. The only sign of habitation is a split-rail fence that runs along the road. Each post is weathered to gray and covered in patches of pale green lichen. The fence could be a hundred years old. Then I spot the pile of rocks rising from the middle of the field like a cairn. Karen told me about this spot. According to her directions, I should go straight for two miles and then turn into her drive. The only problem is that the road ahead is covered in a layer of snow.

I get out of the car and cross to the unplowed section of road. The snow is loose and squeaks underfoot. Far across the field, pines sway. A few seconds later the wind reaches me with eye-stinging cold. The air rings with quiet. The places I used to seek solitude—a bench in Central Park—seem crowded and noisy in hindsight.

Two more miles to Karen’s. So close and yet impossibly far. I could drive and get stuck, end up having to walk the rest of the way. Can you freeze to death in two miles? Probably. Or I could do the smart thing. Go back to my apartment and try again in a few days. All the options are bad. I turn back toward the car, and then stop.

A white owl perches on a fence post, watching me with yellow eyes. Where the hell did that come from? Wind ruffles its feathers, which are speckled brown like someone shook pepper on them. The owl shifts and black talons peek out from feathery boots.

It’s magnificent. I don’t move, don’t breathe.

The owl cocks its head at me and then unfurls its enormous wings. The span could envelop me entirely. The feathers at the end spread wide like fingers. The bird flaps once and launches into the air, soaring pale and silent over the field and into the trees beyond.

I get back into my car, feeling as if I’ve just had an encounter with a unicorn. The unplowed road stretches ahead. Fuck it. I step on the gas. The snow scatters like baby powder.

By some miracle, I make it the two miles without getting stuck, but I’m sweating with anxiety by the time I park behind the yellow farmhouse. I walk up the steps onto the wraparound porch. A pair of rocking chairs creak back and forth, buffeted by wind. It’s the kind of place where you’d sit on a summer night, listening to crickets and watching as stars appear one by one over the hills. But summer is impossibly distant.

I knock. A chorus of barking comes from inside. A few seconds later, the door flies open. A woman with wild gray curls smiles at me. Karen Lafayette. Her legs are spread to contain the herd of dogs jostling behind her. “You made it! Get in here before we all freeze. This old place is a bitch to heat.”

Somehow I squeeze past her. The floor is littered with muddy boots and piles of gardening tools. Three black Labs present their silken ears to be scratched and lick my wrist with soft pink tongues.

“Hang your jacket anywhere you can find a spot.”

Karen waves her hand to indicate the wall hooks already crammed with sweatshirts and raincoats. Her hair is held back by two sparkly butterfly clips—the kind I loved in middle school.

“Come on, gang. Out of the way!” Karen shoves aside the clambering dogs and strides into the kitchen.

I hurry to follow. “Thank you for meeting with me,” I say.

“Happy to,” she calls over her shoulder as she fills the kettle. “Not much to do around here in the winter except feed the horses.”

I force myself to stop shuffling my feet. I’m a bundle of nerves, whereas Karen seems entirely at ease. She must be in her sixties by now, but there’s something decisive in her movements that make her seem younger. She doesn’t wear makeup but her clothes aren’t frumpy. A long gray sweater over black pants. Bangles that sing up and down her arm as she gestures.

“There’s a fire going in the living room,” Karen says. She holds up a box of tea bags. “Do you drink tea? I’m afraid I don’t have any coffee. Gave it up years ago.”

“Tea sounds great,” I say. “I’ll drink anything warm.”

Once the water boils, we take our mugs through the low doorway into the living room. “Watch your head,” Karen says. “People in the 1800s must have been Hobbits.”

The living room is ten degrees warmer thanks to a wood-burning stove. The dogs lie in a pile on the rug, only inches from the flames. Except for the soft snoring, you’d never know they were alive. All the furniture is overstuffed and faded by years of sun, and every flat surface is covered in photos. Karen on a beach. Karen at a long table full of people, a giant turkey in the center of the frame. Karen and a cluster of women holding matching pink cocktails.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a cozier room,” I say.

“As long as you don’t sit too close to those drafty windows.” She laughs, but I can tell she’s pleased.

Karen talks for a while about the history of her house, the farm, how they inherited it from her husband’s aunt before he passed. As she talks, she walks around the living room, straightening a stack of magazines, fluffing a throw pillow. She has the kind of barely bottled energy you see in children, stuffed into fancy clothes and made to sit through long dinners, legs under the table bouncing up and down. I think about steering the conversation to Coram House, but don’t. Some people need to get there on their own.

Finally, she seems to run out of steam and sinks into a chair. “How was your drive? Not too much trouble getting here?”

I picture the unplowed road, but shake my head. “No trouble. Oh—I did see an owl, a white one.”

Karen claps her hands, which makes all three dogs sit up. When it’s clear we’re not about to take them on a walk, they settle back down on the rug.

“A snowy owl,” she says. “How exciting. You must be good luck.”

I laugh. “I don’t know about that.” But I’m pleased that she too recognizes the strange magic.

Karen looks out the window. “Well, you’ve let me go and tell you my whole life story.”

But, of course, that’s not true. She hasn’t mentioned Coram House. Nothing at all from her childhood. I’ve done enough interviews to feel the moment when it comes. I wait, silent.

“Truth is,” she says, “ever since you called, I’ve been thinking about the House. Remembering all these tiny, stupid things that don’t matter to anyone. It’s strange the way they just come back into your head like that. I hardly ever think about it anymore.” She turns back and looks at me like she just remembered I’m there. “Anyways, I imagine you have questions.”

Only hundreds. But I force myself to appear relaxed. I take out my phone and put it on the coffee table, hit record, so she can see. “Karen, is it okay if I record the rest of our conversation?”

“Yes, of course,” Karen says.

I clear my throat. “I’d love to start with what it was like. All those tiny things you mentioned, they do matter—to me. I’ve read all the depositions from the case, but most people who actually lived at Coram House are gone or don’t want to talk to me—which I completely understand.”

She waves away my concern. “God, no. I’m happy to talk. Always have been. But no one ever wanted to hear it. I think you should put everything in your book.”

Karen takes a deep breath as if she’s about to plunge underwater. And then she starts talking. The stories pour out of her. Some are terrible—being made to strip naked and stand outside in the snow as punishment, the other children watching from the windows. Kneeling on the icy floor of the chapel until her knees bled. Other memories could be from children anywhere. Smuggling crackers from the kitchen in their pockets. The nuns taking their lessons outside on a sunny day. Watching the leaves change and blanket the graveyard in red. A time when the bakery in town brought cider donuts for the children and they each got a half. With every story she sits up a little straighter, like it’s a stone she casts off in the telling.

Two hours and two cups of tea later, I get the sense that Karen could keep going forever. I wish I could let her, but there’s a snowy road to travel before dark. And I feel the tapping of someone at the window, waiting to be let in.

“Karen,” I say when she pauses to sip her tea. “I want to ask you about a boy named Tommy.”

Karen sighs. “That poor boy,” she murmurs. Then her expression changes, sadness replaced by something grim and hard. “Poor all of us.”

“Did you know him?”

“We all knew each other at least a little. Tommy was, well, he didn’t have many friends. He used to pee his bed—and we didn’t bathe very often—so he smelled. And he was always carrying his sheets down to the laundry. Those were the worst punishments, you know. Not the hitting. Shame.”

I remember one of the other depositions calling him the bedwetter. It had cracked my heart—for a little boy to be remembered only for that.

“I saw him that day,” Karen says. There’s something eager in her voice. “With Sister Cecile.”

My mouth goes dry. “The day he died?”

“Early that morning. It was his turn for swim lessons. Sister Cecile was telling him to put on his swim trunks, to come down to the beach. And he said no.” Karen laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “It stuck in my head for years because you didn’t say no to Sister Cecile. You just—didn’t.”

“But he did go in the end.”

Karen nods. “Yes. He did go in the end. Stupid kid. To think he ever had a choice.”

There’s venom in her voice. She swipes at her eyes with the heel of her hand, though I don’t see any tears.

“The next day they told us he ran away. Even then, I remember thinking it was odd. He wasn’t the type—always afraid of everything. And then, when I found out what Sarah saw. Well, it all made sense.”

Something in the story feels off. “Karen,” I say, “why do you think he refused to go in the boat that day? From what you’re saying, that seems out of character too. Wasn’t he afraid of Sister Cecile?”

“Oh, he was terrified for sure, but I guess the water was even scarier than Sister Cecile.”

Now I’m even more confused. “The water?”

She leans forward. “Bill used to tell these stories. There was this one about a monster in the lake that gave the kids nightmares.”

“Bill Campbell?” I ask, trying to imagine it.

She snorts. “I know. Doesn’t seem like he’d have the imagination. I don’t remember it all, but something about how the monster would come up underneath and pull you into the dark water, never let go. Once Sister Cecile found out, she let him have it, though. Devil’s tales. So no more stories after that.”

Wind howls outside the window. I shiver at the cold draft on my neck. “So Tommy—you think that’s why he refused to go in the water?”

Karen nods. “Like I said, he was a fragile kid. That type didn’t last long there.” Her voice is as matter-of-fact as a shrug.

“Sarah Dale saw three people in the boat that day,” I say, choosing my words carefully. But it turns out to be unnecessary.

Karen snorts. “If Sister Cecile was there, you can be sure Fred was too. He was like her shadow. Listen, I didn’t see what happened that day. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I do remember what Fred was like the day after. After they announced Tommy had run off, he seemed different. Angry. Well, angrier than usual. He walked right up to Bill and knocked him down. A real gut punch. For no reason at all.”

Based on my experience with Fred Rooney, I can’t say this surprises me. “Karen, were they friends back then—Bill and Fred?”

She shakes her head. “No one was friends with Fred. Besides, Fred was always such a loose cannon, and Bill, well—he’s the opposite. Everything he does is always for a reason. Whatever you call that.”

Calculating, I think. That’s what you call it. The picture she’s painting doesn’t fit with the jovial man who gave me a tour of Coram House. But maybe that’s just how he wanted me to see him.

“Karen, can we go back to the case for a second? Do you think Bill wanted it settled out of court?”

She looks at me blankly for a moment and then her face cracks down the middle. A big, boisterous laugh bursts out. “I-I’m sorry. I just—the look on your face. Oh, honey, didn’t anyone tell you?”

I stare at her, trying to catch up. “Tell me what?”

She leans forward, as if she’s going to tell me a secret, but her voice is almost a shout. “Bill Campbell paid people off to make the case go away. Even back then, he had a plan. He was starting a business with his wife’s money and always needed to be bigger and better than everyone else.”

The air is knocked out of me. “Paid people off,” I manage. What had Father Aubry said? Alan was instrumental to the plan, of course, but so was Bill. Is this what he meant?

“But—who?” I stammer. “What people?”

The fire crackles. Karen’s spoon clinks against the mug as she stirs her tea, though it must be cold by now.

“Whoever he could get away with. Listen, I can’t prove it. He’s too smart for that. But you hear things.” She raises her eyebrows meaningfully.

“So he didn’t offer you money?”

She gives me a stern look, like I’m a child who hasn’t been paying attention to the lesson. “Of course not. He knew I’d have thrown it right back in his face.”

I don’t know what to think. Karen sounds so sure, but she’d sounded sure on tape when she talked about the girl being pushed out the window. A girl whose death certificate says she died of the flu. An event Sarah Dale said never happened.

Karen puts down her mug and looks at me intently. “Look,” she says. “He pushed hard to convince every last one of us to take the settlement the church was offering. And I mean, pushed. And for people like Fred, he did a lot more.”

“You’re saying he paid Rooney off?”

She studies me. “You’ve met Fred, I’m guessing.”

I nod.

“Well, then you can probably guess how I know. Fred would do anything for a crumb of power he could wield over the rest of us. That never changed.”

I can picture it—Rooney as a teenager with that snarl, an enforcer on the littler kids. His power both shield and weapon. “But why didn’t Bill get in trouble if he was bribing people?” I ask. “If you knew, others must have too.”

Karen shrugs. “Who was going to prosecute him? Besides, Fred never came out and said it. Just dropped hints. Just enough to make it clear that he got a bigger slice of the pie than the rest of us.” She snorts in disgust. “Like we were competing to see who could get more of that blood money.”

“Is that why you didn’t take the settlement money from the church?”

“Of course I took it,” she says. “I needed a new truck.”

“But the NDA,” I say, my stomach sinking. Everyone who took the money had to sign a nondisclosure agreement that they wouldn’t discuss the details of the case, an agreement she was in violation of right now.

“Fuck the NDA,” Karen says. Then she looks at me, hard. “Was that all it was worth? Those years of our lives. The down payment on a truck?”

I think the question is rhetorical but it becomes clear she’s waiting for me to answer. “It wasn’t fair.”

She looks disappointed in me. “Life hardly ever is,” she says. “Hang on, I need to feed the fire.”

Karen opens a door on the stove and tosses in a scoop of wood pellets from a bucket nearby. The dogs are still a smelly snoring pile on the floor. My mind spins with what Karen has told me. Bill Campbell, bribing people to drop the case. This goes a step beyond anything I’d guessed. I wonder how Stedsan fits into this mess.

Karen settles back into her chair. “You know, I read about Sister Cecile in the paper,” she says. “So the old hag slipped and fell off a cliff?”

“That’s one interpretation.” I sip my tea, buying time while I decide how much to share.

Her eyes are hungry. “But not yours.”

“No. I think someone killed her.”

“Well, I’m not surprised someone wanted her dead. Hell, I poured myself a drink to celebrate. Someone should have put a stake in her heart years ago.”

I wince at the image of pierced flesh and spurting blood. For a second, I consider what I’m about to say, wondering if I’m violating my promise to Parker. But I know I’m going to say it either way.

“Karen, what if I told you that Fred Rooney was a suspect?”

Karen’s eyebrows furrow. “For killing Sister Cecile?”

I nod. She lets out a low whistle and leans back in her chair. Then, silently, she gets up and fetches a bottle of whisky from a cabinet in the corner. She pours some in her mug and then holds it up to me. The bottle looks old and dusty. I want some, desperately, but shake my head no. It’s a long drive home.

Karen takes a long sip. “No. I don’t see it.”

There’s no waver in her voice, no hesitation. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. Not by a long shot.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Look, at the House, Fred was Sister Cecile’s dog. She’d tell him what to do and he’d do it. Fetch that boy. Lock her in the attic. Take away his food. Tear up her book. ”

“It’s been decades,” I say. “Things change. People change.”

Karen looks at me with sympathy, like I’ve said something very naive.

“No, honey. No they don’t.” Her expression darkens. “And definitely not in Fred’s case. You know, I used to drive by her house sometimes—Sister Cecile, Jeannette Leroy, whatever she was calling herself.” She smiles and shakes her head. “That’s a lie. I used to go all the time. I’d park on her street and just sit there. I didn’t care if she saw me. I wanted her to see me. To be scared. But she always acted like I wasn’t there. The last time I went was, oh, I don’t know, maybe fifteen years ago. Summer. I got there and parked as usual. And there was Fred, up on a ladder, fixing her roof. I thought I was hallucinating. He didn’t ignore me like her. He looked down at me in the car and got this big smile on his face. Then he waved at me. That asshole waved. I never went back.”

“He was fixing her roof?”

“What I’m saying is—he loved her. She saved him. He never would have hurt her.”

I absorb what she’s saying. It doesn’t fit. Rooney was so angry when he showed up at her funeral. The story seemed so clear. The boy who was abused. Revenge coming thirty years later. But maybe this is actually more plausible. Maybe they had a fight. Maybe he never intended to kill her. Then why did he take the canoe? Why go to all that trouble to hide his presence there if he didn’t plan to kill her? A headache is beginning to throb behind my eyes.

“He dug up Father Foster’s bones,” I say. “And took them to the dump.”

Karen tilts her head back and laughs until she’s gasping and has to use her sleeve to dry the tears streaming down her face. “Oh, that’s almost enough to make me like him,” she says.

I see no point in holding anything back now, so I tell her about Sister Cecile’s funeral—how Rooney showed up drunk, taunted Bill Campbell, and rubbed it in the face of the police. Karen nods along, looking thoughtful. “It’s interesting,” she says, “that he’d do it now, I mean. After so much time.”

She blinks a few times and then murmurs, “That creepy fucker.”

“What do you mean?”

“It makes sense,” she says. “Sister Cecile hated Father Foster—never stopped trying to get rid of him.”

I frown. “She hated him? Why?”

“Because he was raping little kids—not that anyone else seemed to have a problem with it. It was the only good thing about that psycho bitch. She put a stop to all that.”

So it’s true. It feels like someone’s turned the world on its axis, so that the sky is the ground and the ground is the sky. Sister Cecile, who used to strip children naked and make them stand in the snow for talking back, who dangled a girl out a window as punishment, who beat children and starved them and locked them in the attic. Who pushed a little boy out of a boat and watched him drown. She really was the one who stopped Father Foster from preying on the children. Plenty of us have good and bad in us.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child,” Karen says. “That part’s in the Bible, so it was just fine with her to knock us around. But the Bible has a few things to say about sodomy too.”

“Karen, did Father Foster abuse Fred Rooney?”

Karen looks surprised. “Oh, yes, definitely. I think Fred was one of his favorites.”

“So the fact that he dug up the bones—or the fact that he dug them up now, I guess—”

“It was a present for her, I think. One last present.”

Unease trickles down my spine—like someone cracked an egg on my head. All the evidence is there. Rooney had access, a history of violence, and what looked like motive too. It all fit together seamlessly like a puzzle. Or at least I thought it did. Now I’m not so sure.

But all of this is based on Karen’s memory, and I’m still not sure I can trust it.

“Karen,” I say, “in your deposition, you talk about a girl who was pushed out of a window. Do you remember that day?”

Karen gets a faraway expression. “I was washing the windows that morning with Eleven.”

Eleven. She means Sarah Dale.

“And the other girl. It kills me that I can’t remember her name. Sister Cecile came in, on the rampage about something. She yelled at us about how the windows were still filthy. The other girl was standing on the windowsill already. To reach the top panes.” Karen mimics reaching up.

“She said something to Sister Cecile about how the smudges were all on the outside where we couldn’t reach. She wasn’t sassing her or anything, just trying to explain, but it was a stupid thing to say.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, Sister Cecile grabbed the girl by the ankles and shoved her out onto the sill. Said something about how she could reach now. I don’t know if she just meant to scare us and lost her grip, but the girl fell.”

“You saw her fall?”

Karen nods. “She was just lying down there, not moving.”

I try to reconstruct the scene in my head. In her deposition, Karen said that she actually saw the girl bounce as she hit the ground. But that would have been two stories down. There’s no way she could have seen it unless her head was already out the window.

“And what did Sister Cecile do after?”

“Nothing. She just left. Didn’t say a word.”

“Karen.” I need to tread gently for this next part. “In her testimony, Sarah Dale said the girl never fell. And Melissa Graves’s death certificate says she died of the flu.”

Karen shrugs, seemingly unbothered. “We all blocked a lot of shit out to survive that place. You don’t always get to pick what you remember and what you don’t.”

Her face lights up like she’s had a great idea. “You should find Sarah—ask her again. You never know what else might have surfaced after all this time.”

She must see something on my face. “What is it?” she asks.

“I’m so sorry, Karen, but Sarah Dale died a few years ago. A car accident.”

Karen looks sad, but unsurprised. “I saw her once, you know? Years later. It was during my travel-the-world phase—Paris, New York, San Francisco. We just ran into each other on the street. Can you imagine that?”

I smile. “It must have been nice to see each other again.”

Karen laughs. “God, no. She was horrified. Like I’d crawled out of the grave. She tried to hide it—was polite and all that, but I could tell.”

“I’m so sorry. That must have been hard.”

“It was my fault. I never should have sprung on her in the street like that, especially when she had her kid with her—of course she didn’t want to go into all that. But I didn’t have kids. I was still so young. I didn’t understand.”

Her gaze is back out the window now. “So many of us died before we should have.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say again. But it’s meaningless. Just something to say.

I’m aware of the deep orange color of the light outside and how little I want to be driving these roads after dark. “I should go,” I say. “I can’t thank you enough for your time.”

Karen waves away both my thanks and offer to help with dishes and walks me to the door. As I pull on my boots and coat, I decide to take a gamble. “Karen, can I ask you one more thing?”

She nods. “Shoot.”

“Do you remember Tommy’s last name?”

Karen looks up at the ceiling, like the answer might be written there. She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “No,” she says, “sorry.”

I force a smile—I knew it was a long shot. “Thanks anyways.”

“One last thing from me too,” Karen says. “When this book is published, make sure you send a copy to Bill Campbell with a big fuck you from Karen Lafayette.”

She smiles at me, but it’s not a happy smile. It’s the look of a scorpion hoping its sting found the killing spot. She shuts the door behind me.

The cold sucks the air from my lungs as I trudge back to the car. I’m about to slide into the driver’s seat when Karen shouts my name. I turn to see her running across the driveway with no jacket.

“Karen, is everything—”

“Under-something,” she says breathlessly. “I remember because the kids used to call him Tommy Underwear. Because of the bedwetting and because kids are little shits. Funny how things just pop into your head.” She frowns. “But I don’t remember the last part. Something nature-y. Underhill?”

“Underwood?” I ask, heart thumping.

“Yes!” Karen shouts and then smacks me on the shoulder. “That’s it!”

We grin at each other and then she pulls me into a tight hug. “Good girl,” she says in my ear. To my embarrassment, I start to tear up as I hug her back. Karen lets me go and waves one last time before closing her front door. I climb into the car, feeling hollowed out, so exhausted I’m not sure how I’ll make the drive back.

Tommy Underwood. It’s the closest I’m going to get to confirmation. But my bright mood dissipates when I think of everything else Karen said. If she’s right, then Fred Rooney had nothing to do with Sister Cecile’s death. So what do I do now? Call Parker—and say what, exactly? Oh, after weeks of trying to convince you that Rooney did it, I’ve changed my mind. And by the way, Bill Campbell has been paying out bribes.

Parker would be justified in kicking me straight into the nearest snowbank. Anyways, it’s all theoretical. My phone doesn’t have service here. I put the car into drive and pull back onto the snowy road.

The story feels like a tree. Every time I manage to answer one question or find a new piece of information, the story branches out into three more questions, ten more, growing thinner and harder to grasp as it grows toward the sun.