Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  He put a hand on my leg. “I’ll have to stay away from you for a while—a few years, maybe. Without the body they’ll always be watching you, waiting for you to come to me or me to come for you. But when the time is right, I’ll find you and you’ll be waiting. That’s our karma, our bond.”

  “Where will you go?” I asked, playing the game with him, knowing how fast he’d turn ugly if I didn’t.

  He shrugged. “I can’t tell you. They’ll torture you to find me. You’re weak. You’ll give in.”

  I started to cry then. I hid my face in the crook of my arm so he wouldn’t see, but I couldn’t keep my shoulders from shaking.

  “Don’t worry, Ophelia,” he said, sitting up and wrapping his arms around me. His voice was sweet and soft. “I’ll come for you. I promise.”

  But of course that wasn’t why I succumbed to the crushing sadness that lived in my chest. I knew in that moment that I would never be free from him. That for the rest of my life, he’d live under my skin, in my nightmares, just around the next corner.

  “When it’s time for us to be together again,” he said, “I’ll leave my necklace somewhere for you to find. That’s how you’ll know I’ve come for you. That’ll be our signal.”

  He was enjoying himself, the drama of it all, making me cry. It fed into his fantasy of who we were and what was happening to us. At the time I was as sick and delusional as he was, playing my role in his fantasy, casting myself as victim.

  We sat there in silence for a time. My tears dried up, and I listened to a coyote howling at the moon somewhere far off in the distance. Then…

  “There’s something I want you to know, Ophelia. I need someone to know.” His voice sounded thick and strange.

  “What?”

  He looked out into the vast flatness all around us for so long I thought he’d decided not to go on. I didn’t press. Inside, I cringed at what he might tell me.

  “Those women,” he said with an odd laugh and a shake of his head. “They didn’t matter, you know. They were nothing to anyone.”

  “Who?” I asked, even though my shoulders were so tense they ached, my fist clenched so hard I could feel my nails digging into my palms.

  “The women my father brought home. Most of them, even their own parents had abandoned them. No one mourned them, not really.”

  I thought of Janet Parker howling at our trailer door. “That’s not true,” I said.

  “It is true,” he snapped, baring his teeth at me like the dog that he was.

  I didn’t argue again. Just listened as he told me again how they were looking for a way out of their shit lives, looking for the punishment they knew they deserved. How death was mercy, how they were noticed more in their absence from the world than they were in their presence.

  “Marlowe,” I said finally, when he’d gone silent. I tried to keep my voice soft the way he liked it. “What are you telling me?”

  The night seemed to stretch, the seconds were hours as the coyotes sang in the distance.

  “My father didn’t kill those women,” he said. His words lofted above us, looped, then floated off into the night sky. His skin was ghastly white, his eyes the dark empty holes in a dime-store mask. “Not all of them.”

  “Who then?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer.

  “I watched him kill her,” he said, not answering my question. “I never told you. She didn’t leave us. She didn’t run away. She burned the English muffin she was making for his breakfast. He slapped her so hard she staggered back and hit her head against the edge of the counter. There was, like, this horrible noise, some cross between a thud and a snap. The way she fell to the floor, so heavy, her neck at this terrible angle—she was dead before she hit the ground.”

  He paused here, and I listened to his breathing, which seemed suddenly labored, though his face was expressionless, his eyes dry. “It didn’t seem real. It seemed like something I was watching on TV. My mother was stupid and weak, I remember her cowering around my father, living her life walking on eggshells. But I loved her, anyway. I didn’t want her to die.”

  I was afraid to say anything. Afraid to move a muscle.

  “Later I lied for him. I didn’t want him to go to jail. When the people she worked with sent the police, he told them she ran off. Withdrew some money from the bank and stole the car. They believed him. They believed me when I said I saw her leaving in the night. I told them she said, ‘Marlowe, honey, go back to sleep. I’m going to get some milk for your breakfast.’”

  There’s a rustling somewhere near us. Some creature making its way over the desert floor, something small.

  “I never forgave him, though. A few years later, he brought someone home. A pasty blonde—a quivering, nervous waste of bones.” He gave a disgusted laugh, kept looking off at that same spot in the distance. “There was no way I was going to allow him to replace her. I couldn’t have another mother, so he wasn’t going to have another whore.”

  He went on then to tell me with no emotion whatsoever about the women he’d killed, somehow managing to paint himself as the victim, the little boy who missed his mother so much, who sought to avenge her. But I was only half listening. Inside, I was screaming.

  Frank, in his guilt, helped Marlowe to hide his crimes and eventually took the blame for the murders—because he loved his son so much, Marlowe claimed. I had no way of knowing if what he said was true, but it didn’t much matter. I had disappeared from that place. On the sound of Marlowe’s voice, I had drifted up into the stars and floated high above our bodies. I looked down to see two people sitting on the lawn of a small white church, one of them talking quietly about murder, the other wishing for death.

  I follow my father up the stairs and into his apartment. It is exactly the same as it was the last time I was here, except older and dirtier. It doesn’t seem like the cool, freewheeling bachelor pad it once did. It looks like the rundown apartment of an old man who doesn’t know how to take care of himself. His party days are behind him, and he never built anything—a home, a family—that endured.

  I notice he has added a recliner and a large television set on a glass-and-chrome stand over by the window. The pool table has been pushed over to the far wall to accommodate these additions. There’s a sweating beer can on the floor by the chair, a rerun of Baywatch on the screen. All the lights are out. He has been sitting here in the dark watching television alone.

  He shrugs when he sees me looking at the screen. “I used to date her,” he says, indicating the bleached blonde on the set.

  “Dad,” I say, shaking my head. This seems to be the only word I can get out. He sits down in the recliner, stares blankly at the television. I go over and stand in front of him.

  “Dad, no more lies,” I say. “I love you, but you’ve been a really terrible father.”

  His body seems to sag with the weight of my words, and I think he might be crying. But I don’t have time to comfort him. “I need you to help me now. I need you to be a better grandfather than you were a dad.”

  I take the picture from my pocket and hold it out for him to see. “Oh, Christ,” he says when he looks at it. “Oh, God.”

  “Marlowe Geary is still alive. Someone’s looking for him, they have Victory, and I need to lead them to Marlowe or they’re going to hurt her.” As the words tumble out of my mouth, I hear how crazy they sound. I suddenly feel very bad for Victory. This is her rescue team: a beat-up old pathological liar and a nutcase mother.

  In a mad rush, the rest of it pours out of me, everything that’s happened since the dark figure on the beach. “Somewhere inside me, I know where he is,” I tell him finally. “I just don’t have access to that information yet.”

  “Opie,” he responds gently, “no offense, but are you sure you haven’t lost your mind?”

  I think about this for a second. “No, Dad,” I admit. “I’m not sure at all.”

  Looking at me from beneath raised eyebrows, he says, “What do you need me to do?”

/>   38

  Less than a week after my disappearance, my memorial service was held at a small chapel by the beach. Neighbors, friends, colleagues crowded into the space. It was a hot day, and the air-conditioning was not up to the task. People were sweating, fanning themselves, shedding tears as Gray gave a heartfelt eulogy about how he’d loved me, how I’d changed his life and made him a better person. He said I’d left all the best parts of myself behind in Victory, our daughter.

  Detective Harrison stayed in the back and watched the crowd. Conspicuous by their absence were Vivian, Drew, and Victory. It’s a show, he thought. No one would have a memorial service for a woman who was still classified as missing unless he was invested in making it appear to someone that she was dead. Gray seemed sunken and hollowed out; to everyone else he seemed like a man suffering with terrible grief. To Harrison he seemed like a man struggling under the burden of terrible lies.

  A woman sat in the front of the chapel and wept with abandon. He recognized her even from behind. It was Ella, beautifully coiffed in her grief, of course—hair swept in a perfect chignon, impeccably dressed in a simple black sheath, her nails done.

  After the service Harrison stood off to the side in the trees watching people leave. He watched for someone alone, someone who seemed out of place. He guessed that most of the men were colleagues of Gray’s—they all had that paramilitary look to them, built and secretive, ever aware of their surroundings. He recognized some of the older people as neighbors he’d seen the night of the intruder on the beach. He didn’t see anyone who aroused his interest.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Ella said, approaching him. “You weren’t her friend.”

  Her breath smelled lightly of alcohol. He regarded her, sized her up. She was handling things badly, seemed unsteady on her feet. Her eyes were rimmed with red.

  “Do you have someone to drive you home?” he asked gently.

  “None of these people were her friends,” she said too loudly. People turned to stare as they moved toward their cars. “I’ve never seen any of them in my life.”

  He put a hand on her arm. “Let me take you home, Mrs. Singer.”

  “I have my own car, thank you,” she said primly.

  “You can get it later,” he said, more firmly.

  She surprised him by not arguing. “I mean, who are these people?” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, leaning her weight against him as he led her to his Explorer.

  “Where is her daughter? Where are Drew and Vivian? I asked Gray. He told me that it was none of my business.” She paused and shook her head. “Something’s just not right.”

  He opened the door for her, and she climbed inside with a little help. He got in on the other side, turned on the engine, and pulled in to the line of cars exiting the parking lot of the chapel. The blue sky was going gray; heavy dark clouds were moving in from the sea.

  “Someone killed her, didn’t they?” she said, looking out the window.

  “Why would you say something like that?” he asked her.

  She shrugged. “The man on the beach that night. Since then, she wasn’t the same. She seemed—I don’t know—not herself. Maybe she was afraid of someone? I don’t know.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about her past?” he asked, pulling in to our neighborhood. The line at the gate was long, with people heading back to our house for the reception. Ella pointed the way to her house and shook her head slowly.

  “You know what? No. I knew that Annie was raised in Central Florida and that both her parents were dead. She didn’t have any family at all except for Gray and Victory. She never talked about her past. I had the sense she didn’t want anyone asking, either. So I never did.”

  He didn’t have the heart to tell her that Annie wasn’t even my real name, that most things I’d told her about myself were lies.

  “How’d she get along with her in-laws?” he asked instead.

  “She loved Vivian. But Drew…bad blood there, if you ask me.”

  “Oh?”

  “He hated her, or so she thought. He didn’t think she was good enough for Gray. She didn’t talk much about that, either. So I didn’t press.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  She let a beat pass. “Shoes,” she said, then let go a peal of hysterical laughter that ended in a sob. He thought she was going to lose it. But she pulled herself together relatively quickly. After a moment she wiped her tears away, careful not to smear her mascara. “I was a terrible friend, wasn’t I? I didn’t know anything about Annie.”

  He pulled in to her driveway. “You accepted her for who she was in the present, Mrs. Singer. We only know about people what they want to show us. You respected her privacy and shared good times with her. I think that makes you an excellent friend. I really do.”

  Detective Harrison was a wise man; I would have told her the same thing.

  She took a tissue from her clutch and wiped her nose. “Thanks,” she said, nodding. “She did that for me, too.”

  They sat like that for a minute in her drive. The wind was blowing the high palm fronds around, and they whispered, gossiping about all they knew and wouldn’t tell. The sky had gone from blue to gray to black and was ready to erupt.

  “That night on the beach?” Ella said, leaning forward and looking up at the sky. Harrison noticed her beauty again, the delicate line of her jaw, the regal length of her neck.

  “What about it?”

  “At the party she thought she saw someone that she recognized. A young girl, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

  “Who was it?”

  She gave him a quick shrug. “No idea. I knew everyone there that night, even all the servers who have worked for me before. She seemed really unsettled by it and left pretty soon after that.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying there was no one at my house who looked like that, no one under forty, and certainly no one wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

  He remembered the night at the rest stop. He remembered how my gaze kept moving behind him as though I’d been watching someone or something. He’d seen fear on my face that night, so clearly that it had caused him to reach for his gun. “You think Annie imagined her?”

  She looked surprised for a second, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. Then, “I don’t know. She had an expression on her face that stayed with me. I think I’d seen it before in flashes, but not like that. She looked haunted. I think she was, in some ways.” She smiled nervously, ran a self-conscious hand along her jaw. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It doesn’t help you any, does it?”

  “You were right to tell me,” he said. “You never know what helps.” After a pause he added, “Did she ever mention her doctor to you?”

  She shook her head. “No. What kind of doctor?”

  “How about an organization called Grief Intervention Services?”

  She raised her eyebrows, thought about it for a second. “No,” she said, bringing her hand to rub her temple. He’d seen Volkswagens that were smaller than the ring on her finger. “I never heard her mention anything like that.”

  “Did you get the sense that she was someone who would take off? You know, just run away from her life? Did she seem like she might be capable of that?”

  She shook her head vigorously, without hesitation. “No way. Not without Victory. She worships that little girl.” Then, “That’s not what you think, is it? That she just took off?”

  “I’m just trying to be thorough. Without a body, we need to examine every possibility.”

  “Well, that’s not a possibility. She wouldn’t leave without her daughter.”

  “Okay,” he said, giving her a smile he thought she needed. “You’ve been a big help. You really have.”

  She offered him a grateful look. “So is this a murder investigation? You showing up at the memorial like that? Isn’t that what they do on television?”

  “I’m just trying to be thorough,” he said ag
ain, purposely vague.

  She nodded, seemed to think about saying something else but then thanked him for the ride instead. Then she dashed from the car to the house as a heavy rain started to fall. He watched until she let herself in the front door and shut it behind her.

  Harrison drove up the street and parked near my house. As he watched the mourners come and go, he thought about me, about Marlowe Geary, and all the desperate things people become for love. He began to realize as the rain turned to hail, causing people to dash from car to house or house to car, covering their heads with their jackets or purses, that if he wanted to know what had happened to me, he was going to have to go back to go forward.

  I tell my father how I dropped into the earth, followed my “dive master” through a long, narrow limestone tunnel for what seemed like hours, and emerged from another sinkhole. There a man whose name I never learned and whose face I barely saw was waiting for me in a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I stripped out of my wetsuit, dried off, and put on the clothes he had for me. I checked the contents of the bag he’d retrieved from my locker with the key I gave to Gray. I lay down on the floor of the backseat and stayed there, uncomfortable and gripped by self-doubt, as we drove for hours. I drifted off, only to be jerked awake by some bump in the road, or by the thought that I’d left my daughter behind and that in a few hours everyone who knew would think I had drowned in a diving accident.

  By nightfall I had boarded a cargo ship in the Port of Miami, headed for Mexico, where I was supposed to stay until Gray came for me.

  “Whoever it is,” my father says. “They found you pretty fast.”

  “It’s true,” I say. I can’t seem to stop moving. I’m pacing the small room, my whole body electric with tension, this physical pain I’ll have until I can get to Victory. Every mother knows that feeling in her body when her child cries. It’s as if every nerve ending, every cell, aches until you can hold and comfort your child. I felt that now, but with a kind of terrified desperation underlying it.