Everything You Want Me to Be: A Novel

HATTIE / Saturday, March 22, 2008

RUNNING AWAY sucked.

Here I was, standing in the exact place I’d daydreamed about in math class so many times, right in front of the departures board at the Minneapolis airport, and every detail was just like I’d pictured. I was wearing my travel outfit—black leggings, ballet flats, and an oversize cream sweater that swallowed my hands and made my neck look even longer and skinnier than usual. I had my beautiful leather suitcase and enough money in my purse to fly anyplace I’d ever imagined. I could go anywhere. Do anything. So why did I feel so trapped?

I’d snuck out of the house at three o’clock this morning and left a note on the kitchen table that said only, Back later. Love, Hattie. Later, of course, meant anytime after now. Ten years later, maybe. I didn’t know. Maybe it would never stop hurting. Maybe I could never get far enough away. The Love, Hattie part was pushing it a little. My family wasn’t the kind to leave love notes lying around the house, but even if they suspected something fishy, they were never in a million years going to think I was flying across the country.

I could practically hear Mom’s voice. That’s not like Hattie. For Pete’s sake, she’s got less than two months of school before graduation and she’s playing Lady Macbeth in the school play. I know how excited she’s been about that.

I shoved the imaginary voice aside and read the destinations again, hoping to feel any of the exhilaration I’d thought I would feel when I finally escaped Pine Valley. I’d only been on a plane once before, when we’d visited some relatives in Phoenix. I remembered there were a lot of buttons and lights on my seat and that the bathroom looked like a spaceship. I wanted to order something off the snack cart, but Mom had fruit roll-ups in her purse and that’s all we got to eat except peanuts and I didn’t even get those. Greg knew I didn’t like nuts and took mine. I was mad for the rest of the trip, though, because I was pretty sure I would have liked airplane peanuts. That was eight years ago.

Today was going to be my second flight, to my second life.

And I wouldn’t be standing here, feeling paralyzed and miserable, if there had been a seat open on any of the flights to La Guardia or JFK. That was the problem with impulsively deciding to run away from home the day before Easter. The airport looked like Black Friday and the security lines stretched out to the drop-off curb. The earliest available flight to New York was at 6:00 a.m. on Monday and that was too long to wait. I had to get out of this state today.

I could fly to Chicago, but that seemed too close. Too Midwestern. God, why couldn’t there be a seat to New York? I knew exactly what shuttle to take from either airport, exactly what hostel I would stay at and how much it cost and how to get to the closest subway station. I’d spent hours on the internet memorizing New York City, so long that it felt like I’d already moved there and I’d assumed that’s where I was going when I left the house this morning. Now I was stuck looking at this stupid departure board for some second-choice destination. If I couldn’t go directly to New York, I needed to at least get closer to it. There was a 2:20 to Boston. How far was Boston from New York?

Even though I knew it was dumb, I kept glancing at the doors, watching people pour into the airport with their mountains of luggage and their keys and wallets and tickets all jumbled up in their hands. No one was coming to stop me. No one even knew I was here. And even if they did know, would anyone really care? Except for my parents, nobody in the world loved me enough to bother bursting through those doors, yelling my name, desperate to find me before I was gone.

I tried not to cry as I went to the counter for the Boston flight. A tanned, overly perky lady told me there was one seat in coach left.

I’ll take it.

It was $760.00, which was more than I’d spent on anything besides my computer. I handed her my driver’s license and eight crisp one-hundred-dollar bills from the horrible envelope that started all this in the first place. There were two bills left. I stared at them, looking so small and alone in that big white space. I couldn’t put them in my wallet. I’d earned every penny in my wallet and I didn’t want my money to even touch the contents of this envelope. Lost in another wave of depression, I must not have heard what the woman said next.

Miss? She was leaning toward me, obviously trying to get my attention.

There was a man with her now and both of them stared at me like that dream where the teacher’s asking you questions and you didn’t even know there was a homework assignment.

Why are you going to Boston today? the man asked. He looked at my small suitcase.

To have a tea party. I thought that was pretty witty, but neither of them laughed.

Do you have a secondary form of ID?

I dug around in my purse and pulled out my school ID. He looked at it and then the computer.

Do your parents know where you are?

That made me a little panicky, even though I knew I was a legal adult. A few stories popped into my head. I could say my parents were already in Boston waiting for me, or maybe just my dad. He’d separated from my mom and sent me the money at the last minute to spend Easter with him. Or I could go the straight-up orphan route. The tears stopped me, though. Emotion clogged my throat and I knew I couldn’t pull it off. Not when they were already suspicious. So I let the emotion take over instead.

Why don’t you mind your own business? Outraged customer. The airport seemed like a good stage for that.

The people behind me stopped grumbling and started to watch the show.

Look, Miss Hoffman, there are certain protocols we have to follow for a cash purchase of a same-day ticket, especially a one-way ticket. I’m going to have to ask you to come with me while we check this out.

There was no way I was going to get locked in some Homeland Security office while he called my parents and made this day ten thousand times worse. What if he could figure out who withdrew the envelope money? Did they have ways to do that? I reached over the counter and grabbed the bills and my IDs.

Then I’m going to have to ask you to shove your ticket up your ass.

Should I call security? The woman—who had totally dropped her perky act—picked up the phone and started dialing without waiting for an answer.

Don’t bother; I’m leaving. See me leaving? I grabbed my bag and wiped my eyes with the back of the fist that had crumpled all the money into a sweaty ball.

Why don’t you calm down, Miss Hoffman, and we’ll—

Why don’t you calm down? I cut the guy off with a glare. I’m not a terrorist. I’m sorry you don’t want my eight hundred dollars for your crappy seat to Boston.

Someone in line shouted out a cheer, but most of the crowd just stared as I wheeled my bag away, probably trying to decide what kind of bomb I was going to smuggle on the plane. Takes all kinds, Velma. Nudge, nudge. You wouldn’t suspect her of anything, would you?

I ran to the parking garage and had no idea how I got to my truck or paid the attendant, it was such a blur. My heart was pounding. I checked behind me every second, paranoid that some security guard was going to chase me down. And then once I got on the freeway, the sobbing started. I almost hit a minivan, my hands were shaking so bad. It wasn’t until a half an hour later that I realized I was headed back to Pine Valley. The Twin Cities had already disappeared and unplanted fields stretched as far as I could see.

This was what happened when you let yourself need someone.

This crap heap was what you turned into when you fell in love.

I was so happy—so free and above it all—when I started senior year last fall. That Hattie was ready to take on the world and she would have, damn it, she could have done anything. And now I was a pathetic, sobbing mess. I had become the girl I’d always hated.

Suddenly the radio cut out and the lights on the dash started flickering. Shit. I panicked as other cars flew past me. Spotting a turnoff up ahead, I swerved onto a gravel road that bisected two fields, eased off the gas, and let the truck coast to a stop. When I put it into park the engine coughed and then died completely. I tried the key. Nothing. I was stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Falling across the seat, I sobbed into the scratchy fabric until I had to puke and then stumbled out of the truck into the ditch, heaving up only coffee and stomach acid.

A cool wind whipped across the fields. It dried the sweat that had broken out on my forehead and helped the sickness to pass. I crawled away from the vomit and sat on the side of the ditch, letting the soggy ground turn my pants and underwear cold.

I stayed there for a long time, long enough that I didn’t feel the chill anymore. Long enough that the tears stopped and something else started.

I was totally alone except for the cars passing on the freeway and I realized that—for the first time I could remember—I didn’t want to be anywhere else on earth. I didn’t want to be trapped in a cramped airplane seat, flying to a strange city with nowhere to go after the plane landed. I didn’t want to be onstage with the lights up and a full audience watching my every move. I didn’t want to be lying in my bed alone while Mom cooked some dinner I didn’t have the stomach to eat. There was something so comforting about the blankness of the land around me, the empty fields edged with naked trees and patches of stubborn snow.

No one knew I was here. Suddenly that fact was wonderful. I could have said it my whole life to everyone I’d ever met—No one knows I’m here—and they would have laughed and rolled their eyes and patted me on the back. Oh brother, they’d say, but it was true. I’d spent my entire life playing parts, being whatever they wanted me to be, focused on everyone around me while inside I’d always felt like I was sitting in this exact spot: curled up in the middle of a dead, endless prairie, without a soul in the world for company. Now that I was here it all made sense. Everything clicked, just like it does in the movies when the heroine realizes she’s in love with the stupid guy, or she can achieve her All-American, underdog dreams, and the music amps up and she walks, like, determinedly out of some random room. It was just like that, except without the sound track. I was still sitting in a ditch in the middle of nowhere, but everything on the inside suddenly changed.

I heard my mother’s voice again. I remembered what she said last night when I was too busy sobbing on her shoulder to listen or understand.

Get off the stage, sweetheart, she said. You can’t live your life acting for other people. Other people will just use you up. You have to know yourself and figure out what you want. I can’t do that for you. Nobody can.

I knew exactly who I was—for maybe the first time ever—and exactly what I wanted and what I had to do to get it. It was clarity. Like waking up from a dream where you thought things were real and then feeling the actual world come into focus all around you. I stood up—ready to ditch this pathetic, crying girl forever. Good effing riddance.

Gerald’s old camcorder was tucked in the top of my suitcase. I pulled it out and set it up on the back of the pickup, hitting the record button on a brand-new tape and centering myself in front of the lens.

Okay, hi. I wiped my eyes, breathing deep into my diaphragm the way Gerald taught me. This is me now. My name is Henrietta Sue Hoffman.

And by the time I was done with Pine Valley, no one would ever forget who I was.

DEL / Saturday, April 12, 2008

THE DEAD girl lay faceup in a corner of the abandoned Erickson barn, half floating in the lake water that flooded the lowest part of the sinking floor. Her hands rested on her torso over some frilly, bloodstained cloth that must have been a dress, and below the hem her legs stretched bare and shocking into the water, each swollen to the size of her waist and floating like manatees in the dirty lagoon. The upper half of her body had no relation to those legs. I’d seen slashed-up bodies before and a share of floaters, too, but never both nightmares lying side by side in the same corpse. Even though her face was too mutilated to ID, there was only one report of a missing girl in the entire county.

Must be Hattie. That from Jake, my chief deputy.

Dispatch had gotten the call from the youngest Sanders boy, who’d found her when he and some girl snuck out here. There was a fresh spot of puke, just inside the crooked door, where one of them had lost it before they’d made their escape. I didn’t know if it was that or the dead stink that made Jake gag a little when we first came in. Normally I would’ve made a point to rib him about it, but not now. Not staring down at this.

I unhooked the camera from my belt and started snapping pictures, angling out and then in, trying to get her from every side without slipping into the water next to her.

We don’t know it’s Hattie yet. The sudden stone in my gut aside, we had to do this by the book.

As soon as we’d walked in the door I’d called the crime lab up in the cities and requested a forensics team to tag and bag every last scrap of evidence. We had maybe an hour alone with her before they got here.

Who else could it be? Jake moved around her head, watching his step as the boards groaned underneath his ex–defensive tackle weight. He leaned in closer and I could see the lawman had clicked on in his brain.

Can’t make a positive ID with her face like that, especially since she’s already bloating. No rings or jewelry. No visible tattoos.

Where’s her purse? I’ve never met a girl that didn’t keep one glued to her hip.

Taken, maybe.

Hell of a place for a robbery/murder.

Don’t get ahead of yourself. ID first. I crouched down next to her. With a gloved finger, I nudged her lip open and saw her teeth were intact. Looks like we can go dental.

Jake checked the dress for pockets, didn’t find any.

Cause of death, stabbing, most likely. I pulled up one of her hands and saw the knife wound either right at or just above her heart.

Most likely? Jake snorted.

I ignored him and lifted her arm up a little farther to reveal where the white skin on top met the red skin underneath.

See that? I pointed to the line separating the colors. That’s liver mortis. When the blood stops pumping it gets sucked down by gravity and pools at the lowest spots. That’s how you can tell if a body’s been moved, if the red isn’t on the bottom like it should be.

We checked a few other places on her. Looks right. This is probably our murder scene.

I kept at the teaching line and focused on the body as just another set of remains. I’d seen hundreds, mostly in Vietnam, of course, and right now I would’ve even gone back there rather than think about who belonged to this wrecked corpse.

I showed Jake the poke test.

If you poke the pale part of the skin and it flushes red, it’s been less than half a day.

So the blood settles within twelve hours.

Mm-hmm. The skin under my gloved finger stayed white. There wasn’t any blood to show beneath it. So she’d been here since at least the early morning.

The barn floor croaked a warning and we both eased back.

This place is going to fall in on our heads.

I doubt it. It’s been like this for the last ten years at least.

I’d seen this barn almost every weekend during the summertime, from fishing opener to frost, leaning into the east bank of Lake Crosby like it was watching the sunnies dart under the surface. Seen was probably saying too much, though. Sure, I knew it was there, as good a landmark for fishing as the public beach on the exact opposite bank, but I’d never stopped to look at the old Erickson barn for who knew how long. That’s how it always was with things right next to you. Lars Erickson abandoned the building twenty years ago when he sold most of the lakeshore to the city and put up new barns next to his prefab house on the other side of the property, a good mile away. The only visitors this old girl had, besides the lake itself that lapped up during flood years, were teenage kids like the Sanders boy who wanted somewhere private to have sex and smoke joints.

Just about all the place boasted was privacy. It was one big room, a twenty- by thirty-footer, with empty rafters except for the remains of a hay loft on the end that dipped into the lake. The double-wide doors opened on the opposite side and there was a hole in the wall where a window used to be.

With the heavy rains and unseasonably early snowmelt this spring, the water had come up to cover a fourth of the floor and it was full of cigarette butts and empty rolling paper packets, along with something that might have been a ziplock bag or a condom.

Jake followed my gaze.

Think our murder weapon is in there?

The team will find it if it is. They’re thorough. Some counties had their own crime labs, whole departments of analysts and investigators, but not us. This was misdemeanor country and most of our felonies were the usual drugs and domestic violence, nothing that justified the extra payroll. It had been over a year since I’d called the boys from Minneapolis out for anything.

If this isn’t Hattie, it’s a transient for sure. There’s no one else reported missing in five counties.

You include Rochester in that deduction?

Hmm. He thought about that.

See if you can find anything outside the entrance. I handed him the camera and crept back out toward the edge of the water. It hardly creaked without Jake there—compared to him I suppose I was tiny, whittled down to bone and gristle after thirty years on the job. I squatted next to the girl and cupped my jaw in one hand, looking for what I wasn’t seeing. She was drained pale and her face was turned slightly to one side. Her eye sockets, pooled with dried blood, had caught some of her hair. The cuts were mainly to her eyes and cheeks, short jabs except for one long diagonal slash from her temple to her jaw. An exclamation point. Except for the stab wound to the chest the rest of the body was fairly clean. Someone wanted this face to go away pretty bad.

I glanced over at Jake to make sure he was out of earshot, before leaning close.

Henrietta? It always riled her when I used her given name, which was why I’d done it for practically eighteen years. Everyone’d called her Hattie since the day she came home from the hospital with a lacy bow tied around her sweet, bald head. That memory just about undid me, so I cleared my throat and made sure Jake was still busy before conceding the name I’d jokingly refused to use in life. Hattie?

I wasn’t expecting a reaction or a dove from God or anything, but sometimes you have to say something out loud and see how the words land, how they end up sitting in your gut. These words felt like knives inside me. I stared at her build, the long brown hair, the skimpy dress too early for the season. No matter what I’d said to Jake, these details told me who I was looking at when I first walked in the barn.

When Bud came into my office this morning and told me he had to file a missing persons on Hattie, both of us figured she’d taken off. Nothing that girl ever wanted more than to get out of town, but Bud’s wife wasn’t so sure. Hattie was starring in her high school play this weekend and Mona didn’t think for one second that Hattie would leave town before finishing the show. Some Shakespeare play. Mona also said Hattie wouldn’t’ve left two months before graduation. What she said made sense, but hell would freeze over before I bet on the common sense of a teenager. I put out the standard missing persons alert, all the while thinking Bud and Mona would get an email from her next week saying she was in Minneapolis or Chicago.

Now, as I stared down at what was probably the remains of my fishing buddy’s only daughter, a worse question started tearing at me, the question that would gut Bud’s life as easily as we’d gutted sunnies and carp not five hundred yards from this very spot.

Who could have murdered Hattie Hoffman?

By the time the crime lab team arrived and the ambulance negotiated the overgrown trail to the barn to load up the body, I’d already gotten two dozen phone calls. The only one I answered was from Brian Haeffner, Pine Valley’s mayor.

Is it true, Del?

I stood off to the side while the forensics boys combed over the entire barn like ants at a picnic.

Yeah, it’s true.

Accident? Brian sounded hopeful.

Nope.

You’re telling me we’ve got a murderer on the loose?

I walked outside and spat near the side of the barn, trying to loosen the dead taste from my mouth. The grass was untrampled, waving toward the lake in a light wind.

I’m saying we’ve got an open homicide case on an as-yet-unidentified victim and that’s all I’ll be saying.

You’ll have to make a statement. We’ll have every news station in the state calling.

Brian always exaggerated the hell out of everything. He’d likely get a few calls from the County Gazette. The truth was, his wife probably wanted to know all the details so she could spread it around at Sally’s Café, where she baked muffins every morning. Brian and I went back pretty far, since we were both long-standing public officials. We endorsed each other every time an election rolled around and he was a good mayor, but I couldn’t take more than one drink with him at a time. He yammered on about every little thing and was always wanting to know about cases and crime trends. Sometimes he reminded me of one of those excitable dogs that can’t stop licking your hand.

You just got my statement, Brian. We’ll release the victim’s ID when it’s confirmed.

I need to know if the town’s at risk, Del.

So do I.

I hung up on him and pocketed the phone as one of the medics walked over.

Sheriff, we’re ready to take her in.

Okay, I’ll follow later. I’ve got some things to check first.

Some leads? The girl looked hopeful. I’d never seen her before—she wasn’t from the county.

No such thing as leads. I walked back into the barn. You either got the guy or you don’t.

The forensic boys bottled and bagged everything that wasn’t nailed down and dragged every inch of the water in the barn. They turned up an empty wine bottle, a kerosene lantern, five empty cigarette packs, some generic matchbooks, and three used condoms.

I watched as they taped up the door and window.

Jake came up next to me. No murder weapon.

Nope. We waited for the team to finish up and clear out. They’d found a few hairs and were going to test the condoms, too, to see if there was any DNA left. Beyond that, they’d hold the rest until we either told them what we needed or closed the case.

After their vans disappeared over the horizon, there was only the sound of the wind drying out the fields and an occasional sparrow call from the lake. It was easier to think that way.

She was in the far corner from the door.

So she either got backed up into the corner or someone found her there. Jake was right with my line of thought. This was why I’d picked him as my chief deputy.

No visible wounds or marks on her hands, so there wasn’t much of a struggle. I walked toward the barn door and faced out, like I’d just left. Farmland stretched to the horizon in gentle hills in every direction, empty fields shedding the last of their snow. There wasn’t a single house or building in sight of the barn. He kills her and heads out. Doesn’t leave the knife. He needs to get away and deal with the weapon and his clothes.

Jake pointed at the trail that circled around the lake toward the beach and the boat launch. That’s our best bet. He parked in one of the lots and went back the same way.

It’s either that or cross-country to the highway or past the Erickson house to Route 7. Both are about a mile.

Why would he park so far away? Doesn’t make sense.

No, it doesn’t. But most killers are stupid. And they usually don’t plan on killing anybody, so they don’t think about details like the best getaway route.

Jake grunted to let me know he wasn’t on board with a cross-country escape.

We’re going to need dogs to go over the fields. A mile in every direction. Call Mick in Rochester. And get the boat out on the lake with a metal detector. The killer might have tossed the knife in on his way back to the car.

I agree with that. I’ll have them go over every inch of the lake and shore.

We left the scene and bumped the cruisers back over the fields to Winifred Erickson’s house. Jake kept on going toward town, but I tried her door first. No answer. Didn’t mean she wasn’t home. Most folks around here threw open the screen door at the first dust trail over the horizon, but Winifred took her notions. Sometimes she’d go weeks without showing her face in town, and I’d been sent more than once to see if she’d fallen over dead in her kitchen. She never answered the door until I was ready to bust it down and then it was with curlers tying up the leftover strands of gray on her scalp and Lars’s old pipe jutting out of her mouth, asking me if I knew how much doors cost and was I damn ready to buy her a new one. A few days later she’d appear on Main Street again, as friendly as you please. She’d been odd like that ever since she killed her husband.

I left her a note about the dog search and headed back to town.

The phones were ringing like fire alarms when I got into the office, but Nancy wasn’t at the desk. I found her in the break room getting a cup of coffee. Jake was scarfing down a sandwich while holding his phone.

I’m on hold with Rochester, he got out between bites. Glad to see the kid’s appetite wasn’t affected by a mutilated corpse.

Grab me some coffee, too, Nance, will you?

They won’t stop, Del. They’ve been pouring in like water since about twenty minutes after you got called out there.

Who? Jake asked.

Everybody I’ve ever met, for starters, and I’m telling them to keep their noses in their own business. But the papers, too, and Shel called to see if you wanted him to come in.

Shel was one of our four full-time deputies. With only twelve people in the whole office, we were gonna be pretty thin on the ground during a murder investigation.

How the hell did he hear about it so quick?

He’s cousin to the Sanders. They called him as soon as the boy came home.

No, tell him we’re fine. Jake can take any emergencies from here.

But I’ve got to open the case, Jake protested.

I’m opening this case.

I lead the investigations unit, Del.

And I’m the sheriff of this county.

I