32
Secrets and Lies
An hour later, Harlan was slowing the car on a back road. A few miles out of town, with fields on either side. A cold, clear day, with a pale blue sky and a biting wind that seemed to be coming straight from the Pole and sweeping across the flat prairie with nothing to block it.
A house ahead on the right, and two cars parked on the side of the road. A gray sedan and a silver SUV. Jennifer knew this was it, because she saw Harlan go rigid. More rigid.
The house looked completely normal. Ranch style and painted white, with a brick chimney, a front porch, concrete steps, and a rail fence surrounding a patch of neatly mown lawn. A few shrubs, some trees around it to break the wind, and no flowers. It was out in the country, surrounded by fields fuzzed with the vibrant green of springtime growth, but the nearest neighbors were only a couple hundred yards away. You couldn’t actually call it “lonely,” even if it looked that way. It was a little plain, but it was well kept up, and it didn’t look one bit menacing. It looked, planted on the flat prairie under an endless sky in the late afternoon light, like an ad for “Midwestern.”
Harlan pulled the SUV into the drive, the front door opened, and Annabelle was running down the steps to him in her stockinged feet, her blonde hair whipping around her face in the chilly wind. He caught her in a hug, and then he held on. For about a minute.
There were two other people on the porch now. A middle-aged woman who was probably the social worker, and a relaxed-looking man in a sport coat and cowboy boots, his hair a little long, who would be … what?
“Didn’t anybody else come?” Harlan asked Annabelle.
“Yeah,” she said. “My softball coach. Ms. Neal. She had to pick up her kid, though, and you were almost here anyway. She helped, though. She made sandwiches.”
That was what women did, Jennifer thought, in times of trouble. They made sandwiches. Whatever else happened, people still needed to eat.
Inside the house, then, which was like the yard. Neat, reasonably clean and well furnished, like nobody was short of money here, but a little bare. A little cheerless. No tablecloth on the dining-room table, and although the TV was enormous and looked new, the last kitchen and bath upgrades had clearly been a couple decades ago. Like the faucets still worked, so why would you change them? Jennifer knew that, because, of course, she’d had to pee. That was one thing she remembered from the last time she’d been pregnant. You always had to pee.
Ten minutes of questions and answers, then, Harlan asking for more detail and the man in the cowboy boots, who introduced himself as Eric Johnson, detective, saying, “I’d like to ask you a few questions first. Get the lay of the land, you might say.” Still looking relaxed, in a respectful kind of way. Jennifer had a feeling he was a whole lot sharper than he let on, though.
The social worker said, “If you’re willing to take responsibility for Annabelle, Mr. Kristiansen, I’ll have you sign, and then I’ll go.”
“My sisters were here when my mom left,” Harlan told Johnson after the social worker had gone. He sat down on the couch, pulling Annabelle down beside him and telling Jennifer, “Sit.” When she looked startled, he gave her the ghost of a grin and said, “Please. Also—get yourself something to eat, if you need it,” before going on to address the detective, who took a seat in an armchair on the opposite side of the couch from Jennifer like this was a social chat. With somebody you absolutely didn’t want to talk to.
“I wasn’t here at the time Mom left,” Harlan said. “Or when we thought she left, I guess. I was off at college, so I don’t have much to tell. Alison is driving down from Minneapolis right now, though, and Vanessa’s flying in tomorrow from Miami.”
“I’ll have a talk with them, too,” Johnson said. “But it’s important to get your impressions now, as they occur to you. Talk it through, see what comes up.”
Before the siblings had a chance to compare notes, Jennifer thought. She told Harlan, “You could have a lawyer here, if you like.”
Harlan said, “I don’t need a lawyer.” Which, she thought, his lawyer would probably disagree with. “Did you show them the postcards?” he asked Annabelle.
“No,” Annabelle said. “I didn’t think of it. I already said as much as I know, but I hardly know anything. I barely remember. I just remember that Mom was gone, and Dad was mad.” She was shaky and pale, but she was holding up. More toughness in her than you’d guess. Just like Harlan.
“What postcards?” Johnson asked.
“Our mom sent postcards, after she left,” Harlan said. “Five of them, about one a month. And then they stopped.”
Annabelle said, “But doesn’t that prove that Dad didn’t do it? Or—wait. She could have come back up here, I guess. Maybe that was why the postcards stopped. Maybe she wanted to come home, but something …” She trailed off, because that “something” would have been one thing. Meeting her husband again.
Not likely, though. More like a guy who’d made up an elaborate story when it had happened, and found a way to reinforce it. Presumably, he’d bothered to copy her handwriting, too, which was a lot of planning. A lot of effort.
He’d buried her car.
A lot of effort.
Johnson said, “Can I see the postcards, do you think?”
Harlan went to a low bookshelf near the big-screen TV that held obvious pride of place in the living room, and pulled out a shoebox. He rifled through it, said, “Huh,” brought it back to the coffee table, and went through it more methodically.
School pictures, mostly. Some sports pictures, too. Not put into an album or in a frame, just tossed into a box. It was a bleak idea, but it hadn’t always been true, because a group of framed photos hung on the wall around the bookcase and TV, maybe a dozen of them altogether in a casual, friendly grouping, in all sizes and with all different frames. A wedding picture, a handsome blond man and a laughing, vibrant brunette, impossibly slim and pretty in her simple gown. A beautiful couple, anybody would say.
Baby pictures, then, and little girls in braids with missing teeth. A framed newspaper article featuring a photo that had to be a young Harlan in a football uniform and pads, leaping impossibly high into the air for a catch, his body bent backward into a graceful C. The oversized headline said, Patriots Win State. Somebody had been proud of that.
Stairstep kids, too, all dressed for Christmas, their hands on each other’s shoulders. In the latest picture, which was bigger and placed in the middle, they were posed outside the house, by the rail fence. Easter, maybe. There was Harlan, impossibly good-looking, his charisma all but leaping out of the frame, with a little girl on his shoulders, her white-blonde hair in neat French braids, smiling out of her whole face while their sisters perched on the top rail on either side and a black-and-white mutt of a dog lay on the grass in front of them, its tongue lolling as if it had stopped chasing a ball a minute before. A sea of multicolored tulips burst out of the ground around them, so there had been flowers here once. And a dog. And happiness.
“They’re not here,” Harlan finally said, and asked Annabelle, “When did you last see them?”