The Winter Sister(45)

“Insistent about what?” I asked. “Come on, what was it?”

Falley reached for her coffee and took a long, slow sip. My heart measured out the seconds as I waited. Then she cradled the mug with both hands, holding it close to her chest, and shook her head. “It’s nothing, really. More nonsense, I guess. It’s just—he kept saying, ‘Talk to the mother.’ Over and over throughout our interview. ‘Talk to the mother. Talk to the mother.’?”

“Whose mother?” I asked.

She set the mug back on the table but kept her hands circled around it. “Yours,” she said.





15




I felt something push me backward, something with strong, insistent arms. I closed my eyes at the impact, but when I opened them, there was nothing in front of me but air. Falley was looking toward the door at the front of the diner, as if she were regretting ever agreeing to meet with me in the first place, and my fingers trembled under the table.

“Talk to my mother?” I asked. “Why? About what? Talk to her, like—question her? Talk to her, like—a suspect?”

Falley nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “And we did question her. She never told you that?”

I was beginning to think I could fill a hundred pages with all the things my mother never told me.

I ignored Falley’s question, let it evaporate in the air like the steam from our coffees. “What would you have had to question her about?” I asked.

As she hesitated, her eyes bounced across my face.

“It’s actually pretty standard procedure,” she said. “You always have to question the parents. And with your mom, we were concerned about the way she acted when we first came to your house.”

“She was devastated,” I reminded her.

“I know,” Falley said, “but at that point your sister was still only missing. And of course she should have been upset—any mother would be—but the way she acted, it was like she was positive that Persephone was never coming back.”

“She was out of her mind with worry,” I said. “Doesn’t it make sense that she’d jump to the worst-case scenario?”

Falley nodded. “Sure. And she was never really a serious suspect, not once we questioned her.”

I couldn’t picture it. Questioning Mom meant she would have had to emerge from her darkened bedroom, taking in the light from the sliding door in the living room, squinting as it fell across her face. Questioning her meant she would have had to speak, string words together, one after the other, like the popcorn and cranberries she used to make garlands with every year for our Christmas tree. But Mom didn’t speak in words, not in the days immediately following the news of Persephone’s murder. Hers was a language of sobs and silence that I couldn’t understand.

“What happened,” I asked, “when you questioned her?”

Falley shrugged. “Not a lot. It was . . . the saddest day of my career, I think. I couldn’t sleep for days afterward because I kept picturing her face. During our interview, I kept looking at her and thinking, ‘This woman is beyond shattered.’?”

I nodded. That was the right word—shattered. I thought of Mom in her recliner that night as I put on my coat to go meet Falley. She’d been watching TV and hadn’t even asked where I was going. I’d looked at the bones that protruded from her hand as it held the remote, and it hadn’t been hard to imagine that even beneath the gentlest grasp, those bones would easily break.

“So you saw that she was perfectly normal, then,” I said. “For someone who had just lost their daughter, I mean.”

Falley put her spoon in her coffee and stirred. She raised one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “Well,” she said, and didn’t continue.

“What?”

She let go of the spoon and shook the hand that had been holding it, as if she’d been writing for hours and suddenly had a cramp. “I don’t know, Sylvie,” she said. “I feel terrible talking about your mom this way. What she went through—what you both went through—is unspeakably horrific, and who knows how I’d react if the same thing happened to me. It’s just, there was something about her behavior that day that didn’t seem right.”

“Not right how?”

“Just—” Falley tilted her head in thought. “I don’t know. She was obviously devastated, but she didn’t necessarily seem surprised. I remember that she was acting almost as if she’d expected this to happen.”

“Expected what? For her daughter to be killed?”

Falley shook her head. “No,” she said. “To lose her.”

I dipped my fingers into my glass of water and placed them, dripping and cold, against my wrist. There was something about icy water above a place of pulse, Mom had taught me once, that always made her feel calm.

“So what happened with Tommy Dent?” I asked, steering the conversation away from Mom. “He just went on to live his life like normal? Have a family? A job? Not a care in the world?”

Falley winced, briefly and only faintly, but I noticed it just the same. “Not exactly,” she said. “Up until about a year ago, Tommy was in prison. He got out last March and he’s been living in a trailer park in Hanover ever since. I only know this because, uh—” She chuckled, but the sound was filled with disappointment. “I’ve learned you can’t ever really leave the job behind. I’ve kept tabs on him. Even though I probably shouldn’t anymore.”