‘I suggest you talk with Detective Banville –’

‘What about when my daughter’s dead? Will someone talk to me then?’

Dianne Cranmore’s voice cracked. She clutched the picture of her daughter tightly against her chest.

‘I understand how you’re feeling,’ Darby said.

‘You have kids?’

‘No.’

‘Then how can you stand there and say that you can understand what I’m going through?’

‘I guess you’re right,’ Darby said. ‘I can’t.’

‘When you have kids of your own, the love you’ll feel for them… It’s more love than your heart can ever hold. Like it’s going to burst inside your chest. That’s what it feels like. It feels a thousand times worse when you’re wondering if they’re hurt and calling out for you to come help them. Only you don’t know that. All you people, this is just a job for you. When you find her dead, you all get to go home. What do I get? Tell me, what do I get?’

Darby didn’t know what to say, felt she should say something.

‘I’m sorry.’

Carol’s mother couldn’t hear her. She had already turned and walked away.

Chapter 18

Sheila’s nurse, Tina, was busy putting together a tray of food when Darby stepped into her mother’s kitchen.

‘How is she doing?’

‘She had a good day. A lot of her friends called to say they saw you on TV. I saw it, too. Going underneath the porch was very brave.’

Darby thought back to the day her mother delivered the news of the diagnosis, the way Sheila held her, arms steady and tough as steel, while Darby broke down.

The doctor had found the mole during a routine checkup. The Boston surgeon took out a good chunk of the skin cancer from her arm and many of her lymph nodes. He couldn’t reach the melanoma that had already settled inside her lungs.

Sheila had refused chemotherapy because she knew it wouldn’t help. Two experimental treatments had failed. Now it was just a matter of time.

Darby dropped her back-pack on the kitchen chair. Stacked near the back door were two cardboard boxes full of carefully folded clothes. She spotted a pink cashmere sweater. Darby had bought the sweater for her mother this past Christmas.

Darby pulled out the sweater and was pierced by a memory of her mother standing in front of Big Red’s closet. It was a month after the funeral. Sheila, holding back tears, had touched one of his flannel shirts and then pulled her hand back as though something had bitten it.

‘Your mother cleaned out some of her closets today,’ the nurse said. ‘She asked me to drop them off at St. Pius on my way home. For their fundraiser.’

Darby nodded. Packing up the clothes, she knew, was her mother’s way of trying to help ease her through her grief.

‘I’ll drop them off,’ Darby said.

‘Are you sure? I don’t mind.’

‘I drive by St. Pius on my way to work.’

‘Before you drop off the clothes, you may want to go through the pockets. I found this.’ The nurse handed Darby a picture of a pale, freckle-faced woman with blond hair and striking blue eyes taken at what appeared to be a picnic.

Darby had no idea who the woman was. She put the picture on her mother’s tray. ‘Thanks, Tina.’

Sheila was sitting up in bed, reading the new John Connolly mystery. Darby was glad for the soft lighting from the two lamps. It made her mother’s face look less gaunt, less sick. The rest of her was covered up by blankets.

Darby placed the tray across her mother’s lap, careful of the IV drip for the morphine.

‘I hear you had a good day.’

Sheila picked up the picture. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘Tina found it the back pocket of a pair of jeans you’re donating. Who is she?’

‘Cindy Greenleaf’s daughter, Regina,’ Sheila said. ‘You and Regina used to play together. They moved to Minnesota when you were around five, I think. Cindy sends me Christmas cards every year with Regina’s picture.’

Sheila tossed the picture inside the wastebasket and glanced briefly at the wall behind the TV.

After the diagnosis, Sheila had taken the pictures from downstairs and more from the photo albums, had everything framed and hung on every amount of available wall space so she could see them from her bed.

Seeing the pictures made Darby think of the wall outside Carol Cranmore’s room. Then Darby thought of Carol’s mother, her words about how having children was more love than your heart can hold. The love you felt for your child, Darby had been told, was all-consuming, and all-encompassing. It owned you until you were buried.

The woman you found underneath the porch looks like a famine victim,’ Sheila said.

‘It looks even worse up close. She had scars and cuts all over her body, and these sores.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘I don’t know. We don’t know who she is or where she came from. She’s being treated at Mass General. Right now, she’s sedated.’

‘Do you know her condition?’

‘She’s got sepsis.’ Darby told her mother about her discussion with Jane Doe’s doctor and what had happened at the hospital.

‘Survival rates for sepsis depend on things like the patient’s overall health, how effective the antibiotics work against the infection, the patient’s immune system,’ Sheila said. ‘Given what you told me about Jane Doe’s low blood pressure, some of her organs starting to fail, I’d say she’s gone into septic shock. The doctor’s in a tricky situation, trying to treat the sepsis while keeping her sedated.’

‘So prognosis doesn’t look good.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I hope to God she wakes up. She might know where Carol is – she’s the missing teenager. Carol Cranmore.’

‘I saw it on the news. Any leads?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid. Hopefully, we’ll find something soon.’ Hopefully. Hope. Darby was spreading it around too thin. It left her nerves feeling frayed and vulnerable.

She sat down in her father’s old recliner. It had been brought up from downstairs and set up next to her mother’s bed so she could sleep here at night.

At first, Darby wanted to be here in case her mother woke up and needed something. Now Darby wanted to be here so she could hold her mother when the time came to say good-bye.

‘I ran into Carol’s mother about an hour ago,’ Darby said. ‘Talking to her, seeing what she was going through, it made me think of Melanie’s mother. Do you remember the first Christmas after Mel disappeared, you and I were in the car, on the way to the mall or something, and we saw Mel’s parents standing out in the cold, nailing a piece of plywood with Mel’s picture to a telephone pole on East Dunstable Road?’

Sheila nodded, her pale face pinching tight at the memory.

‘Everyone in town knew about Victor Grady, and Mel’s parents were standing out there in the bitter cold either refusing to give up hope, or refusing to face the truth,’ Darby said. ‘I wanted you to stop the car and you drove past them.’

‘I didn’t want you to suffer anymore. You had suffered enough.’

Darby remembered looking in the car’s side-view mirror, watching as Mrs Cruz turned her back to a blast of wind, clutching the sheets with Mel’s picture against her chest so they wouldn’t blow away. Melanie’s mother grew smaller until she finally disappeared, and right then, Darby wanted to throw the door open and run back there and help them.

Was Helena Cruz’s love for her daughter just as intense now, after two decades? Or had she learned how to mute it, make it less sharp and easier to carry?

There was nothing you could have done to help them,’ Sheila said.

‘I know. I know they blamed me for what happened to Mel – they probably still do.’

‘What happened to Melanie wasn’t your fault.’

Darby nodded. ‘Seeing that look on Dianne Cranmore’s face… I just wanted to do something to help her.’

‘You are helping her.’

‘It doesn’t feel like we’re doing enough.’

‘It never will,’ Sheila said.