Chapter 7: The House With Yellow Curtains
The house was smaller than I had imagined.
A white clapboard two-story set back from the road, with a red barn across the field exactly as Cynthia had described.
A mailbox at the end of the gravel drive with the number 412 in faded black paint.
A porch with two wooden chairs and a large brown dog asleep between them.
Detective Paulson met me at the end of the drive.
She was a compact woman in her forties with short gray-streaked hair and the kind of steady handshake that tells you a person has delivered difficult news many times and learned how to stand beside people while they received it.
"She's inside," Paulson said.
"She's been asking about you every twenty minutes since we spoke."
"Is she — " I stopped.
Started again.
"How is she?"
"She's remarkable," Paulson said simply.
"Come on."
The front door was open.
A female officer I didn't know was seated at the kitchen table with a notepad.
Carol Harlow was not visible.
Paulson had told me on the phone that Carol was being interviewed separately at the county office, still cooperating, still insisting she had believed the cover story.
I walked through the front room.
And then Cynthia was in the doorway at the end of the hall.
She was taller.
That was the first thing I noticed, and it hit me somewhere deep and wordless — she was taller, she had grown four inches in a year, and I had not been there to see any of it.
She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt that wasn't hers, and her hair was longer, and she looked at me for exactly one second before she crossed the hall in four steps and walked straight into my arms.
I held on.
I don't know how long we stood there.
Long enough that I heard Paulson quietly close the front door to give us the room.
"I knew you'd come," Cynthia said into my shoulder.
"I always knew you'd come."
"I'm sorry it took so long," I said.
"I'm so sorry."
She pulled back just enough to look at my face.
Her eyes were red but steady.
"You didn't know," she said.
"Mom.
You didn't know."
"I should have — "
"You didn't know." She said it like a fact, not a comfort.
Like she had already decided this, long ago, in a room with gray curtains, and had made her peace with it.
"He lied to both of us."
My sister Dana arrived twenty minutes later.
She came through the front door without knocking, found us on the couch, and sat down on Cynthia's other side without saying a word.
She just put her arm around her niece and stayed there.
That was when Cynthia finally cried — not the quiet, controlled crying she had learned, but the real kind, the kind that shakes your whole body.
She cried for a long time, and Dana and I stayed on either side of her, and nobody tried to make it stop sooner than it needed to.
When it was over, Cynthia sat up straight and wiped her face with the sleeve of the gray sweatshirt.
"Can we take Biscuit?" she asked.
Dana looked at me.
"We can ask," I said.
Cynthia nodded, satisfied, and leaned her head back against the couch.
Paulson appeared in the doorway a few minutes later.
She looked at Cynthia first, then at me.
"When you're ready," she said, "there are a few things I need to walk you through.
No rush."
"I'm ready now," Cynthia said.
Paulson glanced at me.
I nodded.
"All right." Paulson sat down in the chair across from us, opened her notepad, and looked at Cynthia directly.
"I want to ask you about the night at the hotel.
And I want you to know that whatever you tell me, you are not in any trouble.
Not for anything.
Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Tell me what happened after your dad said he was going out to get food."
Cynthia looked at her hands for a moment.
"He didn't go out to get food," she said.
"He opened the door and Dennis Harlow was already standing there."
The room went very still.
"He introduced him to me," Cynthia continued.
"He said Dennis was an old friend and that I should go with him for a little while.
That it would only be a few days." She paused.
"I didn't want to go.
I told him I didn't want to go."
"What did your father say?" Paulson asked quietly.
Cynthia looked up.
"He said, 'It'll be okay, Cyn.
I promise.' " Her voice was completely flat.
"And then he closed the door."
May you like
Nobody in the room spoke.
Outside, on the porch, Biscuit shifted in his sleep, and one of the wooden chairs creaked softly in the wind.
