ALSO BY BRAD PARKS
Say Nothing
THE CARTER ROSS MYSTERY SERIES
Faces of the Gone
Eyes of the Innocent
The Girl Next Door
The Good Cop
The Player
The Fraud
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Parks, Brad, 1974– author.
Title: Closer than you know : a novel / Brad Parks.
Description: First edition. | New York, New York : Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017014010 | ISBN 9781101985625 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101985649 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3616.A7553 C58 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014010
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
To Alice Martell—with thanks for her talent, devotion, wisdom, and unending kindness
CONTENTS
Also by Brad Parks
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Chapter Fifty-eight
Chapter Fifty-nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-one
Chapter Sixty-two
Chapter Sixty-three
Chapter Sixty-four
Acknowledgments
About the Author
ONE
He was dressed in his best suit, the one he usually reserved for funerals.
She wore pearls. It made her feel more maternal.
Arm in arm, they walked up a concrete path toward Shenandoah Valley Social Services, whose offices filled a cheerless metal-sided building. There was no landscaping, no ornamentation, no attempt to make the environs more inviting. As an agency of county government, Social Services had neither the budget nor the inclination for such gilding. Its clientele was not there by choice.
The man paused at the front door.
“Remember: We’re perfect,” he said to his wife.
“The perfect couple,” she replied.
He pushed through the door, and they traveled down a stark cinder-block hallway toward the main waiting area. A sign read NOTICE: NO WEAPONS.
The room they soon entered was ringed with blue imitation-leather chairs and stern warnings against food-stamp fraud. A smattering of people, all of them luckless enough to be born into multigenerational poverty, looked up and stared. Men in suits and women in pearls were not a common sight here.
Ignoring them, the man and woman crossed the room and announced themselves to a receptionist who was bunkered behind a thick chunk of clear plastic. This could be a tough business: The administering of benefits; the denying of requests; the dispensing of abused and neglected children, taking them from one family and bestowing them on another. There had been incidents.
After a minute or so, the man and woman were greeted by the family services specialist who had been assigned to them, a woman with a tight ponytail and square-framed glasses who received them warmly, by name, with hugs and smiles.
It was all so different from when they had first met her, about three months earlier, when it had been nothing but dry handshakes and justifiable suspicion. Families like this didn’t just stumble into Shenandoah Valley Social Services and volunteer to become foster parents. Families like this—who had resources, connections, and that air that suggested they weren’t accustomed to waiting for the things they wanted—either went with private adoption agencies or traveled abroad to acquire their babies: eastern Europe if they wanted a white one; Africa, Asia, or South America if they didn’t care.
Seriously? the family services specialist wanted to ask them. What are you doing here?
But then she started talking with them, and they won her over. They told her about the failed efforts to get pregnant, then about the tests that revealed they would never be able to have children of their own.
They still wanted a family, though, and they had decided to adopt locally. Why go overseas when there were children in need, right here in their own community? They were just looking for a vessel to receive their love.
The family services specialist tried to explain to them there were no guarantees with this route. It might be months or years before a baby became available. Even then, they might foster the infant for a time and then have to turn it back over to its birth mother. Adoption was always a last resort. Social Services’ goal—to sa
y nothing of Virginia statutes—prioritized reunifying children with their biological families.
The woman chewed her fingernails when she heard this. The man seemed undeterred.
After that initial interview had come the parent orientation meeting, then the training sessions. They had taken notes, asked questions, and generally acted like they were trying to graduate at the top of the class.
Their home study, in which every aspect of their residence was inspected, had been flawless, from the child safety locks all the way up to the smoke detectors.
And the nursery? Immaculate. A crib that exceeded every standard. Diapers squared in neat piles. The walls freshly covered in blue paint.
“Blue?” the family services specialist had asked. “What if it’s a girl?”
“I have a hunch,” the man said.
They flew through the criminal background check. Their paystubs showed ample income. Their bank statements swelled with reserve funds.
Home insurance, check. Car insurance, check. Life insurance, check. Their physician had verified that both the would-be mother and father were in excellent health. Their references gushed with praise.
In her thirteen years on the job, the family services specialist had interacted with hundreds of families. Even the best, most loving, most well meaning among them had issues.
This one didn’t. She had never met two people more ready for a child.
They were the perfect couple.
Shenandoah Valley Social Services did not officially rank potential foster families, but was there any question about who would be number one on the list if a baby became available?
Even now here they were, turned out like they were attending an important public ceremony when really they were just going back to a shabby, windowless office to accept a piece of paper. It was their certificate, indicating they had completed the necessary steps to become approved foster-care providers.
They beamed as they received it. They were official.
More hugs. More smiles. The receptionist came out of the bunker to take pictures. It was that kind of occasion for this couple.
Then they departed.
“What if we did this all for nothing?” the woman asked as she walked out of the building.
“We didn’t,” the man assured her.
“You really think it’s going to happen?”
He leaned in close.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll have a baby in no time.”
TWO
If you are a working mother, as I am, you know this truth to be self-evident: Good childcare—safe, affordable, and reliable—is rarer than flawless diamonds and at least twice as valuable. It is the connective tissue, the breath in your lungs, the essential vitamin that makes all other movement possible.
The flip side is that losing your childcare, especially when you have an infant, is basically incapacitating.
That was the catastrophe I was trying to avert on a Tuesday evening in early March as I sped toward Ida Ferncliff’s house with one eye on the road and the other on the clock, which was ticking ominously close to six p.m.
Mrs. Ferncliff had been watching our now three-month-old son, Alex, since he went into childcare at six weeks. With children and babies, she was as magical as Harry Potter—patient and kind, caring and calm, unflappable in all situations.
With adults, she was more like Voldemort. My husband, Ben, referred to her as Der Kaiser, after Kaiser Wilhelm. And not just because of her mustache. She had her rules, which she followed with Teutonic precision, and she expected everyone else to as well.
One of them was that children should be picked up by five thirty, no later. She had a fifteen-minute grace period, though Mrs. Ferncliff’s idea of grace was pursed lips and a nasty glare. After five forty-five, she fined you $20, plus a dollar for every minute thereafter.
Picking up after six was cause for termination. That was in the contract that I, Melanie A. Barrick, and my husband, Benjamin J. Barrick, had signed. And Mrs. Ferncliff had made it clear she would not hesitate to exercise the after-six clause the last three times my shift replacement, the contemptible Warren Plotz, had ambled in more than a half hour late, sending me on mad dashes against the clock that had me arriving at 5:52, 5:47, and 5:58, respectively.
My complaints about Warren’s tardiness had gone exactly nowhere. Apparently, being the owner’s son entitled him to act like a human rug burn. I might have simply walked out, whether he showed up or not, except the first rule at Diamond Trucking was that the dispatch desk—the lifeline to forty-six rigs crisscrossing the country, carrying time-sensitive fresh produce—had to be staffed 24/7.
And I simply couldn’t afford to lose this job. It paid $18 an hour and didn’t make me contribute a dime for a no-deductible healthcare plan, a perk that was worth its weight in free well-baby checkups now that we had Alex.
Admittedly, being a trucking-company dispatcher at age thirty-one wasn’t the career I anticipated having when I graduated from the University of Virginia with a summa cum laude seal on my diploma and plans to do meaningful work for a socially responsible organization.
But those high-minded goals had collided rather abruptly with the realities of my graduation year, 2009, which has the distinction of being the absolute worst moment in the history of modern America to have entered the job market. I compounded my horrific sense of timing with a degree in English Literature, which meant I was articulate, urbane, and virtually unhirable.
It took five years and a thousand failed cover letters—five years of either unemployment or slinging lattes at Starbucks—before I finally landed this gig. And I wasn’t going to give it up, even if it meant Warren Plotz’s chronic tardiness gave me angina every other week.
It was 5:54 as I neared the light for Statler Boulevard, which forms a semicircle around the eastern side of Staunton, a quaint city of about 25,000 in Virginia’s Shenandoah valley. Most of the time I enjoyed Staunton’s slower pace, except when it came in the form of people who were leaving six car lengths between them and the next vehicle, forcing me to dance between lanes to get around them.
I knew, from hard experience, that it was exactly six minutes to Mrs. Ferncliff’s house from Statler. As long as I made it through that light with the clock still at 5:54, I would be fine. Barely.
Then, when I was still about a hundred yards away, the light went yellow. The wait for the signal at Statler was, for reasons known only to the light-timing gods, notoriously long. If I stopped, there was no way I’d make it in time. Mrs. Ferncliff would fire us, and we’d be stuck trying to find new childcare.
That, I already knew, was hopeless. Ben was a grad student who was given only a small stipend—and growing up poor and black in Alabama hadn’t exactly endowed him with family money—so we couldn’t afford any of the fancy day care centers that promised all children would master quantum theory by age three. That left us with in-home settings, most of which seemed to be run by chain-smokers, inattentive great-grandmothers, or people who thought there was nothing wrong with a baby inhaling the occasional lead paint chip.
I stomped down on the accelerator. The light turned red a few nanoseconds before I crossed over the solid white line.
No matter. I was through. I breathed out heavily.
Then I saw the blue lights of a Staunton City police car flashing in my rearview mirror.
* * *
• • •
One traffic ticket and twenty-three minutes later, I was in a frenzy as I pulled into Mrs. Ferncliff’s short driveway. I grabbed the ticket in the hopes I could use it to convince Der Kaiser to show me some leniency, then hurried up her front steps and grasped the handle of the front door.
It was locked.
Which was strange. Ordinarily, Mrs. Ferncliff left her door open. She didn’t like to leave children unattended to answer it.
I press
ed the doorbell button and waited. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. I pressed the button again.
“Mrs. Ferncliff, it’s Melanie Barrick,” I said in a loud voice, knowing she was somewhere inside, peeved at me. “I’m sorry I’m late. I got held up at work again and then on the way here I was in such a hurry I got pulled over. And . . . I would have called, but I can’t find my phone.”
Pathetic. I sounded utterly pathetic. I couldn’t say I was the worst parent in history—my own parents, who gave me up for adoption when I was nine, cemented their claim on that title long ago—but I had to be close.
“I’m sorry, okay?” I continued. “I’m so, so sorry. Could you please open the door?”
There was still no answer. Maybe she was just gathering Alex’s things, which she would shove through the door, along with the baby.
And our contract, with the six o’clock termination clause highlighted.
After another minute of standing on that front porch—had that cost me another dollar?—I was starting to get a little angry. How long was the silent treatment going to last? I pounded on the door with the butt of my hand.
“Mrs. Ferncliff, please,” I said. “I’m sorry I’m late. Very late. I’m sorry I’m a terrible mother. I’m sorry for everything.”
Still no response.
Finally, Mrs. Ferncliff’s stern voice came through the door: “Go away. Go away or I’m calling the police.”
“Okay, fine. Just let me have Alex and I’ll be on my way.”
And then Mrs. Ferncliff said something that shot a few gigawatts of electricity to my gut.
“Alex is gone.”
I took a sharp, involuntary breath. “What?”
“Social Services has him.”
The charge was now spiking from my toes to my brain. I knew Mrs. Ferncliff was strict, but this was pathological.
“You turned him over to Social Services because I was twenty minutes late?” I howled.
“I didn’t do anything of the sort. They came and took him a few hours ago.”
“What? Why? What the—”
“You can ask Social Services. Now go away. I don’t want you on my property.”