Reputation(62)

I feel a prickle of excitement. “What do you mean, what happened?”

“You want to sit down?” Judy walks over to a small, upholstered couch and clears off some magazines and laundry to make room. “Can I get you anything to drink? We got pop. And water. Coffee?”

“I’m fine, thanks.” I settle onto the couch. Paul sits next to me, declining a beverage, too. “So wait, you didn’t even know your daughter was in college?” I ask carefully.

“Nope.” Mrs. Hammond plops on a vinyl-upholstered recliner by the window. There’s something fragile about her, like she’s been broken and glued back together too many times. “She ran away in September. Just up and took off. We were worried sick. Bill, too, though he doesn’t like to admit it.” She clucks her tongue. “But college? Well, it’s much better than sticking around this place. Though how’s she paying for it?” Mrs. Hammond sweeps her arm around the shabby room. “We don’t got the money.”

Bingo. I glance at Paul, trying not to get too excited. I had a hunch Raina’s parents weren’t paying for college. “Maybe you could tell me a little more about the person she was when she lived here? And why she would have run away?”

Mrs. Hammond’s gaze lands on me, suddenly distrustful. “Who did you say you were again?”

“We help out with students who are adjusting to Aldrich life. Sort of like therapists.”

Mrs. Hammond turtles her chin. “Therapists,” she repeats disdainfully.

“Listen, if you have anything to tell us about her, we’d be grateful,” Paul urges. “Raina’s doing great in school. Really on track. You want her to do well, right? Come home an Aldrich grad?”

Mrs. Hammond stares at her fingernails. Her hands are chapped and raw, her nails nibbled to the quick. “Raina was always smart. Way too smart to stay in this place. All the industry left this town decades ago. Now all you can get here are dead-end jobs. A lot end up hooked on opiates, meth. Get caught doing random shit. Hauled into jail for DUIs. That’s who Raina was drawn to, but I could always tell she was smarter. She loved to read. And write. She was always writing stories.” She sighed wistfully, but then her expression turned bitter. “Good at telling stories, too. That’s what got her in trouble.”

“What do you mean?” I venture.

“I guess she wouldn’t have told you.” Mrs. Hammond won’t meet my gaze. “I doubt big-city smart people would find what she did particularly admirable.”

Paul rolls his ankle, and a joint cracks. “Is there something we should know about? We want to set her up for success at Aldrich. She has a lot of promise.”

A smile forms on Mrs. Hammond’s lips. “She does have promise, doesn’t she? But . . .”—she takes a breath—“her last few years of high school, Raina got into some . . . trouble. With this doctor fella. He’s one of the only prominent people in these parts, not that he’s from here—he just practices medicine at the hospital out here because someone has to do it.” She sweeps her arm to the left. “He owned a huge lodge a few miles away. It sits on about six hundred acres of hunting land.”

“And?” I ask.

“All of a sudden, Raina was coming home with a pretty new handbag, a new leather coat. I asked her where she got the money. She said she had some new job a few towns away, but I could tell she was lying.”

I’m trying hard not to look at Paul. It’s not hard to put the pieces together. “You think this man was giving her the money? This . . . doctor? Was Raina his . . .” I trail off, not knowing the appropriate word. Girlfriend? Sugar baby?

Judy Hammond sighs. “They were only together once. But as you probably already know, a grown man caught with a girl of sixteen is a criminal offense.”

“Raina was sixteen when this happened?” Paul bleats.

Mrs. Hammond nods soberly. “She knew that law like the back of her hand. Made that doctor pay her in exchange for her not going to the police. And he did.”

I run my fingernails against the rough threads on the couch. That’s pretty slick for a high schooler.

“The only way we found out is because one day Bill caught him paying her in this little playground behind the grocery store. Bill was furious. He shook it out of Raina. Wanted to arrest that doctor, too, but that would mean getting Raina in trouble. In the end, we let both things go. But people found out all the same. Word gets around. The doctor switched hospitals. Sold that big property. And Raina?” She stares up at the ceiling, as though apologizing to God. “Well, she was the talk of the town. She had the grades to be valedictorian, but the principal revoked the honor because of the scandal.” She clucked her tongue.

“She was dead to her father after that.” Mrs. Hammond juts a thumb down the hall, where her husband disappeared. “He screamed at her for days. Screamed at me, too, because I insisted we pay back that doctor every cent Raina took from him.”

“You didn’t have to,” Paul says. “He committed a crime, too.”

Mrs. Hammond tilts her head skeptically. “This is terrible of me to say as her mother, but I think Raina was the instigator. She lied about her age all the time. Always said she was older, and from somewhere else. We went on a vacation to Niagara Falls once and found out that she was going around the hotel pool, talking to men, calling herself Madison.” A sad smirk appears across her lips. “We sold her bags and fancy clothes, but it still wasn’t enough to pay the doctor back.”