The Bad Daughter

by Joy Fielding

  “So you haven’t told her…”

  “About her mother passing? No. There doesn’t seem to be much point at the moment. We don’t know how much, if anything, is registering. In the meantime, we’re trying to get as good a grip on this thing as possible, so anything you can tell us about your father and his wife would be helpful. I understand you and Tara used to be friends.”

  You understand a lot more than you’re letting on, Robin thought. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Best friends, I hear.”

  “Since we were ten years old.”

  “But not anymore.”

  Robin sighed with frustration. “It’s kind of hard to stay friends with someone who ditches your brother to marry your father, especially so soon after your mother’s funeral.”

  A small smile tugged at the corners of the sheriff’s lips. “I imagine it is.”

  “Is this relevant?”

  “Indulge me,” Sheriff Prescott said. “What was Tara like?”

  Robin paused to consider her answer. “I’m probably the wrong person to ask, since she obviously wasn’t who I thought she was.”

  “And who was that?”

  “My friend, for starters.”

  Another tug at the corners of his lips. “What else?”

  Again, Robin paused to consider her former friend, but no thoughts came. Her mind was like a blank canvas, and no matter how much paint she threw at it, nothing stuck. She felt the familiar tingle stirring in her chest. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. I’m tired and more than a bit overwhelmed. I don’t think I’m ready to have this conversation after all.”

  He nodded. “I understand. We can talk later.” A statement, not a request.

  “If you could just tell me what happened…”

  Sheriff Prescott stared down at his boots, the top of his head reflecting the glare of the overhead fluorescent lighting. “The nine-one-one call came in about half past midnight the night before last,” he began, raising his head as he spoke, until once again his eyes were level with Robin’s. “It was Cassidy, screaming that her parents had been shot. And then the dispatcher heard what sounded like a gunshot, and the line went dead. The police got to the house as fast as they could. They found the front door open and your father and Tara lying on the living room floor, their bodies riddled with bullets, Tara’s face pretty much blown off.”

  Oh, God. Tara’s beautiful face. Gone. Robin fought the almost overwhelming urge to throw up and zeroed in on the sheriff’s eyebrows in an effort to still her growing panic attack. His eyebrows were darker and bushier than she’d first realized. They lay like two caterpillars across the bottom of his forehead. “And Cassidy?”

  “She was upstairs in her bedroom, sprawled across her bed. Unconscious. Barely breathing. The front of her pajama top soaked through with blood. Phone still in her hand.”

  What kind of monster shoots a twelve-year-old girl? Robin asked herself again. Then, out loud, “What else?”

  “The safe in the den was open and empty, so it looks as if whoever did this was after something. ’Course, we don’t know what was in the safe. Hoping you might be able to help us with that.” He ran a hand across the top of his smooth head. “And dresser drawers and items of clothing were all over the floor in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom.”

  That doesn’t mean anything, Robin thought. Tara wasn’t exactly a neat freak.

  “It’s also looking as if Tara’s rings had been forcibly removed. She wasn’t wearing any, and there was bruising on both her ring fingers.”

  Robin pictured the brilliant round three-carat diamond solitaire and accompanying diamond eternity band that her father had bought Tara and that she’d never been shy about showing off. Nor had she been reticent about wearing the few good pieces of jewelry that had once belonged to Robin’s mother, pieces that her father had showered on his new wife, leaving the less-valuable items for Robin and Melanie to fight over. Except that Robin had had no stamina for further conflict, and so she gave in to all of Melanie’s demands, settling for the simple amethyst ring her mother had owned since girlhood, which Robin wore on a thin gold chain around her neck. Her fingers went to it now.

  “We’d like you and your sister to go through the house with us tomorrow morning, if you’re up to it,” Sheriff Prescott said. Again, he made it more of a statement than a request. “See if you can figure out what might be missing.”

  Robin nodded, although she didn’t see how she could help. She’d never even seen her father’s new house—let alone set foot inside it. It was right next door to his old house—the one she’d grown up in, the one where Melanie and her son still lived. “Do you know how many people were involved, if there were more than one…”

  “We don’t know,” the sheriff answered before she could finish her question. “There’s been no rain. Never is at this time of year, so it’s not like there are any telltale footprints in the mud or anything like that. Not like on TV. We’re still dusting for fingerprints, but it’s unlikely we’ll find anything useful. The house is brand spanking new. Apparently, workers were still going in and out of it all the time. Plus your father and Tara had just thrown a big house-warming party a few days before.” He shook his head, his small eyes narrowing into tiny slits as his bushy eyebrows converged into a single straight line. “Not to mention we just had the annual rodeo, so there’ve been lots of strangers in town.”

  “So what you’re essentially saying is that it could have been anyone.”

  “Except there was no sign of forced entry.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that either the front door was unlocked or your father or Tara opened it.”

  “I can’t imagine that they would leave the front door unlocked.”

  “Can you imagine them opening it to strangers after midnight?”

  Robin felt her windpipe closing, as if being squeezed by invisible fingers, and a dry cough escaped her throat.

  The sheriff continued, oblivious to her discomfort, “If you can think of anyone who might have had a motive…”

  “My father didn’t exactly make a secret of his wealth, Sheriff. It seems pretty obvious from everything you’ve just told me that robbery was the motive, regardless of whether or not my father knew his attacker. And with workers coming in and out of the house all the time, it would seem logical that one of them—”

  “Would that life was always logical,” the sheriff interrupted again, this time with a rueful shake of his head. “Guess we’ll just have to wait till little Cassidy is able to tell us something.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Absolutely.” Sheriff Prescott pushed himself to his feet.

  Robin did likewise, then stumbled, her mounting panic all but propelling her into the sheriff’s arms.

  “Whoa, there. You all right?”

  “Just clumsy. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. This way.” He took her elbow, as if he was afraid she might stumble again, and led her down the corridor to a room at the far end where an armed officer was standing guard.

  “Is that necessary?” Robin asked.

  “Just a precaution,” Sheriff Prescott explained. “Till we find out what happened.” He pushed the door open, then stood back to let her enter.

  Robin took a deep breath, feeling it bounce against the air like a rubber ball as she released it and stepped inside the room. “Oh, God,” she whispered, inching forward, her mind trying to grasp what her eyes were seeing.

  What she was seeing was the past—a little girl who so resembled her mother at that age that it took away what little breath Robin had left, and she fell back against the sheriff’s burly chest, the gun in his holster burrowing into the small of her back.

  “You all right?” he asked her again. “Do you want me to get your sister?”

  Robin shook her head. God, no. “She just looks so helpless, so young.”

  In fact Cassidy looked even younger than her twelve years. Eyes closed, skin the color of sk
im milk, stringy light brown hair hanging limply past bony shoulders, only a hint of breasts beneath the bandages encasing her torso. More larva than butterfly, Robin couldn’t help thinking, staring down at the child’s sweet, unlined face. Tara’s face, she thought.

  “Pretty much blown off,” the sheriff had said.

  She stifled yet another cry.

  “You can talk to her if you’d like,” the sheriff urged.

  Robin recognized the command inside the gentle request. “What do I say?”

  “Anything.”

  Robin reached for Cassidy’s hand, finding the child’s fingers cold and unresponsive inside her own. “Hi, sweetheart,” she began. “My name is Robin. I don’t know if you remember me. I haven’t seen you in a long time. But I used to be good friends with your mother.” She received no response and glanced back at Sheriff Prescott.

  Keep going, he said with his eyes.

  “We met in the fifth grade. I was in Miss DeWitt’s class, and she was in Miss Browning’s, and for some reason I got transferred into Miss Browning’s class about halfway through the year—I don’t remember why. We were ten years old and I was very shy. I didn’t have a lot of friends. Your mother was the exact opposite. Everybody wanted to be friends with her. ‘A real little firecracker,’ my father used to say.” Oh, God. A deepening pressure on Robin’s larynx put a temporary stop to her words. “Anyway, for some reason,” she continued, scraping the words from the back of her throat, “your mother decided she liked me and she took me under her wing, made sure that everybody was nice to me.”

  Everybody but Melanie, who’d always been impervious to Tara’s charms.

  Strange that it had been Melanie who’d been the one to accept Tara’s marriage to their father, Robin thought with her next breath. That it had been Melanie who’d made nice and continued to live under the same roof with her until construction had been completed on the house next door.

  “We were best friends all through high school,” Robin continued, putting the brakes on her interior monologue. “We were pretty much inseparable, your mother and I, even after she married your father. In fact, I was maid of honor at their wedding.”

  Robin pictured Tara, stunning in the secondhand wedding gown she’d paid for herself, standing in front of the justice of the peace beside dark-haired, charismatic Dylan Campbell, the archetypal bad boy she’d fallen for and married right after their high school graduation, despite her parents’ disapproval. Or maybe because of it.

  It soon became clear that Tara’s parents had good reason to be concerned about Dylan, who turned out to be even worse than anyone had imagined.

  The abuse started when Tara was pregnant with Cassidy, and it had continued until Dylan was jailed for breaking and entering in the third year of their marriage. Tara had seized the opportunity to file for divorce. She was all of twenty-one.

  Where was Dylan now? Did Sheriff Prescott know about him? Was he in prison somewhere? Was he a suspect? Had he shot his former wife? Had he tried to murder his own child?

  Robin spun toward the sheriff, about to voice these thoughts out loud when she noticed Melanie standing just inside the doorway, a bemused look on her face. When had she come in? How long had she been standing there?

  “Please don’t let me interrupt this little jaunt down memory lane,” she said.

  More not-so-gentle pressure on Robin’s windpipe. “Your mother was so beautiful,” Robin said, turning her attention back to Cassidy and squeezing her hand. “She was the most beautiful girl in Red Bluff.”

  “Was being the operative word,” Melanie said, only half under her breath.

  Cassidy’s eyes opened wide.

  “Melanie, for God’s sake.”

  The child’s enormous brown eyes moved from Robin to Melanie, widening even further in alarm.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Melanie said. “You know who I am, don’t you? It’s Melanie. And this is Robin. You probably don’t remember her. You were still pretty little when she moved away.”

  “How are you feeling today?” Sheriff Prescott asked, approaching on the other side of the bed.

  Cassidy’s eyes traveled from one face to another, although she showed no signs of recognition, or even that she understood what they were saying.

  “Cassidy,” the sheriff said, “can you hear me? Do you know where you are?”

  The girl stared at him, said nothing.

  “You’re in the hospital,” he continued. “You were shot. Do you remember that?”

  No response.

  “Can you tell us anything about what happened?”

  Cassidy shifted her gaze from the sheriff to Robin to Melanie.

  “Cassidy,” Sheriff Prescott repeated, “can you tell us who did this to you?”

  Cassidy’s eyes drifted up toward the ceiling, then closed.

  “Maybe we should go,” Robin suggested after several seconds had elapsed. The air had become very thick inside the small room. She was having trouble breathing.

  “Guess we’ll try again tomorrow,” the sheriff said.

  Robin nodded, although returning to the hospital was the last thing she wanted to do. She’d hoped to be on a bus back to Sacramento by then, followed immediately by a plane to Los Angeles.

  That was unlikely to happen until some of the sheriff’s questions had been answered. She’d already agreed to accompany him to her father’s house the next morning, so she’d likely have to hang around at least a few more days. Maybe by then Cassidy would be able to tell them something.

  Assuming the child survived.

  Who could have done such an awful thing?

  Robin had watched enough television to know that if a crime wasn’t solved within the first forty-eight hours, it likely never would be. How could she leave without knowing who was responsible? How could she leave Red Bluff before she knew whether her father would survive his injuries?

  How could she stay?

  In the next instant, the room was spinning, and the floor was falling away. Robin tried to cling to Cassidy’s hand but felt her fingers slipping. She heard Sheriff Prescott’s voice in the distance—“Can we get a nurse in here?”

  The last voice she heard before she lost consciousness belonged to her sister. “She always was a drama queen,” Melanie said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Well, what do you know? She awakens,” Melanie said from behind the wheel of her car as Robin opened her eyes and bolted upright in the passenger seat, her eyes darting in all directions at once. “Relax. You were only out a few minutes.”

  Robin stared out the window at the few middle-class houses scattered among the profusion of vacant lots. A street sign revealed that they were at the corner of South Jackson Street and Luther Road. They turned left, heading west toward Paskenta Road.

  “How many of those pills did you take, anyway?” Melanie asked.

  Obviously not enough, Robin thought, picturing the young doctor with short, frizzy red hair whose huge green eyes had been the first thing she’d seen when she came to on the floor of Cassidy’s hospital room. The doctor had checked her blood pressure and listened to her heartbeat before pronouncing a diagnosis of stress and writing out a prescription for Ativan. Robin had filled the prescription as soon as they left the hospital, running into the pharmacy next to the clock tower on Main Street while Melanie waited in the car, then swallowing two of the tiny white pills without the benefit of water before even walking out the door. The last thing she remembered was climbing back into the front seat and trying to block out the excruciating sound of Enya on the radio by closing her eyes and pretending to be floating on her back in the ocean.

  “What’s the matter—you didn’t do enough drugs at Berkeley to develop a tolerance?” Melanie was asking now. “I thought that was the whole point of going there.”

  Actually, Robin had stopped doing drugs at Berkeley, her panic attacks having abated once she was a safe distance from Red Bluff. Until then, drugs had been part of her regular routine. A few tokes
to get her through the day, a mild sedative at night to help her sleep.

  Tara had been her chief supplier.

  Should she tell Sheriff Prescott that?

  “You didn’t recognize Dr. Simpson, did you?” Melanie was saying.

  “Should I have?”

  “Think. Red hair, green eyes, a nose full of freckles. Of course she tries to hide them with all that makeup.”

  “Oh, my God,” Robin said, vaguely recalling the Annie look-alike who’d been a year behind her in high school. “That was Jimmy Kessler’s little sister, Arlene?”

  “She married Freddy Simpson a few years ago. He was president of the student council the year I graduated. Captain of the debate team. A real know-it-all. Surely you remember him.”

  Robin shook her head. She’d done her best to forget everything about Red Bluff.

  “She’s calling herself Arla now.”

  “Oh, my.” The sisters shared a welcome laugh. “She should have said something.”

  “She probably didn’t think it was the best time to play catch-up. Or maybe she was just embarrassed.”

  “Why would she be embarrassed?”

  “I guess some people find murder embarrassing.” The car crossed Paskenta Road, continuing west.

  Murder, Robin repeated silently, flipping the word over on her tongue, the pleasant buzz from the Ativan softening its impact. Tara didn’t just die. She was murdered. “Has anyone notified Tara’s parents?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Should we?”

  “I wouldn’t have a clue where to find them. Would you?”

  Robin shook her head, concentrating on the increasingly barren vista beyond her side window. She tried picturing Tara’s parents, but all she managed to conjure up was a vague outline. Tara had never been close to either her mother or her father, and they’d all but disowned her after she’d married Dylan. They’d separated the same year that Cassidy was born, and Tara’s father had run off to Florida soon after with the woman who cut his hair. Her mother had joined some religious cult and disappeared into the wilderness of Oregon at least a decade ago. Who knew if either of them was even still alive?