and she was an angel.” She glanced at Blum in embarrassment. “Silly thoughts of a little girl.”
“I’m sure seeing your mother was very comforting to you,” said Blum firmly.
Pine looked over the items on the bed. “Not even the FBI could really find much. No trace. No leads. No motives. No nothing. A complete dead end.”
“No one heard or saw anything?”
“You observed how remote it was. It was the same back then, if not more so.”
“What did the police do?”
“Other than thinking my father had done it? Not much.”
Blum looked at her watch. “It’s dinnertime.”
“Okay.”
“Same place?” asked Blum.
“I suppose. Why, are you hoping to see Cy Tanner again?”
“Don’t make me blush, Agent Pine.”
“You know, I’m really not hungry. Why don’t you go without me.”
“Are you sure? I can wait.”
“No, I think it’ll be better if I’m by myself for a bit.”
“I know this is a lot to deal with.”
“I’ve been dealing with it for a long time now. But if you do the same thing over and over again, how can you expect a different result? Which is why I’m here.”
“Call me if you need me.”
“I will.”
After Blum left, Pine slowly gathered up the pieces of the file and put them back into the box the sheriff’s office had provided.
She left her room and headed out onto the main street of Andersonville.
The night air again held an autumnal chill and she was glad of her jacket as she walked along the quiet streets. She had few memories of the place. She had been so young when she had left. And that time in her life had been dominated by the abduction of Mercy.
The town’s buildings, though old and not in the best shape, seemed not to have changed much. The water tower on metal stilts emblazoned with the name of the town was still there. She passed rustic shops, all with old A-frame roofs and deep front overhangs, and consignment shops with their wares; she glimpsed through a dimly lit window stacked cases of old empty pop bottles in a place selling “antiques.” The town reminded her a little of the movie To Kill A Mockingbird. A quaint Southern hamlet on the rocks, unsure of its future but still plugging along somehow, trusting that better times were just around the corner.
Then there were the ubiquitous railroad tracks running through the area, which was really the only reason there was a town. The National Prisoner of War Museum and the prison site and the vast, adjacent cemetery dominated the area, and there were numerous signs proclaiming this as an enticement for visitors to take it all in and spend their tourist dollars. She supposed the town had to make the best of the hand it had been dealt. A notorious prison in its midst was ripe for exploitation to bring in needed revenue. At least it could be an important history lesson in the cruelty that human beings could show other human beings.
She stepped over puddles of a recent rain that had laid bare the hard, nonporous red Georgia clay. Tall, thin scrub pines with their shallow roots thrived here, though storms and accompanying high winds would easily shear them off or even pull them from the earth itself.
She sat on a damp bench and stared out into the darkness.
Her mother had confided in Pine years later that she had been in so much pain during the delivery that when it was over, she had named the first daughter to come out Mercy, since it had been a “mercy” of sorts for her that the ordeal was halfway over.
When her oldest daughter had vanished that night, Julia Pine had not said her name out loud for the longest time. In fact, she had only told Pine the origins of her sister’s name when Pine had gone off to college.
And then Pine had come home from college one summer to find her mother gone, with only a brief note left behind that really explained nothing. She thought of the moment she had walked into the apartment she shared with her mother and found only a single piece of paper, leaving her to somehow make sense of another grievous loss. Pine smacked her fist against the arm of the bench and had to fight back the compulsion to scream.
Why did you just leave me like that, Mom? Leave me with nothing? First Mercy, then Dad, then you.
Tor had told her on the first visit to the prison that losing Mercy had meant that