One Cold Night

Mrs. Strauss, anything you can tell us, this is the time.”
    “All right.” Susan straightened in her seat.
    Dave looked behind him, to his in-laws. Carole was sitting on the couch, legs crossed and arms folded self-protectively. Bill sat beside her, hands splayedopen on his knees, staring into space. His pale eyes were shot with red.
    “Carole? Bill?” Dave said. “Would you please join us?”
    Carole rose and Bill followed. They sat at Susan’s side of the table, facing Dave and Ramos.
    “Detective Ramos is going to ask us all some questions,” Dave said. On the way over, they had agreed that she would do the questioning, as this was his family; or, as she had more bluntly put it, “You don’t wanna shit where you eat, Strauss, right?”
    “Let’s start with where Lisa was born,” Ramos said. “The hospital, the town.”
    “Mercy Hospital,” Bill answered. “That’s Corning, Iowa, where Carole’s sister May lives.”
    Iowa? Dave was surprised; he had always assumed Lisa was born in Texas. He had heard of Aunt May in Iowa but had never imagined... any of this.
    “Suzie and Carole spent the summer there before Lisa was born,” Bill continued. “Suzie came home first and started at her new school. Carole came later with the baby. That’s how we did it. While they were gone, I moved us from Vernon to Carthage. No one knew us there; they had no reason to think the baby wasn’t adopted.”
    To Susan, Ramos asked: “Your name is on Lisa’s birth certificate?”
    Susan nodded. “But it was a closed adoption; the records were all sealed.”
    “Why’d you bother with all the red tape? Why didn’t you just take her home? I mean, she was already yours.”
    “Because,” Bill said in the same authoritative tone he had just used to outline his master plan, “we didn’twant to confuse Lisa if she ever went looking into her birth records. The paperwork would just say she was adopted and no more information was available.”
    “I see.” Ramos nodded and frowned and drew a smaller circle within a larger circle on her pad. “Susan, was Peter Adkins ever violent with you?” Ramos asked suddenly. “Before you got pregnant? Any signs of unusual anger?”
    “No, not before,” Susan answered. “Just when I told him.”
    “Violent?” Bill shifted forward in his seat.
    “Just a little, Daddy. I didn’t want to worry you at the time.”
    “Worry us?” Bill looked at his wife. “Worry us!”
    Susan took a deep breath, and continued. “Peter was very sweet most of the time; he loved me and I believed I loved him. I was just fifteen years old. I didn’t know anything about love.” She looked at Dave. “What were you doing at the age of fifteen?”
    Dave’s memory fell open to that moment of his life. At fifteen, he had seen the first two of his three sisters leave home. He had taken over their shared room and devoted it to posters of rock stars, hockey players and girls in bathing suits. He had his parents’ old lava lamp and a shag rug he never vacuumed. He spent his time doing what fifteen-year-old boys did alone in a room. That, and he wrote poetry, which he hid between his mattress and box spring. He was a virgin until eighteen, so one thing he knew he did not do at fifteen was father a child. Essentially, though, life at fifteen swept him along, consumed him. That was the answer she wanted, but now was not the time to give it. He met her eyes and tried to tell her silently that they would talk soon — about everything. Her lies, andhis. He realized that not telling her about Becky’s letter, trying to protect her from its horrid implications, had opened her up to a worse shock than if she had been able to prepare herself. At some point in their marriage, they had failed to be fully honest with each other. That would have to change.
    “Tell us whatever you can remember about Peter, Susan,” Ramos said.
    Susan drew another deep breath, exhaling this one slowly. “He would wait for me outside our house, even when I wasn’t expecting him. I guess he was a little controlling, but I didn’t see it that way then. He was sweet. But then when I got pregnant—”
    Carole finished for her. “She grew up five years in one day. It broke my heart to see it.”
    “I was sad I had to give up my baby.”
    “But you didn’t give her up, darling,” Carole said tearfully. “You never did.”
    “How was it Peter never found out you were pregnant?” Ramos asked.
    “She didn’t really show