by Lisa Jackson
Now, Brianna chose her words carefully as she handed a cup to Selma. “Yes, I saw Caldwell in prison. I hoped to have his case dismissed, or at least appealed.”
“Because you think he’s innocent, right? And that means the killer is still out there. What if he’s out there and somehow he knew my girls were turning twenty-one and targeted them and . . . oh, God! He couldn’t have found them, right?” Her eyes hardened as she stared at Brianna for reaffirmation.
“It’s unlikely that the killer would have come here,” Brianna said, though the words seemed a lie. She went to the fridge and pulled out a half-empty carton of milk. “Come on, now. You were going to start at the beginning.”
“Yes, right.” Selma rubbed her eyes, as if lost for a few seconds. “As I said, it’s their birthday, you know, the big one and”—she cleared her throat—“I was hoping to celebrate with them this weekend, but they had other plans. They were going to meet up with friends, go out on Bourbon Street, and didn’t want their mother tagging along. I get that, and told them we could do the family thing later. Dinner and drinks out another night, you know. They seemed cool with that. Of course, I have no idea if they were going to see their father . . .” She pulled a face at the mention of Carson Denning, her ex-husband, then stared into her untouched drink. “I’m not in that exclusive circle.” There was a bite to her words.
The Denning divorce had been far from amicable. Though it had been five years since Carson and Selma’s initial split, Selma wouldn’t or couldn’t get over it. The scars, she said, just ran far too deep. Carson’s betrayal had been devastating; no coming back from that. Brianna understood; she knew all about heartache.
Sighing, Selma glanced out the window over the kitchen sink and focused on a middle distance. Brianna doubted that her friend noticed the morning light streaming through the branches of the magnolia tree, or the birds flitting near the fountain. No, Selma’s gaze was turned inward to her own private hell. Although Selma had spent years trying to heal from the broken relationship, she hadn’t been particularly successful. Since Carson’s remarriage to his girlfriend of a year had occurred less than a month after the divorce was final, Selma had been left reeling. The fact that Carson’s girlfriend had been Selma’s niece had amplified Selma’s pain and feeling of betrayal. Though Selma had been in therapy ever since the breakup, she was far from moving on. Every family event seemed to send her into a new level of emotional hell.
And now this.
“What happened?” Brianna asked again.
“I wish I knew.”
As Brianna took the stool next to her, Selma explained how Chloe and Zoe, students at All Saints College in Baton Rouge, had come to town with plans to spend the evening barhopping with friends in New Orleans. It was, after all, in between terms. Selma hadn’t liked the idea much, but they’d laughed her off, claiming as always that she was a super-controlling mother. They had ignored Selma’s suggestion that since she lived in New Orleans, they crash at her place, an apartment on Lafayette Street. Although she had promised they could come in late with “no questions asked,” her twins had declined to spend their first night as legal adults in their mother’s guest room. “But I did have them leave their car with me. They share a car. It’s in Carson’s name. He bought it for them a while back. I didn’t want them getting back behind the wheel, you know. I insisted they get a designated driver, one of their friends to drive them back to Baton Rouge. They were supposed to get a ride and come back and pick it up, but . . . the car is still there and . . .” She shook her head sadly. “I don’t think they made it back to the college.”
“But it’s only been a few hours,” Brianna argued, thinking her friend had jumped the gun on her worries. “And they were partying,” Brianna argued, feeling a little better. “Maybe they had a late night.”
“Why aren’t they answering their cell phones? Not even a text message.” Selma frowned, eyebrows pulling together behind her glasses, lips trembling a little. “No one has heard from them this morning, and I found out that Chloe didn’t make it into work. She was supposed to be at the coffee shop at five thirty. She didn’t show. Zoe is due at her part-time job at the accounting firm by seven, and you can bet I’ll be calling her there, but . . . but I have a feeling I won’t find her.”
In Brianna’s mind, it was still too early to be alarmed. “They’re young adults. I’d say this is most likely the result of a wild night out.”
“I want to believe that, but I just can’t. I know something’s wrong.” The cup started trembling in Selma’s hands and she set it on the scarred butcher block counter. “Christ, I’m a pathetic excuse for a mother.”
“Selma, quit beating yourself up. You don’t know that anything’s wrong, and you’re a great mom.”
“Didn’t I ask you not to patronize me?” she demanded, anger spiking only to immediately dissolve. Balling a fist, she placed her curled fingers to her lips as she struggled with tears. “I’m sorry. I know you’re just trying to help. The last I heard from them was last night, a text after I had dinner,” she whispered, guilt clouding her features. “And you know what they say about the first forty-eight hours after a crime has been committed?” Meeting Brianna’s eyes, she added, “After that short window of time, if the crime isn’t solved, if a person is still missing or the perpetrator disappears, the trail goes cold fast.” Tears slid down her cheeks and she angrily swiped them away.
“Whoa, slow down. You’re not sure there’s been a crime,” Brianna said, but even to her own ears her argument sounded patronizing. Placating. “Have they ever been out of touch with you before?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Of course. They’re always pushing me away, telling me that I’m a freak show because I worry about them. Once they turned eighteen and went off to school, they would go for days without letting me know where they were. They’re still in college. Seniors in the fall. So they resent my need to mother them.” She sighed loudly. “I guess . . . I guess I’m ultra-protective because I know what it’s like to lose someone close to me.” Her voice cracked a bit. “God, I wish Sandra were here,” she admitted, bringing up her own sister. Selma, like Brianna, was a twinless twin, part of the support group that included Tanisha.
“It’s normal to want to protect your child, no matter what the age.”
“Really? Because their father never seemed protective.” Selma shook her head, her graying ponytail brushing the back of her shoulders. “He certainly gives them their freedom, but then he’s pretty preoccupied with his new family.” She said it bitterly, referring to the fact that Carson now had two sons, one four, the other less than a year. Brianna knew the history; she had heard it often enough in their group sessions.
“Have you gone to the police?”
“I called the Baton Rouge Police Department before I came here. But they weren’t all that interested. Because it hasn’t been that long and, you know, the girls had been out celebrating.”
“Have you talked to Carson?”
“Their father doesn’t communicate with me.” She closed her eyes for a second and sighed. “But I had to get in touch with him. I mean, what if the girls had gone there? So I texted his sister and she was going to call him. But have I heard back? No. No surprise there. He’ll probably think . . . oh, that it was some kind of ploy for me to, I don’t know, gain his sympathy or attention, but that’s just nuts. Hopefully Bette can get through to him.” She lifted her cup to her lips, then set it down before taking a sip. “Of course, I’ve contacted everyone I could think of. I left messages for the dean of students at the college. I spoke with the resident director at their dorm, Harmony Hall.”
“They’re still in a dorm?” At twenty-one, the twins had to have been older than most of the students residing in campus housing.
“Yeah, I know, most kids move to an apartment after their first year, and believe me the girls lobbied long and hard for their own place. They called living on campus ‘archaic,’ and—what was the term Zoe used?—uh, Machiave
llian. But it’s the one thing their father insisted upon. If he was going to pay any part of their schooling, then the deal was that they had to stay in a dorm or a co-op or some other type of campus-run housing and go to school in the summer to make sure they graduated on time. I went along with it. Carson hasn’t been exactly generous with his daughters, you know, and he owes them at least part of their education. Besides that, I thought it would be safer.” Her lip trembled at the irony of it. “Turns out I was wrong. There is no safer.”
Despite the morning sunlight beginning to stream through the windows, a pall had settled over the house.
“What about boyfriends?” The Denning girls were beautiful and smart, and they’d always been socially active in high school.
“Oh, I tried the old boyfriends. Left messages and texts, none of them have gotten back to me yet.”
“That’s not surprising, considering that it was the middle of the night.”
“But neither of the girls is dating anyone that I know of right now. Chloe just broke up with Tommy Something-Or-Other.” Selma paused. “Wait, his name was Tommy Jones, like the singer my mother had a crush on, like, a hundred years ago. Chloe went with him for nearly a year, I think, but a while back she called it off.” Selma’s eyes darkened. “She didn’t tell me why. Didn’t want to. Accused me of ‘prying,’” she said, making air quotes with her fingers. “She also pointed out that her love life was really none of my business.”
“What about Zoe?”
Selma shook her head. “Nothing serious since her sophomore year when Zach broke up with her. Zachary Armstrong. He was her high-school boyfriend. It was a big deal at the time. Zach and Zoe, the two Zs. But the breakup hit her pretty hard. Took her a while to come to terms with the fact that he’s a jerk. Lately she seemed to have gotten over him.”
“Maybe there was someone who wasn’t a serious boyfriend?” Brianna sat on the other stool at the counter. “A new guy.”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “The girls were shutting me out, growing up, so I wouldn’t be the first on their lists to tell about a new relationship.” Blinking against tears, she gripped her cup and finally took a swig. “I’m trying to reconstruct what happened, but it’s all a haze. Their two best friends say that Zoe and Chloe had dinner with them around seven, then planned to meet at a bar down on Decatur, the Hootin’ Owl, later, but my girls never showed. So the friends weren’t all that worried. They thought they’d hook up again back in Baton Rouge at that bar near campus. The Watering Hole. Their friends closed the place down, but my girls never showed.” She glanced up at Brianna, her expression somber. “The twins would never have done this intentionally.”
“And when was the last time anyone heard from either girl?”
“Around eight forty-five, when Zoe texted her friend that she’d see her at the Hootin’ Owl.” She swiped at her tears. “That would indicate that they stopped partying before nine p.m. I don’t believe that. Do you?”
“It doesn’t seem likely,” Brianna admitted as dread replaced the hope in her heart.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s got all the ingredients for disaster, especially if the 21 Killer is out there, like you said.”
Brianna did not want to admit that her friend was making perfect sense. “Maybe they’ll turn up,” she said.
Biting back a sob, Selma shook her head. “The thing I don’t understand is why he would strike here? I mean, he committed all those murders in Southern California, right? Why would he come here? Why New Orleans?”
“That’s a good question,” Brianna said, tamping down the rage she fought daily when she thought of 21. Rather than meet Selma’s gaze again, Brianna climbed from her stool and walked to the far counter. She placed her cup inside the microwave and punched in thirty seconds to reheat her coffee. As she counted down with the timer, a plan began to form in her brain. If Selma’s fears proved to be founded, it was time to get tough. Really tough.
Suddenly, the bad dreams and omens of the night melded into Selma’s frightening story of her missing girls to create a terrifying matrix. Twins, celebrating their twenty-first birthdays. Brianna’s hours of rationalization, all the suspicions she had dismissed as paranoia, now solidified into mind-numbing fear.
She could barely look at her friend.
Why New Orleans? Selma had asked.
The answer was simple: Because of frickin’ Rick Bentz.
“You have to go to the police,” Brianna said. “I’ll come with you.”
CHAPTER 6
“That wasn’t the deal.” Jase Bridges stared his older brother down, but Prescott only shrugged as he stood in the living room of the old house where they’d grown up.
“The deal changed.”
“How?”
“Lena doesn’t like livin’ here,” Prescott said with a shrug. “Says there’s too many ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“Ghosts. Memories. Spirits. Whatever.” Prescott, an inch taller than Jase, was a bigger man all around. Thicker in the middle, wider shoulders, heavier face. His hair was near black where Jase’s was a lighter brown. Prescott had been a defensive tackle on the high-school football team, all-state with offers of full rides to several small colleges, while Jase, a running back three years later, hadn’t garnered the notice of college scouts. Now Prescott raked back his black hair and scowled through the window at the surrounding acres of what had once been a large sugar plantation. Over the centuries the farm had been cut into smaller plots, which most recently had been used to produce soybeans and raise cattle. Now the fields had gone fallow, the barns empty, the sheds filled with unused equipment that was rusting. Jase and his brother had inherited the place with the death of their uncle, who had never married or fathered children. The plan had been that Prescott, who had lived here with his family for five years, was to buy out Jase. Now, with payment finally due, the deal had just gone south.
Prescott placed a hand on Jase’s shoulder. “See, what’s happened is that Lena, she wants to live in town near the school so she can keep an eye on the kids and help out. And now that I’m selling insurance, I don’t have time to mess with this place. We need to move on. You understand about that, brother.” Then as if a sudden thought had struck him, he asked, “You run into Brianna since you’ve been back?”
The muscles in the back of Jase’s neck tightened, but he didn’t answer.
“She’s in town now, has a little place in the Garden District. Come home to roost, just like you.” He sent his brother a look only the two of them could understand. “From what I gather, she’s a psychologist now. Been back nearly a year. She has a practice and runs some kind of group for twins.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Come on, you’re the reporter. Figure it out.”
Jase waited.
Prescott shrugged. “Hell, I’m in insurance. Always pressured to get new clients, so I checked. Who knows, maybe she could use some term life?”
Jase let further conversation about Brianna Hayward slide, didn’t want to go there. “You’re already looking to move?” he asked, following his brother down a short, familiar hallway.
“It’s gone a little further than that.”
In the kitchen, where the old linoleum curled and the counters were scarred by decades of use, Lena was pouring cereal into bowls. Pale hair had been scraped into a loose bun on the top of her head, and she was wearing a T-shirt that hugged her large belly, a white skirt, and flip-flops that snapped as she moved briskly around the kitchen.
A short woman who had once boasted an hourglass figure, Lena was in her eighth month of pregnancy and appeared squat. She glanced over her shoulder at her brother-in-law. “Pres told you we’re moving, right?” she asked, slipping the tab on the top of the Cheerios box into its slot.
Jase nodded.
As if needing to explain, she said, “I can’t stay here. I just can’t. I won’t bring another child into the world to be brought up out here in the middle of no
where.” She walked to the pantry, stuck the box into the cupboard, and yelled up the back stairs. “Kids! Come on! We’re gonna be late for VBS! Trinity? You hear me? Caleb, you come on down here! Pronto!”
Hearing the shuffle of feet on the floor above, Lena walked to the refrigerator where she pulled out a carton of milk and placed it, along with two spoons, on the small table pushed against the wall opposite the sink, the same spot where Jase and Prescott had sat during all of their years growing up on this farm.
“Prescott said the place has too many ghosts for you,” Jase said.
Lena shot her husband a glance, then automatically rubbed the cross that hung from a chain at her neck. “Shhh!” she warned as her children thundered down the staircase and clambered into the room.
“Uncle Jase!” Trinity’s brown eyes lit up when she saw him. She raced across the room, blond hair flying, and flung herself into his arms. “I didn’t know you were here!”
“I snuck in,” he teased, juggling her onto a hip.
A moment later, her younger brother barreled into the room with a squeal of delight. “Hey!” Caleb cried, shooting across the floor to jump up.
Jase caught his nephew with his free arm. “Hey yourself, little man.” Jase had never considered himself much of a kid person, but when his niece was born seven years earlier, all that changed.
Lena scowled. “Hay is for horses, and we don’t have a lot of time to mess around here,” she advised her brother-in-law and sent him a don’t-mess-with-me stare. Then she glared at the children. “Kids, hurry up. Eat your breakfast. Miss Suzy won’t like it if we’re late, and Reverend Tim has a special treat for you all.”
“I hate Bible school,” Caleb complained, and his sister’s eyes rounded.
“Don’t you say that!” Lena hissed, looking over her shoulder as if she expected Satan himself to appear. “You love Vacation Bible School, you know you do. Now, come on, get your things.”
Rolling her eyes, Trinity slid out of Jase’s arms. “Okay,” she said on a sigh that would have made a petulant teen proud, then climbed into her seat.