MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
MONDAY
Chapter 1
Looking back, I should never have returned that phone call.
“Hughes. I’m sending you a voice mail that’s been sitting in my queue since 6:00 this morning. Give it listen and then we’ll talk.” That was Thom Savage, my editor and the next one up on the newsroom food chain.
The newsroom’s first pot of coffee hadn’t even finished dripping as I picked up my phone and punched in the code to get my messages. A nasal, haughty voice played back. She said her name was Cathy Berry, and she was a subscriber living in Land o’ Lakes. Friday night, her daughter, Billie, left her three-to-eleven job at the SuperAmerica gas station on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. She never came home.
I thought back to Friday night. It was one of those nights in mid-January we Minnesotans call “pretty cold.” Cold enough to freeze your nostril hair. Cold enough to kill a teenager who may have fallen asleep in a car after smoking a joint. Or cold enough to freeze the thumb on a girl hitchhiking her way to warmer climes.
Mrs. Berry said she’d called the police six times since Saturday morning wanting them to find Billie. I listened to her message a second time, then dialed her number.
“Billie?” the woman said after picking up on the half ring.
“No, this is Skeeter Hughes returning your call to the newspaper. Are you Mrs. Berry?”
“I was hoping you were Billie,” she said. “Well. The police won’t listen to me. They think she ran away. But I know something terrible has happened to Billie. You need to put an article in the paper so someone will tell me where she is.”
“I’m sorry Mrs. Berry, but I need some more information from you before I can put something in the paper. It’s best we talk face-to-face. Could I come to your house?”
“Of course. Come. Now. ” She gave me the address and hung up before I could say any more.
I trotted over to Thom’s desk. “Missing girl. I want to chase this one.”
“Now wait a minute, Hughes,” he said. “She’s only been gone forty-eight hours. Maybe the cops are right.”
“It’s more like fifty-six,” I replied. “Those first few hours can be the most critical in a missing kid case.”
“Is she a kid?” He pulled his grey-blue eyes away from his computer screen for the first time to look at me.
“I assume so, since it’s her mother who called,” I replied. “Usually teens are the ones who go missing like that.”
“A reporter should never assume anything, except a four percent mortgage.” Thom loves to repeat tired old journalism saws.
“Don’t patronize me, Thom.”
He let that one hang in the air without reply. “What else you working on? How’s the piece on the Land o’ Lakes school board coming?”
I stifled a groan. For weeks he had wanted me to write a long, boring story about plans for a new school, that I knew was never going to happen. But it was in Thom’s neighborhood. There’s a saying in the newsroom that a pot hole is just a pot hole until an editor loses a wheel. Then it becomes a crater.
“I’m waiting for the superintendent to call me back.” A small fib.
He tucked a strand of his longish brown hair behind his right ear, a nervous habit that signals he’s made a decision. “Ok, head out to Land o’ Lakes and talk to the mom.”
Thom returned his attention to his computer screen, but kept talking to me. “Go shake some trees or something. What’s important to the people of Land o’ Lakes is important to you.”
Land o’ Lakes is my beat. That means I sit through school board meetings that last well past midnight. I interview residents when planning and zoning is considering a new K-Mart in the neighborhood. Day after every Thanksgiving I write about how many people are/aren’t shopping at the mall. Neighbors complaining about too much traffic from the Taco Bell on the south end of town? You heard it from me first. I’ve been stuck covering this suburb for two years, and frankly, I’m getting sick of it.
A friend I knew in journalism school works at a newspaper on the west coast, covering missing persons. I read every story she writes. Sometimes the ending is simple. Lost people, usually young adults, turn up asleep on a park bench after closing down one too many parties. Or they float up in the Mississippi River or one of the city lakes, unidentifiable except for the plastic driver’s license in a pocket. Sometimes they never show up.
I would love that job. Lately every time I see a flyer for a missing person, I can’t get it out of my head that a secret is buried in that story. Truth be told, that’s probably why I returned Mrs. Berry’s phone call.
I’m thirty-six-years-old and I’ve been a reporter for the Minneapolis Citizen for six years. I have two beautiful daughters, Rebecca, fourteen, and Suzy, eleven. My husband, Michael Marks, is also a reporter. I should have married someone with a different profession, like an architect or a musician. But I didn’t. He works for the St. Paul Courier, which likes to think of itself as the Minneapolis paper’s archrival. That means between us we make an OK, but not great, living. We’re paid about the same as teachers, but we work summers and holidays. Like cops, we have crazy hours.
I sometimes wonder if I’m doing right by my daughters. How will I know if they’re troubled as they head into their teen years? What am I missing by not always being there when they get home from school? Is there delicious after-school gossip that gets lost because I don’t’ hear it? Will they grow up to be angry women with holes in their hearts because Mom wasn’t home with a hug when a teacher was mean or a boyfriend was a jerk?
Maybe it’s because I have a reporter’s DNA. Maybe it’s because I’m a mom. Whatever the reason, it didn’t seem right to me that a girl who probably worried about zits and getting her period in the middle of going to the movies with her boyfriend had evaporated into thin air. I needed to find Billie Berry, or at least figure out where she had gone.
Chapter 2
I really like my car. A lot.
It’s a 1995 Honda Civic Del Sol, this cute little two-seater, red convertible. I bought it from my brother on a whim, which infuriated Michael. He thought it was a waste of money for a family with two young daughters. I ignored him. Wide and low to the ground, it handles like a dream on icy roads. Because it’s so small, it heats up quickly in the winter. I’ve been known to take the top down as early as February, jack up the heater, and drive around town pretending I’m a hottie.
I drove west on Highway 212 to Land o’ Lakes, a name chosen, no doubt, by a housing developer intending to make prospective buyers think of a life as rich and yummy as butter. That was before anyone knew it could clog arteries.
Until the 1960s Land o’ Lakes was all farmland, so flat that you could see almost to South Dakota. There were stands of trees that had never been touched and small lakes where farmers’ kids of the 1950s went fishing and played king of the raft. As farming got riskier, and the population of Minneapolis began to grow west, the land became more valuable for housing than crops. Fortunately, no one put up tract housing. Instead, there are a million cul-de-sacs all named Something Place, Something View, or Something Terrace. This is where Billie Berry grew up.
I pulled into her mother’s drive and eyeballed the place. It was two stories with a red brick front and cream-colored stucco on the sides and back. The trim and the roof were black. I imagined it was built in the early 1980s to give the impression of an all-brick house without the cost.
Bay windows on either side of the front door made the house look apple-cheeked. Bright green Japanese yews with red berries squatted under the bays. Five windows stretched across the upper level of the house, while creamy sheers obscured the views into the first-floor and second-floor rooms. The front door was painted a deep Episcopalian red. A tall fence around the backyard implied a swimming pool. This time of year most pools are half-drained of water and covered with a dirty snow-laden canvas tarp. I can never understand why Minnesotans put swimming pools in their yards. The hot weather season lasts about ten weeks at best. There are fine-for-swimming lakes just about everywhere. Why would you want to fool around with chlorine levels and vacuuming when you can swim with perfectly healthy fish hassle-free?
I walked up to the door and rang the bell with one hand while reaching into my purse for my business card with the other. I heard what sounded like a poodle barking. The little rat was making enough noise to scare away a Jehovah’s Witness. Anyone inside they would know for sure that someone was at the door.
A minute went by. Right away I wondered what was wrong here. Why was it taking so long for Mrs. Berry to answer? If one of my daughters had been missing for two days you can bet I’d be at the door before the dog had even perked its scraggly ears. In fact, I would have been up all night, trying to decide which I should do first, wring her neck or smother her with kisses if or when she came home.
I stood on her front porch, stuck in the part of my job that I hate. Questioning victims’ families is an unpleasant and dicey business. Sometimes they’re relieved you asked because you give them a chance to review, out loud, the awful events that led to the worst day of their lives. Other times, people see you as an intruder who is trying to satisfy some prurient interest in their misery. Until you ask the question, there’s no predicting how they’ll react.
Thirty seconds later the door opened. It was only 8:30 a.m. but I could smell that Cathy Berry had laced her morning coffee with something much stronger than half-and-half.
“You’re the reporter. Come in.” She turned her back and headed for another room after stepping on the poodle’s paw. She took no notice when it yelped.
Her living room was white. I’m talking white walls and white sofa with a matching love seat that I swear I had seen in a Roche Bobois advertisement. The brick around the fireplace was white. Even the hardwood floors were bleached white. Like bones that had lain long on the beach, the living room looked dried and hard, as though it had forgotten the warmth of flesh. It smelled like Lemon Pledge.
The stick-thin woman who greeted me was equally white, from her just-bleached platinum hair to the pearl nail polish on the toes of her bare feet. All white, except for the dark rings around her eyes, and the bruise on her forearm that bore the outline of four fingers and a thumb that had grabbed her way too hard.
“Have a seat,” she said, with a wave of her coffee cup toward the white sofa. Her poodle had stopped its racket and curled into a tiny white ball of fur at her feet. She took my card, glanced at it then placed it on the glass and brass coffee table. “What do you want to know?”
I wanted to know where she got those bruises and how long it had been since she’d had a decent meal, but even reporters understand there are some questions you don’t ask in the first five minutes.
“Let’s talk about Billie. How old is she?” I dug my reporter’s notebook and pen from my purse.
“Seventeen. I mean eighteen,” she corrected herself. “Friday was her birthday. She turned eighteen. But I still think of her as seventeen.”
“Tell me about Friday.”
Mrs. Berry sipped her coffee, as though she were trying to wash down the bad thought with a caffeine-alcohol elixir. Her grimace made me think it didn’t work.
“I wanted to throw a big party for her. Eighteen’s is a milestone, you know. But Billie said no.”
I tapped into a rule of interviewing. Share commonality with the source, in this case motherhood. “My fourteen-year-old daughter loves birthday parties. Don’t all teens like birthday parties?”
“Billie’s not typical.” Her voice was wistful.
“How’s that?”
“For starters, she’s a year older than the other juniors in her class.”
“Why?”
“I held her back a year before she started kindergarten so she would be a little older than the other children,” Mrs. Berry said. “I wanted her to excel among her peers.”
“Has she?”
“Has she what?”
“ ‘Excelled among her peers.’ ”
“She’s a good student. Her favorite class is pottery.”
“How do you feel about that?” I asked. In some families that would be terrific. Others, not so great.
“Peter—that’s her father—and I thought she should be taking more academic courses, like biology, math, English. She said there was something about working with clay that touched her. She likes the sensuousness of it slippery between her fingers. Makes her think she could actually shape something, she said. Before her pottery phase she insisted on taking acting classes in junior high school. She was quite the actress.”
“How else is she atypical?”
“She tends to run with older kids and acts almost patronizing to the other students in her grade. It’s particularly funny, when you think about it, because she’s a tiny girl and looks much younger than she is.”
“Let’s get back to Friday.”
“Friday. Yes. Because she wouldn’t have a party, I talked her into just popcorn and a movie, with me after she got home from work at the SuperAmerica. I even bought her a present – a darling sweater from the Gap. I wanted to make peace.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t. We had a fight.”
“What about?”
For the first time, Cathy Berry brushed a tear away from her eye.
“I was angry. I asked her four times to empty the dishwasher. She ignored me. Passive aggressive, you know? Finally, I went to her room and told her to get her butt out of bed and put the dishes away. She put on a pair of jeans, her Nikes, and that hideous red hooded sweat shirt of hers and screeched the tires as she drove away. That was the last time I saw her.”
"Tell me about when you realized she was missing.”
“I thought she’d be home by 11:30 at the latest.”
“Wasn’t that late to start a movie?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I get up early in the morning. Work calls, you know? But my friends tell me teens have a different internal clock. So I said I’d try to stay awake until the end of the movie. I wanted to spend some time with her. But soon it was midnight, and no Billie.”
“What did you do when she didn’t come home?”
“I called the SuperAmerica just after midnight, ready to give her a piece of my mind. But the guy who answered the phone said she’d already left.”
“Did that scare you?”
“Not really. I was still furious at that point. I called her cell phone but she didn’t answer. Probably saw on the caller ID that it was me. So I left a message. An angry message.”
“Describe Billie for me.”
Mrs. Berry stared ahead, her gaze piercing the picture window that overlooked a winding road along a frozen creek. I could tell she didn’t see the sunlight playing off the mounds of snow. She only saw the mental photograph of her daughter, an image Kodak could never capture. There is no clarity like a mother’s sense of her daughter.
******
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Quick Info
This is about Resort to Murder, an anthology of mysteries set on Minnesota Resorts.
May 23, 2009
Click on the clip to the right to watch this piece on Channel 4 in the Twin Cities about my work on Kindle