The Winter Sister(42)
She smiled again, her face so open and encouraging that I felt myself relax, even if only slightly.
“Sorry,” I said, and she shook her head, dismissing my apology. I put my hands on the table and tore tiny pieces off my paper place mat. It was a habit I’d had for a long time, with napkins or straw wrappers or place mats like this, and one I usually didn’t even notice until Lauren would lose her patience, clamp her hand over mine, and demand I stop making a mess “like some OCD rodent.”
Dropping the edge of the place mat and brushing the shreds I’d already made to the side, I put my hands in my lap. “I’m sure you were surprised to hear from me,” I said, and my eyes latched onto a waitress a few tables away, the green of her uniform much brighter than Mom’s had been by the time she worked her last shift.
“Actually,” Falley said, “Ryan Parker called me the other day and told me he’d given you my number. He said you’d probably try to get in touch with me, and to be honest, I was happy you did. I’ve kind of always hoped our paths would cross again.”
“You did?” I asked, leaning forward. Falley nodded, opening her mouth to say more, but the waitress slapped two plastic cups of water onto the table and pulled out a pad of paper.
“What can I get you ladies?” she asked.
“Just a coffee for me, please,” Falley said.
“Coffee,” I echoed.
“Easy enough,” the waitress said, and walked away, her eyes never having once met ours.
Mom used to say that true customer service was all about eye contact. You have to look at the person, she’d tell me. It’s important to foster that human connection, because that’s what keeps people coming back. If they’d wanted someone to not even look at them, they’d have gone to the drive-through across the street. So you have to actually care—and that starts with getting to know the color of their eyes.
Falley’s eyes met mine so intensely that I had to look away, focusing instead on my fingers as they found the place mat and tore.
“Yeah, so, as I was saying,” she said, “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years. Your sister’s case was . . . brutal. I was still kind of a rookie. I don’t know if you knew that, or could tell, but I was. Ryan and I were only sent out that day because a couple of the more senior detectives were on vacation. That, and . . .” She paused, as if she wasn’t sure she should continue.
“And what?” I asked.
“They just didn’t think her disappearance would amount to much. She was eighteen—a legal adult. Old enough to leave and be on her own. Not to mention that it was Spring Hill, and there hadn’t been a murder there since the seventies.” She shook her head and took a sip of her water. “But obviously—what happened to your sister—it was all much more than that.” She folded her hands together over the table and leaned forward. “And I promise you, Sylvie, I wasn’t the most experienced detective, but I worked my fingers and toes to the bone on that case. I did everything I could—we both did—but it just wasn’t enough. I’m still so sorry about that.”
She wasn’t smiling anymore. I could see that behind her tightly closed lips, she was biting the inside of her cheek, and now I wondered if her expansive grin when I first arrived had been to overcompensate for how nervous she was to see me.
“I still dream about the case,” she continued. “I think about you. Your family. How badly we failed you. How badly we failed your sister. I’m not going to pretend it’s the sole reason I left the force—the case had been cold for ten years already once I did—but it stayed with me. Made me wonder, if we can’t catch the bad guy in a situation like that, if we can’t give the victim some justice and the family a little peace, then what’s the point of being a cop in the first place? What’s a badge and a pair of handcuffs if you can’t use them to make things right, you know? I mean, I—”
We each moved back as our waitress returned with two coffees and a bowl of creamers. She set them down between us without a word, and the smell that rose from the mugs was instantly familiar to me. When we were really young, Persephone and I would sit at the counter for hours after school, our legs dangling from the stools, waiting for Mom’s shift to be over. “That coffee smells gross,” Persephone would say as we watched a waitress reach for the pot. “Like cinnamon skunk.” She’d hold her nose and we’d laugh while the waitress rolled her eyes, and I wouldn’t tell her that, secretly, I liked it, that there was something to its pungent, nearly sweet scent that comforted me because it meant that Mom was nearby.
“Anyway,” Falley said. “I know you said on the phone that you wanted to ask me some specifics about the case, but I just wanted to get that out of the way first. I wanted to finally be able to tell you that I’m sorry—and not as a cop, but as a human, I guess.”
She reached for a packet of sugar from the dish at the end of the booth. When she stirred it into her coffee, the movements of her fingers were stiff and jerky, as if she was gripping the spoon too hard. Part of me wanted to tell her I didn’t blame her for what happened, to watch the relief slip over her face like a veil, to see her smile come shining back, but another part wanted to stay in that moment, where someone was taking responsibility for the ragged, loose ends of my life.