Cracked

by Barbra Leslie

  “You’ll pay me back,” he answered. I shrugged. I doubted it. I also doubted that Fred and Ginger would have allowed smoking in the house, but I figured these were exceptional circumstances.

  “Who killed Ginger?” I repeated.

  Detective French, satisfied that the room was clear of potential perps, flopped herself down on the couch opposite us. “Fred Lindquist killed his wife,” she stated flatly. Chandler sighed heavily.

  “No,” I replied. “He did not.” I took a long drag of Miller’s Marlboro. “And what about this suicide note someone made her write? It’s addressed to me, he said.” Chandler nodded. He was looking tired. It occurred to me to wonder if him swilling Fred’s Grey Goose constituted billable hours, not that I gave a fuck. “Can I see it?”

  Miller shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “You will eventually see it, or a copy of it. Maybe tomorrow,” he added.

  “Why do you think Fred didn’t kill your sister?” French asked. She had gotten up and was pacing, giving off an air of impatience with all of us. But then she smiled, and all of a sudden she was beautiful. Smile more, honey, I thought. Catch more flies with honey, and all that.

  “Because I’ve known him since I was, oh, eight years old. Because my sister was the most trustworthy person on this fucking planet” – I slammed my glass down on the coffee table, hard, spilling Grey Goose. Shit. “…and like she did, I would trust this man with my life. With the life of anyone I loved.”

  I caught the two detectives giving each other the eyeball. I thought maybe they should go now. And Chandler, for that matter. I had the small matter of a balloon of drugs to attend to. Tomorrow I would find out more. Tomorrow I would do some of the coke to perk up and my brain function would improve, and I would start putting the pieces together. But right now, I needed crack.

  “Guess we’re done here,” Miller said, moving as if to go. “We’ll leave you to your…” he gestured to the vodka. “You must be very tired. We can do this tomorrow.”

  Everyone paused for a minute as we heard a car squeal up out front. I hung my head for a couple of seconds, exhaustion overcoming me. It was only what… ten at night? But that’s one a.m. Toronto time, and when was the last time I had slept more than three hours at a stretch?

  Crack, anyone?

  Darren came in, even before Rosen could get to the door. He glanced at the detectives, but spoke to me.

  “The boys,” he said. “They’re missing. Someone took the boys.”

  4

  Five years earlier

  Jack and Ginger were in the pool, playing with the twins.

  “Marco,” Jack called out.

  “Polo,” Matthew yelled. He and Luke were six, and worshipped their uncle Jack. I had married him when they were just babies, and we flew down to California every few months or so to visit.

  Fred and I sat on beach chairs next to the pool, watching them. Fred’s skin was sunburnt, but I was turning a nice golden brown.

  “You guys have all the luck,” Fred said, comparing our skin. “Why, pray tell, was I cursed with two red-haired parents?”

  I watched Ginger splashing around in the pool. Hyperactive six-year-old twins, and she looked like a slightly more robust Elle MacPherson. If I didn’t love her so much, I’d have hated her. Being fraternal and not identical twins meant that while, in our case, we looked very much alike, we had been hatched from two different eggs. And she got the prettier one.

  I watched Ginger lifting Luke in and out of the water, her long brown arms glistening in the sun. Unlike his brother, who was four minutes older, Luke wasn’t a water baby.

  “Hey,” Ginger called over to us. “Darren should be arriving soon.”

  Fred made a noise at the back of his throat, which I chose to ignore. Darren had just become successful, the band that he had formed at nineteen now actually appearing on the Billboard charts. He looked every inch the rock star suddenly, all blond curls and expensive sunglasses.

  I closed my eyes against the California sunshine, and debated going inside for sunglasses. I didn’t want to look at Fred, who had been acting strange since Jack and I had arrived a couple of days earlier. The gentle, geeky boy who had doted on my sister in high school had become a millionaire many times over, and he had hardened into someone I was no longer quite comfortable with.

  When I had said this to Darren on the phone the night before, his explanation was that money is a soul-destroying, corrupting influence. He said that there aren’t many laid-back multi-millionaire entrepreneurs floating around. I somehow doubted that Fred was still reading Yeats to Ginger before bed.

  Still, Ginger had said nothing by way of complaint against him, and I was sure she would talk to me if there were serious problems. I thought I had caught Fred looking at her with something approaching disdain, once or twice. Before now, the only look I’d ever seen on his face when he gazed at his wife was a kind of wonder that such a beautiful creature existed.

  Something started dripping on me, and I yelled.

  Jack was standing over me, shaking his wet hair – what was left of it – onto me. He had a big smile on his face. He loved coming down here, loved Ginger and the boys almost as much as I did. He certainly seemed to have more time for playing with them than Fred did. Jack grew up in foster care, and while he didn’t like to talk too much about it, I knew that he loved the closeness of my family. Like us, he was from Maine, and had been taken away from his own parents at the age of five. He spent the next twelve years on a working farm with apple orchards, he’d told me, with foster parents who housed six or seven other displaced kids. He left for university at seventeen and never looked back. He rarely talked about his childhood, and I had learned not to push him about it. He just got quiet for a day or two and seemed sad. I felt almost guilty to have had a well-adjusted childhood full of love, and I didn’t want to push the issue.

  “You shithead,” I said to him. I grabbed his hand.

  “Ignore her, boys,” Jack called over his shoulder. Matthew and Luke were standing behind Jack. They followed him everywhere. “Your aunt Danny has a potty mouth.”

  “Potty mouth, potty mouth,” Matty started yelling. Like Ginger and me, the boys were fraternal twins. They were both tall and hearty like the Clearys, and physically confident. Neither of them seemed to have picked up much from Fred’s gene pool, which he always said made him very happy indeed.

  “Sorry, boys,” I said. “Your uncle Jack makes me say swear words sometimes.” Matt plopped himself on the edge of my chair and picked up my book. Unselfconsciously, he leaned against me and started reading. I looked up and gave Jack a look which said, don’t get any ideas, fuckface. Jack had been making noises about us having kids, but I was in my twenties and I didn’t feel quite ready. But the sweetness of having a child’s weight leaning trustingly on me caused my eyes to water. Jack noticed, and kissed the top of my head, and then Matty’s.

  From the front of the house, we could hear the enthusiastic beeping of a car horn, a light, tinny sound. Probably an expensive import. Probably Italian. Probably Darren.

  Matthew got up and ran into the house, followed by Luke, who had jumped out of the pool upon hearing the car, like a loyal dog who hears his master coming home from work.

  It had to be Darren. If they loved Jack, they worshipped Darren.

  Five minutes later, he appeared through the French doors at the back of the house. Matthew was dangling in a fireman’s hold over Darren’s shoulder. Luke was riding Darren’s other side, his little legs trying to wrap around Darren’s narrow waist.

  “Delivery for the Lindquists,” Darren called. “Would somebody please sign for these?” The boys giggled happily, helplessly, as Darren dumped them both gently on the soft grass behind the house, and started tickling them.

  Darren was going to be such a great dad someday. Fred got up and shook Darren’s hand, and Jack hugged him, that manly, back-slapping kind of hug that always touches me.

  “Keeping my sister in line?” Dar
ren asked him, and I got out of my chair.

  “Hey,” Jack responded, peeling Luke off his leg and picking him up. “She just won her third straight fight. She’s keeping me in line, these days.”

  It was true. Under Jack’s tutelage, I had started boxing, then mixed martial arts. I had a knack for it, and against Jack’s better judgment, he had started to train me. Over the course of just over a year, I had gone from being a gym bunny to a woman with a bit of a bloodlust for fighting. I wasn’t sure that Jack was all that happy about it, either. He had been a bit quiet lately. But down here in California, all that had seemed to wilt in the bright sun. I didn’t ever want to leave.

  “Don’t you believe it,” I said, hugging my little brother. “Hey, D.”

  Darren hugged me extra tight. I missed him. He rented a place in Toronto, where Jack and I lived, but he had been on the road for a long time. “No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller than you.” It was something he said to me every time we met after a time apart. I always teased him about being younger and less experienced than me, and he came back with the lame height thing.

  “Hey, Beanpole,” he said. He kissed my forehead. I shot up so quickly as a kid that at nine I was by far the tallest kid in the class, and it stayed that way until seventh grade. Dad had started calling me Beanpole, and it stuck.

  Some things never change. It was comforting.

  Fred seemed to snap out of his current mood, and within an hour he was happily barbecuing steaks and burgers, and Darren and I played water polo with the boys, while Ginger and Jack played backgammon by the pool.

  I started laughing so hard at Darren’s attempts at spiking the ball that I swallowed some pool water. I started coughing, laughing at the same time.

  “Hey, Danny,” Ginger called. “Breathe, why don’t you?” The boys thought that was hysterical.

  It was a nearly perfect day.

  It was the last one I would be able to remember.

  Soon after that visit, the demons haunting Jack began to take him over, the paranoia and psychosis became more pronounced, and nothing would ever be the same again.

  5

  Darren filled us in, while Detective French paced and talked quietly and urgently into her cell phone.

  A woman with my I.D. and matching my description had showed up at the facility where the boys were being housed until family could collect them. She had convinced seasoned social workers that she was their aunt, Danielle Cleary, and was taking them home. She had had identification and the correct paperwork. The boys, the social worker said, had seemed to know the woman, and were happy to go with her. She was about my height and weight, and had choppy dark hair like mine. Said social worker had even phoned the number she was given for detectives who were responsible for the case, and was told with all seriousness that she should release the boys to this woman’s custody.

  Detectives Miller and French, of course, had never heard of any of this. And after thorough checks with the Newport P.D., no one else had either. And according to the social worker, the business card was a standard-issue Newport Beach Police Department card. She knows them, sees them all the time, and didn’t see anything amiss.

  An Amber Alert was being issued. I could hear sirens in the distance.

  Ginger’s boys were gone. Somebody had kidnapped the boys.

  A part of me broke quietly as I listened to Darren. I stopped being able to take it in. I needed to get high. I needed to fuel my body with a bit of sleep and a bit of food.

  And then I would get out of this house, and find whoever did this. Whoever took the boys had to be the person, or people, who had taken my sister from me. Missing children should mean that every law enforcement agency in the state should be looking for them. They would find them, or I would find them.

  Either way, I was going to kill them.

  Half an hour after Darren told us about the boys being taken, while everyone downstairs went into action, I quietly pleaded headache and emotional fatigue, and excused myself to lie down for a moment. No one particularly seemed to notice. Darren was speaking to Miller, trying to be calm, and Detective French was talking loudly to someone on her phone.

  As soon as I got to my room I closed and locked the door and ripped my jeans and underwear off. In seconds I was in an undignified position, retrieving the balloon of drugs from between my legs. Quicker than you could think possible – and with more certainty of movement than I’d had in days – I pulled an old pair of yoga pants from my bag, and rooted around in the various plastic bags I’d thrown in for the seemingly-innocuous, disassembled parts of a homemade crack pipe: a small bottle of Tylenol (with one or two in it, in case my bag got searched) that had a hole gouged in the side, a few Bic pens (to empty the ink cartridge to use as the mouthpiece), and in my travel sewing kit, needles, elastics, a few inches of duct tape and a bit of tinfoil. I threw it all in my toiletries bag, along with the balloon, and before I could go looking for a bathroom, noticed that this bedroom had an en-suite.

  Perfect and perfecter.

  I rinsed the balloon and emptied it – two grams of coke, and a rock of crack cocaine, not quite an eightball. It was all I could get my hands on before I left, and in truth all I felt comfortable bringing. My general lack of paranoia regarding my drug use meant that I wasn’t clear on the laws around what amount constituted intent to distribute, but I was pretty sure that this wouldn’t meet it. My fingers nimbly put together my pipe. I realized I didn’t have a screen or any cigarette ash to use as a screen but I was too close to relief in the form of crack to go and find the cigarettes I had thrown into my suitcase at the last minute, light one, and generate some ash. This was down and dirty but it would still work.

  I broke off a tiny chunk of rock and placed it on the pierced tinfoil and lit it.

  Heaven.

  My grief faded as the high shot through my synapses and down to my fingertips. I closed my eyes. This is what would help me get through the next days, the next weeks. I could do what I needed to do – see my family, find Ginger’s killer, kill Ginger’s killer. I couldn’t do too much, I couldn’t binge on it. I would be sensible and controlled. Just enough to let me do what I had to do. After that, nothing else mattered.

  I was probably in the bathroom for half an hour, sitting on the edge of the tub with the exhaust fan on, taking another hit or two until the bit of crack was reduced to crumbling black ash. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, stuck my head under the tap to wet my hair and get the worst of the vomit out of it. I would have a shower once I had had a quick sleep, and by then Darren and the police might even have the boys back here, and I could do what needed to be done. I hadn’t done enough crack to stay awake, not being as tired as I was. I carefully put the pipe and the drugs in the Ziploc baggie I had brought for my shampoo, left my shampoo on the edge of the tub, and went back to my room. I closed the door.

  Alone and high.

  I slowly lay back on the bed. I closed my eyes and let myself drift.

  * * *

  There were voices in the room, a man’s voice, and a woman’s. I couldn’t quite recognize who they were, or what they were talking about.

  I opened my eyes, and I wasn’t in my room at Ginger’s house. I was somewhere else, somewhere I had never been before. Something was around my right arm, around my bicep. It hurt. I looked down and there was a belt tied around it, a woman’s belt, but not one of mine. And in my left arm was a syringe. I looked at my hand, at the strawberry birthmark between my index finger and thumb.

  Ginger’s hand. Not my hand, but Ginger’s.

  I was Ginger.

  I was crying. Ginger was crying. The woman was slapping the inside of my elbow.

  “There,” she said. “Right there. I showed you how. It’ll be easy. It’ll be beautiful.”

  “No,” I said. I looked at Ginger’s hand, at the syringe. “My boys.” I could feel tears running down my face, and a sadness at a level I had never before experienced.

  “You’re saving
your boys,” the woman said. She was gentle, but insistent. She slapped the inside of the elbow again, the long tanned arm I stared down at. “You must do it now.”

  And I did. I knew I had to, so I let her lead my hand with the syringe to my arm, and her finger pushed my thumb over the plunger.

  I felt it immediately, a rush to my brain, something beautiful for a second before the purity would stop my heart and my brain.

  I looked at the woman. I saw her face.

  “Look at her eyes,” someone said. “They’re brown.” Then I closed them, and it was over.

  * * *

  It was the most comfortable bed I had ever slept in. Scratch that, it was the most comfortable bed ever made. Artisans in a hillside village in South America must have spent a year putting this bed together by hand. It had probably cost more than a car. It should cost more than a car. It was light out when I woke up. Someone had come in and put a blanket over me. Darren? Rosen? I hoped the fan in the bathroom had taken any crack smell away.

  The dream came back to me in patches but I put it out of my head. Here and now. Here and now, my twin sister was dead and I didn’t know if her sons had been kidnapped by murderers.

  Downstairs, Darren and Miller were sitting in the living room. It almost looked like they hadn’t moved since I went to bed. Two uniformed cops were chatting quietly by the front door, take-out coffees in their hands.

  Darren motioned for me to sit down next to him on the couch. He put his arm around me and kissed my head. Between the two of them, they filled me in.

  The boys’ kidnapping was all over the news. The FBI had been called in and a command post was being set up, along with lots of equipment in the dining room to record all phone calls in case of a ransom demand. Everyone was looking for the twins. Darren and I had been asked to not leave the house. We were to leave the search to the professionals. The police had even contacted our brothers Skipper and Laurence and advised them not to fly down, and to take extra precautions for their own safety.