by Gregg Olsen
As I head for bed, it dawns on me that my sister is the dark flip side of “To know me is to love me.”
When I wake up, I resolve that I’ll live life like everything is normal this Saturday—maybe my last Saturday with Emma. I pick her up from Carrie Anne’s, where she has spent the night. Too many nights, I think. I cuddle her. We go to the grocery store—but not WinCo. She and I watch Food Network. I offer a movie, but she declines. I tell her I need to see my father.
“He won’t know if you come today or tomorrow,” she says.
She’s right.
“No, he won’t. I can see him Sunday.”
“Let’s just stay home,” she says, with that serious expression that I love more than anything. She’s thinking. The wheels are turning.
“If you want to,” I say.
“You aren’t looking at your phone.”
She knows me.
“No,” I say. “I’m not. I’m just here for you.”
Her expression changes, and she hooks her arms around me as we sit on the sofa in the front room. I breathe her in. Shelby gets jealous and tries to wedge her way between us, but I don’t let her.
“I know you have to work tomorrow,” Emma says. “But let’s pretend like you don’t.”
I kiss her on the forehead.
“All right. Let’s pretend.”
So we do.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Sunday, August 27
I can barely breathe. She’s gotten to me. She scares me. I want Dad to know how rotten that apple of his eye really is.
To the core.
It’s Sunday morning, and I stand next to him in his room at Ocean View. We’re alone. Just us. Emma is in the TV room. I spare her. It’s what moms do. I am a mom. Dad’s eyes are slits open to the vacuity of the ceiling. I’m unsure of what he comprehends, if anything at all. Sometimes I see a movement of his head that indicates, at least I hope, that he’s acknowledging our conversation. As I sit there now at Ocean View, he hasn’t spoken for days, but that’s happened before. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease, but there are fits and starts to its cruel manifestation. Some days he will utter some phrases that nearly align with what I’m saying. Other times he’ll blurt out something that is nonsensical in context but coherent as a statement. Most often it is about my mother or my sister. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been completely erased from his memory bank. It’s ironic. I’m the one who comes to see him. I’m the one who has told him that, despite everything he’s done to me, I’m still here. I understand. No parents are perfect. My father was leaps and bounds ahead of my mother, so by default he becomes the dad that I wanted.
I look toward the door. It’s just me and Dad.
“Stacy killed Cy,” I tell him, leaning in close, because I really don’t want anyone but my father to hear what I have to say.
His eyes open a little. Or at least I think they do.
“She probably killed Julian,” I say, though I know my father never knew who Julian Chase was. I tell him not because of the who that she harmed but because of what she is.
“She killed our pony, Candy. You know she did.”
A flutter of the slits.
“She’s never been right, Dad. She’s just like Mom. She’s only able to function in Stacyland.”
Stacyland was a word that my father actually coined, though I don’t think he saw it as dark as I did back then. As black as tar as I think now.
“She wants your granddaughter back, Dad.”
I take his shoulders in my hands. I want him to listen to me. I want someone who really understands my sister to get the importance of what I’m saying.
He lets out some air, but it’s not really a response.
I grip the bones of his shoulders tighter—not tight enough to bruise, but close.
“Damn it, Dad. She’s dangerous. She’s not right. We have to stop her. We know who and what she is.”
My dad winces from the pressure of my fingertips, but those slits never betray any real cognition.
How could they?
I imagine his brain is cottage cheese. I visualize the synapses still firing but getting lost in the gunk of his mind.
“Dad, I need help,” I say, keeping my grip tight and my voice low. “I need to protect Emma.”
Talking to him is ludicrous, and I know it.
And then I hear her voice. It’s a pretty voice, but to me it sounds like talons dragged over a chalkboard. A sonic boom. A car crash.
“How’s Dad today?”
I look toward the doorway, and my heart falls. Stacy has decided to show up. Her presence makes the room feel twenty degrees colder. I turn to look at her with a phony warm smile. She’s dressed in what I think is Kate Spade, a white shift. Her purse is white too. Her earrings this time are teardrop diamonds. She wears two. One for each dead husband, I think. I wonder how long she’d been watching me.
And what, if anything, did she hear?
My sister is glamorous and beautiful and she attracts looks wherever she goes. I notice a couple of nurses sauntering by the open door to get a look at her. In Aberdeen at this moment, she’s like a zoo exhibit. A vision in white. Probably someone famous. Definitely rich. Another nurse passes by, craning her neck to take in my sister’s stunning visage.
“You and Dad seemed to be deep in conversation,” Stacy says, now joining me at his bedside.
I release my fingers from his shoulders and adjust the sheet to his neck. My sister would turn me in for elder abuse if she could. Not that I was abusing our father, but I concede that while trying to make him listen, I might have grabbed him with more force than I should have.
She hovers over him and then plants a kiss on his forehead.
The kiss of death, I think.
“He’s not really responsive,” I tell her. “Kind of surprised to see you here. I know you saw him the other day.”
“You come here all the time, Nicole. He’s my daddy too.”
Daddy. Her word of manipulation.
“Of course he is,” I say, now facing Stacy directly. Her eyes are fixed on mine like lasers. I can’t break the directness of her gaze. She’s drilling into me, searching for a weakness to exploit, like a tick trying to burrow deep inside. “You look beautiful today,” I say, because I know her weaknesses as well as she knows mine.
“Dress is wrinkled,” she says, making a face, “but I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Got the valet fired, though, so at least no one else will ever have to endure such incompetence again.”
It’s the Quinault, I think. Not the Four Seasons.
Dad gurgles, and Stacy mistakes that for approval for “standing up for herself” and getting some poor SOB fired.
“You know,” Stacy says, “you were always Dad’s real favorite.”
I look from her face to our father’s. No one but Stacy was anyone’s favorite.
“Thank you,” I say.
That shuts her down.
She pets Dad’s gnarled hand, scarred and misshapen from a life of hard work at the mill.
“When can I see Emma?” she asks.
“I need more time. I haven’t had a chance to tell her, Stacy. This is big. Even you can see that, right? It has to be done in the right way.”
Her eyes are lifeless, like a shark’s. “She’ll hate you for lying to her,” she says. “You should never have done that. Not smart. Not coplike.”
“I did what I thought was right,” I say. “After all, you murdered her father.”
My words are a jab. Not hard enough to provoke, but the best that I can do. “You shouldn’t say that.” Her lips are tight, and I imagine I hear a hiss wrapped around each word.
“It’s true,” I counter, pushing a little more. This is me standing my ground. “It’s true.”
Stacy’s lovely face is now concrete. “If you ever double-cross me, I’ll take you down on the same ride,” she says, dropping her voice a little. “Then Emma will have no one. No family. Nothing.” She stops and t
aps a finger on our father’s head. It’s more of a poke. “Maybe this mush pot will be alive, but really, who could ever count on him anyway?”
“No one will believe you, Stacy.”
She hooks her arm through her purse’s strap and hoists it up to her shoulder.
“I’m very, very believable,” she says. “Emma. I need to see Emma tomorrow.”
“I have to work,” I say, thinking of a way out of this. “I’m in the middle of a big case.”
“Fine, then,” Stacy says. “After work. At the cabin.”
Stacy turns to leave. A nurse has positioned herself at the door, and my sister nearly knocks the girl out of the way. I wonder if she heard what Stacy and I said. I hope not. She’d have reason to gossip about Stacy. Everyone does.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Sunday, August 27
It’s barely five and Sunday dinner is over—a somewhat sad slow cooker special—and Emma and I take turns describing the best dessert ever. She’s nixed my plan gleaned from a recipe we saw on Food Network the day before—apple pie dipped in caramel and topped with ice cream.
“Gross,” she says. “Too gooey.”
“Gooey is good,” I say.
“I want chocolate chip pancakes with whipped cream and a cherry.”
“Of course you do,” I say. “How about some sliced bananas on that?”
She makes a face. No words are needed, but she offers her assessment anyway. “Bananas are gross,” she says. “Slippery. Yuck.”
“Right,” I say. “Mushy. You don’t like mushy. I know.”
I’m in the moment, but I’m also thinking if this will be the last time—forever for a very long time—as I contemplate what I need to do about her mother and how I will handle the meeting at our old cabin. As I smile at her and laugh, I wonder what’s wrong with me. I wonder if I’m like my sister, twisted and messed up. But not as bad as Stacy, because I can rationalize everything as doing the right thing.
Stacy might have done that too.
The bell rings, and I leave Emma and Shelby in the kitchen. The table is clear, and Emma is breaking out the tin of crayons to show me just what those perfect pancakes should look like.
I open the door to find a surprise visitor.
“Sorry to bother you at home,” Debbie Manning says. “I remembered your address from high school. We were friends, right?”
She’s wearing shorts that are too short and a hot pink top, both of which harken back to her high school days. Her style hasn’t changed.
“Mostly you and Stacy were friends,” I say, not indicating that pretty much was the case with everyone in town. Didn’t matter that Stacy was younger. She was the queen bee. “What’s up, Debbie?”
Debbie doesn’t look happy. “This one needs to talk to you,” she says, turning around.
Behind her is Brooklyn, her day care helper. She looks like she’d prefer to be anywhere but on my front steps. Her arms are folded over her Halsey concert T-shirt and I have a feeling that it would take two men to pry them away. She’s visibly upset.
“I had nothing to do with what happened to Ally,” Brooklyn says.
I don’t know what she’s talking about, and the look is plain on my face.
“You called me,” she says.
I’m confused. “No, I didn’t,” I say.
“You did,” she says, holding out her phone. I see her name right away. It wasn’t a Mari who Luke texted. Not Marianne or anything like that at all. The name in the text sent from Luke’s phone was an abbreviation of Brooklyn’s last name: Marinucci.
“Can we come in?” Debbie asks, barely waiting for a response. “She played me your message and I told her we needed to get her ass over here.”
I motion them both inside, and while they get settled, I give Carter a quick call.
“Don’t start without me,” he tells me. “This could be the break we need. And remember, she’s just a kid.”
“Right,” I say.
I check on Emma and tell her that I have some work to do.
“Two people are here and I need to talk to them,” I say.
“That’s okay,” she says, working on her pancake drawing.
“Looks good enough to eat,” I say.
She smiles and focuses on her work.
“Can I get you something to drink? Pop? Coffee?” I call out from the kitchen.
“A beer if you have one,” Debbie answers.
Naturally.
“Nothing for me,” Brooklyn says in a small, deflated voice.
A few minutes later Carter arrives dressed in jeans and what appears to be a Western-style shirt. The only thing missing are cowboy boots. So this is Carter off the clock. Interesting. Not terrible. Just interesting.
While Debbie sips her beer, Brooklyn confides that she in fact had been having an affair with Luke Tomlinson. She sits on the sofa next to Debbie, her arms folded and her legs crossed. She’s human origami. Her hair is up in a messy bun. A half-coin necklace lies against her tan skin. Her eyes are smoky, and her lips are bing cherry red. She’s trying to look older, but she looks her age, sixteen.
She came of her own free will, and I don’t bring up that she should probably have her parents there. Debbie, I rationalize, is filling that role. Slightly drunk, but there, doing her best Emily from Our Town, looking concerned.
“I had nothing to do with what Luke did to Ally,” Brooklyn says out of the gate.
Carter challenges her. He’s going to be the bad cop. That makes me the good cop. I prefer being the bad cop and how it unleashes pent-up anger from every aspect of my life.
“That’s a little hard to believe, Brooklyn,” he says, barely concealing his disdain for the girl. “Your texts say otherwise. You wanted him to get Ally out of the way.”
“You can’t believe that,” she says, looking at Debbie for moral support, I think.
Debbie, instead, is focused on her now-empty beer bottle.
“I’m not like that,” Brooklyn goes on. “I’m a good person.”
“A good person doesn’t sleep with someone who is married,” Carter says, thinking of his own situation, I’m sure. “Neither side of that equation is on the side of good. Maybe no one taught you that.”
I give my partner an exaggerated glare. He needs to stop this now. Brooklyn might be stupid, but she is underage and, technically, a victim. He reads me and, rightly so, draws back a little.
“Let her talk,” I say. “She came here to help. Didn’t you, Brooklyn?”
The girl nods. “Yeah, because I knew you’d find out about me and Luke. Those texts were embarrassing to me.”
“But you sent them, right? And he sent them to you?”
“Yeah,” she says. “But I was kind of role-playing. A game.”
“But you had been lovers, right?” I ask.
Brooklyn reaches up and releases her hair from the bun. She gives her head a little shake to send her locks downward. “I don’t like that word,” she says. “Seems stupid. Like, we just had sex. It was for fun. Something to do. It’s not like we have a lot of options in this town. Anyway, Luke was into me and I wasn’t really that into him. It was nothing. It isn’t like we were going to get married or anything.”
“Because he was already married,” Carter says, unable to resist another slap at his ex-wife through words directed at a sixteen-year-old girl sitting on my living room couch.
Brooklyn touches the gold half coin on her neck. “Old people live by old rules,” she says. “Haven’t you heard? Love wins. Don’t be a hater.”
I offer Debbie a second beer to give the interview a much-needed pause. I ask Carter to help me in the kitchen.
“You need to stop working through your past out there,” I whisper to him as we stand by the refrigerator. Before he responds, Emma interrupts to show me the pancake drawing. I smile approvingly.
“Good work, honey.”
Carter is red-faced but silent now. I hand him the bottle of beer.
“Give this
to Debbie and let’s remember that this whole thing is about a dead little girl. Not about you.”
When we return to the living room, Debbie has her arm around Brooklyn.
“She’s right, you know,” my old not-friend from high school says, taking the second beer. “Times have changed, Nicole. Relationships aren’t like those we grew up with when we were young. Love is more fluid now.”
It’s an odd remark coming from Debbie, who complained about being trapped with the progeny resulting from her romance and marriage to the high school football star who ditched her, but I merely nod in agreement.
“Brooklyn,” I say, “tell us about those texts. What was going on there?”
“Just sex,” she says. “‘Booty call’ is what your generation calls it.”
She seems a little emboldened since Carter and I left for our impromptu powwow in the kitchen.
“Your conversation talks about him being free,” I say.
“Yes. So what?”
“Free of Ally?”
Brooklyn laughs. “No. Not Ally. Mia. He was going to leave Mia.”
“For you?”
“For himself,” she says. “He didn’t like her anymore—Mia. She just didn’t do it for him.”
I wonder how Sam Underwood or Rachel Cromwell fits into this, but I don’t mention either name.
“All right, fine,” I say. “Then you are telling me that being free was about his wife, not his daughter.”
Brooklyn looks at Debbie, then back at me. “That’s what I said, Detective. Can I go now? I didn’t do anything.”
Carter speaks up in a tone and manner that sounds suspiciously like a “dad voice.”
“You lied to Detective Foster when she questioned you at Debbie’s day care,” he said. “You said nothing was going on with you. That Luke was a good guy. Isn’t that what you said?”
Brooklyn gets up, and Debbie looks for a place to set her empty.
“Right,” she says, shrugging her bony shoulders. “But I’m only a kid, just barely old enough to drive. I was scared. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think you’d understand people like Luke and me. We’re not like you. We aren’t conventional. We’re in the gray area of sexuality that you just can’t get. We like sex because it’s fun, not because it has any real meaning.”