by Mira Gibson
Killer.
But he wasn’t! He couldn’t be! He’d promised himself never again!
He told himself to keep hunting through the receipts, find proof of his whereabouts the night of the 12th. He should sneak into the precinct, review the evidence, strip it of anything incriminating.
Was this why he had felt responsible for Holly? Why he’d gone great lengths to protect her? Because she truly was innocent, because by some terrible stroke of bad luck the crimes he’d committed were falling squarely on her shoulders?
He couldn’t get any air into his lungs. Feeling light-headed and knowing it wouldn’t help to swig whiskey straight from the bottle, he did anyway, tipping the bottle up vertically, pouring booze down his throat, determined not to stop drinking until he was certain his rationale had been restored.
He couldn’t have done it, could he? He hadn’t killed them. Had he?
By the time he was staring at the bottom of the empty bottle, he had gotten no closer to the truth.
But Roberta King was weighing heavily on his mind.
If anyone knew what had really happened...
Killer...
She would know.
Decisively, he started for the door, but when he threw it open, ready to barrel down the hallway and out to his car, Holly was staring him in the face.
“I have to talk to you,” she said bluntly.
She looked furious and exhausted, and scowled at the scent of booze on his breath.
She also looked surreal—the one he had wanted all along.
His brain wasn’t working and words wouldn’t come, but he widened the door, welcoming her inside.
She breathed, “Jesus,” when she realized the mess—the torn apart couch, its cushions lain haphazardly across the floor, a blizzard of receipts everywhere, every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen ajar, the pots, pans, and recipe books from the islet now strewn across the linoleum.
“Were the police here?” she asked, catching him off guard.
He shook his head. His chest felt tight, his instincts alerting him to the probability that she knew things he didn’t, things that could shatter him even worse than the mind-bending conclusion he had already reached.
Expression hardening, she stated, “Cody was right. You were involved with Rose.”
“I didn’t know-”
“That you were involved with her? You didn’t know?” she challenged, her eyes misting over with tears. Her voice was thin and trembling when she asked, “Did you kill my sister?”
He swallowed hard, choking down his emotions. “I don’t know.”
They stared at each other for a long moment—Holly’s mouth twisting into a pained grimace as tears sprung from her eyes, Lucas quaking with an agonizing mix of remorse and panic.
Finally, he found the strength to whisper, “I thought she was you. And if I thought that, there’s no way I could’ve killed her.”
But Holly was deaf to him. “Where is Tucker?” she demanded, advancing on him.
“I don’t know.”
Angling up at him, holding herself back, she screamed, “Where the fuck is he?” But all he could do was repeat, I don’t know, I don’t know, hoping her balled fists wouldn’t fly.
They didn’t.
She drew her revolver instead, aiming it at his chest, her arms locked, her finger on the trigger.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” she warned, her tone firm though her hands were shaking. “I know he’s your son. I know the lengths you went to get your hands on him. I want him back.”
Stunned, the information hitting him like a sledgehammer to his chest, though there was something eerily familiar about it—Tucker was his son?—he slowly raised his hands in surrender and said, “I don’t know who I am.”
Chapter Seventeen
The wind howled, ticking sleet against the windowpane, as Mary tip-toed through her bedroom, stepping over the ever growing mess on the carpet, and opened the door a crack, listening. The hallway was dim and quiet. She heard the faint hum of the refrigerator downstairs and startled when the radiator behind her clanged to life.
Cody had been going to bed later and later, his schedule thrown thanks to developments in the case, developments he wouldn’t have if not for her, and she had only gotten a measly handful of beers in exchange.
Determined that a rift not form between them, Hannah had adjusted to his late timetable, pulling even longer hours at the station—her work as a police officer unrelenting, in at dawn, home long after night had fallen, entrusting Mary to cook dinner, tend to the house, act grateful.
Mary was certain they were asleep, their steadily murmuring conversation behind closed doors having dried up a good half-hour ago.
She was already in her jeans, a sensible sweater, lacy cheetah print lingerie hugging her every curve like a second skin beneath.
Pulling her boots on, her heart began punching so hard in her chest that she feared her rib cage might crack. It wasn’t the mere anxiety of sneaking out undetected that had her pulse rate quickening, her cheeks flushed hot, dewy beads of perspiration dampening her back and running down her cleavage where the fabric of her garments couldn’t catch it. The reason she was on pins and needles was Roberta. She hadn’t seen or talked to her best friend in days, not since Tucker had gone missing. Her friend hadn’t returned her phone call that night or responded to any of Mary’s text messages, each more urgent than the last—Why weren’t you in school today? and Where the hell are you, why haven’t you called? and stifling a sob, Don’t do this, don’t punish me for telling him, I had no choice.
The anticipation of seeing Roberta had Mary rocketing into the stratosphere of thrilled terror.
She was dying to know what her friend had been up to.
After lacing up her boots, she eased the door open, which caused the hinges to whine. She winced—had the sound woken them? She paused, listening hard, but was met with the same epic stillness.
As she made her slow, soundless way through the hallway, shifting her weight carefully from one foot to the next, avoiding the areas where the floorboards tended to creak beneath the carpet, she began praying to a God she didn’t believe in that she wouldn’t get caught.
Cody had kept up his end of the deal. He hadn’t dragged her into the precinct and more importantly he hadn’t told Hannah about Mary’s moonlighting at the club. In exchange, Mary had been a model citizen and student, but it had been at the expense of the friendship she cherished the most. She had to see Roberta.
She let out a jagged breath, coming to their bedroom door, and gave herself a moment to work up the nerve. Experience told her the floorboards spanning this portion of the hallway were especially noisy and with her half-sister’s renowned sleeping issues—what if Hannah was balled on the floor with her ear to the ground? The slightest creak could rouse her—Mary would have to rush, light and fast on her feet towards the stairs, or else leap, the landing of which, its presumed thud, could pose problems.
Opting to rush, she gave one hard listen at the door. She would’ve liked to hear snoring, but silence would have to be good enough. She went for it and didn’t stop until she was rounding into the kitchen.
As luck would have it, there were five beers in the refrigerator. Cool air poured out, the bright light in the fridge spilling into the kitchen, as she tucked one bottle under her arm and grabbed a second. She let the door close on its own in favor of checking the digital clock on the coffee maker. It was ten before midnight. In her eagerness, she had left her room too soon.
Reasoning to use her time wisely, she cracked one of the bottle’s open, sucked in a fast sip, and set the bottle on the counter as quietly as humanly possible, and then padded into the foyer where her jacket was hanging in the closet.
It took her a few moments to get bundled up—bomber jacket, scarf, skullcap, and fingerless gloves—after which she peered out at the wintery darkness through a small window on the front door.
Roberta was a dismal failure at
a great many things, but punctuality wasn’t one of them. She was never late and by the same measure she was never, ever early.
Two beers wouldn’t be enough.
If anything good had come out of her cringe-worthy conversation with Cody—Christ, the thought of him discovering her, that photo, topless and smiling, her legs spread around the back of a chair, made her want to crawl into a hole and die—it was the fact that Cody had forbid her to set foot in Diamonds.
She had been happy to obey.
She couldn’t deny she had relished the thrill of it. She’d come to look forward to the late nights, the doting attention, the powerful, dangerous feeling that the club had filled her with every time she'd crossed the threshold. But ever since Rose’s death, the place just didn’t feel the same. The white furniture she had once found glamorous seemed cheap and sticky. The cocktails she’d assumed were top-shelf tasted watery. And the clientele that had fawned over her, now met her with vacuous, lust-crazed glances, which tipped her off to a possibility she hadn’t before considered, that they might expect her performance to escalate into debasing acts she wouldn’t in her right mind volunteer for.
Diamonds was the last place she wanted Roberta to take her.
Chugging her beer and hoping Roberta’s Audi would soon growl up the driveway, she figured Diamonds had always been seedy. It had taken the death of someone she’d loved to open her eyes.
She couldn’t very well toss the empty bottle in the trash where Hannah would easily discover it, so she wedged it into her jacket pocket, stole another beer from the fridge, and rounded back into the foyer, double-fisting the daddy sodas that she hoped like hell would loosen her up enough to go through with another long night at Diamonds, her penance or so it felt for spending time with her best friend.
Peering out the window, its pane distorted with splintered ice, she scanned the dark, snowy driveway, the row of gnarly Maples and bowing Pines beyond lining the road, all traced in a razor’s edge of moonlight.
Shadowy movement caught her eye. Turning up the driveway was the Audi, its headlights off. The vehicle lurched and bounced with the slick terrain and came to a stop well before reaching the house.
Quickly, Mary juggled her beers while unlocking the door and in the same fashion locked up as soon as she’d stepped onto the icy landing.
Though her cheeks stiffened from the cold, Mary was smiling, as she jogged down the driveway, while Roberta maneuvered the Audi pulling a three-point turn.
She didn’t lower into the passenger’s seat so much as jump in, beaming ecstatically at her friend whose serious expression caught her off guard. She slammed her door shut and hissed, “Shit,” in delayed reaction to the thud, her eyes locking on the house, scanning for signs Cody or her sister had heard. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, she reminded herself. She couldn’t let her excitement get the best of her, but she threw her arms around Roberta anyway, beer bottles chinking against the car window.
“Missed you too,” Roberta said coolly, though she held the hug, her body saying what her tone couldn’t. As they loosened their grip, she affirmed, “Seriously though, I missed you.”
Smiling, Mary let out a relieved exhale and shifted into her seat, clamping one beer between her knees, setting the other in the cup holder on the dash, while fastening her seatbelt, after which Roberta stomped on the accelerator.
The Audi barreled down the driveway and when they reached the road, pulling left, Roberta flipped the headlights on.
It wasn’t until Mary had cracked a beer open and sucked down a long haul that she noticed her friend’s right cheek looked discolored—strangely blue under a caked sheen of foundation.
Alarmed, she breathed, “Damn,” reaching out to touch Roberta’s face, but the serious girl batted her hand away. “Is that a bruise?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, brushing her fingertips over the injury, which only piqued Mary’s curiosity to intolerable levels. Perhaps because Mary was staring at her, she added, “Back-handed slap. I took it like a champ.”
“Ron?”
“Are you kidding me?” she gaped. “Conover wouldn’t have a chance in hell of going on breathing if he ever smacked me, you know that.”
Mary meant for her response, Damn straight to be in agreement, but it felt brittle and wavered badly. Rumor had it that Ron Conover had lent a hand in murdering a few under-aged girls up north and since overhearing the gossip Mary had dealt with him accordingly, but never without Rose’s ferocious support. She wouldn’t put anything past Ron, certainly not a backhanded slap to keep Roberta in line.
She feared to imagine how Ron would react when she returned to the club. He generally despised girls who flaked and didn’t show up for their shifts and Mary had been absent for more than a few.
“Who hit you?”
Roberta concentrated as she maneuvered the Audi through a cloverleaf, merging onto the Daniel Webster Highway. Once she straightened the vehicle out, settling into a whopping forty-five miles per hour, she mentioned, “We have a few things to talk about.”
“I’m listening.”
Roberta reached for the beer in the cup holder, but Mary took it instead.
After cracking the bottle open, she handed it to Roberta, whose gaze snapped to the rearview to quickly confirm there were no cops behind them. The coast was clear so she chugged half the bottle. When she handed it back and Mary returned the bottle to the cup holder, she stated, “Lucas has been off.”
“Off?”
“I’ve seen it before, but not like this, and quite frankly, I fucked up big time-”
“Off how? What have you seen before?” she insisted, staring wildly at her friend.
Mumbling under her breath, she said, “I didn’t see it. I just didn’t see it.”
Mary drank her beer, waiting patiently for her friend to make sense.
“You know how I told you about Gerty? How she didn’t remember the worst of it? How she couldn’t, like her brain filed those memories away in a place she couldn’t access?”
“Yeah,” said Mary, feeling a sting of jealousy. She could remember every last disgusting second with her father. No amount of booze had been able to kill it, mask it, or even blur it into enough obscurity that she might forget. Months had passed and the memories, those harrowing flashes that surged through her mind at the worst times—in the shower, lying in bed, flirting with jocks on the football field—hadn’t quit but seemed to grow stronger, more urgent, as though her subconscious was designed to never let her move on. Irony was a bitch and she hated to resent Dale for not beating her, torturing her, making things so bad that some miraculous psychological phenomenon would take root and burry all that she had endured. She grit her teeth at the thought, gaze locking on the darkness where the headlights failed to penetrate.
“When Gerty was in the pit, when things were happening to her, she was functioning from this other place, this zombie-autopilot place, like a second person was living inside her mind, present for the worst of it, gone whenever Gerty had to lead the normal aspects of her life.”
If there was a connection, Mary wasn’t getting it. “What does this have to do with Lucas?”
“Gerty didn’t need to keep living that way once she got out. She was smart enough, her mind was strong enough to like wall off that second part of her. The person who had gone through that shit like died in her, because she didn’t need it anymore, that mode of functioning.” After a deep breath that to Mary looked as though Roberta was trying to ward off a nauseous spell, she finally said, “Lucas’s second... persona, the part of him that took on the brunt of his shitty upbringing... it never died.”
“What?” she asked, stunned yet confused, the concept too haunting to trust.
“It takes him over,” she explained. “It swallows him up and takes over his body and functions for him, and fuck,” she snorted a strange laugh that sounded angry or frustrated or just plain pissed that she hadn’t been smart enough to catch onto Lucas’s multiplicity sooner
. “I didn’t recognize it. I didn’t realize that the Lucas I’ve been dealing with was the dark side of him, the disturbed side. I should’ve known. All that shit about Killer.” It sounded like she was talking to herself all of a sudden. “Why would he open up to me about that if he was in his right mind? He wouldn’t. Of course I was dealing with his dark side. I should’ve known.”
Roberta snapped out of it in time to pull off the exit, squeezing the brakes and angling around the off-ramp. It wasn’t until she veered onto the road that Mary caught sight of a street sign and realized they couldn’t possibly be heading towards Diamonds.
“Where are we going?”
“The shed,” she said easily.
Not that Mary was disappointed, the shed was a paradise compared to the club especially since she dreaded facing Ron, but she asked, “Why?”
“It’s just a pit stop. Gisele’s cool with us showing up a bit late.” She slowed the Audi, turning onto Union Ave, which would take them along the Opechee Reservoir. “I thought he was like me, like us, but he’s not, not in the sense that he’s been, essentially, someone else. But he caught on. He’s been figuring it out. And today, he came to me for answers.” She indicated the bruise on her face. “I thought he was going to kill me.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“He looked... I’ve never seen a person look so angry, the rage in his eyes, the hurt, like I had betrayed him. He only hit me once, but I could tell he was holding himself back. He doesn’t know, though.”
“Know what?”
Again Roberta squeezed the brakes, cutting the steering wheel, this time turning onto Messer Street.
Mary was about to launch into questions, but her friend broke off on a new tangent. “Whatever his disease... Mary, he thought Rose was her twin.”
“What?”
“All those times he came to the club, he thought Rose was Holly. I can’t tell you how many times I hung out with him in his apartment, drinking-” The very mention prompted her to reach for her beer and after a long sip, she continued. “Doing blow and talking all night. And I had no idea he was off. I’ve even spent time with him since Rose and Benjamin were killed, but that’s when I realized what was going on with him; when he asked me to help him find Holly. That other side of him doesn’t know Rose is dead, because it doesn’t know Rose exists at all. That other side of him just thinks Holly disappeared again, like he’s reliving a nightmare from ten years ago.”