Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“ ‘Investment,’ ” I said. “Interesting choice of words. You’ve been on your own for a long time. What have you been doing for money?”

“You mean, have I been jacking people?” Aidan asked. “No.”

“When did you get into town?”

“This afternoon,” he said. “I got a ride in Fergus Falls.”

“So,” I said, “with all the time you’ve been away, what prompted you to come home? Why now?”

“I wanted to see my family,” he said, then quickly clarified, “My sister and brothers, I mean.”

He hadn’t needed to tell me how he felt about his father; I heard it every time Aidan called him Hugh, not Father or Dad.

“And maybe you wanted to tap your old man for money,” I suggested.

“No,” Aidan said, shaking his head for emphasis.

“What about Marlinchen’s cat?”

“Snowball?” he said. “What about her?”

I stayed quiet, waiting for him to betray nerves with some small gesture, or to fill an unbearable silence. But he did neither.

I paused, not sure whether there was anything else to throw at him. One thing came to mind.

“You know,” I said, “since realizing your father wasn’t at home, you’ve shown very little interest in where he actually is. Aren’t you curious at all about that?”

Aidan Hennessy shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Where is he?”

“Your father’s in the hospital, recovering from a stroke,” I said.

Aidan’s blue eyes flicked to mine. I’d surprised him at last, but there was no sign of concern in his gaze. Finally I said, “Are you hungry?”

“I could eat,” he said.

The vendingmachines were poorly stocked. Behind the scratched plastic windows I saw a pillowy white bagel, jalapeño potato chips, pork rinds. The soda machine looked fully stocked, but sugar water was the last thing a hungry teenager needed on an empty stomach, when he wouldn’t get anything substantial until morning.

I walked away, still holding a few quarters in the palm of my hand, to pace under the cold fluorescent lights.

I didn’t like him climbing the trellis. I didn’t like the switchblade knife in his possession. And most of all, I didn’t like him hanging around outside the house at night, so soon after the ugly late-night death of Snowball. Marlinchen had quoted him as saying, years ago, Snowball is your pet, and you’re Dad’s pet.

If Aidan had come home full of anger, primed for a confrontation with his father, might he have taken out some of that anger on a smaller target? And wasn’t there a chance, with his father safely out of his reach in a nursing home, that Aidan would deflect his anger again, onto his siblings?

I took out the switchblade that I’d confiscated from him, sprang the blade. Carefully, I looked for small traces of dried blood at the base of the blade and the haft, found nothing.

Doesn’t mean he didn’t clean it up really well.

Yet when I’d fired the question about Snowball at him without preamble or explanation, he’d responded exactly as he should have: What about her? Guileless confusion is one of the hardest responses to fake. Moreover, I had no proof that, in climbing the trellis, Aidan hadn’t been doing exactly what he’d said he was: checking to see if his father was home. I couldn’t exactly blame him for that; the last time he’d come home unannounced, things had worked out pretty badly, to say the least.

I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I could leave him safely in the Juvenile Justice Center overnight. Then I could go home, get eight hours’ sleep, and take another crack at talking to him in the morning. But I hadn’t arrested Aidan, just taken him downtown for questioning. To keep him here, I needed to arrest him.

That was possible, of course: the switchblade was an illegal weapon. But according to my research, Aidan Hennessy had not yet been in trouble with the law. He had no criminal record. If I charged him with carrying an unlawful weapon, I’d stick him with one.

My head was starting to hurt. When Judge Henderson had given me the responsibility to look out for the Hennessys for a few weeks, neither of us had imagined that it would lead here, to making this kind of decision at the Juvenile Justice Center at three in the morning. Still, I’d taken on this burden; no setting it aside now. And while I had a responsibility to ensure that Marlinchen and her younger siblings stayed safe, didn’t I have a tangential responsibility to Aidan, as well? He was one of the Hennessy kids, too.

When I got back to the interrogation room, Aidan looked at my empty hands, then to my face.

“I’m taking you home,” I said.

It did not come as a surprisethat Marlinchen wasn’t asleep when Aidan and I returned. She came out to wrap her arms around Aidan’s neck and embrace him for a long moment, until I had to turn away from the intimacy of their reunion.

She fixed him a meal in the kitchen, two warm tuna sandwiches with melted cheddar cheese and an oversized glass of milk, and made up a bed for him on the sofa, where he fell into an exhausted sleep. Only when he was asleep did she turn her attention to me.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for bringing him back here.”

“We need to talk about that,” I told Marlinchen. “Let’s go upstairs.”

In Hugh’s bedroom, I sat on the edge of the bed, and Marlinchen folded her legs gracefully to sit cross-legged on the floor. It was as though we’d rewound to an earlier point in the evening.

“Listen,” I told her, “I know Aidan’s your brother, and you’ve been carrying around a lot of guilt and a lot of anxiety where he’s concerned. But do you really know that person down there?” I nodded toward the open door, signifying the stairway and the downstairs area that lay beyond it, where Aidan slept. “It’s like I said about the photo you showed me. Twelve to seventeen are some pretty important years. People change a lot, and Aidan’s been spending those years in circumstances that we don’t know a whole lot about.”

Marlinchen smiled at me, as though I were a child who didn’t understand the real world. “I don’t have to know where he’s been,” she said. “He’s all right.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” Marlinchen said. Her pupils, once again, were wide in the semidark. It made her look younger and more guileless than ever.

“I can’t operate based on someone else’s gut feelings,” I told her.

“What are you really saying?” she asked me.

“I’m going to spend a lot of time out here,” I said. I’d been thinking about it during the silent ride back here, with Aidan.

“That’s what you’ve been doing,” she said, confused.

“More than I have,” I said. “Even nights. I know that may seem strange to you kids; it does to me too. But the court gave me a responsibility for your safety. So until I feel better about this whole situation, I’m going to keep a close eye on things.”

Marlinchen smiled then, her natural and easy smile. “That’s all right,” she said. “Really, I like having you here, Sarah. But-”

“I know. You think I’m worrying about nothing,” I said. “Believe me, I hope I am.”

The next day,I was not at my best at work. There was a time when three hours of sleep would have sufficed for me, but those days were gone. On the brighter side, not much of interest happened at work. The nylon-mask bandits had been quiet for a little while. Maybe they’d gotten day jobs or won the lottery.

Late in the day, my phone rang.

“Sarah, it’s Chris Kilander,” the voice on the other end said.