Cemetery Girl

“This young woman allowed a female police officer to look at her knee. She rolled her pant leg up. The scar is there. We’ve gone ahead and fingerprinted her in order to make a comparison with the prints that were taken when she was little. That will take a few hours, but I don’t have any doubt, looking at her and comparing her to the pictures of your child. This is your daughter. It’s Caitlin.”

I felt the sharp pain in my chest, the same one I’d felt in Caitlin’s closet. My heart swelled like a balloon, expanding until it reached my throat and choked off the passage of air. I put my head in my hands, closed my eyes. I squeezed them tight until I saw firework patterns on my eyelids, great starbursts of red and green. Caitlin. Here.

Alive.

Ryan’s hand landed on my shoulder. I let go of everything-the runaway theories, the unreturned calls, the suspicions. I stood up and wrapped my arms around him.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” I squeezed him tighter, a reversal of our little struggle from a few minutes earlier. He smelled like shaving cream, and I felt his own gentle but awkwardly delivered man-pats against my back.

“It’s okay. We have some things to talk about, Tom. Just sit down. Go ahead there. It’s okay.”

I ended up back in the chair, my vision blurred by tears. I wiped them away with the backs of my hands. Ryan handed me a box of tissues. I don’t know where he found them, but I took one and continued wiping at my eyes.

“Do you want some water?” Ryan asked.

“No, I’m fine. What happened?” I asked. “What the fuck happened?”

Before Ryan could tell me, someone knocked on the conference room door. I looked up.

“Is that her?” I asked.

Ryan went to the door, but it opened before he reached it. Abby stepped into the room, the whites of her eyes prominent, the corners of her mouth turned down. She took short, tentative steps across the carpet and didn’t look up or make eye contact with anyone.

“Who invited her?”

Ryan’s head turned toward me. “I called her, Tom. She’s Caitlin’s mother.”

“She hasn’t acted like it. A mother wouldn’t give up on her child.” I stood up. “You were wrong, Abby. You and Pastor Chris. She’s alive. She’s right here, alive, and you were dead fucking wrong about it.”

Ryan held his hand out toward me. “Please, Tom. Not now.”

Abby didn’t look toward me. She sat in a chair across the room. She dropped her hands into her lap and twisted them around and over the top of each other.

“Are you okay, Abby?” Ryan asked.

She finally spoke in a low church whisper. “It took me a while to get here. I was so. . surprised when you called.”

Ryan grabbed one of the rolling chairs and moved it out into the center of the room so he was between us. He sat down, feet splayed, his knees far apart.

“I’d like to tell both of you what’s going on and how we got to this point,” he said.

“Yes, please. I’d like to know,” I said.

“Abby,” he said, “do you want to hear this?”

For a moment, it looked like she wasn’t listening. Then she nodded.

“This morning, at approximately three-thirty, officers on a routine patrol saw a young woman walking along the side of Williamstown Road, out near the mall. She looked too young to be out at that time of night, so the officers questioned her. She appeared to be in good health. A little dirty, but with no obvious signs of injury. She didn’t appear to be drunk or under the influence of drugs. She didn’t have any identification, and the officers on the scene were going to take her to juvenile detention for processing-that’s routine when a kid turns up like that with no ID-when one of them, a female officer, thought she recognized the girl from somewhere. She remembered the coverage of Caitlin’s burial and the sketch of the suspect. She asked the girl, pointedly, who she was.

“The girl got nervous and agitated. She told the officers, ‘I know you think I’m that Caitlin Stuart girl, but I’m not.’ That seemed to confirm things for the officers, so they brought her here for further inquiry, and they decided to call me.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Was she brainwashed? What was wrong with her?”

Ryan held up his finger, indicating there was more to tell.

“When I arrived at the station, I questioned her about her identity and where she lived. She wouldn’t tell me anything else except to repeat that line. ‘I know you think I’m that Caitlin Stuart girl.’ When I asked her why she was out walking so late at night, who her parents were, where she went to school, she just stared at me like she was deaf or didn’t understand English. I offered her something to eat, and she asked for a cup of coffee.”

“Caitlin doesn’t drink coffee,” Abby said, her voice just above a whisper.

“Did she ask about us?” I asked.

Ryan shook his head. “She kept asking us to let her go.”

“Are you sure it’s her?” Abby asked. “It might not be her.”