“Why don’t we go somewhere tonight? We could catch a movie? Or maybe go ice skating in Laurelwood?”
I tried not to let my face show anything. It was sort of a trick question. As much as I loved her, I didn’t want to spend Saturday night with my mother. But I couldn’t say that. It would hurt her feelings.
“We’re going out for my birthday, right?” I said instead.
“Yes, that’s right. Shall I make reservations at Pagliacci’s?”
Pagliacci’s was where we always went for special occasions.
“Could we go somewhere else this time?” Even I heard the annoying whine in my voice. “Like, somewhere out of town? Let’s go into Seattle.”
I don’t know why I said it. Mom hated going to Seattle. She got overwhelmed with the traffic and irritated by the constant press of people. The one time she took me to an orthodontist appointment in Seattle when I was fourteen, she was totally freaked out the whole time. She spent most of the appointment looking over her shoulder and checking her watch. The next day she’d switched me to an orthodontist in Lynnwood.
“Of course. If that’s what you want,” Mom said. She stood and came around to my side of the table and rubbed her hand over my hair.
I ducked away from her hand and walked to the couch, flopping down and reaching for the remote.
She trailed after me. “Come on, Olivia . . .”
But I’d stopped listening. On the TV was a political ad for Gavin Montgomery. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t recognized him before.
“Mom.” I pointed at the TV. This was my chance. “Do you know him?”
We watched as Gavin Montgomery’s smiling face flashed across the screen. The ad started with him standing tall and broad-shouldered in front of a crowd of people at what looked like a factory, then faded to stills of him speaking in front of a crowd.
Mom stared at the TV, her fair eyebrows scrunched into tiny knots over her jewel-blue eyes. The blood had drained completely from her face, leaving her pale and stark.
“Mom?” I said. A fizz of worry settled in my stomach.
She shook her head hard. “No. Of course I don’t know him.” Her face was suddenly completely blank, like a shutter had fallen. Perhaps I’d mistaken her reaction just a moment before. “How on earth would I know him?”
“He just . . .” I hesitated, searching her face. Had I imagined it?
I stared at her, feeling like I wanted to crack her open and see what was inside. But Mom’s face was pale as chalk. Maybe I didn’t want to talk to her about it. Not if it upset her this much.
“He’s running for reelection to state senate,” I said carefully. “We were talking about the elections at school, and I wondered who you were going to vote for.”
“I honestly hadn’t thought about it.” She breezed over to the remote and turned the TV off. “I’m going for a run,” she said, heading for the stairs to change.
I knew right then that she was hiding something about Gavin Montgomery. Part of me was terrified to find out what, but the other, bigger part of me wasn’t terrified at all. That other part was pretty pissed off.
So I decided then and there that I needed to talk to Kendall, sooner rather than later.
I was going to find out what my mom was hiding.
15
* * *
ABI
november
I watched Sarah and Brad’s car disappear around the corner and felt loneliness mingle with the chill creeping over my skin.
Maybe I should’ve gone with them. Anything would be better than the feeling of emptiness pressing down on me.
But I cleared my throat and turned to Anthony. “I have those pictures printed out for you. Do you want to come inside? I’ll grab them.”
“Sure.” He shoved his shaggy locks out of his eyes and looked at me earnestly, falling in step with me as we crunched toward my house. “Have the police closed Olivia’s case?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so. They just aren’t investigating it. Is that unusual?”
Anthony hesitated. “To be honest, not really,” he said. “Budget cuts mean there are fewer detectives investigating crimes these days. There simply aren’t enough resources, so detectives prioritize what they think are the most important or solvable cases.”
I opened the door and gestured him in, then gathered the pictures I’d printed from the kitchen table and handed them to him.
He glanced at them, then folded them into neat squares and continued, “What is unusual is that Portage Point is one of the biggest tourist destinations in Washington. A potential homicide here should be as irresistible as crack. The police should be all over this. I also find it curious that the detectives didn’t examine Olivia’s skin for trace evidence or embedded fragments, although the police report did note there was no sign of a struggle or blood spatter at the scene.”
I winced, and Anthony abruptly stopped talking. “I’m sorry,” he said, touching my hand. “That was insensitive of me.”
“No.” I shook my head and shoved aside a throb of emotion rising like vomit in my throat. “I need to know everything. What does it mean, then? If Olivia’s case should be an important one, but they’ve been told to stop investigating it?”
“I really don’t know. It’s an election year. Maybe the police chief wants to keep his crime stats down.”
“But as you said, closing a homicide should be a big deal here.”
“Not if you hide that it was a homicide.”
I breathed out hard, shock rippling through me. “You think they’re hiding it?”
“No.” He shook his head vigorously and ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “That came out wrong. I’m sure nobody’s hiding anything. Honestly. It’s probably just shoddy detective work.”
I nodded, but my mind was whirling.
“Anyway”—he held the printed pictures up, then slid them into an inner pocket in his coat—“thanks for these. I’ll have a look and let you know if I see anything in them.”
“Thank you. Actually . . .” I dug a toe in the tile, hating how awkward I was. “I owe you a couple of thank-yous.”
“For what?”
“For looking at the police report. And those pictures. I really appreciate it.”
“It’s no problem.” Anthony smiled. He did that a lot, I noticed. His face seemed made for it, wide cheekbones, a high forehead, upturned eyebrows. It was a face you could trust. “I know how hard it is. I’m happy to help any way I can.”
“Do you want a coffee?” I asked.
It was an impulse, an unfamiliar one. I never sat down with people over coffee. I wasn’t good at small talk. But I found I didn’t want him to go. I wanted somebody to talk to.
“I, uh, don’t have any pumpkin spice syrup, but I have lots of sugar.”
Anthony laughed, and it was a nice sound. Warm, like a blanket. “Sure, yeah, I’d love one. I probably shouldn’t stay too long, though. I have a sitter.”
“Sitter?” I echoed.
“For my mom. I have a health-care assistant who watches her for a few hours on the weekends.”
“It must be hard,” I said as I scooped ground coffee into the french press. “Losing her by inches.”
“I suppose I could look at it that way,” Anthony said. “Really I’m just grateful I have her at all.”
It was a funny answer, so different from how I would look at it. But he was right.
“How much sugar do you want?” I asked Anthony.
“Three spoons, please. No milk.” I made a face and he saw it, smiling sheepishly. “I have a horrible sweet tooth.”
“And yet you’re so slim.” I handed him his coffee, and we went to the couch, sitting on opposite ends. “Guys are always like that. All I have to do is look at sugar and I gain five pounds.”
He laughed. “I highly doubt that.”
He sipped his coffee without speaking, seeming completely comfortable with long silences. I liked that about him.
I pushed
a handful of papers across the coffee table toward him. “I know I gave you a list of everybody Olivia knows, but I’ve also written down how each of them knows her. And I’ve made a timeline of Olivia’s day. Or at least what I know of it. Tyler said Olivia left the barbecue at ten forty-five, and she was found at three in the morning.”
It helped, these lists. To have a purpose, a plan; to move with it. For the first time in more than a month, I had a reason to get up in the morning beyond sitting vigil at the hospital. I felt more in control of my world.
First, I needed to find out who the baby’s father was. He could be the one who’d pushed her, or, at the very least, he might have some idea who had. Second, I needed to talk to Olivia’s friends, her teachers, the people she knew.
Anthony set his coffee down and picked up my notes.
“This is incredibly organized,” he said, looking surprised. “You’d make a good investigator.”
I ducked my head, embarrassed. “Thanks.”
Outside, wind clattered against the house and a draft sneaked under the front door, licking at my ankles with an icy tongue. I pulled the knitted blanket from the back of the couch over my legs and tucked my feet under my body.
“If the detectives didn’t initially take Olivia’s phone, maybe there’s something else in her room they left.” Anthony set his coffee down. “Do you mind if I have a look?”
“I guess not,” I said doubtfully. “But they probably took anything important.”
“Maybe. I just want to look around.”
I showed him to Olivia’s room, opening the door slowly. It physically hurt to go in, to see the bed where she’d last slept, the vanity mirror she’d looked in only a month ago.
I hovered in the doorway as Anthony entered her private space. Dirty jeans lay inside out on the floor. One tennis shoe had been kicked across the room and lay upside down near the bookshelf; the other peeked from under the side of her bed.
Anthony shuffled through Olivia’s drawers, systematically pushing aside balls of crumpled clothing. He opened her closet, rifled through her clothes. I turned away. It seemed too intimate. I wanted to tell him to stop. But I would do anything to find out the truth. I’d sell my soul to the devil if I had to.
Anthony knelt next to the bed, pushed a stray shoe aside, and lifted up the duvet. His dark head moved left and right, like a typewriter. He thrust an arm under and pulled out a small white plate—one from the kitchen set downstairs. It had been used as an ashtray, a cigarette crushed in the middle of a pile of cement-gray ash.
Anthony held the plate up for me to see. “Did Olivia smoke?”
“No.” I shook my head vigorously. “No way. That’s one thing I know she wouldn’t do. She was completely against smoking. Always yelled at me if I did.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe one of her friends’?”
Anthony bent closer and squinted. “There’s lipstick on the end.”
I leaned in to inspect the cigarette butt. Sure enough, coral-colored lipstick marked the end.
“It’s definitely not Olivia’s, then. She hated lipstick. Said it made her lips feel ‘icky.’ She is—was—a bit of a tomboy like that.” I worked hard to keep my voice from wobbling.
Anthony plucked thoughtfully at the stubble on his chin. I noticed for the first time a speckling of gray threading through the dark.
“We need to find out whose this is. It could lead us to one of the last people who was with Olivia. Maybe she knows something.”
“But how?”
“One step at a time,” he said. “We’ll start at the beginning and keep picking apart the threads until we find what connects. In a way, we’re lucky the detectives didn’t look too hard and didn’t have the CSIs come around. Now we have this to use as evidence.”
Anthony pulled a plastic bag from his back pocket and tilted the cigarette into the bag. “I have a friend. If there’s DNA on this, she’ll find it.”
He knelt and reached under the bed again. “There’s something else.”
What he pulled out made my blood run cold.
It was a wooden photo frame with its glass shattered. The photo inside had been ripped out and torn to pieces.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
Dread throbbed in my chest, drawing my mind quickly down the stairs of my own murky subconscious.
“It’s a picture of my dad, but—oh, it’s complicated.”
“It could be important, Abi.”
I exhaled sharply. “I never told Olivia who her father was. But one day when she was in first, maybe second grade, she came home from school crying because she didn’t have a dad. I framed this picture of my dad and told her it was her dad. It seemed to help, and she’s had it here ever since.”
I stopped abruptly, not wanting to tell him who Olivia’s father was. I was a coward, hiding like a rabbit in the woods. But all the fear and worry I’d been holding back was rushing in. Memories of Olivia’s father’s threats reawakened my deepest fears. Nobody could know she was his.
I expected more questions, but Anthony didn’t say a word. He slipped the contents of the broken frame and its torn picture in another plastic bag.
Anthony studied me. “You look beat.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, even though I felt dangerously close to passing out. My body ached from my run, and I was basically surviving on alcohol fumes and short bursts of nightmare-riddled sleep.
“Let me make you something to eat.”
“What?” I said, startled. “No, I’m okay.”
“Come on.”
Anthony took my elbow and led me down the stairs to the couch, pressing me into its soft folds before he went to rummage around in the kitchen. I watched him, feeling disconnected from my old life. Like I’d split in two and was walking in parallel lines. It felt weird: somebody in my house, taking care of me. It had never happened before. I took care of Olivia, but there was nobody to care for me.
Anthony pulled a package of dried pasta from the cupboard, along with a jar of Classico. He made us a simple pasta dish, then cut the mold off the edge of a block of cheese he found in the fridge, and shredded it over plates piled high with steaming noodles and sauce.
He quietly moved Olivia’s schoolbooks from the dining room table to the kitchen counter. I turned my face away, unable to contemplate what it meant that we were moving her things, rearranging our lives. It was unbearably, intolerably sad.
Anthony brought the plates to the dining room table and called me over. “It isn’t gourmet or anything, but here you go,” he said.
I sat across from him and mumbled an awkward thanks. Part of me resented the fact that I had to eat, that I had to carry on at all. But the other part knew he was right. I had to keep my strength up for everything that lay ahead.
We ate in silence for a few minutes, my first hot meal in weeks, the only sound the bloated rain beating against the windowpanes. Occasionally the wind howled, rattling the door; tree branches scraped against the side of the house.
“My sister was murdered when I was in my first year of college.” Anthony didn’t meet my eyes, twirling the noodles on his fork.
I stopped chewing, surprised at his candor. So that was why he looked so fractured.
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Does it . . .” I swallowed hard, a balloon of sorrow swelling in my throat. “. . . get easier?”
“Yes. I know that sounds bad. I still miss her and I often find myself thinking about her, but yes, it does. I was in college working toward my law degree when it happened. It took fifteen years for the case to be solved. Every few years the papers would run an anniversary story, or a new detective would call and ask a few questions.” He exhaled heavily, blowing his floppy hair out of his eyes.
“Sometimes I think it’s a blessing that my mom has Alzheimer’s. That sounds horrible, too. But my mom was tormented by what happened. My dad died of a heart attack a
few years after. I know how hard it is, having all those questions and no answers. There’s nothing worse than not getting closure.”
The house phone rang, and Anthony offered to get it.
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “Probably just a reporter—they want their inside scoop.”
There had been a few other cases in Washington State where a pregnant woman in a coma had been kept alive until her baby was born, but never a teenager. Olivia’s case had captured the attention of the media, but I didn’t have the energy or head space to answer their questions.
I’d learned to be grateful I’d never become a journalist. I didn’t care how much I loved a byline; I’d never have stalked someone in personal agony the way they stalked me. Fortunately, in the last couple weeks they’d eased off, heading in search of new stories.
“I’ll tell them to stop.” Anthony scraped his chair back and picked up the phone.
“Hello?” He waited a beat. “Hello?”
He set the phone down. “There’s nobody there.”
He sat down, and we lapsed into silence again. We’d both finished our pasta when he spoke again.
“We’re going to find out what happened to your daughter, and one day, a few months from now, you’ll have a beautiful baby to fill a piece of the hole that Olivia will leave. You can’t stop living, Abi. You might as well be dead if you do.”
I understood now why he chose to work with those whose lives were tainted by tragedy. In some way, every time he helped somebody, every time he rescued them from their personal tragedy, he was recreating his own experience. He was mending the past.
Maybe that’s what I was doing too. Giving myself—and Olivia—another chance.
16
* * *
OLIVIA
june
I swam lazy laps back and forth across the school swimming pool. I swept my arms up and then down, pulling my body slowly through the water. The smell of chlorine was strong in my nose, the cool water slipping like satin around me.
At the end of the lane I crunched my body, lifted my feet, and spun underwater. My feet connected with the wall. I pushed off, arrowing my arms ahead of me. I pulled my right arm back and kicked. Then bam, head up for my first breath, and back down.
The Night Olivia Fell Page 10