Look Closely
“You do?” Despite the sun on my skin, I felt goose bumps prickle the back of my arms.
Ty watched me. “Your mom died, didn’t she? When you lived here?”
“That’s right.”
“I remember that. I saw a picture of your family that was taken at the funeral.”
“Where did you see it?” Maybe it had been in the paper, something I could dig up.
Ty scratched his jaw, looking a little uncomfortable for the first time since I met him. “I saw it in my dad’s office.”
“Your dad? Who’s your dad?”
“He’s the chief of police.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, after a moment spent digesting Ty’s words. My stomach felt slightly ill, but there was a tickle of excitement. “This picture you saw was in the police station?”
Ty nodded.
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know all the details. I was just a kid too, but…” He trailed off.
“Look, I don’t know much about my mom’s death,” I said. “It’s why I’m here. So please, just tell me what you know.”
A look of surprise came over Ty’s face, and I realized I might have spoken a little harshly.
“I’m sorry.” I leaned toward him. “I had a case in Chicago last week. I’m an attorney. But the point is, I came here to see what I could find out about my mother’s death. Anything you could tell me would be a help.”
“Wow.” Ty shook his head. “That’s tough. But as I said, I don’t know much. What I recall is waiting for my dad in his office at the station. It was a big day for me because he was going to take me to get my uniform and equipment so I could start football. My dad wasn’t the chief then. He was assistant chief. Anyway, I was playing around his desk, and when he came in, I was holding that picture. There was a coffin being moved into the ground, and your family stood around it. You had on a long yellow coat.”
I nodded. My Easter coat, the one my mom had picked out for me.
“When my dad saw me with the picture,” Ty continued, “he stopped, pointed to the coffin and said, ‘Do you know what that is?’ I told him there was somebody who was dead in there. He said, ‘That’s right. A dead lady, and I’m going to find out who killed her.’”
I took a breath. “But they never charged anyone, did they?”
He shook his head again. “My dad told me sometime later that he’d been wrong, that no one had killed her or meant for her to die.”
I felt a little gust of relief. If the police had ruled out murder, then maybe whoever had sent me the letter was simply mistaken. “Would your dad talk about this?”
“I think so. I mean, I don’t see why not. He’s fishing this weekend. He won’t be back until tomorrow night. Will you still be around?”
I didn’t answer right away. I’d been planning on going back to Chicago Sunday night so I could wait for the arbitration decision that should come sometime Monday or Tuesday. But talking to the police might be just what I needed to set my mind straight, and I could follow up on some other questions in the meantime. And then there was Ty with his freckles.
“Can I keep my room at the hotel?” I asked.
He made a face like he was thinking hard about it. “For you, I’ll make it happen.”
“Yeah?” I said, surprised to hear the coy tone of my voice.
“Definitely.”
“I’ll be around,” I told him.
6
For the third time that day, I pulled into Della’s driveway, still thinking about my lunch with Ty. Over lemonade, I had told him what I knew about my mom’s death, about the letter, and about my visit with Della this morning. I hadn’t meant to spill the whole tale—it was so unlike me—but I was unusually comfortable with him, and once I started talking, it was cathartic to get the story out.
Ty had asked me if I’d spoken to my brother or sister. They would be obvious places to start, he said. Obvious, yes, but I had no idea where either of them were, a fact that had always gnawed at me, confused me. When I got up the nerve to ask my dad about either of my siblings, he became visibly upset, telling me that they had their own lives now. During college, I went through a period when I longed for companionship, for family, and I made a halfhearted attempt at finding them. I called Information in different cities where I thought they might be. The Internet wasn’t widely used then, but I had a friend who was adept at computers do some digging. Neither of us could find a Caroline or Dan Sutter. And so I eventually gave up.
Ty thought I should call my father right then and ask him, point-blank, what had happened and where my brother and sister were, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. Old habits weren’t easy to kill, and I still abhorred the idea of distressing my father, of picking at old wounds.
The last time I raised the issue was shortly after I met Maddy in law school. It was so weird, she had said over and over, that I didn’t know how my mom had died, that I didn’t know what had happened to my brother and sister.
“I know,” I’d said, irritated that I’d told her to begin with.
But Maddy’s questions stayed with me, and so I brought up the topic a few weeks later on a Sunday afternoon. I was with my dad on his patio, sipping a glass of cabernet while he grilled steaks for us.
“Do you ever think about Mom?” I said, apropos of nothing.
He dropped the grill tongs he was holding. They clattered on the stone patio tiles. He bent over to pick them up, and when he stood, he looked like a confused old man instead of a confident trial lawyer. His face was slack.
“Of course,” he said quietly, his gaze asking me how I could ask such a question.
But still I pushed. “Really?” I said. “Do you really?”
“Yes, Hailey. I think about your mother all the time.” He blinked.
“Well, you never talk about her. You never talk about when she died.”
A strange, garbled sound erupted from inside my father’s throat, making me stop my words. I could have sworn he was about to cry, something I had never seen, and I bailed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I stood and took the tongs from him. “Let me do that.”
And, like an old man, he feebly handed them to me, wiping the grease from his hands on his immaculate khaki pants before he went into the house.
I had never brought up the issue again. If I could find my own answers, without confronting the parent who raised me on his own, I wanted to do that.
Which brought me back to Della’s.
“Sweetie!” Della said when she opened the front door now, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder. “Come in, come in.”
“Thanks.” I accepted a quick hug. “I hope I’m not bothering you.”
“Not at all.” Della led me into the kitchen, a large, green-painted room smelling of garlic and crowded with plants, knickknacks and crocheted pot holders. It was the type of warm, homey kitchen I’d always hoped my father and I would have, one that was lived in, that was used to cook for a large family. My dad wasn’t much of a chef, though, and so although our homes were lovely and expensive, the kitchens always had cold tiles and stainless-steel appliances, and I never spent much time there.
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