Twin Offerings

by Ruth Parker

  “Where are we going?” Samantha whined.

  “I told you,” his mother said. “You’re going to etiquette school.”

  What the hell did his mom just say? Was he still asleep, having a drug-induced hallucination? His sisters were sitting on the couch. They were wearing matching blue dresses, crisp and starched, with rounded peter pan collars. The girls sat primly with white lace gloves on their clasped hands. Samantha had a matching white ribbon in her hair. His mother was brushing Susie’s hair, a ribbon draped over the arm of the couch.

  They sure looked like they were going to etiquette school. “What’s going on?” he asked from the hallway.

  The shock on his mother’s face was obvious, and a flash of guilt spread across her eyes. “Good,” she said nervously. “I was just going to wake you up.” She was tapping her foot in a random, non-rhythmic pattern while she made wild strokes with the hairbrush.

  “Ow, that hurts,” Susie said as the brush caught in her tangled mass of curly hair.

  “You gotta look nice. Gotta be pretty. When you meet Miss Madeline, she’s going to think you’re the best little girls she’s ever seen.”

  “Who the hell is Miss Madeline?” he asked.

  “She owns the etiquette school. We’re going to go and visit her to see if she’ll take the girls as students.”

  He didn’t think his mother even knew how to spell etiquette, let alone gave a shit if her daughters used the right salad fork or said whom instead of who. She let the three of them run wild, not caring what they did just so long as they didn’t bother her or ask for money.

  She expected him to believe that she was going to pay for some fancy etiquette school for both of the girls? Not a chance. She must have been using heavily—out of her mind delusional—if she thought he would believe that blatant of a lie.

  “Almost done,” his mother said. She went into the other room and came back with an old-fashioned perfume bottle. It was etched crystal and had a long tube connected to a rubber bulb. “Gotta smell pretty too. Come here.” The girls closed their eyes as the mist of perfume landed on their necks and chests. The smell was overpowering, a cloying scent of flowers mixed with a pungent sharp musk.

  His mom tossed him the keys and told him to get in the car. The four of them drove in silence for a while, his mother speaking only to give him driving directions.

  “What’s etiquette school?” Susie asked, growing restless and bored in the backseat.

  “I already told you,” their mother snapped.

  “It’s where they teach you to be stuck-up and snobby,” he said.

  “No it’s not,” Samantha argued. “It’s where they teach you to be a fine lady. How to have real tea parties and say things like, ‘good day madam, how do you do?’”

  “How much does this etiquette school cost?” he asked his mother.

  “Why don’t you just shut up and concentrate on driving,” she said.

  “The lady gives scholarships if she thinks you deserve it.”

  “Everyone be quiet,” their mother said in a shrill, wavering voice that was as frightening as it was unpredictable.

  He drove them for another forty-five minutes. They went east of Portland, on I-84, through the mountain pass. They were headed out to the middle of nowhere—an odd location to teach girls how to be polite little ladies.

  He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew it wasn’t good.

  They finally came to a large old farmhouse that might have been nice once, but if it ever had, those days were long gone. The boards were peeling paint, the wrought iron gable decorations were pitted with rust, and the white railing that wrapped around the large porch was missing several beams, like a rotted, toothless grin.

  He made to get out of the car, but his mother told him to stay put. He watched as she took the girls up to the porch and knocked on the door. It was cold outside, the wind blowing ice off the mountain range. The girls would be freezing in their fancy dresses. A woman answered the door and stepped out onto the porch. She was fat, wearing faded jeans and a large turtleneck sweater. He was parked far away, but not so far that he couldn’t see the sallow skin hanging off her jaw, the frizzy, weightless way her blond hair amassed at the base of her neck, and the nervous way her eyes darted back and forth. She ushered the girls and his mother inside the house and closed the door.

  That had been a cold day, all those years ago. Remembering, it was like a bad dream that had happened to someone else. Today, on the other hand, was going to be the best day of his life. He was finally going to be rewarded for all the suffering and misery he’d endured. As if on cue, he heard footsteps and hushed voices in the distance. He took the lens cap off his spotting scope and looked between the trees.

  There she was. Laurel. For the first time that he could remember, he smiled. He couldn’t help it.

  In a matter of minutes, she would be his. Forever.

  Twenty

  Fletcher was at his desk, reviewing the footage from Delila’s clothing store for the thousandth time. Yesterday, the unsub had outwitted them all with a god damned vinegar and baking soda noise bomb. He set off the noise bomb, lit a dumpster fire, then called in to say he’d seen a suspicious man with a suspicious package in the alleyway behind the clothing store. It was so stupidly simple, Fletcher wanted to punch something. Or someone.

  The young detective on post had heard the blast and responded, leaving the unsub the opportunity to get the dresses. The cashier had tried to stall, but said that the man had just thrown cash on the counter and left the store with the dresses. The young detective had suggested that they dust the cash for fingerprints; Stella gave him fifty minus points and assigned the poor kid to graveyard shift for the next month.

  It was demoralizing. The asshole had outsmarted them with the sort of prank that a middle school kid would pull. All their leads were cold. Fletcher hated to admit it, but he was starting to think that the best they could hope for was a good lead when they found the bodies of Madison and Melissa Webb.

  What a fucking pisser.

  He couldn’t even enjoy the memories of last night with Laurel. It had been hot—no doubt about that. But it had been so much more. They had fallen asleep together and Fletcher was shocked to find out how much he’d enjoyed just holding her close. Her warm, smooth skin pressed against his body had been so soothing, had felt so right. It was something you could get addicted to. He didn’t want to go back to his small hotel room, toss and turn in that cold hard bed until he finally fell asleep.

  He didn’t think he could ever go back to that.

  But that wasn’t something he could afford to think about right now. Right now, the only important thing was finding Madison and Melissa. There had to be something they were missing, some small clue that would point them towards the killer. Fletcher had to find him before he hurt the girls—before he hurt Laurel.

  At the insistence of the Sheriff’s Department, the dress store had put up one grainy camera and it was trained on the cash register. There wasn’t much to see of the unsub on the surveillance footage, just an arm and half of the back of his head. They’d gotten a sketch artist to work with the cashier, but Fletcher wasn’t going to bother to look at the sketch. Those things never looked like the guy.

  He closed the video player on his computer and rolled his chair away from the desk. This had been a waste of time.

  He took out his phone and called Laurel. He was going to go back to her house—he’d hated the idea of leaving her alone even for just a few hours. He kept telling himself over and over that she could take care of herself, but that didn’t stop the constant worry when he was away. It was ten and he hadn’t eaten anything yet except the thick, bitter coffee from the staff room. Laurel would be able to tell him a good place to stop on the way back to her house.

  She did not answer her phone. He called again, but she did not answer. There was only one reason he could think of why she wouldn’t answer her phone.

  If anything happened to h
er, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. It would be his fault. He’d left her alone, knowing that the unsub was fixated on her.

  And escalating.

  Fletcher dashed to the parking lot and got behind the wheel, speeding down the street towards her house. He tried her phone again.

  No answer.

  The sun wasn’t going to come out today—the clouds were too thick, the sky too dark, the air too heavy. That suited Laurel just fine. Sunlight would have been incongruous, would have been all wrong. The reporter had driven them deep into the woods, using a bumpy service road that was slowly being reclaimed by the wilderness. Twice they had to stop the car to clear fallen branches. When the road petered out, they got out and walked.

  “How do you know where we’re going?” Laurel asked. They were following a narrow trail that hadn’t been used in some time. The damp dirt path would disappear under thick undergrowth, only to reappear several yards ahead. In many places, the trail was completely subsumed by tree growth and rocks, but Meredith was confident.

  “He gave me GPS coordinates,” Meredith said. She had typed the coordinates into her phone and was getting step-by-step directions, their path marked out in bright blue on the screen. “He said he comes out here every so often to visit her.”

  Laurel forced her feet to keep going, the wet leaves sticking to her shoes. They trudged along, not covering much distance at their slow, careful pace.

  “It should be just up ahead. Says one thousand feet,” Meredith said.

  “One thousand feet is a long way,” Laurel said. “That’s almost a quarter-mile.”

  “Fucking brainiacs think they know everything,” Meredith muttered.

  They kept going, stepping over branches, wading through thick bushes. Then finally, Meredith stopped in her tracks. Laurel had been so focused on the ground, looking at her feet so she wouldn’t trip, that she almost crashed into the reporter when she stopped short.

  “Holy God,” Meredith said. Laurel looked up. There was a small clearing, not more than a few feet around, where nothing grew. It was as if the ground had gone sour.

  Laurel’s vision got black and fuzzy around the edges. Her head swam with a disorientating current. Underneath her coat, she broke out in a cold sweat, her skin feeling like a clammy slab of meat wrapped around a numb skeleton.

  There was her sister, a crumpled heap on the dirt.

  Laurel ran, her feet finding a path in the uneven terrain. She saw a tea set on the ground, bright white with flowers circling the rim. As she got closer, she saw the bundle of cloth, a dark, tattered mass of fabric. Underneath the fabric would be the bones of a scared little girl who just wanted to get fancy pictures taken, a girl who drank a cup of milk and woke up in the clutches of a madman.

  Laurel dropped to her knees, unable to bring herself to reach out and touch the fabric. She needed to know, needed to see the proof of her dark betrayal. She looked at the tea set. It was the same as the tea set in the background of the Polaroid she’d shown Underwood and Fletcher. The same as the one from the recent crime scene.

  The killer had posed Leigh’s body, set her up in a macabre tea party for one, in the middle of the wilderness where she could stay for eternity. Or, at least, until the flesh rotted and her bones collapsed into a sad pile.

  Laurel’s hand trembled as she reached for the navy blue dress. Her eye caught on the tea set again, so bright against the rich, dark soil. It was too bright. It looked new, like it had just been set out. The cups and pot were all right-side up. There was no mud, no dirt—no sign of fifteen years of Oregon rain and slush and wind.

  The navy blue dress was wrong too. There was a frayed fabric edge, she could see that. But there were no hems, no buttons, no sleeves, no collar.

  This wasn’t Leigh. This was a set-up.

  Laurel scrambled to get up, her foot slipping on the wet ground. She turned around and saw a tall, thin figure looming over her. His pale, washed-out blue eyes eerily calm—almost serene. His crooked, narrow face twisted into a smile.

  It was him.

  “Mommy,” he said. He raised his hand high above his head and brought it down in a swift movement.

  There was pain—terrible pain, white and clear as a bell.

  Then nothing but the black.

  Twenty-One

  “Where is Laurel Gates?” Fletcher asked as he stormed through the front doors of the Sheriff’s Department. Her car was in her driveway, but she was not in the house. He’d banged on the door for ten minutes, accounting for the possibility that she was in the shower, calling her cell phone number repeatedly. When she finally did get to her cell phone, the first thing she would see on her screen was eighty-nine missed calls from Fletcher, but he didn’t even care if he looked obsessive.

  At the risk of getting another broken rib, he’d gotten a running start and hoisted himself over the fence. He felt something inside his chest give with a faint pop. The pain was agonizing, spreading all the way down his side. He let out a scream that he was ashamed to admit was not a heroic war cry but closer to the sound of a wounded cat—but he pulled himself up and over to the other side.

  He peered inside all the windows, pressing his ears against the glass, but he didn’t hear her inside. He stopped short of busting a window, because he knew the alarm system was activated and did not want to explain himself to the police. Again. The second climb over the fence back into the front yard was twice as painful, but he barely noticed it. He was too busy thinking about where Laurel could be. He tried her cell phone again, but there was no answer. He did a haphazard lap around the neighborhood, thinking that she might have gone for a walk, but he did not see her. Already in his car, he decided to go to back to the Sheriff’s Department, hoping that she had decided to go into work today.

  She made it the seven and a half miles to the lab, on what, rollerblades? Her car is in the driveway. Fletcher pushed away those unpleasant thoughts. He sped to the department, parking in the handicap spot closest to the entrance. He asked all the detectives, all the admin staff, the public defender who was there visiting a client. Few even knew Laurel, let alone her whereabouts.

  Fletcher sat down at his work station, not sure what to do. He knew that if an adult went incommunicado for a few hours, it was not a police emergency. Even accounting for Laurel being a former victim of the state’s most wanted killer, she had only been gone for a few hours tops. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of a break in. In fact, all her doors had been deadbolted from the outside, indicating she had left with her keys and locked the door behind. Or whoever took her at least had the presence of mind to think of that little detail.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Fletcher told himself.

  “Well excuse me then,” a voice said. “I’ll just take my hot lead to Underwood. Let him have all the glory.” Fletcher looked up. It was one of the detectives, Barbara Bowen. She’d been in charge of tracking down buyers for the Whitmoore Co. Ltd. tea set.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Talking to myself.”

  “If you’re not cursing yourself, you’re not trying hard enough,” she said.

  “Have you seen Laurel Gates around here?” he asked.

  “The scientist?” she asked. “Oh my God, she’s the one with the sister—” Her eyes went wide with shock as she put it all together. “The killer, he’s the one that took her sister?”

  “Now you can see why I’m worried,” he said. He was more than worried. His stomach was puckered into a hard spasm of fear. In his long years of tracking bad guys and cleaning up their messes, he’d learned to control his emotions, ignore any fear or anxiety and concentrate on the facts. It was different with Laurel. He couldn’t separate his feelings for her from the case. He never wanted to let an unsub slip from his grasp, never wanted to get there too late—but if this asshole did have Laurel and Fletcher got there too late, he could never live with himself.

  “How long ago did you last talk to her?” Bowen asked.

  “This morning,” he sai
d. “When I left the house to come in and review the security footage from the clothing store. That was at seven-thirty.” She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing about the fact that he’d obviously stayed the night at Laurel’s house.

  “It’s not even eleven yet,” Bowen said.

  “Her car’s in the driveway, she’s not answering the front door or her cell phone.” Fletcher wanted to crawl out of his own skin and scream and kick and run. He had to do something.

  “Okay,” Bowen said. Her voice was calm and steady. “We’ll send a patrol car to sit outside her house. I’ll alert everyone in the municipal complex to be on the lookout for her. But since it’s only been a couple hours…”

  “I know,” he said. He had to find this killer. Now. If he could break down this sicko’s door, put a knee into his spine, and tighten a pair of handcuffs around his wrists, at least then he would know that Laurel was safe.

  “I came to tell you something I got on the tea sets,” she said. “But if you really do want me to take it to Underwood instead, if you’re going to be busy looking for her…”

  His heart leapt. He wanted whatever lead Bowen had. He was going to be the one to take the son of a bitch down. “What did you get?”

  “Well,” she hedged. “We couldn’t track down any purchases through eBay or any vintage glassware forums.”

  “Vintage glassware forums?” He couldn’t imagine such an odd way to devote your free time. Then again, he devoted all his free time to death and heartache.

  “Oh yeah, this stuff’s really popular. There’s a pretty big online community for old dishes and kitchenware. We didn’t find anyone who bought any of the tea sets, but there’s someone in North Plains who’s sold at least three of these exact sets in the last couple years.”

  That was good. That was really good. “Who is he?”

  “That much I haven’t been able to figure out—yet,” she was quick to add. She set down a pile of papers onto Fletcher’s desk. “His profile says his location is in North Plains, but there’s no other personal information. Here’s printouts of his activity on the forum, all his posts and comments.”