“Obviously,” Larkin answered. “No one can claim to being born with hair color akin to cherry crush.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” Doyle asked calmly.
“What’s today?”
“Wednesday,” he answered.
“Oh….” That seemed to have mildly surprised Megan, as she said next, “I was in his house for almost two days.”
Doyle reached into his suit coat and retrieved his mini notepad and pen.
Larkin prompted, “You said you’d gone to Mr. Reynold’s to make money—taking pictures.”
Megan nodded stiffly. She looked at the television when a commercial for Domino’s came on, advertising their mix-and-match deal. “Five hundred bucks if I let him take pictures of me. You know what I could do with that much money?”
“Due to severe inflation and stagnant minimum wage, never mind that we live in the country’s most expensive city, almost nothing in the long term can be achieved with five hundred dollars,” Larkin replied.
“Gee, I guess my investment portfolio will have to wait,” Megan shot back, sounding far older than fourteen at that moment.
Doyle tapped his pen against the spiral spine of the notepad for a minute, then asked, “Where were you going?”
Larkin narrowed his eyes and glanced at Doyle, but Doyle was entirely focused on the girl.
Megan had been picking at the chipped black nail polish on her thumb but stopped at Doyle’s question. She looked up. “How’d you know that?”
“Runaways with five hundred in cash tend to either use it on drugs or an escape. You strike me as a girl with a plan,” Doyle answered, having made the same deduction as Larkin.
But then Megan leaned forward, like a celestial body caught in Doyle’s gravitational pull, and asked the one question Larkin hadn’t ever expected, “Did you couch surf too?”
Ira Doyle had been a mystery all this time.
Monday, March 30, sunlight battering the gray clouds, white blossoms carpeting the ground around them at the Arsenal, and Larkin telling Doyle, “We all do it, to an extent. Hide someone. Whether out of shame or safety, we hide who we know in certain situations.”
Something in his past had shamed him, traumatized him, and he hid that damage becausewe all do it.
“Stupid, unsupervised kids think they’re invincible.”
Nonetheless, Doyle had tried to tell Larkin.
“At-risk kids? Yeah. I spent more than a few summer vacations enrolled in those programs.”
But Larkin hadn’t been listening.
He couldn’t breathe. It was like being shot with 100,000 volts of electricity again, and every muscle and organ was seizing, locking up. For being such a decorated officer, Larkin really was a piss-poor detective when it came to understanding the one man, potentially the only man, who’d come to matter. He’d misread Doyle’s appearance, personality, grief, and now, his shame. It sent a queasy roll through Larkin’s gut, and he gripped the vinyl armrests until the material protested and Doyle looked at him.
And Larkin could see the exact second that Doyle realized—knewthat Larkin had finally pieced the clues together. There was a microexpression of control that attempted to wrangle his humiliation and keep it from surfacing, since by its very design, humans sought to avoid showcasing shame so as to protect themselves from disgust, rejection. The fact that Doyle’s childhood, with circumstances that’d been wholly beyond his control, still affected how he presented himself, so much so that it’d fooled someone as perceptive as Everett Larkin, was tragic.
Doyle looked away first—the floor, his lap, then Megan. “Where were you planning to go?” he asked again.
“Montana. I have an aunt out there. Amtrak has tickets for three hundred.”
“But Mr. Reynold didn’t pay you, did he?” Doyle concluded, a sort of weary heartbreak in his knowing.
Megan shook her head. “He asked me to dye my hair, so I did that in his bathroom. He gave me a crop top to wear that must’a been from GapKids or something. It was too small, but I guess that’s what he liked about it. Do you think I can have a snack? I’m still hungry.”
The counselor checked the time on her phone before finally speaking. “Lunch is over, but I’ll see what I can get from the cafeteria.”
Megan watched the woman leave the room and then she let out a very loud, very teenage huff. “She keeps asking me if that creep touched me and stuff, but he didn’t. Not really.”
