Page 77 of Nobody's Fool

“You haven’t seen her in a quarter century. Her hair is changed. She’s aged. She looks pretty different, I imagine. Yet you saw her across the room and immediately knew that this woman in her forties was the girl you knew in Spain. How?”

“It’s a fair question,” I say.

I had wondered this myself, except that I’m not telling him the full story, am I? I’m giving him a sanitized version. You might not remember a girl you dated or who rolled you. Youdefinitelyremember a girl who convinced you she’d been murdered, perhaps by you in some violent, drug-n-drunk haze. But I give him another answer that is probably true too.

“Maybe because she ran when I saw her,” I say. “I don’t think I knew right away. But when she ran, yeah, something clicked.”

There are so many half-truths in the room already, even I’m not sure anymore how much bearing this had on anything.

“So what’s your first step?” he asks me.

“I’d like to speak with your wife.”

I find Talia Belmond in tennis whites heading to the court. I ask her whether we can talk before she starts playing. She looks at her watch a few beats longer than necessary. Still staring at the watch, she says, “May I ask you a question, Mr. Kierce?”

“Of course.”

“Are we being stupid?”

“I’m not following,” I say, though perhaps I am.

“This pursuit. Digging up the past.”

“You want to know what happened to your daughter,” I say. “That’s natural.”

“We are in a good place right now,” Talia Belmond tells me. “As a family. All of us. Including Victoria. So shouldn’t we just let sleeping dogs lie?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I ask.

“I’d like to hear your thoughts.”

“It may sound self-serving with the money you’re paying me,” I say. “But no, you shouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. If you don’t mind me mixing metaphors, I’ve seen a lot of people try to bury the past. It works for a little while. But whatever is buried, it eventually claws its way out of the ground.”

She nods. “That’s how I feel,” she says. “Like whatever happened is still here, still with us, hiding in the closet or, yes, buried in the ground, and if we don’t dig it up ourselves, it’ll attack us by surprise.”

“That makes sense.”

“But I worry,” she says. “Because there’s trauma here. A lot of it.”

“You know I used to be a cop.”

“Yes, of course,” she says.

“Cops do this a lot—dig up people’s personal trauma for answers. It hurts. You have to be careful and do it slowly. Like one of those archeological digs where everything is fragile and so you use brushesinstead of shovels or whatever. But do you know what I’ve learned from doing this a lot?”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing heals trauma better than resolution and closure.”

Talia Belmond studies my face. “Including your own?”

I don’t say anything.

“Come now, Mr. Kierce. You don’t think I know that you have some personal stakes in finding the answers?”

“No, I do,” I admit. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m the one who needs closure and resolution.”

“Sounds like we both do,” she says. “So go ahead. Ask your questions.”