Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  The sky here is so beautiful—like someone spilled a jar of silver glitter over a black velvet cape. I’ve never seen stars like this before, Aurora Grace. It’s like I’m looking straight up at heaven.

  Thirty-Eight

  Robin

  ROBIN FELT AS though she were standing on her tiptoes at the edge of a cliff, and any movement at all—any word in this case—was certain to make her fall.

  “Robin?” Nicola said. “What are you doing?” And Robin realized how agonizing it was, standing on one’s tiptoes forever.

  Robin opened her hand. Held it out to reveal the souvenir penny, older than she was but still shiny and smooth in her palm. The star. Corsica. “Do you know what this is?” she said.

  Nicola took a few steps closer and peered into her hand. “A souvenir?”

  “It’s from a movie theater called the Corsica,” she said. “I found it in Mom’s things.”

  Nicola’s eyes narrowed. “Why were you going through your mother’s things?”

  “Because when he died, Quentin Garrison was carrying a 1976 ticket stub from the Corsica in his wallet. And I have a feeling it had something to do with the podcast he was making.”

  Nicola moved over to Robin’s parents’ bed and sat on the edge of it. She motioned for Robin to sit down next to her, but Robin didn’t move. This was all stall tactics, probably an interrogation technique Nicola had learned as a cop, and Robin wasn’t buying it. “I want to know about my mother,” she said quietly. “I want to know about her past.”

  Nicola exhaled. “She met your father at a coffee shop in Tucson. She was nineteen and waiting tables. He was finishing up a residency at the University of Arizona . . .”

  “I know how my parents met,” she said. “Before that.”

  “We were in foster care together.”

  “What was she doing in 1976?”

  Nicola smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. “Going to the movies?”

  Robin took a step closer. “Look,” she said. “I heard Quentin Garrison’s confession. He says he shot my parents when an argument between them got out of hand, and fine. It sounds a little over the top, but I can believe that. But I don’t believe that argument had anything to do with my dad. I believe it had something to do with my mom, and this movie theater and 1976 and April Cooper.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “And I believe you know the truth.” She leveled her eyes at her. “CoCo. You know her better than any living person.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  “I’m going in late today.”

  “They let you do that?”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  Nicola exhaled. “She loves you. I know that much. I also know that as many times as she’s been over at your house, she’s never gone through your personal things.”

  “Because she’s never needed to.”

  “Neither have you.” Nicola’s cheeks flushed. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, took a breath. “Look, Robin. You know I used to be a cop. These days, I do a little private investigating work. And from time to time, I’ve helped out your mom.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And last year, she was very concerned about you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It was your husband. He was working a lot of late nights. Your friend Eileen mentioned to her that she’d seen him at Chez Chas with a woman . . .”

  “Eileen said that to my mom?”

  “She was worried. She said she’d mentioned it to you, but you didn’t seem to believe her.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Your mom asked me to look into it, and . . . Well I don’t know how else to put it, Robin. Your husband is a real schmuck.”

  Robin swallowed. Her cheeks felt hot. “I know about it. He told me.”

  “And you’re staying with him?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, did he get that woman her job back? Did he help her sue? Did he actually do the reporting he should have done, and did Charlie Maxwell lose his restaurant and his reputation, like he deserves? I guess I must have just missed it.”

  Robin walked to her mother’s dresser. Carefully, she put the penny back in the box and slid the sock drawer closed.

  “I’m not trying to be mean,” Nicola said. “I’m just making a point.”

  “Which is?”

  “Are you better off for knowing what a schmuck your husband is?”

  She turned around. Stared at her.

  Nicola was standing now, hands crossed over her strong chest. “You’re not, are you? I mean honestly. It isn’t like you’re going to leave him over it. And now you’re stuck with not only knowing about this shitty thing he did in the not-too-distant past—but that you’re the type of woman for whom that type of shittiness is not a deal breaker.”

  Robin’s mouth felt dry. Her face throbbed red. “Thanks a lot.” Possibly the most impotent comeback she could have come up with. But there wasn’t anything else she could say. Nicola was right.

  Nicola took a few steps closer. She brushed a hand against Robin’s cheek, as though she were comforting a child. “The point I’m trying to make, Robin, is that we all have pasts,” she said. “And very often, the people we love are better off not knowing about them.” She drew her lips into a smile. “Your mother loves you. She would do anything for you. Isn’t that what’s important?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No one should be an open book to their children. That isn’t healthy for anyone.”

  Robin closed her eyes for a moment, her head pounding. She craved an Advil. “I thought you were taking my mother to the doctor’s.”

  Nicola shrugged her shoulders. “She decided to go alone,” she said. “I think she’s getting tired of me.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “How is it you’ve stayed friends with my mom all these years, Nikki? Even after her husband kicked you out of her house?”

  “I told you, honey,” she said. “Foster care. Nothing makes you closer.”

  Robin and Nicola were in the hallway when Robin’s cell phone rang. She glanced at the screen. Detective Morasco. “It’s work,” she told Nicola. “I’ll need to take this in the other room.” She slipped down the hall and into her old room, closing the door behind her. “Hello?”

  “Robin?” His voice sounded strange. Agitated.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “That text you sent me, from Quentin Garrison. ‘I am not a good person.’”

  “Yes?”

  “You sure the time on it is correct?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, it says 9:13 on it. You’re positive that’s 9:13 P.M., not A.M.”

  “Absolutely. It was nighttime. I was at home with Eric. I’d called Quentin, but his mailbox was full. He sent me that text about fifteen minutes later.”

  “Wow . . . Okay.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “We have an estimated time of death back from the coroner, and it’s between eleven A.M. and one P.M.” Robin thought back to their phone call, the children’s voices in the background—same as on the audiotape.

  “The text came in eight hours later.”

  “You see the problem.”

  “Yes,” Robin said, her skin going cold. “I see the problem.”

  ROBIN TOOK A shower. Changed her clothes, the whole time thinking about the text she’d received, that first apology. Someone else had sent it, eight hours after Garrison’s death.

  And if someone else had gotten Garrison’s phone, only to replace it so it could be found on his dead body, who had that person been? If someone had gotten his phone, that same person could have easily forced him to confess and shot him. That same person could have shot her parents. She hadn’t gone over all that with Morasco, because like most cops, Nicola included, he kept things close to the vest.

  Nicola Cra
ne, what a cop she must have been—with that crazy laugh and that cool blue gaze, steady as a gun sight . . . The point I’m trying to make, Robin, is that we all have pasts. And very often, the people we love are better off not knowing about them.

  Nicola Crane, the opposite of an open book. A sealed, locked journal, with God knows what written inside. These past few days had been so emotional. Yet not once had Robin seen her shed a tear outside of laughter. Not even as her dear foster sister lay in intensive care, on the brink of death.

  Had she known more than she let on?

  She heard voices outside the entrance to the kitchen and as she got closer, she saw her mother and Nicola, involved in an intense conversation in the foyer, just inside the front door. They stopped talking when they saw her.

  “Oh hi, honey,” Mom said.

  Robin gave her a quick tight hug. “What did the doctor say?”

  “Flying colors.” She smiled. “Just like I said.”

  She exhaled. “Thank God.”

  “And you know what? I think I’m starting to get my memory back.”

  “Really?”

  “When I was driving home, I had a sudden flash. Quentin Garrison in my kitchen. The gun in his hand . . .” She exchanged a glance with Nicola. “I was just telling Nikki.”

  “That’s right.”

  Robin turned. She leveled her eyes at Nicola. “When did you get here, Nikki?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When did you arrive in town from Philly?”

  “You saw me at the funeral.”

  “Yeah. Felt to me like you’d already been here for a while, though. For at least a couple of days.”

  Nicola stared at her.

  Mom said, “What do you mean?”

  She thought about letting them know what Morasco had said, but decided not to bother. Mom would find out soon enough that Quentin Garrison probably hadn’t shot her and Dad and hadn’t shot himself unless he’d been forced. “Just thinking out loud,” Robin said, giving them both a smile, Nicola’s much smaller than the one she gave her mother. “I’ve got to head out. I’m needed at work.”

  Once she got in her car, she called Eric—not because she was dying to talk to him, but because she had no one else to say it to who might even begin to understand. “I’m suspicious of Nicola.”

  “Your mom’s friend? That’s crazy.”

  You wouldn’t think it was crazy if you knew that she investigated you.

  “Think about it, Eric,” she said. “Someone got my mom’s gun away from her, but they shot my dad first, not her. My dad’s wounds were almost instantly fatal. My mom was shot once in the abdomen. Now she’s fine.”

  “You think she made sure your mom would survive her injuries. That she only shot her . . . why? To keep her from protecting your dad?”

  “Why not?”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “But why would your mother’s old friend walk into her house and kill her husband?”

  “I’m thinking my mom might be remembering things wrong. I’m thinking it might have been Nicola who had the argument with Dad.”

  “Why?”

  “It turns out Nicola was the one who got my mother the gun. Who taught her how to shoot. She’s an expert shooter. I’ve looked at old pictures of her, and beneath those muscles and that tan and that gray hair . . . Nicola could be the associate of mom’s Quentin Garrison was talking about. Mom’s dear friend Nikki could be April Cooper.”

  There was a long stretch of silence on the other end of the line. And then, “I don’t understand.”

  “You should.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because, Eric,” she said. “You know what it’s like to have secrets.”

  Robin thought about her mother, all the things she never knew about her that she’d only just learned in the past few days: She had fought off an attacker. She owned a gun. She’d hired a PI to investigate Robin’s husband. Her closest friend may have been a mass murderer in the ’70s. She was a woman with important movie tokens and sexy teenage Polaroids, a past she never spoke about, and many, many secrets.

  As she reached her stop, Robin remembered what Nicola had said about Renee. Your mother loves you. She would do anything for you. Isn’t that what’s important?

  It was important. Of course, it was. But it wasn’t everything. There was also the truth.

  Thirty-Nine

  Summer

  SUMMER STOOD OUT in Brittlebush. She stood out everywhere on the West Coast, with her bright red hair and pale skin, but here, in this tiny desert town where it looked as though sunblock had yet to be invented, people kept gaping at her, as though she were some alien species. It didn’t help either that most everyone who lived here looked at least sixty and seemed to have known each other since childhood. Summer couldn’t have blended in if she tried.

  What Summer normally did when reporting small-town stories was to hang out in one of the local diners, order a piece of pie and a cup of coffee, bum a cigarette off the waitress during her break and get her talking. Summer didn’t even smoke, but she could fake it. And she could talk a good game if she did say so herself. By the end of the conversation, she could have that waitress feeling like her best friend, a Deep Throat–style whistle-blower, a freedom fighter who would go down in history, Quentin’s secret crush—whatever Summer needed her to feel like in order to get the info.

  She was a little nervous about doing that here, though, in Brittlebush’s only diner—a place called Heidi’s that looked like Denny’s and IHOP had a baby, shoved it in a time machine, and sent it back to 1983. There were a few leathery old guys in here, sitting at the counter. One waitress, who, despite the perfectly good air-conditioning, looked dangerously overheated in her polyester uniform and didn’t move her face when she spoke, seemingly out of spite.

  The booths were a sickly yellow and made of the type of vinyl you stuck to if you sat on it for too long, and everybody in here kept shooting her looks, as though they were daring her to say something stupid.

  Summer slipped her phone out of her purse. No bars. Still. She wasn’t sure she’d ever felt this isolated. Hell of a place for a second home, she thought. And the fact that Quentin’s mother had loved it here . . . Well, Summer didn’t necessarily know if that was true. Reg Sharkey had been the one to say that Quentin’s mother had loved it here, and he wasn’t the most reliable of narrators.

  “Are you lost?”

  Summer glanced up to see the waitress standing over her, a look in her eye like they’d drawn straws back in the kitchen and she was the loser.

  “No.” Summer tried smiling. “I’m not lost.”

  “Your car break down?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Just hoping for a piece of key lime pie.”

  “Usually, when a stranger comes here, they’re either lost or broken down.”

  “Sounds like the lyrics to a country song.”

  The waitress frowned at her. “Key lime pie, huh?”

  Summer nodded, the conversation officially over.

  When the waitress returned, though, she decided to try again. “Look, I’m working on a story for the radio,” she said. Careful to leave NPR out of it, lest it start some political argument. “I’m looking into a very old story. From the ’70s. And I was wondering if you might be able to help me with it.” Summer peered at her name tag. “Lena. That’s a pretty name.”

  One of the old guys at the counter said, “The ’70s isn’t a very old story.”

  The waitress ignored him. “It’s short for Marlene,” she said. “I was named for Dietrich.”

  “I’m Summer. Named for my least favorite season.”

  This time she got a chuckle out of her. Lena took the seat across from her. “I’ll try and help,” she said. The ’70s aficionado slid off his counter stool and sauntered over, as Summer slipped her notepad out of her purse, trying to make out her own scrawl. “Okay,” she said. “If you could just tell me if you know a Nicola Crane, a Renee White, or a Bill or
William Grumley.”

  The waitress smiled. “Well, I know a Grumley, that’s for sure.”

  “You do? You know where I can find him?”

  She started to laugh, Mr. ’70s joining in. “Honey, if you don’t mind my saying, for a reporter, you’re not all that observant.”

  “Huh?”

  “Two doors down from here,” the old man said. “The general store. It’s called Grumley’s. Helllooo?” He said it like some teen wiseass on a Nickelodeon show. He knocked on his own head. “Anybody in there?”

  “No need to be rude, Freddy,” the waitress said. “The store’s owned now by Bill Grumley’s son, Stephen. Bill passed away about five years ago.”

  “He was one of my closest friends,” Freddy said. “We drove cross-country one summer on our Harleys.”

  “That’s awesome,” Summer said. “I’m wondering, though, if you knew Bill when he ran a foster home?”

  He frowned at her. “Bill didn’t run a foster home.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Nah. He had five kids of his own. They were enough trouble.”

  “That’s weird. A woman told my colleague that as a kid, she’d lived in a foster home run by Bill Grumley.”

  “She?” Lena said.

  “Bill had boys,” Freddy said. “Nothin’ but loudmouthed, troublemaking boys in that house. Their poor mom . . .”

  “Oh, Freddy, you remember.” Lena looked at Summer “You’re talking about the ’70s, right?”

  “Yes. ’76 or ’77.”

  “Remember, Freddy? Right around the bicentennial. Bill and Mary took in those two girls.”

  Summer’s eyes went big.

  Freddy said, “I thought there were three of them.”