by A. J. Banner
“No, but I’ll watch out for you. Very scary. You call me if you need anything.”
“Thank you,” I say, my heart falling. I was hoping she could help. I get up and go to the door.
“Of course, there was the car.”
I turn around. “What car?” My heartbeat thrums.
“Across from your house earlier. You know how the dog barks over on the next block sometimes? I’ve got very sensitive ears.”
“We’re all grateful for that.”
“The dog went on and on, so I came to the window to see what the fuss was all about. There was a car parked right across the street from your house.”
I look over in the direction she’s pointing, toward a stretch of dark forest, an undeveloped greenbelt. I swallow a dry lump of fear. “Could you tell what kind of car it was?”
“Honda, silver, SUV. I think . . . Newish model.”
Lauren’s car? But Lauren is gone.
“Did you see anyone inside?”
“A shadow in the driver’s seat, that’s all. Then whoever it was drove away. I didn’t get a license plate, but next time I will.”
“Let’s hope there’s not a next time,” I say.
“You need to get an alarm system, young lady. I have one.”
“Thank you.” I step out onto the porch. “One other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Did you see anyone deliver flowers to my house today?”
She frowns, then nods slowly and points at me. “I saw the white van from the Vase of Flowers! But I didn’t see it stop at your place. I’m not looking out the window all the time, you know. I’ve got other things to do.”
“You’re so helpful to look outside at all.”
She looks smug. “I do my civic duty.”
“You didn’t see a flower delivery.”
“The van turned around at the dead end and left. Why, did someone send you flowers?”
“It appears that way,” I say.
“Special occasion?” She looks at me as if expecting some interesting tidbit of gossip.
I smile sadly. “Yes,” I say, sighing. “It’s an occasion of mourning.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Back home, I make sure the doors are locked. Windows, too. But I can’t lock out this malaise, the specter of Lauren following me around. The mystery of the disappearing wedding dress. The feeling that Bee Mornay is watching me again.
Of course, there was the car.
Lauren’s car.
Brynn. She might have been driving. Why? Who else could it have been? Jensen? Unlikely. I retrieve the detective’s business card from my purse and call him. His deep, lazy voice tells me to leave a message. “This is Marissa Parlette. Someone broke into my cottage tonight—your officers came out. I’m not sure, but I have a feeling I know who it was. It could have something to do with Lauren Eklund. Could I come down and talk to you?” I hang up, and as I tidy the bedroom, I grit my teeth. Someone threw my clothes all over the room. Broke a perfume bottle against the wall.
How would Brynn know about the dress? Lauren must have mentioned it to her. Why the violence? What did I ever do to her?
Brynn’s only sixteen—maybe Lauren told her about my engagement, about the dress, about how it once belonged to her. Maybe Brynn concocted some twisted explanation for her mother’s death. A reason to blame me. I consider calling Jensen—but Lauren’s family is drowning in grief. And then someone complains about a missing dress?
My cell phone rings, and Julie’s soothing but worried voice fills my ears. “You got broken into? Are you okay?”
“I’m a bit freaked out.” I brief her on everything. Lauren, Anna running away, the detective questioning us. The shocking events of the day roll out of me in a rush.
“I can’t believe this,” Julie says. “I’ll be right there.”
I hang up, feeling Lauren close, although she never set foot in this house. I was planning to invite her over. Well, I’m here now. The ghost of me. She leans back on the couch, crosses her legs, and swings her foot. You need a little color on these walls. Be bold. Like me.
She took her boldness to a whole new level that rainy spring afternoon, in our college apartment. How long had it been going on? Afterward, she moved out, and I refused to speak to her. Ignored her calls. Walked away when she approached me on campus. All the while, my heart fluttered off in tiny pieces of confetti.
After college, I did not return to Silverwood, the town of our childhood. I didn’t want to run into her, in case she went home. I worked in Seattle for a while, immersed in private practice for a few years, but the setting didn’t sit well with me. The noise, traffic, congestion. I yearned for the forest, the rustling trees and chirping birds and stars crowding the sky, so when the job cropped up in Tranquil Cove four years ago, I hopped aboard. I scoured the real estate listings for a quaint, affordable bungalow. My own space, away from memories.
But the past wouldn’t leave me alone. When Lauren moved here, she looked me up, called me. I drove to the hospital to meet her in the cafeteria. Remember when we popped over on the foot ferry, and we talked about moving here? she said, sliding into a booth across from me. Well, I did. After they built the hospital. I got a job in the ER. She didn’t move here to follow me. But she might as well have. She did persist in her quest to renew our friendship, inviting me for coffee, showing up at school to say hello. She had a built-in reason for dropping by. Brynn’s high school is right across the street from the elementary school.
I stand on a step stool to reach the top shelf in my bedroom closet. The box is still there. Not stolen. I haven’t brought the memories down in ages—some good, some bittersweet. I drop the box on the bed, and as I flip off the lid, the doorbell rings.
“You look like hell, and not even warmed over,” Julie says as I let her in. She plunks her bag on the couch and squashes me with a breath-stealing hug, pulls back, and rests her hands on my shoulders.
“Thanks,” I say. “You look amazing as always.”
“Don’t I know it.” She stands half a head shorter than me and I’m only five feet, six inches. But she’s larger than life, clad in an oversized purple sweater, leggings, and boots. Flashy, jangling jewelry. Heavy-lidded eyes, one a little smaller than the other, as if she is always squinting a little. The first time I met her at school, a boy was yelling at me in the hall outside my office. Julie rushed over and performed magic—calming him with what she called “positive reinforcement,” “ignoring and distracting” from his “challenging outburst.” She taught art, but she’d learned the psychology of calming her students. “I go to a conference, and all hell breaks loose.”
“One good thing happened.” I hold up my hand to show her my engagement ring, but my excitement feels muted, as if I’m sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, trying to smile up through ten feet of water.
She takes my hand and gasps. “I knew it. He’s perfect. He has impeccable taste in jewelry. Congratulations, my friend.” But when she sees my expression, the smile drops off her face. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“Or two,” I say, twisting the ring on my finger. “Or three.”
She yanks off her boots and shoos me into the bedroom. “I’ll pour you a glass of whiskey, or whatever you’ve got. Vodka?”
“Maybe chamomile tea instead. But it’s my house. I’ll make the tea.”
“No—you’ve been through too much today. Relax. I’ll take care of you. I’m staying.”
“I might snore. I don’t know. I don’t hear myself.”
“You don’t snore. Trust me.”
I unpack my suitcase, flinging dirty clothes into the laundry basket, while I listen to Julie humming in the kitchen, opening the fridge and cabinets. Comforting sounds. She returns to the bedroom, surveys the mess, the box on my bed. “There’s nothing in your refrigerator. You do realize that, don’t you? One blackened banana and moldy cheese.”
“I was planning to stay longer at Nathan’s.”
/> “That’s no excuse.” The kettle whistles in the kitchen. “Be right back.”
I sit on the bed and pull a postcard out of the box, a missive from my mother, splashed with the words Le Palais du Louvre, showing images of the museum and the Mona Lisa.
Julie brings in the tea in a mug, places it on a coaster on the nightstand. She takes the postcard from me, reads the back. “‘Dear Marissa, Happy twenty-first birthday. We’re so enjoying Paris. Love, Mom.’ Oh, hell, you’re not going to wallow in this drama tonight, are you? You’ve got enough grief.”
I throw the postcard back in the box, sip my tea. “You know, I didn’t even have her address. She had moved to France. She wasn’t on vacation. She was never planning to come back.”
“Have you seen your mom since then?”
“Twice,” I say, staring at the stain the broken perfume bottle left on the wall. “The first time, she had a client in Seattle. She became a financial advisor. Still a CPA under a different name. I met her for lunch. Stupid idea.” I take a deep breath against the pressure on my chest.
“Why stupid?”
“She wanted to talk about herself. Not, ‘How has my daughter been doing? What is your life like? I’ve missed you.’ No, she went on about how Europe had called to her. She left and never looked back. Her life was exciting now. She did travel when I was little, but she also found time to throw me amazing birthday parties, and help me with homework. Maybe she was going through the motions of being a mother the whole time. Or did she enjoy taking care of me and later changed her mind?”
Julie’s brows pull together in the shape of an A-frame house. “You’ll make yourself crazy speculating. It’s her loss, not staying in touch, not getting to know her kid again.”
I look at the pile of photos and papers in the box. “Or maybe I’m not that interesting.”
“Don’t talk that way. Call my mom if you need a mom, anytime, you know. You can even go stay with her.”
“You’re the best,” I say, smiling at her. “I wish I still had my dad. He would’ve offered some sage advice in a situation like this.” The memory of his singsong voice brings an ache to my chest. After my mother left, he put on a brave face, but he dried up like an autumn leaf. Every year, he grew smaller, more diminished by her absence, until finally he disintegrated. I can’t even visit his gravesite—but he’s in the waves every time I look out across the ocean. And in his photographs. And in my heart. What did my mother think would happen to him? He was devoted to her.
“You need some serious downtime.” Julie sits on the bed next to me, stretches her legs out in front of her, propping herself on pillows.
I look at a tiny rip in her black leggings. “I didn’t even ask you about the conference. How was it?”
She runs her hand across the bedcover. “It was freaking awesome. I learned new ways to tap into kids’ creativity, you know? Art comes in many forms. I took a fun session on how to use toothpaste and hand lotion to make faux batik.”
“Whoa. You’re always trying the quirky classes.”
“Quirky is my MO. But enough about me. Why the hell would someone steal your wedding dress?”
“I have no idea. I know it sounds crazy. But I’m wondering if it might be Brynn.”
“What, her mom died so you should suffer, too?”
“It’s possible. I don’t know.”
She taps her fingers on the bed. “She just lost her mother. Why would she care about a dress?”
“What if she was the one who killed Lauren? I know that sounds ridiculous.”
“Why, what makes you suspect that? Kids have been known to kill their parents. But wait, you think she was killed?”
“Nathan says her death is being treated as suspicious, and I’m almost certain she wouldn’t jump,” I say. “The question is, who pushed her?”
“Could Brynn have been having deeper problems? Maybe she thought her parents were going to split up, and she fought with them. Maybe she got into an argument with her mom?”
“I would only be speculating, but maybe Brynn perceives a threat to her family. She responded with hostility. Kids do that, don’t they?”
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“Well, Anna cut me out of a photograph,” I say, a churning in my gut. “I want to believe she’s just acting out, but—”
“Divorce is hard on kids.” Julie crosses her arms over her chest. “But chopping you out of a picture. Now we’re getting into twisted territory. Did she replace you with her mother?”
“Not yet.”
“The key word being ‘yet.’”
“It’s not going to happen. She’s a good kid.”
“And adept with a pair of sharp scissors. I know this firsthand. She’s in my art class.”
“She wouldn’t do anything like that—”
“Probably not. I’ve seen her get upset, but you’re right, she’s never mean to anyone. But then, we don’t always know children as well as we think we do.”
“Anna does run hot and cold. She’s complicated . . .”
“And kids with antisocial tendencies can act as if they have compassion. Fly under the radar. We wouldn’t be able to identify them.”
“What, you’re a psychologist now?”
“Just saying. I’ve read about this stuff. We never know about people.”
“Anna’s not a sociopath,” I say. “Stop freaking me out. We know about her.”
“Okay, we know about her.”
“I mean it.”
“We do. We know about Anna. But Nathan. Now he’s a different story.”
“Stop,” I say.
She laughs. “Okay. He’s a good guy. A catch.”
“He is a catch,” I say. When I met him, sunlight reached in through the window and lit our hearts. In the weeks that followed, on our giddy dates, our late-night walks, the long talks, maybe we didn’t think enough about Anna, about how all of this might affect her. When I showed him the photograph with the edge clipped off, he couldn’t explain. Or maybe he didn’t want to. Maybe he couldn’t admit to himself that his daughter could feel such anger toward me.
Even I can’t quite believe it when I remember her smiles during speech therapy when she articulated a sentence without stuttering. When we made lemon cupcakes together, when I took her shopping for school supplies and indulged her. Marissa, she whispered to me once. You’re the best.
But then, the next week, I wasn’t the best. When I stayed overnight, sat too close to her father. When it seemed to her that I might move in.
I pull out a clothbound journal, sit back on the bed next to Julie. “This one is old,” I say. “From our freshman year at UW. When Lauren and I were still friends.”
“You sure you want to look at it now?”
“I wrote about her.” Even after all this time, I feel a twinge beneath my ribs when I read my own immature handwriting. The melodrama of youth. “I wrote good things about her at first. But afterward, I hated her. I wanted her dead. Makes me cringe now.”
“You had good reason,” she says, taking the journal from my hands. She throws it back in the box. “This is the time for self-care, not self-pity. Think about the future, not the past.”
“But Lauren is dead. She’s fucking gone. I found her. You should have seen her. She was covered in bruises. Her head . . .” I double over, my chest imploding, as if I’ve forgotten how to breathe.
“It sounds horrible—beyond horrible. Oh, Marissa.”
I hold back tears and slowly exhale. “I should burn these old journals. All of them.”
“No.” She touches my arm. “Don’t do anything hasty. The past is the past. Your emotions were real. But you’re not responsible for her death.”
“Maybe I am. I think she wanted me to forgive her. For us to be friends again. The pain dulled over the years. I’ve matured. I have a life. I met Nathan. But I don’t know. A part of me never let go. Maybe I never completely forgave her. And now . . .”
“I get it. Your rela
tionship with her will always be what it was.”
“Unfinished,” I whisper. “Broken. I wish she was still here so we could hash it all out. Mend things. Start again. But life doesn’t work that way, does it? Nothing is ever resolved. Nothing is fair.”
“Yeah, sometimes it’s not. But I’ll say it again. This was not your fault.”
“Easier said than believed.” A text from Nathan pops up on my phone. Is Julie there? Should I come over?
She’s here. I’m fine, I say.
I’m thinking about you.
An image of his phone pops into my head, the text from Rianne. . . . about you . . . can’t stand this. My mind fills in the blanks. What if the text was from someone else? I’m thinking about you. I can’t stand this . . . No, the text could have been about anything. What about you . . . I can’t stand this weather.
“I should catch up on a little work,” I say. “I’ve got hundreds of emails to read.”
“I’ll go and watch the tube,” Julie says, getting up. “There’s a new episode of Poldark. I’ll sleep on the couch. I know where to find the linens.”
Grateful for her presence in the living room, and the comforting drone of the television, I catch up on correspondence for work, search the internet for news of Lauren’s death. Nothing.
Despite my fatigue, I can’t sleep at first, my eyes propped open by invisible toothpicks. But after a while, I slip into amorphous dreams. Lauren laughs, pouring Nathan’s wine, his goblet overflowing. The merlot becomes blood soaking into the tablecloth. Lauren smiles. I need to talk to you. Then we’re on the beach, and she hands me her pail. Her dark hair blows around her face. She pushes her tongue through a hole where she lost a front tooth. How old are we? Seven? We add sticks of driftwood around our sandcastle, forming a moat. We’ve created a work of art, but when I turn around, Lauren is gone. Panic rises inside me. The waves reach up across the beach, clawing at my feet. I see her, several yards away, sprawled out, limbs askew. You let me fall.
I jolt awake in a sweat, the dream evaporating. Morning sunlight leaks into the room. I pull on my robe and stagger to the kitchen. Julie has already made coffee. She’s seated in the breakfast nook, perusing the newspaper, her hair a tousled mess. Even her nightgown is larger than life, splashed with pictures of the countries of the world. “Hey, stranger,” she says, looking up at me.