Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

  Copyright © 2015 by Mary McCoy

  Cover design by Marci Senders

  Cover photos © 2015 by Jill Wachter

  Designed by Marci Senders

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-4847-1215-3

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Brady, my partner in crime

  When I saw my sister in that hospital bed, she was different from how I remembered her. She’d changed her hair. Her cheeks were leaner.

  And someone had tried to cave in the side of her head with a baseball bat.

  The doctors at County Hospital told me how lucky she was. If the person who’d done this had left her somewhere less public than the boat dock at MacArthur Park, if the blow had come down squarely instead of glancing off her brow, if the maintenance man hadn’t found her so soon—the doctors always trailed off before they finished these sentences.

  Instead, someone had broken her back, fractured her skull, crushed the bones around her eye, and left her for dead, and because of that, Annie was lucky.

  Her purse was gone, but one of the nurses thought to look in the toe of her Mary Janes, and that was where she found me—an old school picture with my name and number scrawled on the back.

  I didn’t know why Annie would want anyone to call me. I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve.

  Since then, a world war had ended, I’d started high school, I’d kissed boys, and I didn’t know what my sister would think about any of it. In all that time, we’d never exchanged a single letter, not a phone call, not a telegram.

  Late at night, when the light in the hospital hallways turned an eerie shade of blue, and the long minutes of quiet were broken up by the sounds of heels clicking on the linoleum, barked orders, and sobbing, it was hard not to think about that. I was alone with a stranger. So why did I stay? Why didn’t I leave her the way she’d left me?

  In the kinder light of morning, I asked different questions: Who are you, Annie? Where did you go? And how did you end up here?

  The doctors said she’d wake up, probably. They said it would take time. They said she needed rest. When they asked if I knew how to get in touch with her family, I said I didn’t.

  Annie had stayed gone for almost four years, and I figured she’d had her reasons. And when she woke up, I intended to be around to hear them.

  I’m Alice Gates, California girl, Hollywood High, class of 1950. If you go to the movies, you might think I’m one of those sparkling, impossibly blond youths who go to the beach every day, travel in attractive packs by convertible, and never stop laughing.

  If my life were a movie, it wouldn’t look like that one.

  When my sister disappeared, I kind of lost my taste for movies about young love and girls on horses and silly misunderstandings that ended with confetti and kisses. My favorite movies had titles like Notorious and Nightmare Alley, and I started reading detective novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, too. I like them because they don’t lose their heads over how great California is. They know it’s not all sunshine and oranges and movie stars. In their books, the people who live in the nicest houses have the dirtiest secrets, and those laughing blond California girls get used up and crushed under someone’s heel like cigarette butts.

  I know it’s ugly, but at least it’s not a lie.

  When you’re a kid, people lie to you about a lot of things because they think you’re too young to understand the truth. But you’re old enough to know a lie when you hear one, and in the end, that’s the lesson you learn—not that people are trying to protect you, but that they have something to hide.

  I didn’t know why my sister left four years ago, and I wasn’t any closer to knowing when I found her in the hospital, but I’d always known I’d been lied to. It was only after she turned up again that I realized the lie was a lot bigger than I’d guessed.

  “What are you doing here?”

  It was a low voice, deep, and it didn’t sound very happy to see me.

  I must have dozed off in the straight-backed wooden chair next to Annie’s bed sometime during the afternoon. When I opened my eyes, a man in a tan fedora and a rumpled jacket was towering over me.

  “She’s my friend,” I mumbled, feeding him the same line I’d told the doctors and nurses. I didn’t want to say too much before I was fully awake.

  He walked over to the window, leaned back against the sill, and folded his arms across his chest, glowering at me with eyes so dark they didn’t seem to have pupils. He looked about my parents’ age, though not as tidily put together. A shadow of whiskers covered his cheeks, and frayed shirtsleeves poked out from the cuffs of his jacket, too short in the arms. Then again, I wasn’t surprised he’d have trouble finding a coat to fit him—he was at least six and a half feet tall, and lean except for the beginnings of a potbelly that stretched his shirtfront tight. He stuck a toothpick into his mouth and chewed on it, looking me over, and looking perturbed while he did it. I could see the muscles in his jaw tighten and pop.

  “Cut the crap, Alice.”

  That woke me up. I sat up in my chair and peered out into the hallway, where a stream of nurses in long white dresses and caps made their rounds. Whoever this stranger was, he’d left the door open. Anyone could look in and see us, and that eased my mind a little.

  “Who are you?” I asked, massaging the crick out of the back of my neck.

  “Jerry Shaffer,” he said, handing me a business card. It was printed on cheap cardstock, but it looked official enough and bore his name, the words Private Investigator, and an address near downtown.

  After I’d had a look, he took the card back and tucked it into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Sorry. Only have so many of these things.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  As I spoke, I got up from the chair and put myself between the private eye and Annie. I knew why I’d stayed then, even through those moments in the middle of the night when my sister seemed like a stranger to me. I was all there was between Annie and whatever came through that door. I was all she had. When was the last time a doctor had come to check on her? The hospital was full of women in labor and car crash victims and old people having heart attacks. No one except me had time for Annie now that she wasn’t actively dying.

  “Annie’s a friend,” Jerry said. “We work together every now and then.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “This and that. Missing persons. Stolen goods. That kind of thing.”

  “She investigates things w
ith you?” I asked, and then a horrible thought crossed my mind. “Did this happen to Annie while she was working for you?”

  Jerry Shaffer crossed the room and shut the door. I tensed, but then he pulled up another chair and sat down next to the rickety metal bed frame. I’d spent parts of the night picking at the flaking paint and rust while I tried to block out the sounds of a young widow crying in the hall. The detective took in Annie’s broken face, then his eyes fell to the floor.

  “No,” he said, swallowing hard. “Annie was off the clock when this happened.”

  The Los Angeles County Hospital was a crowded, busy place, no matter what time of day. You didn’t have to be there long before most of that noise faded to static. But when Jerry closed the door, the silence washed over me, and the room and Annie and everything that had happened suddenly seemed real to me in a way it hadn’t been before. I felt dizzy, and a clammy sweat broke out on my forehead.

  “Are you okay, kid?” Jerry asked, lurching to his feet and helping me into a chair.

  “What happened to her?” I murmured.

  He regarded me with some concern. “How long have you been here, anyway?”

  “Since yesterday,” I said. “When they called me.”

  “And you haven’t been home?”

  I shook my head.

  “Have you called your parents?”

  “No,” I said, my mouth set in a rigid line.

  He looked at me with something like respect. “Good. I think that’s what she’d want. For now, anyway.”

  “She told you about our parents?” I asked, a little surprised.

  “She told me enough to make me think she wouldn’t want them here. Your father especially,” he added, shaking his head. “He’s a piece of work.”

  I wondered what he’d meant by that. My mother was the one Annie used to fight with all the time. My father had so little to do with us that I scarcely thought about him at all. The feeling was probably mutual. Sometimes, when we were younger, he’d be in the middle of telling an off-color story at the dinner table, and my mother would touch his elbow and say, “Little ears, Nicky. Little ears,” and he’d look at Annie and me as though he’d forgotten we were even there.

  “If she wasn’t working for you, how did this happen?” I asked. “And how did you know she was here?”

  A dark look crossed his face. “Annie and I were supposed to meet yesterday. When she didn’t show, I called a buddy of mine at the LAPD to see if she’d turned up anywhere.”

  In my world, when I’m looking for someone and they’re not where they’re supposed to be, I call them up. I ask their friends. Maybe I go by their house or the place where they work. Why would Jerry Shaffer contact the police unless he’d expected my sister to be dead, hurt, or under arrest?

  I glared at him and started to speak, but he held up his hand to stop me.

  “Alice, your sister is a real sweet girl. Real sweet, and a lot smarter than those she chooses to associate with.” He looked at me meaningfully. “But she isn’t any kind of angel.”

  Annie had just turned sixteen when she left home, the same age I was now. I thought about that, about how I’d live if I were out on my own in Los Angeles right now, where I’d sleep, the kinds of friends I might have to make to get by. When Annie left, I missed her, I wanted her back, I cried over her, but I never worried about her. She’d seemed like a grown-up to me. Now the idea of her striking out on her own and landing without a scratch seemed a little far-fetched.

  “It’s okay,” I said, swallowing hard.

  Jerry continued. “The cop told me a girl was found in MacArthur Park beaten up pretty bad, so I came here to see about it.”

  He leaned back in his chair and bobbled the toothpick from side to side in his mouth. “Where do your parents think you are right now, anyway?”

  “I told them I was spending the night at my friend Cassie’s house.”

  As lies went, it had not been my best effort. Even my oblivious mother had her doubts, since it had been years since I stayed overnight at a friend’s house—or, for that matter, had friends.

  “I’ll take over here for tonight,” he said. “You go home, put in an appearance. No telling how long we might have to keep this up.”

  I snorted. There was no we between me and Jerry Shaffer.

  “Not likely. I’m not leaving Annie.”

  He leaned forward, clamping his palms together and fixing his black eyes on mine.

  “Do you know what parents do when their daughters aren’t where they’re supposed to be? They start making phone calls. To the police. To hospitals.” He cleared his throat, stalling as he picked over his next words. “You need to do this for your sister. Go home, Alice. Keep them from asking too many questions about where you are, and you might buy me a little time to get to the bottom of this.”

  I met his stare and held it. Jerry Shaffer could have walked into Annie’s room with his mother, his priest, and his first-grade teacher, all attesting to his good citizenship and general trustworthiness, and I still wouldn’t have left him alone with my sister.

  “You could be anybody,” I said. “For all I know, you’re the one who did this. Now you’re just waiting for me to leave so you can finish the job.”

  He sighed and slouched down in the chair, stretching out his long legs under the bed. “Would I have told you my name? Shown you my business card? If I wanted to hurt Annie, wouldn’t I have knocked you over the head by now and gotten on with it?”

  I didn’t answer. All I knew was that there was no way for me to be sure about Jerry Shaffer.

  Without another word, he took a folded piece of paper from the breast pocket of his coat and smoothed it out on the nightstand by Annie’s bed. Then he took out a pencil stub and hunched over the page, scribbling intently for what seemed like ages. When he finished, he tore off a thin strip of the paper and handed it to me along with the pencil. I felt a spark of recognition when I saw the jumble of letters and knew immediately what I had to do to decode them.

  “Who taught you how to do this?” I asked.

  “Who do you think?” Jerry said, leaning back in his chair. “When I tell you I’m Annie’s friend and that I’m here for her, I mean it. Go home and get some sleep, Alice.”

  I looked at the strip of paper, then at Jerry Shaffer, then back at the paper and what he had written there. There’d been no way for me to be sure about Jerry Shaffer—and then he gave me one I couldn’t ignore.

  I wrote my phone number down on the slip of paper and handed it to him.

  “Will you call me if anything changes?”

  “I promise,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Alice.”

  “Okay.”

  On my way down the hall, I spotted one of the orderlies making his rounds. I recognized him—he’d been to Annie’s room twice to change her bandages since I’d been there. I pulled him aside and asked if he’d stop by a little more often. There were five dollar bills in my purse, more money than I usually spent in a week. I gave him all of it.

  At first, he wouldn’t take the money, but I pressed the bills into his hand.

  “Please,” I said. My throat started to tighten, and I could barely get the word out.

  I swallowed down the tears that threatened to come and folded the orderly’s fingers around the money.

  “Take it. Make sure nothing happens to her.”

  This time, the orderly nodded and put the money in his pocket, even though what I was asking of him was impossible, and we both knew it.

  My parents couldn’t be famous themselves, so they decided to have children to do it for them.

  My father was the head of the publicity department at Insignia Pictures. He spent his days telling the world how wonderful movie stars were, and I think he actually believed it himself.

  Before she met my father, my mother was a very minor starlet. She started out dressing hair at Warner Bros. Studios, but then her good looks caught somebody’s eye and she was brought in for a screen
test. The parts she got were never any good—harem girl, bathing beauty, third chorus girl from the left. Getting married gave her a meatier role, one with lines.

  If my parents knew anything about being parents, I’m pretty sure they learned it from the movies. They kissed our cheeks and patted our heads, but mostly it seemed as if they were always leaving for drinks, parties, movie premieres—places we weren’t welcome.

  Annie and I didn’t mind, though. We liked being on our own. Annie was the undisputed leader of the neighborhood kids. If she wanted to go to the pool that day, or the park, or the library, Annie decreed it, and everyone went along with her. I never got the feeling that she cared whether anyone came or not. She’d just say, “I’m going to the drugstore for a cream soda,” and they followed her.

  It was always understood that when she said “I,” she meant me, too. She always made a place for me, watched out for me, and I hung on to her for dear life.

  There was one situation in which our parents demanded our presence around the house, and that was when they threw a party. About once a month, our mother would come up to the bedroom we shared carrying a set of matching outfits—there was usually a theme: sailor suits or gypsies or something like that. She’d dress us up and send us around with trays of finger sandwiches and olives. If we ever got distracted from our duties, she’d immediately materialize, nudge one of us in the back, and whisper in a perky voice, “Circulate, my dear! Circulate!”

  After enough people had remarked on how precious we were, she’d shuttle us off to bed, making a big show of kissing us good night in front of her guests.

  It was always movie people, no one you’d have heard of, but people from my father’s department, office people, and some of my mother’s old friends from her acting days. Occasionally someone important would turn up, if they were in the neighborhood, if they needed a quick drink before moving on to a better party. I always knew who these people were because Annie and I were always dragged over for introductions that were supposed to look spontaneous but were actually quite well rehearsed.

  “Now, let me hear you do it again, Alice.”