“She found a body mechanic to back her up.” Her eyes light up as if this news tantalized her.
“Oh? So a fender bender or something? There were a lot of drunk teenagers out on the road that night.” My heart drums wild in my chest.
“True, but not on that end of town. There were no eyewitnesses. The mechanic says there was a very sharp indentation in the right rear passenger’s side. It had a distinctive quality of a sedan.”
“They tumbled over boulders,” I point out. “Their car looked like a wrinkled piece of paper. Not to mention the fire.”
“I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Allison. No reason to get worked up. Both the Parkers and the Humeras were resentful of the fact you lived and their daughters didn’t.”
“I know.” It was hell, and I hated every moment of it. There were times I actually wished I had stayed in the damn car.
James taps his fingers over the table. “Wait a minute. You don’t think some twisted fuck from one of their families is responsible for what happened to Reagan, do you?”
“I’m not implying that.” She turns over the next photo, and my entire body recoils as if she had uncovered a snake. “Who’s this?”
There we are. High school. Senior year. I had finally conceded to the fact I would never have another friend outside of the one who stalked me so proficiently. A staffer from the yearbook snapped that picture of Heather and me running track.
“Some girl I had P.E. with.” My heart gives a hearty wallop with the lie.
McCafferty flips the next photo. Heather and I locked in an embrace on the front lawn yesterday morning. Shit.
“And this is the same girl?”
“Yes.” My voice grows small with shame. My fingers twitch to flip over that entire damn stack of incriminating photos, cutting to the demonic chase. I’m not a fan of these wicked games.
“Who is this?” James leans in to get a better look at her.
“A friend from high school.” The one I forced into admitting she ran Briana and Karen off the road that night. Heather said she would have taken it to the grave, but I couldn’t sleep not knowing if it were true. Of course, I didn’t sleep afterwards either. I promised Heather I wouldn’t breathe a word, and that’s when she said she knew we were soul sisters. I hated to break it to her, but I was no soul sister—simply an accessory to a very gruesome crime. The only reason I didn’t turn her in was because I was too afraid the case would go sideways and it would be me serving time. Maybe that would have been best, Heather and me serving out our sentences in the very same cell forever. Her heaven. My hell.
I clear my throat. “She was in the area and stopped by to give her support. The one that started the GoFundMe.” I roll my eyes as if the entire thing were ridiculous.
“Heather Evans—Porter.” McCafferty flips over another shot of her crouching in the crowd down at the Boys and Girls Club. Did I know she was in town then? I try to filter through my memory, but the damn thing is stuck on stupid.
“She’s married. Has a family.” I try to whitewash her strange behavior with a patina of normalcy.
“Was,” McCafferty corrects. “Had a family. She and her daughter moved out to Torrance California a while back.”
My mouth falls open. That’s an outlying city close to where we lived. And here I thought Heather Evans was safely tucked in Nevada. “Local school records show the child attended Alta Vista Elementary School for the remainder of the last school year. Never did reenroll.”
“No, that’s not right. Her daughter has to be older than that by now, at least in junior high.”
“That’s the older one.” She grimaces at the picture of Heather. That’s right. Heather has more than one. Honestly, I can’t keep track of my own child—in the most literal sense—let alone Heather’s brood. And poor, poor Heather can’t even evoke sympathy from someone like McCafferty. “They both have curious names.” Here it is. “Allison.”
“Both?” James and I say in unison.
I clear my throat. My skin begins to crawl in that familiar way it has every time Heather is around with those little Heather-shaped maggots of hers burrowing into my flesh.
“How old would you say the youngest of the two is?” Tears blur my vision because I think I already know where this is going.
“A little older than Reagan.”
I pull Ota from the dark recesses of my mind and dust her off, slap her face with Heather’s juxtaposed over it. She doesn’t look anything like her, but then she doesn’t have to.
“Do you think this woman took my child?”
McCafferty leans back in her seat. That intense glare of hers spears right through me as if to say I should know.
“I’m saying anything is possible and we have an entire list of suspects to consider.” She tweaks the corner of the photos with her thumb as if they were playing cards. Her gaunt frame turns toward my husband.
“James.” She blinks a dry smile. “Let’s move on to you.”
James
Marilyn McCafferty sits at the head of the table, bitter, yet drunk with revenge. I’m not sure what I’ve ever done to this battleax, but I can tell by that gleam in her beady little eyes that she’s about to knife my balls off so fast I will never see it coming. For a moment I envision her hunched over a pentagram, the leader of a black mass—worshiping trees in her birthday suit, her arms flailing to the sky as she decries her hatred for men.
“I need some water.” Allison springs to her feet. “Can I get anything for the two of you?”
Both McCafferty and I offer a silent refusal.
I wait until Ally is deep in the kitchen before leaning in. “I’m working on my marriage.”
Allison comes back with a water bottle in hand before I can finish my thought. But McCafferty doesn’t look amused by my efforts. Instead, it looks as if I’ve only managed to piss her off that much more.
Allison gives me a quick wink. “So let’s see what cobwebs lurk in the attic of your past, shall we?”
She’s awfully glib. I can’t believe she didn’t mention the fact some chick from high school has been hanging around. You would think she would mention something like that. I’ll have to pick her brain later. See if this girl is off her rocker. See if her kid can pass for Ota. Leave no stone unturned. I frown at McCafferty because a part of me is afraid she’s about to land a boulder on my chest.
“Are you certain that Reagan is your biological daughter?”
Allison jerks, kicking me from under the table without meaning to. “What?” She slaps her hand down over the stack of pictures patiently waiting for their moment in the spotlight. “Listen, I’m about to ask you to leave our home.” Her face is red with rage. “This is insulting and completely unnecessary.”
“Yes,” I assure them both. “Reagan is one hundred percent my child.” Allison settles down a bit, just enough to take a deep breath. “Look, this is the kind of speculation we don’t need right now. All those morons camping out on my lawn, chanting bullshit until the wee hours of the night, would love to feast off something like this. Reagan is mine. End of debate. You can take all the DNA samples you want once you bring my baby girl back alive.”
Allison gives a frenetic nod of agreement, her eyes set wide as an open sky.
McCafferty places her fingers onto the next photo in her surprise lineup of horrors. “The only reason I ask is because we located a few of your fraternity brothers. One of them mentioned a lengthy breakup ensued just before the two of you announced you would be parents.”
“That’s true.” Allison takes in a quivering breath. “Suffice it to say we were ecstatic to get back together. I’m fertile.”
That’s not entirely true. Ally and I have had a few slipups. Not once did she get pregnant. And then there were the intentional slipups on my part, and again it wasn’t happening. It wasn’t meant to be. Yet. Once Reagan comes home, I want to get to the serious business of expanding our family. I want more daughters, and yes, I would like to have a son. I th
ink that would be wonderful. I want the whole package with Allison. For as many mistakes as I’ve made, I want to spend the rest of my life making it up to her.
“Do either of you know who this man is?”
Allison gasps before McCafferty turns the picture over, but once I see my brother’s smiling face it’s me gasping.
“Aston.” I crane my neck a bit. “It was accidental—his death.”
“I know.” McCafferty flips the next one over, and we find Wilson smiling back at me. “Your other brother.”
“Yes, Wilson. He was a good guy. He OD’d on opiates or something. I was just a kid. I’ve never plied my parents for the details.” The fact he died was all I needed to know at the time. It’s still too much for me to take in.
“He didn’t die of opiates.” She cleans her eye teeth with her tongue. I steal a moment to glance at the door. For once I’m glad my father is taking his scheduled walk of the day. If he couldn’t handle it in the privacy of his own home, he certainly couldn’t tolerate the casket tossing going on in my dining room. “There was another chemical found in his bloodstream.”
“What was that?” Who knew what shit he was on. Toward the end, half the time he didn’t know what state he was in.
“Ethylene glycol. A chemical found in antifreeze. It’s hard to detect.”
“Antifreeze.” I shake my head at Allison. “Sounds like he got ahold of some bad stuff.”
“Sounds like it,” Allison is quick to agree with me, but too quick, and it unnerves me. The last thing I want is for McCafferty to think we’re covering for one another.
She flips the next picture over, exposing a younger, far less affable version of my father—not that any version of him is affable. But this particular one screams asshole even to the kindest, soft-footed woman. There’s not a person on the planet who wouldn’t want to give him the finger in his younger years. He was tough and he had to be.
“That’s my father. Looking good, right?” I glance to Ally and we share a quick smile. When Allison first met Pops, she said if she were older my mother would have to watch out. It was in jest, and something I appreciated at the time since I’ve gone through life wearing his face.
“Handsome devil.” McCafferty gives the photo a slight wink and both Ally and I share a smirk. “Rumor has it, he was a hard man.”
“Still is,” I offer. “He’s been—”
“Staying with you.” She sniffs at the idea. “Yes, I do know that. How do you feel about your father, James? Would you say you have a good relationship with him?”
“Excellent. Better than ever.”
“And your mother?”
“She passed about a year and a half ago.” Something deep in my chest unhinges and I resist the urge to bawl. “She was the best. I miss her like crazy.”
“Sounds like she meant the world to you.”
“Doesn’t every mother?”
“Not every mother.” She shoots a quick look to Ally. “How did your father feel about his children?”
“He was tough. He needed his kids to be perfect. He ran the courthouse. How would it look if his kids were running around wild? Small town.” Wilson was running around wild.
The past comes flooding back and I bite down over my lip so hard I taste blood.
McCafferty flips the next picture. Rachel standing in front of a batch of brownies. Home ec yearbook picture. I recognize it because the editor of the yearbook gave us a blowup print to display at the funeral. She looks happy. Whole.
“Is that your sister?” Allison pulls it over and admires her with a saturated smile. I would like to think that Allison and Rachel would have been very good friends. It’s a recurring fantasy I have—all my siblings alive, the entire lot of us enjoying long and joyful Sunday dinners. We could have been something great. Great indeed.
“And this one.” McCafferty flips another one over, the remaining pile growing markedly thin.
“That’s Mom.” God, I miss her. I give a wistful twist of the neck. There she is in all her redheaded Irish glory. “Rich in a dress.” Both Allison and McCafferty share a quiet chuckle.
“She was killed tragically.” McCafferty is fishing. But for what?
“It’s no secret how my mother died. Bad transmission meets railroad tracks. It was unfortunate.” That letter I found comes back to me and my stomach grinds.
“Yes.” She picks up my mother’s picture and hands it to Allison. “It’s unfortunate your father had the car impounded. Had it crushed down to a tin can that very afternoon.” She pumps her brows.
A self-righteous anger percolates through me on behalf of my father. He may not have been perfect, but he was damn near close. “What in the hell are you suggesting?”
McCafferty’s lips twitch as if she were getting off on my annoyance. “I’m suggesting we move on.”
She flips the next and final picture over.
Monica and I locked in an embrace outside of the house I grew up in.
“That’s from the other night.” I nod to Ally because for some reason she knew about it, too. “How did you get this?”
McCafferty pulls the pictures forward and straightens them as if she’s getting ready to shuffle a deck. “Someone sent it to me.” Her gaze skirts the two of us. “My number is included on all of the missing posters and on the website Rich created. You wouldn’t believe the stories I’m hearing these days.” A smile warbles on her lips. That smirk coupled with that statement makes her look like some old deranged grandmother that belongs locked up and forgotten in a home somewhere.
Allison growls at the idea. “Anytime you want to pull fact from fiction, I’m available to you.”
“I might take you up on that offer. In the meantime, neither of you looks too concerned about this woman.”
“Monica,” I offer. “My ex. We dated in high school.”
“Monica Percale.” McCafferty taps her finger over the picture. “Twice married, twice divorced.”
A curious huff expels from me. “Did not know that.” Do not care.
“Hospital records show a birth in Clark county nine years ago.”
I swallow the baby-sized lump down my throat. Convenient. Just around the time we split up.
“Rumor has it, she went wild after our breakup.” Rumor has it, I just made up a rumor. Monica told me point-blank we had a kid. She also mentioned she lost it. Crib death two months old, a baby girl named after me, sort of, Jamie.
“She said the baby died. Tragedy upon tragedy.” McCafferty shoves her salacious stash back into the envelope from which it escaped. Pandora’s box. That’s what Hailey’s bikini top amounted to, Pandora’s box. If I could rewind time, I’d shove myself into the pool and hold myself under. Take that bikini top I stripped off and hang myself with it. Reagan would still be here. Reagan would be safe. Far away from the monsters that have captured her. Monster. That word circles my brain in a loop.
We walk McCafferty out and Allison spins into me, disgruntled and pissed.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had a kid?” Her eyes bulge like two lime green discs.
“Is this where I’m supposed to say you’re really good at math?”
She swats me. “You’re not funny.”
“And I’m probably not the father. Look, once I cut her loose—she cut loose. It could have been anyone she met, the bartender, the box boy at the grocery store. She was moving fast, and she wasn’t keeping it a secret. She was trying to hurt me, only I didn’t care.” I wrap my arms around her. “Because I already had you.”
She bats those long lashes at me a million miles an hour. “Do you really think the kid is dead?”
“Yes.” I inch back, trying to get a better look at her. “You heard McCafferty. She said it herself.”
“No. She suggested Monica said it. I don’t believe a word that comes out of that lying cunt’s mouth.”
My body jerks just hearing the vulgarity. Allison isn’t one to toss around an errant expletive unless she means it—especially no
t that one. And I’d venture to guess she means it in the most vulgar sense.
“I promise you. She’s telling the truth. Why would she lie about something like that? It’s insanity.” But then, everything about Monica is insanity. Why not this?
Allison lands a finger over my lips as if to hush me. She hooks those steely green eyes into mine and makes me stay there. “People like to kiss you, James. Don’t they?” A moment bounces by as if she wants me to admit it. She gives my cheek a light tap. “It happens.” She heads for the stairs and my stomach drops to the floor, it cannonballs right through middle earth. She knows. She has to know. “I promised my sister I’d give her an update.”
“Great. Tell her I said hello.” I want to say tell her I like the location of my dick but don’t. It’s common knowledge that Jane runs some street gang from the inside. With all those crooked connections, maybe she’s the only one who can help find my daughter. Come on, Jane, you psychotic bitch—bring my baby back.
God knows someone has to.
* * *
Later that night I take the letter my mother wrote, a six-pack of beer my father generously sprung for, and head for the backyard. Allison is wrapped up like a burrito watching television in bed—the news—the story of us. That catatonic stare lets me know she’s not capable of taking any of it in. She shouldn’t. It’s all speculation and bullshit. Soon they’ll have one of my dead brothers as the leading suspect. It’s twisted and ridiculous, but it must sell airtime or they wouldn’t have it wallpapering our nation day and night.
Dad is out a little later than usual tonight and I appreciate it. I like the solitude for once. Not that I wouldn’t trade that for Reagan. But my father’s presence has been a touch cloying. I’m shocked Allison hasn’t kicked him to the curb yet. Maybe I’ll ask him to leave. She’s probably thinking it.
The iced cement greets me as I take a seat on the first step. The sun went down an hour ago, but the sky is still striated orange and black—tiger sky.
Carefully I extract my mother’s letter from the envelope, pressing the paper to my cheek as if it were her fingers, her skin. The letter is dated April 14th just six weeks before she took that fated drive.
Psychological Thriller Boxed Set Page 45