Little Deaths(48)

“Is that . . . ?”

“Yes. You need to see this.”

She knocked and the door opened and the old woman from the funeral was standing there. She looked at Pete with blank indifference and shifted her gaze to Gina. Just for a second, there was a sneer of disgust: then she shouted her daughter’s name at them and behind her at the same time. A moment later, Ruth Malone was there.

She was tiny. She seemed to have gotten even smaller in the days since he’d last seen her. Even under her makeup he could see how pale she was, how fragile and afraid. This was not the glowing, golden woman he had seen in those bars. This woman was consumed by something bigger than she was. Her eyes were huge and dark and lost and she blinked and had to swallow before she could speak.

“Gina,” is all she said, and she reached out a hand, and the other woman moved to take her in her arms. For a moment he almost thought that everything would be okay. That Gina would hold her and rock her until the pain had gone and she could stand straight. As though a little kindness was all she needed to turn her back into that girl with the glossy hair and shining lips and eyes.

But she pulled her arm back and swallowed again and Pete saw something come down hard in her eyes. And then she looked over at him: there was a flicker of recognition and then of anger. Color came bright into her cheeks.

But before she could speak, Gina said, “Ruth, honey, this is Mr. Wonicke. He’s a reporter. He’s . . . well, he’s okay. I figured you keep getting bothered by them, you may as well give them something.”

Ruth stared at her for a long moment, and looked at Pete again. Then she turned to Gina and said in a strange high voice, “Won’t you both come inside? My mother is visiting. Go on into the kitchen. I won’t be long.”

He watched her heels click-clacking along the hallway until she turned the corner and disappeared. He heard a door close, and he followed Gina into the kitchen.

The two women had been sitting around the kitchen table, a pot of coffee in the middle. Someone had scrubbed the table—fading Formica, chipped and wearing the scars of crayon scribbles and fork scratches—and laid out two placemats: one for the pot and one for two matching mugs. The floor gleamed and the room smelled of bleach and synthetic lemon. The tiles above the stove, yellow with a fading pattern of cherries, had recently been cleaned, the smears still visible in the too-bright light. There were dishes drying on a towel on the countertop, waiting to be put away.

It took Pete a moment before he realized what was wrong with the room. The photographs of this apartment that Devlin had given him had shown the kitchen as cluttered and untidy: toys littering the floor, laundry piled on the chairs, cereal bowls by the sink, scribbled drawings pinned to the wall. Now everything personal was gone. Every trace of the children, every indication that this had been the home of a family, rather than a single woman: gone.

Ruth’s mother sat upright at the table. She didn’t say a word, even to invite them to sit, but Gina sat anyway, nodded at Pete to do the same.

When he looked up, the mother was staring at him: her eyes cold, her lips thin. Pete met her gaze, cleared his throat.

“Ma’am? I’m . . .”

He heard footsteps behind him and the mother spoke over him. “Fetch two more cups, Ruth. Can’t you see we’ve got company?”

Her voice was as hard as the rest of her. He thought suddenly of his own mother, of the way her anxious eyes would search his for reassurance and her shy, gradual smile, and there was a lump of selfish longing in his throat.

Ruth came into the kitchen, set out two more cups. He saw that she had powdered her face, combed her hair, applied fresh lipstick.

Her mother poured coffee and they sipped in silence, until eventually Gina cleared her throat. They all looked at her and she reached out, put her hand over Ruth’s.

“I figured . . . I wondered if it might do you some good to talk. Maybe once you give them an interview, they’ll go away.”

They wouldn’t go away, not until there was a trial and a conviction, or until something worse came along and took the place of two dead kids, but he didn’t say so. Instead he put down his cup and got out his pen, and asked the questions that he knew he should ask.

“Tell me about the children, Mrs. Malone. Tell me about the last day you spent together.”

“We went for a picnic in Kissena Park.”

Her voice was hoarse.

“We left at four. I had to speak to my lawyer later. About the custody case.”

As she told the story she’d told dozens of times before, as she took frequent gulps of hot coffee to ease the lump in her throat, he tried to sound professional. Sympathetic.

“I made dinner. Veal and string beans.”

But his thoughts were steeped in her rather than the story. Skewed from his continual awareness of her. Of her every movement. Of the shape of her mouth.

He asked her: “What do you think happened, Mrs. Malone?” and watched her blink back tears. She lit another cigarette and tried to keep her voice steady.

“I think it must have been a crazy person. A man who was looking for an opportunity to hurt kids. Some kind of . . . animal.”

“And what do the police think? Have they said?”

“They . . . they don’t know. They don’t seem to have any real leads.”

He looked at the shadows under her eyes, not quite hidden by her makeup. Her hollow cheeks, her bitten nails, the way she couldn’t look at him when she talked about the kids.