The Death of Life (The Little Things That Kill Series, #2)

by Pamela Crane

  Chapter 11 Ari

  I didn’t know what I was going to say when I arrived at the house I made my earliest memories in. Memories of birthday parties and games of tag. Night had already fallen by the time I pulled up the driveway. I needed to prepare my father for what was to come ... though what exactly that was, I couldn’t be certain. All I knew was that his name was now publicly attached to Marla Rivers’ murder, and the cops would be trailing him for answers ... and there’d be no room for dear old Dad to make a mistake.

  I knocked on the front door, freshly painted a new burgundy I hadn’t seen before, but no one answered. Knocking again, I heard the dull echo of my fist across the yard. Climbing through the bushes, I crept up to the window that looked into my old living room and peered inside. Darkness. Emptiness. Not a trace of light. No one was home.

  The temptation to use this opportunity to dig for answers pulled at me. I couldn’t resist, no matter how illegal it was. Breaking and entering. Big no-no. But then again, these were my parents. What would they do? Turn me in if I got caught? Press charges? Whatever the punishment, it couldn’t be worse than when they surrendered me to social services. I was a risk-taker, a gambler. It was what I did best. At only twenty-four, I still packed some hefty girl-balls, and youthful fearlessness was my ticket to misadventure.

  A gentle drizzle had started, leaving white pinprick droplets all over my hair. Snaking through the bushes, I headed toward the backyard where I remembered the basement window had never locked properly. As a kid I had discovered it to be a resourceful way of sneaking small animals into the house. Since my mother never ventured into the basement except for twice a year—once to retrieve Christmas decorations, again to return them to storage—I had safely hid my menagerie of caged friends, from injured birds that had flown into the window, to chipmunks that the neighbor’s cat had caught and toyed with, until I grew tired of the upkeep and released them back into the suburban wild. As I knelt down to the window, I hoped my parents hadn’t thought to replace it.

  I tugged up on the lip of the pane. Sure enough, with a little effort it slid upward, stuck halfway up, allowing me ample room to grip the edge to drive it the rest of the way. Once fully open, I squeezed through feet first and dropped to the concrete floor below. The floor was still the pale blue I remembered, the walls a gray cinderblock. The basement had seemed as big as all outdoors when I was little; fallen into disuse, it felt oppressive and claustrophobic. The sharp tang of mold and mildew assaulted my nose as I fumbled for the switch plate. Other than the one window, the basement was completely underground; I wasn’t worried about the light arousing suspicion. I found the switch and twin fluorescent fixtures sputtered to life, flooding the basement in brilliant light. There were the animal cages, the store-bought ones and the ones I’d cobbled together from scrap wood and chicken wire, stacked in a lopsided pyramid. Tucked in another corner were the red and green plastic storage bins labeled “Christmas decorations” in Mother’s large, precise printing, as if that wasn’t obvious from the festive colors. I walked over to them, tracing the words that once upon a time meant so much to me and Carli. Years of dust covered the boxes, and I wondered if Christmas ended with Carli’s dying breath for them too. I flicked off the lights, wiped the switch plate for fingerprints, and left the room as I’d found it, a neglected tomb for my memories.

  With careful steps I climbed the creaky wooden staircase that always frightened me as a child. Even now my footsteps were hurried as I waited for a hand to reach out between the slats and grab my ankle. The door at the top of the stairs was closed, as I expected. I boldly flung it open, half expecting to come face to face with my father. But instead I opened the door to an eerie silence.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I’d know when I found it. Dad had always kept an office on the second floor; presumably that hadn’t changed over the years. I took the stairs two at a time. Just beyond the landing was the bedroom I shared with Carli. The door was closed but unlocked; I stole inside and a flood of nostalgia overwhelmed me. My parents had preserved the room in all its pink splendor—in tribute more to Carli than me, I cynically assumed. I remembered with fondness all the girly things we’d done, like using each other as guinea pigs for hideous makeovers and poofy hairdos, the late-night bull sessions, crawling into one or the other’s bed and holding each other for dear life when thunderstorms raged. Carli never got to grow up, like I had. Survivor’s guilt was a bitch. The adult me didn’t belong here; I felt like an intruder in my own bedroom, feeding on the memories of strangers. The room was a museum exhibit now, something to be seen but not touched.

  I glanced inside my parents’ bedroom. A suitcase sat on the bed, open and mostly full. From the doorway I could see my father’s khaki pants and collared polo shirts neatly stacked inside. An impromptu trip. What convenient timing.

  Further down the hallway my father’s office door hung open, and as I walked in I could hear the hum of his computer. With any luck it’d be logged into his account, making my job easier. I slipped inside and sat at his desk. I remembered sitting on Dad’s lap as a child at this very desk, spinning us in his chair while he held me tight. I still loved the bastard. Wounds and lies and all.

  After scanning his computer files and finding little of interest, I decided to check the desk drawers. Unlocked. My father had always been too trusting. Like the time he’d given me and Carli a family-sized bag of M&Ms unsupervised and made us promise not to eat more than a handful each. As he walked away, we had exchanged looks of incredulity at our father’s naiveté as we ate ourselves sick that night. I never did like M&Ms after that.

  My father’s mania for organization made it easy to flip through the paperwork, once again turning up nothing unusual. Still unsure of what I was looking for, I figured it’d stand out to me when—or if—I found it. As my fingers rifled through paper by paper, a flash of white light crossed the room. In two steps I was at the window, peering through the closed blinds. A pair of headlights skipped across the room, aimed at the house.

  Damn. They were home early. I slammed the drawer shut and crouched at the window to see if they had left the car yet, mentally calculating how much time I might have to sneak back into the basement ... or climb out of this very window onto the porch roof below. Years of group homes had prepped me in the art of escape, so this was a piece of cake compared to the Houdini-like breakouts I’d plotted as a teenager. But the car continued to hum, and as I watched, I realized it wasn’t their car at all. Someone else was here. But who? Watching me, or watching my parents was the bigger question.

  Regardless of who it was, I couldn’t be caught here. Crossing around the desk, the floor squeaked under my footsteps. Not the usual creak of achy wood, but a shifting, moving groan. I reached down and pushed it. The floorboard was loose. I couldn’t believe it. My father had clearly watched too many spy movies that he would use the old floorboard hideaway rather than a safe. But his lack of ingenuity was my lucky break. Prying my fingernails between the slats, I caught the edge of the plank and pulled at it. It popped off, revealing an empty cavern of space. Aiming the flashlight into the dark cavity, I caught a glimpse of a shape. Something was hidden in its depths. A book. Brown leather and palm-sized.

  I picked it up and flipped it open.

  Hundreds of names and numbers lined page after page, all in my father’s meticulous handwriting. Handwriting I remembered even now from birthday cards of years past—years before they sent me away. It was a banker’s script, the thoughtful appreciation of each letter and number as it was crafted by his pen.

  As I flipped through it, I realized it was a ledger of some sort. Most likely from his side business with George Battan. The dates went as far back as the 1990s, and I felt my heart splinter that the man I thought I knew during my childhood had been a Grade A phony hiding behind a façade of Kiwanis Club respectability. I had always considered my dad a family man, a dad whose lap I cuddled on, who delivered silly jokes that I’d incorrectly retell
to my classmates at school the next day, who made pancakes every Saturday morning for breakfast, who regaled me and Carli with tales of his boyhood memories walking to school in six feet of snow, uphill both ways. As my eyes pored over the countless names and dates and numbers, I had never imagined the extent of his sins to be this great.

  I traced the dates to 2002, narrowing it down to April, when Carli had been killed. A large gap of time was missing between November 2001 and April 2002. Apparently he had gone on a hiatus, which I imagined was the reason Carli was targeted. Dad must have tried to bow out, and look what happened. It was a deadly cycle he couldn’t escape.

  I pulled out my cell phone and took a picture of the pages. A snapshot of the victims, the suffering, the slavery that my own father endorsed, captured in aseptic columns of names, dates, dollar amounts. That was all these lives were worth to him.

  I flipped to February 2013, the month and year Giana was born. A specific dollar amount stood out to me. Much higher than the rest. Most of the amounts were costs or income in the hundreds, some low thousands. I assumed those were related to regular payouts to parents who sold their kids off, or incoming payments from selling those same kids’ services. But this particular number struck me immediately: $100,000. A tidy sum, too large for any usual service. Not too much to buy a child, though. A baby, in particular. A black-market baby. A red-tape-free baby.

  This was the same time Giana was taken from Tina. I read the name next to the 100-grand notation:

  P. Baxter

  Most likely the name of the person who purchased her.

  On the same date was a withdrawal for $3,500 to another name:

  E. Peterson

  I wondered if there was a connection there. I took another snapshot with my phone, then glanced out the window to see if the car was still there.

  Gone. I regretted not getting a license plate number and car make and model, but my heart was drumming too hard and my nerves too frazzled to think straight. I skimmed through the rest of 2013, until I saw a familiar name:

  M. Rivers, December 6, 2013

  The date Marla Rivers went missing.

  A payment had been made in the amount of $2,000 to someone by the name of N. Bledsoe. Probably the man who abducted her, maybe even the same one who murdered her. Flipping ahead to May 2015, my finger trailed down the page as I checked names and dollar amounts. Sure enough, May 23, 2015, another entry for N. Bledsoe in the amount of $10,000. Apparently murder was cheap these days, the life of an innocent child worth less than a Birkin bag. My fury worked its way up from my stomach, warming my neck. Battan had to pay for his crimes.

  I wanted to take the ledger with me, see what else I could dig up, but I knew this would be crucial to the police investigation; it had to stay here and be uncovered through the proper channels. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t use what I was discovering to follow my own leads to finding Giana.

  Another picture with my phone, another piece of evidence that I hoped would put George behind bars for life. As for my father, I wasn’t sure what this meant for him. No matter what he had done in his life, he was still my father. I didn’t want to see him go to jail. But this ledger ... it was proof he deserved it. I didn’t want to be the one to put him there, though.

  I tucked the book back in its hiding spot beneath the floor, replaced the wood exactly as I had found it, and peeked outside one last time. It was all clear. I tiptoed down the stairs, though I knew no one would hear me regardless, and checked the front door locks. Only the doorknob had been locked, not the deadbolt, so I could lock the door behind me without them knowing someone had been inside. It was easier than climbing back out the basement window. Pulling my sleeve down over my hand to hide my fingerprints, I engaged the lock on the knob and exited, hearing the lock click behind me.

  Once outside, I noticed the drizzle had slackened to a fine mist. As I stepped toward the driveway, I saw something white on the doormat, obscuring the welc from the script welcome surrounded by yellow sunflowers. An unmarked envelope. With my sleeves again over my hands, I picked it up. It wasn’t sealed. I pulled out a folded piece of typical college-ruled paper. A note was messily scribbled in blue ink pen on it, not the studiously precise handwriting as the one sent to me:

  I know what you have done. I know what you are. You can’t hide your secrets. I see you. I am coming for you. I must soldier on. You think you’ve gotten away with it, but I know. I know what lives inside of you, because it now resides in me too. The wraith. The hunger for more. You’ve been swayed and swindled by a devil you didn’t recognize, but I’ve gone willingly, knowing the evil I am about to carry out. You’re next.

  Based on the frenzied scrawl, this was emotional. Personal. Not the cool, collected thoughts of a man behind bars with too much time on his hands, but the ramblings of a psychopath. In the briefest of moments all my fears coalesced into a reality that tasted like bile. Someone knew about my father’s involvement. Someone was after him. And I needed to find this someone before they found out what I was up to.

  The unanswered questions haunted me yet again. First the letter to me, now one to my father. It was the handiwork of a spineless coward, just like George Battan. But what if I was wrong? What if it was someone else?

  I pocketed the letter. I’d pass along the warning so that my dad was prepared, but for now I needed this evidence to point me toward the one behind the threat. Nothing was going to scare me off now. The asshole clearly didn’t know who he was messing with.

  Chapter 12 Giana

  The little girl’s black ringlets bounced, brushing against her chubby cheeks as she pumped her legs to go higher, higher, higher into the sky. The swing set vibrated as she swung, the metal legs shifting ever so slightly back and forth under the pull of each ascent. But she didn’t notice the subtle lift off the ground, or the squeal of metal. All she noticed were velvety white clouds nudging their way across the blue expanse above—a hippo, a heart, a duck ... and there went a flower.

  It was her favorite time of day, the Best Part, when Daddy got home from work and Mommy had fresh warm cookies waiting. Daddy would eat two or three with a cup of coffee while she and Mommy had theirs with milk. Dip, bite, dip, bite. Then drink the chocolately crumbs with the last sip of milk. To a three-year-old, it was perfection. Yesterday was chocolate chip cookies; she wondered what they’d have today. She hoped for peanut butter cookies, but most likely it’d be oatmeal raisin.

  After cookies Daddy would probably want to either snuggle up on the sofa and watch a movie together—she always got to pick, and today felt like a Shrek kind of day—or play outside while Mommy started dinner. No matter how long the routine played out, she’d never grown bored with it. After all, as Mommy’s swollen belly reminded her, it wouldn’t be long before things changed. She’d be a big sister soon, which was sure to be a demanding job. But Giana was up for the task. She’d been waiting nine forever-long months for Baby’s arrival.

  “As big sister,” Mommy told her last week, “she’s going to look up to you, want to be like you. So it’s your job to help protect her and take care of her. Big sisters are the most important people in the world.”

  “More important than mommies and daddies?”

  “Sure. One day you’ll want to leave here and find new adventures, and you’ll want your little sister to join you. She’ll be your best friend someday.”

  She had nodded understanding, though her smile was uncertain. She couldn’t imagine anyone as important to her as Mommy and Daddy.

  “I can’t wait to meet Baby. I promise I’ll take care of her.”

  “I know you will, sweetie. I can’t wait for you to meet her too. Our little miracle baby. Mommy never expected to carry one in her belly.”

  “Was I in your belly too?”

  “Well, you were a special delivery. An angel brought you to us.”

  Giana’s eyes widened with bright curiosity and her mouth opened with a fascinated gasp. “An angel?”

  “Yep, you
were the gift we’d always prayed for.”

  Mommy’s hug pressed Giana against her hard belly where she felt something poking her.

  “Is that Baby?” Giana had asked, placing her palm on Mommy’s tummy while Baby rolled around, pushing through Mommy’s flowered shirt that always looked so pretty on her. A grape-sized ball thrust out, then vanished, only to appear on the other side of Mommy’s stomach. It kind of grossed Giana out, but Mommy seemed to enjoy it.

  “She’s so excited to come out. Look, she wants to be with you!”

  Bending down, Giana had kissed the tiny fist poking through. “I love you too, Baby.”

  Last week felt like forever ago. When was Baby going to arrive? After two midnight trips to the hospital, still no Baby. The anticipation was exhausting.

  She wondered if Baby would swing with her, play tea party with her, eat cookies and watch movies with her. Maybe they could be best friends after all. As the sun warmed her hazelnut-colored skin, Giana felt like today was a perfect picnic day. Maybe when Daddy got home he’d lay out a blanket and they’d eat their cookies on the grass amongst the lilies and pansies Mommy and her had planted in the garden last month. In April. And now it was May. Giana had just mastered memorizing the months of the year and earned a lollipop for her effort. Lollipops sure made learning fun.

  In the distance she heard a car door slam shut. From the fenced-in backyard she couldn’t see the driveway, but she already knew who it was. Any moment now her mother would call her inside, and the Best Part would begin. She let the swing slow down its momentum, until she came to a jarring stop as the soles of her sparkly Dora the Explorer tennis shoes skidded against the patch of ground beneath her, stripped bare of grass after months of wear and tear.