by Lisa Regan
“Not what I think?” Rachel snorted. Her voice was thick and throaty. Leah recognized the tone. Rachel wasn’t much of a crier, but a few times in the eight years Leah had known her, she’d seen her overcome with painful, raw emotion. When Maya was mistakenly diagnosed with leukemia at three years old, and again, when they found out it was a mistake. The day she found condoms in Mike’s suitcase upon his return from a business trip. He’d mollified her by telling her his notoriously womanizing colleague had thrown them into Mike’s bag when the man’s wife unexpectedly showed up at their hotel. Leah was surprised that Rachel had accepted the “holding it for a friend” defense, but who was she to criticize? You did what you had to do to keep your family intact. You believed what you had to. You looked the other way. You became a master of self-deception. Now, the sobbing rasp was back, and Leah had a bad feeling about what was to come. A very bad feeling.
Finally, Peyton sat on the toilet. She stared up at Leah, face flushed. “It won’t come out,” she said in a tiny voice.
“Shhh,” Leah said. She turned her back on the girl. Her free hand fidgeted with the strap of her purse, fingers bumping against Alan Wheeler’s bottle of vodka.
“Do you think I’m stupid, Leah?”
Leah’s hand curled around the neck of the bottle. She had something on Rachel, she reminded herself. That was the whole point of the hairbrush and getting the sample from D.J. She’d been trying to figure a way out of the whole thing with D.J. A way to get rid of him without completely destroying her life. She was willing to give up her marriage to Jim if she had to, but she had to keep her kids and her job. She had figured that the only way to get rid of D.J. once and for all was to come clean to Jim and all the world about everything. It would be the hardest, most painful thing she had ever done, but once everyone knew, she could go to the police freely. She could go to work removing him from her life once and for all. But she needed Rachel in her corner.
She had the DNA test, she knew Rachel’s secret, that D.J. was her son. She must have been incredibly young. Given him up for adoption. There was no shame in that, but still, Rachel had felt the need to lie about his true identity—even to her own husband, from what Leah could gather. Obviously, she didn’t want people to know. Leah had intended to use that fact as leverage, if she had to. She would keep Rachel’s secret if Rachel would forgive her for what she had done. Leah would need one friend. Now, though, it was clear from Rachel’s tone that any hope of remaining friends was long gone. Now, Leah was thinking she might have to use the secret to combat whatever threats Rachel was about to level against her. Leah knew Rachel. Knew she could and would be vindictive. “She has a mean streak,” Jim had always said. She had, in fact, outed Mike’s Lothario colleague to his wife at an office party six months after discovering the condoms. With a smile on her face, she’d told the woman to make sure her husband kept his condoms out of Mike’s things. “I mean, they’re golf buddies, not frat brothers. It’s bad enough Mike has to hear about every dirty tramp your husband fucks—how they do it, where, how many times. Honestly, you guys may be into the whole open marriage thing, but some of us are just plain old vanilla.”
The woman hadn’t had an open marriage. Hadn’t had a clue about her husband’s infidelities. And she was eight months pregnant. The whole thing had caused quite a stir at work for Mike. His colleague left the company. Mike had come down hard on Rachel for the incident. To his face, she’d acted wide-eyed and innocent, remorseful and repentant, but to Leah she was devilish and gleeful. The whole thing had been calculated on Rachel’s part. It had been very much on purpose.
Peyton flushed the toilet.
“There are pictures,” Rachel said, in a voice like a death knell.
Leah’s body went cold. Her hand tightened around the vodka bottle. “No,” she said. She didn’t try to lie or to cover it up. “I watched him delete the pictures,” she said, voice shaking. She turned to see Peyton wiping herself and pulling her pants up. She looked up at Leah, and Leah was struck again by the look of expectation on her daughter’s face. Expectation that she would be scolded for some reason. Leah was no better than her own parents, when she got right down to it. Tears burned her eyes. She reached out and touched Peyton’s cheek. “Good job, honey,” she whispered, craning her chin away from the phone. The girl’s eyes lit up. A smile broke across her face. She skipped out of the stall.
Rachel said, “Screen shots live forever, bitch.”
Leah poked her head out the door. The children were all still in the vehicle. She turned back into the bathroom. Peyton looked up at her expectantly. Leah covered the receiver and tried to smile at her daughter. “Wash your hands, baby. Then wait outside the door for Mommy.” As Peyton dutifully turned toward the sink, Leah locked herself inside the nearest stall and leaned against the door. The phone vibrated in her hand. She pulled it from her ear and stared at the screen. Her teeth began to chatter in her mouth. The phone vibrated again and again. Texts were arriving. Rachel’s voice punctuated each vibration. “Look,” she said. “Look.”
There they were. The photos that D.J. had taken of her naked in various compromising positions. There was one of her fellating him. Even one of him entering her from behind, which he must have taken in secret. In fact, there were at least a half dozen she had never seen. Hands shaking, she deleted each one as it came in, but it didn’t matter, did it? They were out there. Rachel had them. Her best friend, Rachel.
Rachel with the mean streak.
As she adjusted the strap of her purse, her fingers brushed the cap of the vodka bottle again. In one movement, she freed it from her bag and unscrewed it. She hesitated. She didn’t drink. She had the kids. But she also didn’t fuck nineteen-year-old boys who turned out to be her best friend’s son. She didn’t get pregnant with their children and try passing the baby off as her husband’s. She didn’t let her nineteen-year-old lover take photos of every disgusting sexual thing they had done together. She wasn’t that person.
But she was.
And her world was about to be blown apart. Why had she ever thought that she would be okay admitting to the affair and taking responsibility? What she had done was unforgiveable on every level—and there were photographs to prove it. This was ten times worse than anything Glory Rohrbach had ever done.
The vodka seared the back of her throat. It spilled over and dribbled down her chin. Keeping her voice low so that Peyton wouldn’t hear her, she said, “I know he’s your son.”
Silence. Then: “You think exposing me is going to make what you did seem less wrong? You have no idea what you’ve done. You want me to say it, Leah? Yes, D.J. is my son. I made a mistake when I was a teenager. I brought him into the world, and I left him because he was a mistake.”
Again, Leah felt a coldness creep up the backs of her legs. She shivered. “How can you—how can you say that about your own son?”
Even as she asked, Leah knew. She had known early on that something was not quite right with D.J. She had no idea what kind of situation Rachel had found herself in as a teenager—a young teenager, by Leah’s calculations—but still, Rachel’s words seemed harsh.
“He’s a monster, Leah. He’s always been a monster.”
The photos of the Soccer Mom Strangler victims flashed across Leah’s mind.
“They all had hair like yours.”
She took another small sip of vodka. It was like gasoline on her esophagus.
“What are you saying?” she croaked.
“You don’t know what he’s capable of. Do you know why he left last year?”
Because I broke up with him. “No, I—”
“He exposed himself to Maya and Molly.”
“Oh my God.”
A full-body shudder descended through her. She closed her eyes, thought of all the times she’d allowed him to put his hands on her. She felt even more violated than she had as a twelve-year-old, when her father started sneaking into her room at night. She took another swig of vodka.
&nbs
p; “He’s a monster,” Rachel repeated. “He’s a monster, and you fucked him. A lot, apparently. Looks like you enjoyed it. How could you?”
“You don’t understand. It wasn’t like that.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what it was like. I’ve got pictures. At first, I thought no one would believe me, but oh, look, there are thirteen photographs of my best friend sucking my deviant son’s dick. How could you? And what I can’t figure out is, why you? You’re a fat cow. Your own husband doesn’t even like you that much. But I forgot—D.J. spent the last eleven years in an institution. He doesn’t know any better. You were supposed to be my friend. How could you do this? You, of all people?”
Each word was a new barb in her skin. This woman was supposed to be her best friend. She called D.J. a monster, and if he really had exposed himself to the twins, then he certainly was—not that Leah needed convincing, after he’d killed her dog and tried twice to harm her own kids—but Rachel had refused to acknowledge him long before the incident with the twins. Somewhere, in a far-off corner of her mind, she wondered what Rachel was really angry about. But she kept returning to the word institution.
“What do you mean ‘institution’? What kind of institution?”
“The kind you put your kid in when he is a born fucking psychopath. The kind you hope he never gets out of. The kind you put your kid in when he pours hot coffee on the family dog at age four and pushes a classmate off the jungle gym at age five. You know the scar on my chin? The one I always tell everyone I got from falling while ice-skating? It’s from him. When he was five he bit my face because I wouldn’t let him have a chocolate bar for breakfast. Hard enough to leave a scar for the rest of my life. So go ahead and tell people. Rachel has a psychopathic deviant for a son. I’ll still come off more sympathetic than you. Once people see these photos, they won’t give a shit whose son he is. They’ll be too disgusted by the fact that you were having an affair with a boy young enough to be your own son—a boy who enjoys showing his penis to five-year-old girls.”
“Rachel.”
“Shut up.”
“He used to bite you?”
Her own body was still tender from the other day. D.J. had broken her skin. No matter how many times she washed the bites or lathered them in bacitracin, they still ached. She was worried they would get infected and she’d have to see a doctor for them. What would she say? Her twenty-year-old lover had bitten her like a rabid dog? But he’d almost always bitten her. Not this hard, of course, but he was angry and incensed, waging a campaign of terror to bring her back to him. She’d often had to hide the bite marks from their lovemaking.
The bite marks.
It was a detail of the Soccer Mom Strangler case the news media was completely euphoric over. They were high on it, on the sheer gruesomeness of it, as though the way those women had been killed wasn’t gruesome enough. Every newscaster had delivered that detail as though they were telling viewers about the trip to Disneyland they’d just won.
A source close to the investigation revealed today that the Soccer Mom Strangler leaves bite marks on each of his victims, usually on their breasts or neck.
The detail had lodged somewhere in her mind, but she had shuffled it off to the drawer marked “If I Don’t Look Directly at It, It Won’t Become Important.” But here it was. Bite marks. A monster. A deviant. Since he was a child. Institutionalized. Leah racked her brain, trying to think back to when the news of the first Soccer Mom Strangler victim broke. Had it been right after his return—after he found out she was pregnant with Tyler? After she sharply rebuffed him? Rejected him? Had he gone out and found a woman who looked like Leah and done all the things with her that he’d wanted to do to Leah? Had he killed her?
Again, the faces of the victims flashed in her head. No, not just their faces. Their bodies too. What had Rachel called her? A fat cow? She was hardly that big, but she was slightly overweight, just as all the Soccer Mom Strangler victims had been.
She took another swig of vodka.
Rachel said, “You want to play this game? The secrets game? Really? You want to go there with me? Fine then. Let’s go.”
“No,” Leah said. “I don’t.”
She dropped her phone into the toilet. She turned and reached for the stall lock only to discover that she felt a little woozy. Had a few sips of vodka made her drunk already? She held the bottle out in front of her. It was half-empty.
She clutched the bottle to her and staggered back onto the toilet. She needed to think. She would never mollify Rachel. Her mistake had been in challenging her.
“I know he’s your son.”
That had sealed her death warrant with Rachel. She might not circulate the photos right away. No, she would hold them over Leah’s head for a while. Watch her squirm. Savor it. But one day, they would appear on her husband’s phone or in her boss’s email or her mother-in-law’s mail. Rachel had social media accounts, and Leah would not put it past her to “accidentally” post a photo on one of her accounts. Everyone would know. Everyone would see what Leah had done. Those most private moments.
Private moments she had shared with a serial killer. The serial killer she had inspired, if not created.
She didn’t want to think it, didn’t want to acknowledge it, the thing her mind had been circling around for the last week. But it was true. She knew it in her heart. Had known it the first time she saw the newscasts about the bite marks on the Soccer Mom Strangler victims. That had been the impetus for getting the DNA tests, finally. She needed to know if her son came from a killer. And he did.
Tyler was Dylan’s son. She had lied on the DNA test kit because she could forge Jim’s signature. It was easier that way. Only she knew the truth.
What had she done?
She thought of people she’d read about whose lives had been ruined over much less, like racist tweets or photos on social media that they only intended as jokes. Even people who’d only worn offensive Halloween costumes found their lives ruined when photos got around. Leah didn’t stand a chance. Her name would always be associated with the Soccer Mom Strangler. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that her affair had been going on when she got pregnant. People she didn’t even know would question Tyler’s paternity—and they’d be right.
Everyone in the world would know what she had done, who she had become, and the shame would follow her children into adulthood. People would wonder about her kids. Little Tyler’s father was a savage, remorseless killer. A killer who’d shown violent tendencies as a very young child, if Rachel was to be believed. What if Tyler turned out the same? Would she even be able to look at him the same after this? Would she be wondering about him his entire life?
What about Rachel’s girls? Their mother had given birth to a serial killer. Rachel with the mean streak. What if her daughters grew into monsters as well? They would be unstoppable.
Leah slid off the toilet, wedged between the stall wall and the commode. She lifted the bottle to see that only a small amount was left. Had she really consumed all of that vodka? Wriggling and grunting, she freed herself and stumbled to her feet. The stall door banged open, the noise echoing in the tiny room. She dropped the vodka into the trash can.
Peyton stood outside the door. “Let’s go,” Leah told her. Using every ounce of concentration she had, Leah got her daughter across the parking lot and strapped back into the car. Hunter and Tyler were sleeping. The twins were engrossed in a conversation about something they had seen on Secret Agent Bear, which they quickly brought Peyton into.
Leah fled back to the bathroom. She braced herself against the sink. All the compartments of her mind were flying open at once. The vodka was making it hard for her to keep her mind so tightly controlled. She couldn’t stop it from happening. She couldn’t stop anything from happening. She looked up and saw herself in the mirror. She had her mother’s features.
The woman in the mirror blurred out of focus and then returned, looking resolute. She said, “No more.�
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CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
TWO MONTHS LATER
After her return from captivity, Claire had traveled. Sometimes with her sister, sometimes with their mother. They had taken one trip as a family, all the Fletchers together, to Disney World. She had always stayed in budget hotels, especially when she was with Brianna, who was notorious for cutting corners. “The less we spend, the more places we can visit” had always been her reasoning. Claire hadn’t cared. She’d enjoyed exploring new places. Places she never imagined she would get to see during the years she’d been chained to a radiator in a shack in the woods. Traveling—even on the cheap—felt like the kind of luxury only A-list celebrities and lottery winners could indulge in. It was a fantasy.
But the resort in Bora Bora Connor had chosen for their romantic getaway was beyond all of her wildest dreams. It literally looked like a version of paradise. It was a cliché, but she honestly kept pinching herself surreptitiously. A small part of her wondered if the Soccer Mom Strangler had actually killed her and sent her to this heaven to spend all of eternity with the man she loved.
She lay on an outdoor chaise lounge in a bathing suit, the warm breeze caressing her bare legs. They’d tanned nicely in the three days they’d been there. Crystal-blue water spread out before her, so clear and clean that she could see to the bottom for miles. In the distance, the green hump of Mount Otemanu rested beneath perfect, cloudless blue skies. She’d spent the better part of the last hour trying to decide which was more blue—the sky or the water? Connor had booked them in an overwater suite that wasn’t even a suite, really. It was a Polynesian-style bungalow with a faux thatched roof. There were several of them, spread out along the shallow waters near the bank of the lagoon. They were all connected by a wooden walkway that led to the main hotel building. The inside of the bungalow was decorated in lovely wood decor, a king-size bed the centerpiece of the main room. It also boasted a couch, table and chairs, and the deck that Claire now sat on.