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“It’s not like television, ma’am. Criminals don’t go back for victims who got away.” He paused, seeming to internally recognize this wasn’t always true. “Unless this person had some kind of…family connection? Or a romantic one?”
She shook her head at the idea she was related to the Corner, had had an affair with him, and the fervor of the movement spun pain down her skull and neck.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe they’re safe. But—
“Are my kids still with that man?” she asked.
“Your father-in-law? Yes.”
“I’ll get someone else. Call someone else. Do you see my phone?”
“Your phone’s in evidence. Their grandpa was the only relative we could find nearby.”
“You—I told you what he did, didn’t I? When we talked about my husband’s fall?”
“Yes.”
“And you still gave him my kids?”
“The alternative is family services.”
“What?”
“They’d stay with strangers. Or in a group home. Likely be split up.”
She saw her father-in-law sneering, heard his voice saying, “You need to stop babying him. It’s one thing for the girl to be a tomboy. But you’re going to turn him all wrong, too.”
“I’ll find someone,” she said.
“You have some other relative I don’t know about?”
She imagined her children wedged among her father’s stacks of neglected things.
“In Utah. But…I’ll think of someone.”
She had friends, of course she did. But she’d let communication lapse over the last two years, dominated by their move, her mother-in-law’s illness, then the illness of the whole world, its isolation. And none of the friends who were left lived nearby.
Why? Why’d you let them slip away from you? Is there anyone, really, that you’re close enough with? Who is close enough to take them?
Anyone would be better than him.
“A relative’s preferred,” the sergeant said.
“Not one who’s dangerous.”
Again the sergeant exhaled in a way that implied she was uselessly panicking, didn’t understand the facts. “Ma’am, he denies he did anything to you. You never pressed charges. And a man who just learned his wife died? It’s understandable he might act…out of character.”
“Out of character,” she repeated, feeling the sting of the sergeant’s rationalization, her body cast aside, shoved by the sergeant the same way he’d done after she’d opened the panel. Again came the melting confusion of that realization—they think you hurt the children.And again the understanding,He doesn’t believe you. He believes your father-in-law. Thinks you’re lying. Or at least exaggerating. Hysterical.
Her head ached and her memory went crooked. Everything fuzzed together, overlapping. The sergeant shifted into the past, became one of the suited men in that long-ago courtroom, one of the diodes in that circuit who said, “What we need to consider is this woman’s active, contributory fault.”
“Rest assured,” the sergeant went on, voice indulgent now, “we’re aware of your allegations, and your children are regularly checked on. And as far as moving them”—he cleared his throat, looked away from her—“now that they’re with their grandpa, he may not want to pass them along to someone else.”
She rattled her unhurt hand in its cuff to focus herself.
“He’s never shown any interest. He’d be happy to get rid of them.”
“No, ma’am. He’s holding his own.”
