Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “But Frank Geary didn’t kill Melissa,” I say, really just guessing.

  He shook his head. “He may not have, no. I had Melissa’s body exhumed when we won the first round of evidence retesting. And the DNA samples found were similar to Frank Geary’s without being identical. So the conclusion was that Marlowe Geary played some role in her torture and death.”

  There’s flash lightning in the clouds above us and the deep rumble of distant thunder, but it’s not raining. Every few minutes the sky illuminates and then goes dark again, as if someone is turning it on and off with a switch.

  “To be honest,” he says, “I’d suspected this early on. In my life I’ve been around enough killers—in Vietnam—to know one when I saw one. At the trial, Marlowe seemed as dead inside as his father. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  I realize something then. The lights start to come on inside, illuminating places within me that have been dark for so long. “Briggs worked for you. You sent him to find Marlowe after we ran.”

  He nods. “I wasn’t sure what Marlowe had to do with Melissa’s death. But I knew he’d used Janet to kill his father. And when I realized he was killing other women, taking other people’s daughters away, I wanted to stop him. I was filled with a sick rage—it was something living inside me. But I didn’t want him arrested and in prison. I didn’t want that kind of justice. I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to suffer and die the way his victims did. And I knew plenty of people to help with that—the military is good at turning out merciless killers.”

  “Why didn’t you come yourself?”

  “After Janet died, I started coughing up blood. The sickness of fear and anger, you can’t carry it forever. It starts to kill you. In my case, cancer.”

  More of that horrible coughing. I hate, am repulsed by him, and pity him in equal measure.

  “After you and Marlowe were ‘killed’ in your car accident, I had an epiphany. I realized that my and Janet’s rage and desire for revenge had cost us everything. We might have had some years together, we might have touched happiness again, if only we had faced down our fears, our regrets, our hatred for Frank Geary. But instead we let the rip he’d opened in the fabric of our life suck us in like a black hole. We let him destroy all three of us.”

  He looks at me as though trying to decide if I’m listening to him. Whatever he sees on my face makes the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.

  “I decided I’d fight my cancer and live for Janet and Melissa rather than die for them. As I fought that war, I realized that the rage I’d directed at Frank and Marlowe Geary was really directed at myself, for all the ways I’d failed as father and husband. If I’d been present for them while they lived, maybe I wouldn’t have had so many regrets when they died.”

  I notice how still he is. There was so much anxiety and adrenaline living inside me that I couldn’t keep myself from fidgeting, shifting my weight from foot to foot, pacing a few steps away, then back toward him. But he is fixed and solid. He keeps his hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on some spot off in the distance. All there is to him is his raspy voice and the story he tells.

  “When I went into remission, I started an organization called Grief Intervention Services with some friends of mine to help other victims and families of victims face their fear and heal.”

  I draw in a sharp breath as I remember. “Your website. I visited it after I heard about you on television.”

  He nods. “The website captured your IP address. It was only a matter of days before we traced it to Gray Powers. It was only a little while longer before we connected him to you. Just one visit confirmed that you were Ophelia March.”

  I stare at his pale face and think how ill he looks. There is a distance to his stare. He is already on his way somewhere else.

  “Naturally, I started to wonder. If Ophelia survived, what about Marlowe Geary? And, if so, where is he?”

  “But you’d given up your quest for revenge,” I say, putting my hand on the hood of his car. I am feeling weak now, wobbly. The frenetic energy I had is abandoning me.

  He offers a thin smile. “I’ve always remembered you, Ophelia. You were the saddest-looking child I’d ever seen. I remember you coming and going from that farm, the circles under your eyes, the way you hunched your shoulders and hung your head. You were living in a pit of snakes; I was never sure which of them would be first to squeeze the life out of you, then swallow you whole. I should have guessed it would be Marlowe.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “The man you knew as Dr. Paul Brown believed that somewhere inside you, you might know where Marlowe Geary was. He suspected that your fugue states, the flights you made from your life as Annie Powers, were Ophelia’s attempts to return to him. He also felt you were on the cusp of remembering a lot of the things you had forgotten. So he devised ways to jog your memory a bit.”

  “Wait,” I say, lifting a hand. “Dr. Brown worked for you? So the encounter on the beach, the necklace—those were his ideas on how to jog my memory? So that you could find Marlowe Geary and exact your revenge?”

  “This is not only about me and what I want.”

  “No?”

  “No. It’s about both of us. I’m trying to help you.”

  I confided those things to my doctor, and he used them to manipulate my memory. It seems a relatively small violation in comparison to everything, but I feel my face go hot with anger. I realize that I have grown uncomfortable with rage. Ophelia used to rant and scream and weep. But Annie is always dead calm.

  “But Vivian brought me to Dr. Brown,” I say. I remember then that Gray told me that the doctor was someone Drew knew. And suddenly I feel sick, realizing how everything fits together.

  Parker gives me a sympathetic grimace; for a second he looks as though he might reach to comfort me, but I take a quick step back from him. “They thought they were helping you, Ophelia. They thought they were helping you to face your fears so that you could be well again. For Victory.”

  At first I think he means my husband, too. But it doesn’t sound like Gray. He’s too upright, too honest. He loves me too much. I can’t imagine him being a part of something like this. And if he were, why would he kill Briggs?

  “Gray didn’t know what was happening,” I say. “He was afraid, too, that Marlowe—or someone from the past—had come for me. That’s why he killed Briggs.”

  Parker offers a slow, sad nod. “You’re right. He never would have been a part of it. He would never deceive you or cause you so much pain. In fact, in his way, though only because he loves you, he has been enabling you. Maybe part of him doesn’t want you to remember.”

  “So who then? Who thought they were helping me then?” I yell, nearly shriek. I am startled by my own emotion. He seems startled, too, as though he didn’t expect any of this to upset me. He raises a calming hand.

  “Your in-laws, Drew and Vivian. A representative approached Vivian, told her that you’d contacted us for help and then changed your mind. She and Drew agreed to our plan to help you confront your past.”

  I think of Vivian taking me to Dr. Brown, of the fear on her face when I confronted her with the things that were happening to me. I struggle with this, trying to recast her as the liar and the manipulator she had to be to do that. I want to think I know her well enough to know that she was trying to help me. I hope that’s true, at least.

  “No,” I say, drawing in a breath to calm myself. Something is wrong. “They’d never let you hurt Victory. They’d die first.” I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything.

  “Admittedly,” he says with a mild shrug, “they weren’t aware the lengths to which we’d go to accomplish our goals. No one ever is.”

  He seems empty then, vacant, and I see that Alan Parker is a man who has been gutted by grief and rage, filled up again by a quest for revenge that he could never quite release, even when he knew better. I feel a sob rise up, a great tide moving inside my chest. />
  “They were so sure you were helpless, so devastated by the events of your life that you would never be whole. They resorted to these tactics to help you. Well, really to help Victory, I think, so that she would have a strong and healthy mother. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that now you’re the one to help them.”

  I feel that adrenaline pump again as my heart starts to thud.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s all up to you now, Ophelia.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say, moving closer to him. My voice has taken on the quality of a plea. “Where are we? Where’s my daughter?”

  I’ve never felt so frightened or so desperate, but he just moves away from the car. I see he is going to leave me here. “The keys are in the ignition. There’s a gun in the glove box. At the end of the road, you make a right. You’ll know where you are once you’re driving.”

  He starts walking away from me then, moving toward the trees that surround the airfield. “You need to be strong now, Ophelia. Stronger than you’ve ever been. For yourself, for your daughter, for me.”

  “You never needed me to lead you to Marlowe,” I call after him. “You knew where he was. Why are you doing this?”

  I see him lift the wad of tissues to his mouth, see his shoulders hunch into a cough. That sob that’s been living in my chest escapes through my throat.

  “What do you want me to do?” I cry out. “What do I need to do to get my daughter back?”

  Just then the tower lights go out. I look up, and as I do, the runway lights go dark. The plane is gone; the pilot must have moved into the hangar, because I never heard it take off again. The only lights come from the headlights of the car beside me.

  “Tell me!” I yell into the darkness. But the Angry Man is gone. I am alone. The air around me is thick with silence. Out of sheer desperation, I get into the car and start to drive. I turn onto the road, and he’s right—I do know where I am. The farm is less than ten miles away.

  “They are not here,” said Esperanza at the door to my house. She blocked the small opening she’d created and was peering at Detective Harrison worriedly through the crack.

  “I need to know where they are, Esperanza,” he said sternly. “This isn’t a social call.”

  She looked at him blankly, opened the door a little wider. She was shaking her head and seemed close to tears.

  “Miss Victory is with her abuela,” she said. “Mr. Gray, he left en la noche. Nothing. He say nothing. Mrs. Annie, she’s—” That’s where she started to cry. “They’re all gone.”

  “Let me in, Esperanza,” he said more gently, giving her what he hoped was a look of compassion. His “I’m a really good guy and I only want to help” look. It worked: She opened the door, and he stepped inside. She started talking fast, her tears coming harder now.

  “Mr. Gray, he call me the other day, say Victory is coming home, can I come back? I come back but no Victory,” she said.

  Harrison took her by the elbow, led her over to the couch, and stood beside her until she managed to stop crying and looked up.

  “We wait and wait,” she said. “In the night a call come. Mr. Gray leaves. He just told me go home and no worry. But he was very afraid.” She motioned at her face, to tell him she read Powers’s expression. “So I stay. I wait for them to come home.”

  “When was this?” he asked her.

  “Two nights I wait.”

  “And you haven’t heard anything else?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing. I call Mr. Drew. No answer; no one call back.”

  He walked over to the phone and scrolled through the numbers on the caller ID, looking for what, he didn’t know. “The call came on this phone?”

  She shook her head. “No. His cell phone.”

  Harrison felt like he was trying to hold on to a fistful of sand—the tighter his grasp, the faster it slipped away. His desperation was compounded by the promises he’d made to his wife. She didn’t care about the money, she said. She accepted his addiction. What she couldn’t understand and wasn’t sure she could forgive were the lies, the blackmail, the secrets he’d kept from her. She couldn’t understand what he’d done to me.

  “Why, Ray? Why didn’t you come to me? We could have asked my parents for money, taken out a loan. How could you let yourself go so low? It’s not you.”

  But that’s what she didn’t quite get. It was him. Part of him was in fact that low. Money and the things he thought it could give him—not possessions necessarily, but freedom, ease of living, a certain power he’d lacked all his life—obsessed him. That’s how he could risk the small amount they had in the hope of making more, that’s how he could blackmail us not just for the money to pay off his gambling debts but a hundred thousand dollars besides. And Gray had paid it—paid it without a word, because he loved me that much, because he wanted to protect me.

  “You need to make it right, Ray,” Sarah said.

  “How? How do I make it right?” he asked. He reached for her, but she moved away from him. She shifted over to the corner of their modular unit and sat there with her arms wrapped around herself in a protective hug.

  “You can start by paying him back everything you didn’t give the bookie and making a plan to pay back the rest,” she said gently.

  The thought filled him with dread. He couldn’t stand the idea that their savings account would be empty, that they’d go back to living paycheck to paycheck. That he’d always be worried about the next time the car broke down or the refrigerator started to leak. He wasn’t sure he could do it.

  “Sarah…” he started, but found he couldn’t finish.

  “Find a way to make things right, Ray.” She didn’t issue any threats or ultimatums; she didn’t ask him to leave the house. But he heard in her tone what she never said: Find a way to make things right, Ray, or I won’t ever be able to look at you the same way again.

  She must have seen the despair on his face, because she moved back over to him and placed a hand on his leg. He couldn’t even look at her.

  “Everybody makes mistakes, Ray,” she said, her voice very low and gentle. He’d heard her talk to the baby in this tone. “Everybody stumbles. It’s what you do then that makes or breaks your life. It’s what you do after you fall that’s the measure of who you are.”

  He left the room then. She called after him quietly, but he kept walking. He walked out onto his back porch and gazed up at the sky. He didn’t want to be in the same room with her. He couldn’t stand for her to see him cry.

  “What’s going on?” Harrison was snapped back to the present by Ella’s voice. She stood in the open doorway looking different somehow, a little angry maybe. She looked fit and strong dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, sneakers on her feet. She didn’t seem primped and coiffed in the usual way. He found himself staring at her, trying to figure out why she looked so different. She frowned at him and then walked over to Esperanza.

  “Where’s Gray?” Ella said, taking her by the shoulders.

  “Gone,” Esperanza said, starting to weep again. Ella embraced her. “I don’t know where.”

  Ella glanced back over at Harrison. “What’s he doing here?”

  “This is none of your business, Mrs. Singer. Go home,” he said.

  She gave him a dark look, released Esperanza, and walked over to him, got in his face. “Don’t tell me that. First Annie disappears. Then Drew and Vivian take off with Victory. There’s a memorial service—pretty premature, if you ask me. The woman’s only been missing two weeks. Now Gray’s gone. Someone needs to tell me what’s going on. It is my business. These people are my friends.”

  “Go home, Mrs. Singer,” he said again, walking over toward the door and holding it open for her. He saw color rise on her neck and cheeks, but she didn’t move.

  “I can get you into his office upstairs,” she said after a beat. “Maybe you’ll find some of the answers you’re looking for up there.”

  He remembered the
door with the keypad lock from his previous visits. “You know the code,” he said, not even bothering to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

  She nodded. “Ophelia let it slip.”

  “She let it slip?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Seems unlikely.”

  “Maybe she just got a little careless around her friends,” she said with a shrug.

  He didn’t quite believe her, but he was out of luck and out of time.

  “Okay, so what is it?”

  “You tell me what’s happening and I’ll tell you the code.”

  He released a sigh and rolled his eyes. “You’re not helping her by slowing me down. You know that.”

  “Just tell me.”

  He was desperate enough to do it. He told her everything he knew, starting with my fake identity and my history with Marlowe Geary and ending with Alan Parker and Grief Intervention Services.

  “You think she’s alive?”

  “I do. And I think she needs some help. I just don’t know how to give it to her.”

  Ella gave him a nod; he thought she looked a little sad. “It’s VICTORY, with a five for the V and a zero for the O.”

  He took the stairs to the office with Ella right behind him and punched in the code. The door unlocked, and he pushed it open. The room was dark, and when he stepped inside, he realized something that caused his stomach to bottom out.

  “You called her Ophelia,” he said, turning around.

  “Sorry, Detective Harrison, nothing personal. You should have taken your money and disappeared.”

  She held something in her hand that he didn’t recognize until the prongs shot into his body and electricity started to rocket through him. A horrific scream escaped him; he barely recognized it as his own voice. The room around him spiraled as the pain seemed to ratchet higher and higher until he could hardly form a thought in his mind. Before everything went black, he remembered his wife coming up behind him on the porch and wrapping her arms around him as he wept. He remembered feeling a terrible mingling of deep shame in himself, gratitude for her love, and the fervent hope that he could be worthy of her again.