A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense

by Christine Carbo

  “What has he told you?” Rose asks.

  “I can’t tell you that, you understand. But I can tell you that he has a photo of the two of you. He showed it to Anne Marie Johnson, even gave it to her.”

  A faint smile curves onto Rose’s mouth.

  “Why is she suddenly smug?” I ask the room.

  “Because,” Brander answers, “we couldn’t find the photo. We think she could have taken it from the bag Anne Marie was carrying into the cabin, to obliterate the proof that she knew Reiko before he broke into her family’s home. She probably thinks we can’t prove he has a picture because she knows she has it. Probably already burned it or flushed it down the toilet herself. But,” Brander says, “even though Reiko is definitely not the brightest bulb in the package, he was smart enough to have one of the guards make him a copy.”

  “Does Herman know?” I ask.

  “Yes, he knows.”

  I look back to them. Herman is saying something to her, his voice soft and soothing. “Rose, there’s a copy of the photo of the two of you. I can show it to you if you’d like.”

  Her face goes soft again, and she instantly looks like a little girl who’s afraid, who has suddenly understood that she’s in trouble. “Prison,” Herman says, “is a tough place, and it’s going to be in your best interest to cooperate with me, because if you don’t, I can’t protect you, Rose.” His voice is gentle, coaxing. He’s playing the safe uncle or father role. “Sentences go higher, and I know you don’t want that. I don’t want what’s happened to Vince Reiko to happen to you, Rose. Cooperation goes a long way in a situation like this. The only way I can help you is if you tell me what happened.”

  Tears are falling down her cheeks now. She’s breaking, I think, under the soothing, fatherly touch of Herman’s voice. Asking for Herman, someone she knows, was the worst thing she could have done. If she’d stayed in no-comment mode with Reynolds and asked for an attorney, she would have been much better off. I can see Toni doing the same, how one minute she was a raging monster, coming at me with a vase because I wouldn’t give her money I’d made in tips the week before at the restaurant I worked at, and the next, breaking into tears when I spoke softly to her, saying how sorry she was, how she would never want to hurt me, admitting to every wrong she’d ever done.

  I hold back on my own tears, try to keep them from coming. I hate Rose right now, but another part of me wants to hug her, to soothe her and fill the void in her that I recognize—the same hole that’s in Toni, that’s in me, that’s in Reeve—the one I refuse to let take root and grow in Emily. But now, in spite of all my efforts, she’s going to be losing her second mommy, her best friend, because if I’m sure of one thing, it’s that this woman killed Anne Marie Johnson.

  “Rose,” Herman says so softly, I can barely hear him, “we know you didn’t get the rifle from Reeve that night. You had no time alone with him. It doesn’t add up.”

  She looks down at her hands in her lap, then draws in a shaky breath and places her face in her palms.

  “Rose,” Herman presses on, “how did you get the rifle?”

  She lowers her hands, her face contorted with pain.

  “Did you get it the day you borrowed his truck?”

  She stares at him for a moment and shrugs, blithe like a teenager, but her eyes are large and frightened looking, fixed on Herman, like she understands there’s no good way out of this anymore and he’s her only savior.

  “Rose?” Herman says, “did you take it from him?”

  She finally nods.

  “Can you say it, Rose? Can you say it out loud so we have the proof that you’re cooperating?”

  “Yes,” she says, her voice firmer than I expected, but secrets are difficult to keep. That’s why they’re always getting shared, why gossip is rampant with human beings, because it’s very tough to keep something to yourself for any period of time, even if it’s something incriminating. Get the right person in the room with a criminal and you can get them to share, just from the sheer relief of the spilling of the beans, letting someone who is asking know not just that it went down but how it went down. She’s been able to keep the secret about her part in her sister’s murder for seven years, but she didn’t do the deed. She was the Lady Macbeth of that murder. But this time, if she pulled the trigger, that’s a different beast—the kind that sprouts poisonous roots through your being. I think of the dark bags under her eyes during the last week, of her saying she was sick—some twenty-four-hour bug—and I realize she wasn’t sick. She just wasn’t coping. She was exhausted. The difference between a sociopath and a screwed-up person who kills is that the prior can go home and still cope, still get some sleep, even get off on the act; the latter can’t. Someone like Rose wouldn’t be able to manage for very long after taking another person’s life with her own hands.

  “I got it the day I borrowed the truck,” she finally says. “The key was on the key chain. I just opened it and took it. I knew he’d never even know it was missing. He never uses it. I only took it because I wanted something to scare her with. That’s all. I just wanted her to know I meant business and I wanted her to give me that photo back. To tell her not to print any information that Vince might have given her.”

  “What kind of information might Vince have given her?”

  She shakes her head and hugs herself. “I don’t know.”

  “Rose.” Herman shifts in his seat, then leans in closer to her. He doesn’t want this momentum to stop, for her to clam up. “Maybe I’m just a softy, Rose, but I gotta think that you’d do anything to protect all that you have with Emily after you’ve already done so much for her. You’re so important to her. I can understand how you would want to protect what you’ve created. Is that what you’ve done, Rose? Protected Emily?”

  Flattery mixed with some faith and an out. It was a stretch, because she was most certainly not protecting Emily, but I can see in the contortions of her face that it’s registering, that she’s thinking it’s true.

  “Rose, what might Vince have told Anne Marie besides the fact that you knew him?”

  Tears are running down her cheeks now. “That we dated. That I hated Kimmie,” she whispers. “That something needed to be done about her.”

  “What needed to be done?”

  Rose moves her head in little angry shakes, as if she’s tired of the fact that nobody has understood her situation, even after all of this time. “She stole things, Herman. My things.” She places her hand on her chest. It’s a good sign that she’s using his first name. She could have transported herself to a kitchen, a backyard, anywhere safe at this point, because all she is seeing is Herman—kind, loving Herman. The walls of the interrogation room have faded from her vision. “And later,” she continues, “she’d lie to my parents about it. They’d always believe her over me. I’d find my own clothes in her room and show them to my mother, and she’d pooh-pooh it, like it was no big deal, that sisters will be sisters. But we weren’t sisters. Not even close. She was so manipulative and no one cared.”

  “That’s what Vince said, that he was protecting you. That he loved you. That he would have kept the secret that you put him up to it forever if you’d simply visited him in prison more, if you’d have written him back.”

  “Vince.” She sighs. “Why can’t he just move on? I don’t love him. I don’t care about him.”

  “But something needed to be done, Rose, right?”

  “Right.”

  “What needed to be done?”

  “We needed her out of our lives. Don’t you understand? My parents should never have adopted her.” Deep lines cross her forehead, and suddenly she looks years older than she is. Her voice is higher-pitched and more desperate, as if she’s begging for something. “But they just couldn’t see it, no matter what I told them.”

  “Rose, did you ask Vince to shoot Kimmie?” It’s so low, I almost don’t hear it. I lean forward, my arms around my waist, straining to hear him.

  Herman sits still, wa
iting for more. His back is to me, but I know his wide-eyed look of empathy and know he’s giving it to Rose. It says, Tell me your secrets and you will have my sympathy, my full embrace. It’s the best tool an interviewer has—compassion. Herman’s warm, liquid eyes are only one tiny step away from a sweeping hug of acceptance. Often interviewing is simply a game of patience, waiting for the other to speak, but coupled with empathy, it can seduce the darkest secrets from the tightest vaults. And once the telling begins, it has its own force, like a stream from melting snowpack gaining in momentum—water murky with the debris of ugly justifications, self-disgust, and delusion.

  “She took all the attention, all the time. You don’t understand how awful it was, to have this stranger come into your life because your parents think they’re so damn righteous and need to help the world. She took advantage of all of us. She stole my stuff all the time and acted all innocent. People would go on and on and on about her—how beautiful and exotic she was, how brave she was to go through foster care. She was a liar and a manipulator, but no one could see it. My parents said, ‘Be compassionate! Be patient with her. This girl needs our help, blah blah blah . . . ’ ” Rose makes her voice prudish, imitating her mother: “ ‘You’ll see,’ my mom told me, ‘it will all work out.’ ” But it didn’t. It just got worse. The lying, the stealing. And you know what my parents did?” She looks at Herman dumbfounded, her palm out, and Herman nods her on. “They adopted her. Can you believe that? That was their solution to the problem. ‘We need to make her feel more loved, not less,’ my mom said. And then the final straw: she slept with my boyfriend Michael. She slept with Michael. I finally had someone, and she took him from me. Just like that.” Rose snaps her fingers.

  “I can understand how incredibly frustrating that would be,” Herman says to egg her on, probably before she can realize how whiny she sounds.

  “It was sickening, all the never-ending attention, all the overcompensating my parents did to make themselves feel better. So self-righteous, like they’d atoned for all of their sins in life through that one act of adoption. It was completely out of control,” she says, folding her arms over her chest. “So yeah, like I said, something needed to be done.”

  “So you asked Vince to break in when she was home sick?”

  “I had to,” she says. “There was no other option.”

  We all exhale. It’s not a full confession, but he’s getting close. I’m listening so intently that I don’t realize tears are streaming down my cheeks. I never cry, but I’m reacting now to the shock of it all, to the idea that Rose—a girl, a young woman whom I care deeply about—was vengeful enough at the age of seventeen to orchestrate the murder of an adopted teen and to kill a journalist to cover it up years later. All this time I’ve been guarding myself from bad relationships with men, including the father of my child, building thick, impenetrable walls to protect me from my own voids, and in the meantime, I’ve been developing the most dangerous relationship possible. I wipe a tear away with the butt of my hand and steal a glance at Shackley. He stands up, his eyes trained on me, like he’s been watching me the entire time and not the interview. He motions with his thumb to the door. “Come with me,” he mouths.

  I stand up, straighten my blazer, and follow him out.

  He takes me to one of the vacant offices, sits me down, and gets me a glass of water. “How are you holding up?” he asks.

  “Just fine, sir,” I say.

  “You look pretty shaken.”

  “It’s been a strange day, to say the least.”

  “A strange week from what I hear. Listen, I’m not going to scold you now, not after you practically ended up solving this case on your own. Plus, I know this must be extremely emotional for you. Still, I have to do my job. I have to tell you that you crossed professional boundaries. You weren’t honest with the local authorities, jeopardizing our standing with them and in some ways obstructing their investigation.”

  “I understand,” I say. I don’t have the energy to make any more excuses; none of it matters now. The bottom line is that I was prepared to even lose my job if it meant I could protect Emily. “I’m willing to take whatever punishment you think I deserve, sir.”

  He looks at me for some time, his eyes a sharp greenish blue, his nose thin, and a hard line etched between his brows above his nose. I can’t read him, and I have no idea what lies ahead for me. If I lose my job, so be it. It will be a while before I can even find someone new to babysit Emily.

  “Yes,” Shackley says, “I have to report this to OPR, but I’ll explain the special circumstances and make clear that you actually solved the crime while they had a BOLO out on your ex. This will be more of a hand-slapping than anything. Consider it a warning. But I don’t expect you’ll ever cross these lines again.”

  “No, sir,” I say.

  “Agent Paige,” he says, “go home and get some sleep. Let them handle the rest here tonight. You’re off duty.”

  “But I need to—” He raises a hand to stop me.

  “No, it’s time to leave this one to Agent Marcus and the county. We’ll fill you in when it’s over.”

  I nod, then stand reluctantly. “Please thank Agent Marcus for me; he was incredible in there.” I gesture in the direction of the interview room, where I know he still sits with Rose, trying to bang out the remaining details as she confesses to everything. I walk down the hallway to the room I left my coat in and put it on. I take another hallway leading to the reception area, say good night to the woman on the night shift, and head for the large glass doors. I push one open, feeling like I’m coming down from a bad high.

  The violent wind whips my hair across my face. I swipe at the strands, trying to hold them back as I march to my car. I feel like I’m sliding someplace I’ve never been. Maybe it’s the fatigue, but my entire being feels like jelly. I still feel anger—at myself, at Rose, at my mom and my dad for not teaching Toni and me better boundaries—but I feel a rawness too.

  I open the car and hop in. The upholstery is cold and so is the steering wheel. I turn the ignition and wait for the heat to kick in. A memory from the past summer comes to mind. It was July and all the windows were open. The warm air filtered in, carrying the scent of lilacs and freshly mowed grass from the neighbor’s yard. Emily was bored, so I suggested we walk out to get the mail. From the box at the curb, I let her pull out the stack. She grabbed the pile of bills and junk mail. On the top of the stack lay a bright blue flyer with large block letters in white that read: You’ve won a million dollars!

  Emily had been learning to read and she stopped and studied the text. She started jumping up and down. “Mommy, we’ve won a million dollars! Look, look. It says we’ve won a million dollars!” Her smile was bright and magnificent, her eyes shining with sheer joy. It broke my heart and nearly took my breath away—that kind of innocence, that kind of faith in the world. I stood for a moment on the hot pavement, wondering how to explain to her that we really hadn’t won anything. That it was advertising, which is a type of lie. The world lies to you, sweetie, the world can be a very bad place rang in my head, although I knew I would never say those words to her. I watched the joy leak from her face and her eyebrows draw together in confusion as I chose my words carefully to explain that we hadn’t really won anything at all unless we jumped through a bunch of hoops and even then, even if we did that, the chances were very, very slim that we would win the money.

  My mind moves to my mother, tired and scared, unwilling to take a stand against my drunk, drugged-up father—her weakness reinforced by him and spreading inside her so that she could barely make any decisions when it came to raising the two of us. I think of my sister, of her little spirit crushed by life with a deadbeat angry dad who had all sorts of demons of his own. I think of how she learned to cope by manipulating and lying to get a substance that could fill her black hole. I think of Reeve and what happened to him. How he pays for it every day of his life.

  And last, I think of me. I don’t feel
sorry for myself. I’m someone who makes the best of things, and I realize as I reach for the door handle on my car that I will go to Kaylee’s house in the morning because it’s too late now, and I will get my daughter and hug her tightly. I will get up tomorrow and cope. I will find someone—not a perfect person, but a decent person—to help me with my daughter so that I can continue to do what’s important to me.

  Reeve

  * * *

  Present—Wednesday

  I HEAR HIM CALLING to me, and strangely enough, I smell the salt of the ocean. I’m back in Florida with my family, staying in the small cabin we sometimes rented on Sanibel Island. It all feels expectantly familiar, like it’s home, the coconut smell of Coppertone, the briny scent of barnacles on the piers, the bright red and pink of the rhododendrons outside the cabin, the black mangroves that line the island, and the feel of soft, sandy seaweed and thin shells crushed by unthinkable ocean forces under my feet and sticking to my thin, pale ankles. There’s an unbearable layer of lightness—of unawareness and innocence—laced into the bright sunshine scintillating on the channel by our cabin.

  My dad had said I should wait for him before I cross the narrow passage to the bay on the other side where we intend to cast our lines for bass. But I’m eager to fish the other side and the water looks calm and easily crossable. I can barely wait to feel the tug of a prize catch. I’m positive I’m going to get the first bite this time and that I’ll proudly show my dad the glimmering fish on the end of my line. I wade in, feeling the refreshing Gulf water on my legs, and begin to swim. My dad has the gear and is coming down the path soon enough.

  It doesn’t take long before I can feel the strength of the tide pulling against me. I pump my arms, trying to make headway to the sandy shore on the other side, but I’m not moving any closer to it. If anything, the distance is widening, and I’m being pulled toward the main channel. My dad yells at me from the shore, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. The water has strong tentacles that drag me against my will. Real terror rears through me for the first time in my eight years of life—the sense that reality is a dark, gaping mouth with sharp teeth that can chew you up in an instant. Salt water sloshes into my nose and mouth. I choke and spit it out. It splashes into my eyes, and I slap at my face and wipe my eyes, at the sting of it, then realize if I don’t use my arms to swim, I’ll be swept farther out. I frantically go back to cycling my arms through the water, fighting against the thick and powerful churning blackness surrounding me.