by Gregg Olsen
I settled on a Mexican villa pitched on a cliff above sapphire and turquoise waters, though deep down, as much as I know my sister, I doubted that would satisfy her thirst for extravagance—not when she undoubtedly had millions of dollars to spend.
When Carter pokes his head into my office and says he’s off to get a bite and asks if I want to come, I do something I’ve seldom done before.
“Sure,” I say. “Give me five minutes.”
“Really?” he asks. “Wasn’t expecting that.”
“Me neither,” I say.
“How does Red Lobster sound?”
It sounds terrible.
“Fancy,” I say.
We take his car and I watch the #1 Dad key ring sparkle as it swings when we drive over a pothole that seems to go unchecked by the city. “How are they doing?” I ask.
He looks at me. “Who?”
I indicate the key ring. “Your kids. I know you miss them. I’m sure they must miss you.”
Carter gives me a cursory nod as we pull into the parking lot of the Red Lobster. It’s new, so it’s busy for a weeknight. He finds a spot in the last row.
“Kids are all right,” he says. “I talk to them about every day, though sometimes I wonder why I bother. They don’t have much to tell me, except how much they want this or that.”
“That’s the burden of being number one dad,” I say.
He grins, but it’s a forced one. “Right. I guess. I wish there was a do-over for my life, because I sure screwed things up. I know all of this is on me. Now Sherry has a boyfriend. Serious too. Pretty soon all I’ll be to anyone is an ATM with a serious bank balance problem.”
I give our name to the hostess, and we go into the bar and find a couple of empty stools at the far end.
“This isn’t a date,” I say. It feels a little mean when it comes out of my lips, and it wasn’t meant that way. I just wanted to be clear. I don’t date partners anymore. That was one of many mistakes that I don’t—I can’t—revisit. And seeing how I don’t meet anyone else, that pretty much seals my fate as a spinster aunt to Emma.
Carter nods. “I know. You’ve made that clear.”
I feel bad for him. I’m not sure what mistake he made, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a philanderer. He has zero game. Quite possibly less than zero.
“Sorry,” I say. “Not that I think I’m all that. And not that you aren’t a hell of a nice guy. It’s just something I can’t ever do.”
“Because you did it once before,” he says.
“Right,” I say. “And we both know how that turned out.”
I order a whiskey sour. Carter orders a glass of rosé. Seriously. My phone pings, and I look down at the text message from the DA’s office. Crap, I think, but I set the news aside.
When the bartender working our end of the bar returns with our order, he mistakenly sets the pretty pink wine in front of me and the amber-hued cocktail by Carter. We do the switch when the server leaves.
“I didn’t figure you for a whiskey drinker,” he says.
I shrug. “Don’t get me started, Mr. Rosé.”
Carter grins, and we drink and we do what cops always do: we talk about the case.
“You believe Mia?” he asks.
The whiskey sour is good, and I’m going to savor it. No matter how long and bad my day has been.
“What part of her story?” I ask.
“I’d say all of it,” he says. “Any of it. She’s about as reliable as Luke is. I doubt very much that she researched hot-car death because her husband had been talking it up. Just doesn’t hold water.”
“That’s probably why I believe her,” I say. “The craziness of her looking up the same subject before it happened and then blurting out that Luke had left Ally in the car when the blues picked her up at the hospital.”
His glass is now empty. “You don’t think that’s far-fetched?”
I do, and I tell him so. “Of course it is. It’s so far-fetched that it just might be a genuine coincidence. She’d have to be seriously stupid to bring all that up if she had a hand in Ally’s death. I don’t think she’s stupid.”
Carter indicates to the bartender that he wants another glass of wine. The woman behind the bar points to me, but I shake my head.
Carter pushes back from the barstool.
“Because she’s a nurse?” he asks, sipping from a second glass while I continue to nurse my whiskey sour.
“No,” I tell him. “Because she is—rather, was—Ally’s mother. That’s a big bond.”
I realize the stupidity of my remark. My own mother snapped the big bond like a twig. Stacy did too. My idea of motherhood and its importance has been completely warped by my own inexorable need to fix things in my life.
“Table’s ready,” says a server in a white shirt and black slacks.
So fancy, this Red Lobster.
We get up with our drinks in hand and follow the young man to a corner booth in the dining room adjacent to a mammoth aquarium holding a group of lethargic lobsters. A basket of biscuits greets us. By the time we slide into the booth, Carter has one in his mouth.
“I haven’t eaten a thing all day,” he says, a tiny avalanche of buttery crumbs falling to the tabletop and onto the front of his pale blue shirt.
He really has zero game. I think of flicking off the crumbs. But I don’t.
“Makes me sick they let Luke go to Ally’s funeral,” I say.
“No shit,” Carter says, the wine loosening him up a little.
“Yeah,” I say, picking at the crispy edges of a biscuit. “DA says that Mia and her parents pled with them to allow it. Said that if he’s exonerated, then they’ll feel like crap that they kept him away.”
“He won’t be exonerated,” Carter says, scanning the menu like he’s studying a latent print.
“They said that about Casey Anthony,” I say.
He lifts his eyes from the menu. “Not guilty isn’t the same as innocent, you know. I wonder how the lobster is here,” he says with a wry smile. “Think it’s any good?”
Carter makes me smile just then. That’s a good thing. I need a smile.
The house is as still as the air outside when I get home. Shelby meets me in the kitchen with a tail that I’m certain could whip cream. I pick her up.
“God, girl, are you getting heavy.”
She licks my face, and I do nothing to stop her. I wonder if she’s getting a taste of those oversalted and -buttered biscuits that Carter—with a tiny bit of help from me—demolished before our food came.
Shelby was supposed to be a miniature dachshund, but, weighing at least fifteen pounds, she’s clearly a standard. I sit in my father’s chair by the front window. It’s a leather chair that Stacy and Cy got him when they first got married. Shelby finds a cozy spot on my lap while I look through the mail, a few bills for the water and electricity, a notice that my father’s pension is all but tapped out. A copy of This Old House magazine holds my interest as I turn its pages, trying to see just what it was that appealed to my father. He was the worst carpenter ever. He watched videos. He read books. He subscribed to magazines. No matter what he did, he just couldn’t do anything right. Just like me, trying to win myself a new life in front of the glittering lights and sounds of the slots, maybe my father was trying to fix himself. Maybe home improvement was his personal metaphor.
I go upstairs and lie on Emma’s bed and look up at the same ceiling that I gazed at when I was her age.
I was hoping that my mother would come home.
I wonder if Emma lies here missing her mom too.
Ally has been dead eight days. Autopsied. Mourned. Buried. It is hard to reconcile that because to really think about what happened is completely bone-chilling. But it’s my job.
I think about the time line as I settle in my father’s old chair, my laptop casting a glow on my face and the wine glass on the table next to me. The answer is often found there—between point A and point B. A time line is the backbone of circ
umstantial cases. I know this. Every cop does. And while life is never really on schedule—at least, mine has never been—prosecutors love nothing more than a time line without the slightest bit of wiggle room. Defendants often consider the concrete points in a chronology as their best chance for an acquittal.
“I couldn’t have done that,” a suspect who’d killed his mother with a piece of Carrara marble tile from an installation he was doing at her home told me one time. “I was at lunch when she was killed. Twenty people can vouch for me.”
“It doesn’t matter that you were at lunch at twelve thirty-seven when your mom’s body was discovered. She’d been dead for three hours. She was dead when you left her.”
“The medical examiner’s time of death is hazy,” his lawyer said.
I pushed back. “Not hazy enough to get your client off.”
While Shelby curls up next to me, I put together the elements that are best known to Carter and me. A few are incontrovertible: time stamps from video surveillance and charge cards. Others are less concrete but are a close approximation. Off maybe by two or three minutes.
I lean back and scrutinize the time line.
6:00 a.m. Mia goes to work.
8:30 a.m. Luke and Ally leave the house.
8:39 a.m. Luke and Ally arrive at McDonald’s, order their food, and eat.
8:55 a.m. Luke and Ally leave McDonald’s for the drive to WinCo.
Around 9:00 a.m. Luke arrives at work.
10:23 a.m. Luke gets beach walk email from Little Pal’s.
11:45 a.m. Luke and pals leave WinCo for lunch at the nearby Jersey Mike’s.
Around 12:30 p.m. Luke returns to the back parking lot to put his printer cartridge into the car.
Around 4:00 p.m. Luke departs WinCo.
4:16 p.m. Luke pulls into the Starbucks parking lot, gets out of his SUV, and screams that something is wrong with his daughter.
4:33 p.m. Ally is pronounced dead.
I see Shelby by the door waiting patiently. She’s fully recovered and wants out. Except when there are strangers, she’s mostly a silent dog. I close my laptop and go to her. I love her so much that it hurts sometimes. People who don’t have a dog can’t know how it feels, just like those who don’t have children can’t understand that kind of love. They aren’t the same, of course. But both are real. As I watch Shelby’s pointed muzzle grow a little lighter with time, I can’t help but panic a little inside. She’s older. Older means an end is coming. I swing the door open, and she looks up with those soulful brown eyes, a look that is only for me.
“Go on, now,” I say.
The poisoning and the rush to the vet were a jolt to my heart. A canine defibrillator. She’s been with me through every terrible mistake I’ve made. She won’t be here forever. And that kills me.
She trots out into the dark, and my thoughts go back to Luke and Ally and the time line—such a mundane little day with such horrible consequences. Luke will never be able to wriggle out of his culpability.
He was the only one in the car with Ally.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Wednesday, August 23
It’s morning before work, and I go where I try to go every Wednesday. My father sits in that peculiar wheelchair with its very high, stiff metal back in his room at Ocean View. He’s strapped to it. As my eyes graze over the scene, Hannibal Lecter comes to mind. The famed fictional serial killer had a similar seating arrangement when guards moved him from one prison to another. Dad’s not wearing the hockey mask, but he might as well be. He’s spoken barely a word during my last several visits to the care facility. Emma has asked several times to see her grandfather, but I’ve told her that he’s not feeling well. She knows he’s ill, but I don’t need her to see him as a monster.
Alzheimer’s is scary enough without the serial-killer-in-a-wheelchair visuals.
We sit in the TV room as an infomercial for a countertop appliance that promises to fry food without a drop of oil runs on what I’m sure is an endless loop. Chicken wings. Empanadas. Wontons. All of fried foods’ greatest hits play out in glorious crispiness while my dad and another man, whose name I don’t know—and my guess is that he doesn’t, either—watch raptly from their respective chairs. My dad has the weird chair. The other guy, a normal one. The light from the television screen moves across my father’s light blue eyes, and I wonder if anything he sees registers with him at all.
“Remember that time you ate ten thousand barbecued wings in one sitting?” I ask him.
There was no such time, but I know I can say anything I’ve ever wanted to say and there is only the slightest chance it would show up anywhere in the shattered essence of his subconscious.
I could say anything in the world to him right now. I could disclose my darkest secret. Instead, I ask one of the questions that has haunted me all of my adult life.
“Why did you wait all those years for Mom?” It’s a subject that I’ve never had the heart to give voice to before, but one that framed everything about our lives after she left us for California.
He doesn’t answer, and images of oil-free empanadas command the TV screen.
“I remember how much I wanted to just punch you in the gut for believing that she was ever going to return to Hoquiam. To us. Don’t you know that your hope kept us all hostage? It wasn’t right. Don’t you know, Dad, Stacy and I stupidly believed you when you said you were sure she would come home?”
“Cherry empanadas are piping hot now. Next, an amazing lemon curd recipe!”
The host’s assistant, a middle-aged woman with the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen outside of an anime character, bites into an empanada and goes into full-on orgasm. It’s undoubtedly the best thing she’s ever eaten in her entire life. Or perhaps, I think, she’s been held in some shipping container somewhere and hasn’t had anything decent to eat in eons. The man next to my father leans a little closer to the screen, and a faint smile comes to his lips while his hand slips into the waistband of his pajamas.
This guy’s clearly not dead yet.
Dad, however, is fish eyed with a blank grouper gaze at the TV.
“Mom was a complete bitch and only cared about herself, Dad,” I say.
No reaction.
I consider grabbing him by the shoulders and snapping him out of his perpetual twilight. But I don’t. Not yet, anyway.
I keep my voice low so as not to disturb the masturbator in the wheelchair next to us. “She never wanted you and she sure as hell never wanted Stacy and me.”
His eyes flutter with some recognition. “Stacy,” he says in a kind of semilucid mutter.
Her. It’s always her.
“I’m not Stacy,” I tell him, reminding myself that he’s not half as smart as one of those empanadas. He’s parroting a word. That’s all. Not really thinking of anyone.
Not her, I tell myself.
It isn’t that I despise my sister, though God knows she’s given me a million reasons to do so. It’s that I just never understood how it was that she was so favored. Beauty can’t be everything. Can it? She is a sociopath like our mom. She doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone other than herself. I tell myself that she wasn’t always that way. She grew into it. A sweet baby. A cute little sister. And then the evil inside her grew. I could give my dad a litany of the evil Stacy has wrought in the world. I want to. Yet I know that even if I did, and even if he could understand, he would side with her. That I would be the bad person.
How could you betray your sister like that?
My sister killed her husband.
She’s your blood.
Her blood is poison, by the way.
Get out of here. You’re nothing but a gambler.
None of that conversation transpires. I know in my father’s eyes I could never win against Stacy.
So I do what I’ve always done. It’s supposed to be from the heart, but it always feels a little like groveling over splinters of broken glass.
“All I ever wanted was to find a way t
o make you happy—a way to forget about her,” I say. “You have no idea now, I guess. You had no idea back then. Every mistake I’ve made in my life is my own, but, Dad, I want you to know that you sent me on that road. You. You really did.”
Tears come to my eyes, but I don’t let them fall. In some weird way this confrontation with my dad makes me feel good. I’m not yelling at him, but it feels cathartic, like I’m in primal scream therapy or something of the like.
“I could have left you in that other place in Hoquiam—the place where the rats had nicknames—and you’d be lying in your bed right now with a chapped penis and a dirty diaper. But I didn’t. I got the money from Stacy and I moved you here, Dad.”
He pulls his eyes away from the TV.
“Stacy,” he repeats.
Her name has always been a mantra of sorts. Sometimes I wonder if it is because her abandonment of him hurt him more than my devotion made him feel better. That he’d rather wallow in missing Stacy than be happy that I’m here, sitting in the godforsaken TV room, watching hash brown potatoes fry without a drop of oil.
“It’s the magic of hot air,” the host says, while his excited assistant moans and those eyes of hers roll back into her head.
Hot air is right.
I notice some food—dried egg, maybe—stuck on Dad’s chin, and I gently pick it off.
He looks up at me once more with his chambray-blue eyes. For a second I see—at least, I think I see—a bead of recognition.
“Dad,” I say, seizing this potential moment of lucidity, “I need you to know this.” I hold his bony shoulders, shoulders that once seemed like the cornerstones of some massive building but now are rubble. He is nothing if not flawed. Yet out of the family that I had, he was the closest to what I envisioned was normal. Loving. At least mostly. “I would never have wanted another father other than you.” No matter what, I want him to get this and hold on to it somewhere in the part of his memory that still functions. “When I finally figured out that Mom was never coming back, I prayed that you would find a new wife. Not for me. Not a mother for me. Or even for Stacy. But someone to love you, Dad.”