The Tiger in the House Page 2

  Her last intern said, “How old are you? You seem a lot older than you look.” Her comment could have been in reference to Delia’s lack of cloud technology. She hoped it wasn’t the way she looked, at thirty-two. But she felt older, sometimes decades older.

  When Delia told her boss, Ira, that she was leaving, Ira had not accepted her resignation easily. “This is about Juniper, isn’t it? You can’t keep taking care of her forever.”

  The truth was, resigning was about Delia and starting a new life that was bright and beautiful, without social services.

  Ira, director of Southern Maine Foster Services, had worked his way up through the ranks. He had been a kid in the foster care system by the time he was eight years old, fresh out of the burn unit at Shriners Hospital in Boston. Delia never asked him for details about the abuse; the burn scars visible along his arms were all she needed to know about a little boy who had been through unspeakable trauma. He was one of the survivors. He had only been in two foster homes before he landed with a family who wanted to adopt him. His biological mother died from a drug overdose and his remaining biological parent, who was in prison, did the best thing he’d ever done for Ira by relinquishing all parental rights. But someone like Ira saw everything, every twitch, because he had learned to be vigilant when he was a kid, on the lookout for any sign that his parents had gone from benign to dangerous. Now he was like one of the dogs that were trained to sniff out seizures moments before they felled their owner.

  “It’s the accumulation,” she had told him, avoiding the comment about Juniper.

  Delia finished her notes and filed them, snapping her laptop shut, and headed for whatever awaited her with Ira. Even now, walking along the hallway, she could smell it, the fear and anger of children who had come through the foster care system. A steel-wool-meets-linseed-oil smell that children gave off when they’d been hurt by the ones they loved.

  Delia did all the right things that she’d learned over the years at the professional development workshops. Most recently she had attended yet another workshop about establishing clear boundaries. Buzzwords for not getting traumatized by the pain of your young clients. Bystander trauma.

  She exercised, had friends, took every bit of her vacation time, and listened to music on her drive to and from work rather than the news. Even so, with each child, a droplet of something had found its way into Delia, like acid rain eating up the paint on her car. The accumulation finally hit her personal high water mark.

  Delia saw other people in her profession who had missed the signs. She did not want to become the bitter, fatalistic curmudgeon that others had morphed into.

  As of today, she had thirty days left. Time to sensibly close out her cases, transfer them to others, and withdraw from the world of uphill battles. But Ira had called her, and she did not, absolutely did not, want to know what waited for her. The underside of her chin itched, as it always did with the worst cases. She had stopped trying to explain the telltale itch to others. It just was, and she had learned to listen to it. Scritch, scratch, like little creatures rambling about along her jawbone. This meant the case was searing hot with abandoned kids and parents in a tailspin. Or worse.

  She rubbed her chin, trying to rub out the familiar twitch. She paused at her desk long enough to read the new file. A gift from Ira. He had already penciled her name on the front of the file: Delia Lamont.

  She closed the file after reading it. The child was five years old and had been released from the hospital. Blood was found on the child, but it was not her own. The pediatrician noted symptoms of malnutrition, a good deal of dirt under her fingernails, and mosquito bites that had become infected. She came in at the seventieth percentile for weight.

  They had reason to believe that she lived in a house on Bakersfield Road. Because the house was a crime scene, the on-call caseworker had not been able to get into the house to check for something that might be special to the girl: a blanket or a stuffed animal.

  There had been three adults at the house, all shot at close range. One woman, two men. The woman had been identified by her driver’s license as Emma Gilbert, twenty-six, from Florida. The two men had no ID’s on them, as if they had been stripped of ID’s or maybe they never had them. The house was a rental. A local management company received cash, one month in advance, deposit, and rent for part of August and September, for a total of $4,600. The name on the rental agreement was Russ Tiggs. The police said that upon checking, his ID was false. No one named Russ Tiggs existed. There was no information about the child.

  This wasn’t the first time a child had arrived in emergency foster care without any records at all. Children could fly under the radar for years, never see a doctor or a dentist, and never go to daycare or preschool.

  She had been found by a local middle-aged couple who stayed with the child until the police arrived. They requested to be notified about the well-being of the child. When the first cop on the scene had asked the girl what her name was, she answered without hesitation. “Hayley.” When asked for her last name, she had shrugged.

  * * *

  Delia was glad that the job of locating relatives of the girl was up to Ira and not up to her. She looked at her job as surveyor of disaster, sort of a one-woman hazmat crew. Despite the media portrayal of foster care as the devil, foster care couldn’t even enter the equation unless a true shit storm happened in a family where kids were in situations that looked like war zones. Or sometimes kids were just left with nobody, dangling, free-floating on their own.

  No one wanted to be the kid who had to go to foster care, because that meant something cataclysmic happened, and one of those things might be that your parents didn’t care enough about you, or weren’t able to care about anyone, not even themselves. If kids at school knew you were in foster care, it was a neon sign on your forehead that said you weren’t worth loving.

  She paused in front of Ira’s door, calming herself with several breaths. It wasn’t working. Delia slid the file across Ira’s desk and said, “Were there really no family members for this child to stay with?” She looked down at the file again. The child’s name was written on the file tab, not a nameless girl, but Hayley.

  “What’s going on here and why have you called me in? This child may need someone who can stick with her long term. Why not someone else?”

  “Because you’re the best. Don’t you think we should give this child the best that we have?”

  She could never say no to Ira.

  There were parts of her job that Delia never got used to and she prayed that she never would. The first was the smell of fear when a child was left alone. Not just alone for an hour, but unspeakably alone, and Delia’s job was to bring them (after clearance by the police and the hospital) to an emergency foster placement. If anyone had asked her to describe what this kind of fear smelled like (unlikely since she had never mentioned it to anyone, not even Juniper), she would have said that she had forgotten. And it would have been true, or mostly true, because she tried so hard to banish that scent.

  The second was the lack of oxygen when a kid’s parents had died. She had seen photos of the forest around Mount St. Helens after it erupted and how all life was snuffed out, choked in ash, and the trees all fell like toothpicks in a strange art installation. That’s how the kids looked. If she ever grew accustomed to this part of the job, she’d quit. Well, she had quit.

  What humbled her was the way that memory softened the blow for children, the surprising kindness, perhaps an evolutionary safeguard for humanity, that the brain protected itself from shattering by simply forgetting. The way Delia had forgotten.

  * * *

  This was precisely what Delia wanted to avoid with the girl found on the back roads of South Portland. The child had to remember. She was approximately five years old, and she had been with the three adults who were killed in a home invasion/ robbery. The girl had been found walking along a gravel road almost a mile from the house where the murders took place.

 
With file folder in hand, Delia had headed straight to SPPD after calling Detective Lt. Michael Moretti. He was one of the newer additions to the South Portland Police Department. He was younger than the other cops and somehow, Delia hadn’t yet crossed paths with him officially. He walked around his desk and sat in a chair near her. She wasn’t expecting the way his hands looked, fingers braided together, resting on his thighs, or the way his eyes softened when he looked at her. A photo of a young girl on his desk announced that he was a dad. It seemed like all the men she ever met were married.

  “Murders like this either have to do with passion or drugs, and my money is on drugs. I wouldn’t have said this fifteen years ago, maybe even ten years ago. The drug trade, mostly heroin, is like an airborne fungus, and it has spread into every crevice of the country. There were traces of heroin found on one of the bodies.”

  Delia liked his voice, even when he delivered harrowing information. Some men had the right warm tone, a wavelength that was easy to hear.

  “Was there any evidence of identification with the child? Were the victims related to her?”

  “We’re checking DNA right now,” he said. The detective tilted his head slightly, not the coquettish way that a young girl might, but as a sign that he might be ready to choose his words carefully. “I want to be clear with you about what we are up against. This case gives me every indication that larger crime syndicates have moved into the area to manage the heroin pipeline and its related little brothers: street prescription drugs. These victims might have stepped into someone else’s business. At any rate, they made someone very angry.”

  He smelled like the outdoors, like a breeze.

  “We’ve always had some heroin in the city, this is nothing new. And crack,” said Delia. She liked looking at him, his neck and his Adam’s apple. She crossed her right leg over the left.

  “I was hired because of my experience with the drug trade in Rhode Island, precisely because something is different now. Heroin has followed a phenomenon that started back fifteen years ago, when doctors wrote prescriptions for OxyContin and the rest of the pain meds. Big Pharma neglected to spread the word that Oxy is chemically one hair’s breadth away from heroin. So let’s say you’ve had a hip replacement or a car accident and your knee is shattered. You get pain meds, and for lots of people, they became addicted. Solidly addicted. Like brain glue addicted.”

  He stopped, exhaled, and rubbed the back of his neck. He slid one foot in closer to his chair, the rubber of his running shoe leaving a black streak on the old linoleum. Something was driving him other than the demands of his job.

  “Is heroin personal for you?” she asked.

  His brown eyes flashed. “My niece. Senior year, basketball player, scholarship to North Carolina. In the spring before graduation, she had a car accident and broke her ankle. We all thought she was getting better, and she was, well enough to work on a house painting crew that summer. What none of us knew was that she was addicted to Oxy and bought it off the street.” He stopped. “I haven’t told this to anyone outside the department.”

  Delia uncrossed her legs. “Your niece sounds like she was close to you.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. “I was close to her. She was an awesome, smart, beautiful kid with a free throw record that still stands at her high school. That summer she started on heroin. A bad batch came into Providence and she overdosed.”

  Delia’s throat tightened. “I am really sorry.”

  He looked down as muscles twitched along his jaw.

  “What I didn’t know back then was that this was happening all over, times fifty states, times one hundred towns per state. There is now huge, and I mean enormous, money to be made in this drug industry, because heroin moved to the suburbs and rural areas of states like Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Everywhere. It has exploded. Until you’re like my niece, sitting in your two-story house in white America shooting up in the basement. And our three dead victims are linked into it.”

  His phone buzzed. “I’m sorry. But I have to take this call. I’ll let you know anything about the girl’s identity as soon as I find something.”

  Delia wanted to stay longer in his office. She knew from experience that all of the police went into hyperspace when a child was involved. When a child was a victim of a crime, the police took it personally. This detective had a daughter of his own. But he also mourned the senseless death of his niece.

  She gathered her purse and the file and gave a small wave to him as he settled back behind his desk. He looked up and nodded.

  The bad guys were Moretti’s job. Delia was accustomed to working with the police in Portland who handled domestic problems, not homicide. But she had never worked with the South Portland Police and never with Moretti. Her job was to provide an assessment that would safeguard the child and ensure the best emergency placement for her. Ira said only his best-trained foster families could offer this type of placement.

  CHAPTER 4

  Delia and her sister walked the Eastern Promenade along the waterfront of Portland several times a week. They had just passed the place where people left sculptures made from the rocks well-rounded by the ocean.

  “That child looked terrified in the photo,” said Delia.

  “What do you mean terrified?” said Juniper.

  Delia tossed her paper coffee cup into a trash bin. “What I mean is a five-year-old kid in a police photo, dressed in white cotton underpants and lavender T-shirt with a princess on the front. I mean her eyes, I mean the way a mouse doesn’t move when a cat has it in his jaws, doesn’t move its eyes left or right. The way the muscles have frozen up.”

  Delia imagined the child’s intestines either frozen up or, more likely, voiding everything out of her system, the way soldiers do under fire.

  “I read the report. The child was not physically hurt. She wasn’t assaulted physically or sexually, but she had been found walking along a back road in South Portland. The child hasn’t spoken other than to give her first name and could not say where anyone else was. Like Mommy or Daddy or brothers or sisters.”

  Delia could talk about a case as long as she didn’t exceed the details that were public knowledge. The newspapers reported about Hayley, excluding her name. The sisters ended their excursion at Juniper’s car, parked near the Italian Market.

  When Delia was still in college, she had volunteered with the Red Cross right after Hurricane Katrina hit. She had been sent to Meridian, Mississippi, where thousands of evacuees from New Orleans had landed. People who had evacuated New Orleans were scared in a way that turned them inside out, whacked them senseless. Delia met with hundreds of people at the makeshift shelters in churches and schools. But it was a cat that unraveled her. A young man and woman had rescued their cat from the storm surge in New Orleans, put it in a cat carrier, and carried it on top of their heads for miles in chest-deep water to get out of the city. When they arrived at the Red Cross center, dazed and looking for a place to sleep, the cat sat in the vinyl carrier and looked straight ahead. You could snap your fingers right in front of its whiskers and it wouldn’t blink, wouldn’t follow your hand from left to right.

  That’s what this child looked like.

  * * *

  After the walk along the Promenade, Delia and Juniper drove into the parking lot at the Whole Foods Market.

  “We can get the last of the local peaches,” said Juniper. “I’ll make a peach pie. Or I’ll roast peaches on the grill.”

  Delia heard the hopefulness in her sister’s voice, the desire to offer something soothing. She envied her sister’s absolute certainty that food was the ultimate salve. Delia was soothed by her soon-to-be career in baking also, but not with the conviction of her little sister. On her good days, it was only envy. On her worst days, she saw the monsters skulking the shadows for Juniper, and Delia was forever on the alert for the tweak in their DNA that might steal Juniper away. The way her father had been stolen from them.

  CHAPTER 5

  Deli
a’s father, Theo, smoked furiously. Camel cigarettes, a retro choice even then. The smoke had drifted into most of his jackets and sweaters, the things that were hard to wash or have dry-cleaned. He didn’t smoke in the house during his good times, needing only occasional nudges from her mother, Susan. “Sweetheart, would you mind taking the cigarettes outside?” But during the bad times, he lit one cigarette directly from the other and they would have had to blast him with dynamite to get him outside. Delia was eleven, in the autumn of fifth grade.

  When his clothes were stale or he was adrift in his paranoid thinking, the smell hit her like a chemical bomb. She learned to calculate how the day would go by the scent of cigarette smoke. Too much smoky resin spelled disaster.

  One day when the autumn sun was warm, it must have been a Saturday, and he wasn’t head down in his office writing his food reviews, Delia and her father were under their largest maple tree, the bell ringer that announced autumn for the neighborhood. He had softened around his jaw, and the scent of cigarette smoke was nothing but a teaspoon of seasoning. Most of his syndications had canceled him, but a few newspapers in Maine still carried his reviews.

  “Delia, let’s rake these leaves into a dragon, like a dragon sand castle. We’ll surprise your little sister and Mommy when they come home from the grocery store.”

  She startled at the word dragon, fearing that making a dragon would bring out the real monster from its lair. She looked at his eyes; his pupils weren’t dilated and dark with failed medication. He was here, fully here with Delia. This was what it felt like to rake leaves in the backyard with your father.