The Final Act

by Joy Fielding

  Cindy nodded, afraid to question her further. The two women sat at the foot of the bed, holding tightly onto one another, waiting for more news of Julia.

  *

  IT WAS ALMOST ten o’clock when Cindy heard the front door open and close. She leaned forward in her bed, pressed the mute button on the TV, and waited as footsteps filled the upstairs hall. “Heather?” she called. Heather had phoned to say she wouldn’t be home for dinner, that she was meeting up with friends but wouldn’t be late.

  Elvis jumped from the bed, ran out of the room. “Heather?” Cindy called again.

  “It’s me,” Duncan answered, his face appearing in the doorway, Elvis leaping against his legs with such enthusiasm he almost knocked him over.

  “Duncan,” Cindy acknowledged. “Is Heather with you?”

  Duncan shook his head. Dark hair fell across his forehead. He looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept in days. His normally smooth skin was splotchy and pale. The stale odour of too many cigarettes wafted from his clothes. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon,” he said, swaying. He leaned his shoulder against the wall, as if to steady himself.

  “Are you okay?” Then, “Are you drunk?”

  Duncan’s eyebrows drew together at the bridge of his nose, as if he were giving the question serious consideration. “No. Well, maybe. Just a bit.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he repeated.

  “Why were you drinking?”

  He laughed, an annoyingly girlish giggle Cindy hadn’t heard before. “Does there have to be a reason?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk before.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “When did you start smoking?” Cindy pressed.

  “What?”

  “Smoking and drinking—it’s just not you.”

  “I don’t do it very often,” Duncan said defensively. “Just every now and then. You know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mrs. Carver, you’re making me a little nervous here.”

  “What are you nervous about?”

  “Are you upset with me about something?”

  “Why would I be upset with you?”

  “I don’t know. You just seem . . .”

  “Upset?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t think I have good reason to be upset?”

  Duncan glanced down the hall toward the bedroom he shared with Heather. “I didn’t say that.” He paused, pushed himself away from the wall, wobbled on his heels. He took two steps, then stopped, stared hard at Cindy. “Has there been any news?” he asked, carefully. “About Julia?”

  “No. Duncan . . .” Cindy called as he was about to turn away.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s going on with you and Heather?”

  Duncan swallowed, rubbed the side of his nose. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Something’s obviously not right between the two of you. . .”

  “We’re just going through a bit of a rough patch, Mrs. Carver. That’s all. I really don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”

  “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if there was anything I should know?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know something, don’t you?”

  “I know I’m drunker than I thought I was.” He tried to laugh, coughed instead.

  “You know something about Julia,” Cindy said over the sound of his hacking.

  Blood drained from the young man’s already pale face. He seemed to sober up on the spot. “About Julia? No. Of course not.”

  “You were fighting with her . . .”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “And then she disappeared.”

  “Mrs. Carver, you can’t think I had anything to do with Julia’s disappearance.”

  “Did you?”

  “No!”

  Cindy fell back against her pillow. Did she really think the boy she’d welcomed into her home, this young man who was her younger daughter’s lover, was in any way responsible for her older daughter’s disappearance? Could she really think that? She shook her head. She didn’t know what to think anymore.

  Duncan stood silently in the doorway, his arms hanging limply at his sides. “Maybe I should spend the night at Mac’s,” he said finally. “You’d probably feel more comfortable if I weren’t around.”

  Cindy said nothing.

  “I’ll just get a few of my things.”

  Cindy listened as he shuffled down the hall. She thought of running after him, wrestling him to the ground, beating a confession out of him. Then she thought of her mother asleep in Julia’s bed. What was the point in waking her up by creating a scene? Duncan wasn’t about to confess to anything. Did she really think he had anything to confess?

  Cindy heard him rummaging around in the closet. A few seconds later, she caught sight of his shadow as it hurried by her room. He left without saying good-bye.

  *

  “HOW HAVE YOU been holding out, Mrs. Carver?” the doctor was asking, his face drifting in and out of focus. He was a big man with a full beard, bushy eyebrows, and thinning gray hair.

  “I’ve been better,” Cindy said, adjusting the white sheet tucked around her breasts.

  “Remembering to take your pills?”

  Cindy rubbed her eyes, watching the doctor’s features flatten and slide across his face. “What pills?”

  “It’s very important that you take your pills, Mrs. Carver,” he was saying. “If you don’t take your pills, you’ll die.”

  “Oh no!” Cindy shot up in bed. “I forgot. I forgot.” She was halfway to the bathroom, her heart pounding against her chest when she stopped. “What pills?” she asked out loud, glancing toward the television set, realizing it was still on, that she’d fallen asleep sometime before midnight during a rerun of Law & Order, and that she was standing naked in the middle of her room in the middle of the night in the middle of the recurring nightmare that was her life. “What pills?” she asked again, collapsing on the floor, and staring at a handsome man in an orange jumpsuit walking glumly across her TV screen. The camera lowered to reveal the man’s hands in shackles as his head of curly brown hair was pushed roughly inside a waiting police car.

  It took Cindy a minute to realize that the man she was watching was Ted Bundy, notorious killer of dozens, possibly even hundreds, of young women. She shuddered, unable to turn away, transfixed by the announcer’s deep voice and the killer’s bottomless stare. “Stay tuned as Ted Bundy makes a daring escape,” the announcer intoned solemnly. “American Justice continues after these messages.”

  Was that what happened to Julia? Cindy couldn’t stop herself from wondering. Had she run into a man whose boyishly handsome exterior belied the heart and soul of a deranged killer? Had he tricked her into getting into his car, charmed her into going back to his place? Had she tried to fight him off? Had he used drugs or chains to subdue her? Was he keeping her prisoner in some dank underground cave?

  So many madmen out there, Cindy was thinking. So many mad men. Had one of them taken out his rage on her little girl?

  She pushed herself to her feet just as Ted Bundy’s smiling face once again filled the screen, his crazed eyes quickly settling on her own, daring her to confront him.

  “The boy next door,” the announcer proclaimed as Cindy groped for the remote control. For a station that was ostensibly about art and entertainment, it seemed to spend an awful lot of time detailing grisly murders. She clicked it off, watching the room go instantly dark, as if the TV itself had swallowed the light. Eating its young, she thought, walking to the window, pushing aside the curtains to stare at the backyard. There was only a sliver of moon, and it was pretty much hidden by the tall maple tree that sat in the center of the Sellicks’ unruly and overgrown lawn. She should really do something about the cedar fence that divided their property, she thought absently. It was starting to cave in at the far end, buckling under the extended p
ressure of a nearby sumac tree. All it would take was one good snowfall and that fence would collapse altogether.

  And “Good fences make good neighbors,” she thought, recalling the lines by Robert Frost, projecting ahead to the coming winter, trying to imagine herself in three months time. Would she still be standing by her bedroom window, staring into the darkness, waiting for her daughter to come home?

  It was then she saw her.

  She was sitting on the bottom step leading from the patio off the kitchen to the backyard, and while Cindy couldn’t see her face, she knew immediately it was Julia. “Julia. My God—Julia!” She pulled on her terry-cloth robe and raced down the stairs, Elvis at her heels. She ran into the kitchen, unlocked and opened the sliding glass door in one fluid gesture, and vaulted outside, the cool night air whipping against her face like a wet towel. “Julia!” she cried, as the girl on the bottom step jumped to her feet and backed into the night.

  “Mom, no. It’s me.”

  “Heather?!”

  “You scared me. What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? What are you doing?” Cindy demanded. “It’s after three in the morning.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I saw you from my bedroom window. I thought you were Julia.”

  “Sorry,” Heather said. “It’s only me.” There was a strange, gargled quality to Heather’s voice.

  “Are you crying?” Cindy inched her way down the steps, as if her daughter were a stray kitten who might run away if she moved too fast.

  Heather shook her head, the sliver of moonlight catching her cheek, revealing a path of still-wet tears.

  “What is it, sweetheart? And please don’t tell me, nothing,” she added just as the word was leaving Heather’s lips. “Does it have something to do with Duncan?”

  Heather turned away. “We split up,” she acknowledged, after a long pause.

  “You split up? When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Why?” Cindy asked, her voice low.

  “I don’t know.” Heather released a deep breath of air, lifted her palms into the air. “We’ve been fighting a lot lately.”

  “About Julia?”

  Heather looked confused. “About Julia? No. What’s Julia got to do with this?”

  “What were you fighting about, sweetheart?” Cindy asked, ignoring the question.

  Heather shook her head. “I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. It’s just so stupid.”

  “What is?”

  “We were at this party a few weeks ago,” Heather began slowly, “and I was talking to this guy. I was just talking to him. It was perfectly innocent, but Duncan said I was flirting, and we had this whole big argument. I thought we’d patched it up, but then it started up again last week. I’d gone to this club with Sheri and Jessica, and Duncan was really upset about it. He said I shouldn’t be going places like that without him, and I said, Why shouldn’t I? I’m not doing anything wrong. Why can’t I just hang out with my girlfriends and have a good time? And he said, if that’s what I wanted, I could hang out with my girlfriends every night. Then tonight we had another big fight, and Duncan got pretty drunk, and I got mad and left with Jessica, and when I got home, I saw his stuff wasn’t here, so I called him at Mac’s, and he said he wasn’t coming back, that it was over between us.”

  “Oh, sweetie, he doesn’t mean that.”

  “Yes, he does. He said he doesn’t want anything more to do with any of us, that we’re all crazy. Why would he say that?”

  “I don’t know,” Cindy lied, thinking of their earlier confrontation.

  “Did you see him when he came home?”

  “Yes,” Cindy admitted.

  “And?”

  “He was pretty drunk.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing. I just asked him a few questions.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “I just asked him . . . if there was anything he thought I should know.”

  “About what?”

  “About Julia.”

  “About Julia? Why would you ask him about her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why does everything always have to be about Julia?” Heather demanded suddenly. “I am so sick and tired of everything always being about Julia. This isn’t about her. It’s about me. Heather. Your other daughter. Remember me?”

  “Heather, please. Your sister is missing. . .”

  “Julia’s not missing.”

  “What?”

  Heather looked toward the ground.

  “What are you talking about? Are you saying you know where she is?”

  “No.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Heather reluctantly met her mother’s gaze. “I didn’t think she was serious. I didn’t think she’d actually do it.”

  “What are you saying?” Cindy repeated, her voice a low growl. “Tell me.”

  “The whole thing is just so stupid,” Heather began. “Julia was mad at Duncan because he wouldn’t give her a lift. She was calling him names, accusing him of being selfish and ungrateful. She said if he was going to live here free of charge, the least he could do was make himself useful. He told her he wasn’t her chauffeur; she told him to get the hell out of the house. I told her to get the hell out, that everyone was sick and tired of her stupid tantrums, and she said she couldn’t wait to get out, that she hated me, that I was ‘the bane of her existence.’ And then she said that maybe she wouldn’t wait until she’d saved up enough money to get her own place, maybe she’d move out right away. Today, she said. Maybe she wouldn’t even bother coming home after her audition.”

  The words pounded against Cindy’s consciousness like a boxer’s fists. “What?”

  “I didn’t think she really meant it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “When? When the police were here? You got so angry when Fiona suggested Julia might want some time to herself. You said she was trying to sabotage the investigation. I didn’t want . . . I mean, just in case . . . I didn’t know . . .”

  Cindy fought to make sense of her daughter’s words. Was it possible Julia had simply taken off in a fit of pique? That she could be so vengeful, so thoughtless, so cruel? That she could disappear as a way of making a point?

  No. It wasn’t possible. No matter how angry Julia was at her sister, no matter how selfish and self-absorbed she might be, she would never put her family through this kind of prolonged torture. She might have stayed away a few hours to teach her sister a lesson, possibly even overnight. But not this long. Not this long. “No,” Cindy said out loud. “Julia would never pull a stunt like this. She knows how worried we’d all be.”

  “Mom, wake up,” Heather said forcefully. “The only person Julia has ever worried about is Julia. She . . .”

  Whatever else Heather was about to say was lost as the palm of Cindy’s hand came crashing down against the side of her daughter’s face. Heather gasped, fell back, staggered to the ground.

  “Oh, my baby, I’m so sorry,” Cindy cried immediately, reaching for her daughter in the darkness, the sliver of moon spotlighting the trickle of blood slowly spreading across Heather’s mouth like lipstick carelessly applied.

  Heather recoiled from her mother’s touch. “No, you’re not.” She pushed herself to her feet and ran up the back steps to the patio. “Face it, Mom,” she said, clinging to the sliding glass door, “the only thing you’re sorry about is that I’m standing here and Julia isn’t.” The simple sentence tumbled down the steps, then ricocheted off the damp grass to hit Cindy right between the eyes.

  Cindy stood at the bottom of the outside steps, too weak to move, too numb to fall. This must be what it feels like to be shot, she thought, as Heather disappeared inside the house. The moment right before you collapse.

  Cindy looked up at the moon’s thin arc, searching for stars in the cloud-carpeted sky. But if there were stars, the
y were hiding, she thought, her eyes drifting toward the house next door.

  Faith was at her bedroom window, staring down at her. It was too dark to read the expression on her face.

  NINETEEN

  THE phone rang at seven o’clock the next morning, abruptly pulling Cindy out of a boxing ring in the middle of a close match with a faceless opponent. Blood seeped from her bandaged fingers as she stretched her hand toward the phone, the dream receding as she opened her eyes, disappearing altogether at the sound of her voice. “Hello,” she said, trying to sound as if she’d been up for hours, and not, as was the case, as if she’d just fallen asleep.

  “Cindy Carver?”

  Cindy pushed herself into a sitting position as Elvis adjusted his position at her feet. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Elizabeth Kapiza from the National Post. First, let me say how very sorry I am about your daughter.”

  “What’s happened?” Cindy grabbed for the remote control and turned on the television, rapidly flipping through the channels, her heart pounding wildly against her chest, as if trying to escape before the dreadful news descended.

  “Nothing,” Elizabeth Kapiza assured her quickly. “There’s nothing new.”

  Cindy fell back against her pillows, fighting the urge to throw up, her forehead clammy and bathed in sweat.

  “I don’t know if you’re familiar with my work,” Elizabeth Kapiza was saying.

  Cindy pictured the thirty-five-year-old woman with the pixie haircut and gold loop earrings that were her trademark smiling at her from the side of newspaper boxes across the city. “I know who you are.” Everyone knew Elizabeth Kapiza, Cindy thought, even if they didn’t read her columns. Her increasingly high profile was the result of a canny mixture of talent and self-promotion, achieved by carefully injecting herself into the middle of every tragedy she covered, be it a local case of child abuse or a case of international terrorism. In theory, she wrote human interest stories. In actual fact, she wrote about herself.

  “I was wondering if I could come by and talk to you.”

  “It’s seven o’clock in the morning,” Cindy reminded her, glancing at the clock.

  “Whenever it’s convenient for you.”

  “What is it you want to talk about?”