Never Look Back

by Alison Gaylin

  “No, that was Kate. The kid with the summer home. Jesus, Freddy, I remember the ’70s better than you do, and I was just a child back then.” She smirked.

  Summer looked at her. “Kate Sharkey?”

  “That’s right. Is that who your story is about?”

  “A little bit. Yes.”

  “Oh, well, then in that case,” Lena said. “I got stuff to tell you.”

  SUMMER TOUCHED THE phone in her lap, turned on the voice recorder, and set it on the table.

  For the next few minutes, she sat there, rapt, as Lena told her about fourteen-year-old Kate Sharkey hitchhiking to town and staying in her family home for two weeks before anyone realized she was there all by herself. “I worked behind the counter at Grumley’s, and she’d buy food there. Say it was for her family,” Lena said. “She was coming in almost every day, buying not just food but toys. Coloring books. Candy. Plastic pants. Said it was for her little sister, Kimmy.”

  “I don’t remember that at all,” Freddy said.

  Lena shot him a look. “You didn’t work behind the counter with me, did you?” She turned back to Summer. “Anyway, Kate comes in one day. She’s exhausted. In tears. She’s got a little girl with her who’s about Kimmy’s age, maybe a year younger, and she confesses to me that she’s been staying in the house alone. That she’s been ‘hiding from her cheating asshole dad’—that’s her words—and waiting for her brother, but she doesn’t think he’s ever going to come meet her.”

  “Kate Sharkey didn’t have a brother,” said Freddy.

  Summer’s eyes felt salty and dry. She realized it was because she hadn’t blinked in several seconds. Quentin. If you are out there, I hope you are listening to this. “Kate did have a brother,” she said, very quietly. “A half brother. She didn’t know about him, though. I mean. I didn’t think she did . . .”

  “She said her brother asked her to take care of this little kid. I guess the two of them had gone to his girlfriend’s house. It was the girlfriend’s little sister, and he’d asked Kate to take her away and watch over her till he and the girlfriend could come and pick her up. Well, weeks went by and she couldn’t handle it anymore, so she gave the little girl to Bill and Mary and they took her in. No one could get a handle on who this kid’s sister was, because she wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t answer questions. But then a day or two later, the big sister actually shows up. Kate brings her over to Bill and Mary’s. Hitchhikes back home. Fourteen freakin’ years old.” Lena looked at Freddy. “Say whatever you want about her, but Kate Sharkey was a true badass.”

  Summer said, “Did you ever find out who the girls were?”

  She nodded. “They were both from that crazy Gideon compound. The one that those two murderers burned down?”

  Summer touched her phone, thinking, Oh my God. Oh my effin’ God. “The two girls,” she said softly, waiting. “Were their names Nicola and Renee?”

  Lena shook her head. “I mean, they could have changed them to that,” she said. “I’d sure as hell change my name if I were a Gideon.”

  “What were their names when they lived with the Grumleys?”

  Lena smiled, the memory so clearly alive and glittering in her mind. When she spoke, she sounded like a grade-school kid, thrilled with herself for knowing the right answer. “The big one was named Elizabeth,” she said. “And the little girl was named Jenny.”

  ONCE SHE WAS back on the 405 and she had service again, Summer’s phone began buzzing wildly with voice mails. She listened to them over her Bluetooth—five messages from Dean, almost all of them repeating the same information: Quentin hadn’t killed himself. And most likely, his confession for Mitchell Bloom’s death had been coerced.

  She stared through his sunglasses and smiled. I knew it, she thought. I knew that wasn’t you.

  Summer called Dean from home and updated him on all the information she’d learned. When she was through, he said, “So you’re doing this right? You’re continuing with Closure?”

  “Do you think I should?” she asked. Because honestly, that had been her reason for calling. To get his permission to go ahead with this podcast, in spite of everything it had caused.

  “I think Quentin would have wanted you to,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Summer said, relief sweeping through her. Then she hung up, climbed into bed, and slept for twelve solid hours.

  Forty

  June 23, 1976

  12:00 Noon

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  I haven’t been able to write for days. I haven’t been able to speak or do anything other than walk. Stick my thumb out. Jump in the back of trucks. None of the truck drivers bother me because I look like shit and I smell of smoke. And when the few pervs who stop for me try to talk me into a trade, I start crying like a crazy person and they drive away.

  Whenever I close my eyes, I see Elizabeth—my last glimpse of her. I see the tents burning and I hear the screams, and Elizabeth in the middle of all of it, her beautiful hair on fire, waving her arms at me, yelling at me to run. Sometimes, in my imaginings, she turns into Papa Pete or Officer Nelligan or Ed Hart. Sometimes Brian Griggs or Carrie Masters, who I know must have met a terrible fate. Worst of all is when she turns into Jenny.

  After we put Gabriel’s body in the fire, I fell asleep, and woke up to the sound of Elizabeth’s screams. Her father was awake—Elizabeth’s knapsack in one hand, a burning torch in the other. He kept yelling “Witch!” over and over. I saw him do it. I saw him burn his own daughter. Elizabeth was dying and I couldn’t get near her, because her crazy father had dropped the torch and it was a windy desert night and the flames kept growing and spreading, from one tent to the next to the next. Her brothers shrieking.

  “Run!” Elizabeth yelled. And so I ran and I ran, thinking about what had happened. Torch in one hand. Elizabeth’s knapsack in the other. That psycho freak of a father had found her tarot cards.

  Now, I am trying to get back to the Arco station, because I have decided to let that spot determine my fate. If the pay phone there is working, I will call the number in Gabriel’s wallet. If it’s not working, or if there are police officers there, I will turn myself in and go to jail. If I die before ever arriving there, well, that’s fine too. I haven’t slept in days. My best friend burned to death. Another life I’ve ruined. I can’t make decisions. All I can do is keep moving.

  June 25, 1976

  9:00 A.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  Aurora Grace, there is a wonderful old movie called Easter Parade (I saw it yesterday), and in it, this goofy girl named Hannah Brown falls in love with a famous dancer named Don Hewes. And he loves her too, but she refuses to believe it because why would a famous dancer love a goofy girl like her? So, Hannah says to Don, “Why do you want to dance with me when you can have the very best?” And he says, “I don’t want the very best. I want you.”

  I’m writing that down in this letter to you so I can remember that line and the movie, and what happened after the movie. I want to take that day and wrap it up in a box that I can keep with me always.

  You know, it’s funny. I thought I had to get back to that Arco station so I could either rescue Jenny or receive the punishment I deserve. I was leaving it up to God. But God had other plans. I think God brought me back to that Arco station, so I could experience one full day of perfect happiness. Everyone should have one full day of happiness, Aurora Grace. Even somebody who deserves to lose everything and probably will. Even somebody like me.

  Love,

  Mom

  June 25, 1976

  1:00 P.M.

  Dear Aurora Grace,

  I found a pay phone. I called the number. Jenny is alive!!!!!!!!!

  Love,

  Mom

  Forty-One

  Robin

  WHEN ROBIN ARRIVED at her parents’ house, she didn’t see her mother’s car in the driveway or, for that matter, Nicola’s. The only car she did see there was her father’s sensible blue Volvo, which
gave her a fresh stab of grief that made her doubly glad to be alone.

  No reporters either—probably too busy trailing after poor Dean Conrad. But on her way up the walkway, she heard Mr. Dougherty calling out her name. She sighed. Waited in the driveway as he jogged up to her. A nice man. She shouldn’t be so impatient. “How is your mother holding up?” Mr. Dougherty said.

  “Surprisingly well,” said Robin, which made his jaw drop. Of course it did. He had lost his wife a year ago, and still mourned her, every day. That was normal. He was normal. Her mother . . .

  “I guess it helps having family around.”

  “Yeah, it comes in handy being a few blocks away,” she said. “My dad used to call this neighborhood the Bloom family compound.”

  “Actually, I meant that lady. The one with the loud laugh.”

  “Nicola,” Robin said. “She’s not family. She’s my mother’s old friend.”

  “Your mom introduced her as her foster sister.”

  “Oh.”

  “Was it the pain pills talking?”

  “No,” she said, “that’s accurate.” Robin headed into the house, thinking of her new family: Mom, Eric, Nicola. Of the three of them, she knew Nicola best.

  Once she was inside her parents’ home, Robin found herself in her father’s study, standing in front of his glass-enclosed bookcases, her gaze trained on the shelves. All those leather-bound notebooks. What would happen to them all, now that he was gone?

  She imagined a bonfire in her parents’ backyard, years and years of his patients’ secrets and fixations and recurring nightmares all gone up in smoke, turned to ash like the Gideon compound, before April escaped, changed her name to Nicola, found herself a foster home and befriended an innocent, slightly older girl named Renee White.

  It made so much sense. It made too much sense.

  She sat down on his soft leather couch, breathing deeply, the way she sometimes used to do when she was feeling panicky as a kid.

  As hard as she tried to calm herself, though, she couldn’t contain her thoughts—images of Nicola Crane flinging open the back door, opening fire on Dad, shooting at Mom when she runs into the room, trying to stop her. Nicola Crane holding a gun to Quentin’s head as he confesses to the crime on tape, the two of them in a park, Nicola so sweet and jovial that nearby children take no notice. That laugh . . . Nicola Crane threatening Mom in her hospital room: Keep quiet or else. Laugh with me, or else. Say you remember nothing, Renee, or I will finish what I started.

  And why had she started it? Why had she shot Dad? Because he’d just been told that his wife had some connection to a teenage mass murderer. And he thought of that stray babysitter who kept coming back and put two and two together.

  Robin knew Nicola better than anyone else in her family, and this was what she knew: She was April Cooper. Mom knew it. Just like she knew about the safe in the basement—some hidden place where she could hide a gun from her husband and daughter for more than twenty years.

  She left her father’s study and headed for the staircase, the basement door behind it. She stumbled down the dark, rickety stairs and into the musty space, knocking into boxes and broken furniture until she finally found the light. She breathed in the moldy air, pushed cobwebs from her hair—this room the neglected sibling of every other room in this otherwise spotless house. It used to scare her as a kid, this basement. She remembered coming down here once with a boy from her seventh-grade class. A football player she’d been helping with math. He’d dared her to come down here, and then he’d dared her to kiss him and she had, just to get back upstairs again. What was his name? Grant something, she thought, her gaze coasting from an old changing table to a toybox to an enormous stuffed bear that she never remembered owning, all of it down here for years. Lurking like ghosts. Like memories.

  She saw a clothing rack, hung with her parents’ old Halloween costumes. His and hers surgical scrubs, his and hers pirates, Groucho and Harpo Marx—her parents always a team, inseparable. Though, as she remembered it, the costumes had always been Dad’s idea. She collapsed onto the dusty floor and looked at that costume rack—easily twenty Halloweens’ worth of his and hers outfits, worn once and never again . . . except . . . Robin put a hand against the ones at the end—a pinstripe suit. A pencil skirt and sweater. A fedora and a beret and two fake machine guns. Bonnie and Clyde. Robin could remember her dad bringing those costumes home, when she was young enough not to have understood the cultural reference. Mom had taken one look at them and locked herself in their bedroom.

  How could you, Mitchell? How could you?

  Young as Robin had been then, Mom’s reaction had stuck in her mind—the drama of it. Robin had always assumed it was because of the guns.

  She pulled herself up to standing. And that’s when she caught sight of it between her feet. A trapdoor. She lifted the door open, and saw it, glaring at her from within. A small, industrial-looking safe. Robin hoisted the safe out. She placed it on the floor in front of her and crouched down. Looked it in the eye. “Nice to meet you after all these years,” she whispered.

  The safe had a digital combination lock. She tried her mother’s birthday, then her father’s. Then their anniversary. Then her own birthday. None of them worked. She glanced at the costumes again and tried Halloween. 1031. The door drifted open.

  Robin crouched down and looked inside, unsure of what she was expecting to find. The gun, after all, was in police custody . . .

  The safe held a single, leather-bound notebook, identical to the many that lined Dad’s office bookshelves. She slipped it out. Looked at the cover. The taped label, just like the others, the patient’s name in mechanical print:

  APRIL COOPER

  The notebook fell from Robin’s hand, but she picked it up again. Opened it to the first page. She saw her father’s handwriting at the top in ballpoint pen, barely legible: “April Cooper, aka Renee White: Forensic Case Study #1 February 28, 1977, Borderline Personality Disorder. Patient exhibits . . .”

  Robin slammed the book shut.

  “Do you remember what I said, Robin, about how no one should be an open book to their children?”

  Nicola stood behind her.

  Robin turned to face her. Nicola Crane, who wasn’t April Cooper after all. Just an angry-looking woman with bright blue eyes, speaking with studied menace, holding a gun. “You want to know?” she said. “You really want to know that badly?”

  Robin stared at her.

  “Mitchell wanted to talk to Quentin Garrison. He wanted to come clean. You’re grown, he said. He’s semiretired. He said he believed he could help Quentin Garrison. As though some selfish little podcaster were more important than your mother.”

  Tears seeped out of the corners of Robin’s eyes. “My mom was . . .”

  “He didn’t think things through. Mitchell never really thought things through, not when they didn’t concern him. Your mother is a fugitive. There’s no statute of limitations on the shit she did when she was a teen.”

  “I . . . I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “Oh no, Robin. You wanted to know. You came all the way down here and nosed your way into that safe just like you got into your mother’s jewel box.”

  “Jewel box?”

  “Each item in that box is a reminder of someone from her youth that she loved and lost. Well, some of them she just lost. That little aqua heart necklace? That was a gift from Gabriel LeRoy. He said it matched her eyes.”

  She swallowed. “The penny from the movie theater.”

  “A gift from George. Her soul mate. She used to carry a Polaroid of him, until your dad made her throw it out. Said it was unseemly. Made it look like they were something other than husband and wife . . . even though that’s exactly what they were.”

  Tears slipped down her cheeks.

  “Your father didn’t care at all about your poor mother. Doing this podcast will be best for us, he said. It’s the right thing to do. He called her from work, told her that and, of cours
e, she called me right away. To vent, she said. But I knew she wanted more than that.”

  “No . . .”

  “When your mom picked me up at the train station, he’d come home, and they’d been fighting. He wasn’t backing down. He didn’t care if he ruined her. Her own analyst and he was ready to throw her in jail.”

  “Her analyst.”

  “Yes. That’s what he was. And she was his research topic. Mr. Forensic Psychiatrist. All the papers he’d never have been able to write without her. And now that he was retired, he was ready to be rid of her. That, my dear, is what you call a marriage of convenience.”

  “You shot them both.”

  “To save Renee. It’s hard to make it look like a home invasion if only one of you gets shot.”

  Robin exhaled. A deep, shuddering breath. She heard the front door opening above, her mother calling out for Nicola.

  She thought of her father’s voice over the phone, the sadness in it. Have we been good parents to you? “He felt bad for Quentin because of the way he was raised.”

  “Please. He just wanted someone new to study.”

  Footsteps tumbled down the basement stairs. “Nikki?” Renee said. “What are you doing?”

  “Just asking Robin if she has any more questions,” Nicola said.

  “About what?” Renee said.

  Robin shook her head.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. There was no man in a parking lot. That was your dad. Let’s just say he got impatient with his patient.”

  “That . . . that can’t be true . . .”

  Nicola released the safety. “I’ve always loved you, Robbie,” she said. “It’s not personal. But I’m afraid it’s necessary.”

  Robin stared at the barrel of the gun.

  “My God, Jenny, stop!” Renee screamed. She fell on her, the two of them rolling on the dusty basement floor. The gun went off, and Renee fell back, blood spreading from her chest, pooling under her body.

  “Oh my God,” Nicola cried out. “Not April. Please, God, please not April . . .”

  Robin rushed to her mother. She grabbed one of the costumes off the hangers—the surgical scrubs—and pressed it to the wound. In seconds, it was drenched. She heard Nicola. Or Jenny. Her mother’s sister, weeping behind her. “I can’t. I can’t. I couldn’t have. No . . .”