You Are Not Alone

by Greer Hendricks

  Still, occasionally when Trey visited and they crossed paths, he’d hold up a joint and waggle his eyebrows, and they’d sneak into the woods bordering their backyard. He’d imitate their classmates and sometimes slip her a copy of an upcoming test that he’d somehow obtained. Trey could be fun.

  She hopped in the car.

  A joint was in the ashtray of his Audi today, too. “Let’s stop by the river.” He took a drag and passed the joint to her. She inhaled, holding the smoke in her lungs.

  “Nah, I should go home.” She wanted to start memorizing her lines.

  “C’mon.” He turned the wheel in the direction he wanted to go. “Everyone’s there.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Everybody was at the river that afternoon—including a guy Valerie liked, another senior named Mateo, who was into black-and-white photography and played bass, which was cool.

  Feeling bold from her triumph at school and from the joint, Valerie went to sit beside Mateo, leaving Trey to hang with his buddies. She felt Trey’s eyes on her, and once he called out for her to come grab a beer, but she waved him off.

  Barely a half hour after they arrived, Trey walked over and stood staring down at her. “Time to go.” She was leaning against Mateo, admiring on the screen of his Nikon photographs he’d taken.

  Valerie had to shield her eyes when she looked up at Trey; the sun was behind him, turning him into a dark silhouette.

  Mateo’s leg was pressed against hers, and its warmth felt delicious. “Not yet,” she told Trey.

  He stood there another minute. Then he said, “I’m leaving.”

  Valerie rolled her eyes at Mateo. But he was looking at his watch. “Damn, I’ve gotta go, too.”

  So Valerie stood up, brushing off the back of her skirt. “Hold on, I’m coming,” she called as she hurried to catch up with her stepbrother.

  The moment she slipped into the passenger seat he revved the engine and peeled out. Her door wasn’t even fully shut.

  “Jeez, Trey. What’s the rush?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he drove around a bend.

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  He jerked the wheel, pulling the car into a dead end. “You’re such a whore,” he spit out.

  She stared at him in disbelief; was this some kind of a joke? His face was all red and the cords in his neck stood out.

  Her hand, almost of its own accord, crept toward the door handle. But before she could open it, he propelled himself over the console, moving so fast he was on top of her before she fully realized what had happened.

  “Trey! What are you doing?”

  He straddled her while simultaneously grabbing the lever on the side of her seat to jerk her down into a reclining position.

  She was too stunned to immediately react. Then she yelled, “Get off me!”

  His mouth crushed hers. His hand pulled up her skirt and clawed at her skin. His fingers jammed their way inside her.

  She fought back, squirming away from his fingers, trying to push him away. But his athletic body was so big and strong it easily overpowered her.

  “Whore,” he muttered again as he captured both her wrists with one hand, pinning them above her head. He ground his groin against hers.

  Trey was reaching down to unzip his jeans when her knee knifed up through the air. He stopped moving and made a high-pitched, strange sound. She somehow managed to push him off and grabbed the door handle, sliding out from beneath him.

  She fell roughly onto the gravel street and scrambled back up, cutting through backyards. Running toward safety.

  A little later Valerie pushed through the front door of her stepfather’s house, still breathing heavily. She could smell the roast chicken her mother—who was such a fake little housewife now—had made for dinner.

  She stormed into the kitchen and grabbed a can of Diet Coke from the fridge, popping the tab and spilling a few drops on the white tile floor.

  She shuddered. She could still feel Trey’s tongue pushing into her mouth while his fingers invaded her body. She wanted to punch him, to hurt him again. She took a long sip of Diet Coke, trying to erase the taste of his tongue in her mouth.

  “You’re late,” her mother scolded. “And you know you’re not supposed to drink my soda.”

  Valerie locked eyes with her mother and took another sip. Her little sisters, Cassandra and Jane, were sitting at the wooden table, their napkins in their laps, glasses of milk in front of them, still wearing their school uniforms.

  “Hi, Val,” Cassandra piped up.

  “Guess what? I got a hundred on my spelling test!” Jane said.

  Valerie exhaled. “Good job,” she muttered. Normally she’d go over and give them both a hug. But she couldn’t bear to be touched right now.

  “Dinner’s ready,” their mom said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Valerie mumbled.

  If her mother would just take a good look at her instead of fussing over the salad she was preparing for her new husband, she’d notice what had to be written all over Valerie’s face.

  He hurt me.

  Her kneecaps stung, and dried blood was still on her palms from when she’d landed so roughly on the gravel road.

  Her mother sighed heavily, bending down to wipe up the drops of Diet Coke. “I’m not in the mood for this tonight, Val.”

  Valerie turned and ran upstairs, slamming her door. She desperately wanted a shower; she was already pulling off her jean jacket. She flung it across the room, where it hit a lamp and knocked it over.

  Her mother pushed her door back open a moment later without even knocking. “Young lady! Your father is going to be home any minute now! You need to get your act together.”

  “He’s not my father!” Valerie’s whole body felt hot and jittery and somehow alien, as if Trey had altered it. She needed to wash everything away.

  Her mother stood in the middle of the bedroom, not even seeing her. “If you don’t change your attitude right now, you’re grounded.”

  Valerie took a deep breath. “You don’t understand.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Trey—he grabbed me.” She felt her chin tremble. Tears pricked her eyes. “He wanted to—he was on top of me—”

  Her mother picked up the jean jacket Valerie had thrown and began to fold it. “Valerie, don’t be so dramatic. That’s ridiculous.”

  “He wouldn’t stop!” Valerie blurted. Finally, she was able to put words to what had happened: “He tried to rape me!”

  Her mother laid the jacket on the bed and smoothed the already-neat comforter. “Trey could have any girl he wanted.” She could have been talking about the weather; her tone was conversational. But a remote coldness came into her eyes just before they slid away from Valerie’s.

  “I’m sure you got this wrong,” her mother continued briskly. “Why don’t you take a shower and try and calm down. I’ll keep your dinner warm in case you want it later.”

  Then she exited the room, quietly closing the door behind her.

  “Mom,” Valerie whispered.

  But her mother was gone.

  * * *

  A few weeks later—after enduring Trey’s leers, and the rumors he’d spread that made his buddies in the school bark when she passed by, and watching her mother beam up at Trey every time he entered a room, as if he were the perfect son she’d always dreamed of having—Valerie was gone, too.

  Trey was a charmer, a star athlete, a solid student who called his teachers “sir” and “ma’am.” She was a teenager who wore short skirts and heavy black eye makeup and struggled to get B’s and had spent more than a few afternoons in detention for skipping classes. Guys like James Scott Anders the Third—with their pedigrees and trust funds—always won. Who would believe her word over his?

  Not even her own mother.

  She stole all the cash she could from her stepfather’s wallet and her mother’s purse and bought a bus ticket to Hollywood.

  She did one final thing on the m
orning she fled town.

  She wrote an anonymous letter to her stepfather, using her left hand to disguise her handwriting, telling him his new wife was sleeping with the manager of a steak house on Wednesdays when she pretended to be taking step aerobics.

  * * *

  It took years for Cassandra and Jane to finally learn the truth about Valerie.

  Their big sister hadn’t fled Mossley because she no longer cared about any of them. She didn’t write that letter to their stepfather out of spite, as the younger Moore sisters had suspected.

  On the night that Valerie left Los Angeles after what she described as the second-worst betrayal of her life, she finally told Cassandra and Jane her secret. She explained she’d written the anonymous letter because she hoped it would make their stepfather divorce their mother and get them away from Trey.

  Valerie knew at the center of her soul that he would target Cassandra or Jane next. Valerie had to get them out of that house.

  She had been their secret protector all along.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  SHAY

  According to one comprehensive survey, the odds of having three children in one family who are all girls is 21 percent. In the 1920s, Alfred Adler—himself the second of six children—studied birth order and how it shaped personality. He theorized that the oldest child can develop a “taste for power” and can dominate younger siblings.

  —Data Book, page 75

  THREE MOORE SISTERS. Not two.

  The city is swimming around me, with streetlamps and cars throwing off elongated, wavy streaks of light. A siren starts to blare, the noise echoing in my skull.

  Cassandra, Jane, and Valerie had a stepbrother. His nickname was Trey, but he went by James as an adult. He was murdered in New York a few months ago. The revelations explode in my brain, one after another.

  I have to get to somewhere safe.

  I step to the curb and hail a cab. When one pulls up, I give the female driver the address of the Seventeenth Precinct.

  If Detective Williams isn’t in, I’ll wait all night for her on one of those old wooden benches—at least there’ll be an armed officer a few feet away.

  As I sit down on the bench in the cab’s backseat, a fatigue descends over me. I feel almost as groggy and weak as I did after I drank the champagne I’m now certain the Moore sisters doctored with some drug.

  The driver catches my eye in the rearview mirror. She doesn’t smile.

  Could she be in on all this, too? I wonder.

  I don’t latch my seat belt, and I check the locks to make sure they’re not engaged. But a moment later the driver pulls away her eyes and I see a picture of her children on the dashboard.

  I’m being paranoid, I tell myself.

  Still, I wonder if I should call Detective Williams to let her know I’m coming in.

  I flip to a clean page in my Data Book and begin to write down exactly what I want to say to her. I need to sound cogent and believable.

  I’ve barely written two sentences when a call comes in on my burner phone from an unfamiliar 917 area code. I hesitate, then pick it up and press the button to accept the call.

  “Shay Miller?” The woman sounds middle-aged and has a deep New York accent.

  “This is she.”

  A lot of noise in the background—a mechanical rumbling and clattering and distant voices. “It’s Detective Santiago from the NYPD.”

  Detective Santiago’s next sentence feels like a bombshell. “I’m the lead homicide detective on the case of James Anders. Look, I know you’ve gotten wrapped up in something crazy. Things are moving fast. We’re reopening the investigation into Amanda Evinger’s suicide.”

  “What?” I gasp.

  “There’s no doubt she jumped. We have a clear view of that from our surveillance cameras in the subway. But we have reason to believe someone was pursuing her. And we’ve been investigating the Moore sisters ever since Amanda’s death.”

  “They were James’s—”

  “Stepsisters. We know. Sorry, hold one second.”

  I hear the sounds of a subway train pulling into a station; then a man shouts, “Santiago!”

  “One minute!” she shouts back. “Shay?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “We need you to come down to the Thirty-third Street subway station as soon as possible and show us exactly where you were standing in relation to Amanda and walk us through the scene. How quickly can you be here?”

  I wonder if she can also hear noises in my background—the sound of a heavy engine and the drone of traffic.

  Everything she says sounds believable. And I’m only a couple of blocks from the subway station now. I could be there in five minutes.

  But I’m going to verify Detective Santiago’s identity first. And I’m definitely not doing anything until I’ve spoken to Detective Williams.

  The lie springs to my lips so easily it astonishes me. “I’m actually just driving back to the city.” I know she can probably hear the sounds of the car. “I was visiting my mom in New Jersey. I’m not too far away, though.”

  “Oh. Which exit are you near on the freeway?”

  I pause. “Just about to pass Newark, so I’m forty-five minutes away. I’ll get there as soon as possible.”

  The moment I hang up, I dial Detective Williams.

  I drum my fingertips against the cover of my Data Book while I wait for her to answer.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  VALERIE

  VALERIE STANDS BY THE green pole marking the entrance to the Thirty-third Street station, watching passengers, mostly gray-faced men and women trapped in the kind of small, colorless lives that Shay inhabits, travel up and down the stairs.

  In less than an hour, Shay will return from New Jersey and hurry to this exact spot, expecting to meet Detective Santiago. Shay will be breathless and hopeful, convinced that she has finally outsmarted the sisters and that justice will prevail.

  Shay hasn’t shown a great deal of aptitude in anticipating the threats that have befallen her, though it was clever of her to track down Belinda—Valerie no longer thinks of her as “Mom”—and learn about the sisters’ connection to James. That move won Shay a bit of grudging respect from the oldest of the three sisters.

  Still, Shay bumbled by not expecting Belinda to report the strange female caller who’d hung up midconversation after finding out about Valerie’s relationship to James. “Wouldn’t she have known that if she was really in Val’s class?” Belinda had asked Cassandra.

  Cassandra and Jane are en route to a hot new restaurant now. By the time Shay arrives at the subway station, they’ll be seated and ordering drinks surrounded by other customers, their alibis secure.

  Valerie thinks she could have orchestrated all this without her younger sisters, but she’s glad she didn’t have to.

  Growing up, Cassandra and Jane were inseparable—they were closest in age, and temperamentally suited. Sometimes Valerie would let them bypass the KEEP OUT! sign on her bedroom door and flop down on her comforter to tell them what it was like to French-kiss boys, or how to shave their legs. Her younger sisters were a rapt audience; they’ve always been impressionable.

  As adults, their loyalty to Valerie intensified a thousandfold when she moved to New York and finally revealed what had caused her to leave their hometown. She hadn’t been rejecting them, she explained. She’d pulled away because it hurt too much to have reminders of her past.

  The story Valerie shared about their stepbrother, Trey, was true—every last bit of it, down to the feel of his fingers hurting her and the slightly derisive look on Belinda’s face when she committed the ultimate betrayal against her oldest daughter.

  But the other tale Valerie relayed on the stormy night when she reunited with Cassandra and Jane—the one in which she played the role of the innocent victim who was tricked by her conniving roommate Ashley—was tweaked and altered for dramatic effect.

  Valerie is an actress, after all.

&n
bsp; Ashley hadn’t drugged Valerie or hidden her phone on the night before her big callback. Those details were a complete fabrication. Or, as Valerie prefers to think of it, creative license.

  Valerie didn’t make it to the callback because Ashley won the part, fair and square, during her own callback, which took place on the afternoon before Valerie’s was scheduled. Ashley hadn’t even known Valerie was chasing the same role.

  In her heart, though, Valerie believed the part belonged to her, and she to it. Her devastation was genuine.

  Maybe Valerie should have felt guilt when her supportive younger sisters used their influence to ruin Ashley’s career. Ashley might have been able to survive the horribly unflattering photos that were leaked to the tabloids, but the rumors about her sexual perversities were so depraved and vile it seemed no one in the industry could look past them.

  Today Ashley is married and living in the Valley; that was a much better role for her.

  Perhaps Valerie should feel guilty about what will befall Shay—another innocent woman who got in the way.

  But she doesn’t.

  Valerie has a new purpose now, one that is more meaningful than hitting her marks and channeling a character, and even more rewarding than hearing an audience’s applause.

  She began to feel fully alive again when she watched Trey—or James, as he’d shed his childhood nickname when he went to college—die on that park bench.

  Who knows what atrocities she can guide her sisters and the other women to avenge in the future?

  Ever since the three sisters reunited, Valerie has been a powerful stealth influencer, shepherding Cassandra and Jane in an exciting new direction. Valerie is the invisible architect of every act of vengeance their larger group has perpetrated. After being alone for so long, she relishes having her sisters by her side.

  There’s just one more loose end to tie up.

  Valerie lifts her head slightly as she catches sight of a woman in a black puffer coat approaching the subway station. Valerie smiles.