I love you.
She screamed the words inside her head, but when she opened her mouth, the only thing that came out was a pathetic “I’m sorry.”
“Get away from me!” Charlie yelled, shaking her off. “All of you! Everyone just leave me alone.”
They all stood frozen, wide-eyed.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Charlie hissed, lunging forward one more time, pushing Sid with both hands. Sid’s feet caught on Tara’s leg, and he flipped backward, legs flying up, head hitting the pavement with a sickening crack.
For a second, no one moved. Time stopped, and Reggie felt herself slip away and view the scene as if she were looking down at a photograph. There was Charlie, arms in front of him like Frankenstein’s monster; Tara stood sideways, the left leg Sid had fallen over planted firmly against the pavement; and Reggie’s eyes were on Charlie as she wished she could take it all back.
“Sid?” Tara called. “Oh Jesus, Sid?” She went down on all fours to check on him.
Charlie nervously shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “He’s okay,” Charlie said.
Tara looked up. “No! He’s not fucking okay. His head’s hurt. There’s a lot of blood.”
“He’ll get up in a second,” Charlie said. “He’s just stunned.”
Reggie got down and studied Sid’s crumpled body in the dim light. His eyes were open and a dark pool of blood surrounded his head. Reggie put her hand in front of Sid’s nose and mouth. “Guys, I don’t think he’s breathing at all. I think he’s hurt bad.” Her voice rose in pitch.
She had done this. Her love for Charlie, her jealousy. If she hadn’t said those things to him, he and Sid wouldn’t have fought. Sid wouldn’t be lying here on the asphalt.
The rotten spot deep inside her was spreading.
“He’s dead!” moaned Tara, looking up at Charlie. “He’s fucking dead and you killed him!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Charlie yelled. He was rocking. “I thought—oh, shit! It was an accident!” He came over, kicked at Sid’s body. “Get up!” he yelled.
“We’ve gotta get help,” Reggie said, standing, backing up slowly, moving toward the front door of Reuben’s.
“No,” Tara said, jumping up and grabbing Reggie. She clamped her hand tightly around Reggie’s arm, pulled her back. “It’s too late for that. What we’ve gotta do is get out of here. Now.”
A car turned into the parking lot, its headlights illuminating the whole gruesome scene: Reggie looked down at Sid’s face, pale and stonelike, and saw the lake of blood spreading out behind his head like a halo. The car sat for a few seconds, idling, and with the bright lights in her face, Reggie couldn’t see who was inside.
“Run!” Tara squealed, pulling on Reggie, dragging her away. And Reggie and Charlie ran, following Tara. Reggie turned to look over her shoulder and saw the car back up, turn around, and leave the parking lot, tires squealing.
It was a light-colored sedan with only the driver inside.
Chapter 40
October 23, 2010
Brighton Falls, Connecticut
“REGGIE,” GEORGE SAID WHEN he greeted her at the door. “Everything okay?”
“Can I come in?” she asked.
“Of course.” He stood aside and she stepped in.
“Come on back to my office,” he said, leading the way down the hall.
George sat down behind the heavy wooden desk and Reggie took the upholstered chair across the desk from him. After the chaos of Stu Berr’s office, George’s seemed almost like a monastery. The wood floors were clean and polished, the books in neat rows on the small set of shelves built into the wall. A green banker’s lamp illuminated the desktop, which was empty except for a few invoices George had been going over. The sense of order comforted Reggie, made her believe in a world where things just might turn out okay.
“Your mom all right?” he asked, taking off his glasses and setting them down on the neat desktop. Even his glasses were spare and clean with neat wire rims.
“She’s fine. You know, considering.”
He nodded understandingly. “I’m sorry I haven’t been over much to help out. I’ve been swamped with work. We lost one of our big suppliers, and we’ve run into some snags with the construction on the new Brattleboro warehouse.”
“It’s okay. We’re holding our own, I guess. Look, George, I need a favor.”
“Shoot,” he said.
“I was hoping you’d go to the police station with me.”
“The police station?”
“I think I know who Neptune is. I’ve got evidence, but I’m afraid they won’t believe me. Especially that young cop Levi. I’m going to need all the help I can get. My friend Len is on his way down from Vermont, but I don’t want to wait.”
George’s eyes were huge. “You know who Neptune is?”
Reggie nodded. “What do you know about Stu Berr?”
“The detective?”
“He and my mom were involved in high school,” she said.
“Yes,” George said. “I remember. She also dated his brother Bo. Things got a little messy, as I recall.”
“I think Stu Berr might be Neptune,” Reggie said.
“What?” He pushed forward in his chair, leaning forward, as close to Reggie as he could be with the desk between them.
Reggie reached down into her messenger bag and pulled out the file on Vera, the note from Tara, and showed them to George, filling him in.
“He was the one in the Yankees cap who talked to her in that bar that night. He said he was questioning her, that he thought she might be Neptune.”
“Vera?” George chortled. “That’s crazy!”
Reggie nodded. “I know. I think he was trying to distract me, to throw me off his trail.”
George shook his head. “It’s absurd.”
“What if Stu was the one who promised to marry her? What if he was luring these women away in whatever twisted way he could manage?”
George pushed back, rubbed his face with his hands. “My God,” he said. “Just imagine it. He’d be in the perfect position to commit those crimes and get away with it. He was the detective working the case! No one understood how the hands got left on the steps of the police station without anyone noticing. But everyone was used to seeing Stu Berr come and go.”
Reggie nodded. “I need to go to the police, show them the note from Tara. I’m worried though—the cops there all know Stu. They’ll stand up for him, maybe even refuse to look at evidence.”
“I’ll go with you,” George said. “It may take some convincing, but this is the last day, Reg. If he’s following the same pattern, he’ll kill her tonight, dump her body in the morning.”
Reggie shut her eyes tight, trying to blink away the image of Tara, naked, wrist wrapped in gauze on some early-morning-dew-covered field. “I know. Thanks for offering to go with me. Whatever happens, it’ll be easier with you there.”
“It’s no problem at all.” He stood.
“Wait,” Reggie said. “Before we go, there’s one more thing I need to ask.”
“Okay,” he said, sitting back in his chair. He looked suddenly worried.
Just ask, Reggie told herself. Best to get it over with. To know for sure one way or the other.
“You and my mother were involved once, weren’t you? Before you got together with Lorraine.”
“Reggie.” He sighed. “We’ve been over all of this, haven’t we? And I told you—”
“You told me what you thought I should hear. My whole childhood and adolescence, you worked so hard to protect me from the truth—you and Lorraine created this whole mythical reality about who my mother was and where she went when she wasn’t home. Now I think there are other things you were hiding from me, too.”
“Such as?”
“Are you my father, George?”
His face turned to the side, like the words had slapped him. Recovering, he took in a breath and faced her, but only stared.
“
Please, George. No more secrets.”
He nodded wearily. “She never wanted you to know,” he said. “Your mother said I could be as involved in your life as I liked in the role of family friend, but that I mustn’t ever tell you the truth. She thought it was better, I guess, for you to imagine all the people your father might have been than to have all the complications of it being me.”
Reggie bit her lip, remembered the way Vera used to talk about George: calling him a dud, teasing him about his ducks.
“Does Lorraine know?”
“No . . . Well, maybe. I think she suspects, but she’s never asked. She knew about my history with your mother, such as it was.” He looked down at his shoes.
It amazed Reggie—the tangled nest of secrets they’d all been living inside.
Reggie wondered what to say next. She felt a little like she’d been dropped into a bad daytime television movie: daughter realizing the man who’d been a father figure to her was her actual father after all—she could practically hear the cheesy music building to some sort of climax. And here was the part where she was supposed to say something touching, something meaningful; something that would end with the two of them in a tearful embrace.
Her mind went blank, everything spinning too fast to grab hold of any one thought or idea long enough to say it out loud.
George gave her a weak smile and stood up. “We’d better be on our way. Just let me go grab my coat and turn some lights off. Be right back.”
Back to the practical world.
Reggie sank back into her chair. It would be over soon. They just had to make the police check out Stu, go down to his boat. Maybe that’s where he was keeping her.
Reggie tucked the file on Vera and note from Tara back into her bag. There, at the bottom, was George’s swan.
George. Her father, George. It would take some getting used to, yet on some deep level, she knew it to be true. She felt it, a part of him inside her—the logical, practical part. She understood the genetic origin of her love for order, for plans and blueprints, for seeing the beauty and possibility in a single piece of wood.
She ran her fingers over the carved wooden swan, pulled it out of the bag.
It’s the ugly duckling. All her life she compares herself to others, thinks she doesn’t fit in; then she grows up and realizes she’s really a beautiful swan.
It wasn’t just her mother’s story, but Reggie’s as well, wasn’t it?
Reggie turned the bird over in her hand, noticing the fine cross-hatching of feathers. She pictured George bent over his workbench, chisel in hand, paying careful attention to each detail.
But there, in the center of its chest, right over its nonexistent solid-wood heart, was something that didn’t belong.
Not feathers, not a name or initials an artist might leave.
No. There, buried in the pattern of its breast, was a hidden message. A warning. A confession.
A tiny, carved trident.
“Oh shit.” Reggie gulped, the jolt of adrenaline hitting her like a hundred shots of espresso, all her senses on overdrive.
Reggie ran her trembling fingers over the trident, thoughts exploding in her head, one message loud and clear above all others: Run! Get of there, now!
“Ready?”
Reggie jumped. George was standing right behind her in the doorway, a smile on his face. His gaze fell on the swan in her hand and his smile seemed to change, just a bit.
“Sure!” Reggie said, overly chipper. Damn it, she had to get herself under control. “Remember this?” she asked, turning the swan and holding it out, not wanting to draw suspicion. “I think you gave it to Mom once. I just found it in a closet at Monique’s Wish. It’s quite lovely.” She kept her voice as steady as she could and dropped the swan back into her bag.
George nodded, eyes on the bag. “We’ll take the van,” he said calmly.
“I can drive,” Reggie offered, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice.
George pulled the keys out of his pocket and opened the front door.
“Oh no,” he said. “I insist.”
PART THREE
Chapter 41
October 23, 2010
Brighton Falls, Connecticut
GEORGE WHISTLED AS HE drove, both hands clasped safely on the steering wheel of his van. Reggie studied his hands; they were small, dainty almost, with neatly trimmed nails. They looked smooth, nearly hairless, and Reggie was sure they’d be soft to the touch. She’d always pictured Neptune’s hands as being larger, rougher. These were the hands of an artist, a surgeon, and the fact that they looked so harmless disturbed her.
She was still spinning from the shock of it—George, the man who helped her with her algebra, taught her to ride a bike; meek little George with his Uncle Mouse face—he was Neptune. It just didn’t seem possible.
Reggie made herself say the words over in her mind, trying to get them to sink in:
George is my father.
George is Neptune.
Neptune is my father.
She thought back to her astrology chart, the tiny blue trident in the twelfth house, a piece of Neptune tucked away inside her, giving her bad dreams and artistic visions. Now she understood it was so much more than that: half her DNA—the building blocks that made Reggie the person she was—had come from him.
She studied his profile, searching for some familiar piece of herself. Did she have his forehead, his chin?
In addition to her love of plans and order, did she have some small piece of what it took to be a killer buried deep down in her cells?
Reggie rode in the passenger seat, bag on the floor, tucked between her calves. Her stomach cramped and she took in a deep breath, going over her plan. When they got to the police station, she’d go through the motions with George, tell the cops about Stu Berr. Then she’d find an opportunity to get one of them alone, to show them the swan and say that George was really Neptune. She’d be safe with the entire Brighton Falls Police Department there with her. And they’d have their guy, just like that. They’d hold him, question him until he confessed, told them where Tara was. It would work. It had to.
She just had to make sure that if he had any suspicions whatsoever after seeing her with the swan, they were laid to rest. She licked her lips, wished that some of her mother’s acting skills had been passed down to her.
“I still can’t believe it was Stu Berr all along,” Reggie said. “And to think he actually tried to convince me that my mother was Neptune.”
She glanced at George. He had an expression on his face she had never seen, a small smile with mirthless, determined eyes. And she knew he knew.
He’d seen her notice the trident. There was no doubt. And now, she was in deep, deep trouble.
“Your mother,” George said reflectively, “is an extraordinary woman.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Reggie nodded. Her palms were sweating, her heart was beating all the way up into her throat.
She looked around in a panic. He’d turned the other way. They weren’t going downtown at all. He was taking her the long way around, the back way to Airport Road.
“Shouldn’t you have turned left?” She tried to sound calm and matter-of-fact. Silly George, you missed the turn.
“I have a little errand I need to run first.” He gave her a wolfish grin, all teeth. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Reggie swallowed hard. “Actually, I was kind of hoping we could get there soon. I think the sooner they see the note from Tara, the sooner they’ll be on Stu’s trail. The better the chances at rescuing Tara.”
“This won’t take long,” George promised.
“My friend, Len,” she said, grasping at straws, “he’ll be arriving in town any minute. He’ll wonder where I am.”
“Mmm,” George said, eyes on the road ahead, completely uninterested.
They drove in silence for a few minutes. Reggie contemplated opening the door and jumping, but all the lights were green and George was driving at a steady clip. The la
st thing she wanted to do was land wrong and crack open her skull or get pulverized under the wheels of an oncoming truck. She needed air and pushed the button to lower the window, but nothing happened. He’d locked them. Had he locked the doors, too? Shit.
“Are you too warm, Reggie?”
“A little.”
“I’ll turn on some cool air.”
They were passing the old tobacco barns. Not many actually grew tobacco these days. One had been turned into a Christmas tree farm. Another sold chrysanthemums. But most were just abandoned, the empty barns leaning, the tattered shade cloth flapping on posts, like the handkerchiefs of ghosts.
George cranked up the AC and the fear sweat on Reggie’s body was now giving her chills. She bent forward a little, picturing the cell phone in her bag, wondering how she could get to it without him noticing. She leaned farther forward, scratching an imaginary itch on her leg.
“Everything all right, Reggie?” he asked, staring at her.
“Fine,” she said, sitting upright.
She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, out the windshield, but watched George in her peripheral vision. He wasn’t a large man—about as tall as Reggie, as a matter of fact. His shoulders slumped and a little belly hung over his pants. She doubted he could overtake her using strength alone, and Reggie had seen no weapons in the van. Surely she stood a good fighting chance.
“I was saying,” George said as he pulled into the passing lane to go around an airport shuttle van, “your mother is an extraordinary woman. Think of it—everything she’s been through, all the lives she’s changed.”
Reggie bent down to scratch her leg again, hand brushing the top of her bag. George glared at her and she sat back up.
“And do you know the most amazing part—the part that had always confounded me?” George’s voice was getting louder, faster. She watched a little vein on his forehead bulge and pulse.
Reggie shook her head. “No,” she admitted. “What?”
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