Second Chance at Five

Chapter 4 The Detective

Detective Vasquez came to our house three weeks later. She was a tall woman with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a bun and a no-nonsense way of talking that made my mother sit up straighter. She sat at the kitchen table with a notebook and a cup of coffee and asked my mother questions while I played on the floor with my blocks.

"Mrs. Callahan, you said you had information about a man named Ronald Kessler."

"I do."

"Where did you get it?"

My mother glanced at me. I did not look up. "From my sister. She heard something."

That was a lie. My mother had never gotten anything from Dana. But she was protecting me, I realized. She was protecting me from having to explain how a five-year-old knew a name she should not have known.

The detective wrote something down. "What did your sister hear?"

"Just that he had been to a woman's house up north and something happened. The woman filed a report but did not press charges. Her name is Theresa Lang."

"We're aware of that report. It was closed for lack of evidence."

"I know."

The detective looked at her. "Mrs. Callahan, I have to be honest with you. A single closed report is not enough to open an investigation. If Ms. Lang won't come forward, there's not much we can do."

"I understand."

"But you called me anyway."

"Yes."

"Why?"

My mother was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "Because I have a daughter, and I don't want her to grow up in a world where this happens and nobody does anything."

The detective looked at me. I looked up from my blocks and looked back at her. She had kind eyes, I thought. But kind eyes were not enough either.

"I'll keep his name on file," the detective said. "If you hear anything else, call me."

She left. My mother sat at the table for a long time with her coffee going cold. I stacked my blocks into a tower and knocked it down and stacked it again.

I had to do more. I had to find other women. I had to build a case that did not depend on a single victim who was too scared to speak.

The only problem was that I could not do any of it myself.

I needed an ally. Someone who would take me seriously. Someone who had access to the world outside my house.

I thought about this for a long time. And then I thought about the fact that, in the first version of my life, my aunt had never gotten better because no one had ever held Ronald Kessler accountable. The system had failed her. The system had let him walk.

But the system was not the only thing in the world.

I thought about my mother's boyfriend from the first version of my life, a man named Daniel who had been a sheriff's deputy for twelve years before he retired. He had been kind to me when I was small. He had taught me how to fish. He had come to my aunt's funeral and stood in the back with his hat in his hands.

In this version of my life, I had not met him yet. But I knew his name and I knew where he worked, and I knew that he was the kind of man who believed children when they said something was wrong.

I needed my mother to meet him. And I needed to make sure she did it on purpose.