by L. T. Vargus
The woman’s eyes met Darger’s.
“Are you going to bring her back?” she asked. There was a bitter note in her voice.
“No, Mrs. Whitmore. But I might be able to find who did it.”
Tears welled in the woman’s eyes now. Darger was out of ideas.
“I know it’s not enough. Nothing ever is.”
Her eyes strayed back to the line of photographs of the happy family that once was.
“I’ve seen so many lives ruined by this kind of brutality. And some days I feel like it’s all a hopeless fight. Because even if I solve a case, the victims are still gone forever. There are some wrongs that can never be put right. Not really.”
Mrs. Whitmore was staring at her wordlessly, moistness clinging to her eyelashes but not yet spilling. Darger lowered her gaze, ready to give in. She’d come here expecting too much.
The woman’s voice stopped her.
“Where did you say you were from?”
“I’m a consultant—”
Mrs. Whitmore waved an impatient hand.
“No, I mean, where are you from?”
“Oh,” Darger said, blinking and caught off guard. “I’m originally from Colorado. But I live in Virginia now. Outside of Quantico.”
Mrs. Whitmore’s eyes went wide, and before Darger could say any more, she’d leapt from her chair and bustled out of the room.
Darger turned to Fowles, who only shrugged.
Mrs. Whitmore returned, flapping a catalogue in her hands.
“I knew it! I knew I’d seen you before.”
Darger realized then it wasn’t a catalogue at all, but a magazine. Vanity Fair.
“This was Christy’s favorite, actually. Loved her magazines.”
“Oh,” Darger said, trying to swallow away her discomfort. That interview just kept coming back to bite her in the ass.
“You didn’t say FBI.”
“Pardon?”
“You keep calling yourself a consultant, not FBI.”
“Right. I’m… taking some time off.”
“Let me guess. Another Old Boys’ Club?” Mrs. Whitmore said, shaking her head. “It’s all the same, isn’t it?”
Her eyes drifted over to Fowles for a moment, a glint of suspicion in her eye, like perhaps the mere fact that he was male made him one of the so-called old boys.
But then she fixed her focus back on Darger. There was cold fury in her eyes now, and it wasn’t until Mrs. Whitmore spoke that Darger realized it wasn’t for her.
“You’ll get him, won’t you?”
“Who?”
“Whoever did this to my baby girl. You’ll see that he pays for taking her from me.”
Darger met her unblinking gaze.
“Yes. I will.”
The woman’s head nodded once, and she pushed herself to her feet.
“There’s something I want you to see.”
Chapter 26
Christy’s room was painted sky blue, though only thin slivers of the color showed through the wall-to-wall display of posters, magazine collages, and India ink drawings that looked like projects from art class. And photographs. Actual printed snapshots tacked to the wall with push pins. Hundreds of them.
Darger couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen actual printed photographs on a bedroom wall. Not since college. It was a throwback. A room perfectly preserved since the day Mrs. Whitmore came home to find her daughter’s ruined body.
The woman stood aside while Darger studied the room, arms crossed, one hand fidgeting with a hole in the sleeve of her sweater. Fowles hung back, just inside the threshold, like he was uncomfortable with the idea of disturbing this place. Or maybe he was still thinking about the dubious look Mrs. Whitmore had given him earlier.
There was a thin layer of dust on the four-poster canopy bed, evidence of just how much the room had been left alone. A hook near the window held looped strands of purple and green Mardi Gras beads. On the opposite side, a selection of silk scarves, their colorful prints bleached to pastels by years spent in harsh sunlight.
It was a girl’s room not unlike dozens Darger had seen growing up.
And yet something was off.
The disused feeling Darger got from the place was incomplete, she realized.
It was the smell, she realized, sniffing the air lightly. There were fresh notes of incense — sandalwood and something floral. Her eyes wandered the space, found the ash catcher with a half-burned stick on a shelf. Darger moved closer, inhaling.
The voice of Christy’s mother came from behind her.
“She loved incense. Nag Champa was her favorite scent. I burn a stick every year on her birthday, and then I sit on her bed and cry my eyes out. The memories just come flooding back with the smell.”
Mrs. Whitmore’s emotions seemed more raw in here. Like she couldn’t fit the walls she’d built around her grief through the door frame of her daughter’s room. She had to leave them outside when she came in here, stripped of her defenses.
Darger turned to the woman and spoke softly.
“Was there something specific you wanted to show me?”
Mrs. Whitmore gestured to a dresser littered with makeup and nail polish and the kind of cheap jewelry that comes from shops at the mall.
Darger took a step closer, eyes on the cluster of photos tucked into the dresser’s mirror. There was a theme to the photographs. They all featured the same dark-haired boy. A good-looking kid with a lazy smile. In most of the photos, he wore baggy skater jeans, often with a cigarette tucked behind one ear.
Christy was in several of the pictures, as well. Sitting on the boy’s lap in one. Locked in a kiss with him in several others.
“Christy had a boyfriend?” Darger asked.
Of course she knew this already. She’d read the file. But Darger wanted the topic to come up naturally. Wanted to let Christy’s mother lead the way.
When Mrs. Whitmore answered, her mouth puckered like the name left a bitter taste on her tongue.
“Dustin Reynolds. He’s the one you should be looking at.”
“You think he did it?”
Mrs. Whitmore scoffed.
“I know he did. Everyone knew. Everyone but the goddamn Sandy Police Department, anyway.”
“Why do you think it was Dustin?”
“It’s always the boyfriend, isn’t it?” Mrs. Whitmore said, the acidic tone still there. “Besides that, he was a manipulative little bastard. I knew that from the start. He was a bad influence on my Christy. She never drank or smoked or anything like that before he came around. She was a good girl. But soon enough, she was stealing my cigarettes and pilfering booze from the cabinet. They’d deny it, but I marked the bottles. Caught ‘em red-handed when there was an inch of vodka missing.”
“Was he ever violent?” Darger asked.
Mrs. Whitmore gripped her crossed arms tight to her chest.
“Not to Christy. If he’d ever touched her, and I found out about it?” The woman paused to let out a short bitter chuckle. “I would have cut his balls off. No. But he had a temper.”
She pointed to a hole in the particle board of Christy’s bedroom door. Darger hadn’t noticed it before, and now she crouched down to get a better look.
“He kicked this hole in the door?”
Mrs. Whitmore nodded.
“It’s on the inside of the door, so he wasn’t trying to get in. Why’d he do it?”
“If I recall correctly, Christy told me it happened when he was talking on the phone with his parents. There was a concert in Portland he wanted to go to. One of those alternative rock bands that was big back then. But the concert was in the middle of the week — on a school night — and they said no. I don’t think he was used to hearing that. They pretty much let him run wild.”
Darger raised an eyebrow, eyes still on the jagged hole in the door.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s a kid with a temper.”
“They were always fighting,” Mrs. Whitmore explained. “He’
d do some real lowdown thing, and my Christy’d break up with him, and then he’d be calling day and night, showing up at my door, begging to talk to her. And eventually he’d weasel his way back in. They’d just had one of their big blow-ups right before she died. She told him they were done for good.”
Mrs. Whitmore’s head swayed slowly from side to side.
“Three days later they were back together again. A week later, she was dead.”
Darger peered back at the photos of the handsome, dark-haired boy. Could this really be who they were looking for? Had he possibly killed Christy during an argument, a crime of passion that eventually sparked in him a taste for murder?
“Did the original investigation look into Dustin?”
“What’s your definition of looking? Because you can be sure I told the Keystone Cops all about Dustin and his little temper problem, but a fat lot of good it did. Buncha incompetent idiots. Besides that, Dustin’s family goes way back in this town.”
Making a mental note to double-check all of the information on Dustin in the original file, Darger’s eyes flitted to a collection of photos on the wall next to the dresser. A scrawny-limbed, gap-toothed Christy at about age eight, smiling proudly over a pair of mud pies with another little girl about the same age. Above that was another shot of Christy from a few years later. She and a girl with lank brown hair posed in front of an old wooden rollercoaster, hooking their fingers together in a “Pinky Promise.” A third picture in the grouping was Christy and a schoolmate, dressed up for what Darger figured was a school formal. Both girls wore long red satin dresses — not quite matching, but close.
It was a few moments before Darger pieced together the fact that it was the same girl with Christy in all three photos. And there were more. Darger glanced around and saw the girl in at least a dozen other pictures.
She tapped the nearest shot with a fingernail.
“Who’s the girl with Christy in all these photos?”
“That’s Cat. Christy’s best friend,” Mrs. Whitmore answered. “They met in third grade and were inseparable after that. She just worshiped Christy. They dressed alike, did their hair alike. I used to joke that if I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought they were twins separated at birth. She even called me mom sometimes, as a little joke.”
She pointed to the Pinky Promise photo.
“That was their secret handshake. There was a whole hand-clapping routine and a rhyme that went with it.”
Her eyes slid up to the ceiling, squinting in concentration.
“Cross my heart and hope to die. I’ll never betray you, never lie. Best friends forever… you and I? Something like that.”
For the first time, Mrs. Whitmore smiled. It was small and sad, but a smile nonetheless.
“We called ourselves the Three C’s — Carole, Christy, and Cat. Had a movie night almost every Friday I didn’t have to work, the three of us. We’d pig out on pizza and Pepsi and Red Vines and rent whatever new rom-com was out.”
The woman’s eyes seemed to glaze over as she went back over the memories in her mind.
“You probably saw their clubhouse out back as you drove up. The little yellow playhouse. That was what they called it. ‘The Clubhouse.’ Christy’s birthday present when she was seven. My dad built it from his own design. She’d outgrown it in her middle school years, but then for a while, she and Cat sort of rediscovered it. They must have been fifteen, sixteen at the time. Used to take a boom box out there and listen to music, paint their nails, read their fashion magazines. They slept out there a few times, in summer. I’d go check on them, of course. Pretend I was just bringing out some snacks, but really I wanted to be sure they weren’t up to anything… trying to sneak boys in or something. But they were always just hanging out like they said they would be. It’s like I said. Christy was a good girl. It was that Dustin who messed everything up.”
She shook her head. Then laughed a little.
“Sorry, I was just thinking of a time I went out there — oh, Christy must have been about ten. She had probably about eight neighbor kids crammed inside, and they were playing Spin the Bottle. Can you believe it?”
The smile slowly slid from her face with a sigh.
“I don’t even know where they would have learned about something like that. I figured it was the kind of thing that went the way of go-go boots and polyester leisure suits.”
Mrs. Whitmore’s face tightened again, a fierceness coming into her eyes.
“My little girl was barely cold in her grave before Dustin took up with Cat. Can you believe that? His dead girlfriend’s best friend? I mean… I tried to warn her that he was no good. That he was downright dangerous, but she was always such a mousy little thing.”
Her gaze softened.
“Besides that, I think Cat loved Christy so much that it made her love anyone Christy loved. She just couldn’t see Dustin as bad, because Christy had loved him.”
“Do you know if Dustin is still in town?” Darger asked.
The woman shook her head.
“I never knew what happened with them. Christy died a couple months before graduation, and Dustin and Cat moved away after that. Together, I was told. I hope she got away from him. I honestly do. Because if he could do what he did to my Christy… well, then he’s capable of just about anything, I figure. A monster is what he is.”
She reached out a hand to one of the photos thumbtacked to the wall. Christy posed, tongue sticking out, in a comically tall stovepipe hat — the kind The Cat in the Hat wore — except this one was made of purple and green fur. Mrs. Whitmore stroked the likeness of her daughter, and Darger wondered if she imagined the soft warmth of her daughter’s face under her fingers, instead of the cold glossy surface of the photograph.
“You know what I miss more than anything else? Being a mother. The most important job in the world, to me anyway, was being Christy’s mom. Because it was more than that. She wasn’t just my daughter. She was my best friend. And he took that away. He took it all away.”
Tears fell from the woman’s face now in earnest, and Darger looked away. She suddenly felt like she needed to get out of the room. The cloying smell of the incense, the cluttered walls, the mother’s grief — all of it had begun to close in on Darger, making her feel claustrophobic.
She turned toward the door, and as she did, her eyes caught a glimpse of the little yellow playhouse through the window.
“Mrs. Whitmore,” Darger said, “would it be OK if I took a look at the playhouse?”
The woman sniffed, gathering herself.
“I doubt there’s anything to see out there. Probably full of mice and who knows what other vermin. But go ahead. Knock yourself out.”
Chapter 27
Painted pale yellow with white gingerbread trim, Christy’s so-called Clubhouse stood at the far end of the Whitmore’s yard.
There was a small heart-shaped window over the Dutch door, a sloped roof with a faux brick chimney. The whole thing was bordered by a white picket fence.
Darger pushed through the gate and held it aside so Fowles could pass through. Now that they were closer, she could see missing shingles and that the yellow paint was beginning to peel. Old window boxes on either side of the door held only bare dirt.
The door let out of a whine of protest as Darger stooped to enter the playhouse. It smelled of mildew and mouse droppings, but she could still see that at one time, it would have been quite a charming space. It was pink and flowery, a girl-sized dollhouse.
And that was exactly what Darger thought Mrs. Whitmore had seen her daughter as. A doll. It wasn’t fair, she knew, to judge this way. But she couldn’t keep the thought from forming.
There was a loft at one end with a ladder leading up to it. The platform was just wide enough to fit a sleeping bag or maybe two. A small table and chair, painted pale blue, stood in front of a smudged chalkboard.
“I had a cousin who had a playhouse like this when we were kids,” Darger said.
“Wh
at happened?”
She pivoted to face him, frowning.
“What do you mean?”
“You said ‘had.’ You had a cousin.”
“Oh! She’s still alive. I just haven’t seen her in a while.”
Darger pushed the chintz curtains covering the window aside and peeked out. Probably the curtains had once been bright and colorful — shades of pink and blue and green. But now they were a mottled and sun-bleached beige. Even the window glass was so grimy she could barely see through it.
“OK, so I have a cousin who had a playhouse like this. All I was really going to say was that I remember being very jealous of it. I wanted one so badly. My own little hideout.”
There was a Barq’s root beer can on the floor in one corner. Darger nudged it with her toe, sent it bumping and clanging over the warped floor tiles. Its progress stopped right in the center of the floor, between Fowles and herself, but it didn’t exactly cease moving. The empty can hung there on an uneven corner of tile and sort of spun, slowly and lopsidedly, before coming to rest with the top facing Fowles.
Immediately, Darger thought of Mrs. Whitmore’s story about Christy and the neighborhood kids playing Spin the Bottle. And it wasn’t actually a bottle, of course, but…
She glanced up. Fowles was staring at her, a strange smile on his face, and she knew he was thinking the same thing.
Huddled together as they were, their knees and elbows crowding the small space, he only had to dip his head forward to kiss her. And he did.
Then he was pulling away, raising his arms into a shrug.
“Sorry, I just… could no longer resist the urge.”
Darger was smiling, about to tease him, to ask what other urges he’d been feeling. But the words froze on her tongue. She stared over Fowles right shoulder, eyes not moving from the one dark spot on the trim of the heart-shaped window.
“What?” he asked. “You’re not about to tell me there’s a giant spider hanging over my head, are you? Because that trick doesn’t work on entomologists.”
“Look,” she said, aiming a finger at it.
He turned, saw the small symbol scrawled on the wood. An upside-down heart with a cross. The same symbol that had been etched onto the fence outside of Shannon Mead’s house.