The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle

by Jennifer McMahon

  “That she’s never had any idea of the power she wields over other people. This unique ability to crush and destroy.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  There was that hungry-animal grin again. “Oh, I think you do.”

  They’d turned onto Airport Road and were going by the Silver Spoon Diner, once-upon-a-time employer of the late Candace Jacques. Reggie stared at the art deco building, saw the reflection of George’s white van on the side of the polished silver diner.

  “Look at what she did to you,” George said.

  Reggie winced. “She did the best she could.”

  “A dog would have been a better mother to you than Vera,” he said. The vein on the side of his head stood out more. Sweat formed on his brow. He was spitting out the words now. “Abandoning you to go off drinking with her boyfriends. Always up for a fuck if it meant a few free drinks, a dinner out now and then.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “And then,” George interrupted, “they’d always leave her in the end. They’d see her for what she was and know they could do better.”

  They passed Reuben’s, which had a big for sale sign in front. The windows were boarded up and the parking lot was empty. Reggie remembered Sid lying on the pavement in a puddle of blood, heard Tara’s voice, Run! They came up to a yellow light, and Reggie fiddled with the lock as surreptitiously as she could, her heart leaping when she heard a tiny click. George gunned it through the yellow light. They passed the airport and headed out into the no-man’s-land of warehouses, abandoned factories, and pay-by-the-hour motels. Airport Efficiencies was on the left, still painted Pepto-Bismol pink.

  “Choices,” George said. “That’s what life comes down to, isn’t it? The choices we make. We’re each in charge of our own destinies, Reggie, whether we realize it or not.”

  “I agree,” said Reggie, looking frantically around as the buildings got farther and farther apart. They crossed railroad tracks. Empty lots full of knee-high scrub brush and dead grass.

  “You may think that Vera was the victim here, but the truth is, she got to where she is by the choices she made along the way. One bad choice after another. When it would have been so easy to stop, to choose another way. A decent life. That’s what I offered her. And she turned me down, again and again. Mocked me.”

  He grimaced. Licked his lips. The van slowed as they approached a bend in the road. Reggie yanked the door handle, praying it would open. The door swung out and she jumped, hitting the pavement, rolling like a sack of potatoes, her elbows and hips skidding on the asphalt. She heard the screech of brakes, and not looking back, heaved her body up and started to run. If she could just get into the overgrown brush, she’d have a chance. She was a fast runner, used to long distances. George was a good twenty years older. If she could just get enough distance between them at the start, she’d be okay.

  She was facedown on the ground before she even realized he was close. She lay stunned for a second, felt George’s weight shift on top of her. She bucked up, trying to throw him off, but he held steady. She’d underestimated his strength. He flipped her over onto her back. She kicked up at his groin but didn’t make contact.

  “It didn’t have to be this way,” he said, lifting her up by the shoulders, then slamming her down against the ground. The sky behind him darkened, the whole world dimming, turning into one narrow tunnel, and all she could see was his face there at the end of it, grinning down at her like a sinister moon. Then he too was gone.

  Chapter 42

  June 24, 1985

  Brighton Falls, Connecticut

  REGGIE CRANKED THE PEDALS of her Peugeot as she rode through town. The sun was just coming up, making the sky in the east, over toward the airport, glow Martian red. Reggie felt like she must be on some other planet. There were hardly any cars on the roads, just the occasional delivery truck bringing fresh bread, milk, and gasoline into town. A few commuters were off to an early start, heading into offices in Hartford before the traffic got too bad. There were lights on in some houses, and Reggie could see movement through the uncurtained windows: a woman making breakfast, a man in boxer shorts turning on the television. Lawn sprinklers were running, keeping the grass a perfect sea of green. The streetlights were still on, and when she got downtown, it was a little like being in one of those zombie movies where you’re one of the last survivors. The stores were all empty, windows dark like closed eyes. There was this sense that the town was holding its breath, waiting.

  She looked at the sunrise again, the pinks and reds spilling out across the horizon, and remembered Sid’s blood on the pavement last night. She squeezed her eyes shut tight a second, pushing it all away.

  She circled the downtown streets, checking every grassy area, every storefront. She passed a police cruiser, knowing the cops were doing the same. She pedaled harder, faster. She didn’t want some uniformed cop, a total stranger with a gun and radio strapped to his belt, to be the one who found Vera. Reggie needed to be the first; she’d take her jacket off to cover her mother’s naked body before the hordes of onlookers came—snapping pictures, scraping under Vera’s nails, combing through her hair looking for shreds of evidence. Mostly, what Reggie would do—what she needed to do—was to say she was sorry. She’d failed her mother. If she’d been more clever, had paid more attention and been a better daughter, then maybe she might have found her in time.

  Now, not only would she be the daughter of a murder victim, but also a murderer herself. An accomplice, at least. If she hadn’t screwed things up so badly last night, let her own selfish feelings take control, then maybe things would have turned out differently.

  Unable to find any sign of her mother’s body downtown, Reggie crossed Main Street and headed out toward Airport Road. As she rode, images of last night popped into her head: Sid falling like that, hitting the pavement with a crack, Tara telling them all to run. Her stomach churned as she remembered the three of them running, not speaking, then all turning their separate ways as Tara shouted, “Remember, it never happened.”

  Remember.

  It had been an accident, yes, but running away had been wrong. Reggie knew that. She’d known it at the time but had been too stunned, too frightened, to stand up to Tara. Now they were probably all wanted for murder.

  Reggie cycled past the tobacco barns, where men were just starting to show up for work. One of them whistled as she rode by, not a sexy lady kind of whistle, but more like something you’d do to call a dog. Reggie kept her eyes on the road ahead, didn’t look back.

  She passed the billboard that still had Candace Jacques’s huge face on it. have you seen me? God, why hadn’t someone taken that down?

  And soon it would be her mother’s turn. Reggie imagined Vera’s picture in the paper tomorrow: NEPTUNE’S FOURTH VICTIM, VERA DUFRANE. And what would they say about her? Surely it wouldn’t take reporters long to dig up the truth. They’d find out about the squalid little room at Airport Efficiencies. The failed acting career. The list of men. The bars. Would Reggie even be mentioned? Reggie concentrated, visualizing tomorrow’s headline, trying to scan the imaginary article to find out where Vera’s body had been found. Stupid. Like it could really be that easy to see into the future. If Tara had been here, she might have pretended she could. But pretending was a whole different thing. And Reggie was no Tara.

  The two-lane road turned to four lanes and Reggie passed by the Silver Spoon Diner, which had a dozen cars in the lot and more pulling in. The traffic was heavier out here, taxis and airport shuttles, delivery vans, travelers hurrying to catch their flight. The air smelled like diesel fumes and fried food. A plane came up overhead, taking off to some far-off destination: San Francisco, Puerto Rico, Rome.

  She tried to imagine the people on the plane above her, what the view was like from up there. Could they see her, a lone girl, bicycling along the expanse of asphalt, past the corrugated metal storage units, the Pepto-Bismol pink motel, a bar called Runway 36? Reggie studied every pa
rking lot, every side road and alley. No sign of her mother’s body. She rode on, ankle aching, sweat dampening her T-shirt, making her cold in the early morning air.

  When she got to Reuben’s, she half expected it to be blocked off with crime scene tape and crawling with cops trying to reconstruct what had happened to Sid. But the lot was empty, his body, gone. She wanted to pull in, look at the place in the parking lot where his crumpled body had lain still. Was there a bloodstain there, marking the place?

  She didn’t dare turn in. The police could be watching, wondering if the killer would return to the scene of the crime. Everyone in Reuben’s had seen her, Charlie and Tara with Sid. It was only a matter of time until the police found them. And then what? Would they all be arrested, taken off to juvenile detention, to actual prison even? Reggie didn’t care. It didn’t matter really. They deserved it. Part of her even wished for it—to be locked away from the rest of the world.

  Reggie pedaled on, past the airport, out to where the buildings thinned out, the four lanes turned back to two. She passed a driveway that led down a dirt road to one of George’s warehouses. A Monahan Produce truck was pulling out, off to make an early morning delivery. Suddenly afraid that George would catch her out here, Reggie turned her bike around. Maybe she’d try the airport, circle through the parking lots and garages.

  A mechanical chirp sounded behind her, and she turned, looked back over her shoulder. It was a police car, lights flashing. She was being pulled over. She stopped her bike and turned to see Stu Berr hop out of the car.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Regina,” he said.

  Chapter 43

  October 23, 2010

  Brighton Falls, Connecticut

  “WE’RE BOTH DEAD, DUFRANE,” Tara said, face swollen, lips sticky with blood. Her head was drooping forward, like it was too heavy to hold up. Her eyes were barely open.

  “Are you okay?” Reggie asked. Stupid question. Reggie had just woken up moments ago, Neptune standing over her, his breath chugging like a train, his voice scolding:

  It didn’t have to be like this.

  He’d taken off her blindfold and left, but Reggie had the sense that he wouldn’t be gone long. She had to act quickly.

  The cement under her back was cool and gritty, scraping her where her shirt had pulled up and bare skin made contact with the ground. Her arms were pulled above her head, elbows by her ears, her wrists around a pipe and bound with duct tape. The pipe, old electrical conduit, was firmly attached to a ridged metal wall. She could feel the wall when she reached back with her fingers. She lifted her head up and saw that he’d used half a roll or so on her ankles, too.

  The tray of tools he’d left out for her amputation seemed to glitter and sparkle in the dim light, the only bright shiny things in the room. They were laid out on the floor about five feet to her right, taunting.

  “I’m fucking great,” Tara said, spitting blood. Tara was sitting upright against another iron pipe on the other side of the building, about twenty feet across from Reggie. Her torso had been wrapped round and round with silver duct tape, holding her against the pipe. Her arms were free, but there was nothing within reach. The end of her right arm was a mass of white bandages.

  “Does it hurt?” Reggie asked, looked at the place where Tara’s right hand had been.

  “You could say that,” Tara said, grimacing. “The son of a bitch hasn’t given me morphine since last night.”

  Reggie’s eyes went back to the saw and scalpel, the pile of bandages.

  Don’t look at them, she told herself. Don’t panic. Just think.

  Reggie’s head exploded with a great dark blooming flower of pain as she tried to look around the abandoned warehouse. Her skinned elbows and right hip throbbed. Her cheek felt torn and crusty.

  She looked down at her own chest and saw that the hourglass necklace was lying on the outside of her shirt, the glass cracked, the pink sand spilling out.

  You have one minute to figure a way out of this. If you don’t, you both die.

  “Where are we?” Reggie asked, trying to still her racing heart.

  “Hell,” Tara answered dully.

  Reggie craned her aching neck. Saw the curved metal walls arching over them, like they were inside a giant tin can cut in half lengthwise. The building was about twenty feet across, forty feet long. There were no windows, only a large wooden sliding door at the end, and a huge ventilation fan above it.

  “It’s a Quonset hut,” Reggie said, feeling a strange sort of relief. This was not some magical madman’s cave: it was a building. A building Reggie happened to know a great deal about. She’d studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, the same state where the Quonset hut was developed. And she’d gotten to know the building intimately when she did the retrofit for the couple in Bennington.

  “They’re named for Quonset Point in Rhode Island,” Reggie said, slipping into the voice she used for university lectures. “They were originally developed by the navy at the start of World War II. They needed a shelter that was inexpensive, lightweight, portable, and could be put up quickly using only hand tools.” Reggie looked around at the corrugated metal walls, the steel arches supporting them. The metal was tarnished, rusted in places. This building had been here for a long time.

  “As impressed as I am by your wealth of knowledge,” Tara said, “it doesn’t do us a damn bit of good.”

  But Tara was wrong. It did Reggie a world of good. To be able to break things down, to categorize and name them, to focus on the structural elements—it took things, for the moment at least, out of the realm of nightmares and into the real, tangible world.

  Reggie remembered the Boston Globe article highlighting her work on the Bennington Quonset hut. There was a picture of the owners at the kitchen table, light streaming through the south-facing windows, the cabinets painted a cheery lemon-drop color with cobalt-blue accents. “Dufrane is a magician,” they’d told the reporter. “She makes the impossible possible.”

  The hut Reggie found herself in now was far from bright and cheery. A few dim lightbulbs glowed overhead from ancient fixtures. The sliding door was framed with a crack of sunlight, and wind blew the fan on top, casting spinning shadows across the stained and cracked concrete floor. There was an old wooden table near Tara. In back, behind that, some broken-down machinery—old truck axles, the front of a forklift, a rusted-out pulley system.

  Scattered here and there were piles of shipping pallets and old wooden crates. They were fruit and vegetable crates, Reggie realized. product of argentina, the one nearest her said. There was a colorful label showing a dark-haired woman with seductive eyes holding a big, juicy pear. She looked at another, showing a bunch of smiley-faced purple grapes who appeared to be singing. The lyrics hung in the air above them, surrounded by music notes: THE WEATHER IN ARGENTINA IS ALWAYS LOVELY.

  A chill ran through Reggie.

  He’d taken her mother to this same place. Probably the other women, too.

  She pictured them, the faces she’d seen only hours ago on Stu Berr’s wall: Andrea McFarlin, Candace Jacques, Ann Stickney. They’d all spend their last days on earth here, in this filthy, cold place that stank of rotting fruit and oil, of things forgotten and spoiled. They’d laid on their backs here under the arched cathedral-like ceiling, tied up and trapped in this twisted Church of Neptune.

  She lifted her head to look at Tara. “Were you awake when he brought you here? Do you remember anything about the outside of the building?”

  “No. But we must be in the middle of fucking nowhere. I screamed and screamed at first. But no one ever came.”

  Reggie listened, heard airplanes overhead, coming and going from somewhere behind her. She looked at her watch. 2:15. The sun was right behind the spinning fan. She guessed they were a couple miles west of the airport. George had some old warehouses out at the end of Airport Road. They must be in one of those.

  “How long was I out?” Reggie asked.

  “Not long. Ten, fif
teen minutes. I heard the car outside. Then, a couple minutes later, he carried you in. How long have I been here anyway?” Tara asked. “I’ve lost track.”

  Reggie thought of lying, but couldn’t. “It’s day four,” she said.

  Tara let her head drop all the way down and closed her eyes. “It won’t be long now,” Tara said, voice remarkably cool and matter-of-fact.

  “How did you know it was George?” Reggie asked.

  “I didn’t know for sure,” Tara said. “Vera got all worked up one night. It was right after he’d visited her. She kept going on and on about how she wouldn’t go back, how he couldn’t make her. We were up half the night and I didn’t understand a lot of what she said, but I’d heard enough to make me think that George was Neptune, and that before she turned up at the homeless shelter, he’d been holding her somewhere. I went to Charlie’s dad, but he wasn’t home.”

  “Why go to him? He’s retired.”

  “I figured no one knew the ins and outs of the Neptune case more than Stu Berr. I thought he’d know what to do. But . . . George caught up with me.” She was quiet for a moment. “I guess Lorraine had told him how upset Vera had been, how I’d been up with her all night. I dunno, somehow he figured out that I’d figured it out—maybe with his fucking serial killer psychic powers. He caught up with me, and he jumped me, and practically fucking choked me to death—I thought I was dead then, but I woke up here. He’s told me things. He’s crazy, Reggie. Scary, batshit crazy. Between what he and Vera told me—he kept your mother in a little rented room of some kind for years up in Worcester, not far from one of his warehouses there. Pretended she was his wife. Told her that if she ever left, he’d come after you.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Reggie whispered.

  “Yeah. He brought her food, cigarettes, booze. She wasn’t locked up or anything—but she was too scared to leave. He’d bring her a cell phone, dial your number, and let her hear your voice when you answered. That was how she knew he was keeping to his word, that you were okay for now. And it was also a threat, showing her that he knew just how to find you.”