Robert Parker - Family Honor

Miss Plum smiled a little uneasily.

“Millicent was gone for ten days before they took steps to find her.”

“Have they gone to the police?” Miss Plum said.

“No.”

“Wouldn’t that be the, ah, usual first step?”

“Yes.”

“Why did they hire you instead?”

“They mentioned something about discretion,” I said.

“Wealthy people often value that,” Miss Plum said.

“So do poor people,” I said. “But they can’t always afford it. What do you suppose they wanted me to be discreet about?”

“Why, I assume, Millicent’s disappearance.”

“Because it’s so shameful?”

“I don’t know. Miss Randall, these people are your employers.”

“Doesn’t exempt them,” I said. “This shouldn’t be adversarial, Miss Plum. You must want Millicent found.”

She was silent again, her head barely nodding, as she looked at her folded hands. Then she raised her eyes.

“I am,” she said, “a traditionalist in education. I believe in Latin, grammar, and decorum. I believe in math and repetition and discipline. I am not much taken with theories about self-worth and maladjustment.”

I nodded.

“But I believe two things about Millicent Patton. I believe that she has never been loved. And I believe that sometime this year something happened. Her grades and her behavior, never admirable, have declined precipitously in the last two marking periods.”

“You don’t know what that thing might have been?”

“No.”

“You think her parents don’t care about her?”

Pauline Plum took in as much air as she could and let it out slowly in a long sigh, and then fortified by the extra oxygen, she said, “That is correct.”

I nodded.

“We agree,” I said.

“But they have hired you to find her.”

“Decorum?” I said.

Miss Plum shook her head. She had already gone further than she wished.

“I really have a school to run, Ms. Randall.”

“Or maybe she ran away for a reason and they don’t want the reason known,” I said.

Miss Plum’s eyes widened with alarm. She was far too accomplished to discuss anything like that with a woman who, for all she knew, might have gone to a public junior college. She stood up.

“I hope you’ll excuse me,” she said.

I said I would and she showed me out.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Rosie and I had been to seven shelters. The eighth was the basement of a dingy Catholic church on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain. We were talking to Sister Mary John. Actually I was doing most of the talking. Rosie was working on Sister to rub her belly. Sister Mary John was apparently not a dog person. She paid no attention to Rosie. I thought about mentioning St. Francis of Assisi, but decided it wouldn’t help me find Millicent Patton, which was what I’d been hired for.

Sister didn’t look too nunnish. She was dressed in an Aerosmith tee shirt, jeans, and loafers, no socks. I showed her my picture of Millicent Patton.

“Yes,” Sister said after a long look, “she was here. All she would tell us was that her name was Millie.”

“She’s not here now?”

“No.”

“Had she been abused?”

“Not that we could see,” Sister said.

“She tell you why she was running?”

“No. We try to help, but we try to do so without prying.”

“I have to pry.”

Sister smiled. For a non-dog person she had a good smile.

“I know,” she said.

“Why’d she leave?”

“She just left without a word,” Sister said. “But here’s my guess. Every day or so, Bobby Doyle, who’s the youth service officer at District 13, comes down and brings some donuts and we have coffee and sort of talk over who’s shown up and what we should do about them.”

“And Millicent spotted him?”

“Not even him, I think. She spotted the police car outside.”

“And she was gone.”

Sister nodded. She looked down at Rosie who was being completely seductive under the table.

“What’s wrong with this dog?” Sister said. “It is a dog, isn’t it?”

I decided to ignore the second part of the question.

“She wants you to rub her belly,” I said.

The prospect of rubbing a dog’s belly seemed deeply unappealing to Sister Mary John.

“Why do you suppose she ran at the first sign of a cop?”

“Afraid he’d come to take her home,” Sister said.

“Any idea where she would go from here?”

Sister shook her head.

“I assume that sooner or later a pimp will find her,” Sister said.

“That seems the prevailing assumption,” I said.

“And rightly so,” Sister said.

“Any thoughts on why kids do this?”

“Not brain surgery, Ms. Randall — they don’t like it at home.”

“There must be more to it than that.”

Sister leaned back a little in the folding chair she was sitting on, and looked at me more closely. I felt as if I might have asked a good question.

“Lot of people settle for the easy answer,” Sister said. “Of course there must be more than that.”

“So many of them run away from home and end up degraded,” I said. “It’s almost a pattern.”

“Maybe it’s what they deserve for running away.”

“Excuse me, Sister,” I said. “But no one deserves to be giving oral sex to strangers in the backseat of a car.”

“No, of course not. I’m a nun, not a shrink, but I’ve seen a lot of these kids, and they have equal measures of defiance and guilt. The defiance causes them to run away, and the guilt helps them end up selling their bodies.”

“So they can run away and get punished for it, too,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Some of it must be economic,” I said. “They haven’t finished high school. They haven’t got a social security card. They have no hirable skills. Some of them, perhaps, simply have no other way to stay alive.”

“Things usually have several causes,” Sister said.

“So what causes them to run in the first place, in Millicent’s case, from affluence?”

“Whatever is in that home is intolerable to her,” Sister said.

“Molestation?”

“Maybe. Maybe a situation which must be resolved and she can’t resolve it. Maybe simply the way being there makes her feel. What I know is that kids don’t give up a secure home for a desperately uncertain alternative simply because loving parents are firm with them.”

“There’s something wrong in that house,” I said.

“You can bank on it,” Sister said.

Rosie gave up on Sister Mary John and nosed my foot. I rubbed her belly with my toe.

“You save many of them?” I said.

“I don’t even know. They come here. They stay awhile. They move on. Some straighten out as they get older. Some we get psychiatric help for. Some we may save with prayer. A lot of them, I would guess, we don’t save at all.”

“Hard work,” I said.

“Brutally hard, sometimes,” Sister said.

“You ever want to give it up?”

“I’m a nun,” Sister said. “I believe in a divine purpose. I believe I am an instrument of it. I did not become a bride of Christ for the perks.”

We sat in silence for a moment in the small basement room paneled in cheap plywood, sitting in folding chairs on either side of a card table, with the shelter’s files stacked in milk crates around the walls.

“And you?” Sister said. “You seem in an odd profession.”

“My father is, was, a policeman. He’s retired now.”

“And you wanted to be like him?”

“Well, no, actually I got out of college with a degree in social work, but I wanted to be a painter. My father got me a police job to support myself until I sold my paintings.”