by Willow Rose
He is still just staring at me and shaking his head. I can tell he is laughing on the inside.
“What did he do to you?” I ask. “Why do you work for him? Does he have something on you? Did you cheat on the wifey and did he threaten to tell her?”
I know I’m on thin ice now, but I can’t help myself.
“I saw you, you know,” I say. “In my brother’s studio. You were looking for the ring. The ring that I later saw on Olivia Hartman’s finger.”
Chris Fisher stops smiling. “What?”
“I was in the studio when you got there, when you looked for the ring. I saw you grab it and take it. That’s tampering with evidence, my friend.”
Chris Fisher leans forward with a sigh. “I don’t believe the ring was of importance. The general wanted it back; there is nothing wrong with that,” he says. “It’s a very expensive ring.”
“Did you write Olivia out of the police-report as well? Did he tell you to?” I ask.
Chris Fisher’s face turns red all of a sudden. He leans in and snorts at me. “I did him a favor. The general feared that it would come out in the open that his wife had an affair. He thought it was embarrassing to them. I can’t blame him. His wife was sleeping around right under his nose. Humiliating the man. Yes, I helped him out when he asked me to. You’ll never hear me admit it outside of this room, but yes, I did. I left Olivia out of the report, and when the general realized the ring was missing and Olivia told him where it might be, that your brother might have it in the apartment, then yes. I helped the guy out. He’s an old friend of mine. We served together. I didn’t destroy any evidence, nor did I ruin the investigation. Olivia had nothing to do with the murder of Jamilla Jenkins.”
“And my brother did? Olivia placed the chisel in his studio. The general told her to.”
Chris Fisher leans back in the chair. “What?”
“You heard me. She admitted it to me yesterday. That’s why the general wanted me to leave town.”
Chris Fisher runs a hand through his hair. “That is a serious accusation. You do realize that, right?”
“I can’t prove it and she’ll probably never admit it if you ask her again, but yes. She told me she did it. She placed the bloody chisel in the bucket under the sink because she had no other choice.”
“But…but your brother just admitted his guilt?”
I let out a deep sigh. I feel so confused right now. Chris Fisher doesn’t seem to be as bad as I expected him to be. I don’t hate him. I feel like he is being honest with me. A lot more honest than I had ever expected. It confuses me deeply. He sounds sincere. He looks sincere. But I suspect he is only acting. Quite the actor he could have been.
“I know,” I say with defeat in my voice.
“Why would he declare himself guilty now?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I intend to find out.” I get up from my chair. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Detective Chris Fisher gets up as well. He looks at me intensely. He is handsome and it annoys me that I like him. I suspect he is still playing a little game with me, trying to be the nice guy and make me believe in him. I am not falling for it.
“Let me know if there is anything I can do,” he says.
Ah! Come on!
Chapter Sixty-Three
September 2015
I am strumming my fingers on the table while I wait. I feel so frustrated, so confused and lost at the same time. I have left Salter at Sandra’s house. I don’t think he should be with me when I visit my brother in prison.
The door opens and my brother comes into the barren room. He looks pale and tired. He has lost weight. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes dark and sad. I feel like crying when I look into them, but hold it back by forcing a smile.
“Mary!” he exclaims.
“Blake. How are you?” I ask when he sits down. “Are you okay?”
Blake nods, but I can tell he is lying. “I’m good. I’ll be alright.”
“What’s going on Blake?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“You plead guilty all of a sudden?”
Blake sighs. His eyes are avoiding mine. “Yeah, well…”
“Well what Blake? Explain it to me. I’m out there trying like crazy to get you acquitted, trying to help your lawyer make your case, and you go out and destroy everything?”
“Well, it’s the truth. I did it.”
I slam the palm of my hand onto the table. The guard watching us looks at me. I pull it back.
“Goddammit, Blake, why are you saying that?”
“Because it’s the truth. I couldn’t remember before, but now I do. I got my memory back the other day. I killed her, Mary. I should be punished for it. I belong in jail for what I have done. I am sick. When I get drunk, I do things I wouldn’t ordinarily.”
“Yes, like sleeping with a married woman or getting in a bar fight with someone, but you don’t kill people, Blake. That’s not who you are,” I say, trying to keep my voice down. It is hard, though. I am so mad at him right now.
“What do you even know about who I am?” he says. “I was three years old when you left. A lot of years have passed since then. People change, Mary. I’ve changed. And I need to be responsible for my actions.”
I stare into his eyes. I try to look for something, anything that tells me he is lying to me.
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
“Suit yourself. I can’t help you with that.”
“They got to you, didn’t they?” I ask.
“Who?”
“The general, Detective Fisher. They got to you somehow. What did they do? Threaten you? Oh, I know. They threatened to kill Olivia, didn’t they?”
I look deep into his eyes to see his reaction. I know he won’t give it to me verbally because then the guard will hear it. I detect a flinch in his eyes when I mention Olivia’s name. That’s enough for me.
“That’s it, isn’t it? They came here and told you they would hurt Olivia if you didn’t plead guilty. Am I right?”
He doesn’t say more. He bites his lips. His eyes are flickering. He is right. I haven’t known him much through his life, but he is still my brother.
“The bastards,” I say and slam my hand onto the table again. The guard gives me a glare and I excuse myself. I lean back in the chair instead. “I can’t believe them.”
Blake leans in over the table. His chains rattle when he moves. “Mary. You need to leave it alone. I appreciate all you have done for me. But, for my sake. If you love me, you’ll leave it alone.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
September 2015
Leave it alone? Leave it alone? What the hell is he thinking? That I should just leave him to rot in jail?
I am angry as I drive back to Cocoa Beach. No, that’s too mild. I am more than angry. I am furious. I don’t have the words to describe it. I have come all the way down here to a place I’d rather never see again in my life, with so many bad memories that I have been busy trying to forget, just for him, just to help him out, and then this? Then he goes ahead and does this? He declares himself guilty and has the nerve to tell me to leave it alone.
“If you love me, you’ll leave it alone,” I say out loud, mocking him. I drive over the bridge leading to the islands. I take no notice of how fast I am going and once I reach the island and the entrance to Cocoa Beach, I get pulled over.
Crap.
The officer gives me a ticket and I drive on, growling and cursing even more than before. I drive to Joey’s house and park in the driveway. Joey is back from work and is standing in the yard when I drive up. He is wearing nothing but shorts. He is dirty and sweaty and way too hot for me to handle right now. He waves as I approach him. He looks me in the eyes.
“Hey. What’s wrong?”
Not knowing what to say or do, I stare at my gorgeous ex, who I could never quite live up to.
“I…I just had a real bad day,” I say.
“Did you visit Blake?” he asks.
“Yeah. He plead guilty and he wants us to leave it alone. So, there you have it.”
“We can’t do that. He’ll get life in prison. He’ll never survive it,” Joey says and wipes sweat off his forehead.
“That’s what I said, but he won’t listen. He ended up getting mad at me and that was it.”
“You think someone threatened him?” Joey asks.
I nod. “They must have. Why else would he all of a sudden change his statement like that? When I visited him last time he told me he didn’t remember anything and that he had never seen the girl before. I don’t buy his crap about all of a sudden remembering everything. It’s just too weird. But it changes everything, the lawyer says.” I can feel the tears are pressing from behind my eyes. I can hardly speak for the lump in my throat. I sit down in one of his chairs on the porch. Joey disappears for a second, then returns with two beers. He hands me one. I open it and drink. It doesn’t help much. I still feel like breaking down.
“What am I supposed to do?” I say.
Joey shrugs. “If he wants you to leave it alone, then maybe that’s what you ought to do. Go back to New York with Salter. You probably have to be back soon anyway, right? I mean they can’t live without you for long at the paper, can they?”
I scoff and lean back on his patio chair. I can hear the waves in the distance. I love that sound.
“I was sacked,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“Fired. They fired me.”
Joey almost chokes on his beer. “You’re kidding me?”
I shake my head. “Nope.”
“You? Their star reporter? They fired you? How? Why?”
I sigh and drink my beer with my eyes closed. I am not sure I can cope with all this right now. Talking about it makes it all so real all of a sudden. I don’t want it to be real. I want it to be a bad dream that I can forget about. Just like everything else in my life, I just want to close my eyes and make it all go away. But it never does, does it? It always comes back somehow to haunt you. The past never leaves you alone.
“It’s a long story,” I say.
He leans back in his chair. “I don’t have to be anywhere.”
I exhale deeply. I really don’t want to talk about it. “Alright,” I say. “To make a long story short, I wrote the wrong story. I pissed off some big shot people from a big medical company, Mirah, by revealing how they lied to the public about their results with a specific medicine that people are taking all over the U.S., but yet got it approved by the FDA. The FDA approved the medicine, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug and a prescription painkiller, for use three years ago. I wrote the story of how the company was accused of misleading doctors and patients about the drug’s safety, fabricating study results to suit the company’s needs, continually thwarting an FDA scientist from revealing the drug’s problems and skirting federal drug regulations. Last week, Mirah withdrew the drug from the market after a study revealed the drug more than doubled the risk of heart attacks and death. They had tried to keep this study a secret from the public, but I got my hands on it and published it. By that point, more than 8,000 deaths were already related to the use of the drug, and up to fifteen million Americans had taken the drug. The story went viral. People loved it, and hopefully we saved some lives because they were forced to withdraw the drug, but apparently both my editor and I had to pay a price. I don’t know who is in the pocket of whom, but that’s what happened.”
“That’s crazy,” Joey says and finishes his beer. “They should give you an award instead.”
I scoff. “Well, that is not how the world works, unfortunately.”
“You should write about that,” he says.
“About what?”
“About how you were fired. How they’re all in bed with each other. You could do it, you know. Now that you’re famous for the article. People would listen to you. You have a voice.”
I shake my head and finish my beer. “Nah. I’m in bad standing everywhere in the publishing world. The company says I violated the regulations for printing an article. Nobody will touch me after this. Who would publish it?”
“You could.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Do it online. Create a blog and write about it. Have Chloe help you create it. She could probably give it a real cool design and everything. She knows what it takes.”
“True, but still…come on,” I say. “Why would I?”
“So they won’t get away with it. Don’t let them do that. Those bastards should pay for what they did to you. They deserve to pay big time. If you keep quiet, they’ve won. Do you want them to win? To keep you down? Do you want them to silence you?”
I look into Joey’s blue eyes. This is nice, I think to myself. To sit with him like this again, just talking. Just the two of us. I can’t remember the last time we did this. I miss him, I realize. I miss him so terribly. We were invincible when we were younger. Together, we could conquer the world. I am sick of feeling like I am defeated.
“That’s not a bad idea, actually,” I say with a smile. “Not bad at all.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
September 2015
I walk to Chloe’s house with Joey. We have brought a twelve-pack of beer to smooth the way a little. Chloe likes beer. I knock on the door and she opens it.
“Good,” she says. “I was about to call you. I have news. Come.”
We walk to her room in the back. I feel like I am sent back to twenty-five years ago when I would visit her in that same house in that same room where she would be all cooped up behind her computer screens. The computers had changed, they had changed a lot, but Chloe was still the same. It amazed me how all of us were still pretty much the same. We quickly fell into the same roles as back then.
Chloe sat down in her chair behind the big screens. The room was dark and the curtains pulled, as always.
“First of all, I’ve been going through old cases,” she says. “I went through criminal complaints and missing persons reports over the past fifteen years to see if I could find any similarities to what happened to Jean and Cassie.”
I grab a chair and sit next to her. Joey does the same. The room is small and stuffy, but I like it there. I like hanging out with Chloe again. I have always been so impressed with her and her talent. I have never met anyone like her. And she is, by far, the most trustworthy person I know. Loyal to the bone.
“And?”
“And this is what I found,” she says. “She pulls up a document on the screen and opens it. “You remember CC?”
“Coraline, sure,” I say and look at Joey. He shakes his head. He never remembers any names. He never forgets a face, but names he can’t remember if his life depends on it.
“Coraline was found killed in 2004.”
I gasp. “What?”
“She was found killed in a hotel room,” she says. “A pair of scissors in her throat.”
“Why haven’t we heard about that?” I ask.
“It was in Orlando. Coraline Cane, married name Densley, moved to Winter Park in 1999. She was married to a senior pastor at some church there. According to the case file, she was supposed to meet someone at the hotel room, a man she had been seeing for years on the side. He was the one who found her lying on the bed with the scissors in her throat, blood everywhere. The killer was never found.”
I swallow hard. I can’t believe what I am hearing here. This is getting very strange. “Coraline was friends with Cassie and Jean,” I say.
“Exactly,” Chloe says. “They always hung out together.”
“I don’t remember that,” Joey says.
“You don’t remember them?” I ask. “They were this group of girls who were always causing trouble everywhere they went. It didn’t last long, but for like a year, they were the troublemakers of Cocoa Beach High. Right before…”
“And that’s what I’m getting at,” Chloe says. “I think there might be a connection of some sort to what happened to Joanne’s son, Billy,
recently. I’ve read up on the story, and from the outside, from what they write in the papers, he tried to commit suicide, but I managed to pull the surveillance camera from the International Palms Resort,” she says and touches the mouse. “From the night when Billy checked in. They have, like, the worst security in town, for your information. I could have pulled any credit-card information if that was what I wanted, but that’s beside the point. I found these pictures,” she says and clicks the mouse.
In the surveillance video, we watch as someone enters the lobby. There are five people. Four women and one man. I am guessing the man is Billy. The three women stay behind as the fourth woman grabs Billy’s arm and puts it around her neck. They laugh and walk up to the woman behind the counter. They speak to her. I can tell Billy is not happy; he is not enjoying the situation. They check in and get the keycard to the room. As they’re about to turn, Chloe pauses the movie. She looks at me. Her face is dead serious. It makes me uneasy.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I hope you’re ready for this,” she says with a deep exhale.
“Ready for what?”
“This,” she says and zooms in the picture.
With my heart pounding in my throat, I watch as the picture of the woman next to Billy gets closer and clearer. Seconds later, I have a clear picture of her face.
My heart freezes to ice.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Chloe shakes her head. “Nope. It’s her,” she says. “She’s back.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
March 1992
“WHO ARE YOU!”
AK looks at the man with the gun pointing at them. Ally is shivering in fear. She wants to cry. She wants to go home so badly.
“No. You first,” the voice says. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
“I…We…” Ally tries to speak, but AK stops her with just one look.
“I’m sorry if we have intruded,” AK says. “We didn’t mean to. We just needed a place for the night, that’s all.”